Imagining the Jewish God 2016015835, 2016016269, 9781498517492, 9781498517508

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Imagining the Jewish God

Graven Images Series Editor Leonard V. Kaplan University of Wisconsin, Madison

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The Graven Images Series is intent upon publishing intellectual contemplation from the foremost scholars of law, theology, and the humanities. In part, Graven Images returns to the possibility of engaging the real and its analysis without losing the gains of the Enlightenment. Series authors and editors choose to revisit classical thought and analysis with an aim of understanding contemporary issues, creating trust and meaning in a confused and everchanging modern world. Titles in the Series The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law, Edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State, Edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Charles L. Cohen The Law Before the Law, By Steven Wilf Cognitive Justice in a Global World, Edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos Thinking Jewish Culture in America, Edited by Ken Koltun-Fromm Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer, By Brayton Polka Western Art and Jewish Presence in the Work of Paul Celan: Roots and Ramifications of the “Meridian” Speech, By Esther Cameron Modernity between Wagner and Nietzsche, By Brayton Polka

Imagining the Jewish God

Copyright © 2016. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Edited by Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaplan, Leonard, 1941– editor. | Koltun-Fromm, Ken, editor. Title: Imagining the Jewish God : edited by Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2016] | Series: Graven images | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016015835 (print) | LCCN 2016016269 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498517492 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498517508 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: God (Judaism) Classification: LCC BM610 .I43 2016 (print) | LCC BM610 (ebook) | DDC 296.3/11—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015835 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm PART I. PROLOGUE: INSCRIPTION 1  On the Poetics of the Jewish God Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller 2  S  eeing Divine Writing: Thoughts on the Drama of the Outside within the Technology of Inscription Lewis Freedman

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3  Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin Jonathan Boyarin

3

19 33

PART II. OUT OF LEVANT: BIBLICAL AND RABBINIC IMAGININGS OF GOD 4  C  lassical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates of the Mishnah Jonathan Wyn Schofer

47

5  What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God Kenneth Seeskin

63

6  The Bible as Torah: How J, E, P, and D Can Teach Us about God Benjamin D. Sommer

83

v

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Contents

 7 Job, the Levantine Book: A Beginning Guide through Human Perplexity Leonard Kaplan  8  Job: Two Endings, Three Openings Alicia Ostriker

103 133

PART III. CLINGING TO GOD: THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION  9  T  he Repersonalization of God: Monism and Theological Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination Jay Michaelson

143

10  T  he Word of God Is No Word at All: Intimacy and the Nothingness of God Shaul Magid

163

11  Who Is God? Lenn Goodman

179

12  Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn Randi Rashkover

205

13  T  he Perils of Covenant Theology: The Cases of David Hartman and David Novak Martin Kavka 14  Freud’s Imagining God David Novak

227 255

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PART IV. INSCRIPTION: GOD IN JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE 15  God of Language Michael Marmur

267

16  Location, Location, Location: Toward a Theology of Prepositions 293 Rebecca Alpert 17  Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God Noam Reisner

299

18  Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d Elissa J. Sampson

319



Contents vii

19  “Don’t Forget the Potatoes”: Imagining God Through Food Susan Handelman

347

20  Imagining the Jewish God in Comics Ken Koltun-Fromm

369

PART V. POETICS: GOD IN LANGUAGE 21  God’s Inside/The Line of a Poem: A Philosophical Commentary Zachary Braiterman 22  R  econciling God, Revisioning Prayer, and Reaching into the Spaces Between in Selected Works by Alicia Ostriker, Marcia Falk, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis Allison Creighton

405

431

23  Unimagining the Jewish God (Remix) Charles Bernstein

451

24  Poems and Commentary Laynie Browne

453

25  Poems 457 Clive Meachen 26  Parables and Commentary Howard Schwartz

459

27  Poems and Commentary Rachel Blau DuPlessis

467

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28  Poems 475 Bill Sherman 29  Poems 477 David Weisstub 30  Poems 481 James Chapson 31  Poems 485 Jack Hirschman 32  Poems from The Days Between 493 Marcia Falk

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33  Poems and Prose Jeff Friedman

Contents

497

34  Poems 503 Gerald Stern 35  Poems 505 Michael Castro 36  Poems and Commentary Jerome Rothenberg

511

37  Poems 517 Alicia Ostriker Index 521

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About the Contributors

543

Acknowledgments

For Philip Anisman, Lawrence Rosen, and Alan J. Weisbard: three friends with heart and intellect; and for my family—my wife Martha the poet, my son Jonathan the quant, and my daughter Sarah the photographer.

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And for our students, who will imagine the Jewish God in ways unimaginable in this volume.

ix

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Introduction Imagining the Jewish God

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Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm

To imagine a Jewish God: Is that an open invitation to conjure up a graven image? Is it to transgress the prohibition we read in Exodus to make no such images, either in the heavens above or on the earth below? Does Exodus 20:4 require Jews to surrender all pictorial or sculptured art? As Kalman Bland and others have taught us,1 if that was indeed the sacred intent then Jews throughout history have acted more like children who are motivated and enticed by the very things they are forbidden to do. Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God. Note, for example, how Jews have considered God’s name as one form of imagining. Early Jewish mystics meditated on the very Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh) to explore divine pathos and even God’s body. To conjure up that name brought one close to God’s energy, if not control and power over this God. Invoking God’s name is one intoxicating way to imagine God. Moreover, naming is substantive for some and not merely conventional: When God called for light there was light in the Genesis account. The naming is the act itself. To name is to be; the word made flesh. The various attributes and names of the Jewish God are indeed many, but they are also local and material. We discover Jewish imaginings in particular cultural settings, in specific geographical locales, and within diverse Jewish communities. Even within particular historical communities we find breathtaking diversity. Take a quick perusal of the various biblical names for God in the Hebrew Bible and here is what you will find: YHWH, El, El Shaddai, Adonai, Hashem—and the list continues. How can it be that such local diversity speaks to the same, unified God? This way of asking the xi

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Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm

question—diversity within unity—has plagued Jewish thinkers and practitioners for centuries, and not only them. But we find throughout this trajectory of imagining God a basic commitment to textual reasoning. Whether poet or philosopher, theologian or cultural critic, rabbi or grammarian, Jews have turned to their textual tradition to help unpack the various shadings and colors that give shape to their God. The Jewish God does not live beyond the text so much as inside and behind it. The journey to this God came through enlivening, cultivating, rereading, refining, uncovering, displacing, and even erasing the text. But that text, to be sure, was expansive: It would include not only the Bible and the fuller Torah, but also Halachic and Aggadic works, philosophical treatises and poetic commentary, folklore and diaries, and even graphic novels. We imagine the Jewish tradition as textual in this sweeping sense of material inscription in both text and practice. Jews imagine a textual God when that God is textured by written invocations and material practices. Yet this dichotomy of text and practice is rarely experienced in Jewish lives; like many other religious communities, Jews live their texts in their embodied practices. The academic study of Judaism has, by necessity, played catchup to this lived tradition, and through new methods of analysis has recovered what has always been the case. Not only the elite, but also the folk and even secular Jews imagine their God in and through the texts they read and the practices they embody. We certainly read about God, but we also perform that God through art, study, bodily movements, and song. Imagining the Jewish God is a radically democratic process, one that compels a broad spectrum of belief and practice. This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, even as we humbly recognize that we could not possibly contain such creative dialogue. Yet even as we are bewildered at the sheer diversity of Jewish expression, we are baffled by the silence one often encounters when approaching the Jewish God. To put this bluntly: Should Jews really worry all that much about their God? Isn’t it enough to pursue textual study, or to walk humbly, or to change the world, or to argue about Israel, or to do good works, or just simply to continue as Jews? Maybe we should let God rest in peace. This might do but for two factors: the scholarly research trajectories in the academy and the experiential fact of the Holocaust. Jewish and religious studies scholars have directed the question concerning God’s representation well beyond religious practitioners, and have done so repeatedly over the last two hundred years—even within Orthodox circles. We recognize the influence of these scholarly moves within everyday religious practices, and these elite experts continue to hold sway in many Jewish communities. Simply, Jewish studies scholars have not allowed talk of God to fall silent. With regard to that

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Introduction xiii

silence, the Holocaust presents a more vital challenge. Inertia may hold sway and warrant a far more modest academic and literary response. But over time the bald question asserts itself and will continue to do so: How can this Jewish God, the God (as the Hebrew Bible has it) of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, command individuals or unify diverse communities? How can we live in authentic response to this God in the wake of ashes, in the aftermath of a Nazi design to destroy one and all? Are territorial Zionism and rote liturgical prayer the only aggressive rejoinders to such destruction? Have we reduced God to what the poet Zukofsky calls yammering—just making noise? Within a world of passionless ritual and aggressive politics, who needs the Jewish God? Arthur Cohen understood this issue more clearly than others, and he responded to this void by groping for a new language to approach God.2 He demanded such a revivifying discourse to confront the God of the Hebrew Bible. We must do new theology, Cohen insisted, or the Jewish God will hold little value for Jews stammering for an authentic word of response. We might still say Kaddish, but we will not direct it to a living, real God. And yet as the Holocaust recedes into history, so too the deafening silence calls out. Jewish renewal, even in Cohen’s terms, now calls out boldly to that God with vigor, with demands, with passion, and with renewed assertiveness. In the wake of the Holocaust, God needs us far more than we need God. Reassessing our encounter with the God of the Hebrew Bible is the charge Cohen has bequeathed to us, especially for those who do not take evil, or even God’s evil, seriously. What can we make of messianism, revelation, law, ethics, or even God’s body after such a deafening tremendum? This is no easy, self-affirming renewal, but the kind of work required to search deeper into the depths of religious yearnings and aspirations. Even if, as Adorno had warned (yet refuted by Celan’s poetics), there can be no lyric poetry after the Holocaust, we still assert God’s presence in the very desire for spiritual sustenance. The essays in this volume affirm this sense of covenantal reciprocity, for Jews have never let God off the hook completely, or allowed their God to rest for too long. Our poets invoke God’s presence, if not God’s body, in everyday practices, and our philosophers still engage divine truth. Though the story can be said to begin with the Hebrew Bible, it does not end there. Our methods and materials go far beyond source and historical biblical criticism, and now include archeological evidence, poetics, food culture, visual theory, mythology and folklore, linguistics, and performance. This does not mean the authors in this volume have abandoned the Bible. They have instead reimagined it as an eclectic, vibrant, and culturally rich living text. This collection of essays is also a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue about the kaleidoscopic ways we imagine the

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Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm

Jewish God. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of the Prologue to this book, but it also enlivens each and every chapter. Covenantal reciprocity, as we imagine this term, means actively engaging the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. Jewish sacred texts, broadly construed, record these intimate voices. The essays in this volume seek to draw out these vocal intimations so we can all hear their resonate call. The sections in this book move in this call and response mode, as any strong dialogical encounter should do. The response here is not a mirror but an engagement that invokes authority by its presentation and intelligence. We have coupled theoretical essays with poetic works not because the one answers the other, but rather because together they provoke sustained, reflective dialogue about the Jewish God. The poetic restores and refers back to a biblical poetics that has always retained a strong presence in Jewish thought and theology. To repeat, these texts intimate the Jewish God, and in doing so enact the mystical value of devekut: a clinging to God through an intensive, intentional act of relation. Our poets often mask this God in language, in the body, and in the physically present. But these imaginings are no less powerful for their material embodiment. Indeed, the poetic works ask us to find God in places we often overlook and pass by—a theme that runs through many of the essays as well. The Jewish God, as imagined in these essays and poems, lives in the intimate space of devekut as material and dialogical encounter. But this God also lives in the beyond, in the end of time, and so forever exceeds or transcends our encounters. These contradictory impressions—of being close and yet far off, or as Joseph Soloveitchik intimated, a striving coupled with retreat3—provide the wellspring for a rich hermeneutics that continually reshapes Jewish perceptions of covenant and revelation. This belies neither a systematic theology nor a common one within such a living, fragmented tradition. Instead, we live with, and sometimes struggle against, God’s presence as a mode of encounter. The God imagined in these pages is not the philosophical, theological, or even the historical God of traditional, medieval, or modern Judaism. Although our authors maintain expertise in one or more of these fields of inquiry, we believe the appeal to imagination, as the title of this book suggests, crosses and dissects boundaries of history, geography, and discipline. Imagining the Jewish God is a practice of interpretive and poetic license, a

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Introduction xv

fearless engagement with the unknown, and an appeal to tentative hybridity rather than protective isolation. Too often, in our political and academic projects, we hide within our comfortable paradigms and terms; we talk easily of Jewish philosophy or political Zionism; we speak to rather than with and among those who do not do our work nor voice our politics. To imagine the Jewish God is an act of defiance: It is to subject philosophy, poetry, and theology to a politics of contestation and conversation. Here too academics have been playing catchup to Jewish practitioners. Rarely do Jews ask, what is Jewish philosophy? Instead they pose questions with their feet and challenge us to answer, what is to be done? Imagining the Jewish God succeeds if it paints a broader canvas for those intimate and practical questions of Jewish engagement. Rabbis, sages, and philosophers have carried the burden to allow intellectuals a platform to engage and express their respective Judaisms. These viewpoints have made a difference for Jews and non-Jews alike who thrive on everyday practices and the conviviality of community. Our view is that intellectual diversity must engage the question of the Jewish God when confusion reigns over the very richness and meaning of contemporary Judaism, especially so in the Diaspora. The state of Israel occupies an ambiguous space of obligation for many, and still shoulders the burden to energize American Jewish identity. The intensity of that pressure is perhaps unfair, and certainly contributes to the severity of public debate about Israeli politics. We are at a moment when the question of place is front and center: Where do we place Israel in the debate about Jewish identity and the Jewish God? Jewish thinkers are obligated to locate this place, or at least articulate the possible coordinates of relation—a geography of identity, if you will. We must know how to place ourselves if we are to answer the burning question, “what is to be done?” The essays in this volume, we contend, will help clarify how place and identity inform notions of the Jewish God, and in doing so draw Jewish thought into the orbit of public conversation and debate. For those who look for inspiration, insight, and intellectual integrity, this volume responds to the yearnings of a generation who seek dialogue rather than philosophical security, radical questioning rather than sound-bite answers, openness without fear of border crossings. One of those borders is the thorny issue of God’s place in human history. The essays and poems in this volume confront that dilemma in a variety of ways, but do so nimbly, sometimes confrontationally, but also teasingly with a lighter touch. We hear echoes of Heschel’s sense that God searches, continually, for human encounter,4 but also witness Buber’s more hesitant and despairing “eclipse of God,” as well.5 There is also a palpable sense, both here and in Jewish thought more generally, that God’s presence lies in the

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Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm

active covenantal commitment to commandment and tradition. God’s place is in our reflective and active engagement with text and practice, as it were. We might think of God’s place in history as less a geographical modality than an existential rhetoric: How do we—or the text, tradition, essayists, and poets—imaginatively reveal God’s presence in history? We have organized the book into five sections: 1) Prologue: Inscription; 2) Out of Levant: Biblical and Rabbinic Imaginings of God; 3) Clinging to God: The Jewish Theological Imagination; 4) Inscription: God in Jewish Literature and Culture; and 5) Poetics: God in Language. The Prologue introduces the volume by presenting three distinct dialogues of encounter: a conversation between poets Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller, Lewis Freedman’s dialogue between prose and poetry, and Jonathan Boyarin’s response to a series of questions posed by the editors. What follows is a working out of many of the issues raised in the Prologue. “Out of Levant” includes essays focusing on the biblical and rabbinic traditions, while “Clinging to God” gathers directed, theological responses to imagining God. The fourth section, “Inscription,” reveals how the Jewish imagination works through texts, images, and culture, and the final section, “Poetics,” opens up creative space for imagining the Jewish God in poetry. But that creative license is always tethered to intellectual integrity, and so we have asked some of those poets to offer their own critical commentary to go with the two critical reflective pieces from Allison Creighton and Zachary Braiterman. This volume, more than any other we know of, couples intellectual rigor with poetic license, critical scrutiny with imaginative leaps, and textual reasoning with visual splendor. In an age saturated with media outlets, an edited volume like this one has to do more than collect the very brightest and most creative minds in a discipline. It has to challenge, provoke, and prod us into a sustained dialogue about meaning, about care and commitment, about community and individual flourishing, and at least for this volume, about God. Jews have imagined their God in the various forms articulated here in these pages, and in countless ways beyond them. Imagining is not a possessive activity, but a radical, ever-receding opening to encounter—beyond the text and into the lives that matter most. To imagine the Jewish God is to become what Charles Taylor calls a “porous self,” or what Judith Butler calls an openness to vulnerability.6 If Jews have imagined many different kinds of Jewish Gods, as this volume contends, then perhaps this indicates just how open and attentive we have become. And we must continue hesitantly to imagine how far we have yet to travel on the paths still open but unexplored: “There are still songs to sing beyond mankind.”7



Introduction xvii

NOTES 1.  Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2.  Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981). 3.  Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” in Divrei Hagut Ve-Ha’aracha (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1982), 9–55. 4. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955). 5.  Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1952). 6.  See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), especially chapter 2, “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” 7.  Paul Celan, Threadsuns, Breathturn, trans. by Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bland, Kalman. The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy. Amherst, NY.: Humanity Books, 1952. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Celan, Paul. Threadsuns, Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995. Cohen, Arthur. The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955. Soloveitchik, Joseph B. “Kol Dodi Dofek.” In Divrei Hagut Ve-Ha’aracha, 9–55. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1982. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

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Part I

PROLOGUE

INSCRIPTION

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Chapter One

On the Poetics of the Jewish God

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Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller

Dear Michael, “Imagining the Jewish God”: First thought is that Jews are forbidden to imagine Him, as per the Second Commandment. But to cut through endless commentary, I think that basically means that graven images or visual representation is forbidden. Representation in language is something else again. Second thought: Given our years of shared reading, writing, and thinking on the subject, especially in regard to the centrality of commentary in the tradition, I think we are bound to turn to thinkers like Gershom Scholem, since it is in the kabbalistic literature (and Scholem has been our guide here) that the boldest verbal representations of God are to be found. So perhaps we can begin with a passage that I’m sure you’ve encountered, from Scholem’s “Reflections on Jewish Theology” (in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis). It is a passage, I confess, that has haunted me for many years, and has shaped my thinking and belief. Scholem is discussing the concept of Creation, and how for the kabbalists, the concept of tzimtzum becomes necessary: “By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates Creation”1—and in this way, Creation perpetually renews itself. But what really resonates (and mystifies) me is what follows. God’s withdrawal into himself produces a Void in and through which Creation takes place. Scholem observes: This, to be sure, is the point at which the horrifying experience of God’s absence in our world collides irreconcilably and catastrophically with the doctrine of a Creation which renews itself. The radiation of which the mystics speak and which is to attest to the Revelation of God in Creation—that radiation is no longer perceivable by despair. The emptying of the world to a meaningless void not illuminated by any ray of meaning or direction is the experience of him whom I would call the pious atheist. The void is the abyss, the chasm or the crack which 3

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opens up in all that exists. This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void—in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.2

There have been times, I have to admit, when I have identified strongly with this vision of the “pious atheist,” and I know it has informed a good deal of my poetry. And I think this is preeminently a modern, or even a modernist, vision—distinguished from a postmodern vision, in which the void is somehow flattened out into a meaningless surface, or may be filled up with the endless detritus of language. What does that then do to our sense of Creation, to which, I think, it has been the traditional role of the poet to attend? And this in turn can lead us to another of our dominant interests, that of Objectivist poetry. The locus classicus would be Oppen’s “Psalm,” in which it is revealed that the natural world, “this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out,” consists at the same time of “The small nouns / Crying faith”:            Veritas sequitur . . . In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there!                                 Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass

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                               The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there.                                Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun                                The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out.3

And this, I think, is as far as I should go before hearing your reply. Perhaps I’ve already said far too much. . . . Dear Norman, I’m using your text to me, the one citing Scholem’s passage, as my takeoff point. First, let me register the problem as I see it at its most basic, the idea

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On the Poetics of the Jewish God 5

of “god” as the named (yet designated the Unnamable), the forbiddenness that brackets the designation, the prohibition of the graven image. Scholem, in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, discusses the clash between those, who through contemplation of God’s sublimity do not conceive “the idea that man carries the divine form.” and those who speak of God creating “man in His own image.”4 Scholem describes the clash between these views as “vehement,” and giving rise ultimately—and we have to think of that rise as one of enormous tension—to the resort to mystical representations of God, the most well-known perhaps, the varieties of forms discussed in Kabbalah. Kochan, in Beyond the Graven Image, develops an argument between the image and the making of images that echoes the tensions above, the latter “making” being the assimilation of the divine to man (imitatio dei). (This would be an activity in contrast to that of worship of already created images or idols). As poets, this is full of suggestion for me. A couple of phrases in the Scholem extract caught my attention: “the horrifying experience of God’s absence,” in its collision, “irreconcilably and catastrophically” with a Creation renewing itself. The atmospherics of these words and their alignment with Kafka suggest something static and perhaps problematic. As A. N. Wilson describes it, in a recent TLS review of The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, the Romans in 63 BC, after entering the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, were puzzled that, according to Josephus, “in the sanctuary stood nothing whatever.”5 Yards of literature and commentary have been written about that Roman astonishment, not only as it relates to the nature of Judaism and its God, its difference from the god-filled pantheons that surrounded it, but also, as Kochan so pointedly puts it in his section on “Holiness of the Land,” the “Problematik of the land of Israel” as opposed to the people of Israel.6 If I understand Kochan’s discussion properly, sanctity is problematized for the thinkers on Judaism and holiness because both space and matter, i.e., “holy” places, temples, and the land itself are in danger of being transformed into idols. In this sense, the empty chamber of the Holy of Holies that so shocked the Romans is also a commentary on the transience of the sacred. This astonishment and puzzlement strikes as a lead-in to other questions of imagining God. My own sense is that, as one whose traceries are through language, that God, the idea of God (this nowhere/everywhere of his being) as conceived by Scholem’s “pious atheist” is that this God consists of that which is markable. That the appearance of the sacred is revealed by marks, by our marking and writing. Unlike the Romans, we do not make an image to worship—we do not worship anything—but instead make sacred by making marks.

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Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller

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You refer to Oppen’s “Psalm” earlier. His “small nouns crying faith” in the “this in which,” is a phrase that reminds me of another line of his from another poem, “World, World—”: “The mystery is that there is something to stand on,” which to me is the mystery (and a kind of “faith” in itself) of the surface on which he writes “Psalm,” the surface on which any of us write, which is not blank but the “something we stand on,” the background space of possibility.7 The mark on the background is the beginning of inscription and also of the possibility of the sacred, because the sacred must be visible in order to be sensed or seen, which is why, in my view, the supernatural is not necessarily a component of the sacred. Quite the opposite: I would define the sacred as that which has been made intelligible and in the process made the world intelligible. The “mystery” (not the supernatural) of the sacred—the arena beyond its literalness, the possibility that this arena is invisible, is to be read via the offices of language. 8/3/15 Dear Michael, Without digging further (yet!) into Scholem or Kochan (the latter having shaped my thought on the subject years ago, when you first introduced me to his work, to the point that it has become part of my unconscious, and I was amazed to discover yesterday how thoroughly I had marked up the copy which he himself sent me, at your urging . . . )—let me respond to some of your remarks, and see where that leads. “ . . . the problem as I see it at its most basic, the idea of ‘god’ as the named (yet designated the Unnamable), the forbiddenness that brackets the designation, the prohibition of the graven image.” Surely we are immediately faced with the basic paradox: named (or designated) the Unnamable, though the pious refer to Him not as the Unnamable (shades of Beckett—or Lovecraft!) but as HaShem—the Name! The name of the Unnamable is the Name. As you say, we whose traceries are through language—we who weave the web, the openwork of words—understand “that this God consists of that which is markable.” Yes, but also that which is unmarkable as well. How could it be otherwise? So that in one respect, our writing occurs (cf. Zukofsky) in the space between the named and the unnamed, a liminal space, or a space between the sacred and the profane. (Liminality, for the anthropologists, is that condition of uncertainty in the middle of the ritual, when one is no longer one thing but not yet another.) As for me, the alleged “pious atheist,” it strikes me that such writing must be simultaneously sacral and transgressive. As I write in Track:

On the Poetics of the Jewish God 7



But to profane this sacred history But to sacrifice this deserted writing To call and call knowing he will answer To answer not knowing if he calls.8

Which leads me to your entirely justified concern about my original quote from Scholem, “‘the horrifying experience of God’s absence,’ in its collision, ‘irreconcilably and catastrophically’ with a Creation renewing itself.” Yes, atmospherics—the atmospherics of cosmic or existential dread. I confess to be attracted to this stance, and its version of mystery, but I can certainly understand the objections. No doubt that some of Kafka’s critics, and some of Kafka himself, reifies that sense. As I say, very modernist, so that a writer like Oppen, without becoming “postmodern,” may oppose such static dread through his bracing sense of open possibility. And in religious terms, wouldn’t that be analogous to Creation renewing itself? So a writing practice like Oppen’s (and here I think your poetry inherits this stance) does indeed become a sacred practice because of its intelligibility. That the world is always open to investigation, an investigation being continuously written by the poet. Again, I take the liberty of quoting myself from Track:             ** And yet the poem must sustain all things All of the orders as have been prescribed Copyright © 2016. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

As have been ordered.             * Therefore and therefore Not that it can be explained not that it can be inscribed But still.           * Nor is language magic as in some cabal waving their wands

Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller

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Not magic but mystery into which one may go.           * Into which one may go when one’s name is called Called by the Name the nameless Name Called into the nameless.           * Not mystification but a simple mystery The self and the world are made manifest in language Called out of the nameless.9

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If I’m not mistaken, I wrote that section while we were staying with you and Jane in Colorado. Makes sense to me. Dear Norman, Your note of 8/3/15 continues our round of provocations, useful ones. My first quick response was to ask myself, should the poet concede too readily to the idea of “that which is unmarkable”? Unmarked, yes, but “unmarkable” seems to give over too much to the kinds of mysticisms that have led to dogma, intolerance, and, in the poetic field, a vocabulary of abstractions and even weary fatalism (I could probably name a few more). I presume that the poet’s job, à la Bialik’s word, is “revealment.” In this, the poet resembles the kabbalist in assenting to the idea that in creation Torah preceded God. Scholem has an interesting passage in his essay on Benjamin and his angel that resonates with this idea; writing of Benjamin, he talks about “his ties to the mystical tradition and to a mystical experience which nevertheless was a far cry from the experience of God, proclaimed by so many oversimplifying minds as the only experience deserving to be called mystical. Benjamin knew that mystical experience is many-layered, and it was precisely this manylayeredness that played so great a role in his thinking and in his productivity” [my italics].10 This succinctly defines the activity of our “pious atheism.” Following this back to the putative subject of Imagining God, I at least want to put the emphasis on the gerund, that the act of imagining creates the sacred—as opposed to the idol worship of bowing down before what has been designated “sacred.” I think this is what I read from your excerpt from Track.



On the Poetics of the Jewish God 9

In my poem “Mappah,” which in a sense is about the fate of the cloth protecting the Torah (in particular, its being burnt along with the scroll in the Shoah), I wrote: “Let this be put another way: the cloth that wrapped the Torah in darkness shielded the light from the dark. “Let this be put another way: let this be put differently, the wish to call out.”11

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The “dark” at the end of the first line above is the historical dark of that period; the light emanating from the Torah, from the ground of creation—in this case, language—was to be protected. The “wish to call out” is the wish to sacralize, to make poetry of that horror. In a way, this brings us back to Kochan’s imagery, as I mentioned above, in his chapter “Symbolism in Action,” where he writes: “But if, in the process of the unmediated cleaving to God, the symbol disappears in the agent’s performance of the actions dictated by God it reappears. This is consonant with man as the ‘icon of God’ and the only way in which God can legitimately be represented. In the imitatio dei man becomes his own symbol.”12 Can this be a picture of the poet sitting at his/her desk? Is this picture the one that imagines God for us? That, to use your word, is already transgressive. Which leads me to another contemplation re: “transgressive,” that like the “sacred,” it is, for me, less the name for something than for being some kind of enacting. Dear Michael, It seems that we are both moving to a position that insists upon the necessity of “transgression” insofar as it insists upon “markability” when it comes to representing or imagining (making an image of) the Jewish God. This would be congruent with your references to Bialik’s task of “revealment” and to Scholem’s understanding of Benjamin’s God-less (?) mysticism, a position that certainly appeals to me personally and probably could be found throughout my work. In any case, one is still led to ask of Bialik, “What is revealed?” And of Scholem, “With what did Benjamin mystically commune, if not with God?” The answer in both cases, if there is an answer, may not prove especially kosher. Imagining may create the sacred, as you propose. But in going back to Kochan’s chapter (“Symbolism in Action”), I also find this: “ . . . although a symbol may perform a large number of functions, primary among them is its supposed capacity to bring together two entities, one seen and one unseen.”13 Kochan, if I understand him correctly, sees this as a potential problem, since the symbol, whether visual or verbal, tends toward idolatry. He thinks that

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Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller

in some instances, Jewish verbal symbolism (the making of Jewish poems?) becomes permissible “if symbolism, as is normally the case, inheres in the relationship of the profane with the holy or actually structures the holy.”14 Closer to the passage that you quote, he argues that “The symbol that is both material and immaterial attains its apogee in both respects when it is wholly annulled and at the same time brought to perfection. [This sounds like Benjamin’s version of dialectic, by the way.] This state is synonymous with the human imitation of the divine—to be more specific, it is synonymous with man’s performance of the commandments.”15 This is both heavy lifting and very slippery thinking. Are we performing the commandments when we are producing sublimely self-annulling symbols in our poems? I wonder. One important reason that Jewish writing, including modern Jewish poetry, has tended to be oriented to commentary, is because commentary does not appear be a matter of “imagining” or inventing the new: It appears devoted to rehearsing and explaining, opening, the tradition, however that is construed. Yet this has always been something of a strategy, if not a self-conscious ruse (cf. the supposed authorship of the Zohar). Scholem’s great essays “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists” and “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” provide ample proof that engagement with tradition through commentary or rehearsed ritual may actually prove to be a means of invention and innovation. Anxiety over idolatry, sacrilege, transgression proves to be an immense spur to creativity. Then again, so does (to draw on another Scholem essay), “Redemption Through Sin.” But to what extent does all this truly apply to modern Jewish poets, who understand themselves to be secular, embrace the profane, and yet yearn for a sense of the sacred or the numinous? Is this yearning merely nostalgia— keeping in mind that nostalgia is, at least for Benjamin, a powerfully enabling psychic force? It would appear that we simply cannot dispense with traditional religious categories, because in the past, if not the present, they named the existential, psychic, and indeed, social experiences that remain the most crucial subjects of a modern poetry that seeks to make important cultural contributions. I think one of the texts that make this case most strongly is your essay “Remains of the Diaspora,” certainly required reading for anyone concerned with imagining the Jewish God. Another thought occurs to me, and here I will end for now. Isn’t imagining a Jewish God another way of imagining the Jew? Doesn’t raising the first question inevitably raise the second? And aren’t the questions all the more relevant today, both in the diaspora and in Israel, when there is so much uncertainty and conflict around Jewish identity? For me, the claim that secular



On the Poetics of the Jewish God 11

Jewish culture has real, substantial, and historical validity hinges on what Jewish literature—Jewish poetry—may say to such questions. Dear Norman, We should put Kochan and Bialik in a room to debate our question. Bialik responding to Kochan’s “one seen and unseen,” would probably respond as he does in “Revealment and Concealment,” that “language with all its associations does not introduce us into the inner area, the essence of things, but that, on the contrary, language itself stands as a barrier between them. On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly.”16 He remarks that there is “only a perpetual search, an eternal ‘what?’ frozen on man’s lips. In truth there is no place even for this ‘what?’”17 A few sentences later, Bialik refers to the barrier of language as covering the void, to “prevent the void’s darkness from welling up and overflowing its bounds.”18 For me, Kochan’s “unseen” and Bialik’s “void” are the manifestations of the unknowable divine, and language is hiding them from sight. But Bialik, operating as poet, seeks a dynamic in which the poet is “forced to flee all that is fixed and inert in language, all that is opposed to their [the poets’] goal of the vital and mobile in language

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. . . [they, the poets] by this process there takes place, in the material of language, exchanges of posts and locations: one mark, a change in the point of one iota, and the old world shines with a new light. . . . The profane turns sacred and the sacred profane.”19

We would agree, if we follow the above, that the category of the “sacred” is a created category, that nothing, ipso facto—I would go so far as to say, ipso facto, nothing that already exists is “sacred” from the point of view of the poet, in the sense that to call “sacred” that which has already been created or labeled sacred would be redundancy. I’m not trying to debunk the category as much as I’m trying to emphasize that from my point of view as “poet,” the marking/making is the creating of the sacred. In our task of imagining God, it is the moment of making sacred in which He is revealed. The noun and pronoun here are only handles. The locus of “God” or “He” (or any other nominative at which one can point, or better, use to point) is somewhere moving along the process of the marking. You may recall in my “Remains of the Diaspora”—which you mention so kindly—the two categories of “rabbini” and “ribboni,” the former living within the Law, the latter seeing or transforming “Law,” as Robert Alter writes, into “Lore.”20 My emphasis on “the markable” and “markability” is to

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place the act of transforming, the marking, the act of creating, at the very center of making sacred. (And I don’t want to exclude the reader from this, the one who recognizes (or experiences and is affected by) that which has been newly marked as an instance of encountering the sacred). Bialik calls this “the way of the world: Words rise to greatness, and, falling, turn profane. What is essential is that language contains no word so slight that the hour of its birth was not one of powerful and awesome self-revealment, a lofty victory of the spirit.”21 “Transgression” here is the refusal to keep within the stock of already existing things, even (especially?) those called sacred, to override, to replace or re-order, what we seek to do by the act of composing (inscribing). If all is language, perceived through language, as both the Kabbalists and Bialik maintain, then isn’t every new construct of language also commentary? I’m thinking that Benjamin’s “now-time” poetics is very much of this order of understanding. Am I making an unwarranted leap here or is this the “heavy lifting and very slippery thinking” you are warning about? But our thinkers above would probably see composing as commentary, an act of marking. And therefore conceiving the blank page, the untouched stone or canvas not as truly blank but as the suppressed representation or repository of all previous markings. (And wouldn’t this conceiving actually be an aspect of Tradition, the jump-off point of what has previously been made intelligible?) To repeat: the dynamic force behind this is the hunger, to use Bialik’s term for “the void,” to reveal it, but which is then concealed again by the words we mark it with, the words that have now concealed the revealment. And so one must go on. The matter of the “modern Jewish poet’s” nostalgia, which you bring up, seems a question that can only be addressed by a discerning criticism that can evaluate various modes of nostalgia. Oppen’s yearnings, for example, cannot be lumped in with X, Y, or Zs, any more than we would lump Baudelaire’s spirituality with Claudel’s. And Benjamin’s nostalgia—think of his ride on the Angel seeing the ruins as it flies toward Progress—is less about a golden age than for a cleansing violence embedded in an image that can set the world right. As to the religious categories you invoke as necessary, aren’t they also entangled in the process of the profane becoming sacred and the sacred becoming profane, so that each, at every instance, each term is scrutinized/scrutinizable? As to your last paragraph, yes, imagining a Jewish God would be another way of imagining the Jew, bound up with his/her Jewishness (what is strikingly strange is that the amplitude and freedom of that imagining may lie with the outsider secular Jew more than with the Jew bound by religion), and the implications for what identity now means in such places as Israel or the Diaspora makes the imagining of great importance, culturally, politically, and



On the Poetics of the Jewish God 13

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socially. What remains as part of the construal of an answer to that question is transmissibility (not in the poetry world sense but rather as a question of “legitimacy”—is there a legitimacy to the transgressive—the winged horse of our discussion?), but that may yet be another topic entirely. The hunger for the profundity of a word leads us to marking (WCW “tuning?”) The way of looking at language as we have discussed above, and as you can intuit, is contrary to the experimental mode based on the idea that we are enclosed in language, and that poetry is the endless generation of language, such that it always refuses closure. Dear Michael, To begin, a few words about Bialik’s essay, to which I return after many years (and it’s always revealing—so to speak!—to see what I chose to highlight when I first read it). This time around, I’m deeply impressed by his suspicions regarding language, how it serves mainly to conceal, even in the hands of “the masters of prose,” the philosophers, the builders of systems, and so on. Even at the end of the piece, when he looks directly at the poets (in the passage from which you quote), they must first “flee [my italics] all that is fixed and inert in language. . . .”22 Yes, certainly, such is basic law for our tribe, but even when the poets assert their power, “words writhe [my italics again] in their hands; they are extinguished and lit again . . . put off a soul and put on a soul.”23 Such, I imagine, relates to the constant risk involved in writing poetry, especially a poetry imagining a Jewish God, or even a poetry in any way invested in some notion of the sacred. Bialik, it seems to me, cuts us no slack (and good for him): the uncertainty, the risk, the extremity of the void, is just a hair’s breadth away from overwhelming. And furthermore, in case one was even thinking about it: “No reply to the question of essence is ever possible in the process of speech.”24 Which includes, I suppose, poems. And yes, Bialik’s “void” and Kochan’s “unseen” are indeed “the manifestations of the unknowable divine.” In this respect, we seem to be spiraling back to my original letter and quote from Scholem about Kafka and the void. But I’m also getting a sense of an all or nothing dialectic operating just beneath our discourse. Let me try to bring it to light. In imagining the Jewish God, we move, you and I, given our studies and predilections, to a conception of divinity in terms of absence, Ein Sof, if you want to use the kabbalistic term. But given our Objectivist orientation as well, there is also a sense (cf. Oppen’s “Psalm” once again) of a fullness of Creation, a presence that approaches the sacred which language can reveal, rather than conceal or veil. And how is one to consider this (divine) plenitude? In your last letter, you note “that the category of the ‘sacred’ is a created category, that nothing, ipso

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facto—I would go so far as to say, ipso facto, nothing that already exists is ‘sacred’ from the point of view of the poet, in the sense that to call ‘sacred’ that which has already been created or labeled sacred would be redundancy. I’m not trying to debunk the category as much as I’m trying to emphasize that from my point of view as ‘poet,’ the marking/making is the creating of the sacred.” I certainly can’t argue with this, but I would have to claim that the converse is true (or operative) as well: everything that already exists is sacred, again, when the poet marks the created thing as such. “That they are there!”25 So: plenitude or the void; a totally sacred creation or a totally profane one; language revealing divinity or concealing it. The paradoxical situation in which we find ourselves recapitulates that which Steven Wasserstrom chronicles in Religion After Religion, his study of Scholem, Corbin and Eliade at Eranos. Wasserstrom notes that Scholem preferred his religion “the more paradoxical the better” (those are Scholem’s own words). Wasserstrom also writes of Scholem that “The crisis of tradition is still tradition, both remaining within its spirit and yet leaving its current forms behind. If this relationship to tradition was paradoxical, Scholem did not shy away from this conclusion.”26 I’m content to “rest” within that condition—and more importantly, to write from it. As for God, Jewish or otherwise, Wasserstrom quotes Scholem’s colleague Eliade: “the true dialectic of the sacred: by the mere fact of showing itself, the sacred hides itself.”27 And again, this may not serve as any sort of ground of belief, but it may well be a condition, a dimension, of a poetics. Dear Norman, The “sense of an all-or-nothing dialectic operating just beneath our discourse” stems, I think, from two aspects of our discussion on which we most likely agree, aspects implicit in Bialik’s “flee all that is fixed and inert in language.” The first aspect, which I believe permeates so much Judaic thought, concerns the fear of the petrification of the sacred, which, as I hinted earlier, leads to a dogmatic, law-driven theology, repressive and unable, except by pressure and/or enforcement (sometimes violent), to deal with the variability of the human condition or with historical change. The saving tools that enable fleeing in this regard, are Talmud, midrash, commentary, poetry. The Kabbalah is perhaps the supreme monumental endeavor of such flights. The second aspect relates to how the sacred is realized: For the poet (one of Bialik’s “masters of allegory”) it is through the poet’s engagement with the dynamic of language as it is combined and recombined in new creations, its fleeing act from the “fixed and inert.” But there is also a restlessness that consigns this new instance of creation, this new node of the sacred ultimately to the category of what has been “fixed and inert.” As I put it at the end of my essay “The Uncertainty of the Poet,” “the next poem is always the aim



On the Poetics of the Jewish God 15

of the prior poem, and this is how poetry develops, not by offering truth upon truth, but by reminding us of how truth is always passing into a lie.”28 A number of people have asked me what I meant by “truth passing into a lie,” and I’ve answered with Bialik’s thought in mind—that, on the spiritual level, the sacred must constantly be made anew (i.e., to go back to one of your worries about the contemporary Jewish poet in the Diaspora, he/she should not be concerned about writing “self-annulling” poems, since, where the sacred is concerned, from Bialik’s point of view, there are no other kind). This idea of renewal does not contradict your words, your “converse” above that “everything that already exists is sacred, again, when the poet marks the created thing as such.” It is in the act of imagining, in making the mark, that divinity is possibly manifest, in a way, recovered from its invisibility. Wilson, in his TLS review mentioned above, cites Étienne Gilson’s remark that “God is not a being, he is being.”29 The emphasis here, then, is away from idolizing an object and toward a notion of the inherency of the divine, possibly realizable through the act of a reader or poet. Such a process is suggested in Judaic thought, even in the earliest conceptualizations leading to Kabbalah. One of the passages that Scholem cites by the second century Gnostic mystic Marcus, influenced by Judaic thought, reads:

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When, in the beginning, the fatherless father, who is neither grasped by the mind nor has a substance and who is neither man nor woman, wanted to express His ineffable being and make his invisible being visible, He opened his mouth and produced a word that resembled Him. In coming to him, it showed him that it was thereby becoming manifest as the shape of the invisible.30

The thought trains leading to and from this conception are multiple, possibly originating in commentaries on Ezekiel’s descriptions of the throne of God, one of the most “anthropomorphizing” passages, as Scholem describes it, in holy scripture and leading toward Kabbalistic notions of word, naming, and the sacred. I am by no means a scholar of this material, and what I take from it, as a “pious atheist,” is its suggestibility that the divine is manifest in utterance (our “marking” of it) and then recedes into silence and invisibility as the moment of utterance passes. That is the condition in which divinity offers its simultaneous image/invisibility to the poet (and, I might add, to the reader who experiences the sacred through an encounter with a poem, a text). One of the lines in “Mappah,” the poem of mine I cited above reads: “The teacher remarked that to regard the earth as the shrine-room floor is enlightenment.”31 This is a Buddhist version perhaps of your “everything that already exists is sacred.” And the Kabbalistic literature is replete with echoes of this attitude, even to its insistence on the “sparks” of the good lying hidden in the realm of Satan or Gehinnom. The particular genius of the Kabbalistic

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view and of the potentialities within the sphere of contemporary poetry lie in their abilities to resolve the dualisms of sacred/profane, good and evil. “Their common denominator,” as Scholem puts it of such points of view “seems to be the assumption that, fundamentally, all of the divine potencies wish to operate in the existential realms of Creation.”32 (An aside: In some of the Buddhist traditions, particularly in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition in which I have studied, the cosmos in all its manifestations is sometimes referred to in the literature as “the Great Wrathful One,” the source of the potencies [as in the Kabbalistic vision], “the trees, the greenery, the individuals, etc.” that make up worlds and are “wrathful” in the sense that they are incitements to creative action, irritants that punctuate the habitual and conventional overlays of our mind. The sutras and the endless commentaries and refinements on them constitute a movement toward spiritual realization similar to midrashic studies. Both traditions seem, before all else, to have a desire to keep both sides of our dualisms alive, hence always in interaction and hence resolvable into something which for want of a better word we call a path.) It is the Tsaddik, as Scholem cites from an early description in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, who is tasked with setting “all the inner things in their place within, and all the outer things in their place without, and nothing leaves the boundary set for it.”33 It would be an impossible leap to equate the poet with the Tsaddik, but certainly it is the possible righteousness in the relationship (practice?) of the poet to his or her language that sets “all the outer things in their place.” Bialik puts it this way: “The profane turns sacred, and the sacred profane. Long established words are constantly being pulled out of their settings, as it were, and exchanging places with one another. Meanwhile, between concealments [our poetry?] the void looms. And that is the secret of the great influence of the language of poetry.”34 Perhaps for the Jewish poet, an image of God would be synonymous with that looming void our very words enable. In this we create the one divinity that seems boundless. NOTES 1.  Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 283. 2. Ibid. 3.  George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. by Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 99. Copyright © 2002 George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. 4.  Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 18.

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On the Poetics of the Jewish God 17

5. A. N. Wilson, “A Kind of Poetry,” Times Literary Supplement 5857 (July 2, 2015): 22. 6.  Lionel Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 46. 7. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 159. 8.  Norman Finkelstein, Track (Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2012), 104. 9.  Ibid., 262–63. 10.  Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” On Jews and Judaism, 201. 11.  Michael Heller, Dianoia (New York: Nightboat Books, 2016), 4. 12. Kochan, Graven Image, 65. 13.  Ibid., 61. 14. Ibid. 15.  Ibid., 64. 16.  Hayim Nahman Bialik, “Revealment and Concealment in Language,” trans. by Jacob Sloan, Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000), 15–16. 17.  Ibid., 16. 18.  Ibid., 17. 19.  Ibid., 24–25. 20.  Michael Heller, “Remains of the Diaspora,” Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, ed. by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 171. 21.  Bialik, “Revealment,” 12. 22.  Ibid., 24–25. 23.  Ibid., 25. 24.  Ibid., 21. 25. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 99. 26. Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 62. 27.  Ibid., 87. 28.  Michael Heller, “The Uncertainty of the Poet,” Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005), 14. 29.  Wilson, “A Kind of Poetry,” 22. 30. Scholem, Godhead, 26. 31. Heller, Dianoia, 4. 32. Scholem, Godhead, 72. 33.  Ibid., 105. 34.  Bialik, “Revealment,” 25.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bialik, Hayim Nahman. “Revealment and Concealment in Language.” In Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays, translated by Jacob Sloan, 11–26. Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000.

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Finkelstein, Norman. Track. Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2012. Heller, Michael. “Mappah.” Dianoia. New York: Nightboat Books, 2016. ———. “Remains of the Diaspora.” In Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris, 170–83. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. ———. “The Uncertainty of the Poet.” In Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics, 3–14. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2005. Kochan, Lionel. Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Oppen, George. New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson. New York: New Directions, 2002. Scholem, Gershom. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. ———. “Reflections on Jewish Theology.” In On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, 261–97. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Wasserstrom, Steven M. Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Wilson, A. N. “A Kind of Poetry.” Times Literary Supplement No. 5857 (July 3, 2015): 22.

Chapter Two

Seeing Divine Writing Thoughts on the Drama of the Outside Within the Technology of Inscription1

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Lewis Freedman

In the surviving compendia of Mesopotamian extispicy omens— prognosticative texts in which a sheep’s liver or gall bladder is read by the diviner as a surface bearing divine inscription—we repeatedly find a treatment of the written sign in which a graphemic or homonymic instrumentation of the sign is itself the medium to prophetic knowledge. In one such instance a visual similarity between the shape of a groove on the lobus sinister of a sacrificial sheep’s liver and the shape of the cuneiform grapheme known as kaškaš is read as a portent of heavy rain due to a paranomasic pun between kaškaš and kaškaššu, “an epithet used of the storm god Adad.”2 In another case an astrological omen, one that interprets the heavenly inscription of “a lunar eclipse in the morning watch during the month Elul” as a sign of “the moon god’s ‘desire’ (erēšu) for a priestess,” is confirmed through an extispicy ritual which reveals two eclipse-like overlapping black marks upon the gall bladder. These marks create a visual correlation between divine texts of sky and sheep organ that in turn are read and inscribed in the diviner’s extispicy omen through a homonymic pun between the differing cuneiform graphemic clusters for “erēšu ‘to desire’ and erēšu ‘to cultivate,’” thus reaffirming the original astrological reading.3 In both of these instances the gods, whose communication in its prognosticative capacity is figured as temporally exterior to the bounds of human knowledge, have issued their message by writing upon a surface, one that is radically exterior (in the case of astrological movement) or interior (in the case of a sheep’s liver), outside of the boundaries of human inscription.4 In order to decipher this divine inscription the diviner’s act of writing is, in turn, ritually charged; and to receive a prognosticative communication beyond the temporal limits of human knowledge the diviner employs associative signifying pathways of the written sign, punning to exegetically translate what 19

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the gods have inscribed upon their radically exterior tablet into the foretold inscription of a particular future. In these extispicy rituals inscription was indeed central not only to the gods’ communication and to the diviner’s exegesis, but also to the particular question at stake in the ritual (the ritual was ordinarily performed on behalf of a client to resolve an uncertain future), which was inscribed upon a tablet at the start of proceedings to be presented to the gods.5 This complex circuitry of divinely and humanly read and written texts, made even more complex in the second instance referenced above by a translation of the lunar inscription and interpretation into the question of the extispicy ritual, suggests to me the necessary activity of inscription and the crucial role of imagining the inscribable surface within the dynamics of Mesopotamian divination rituals. That prognosticative content in these rituals can be signified through the materiality of the sign’s shape (as in the first example) and its paronomasic associations (present in both of the instances above) tantalizingly suggests this divine transmission to be a product of writing itself. This is to write that we might imagine the act of writing in the instances above to constitute a practice of “divinatory inquiry.” Along this same line of thinking we might consider how in the Akkadian “the same word” is used to denote an “‘ominous sign’ and [a] ‘cuneiform sign’” as though the mark of the grapheme itself is already implicated in a prognosticative communication.6 I begin with these speculations on extispicy omens in order to pose a question that markedly I’ve not seen posed elsewhere in the extensive canon of twentieth-century theorizations of writing, at least not with quite the same An arrhythmia of uncertain age and origin served as a countenance . . . a pure lamp of lightening . . . was actually yes . . . an angle . . . forced in the eschatological age upon the biology of vision. Not true there is only one clue . . . I made the dream-text without doing shit. And the worst violence is to be made visible . . . so I keep one part suddenly compiled by its earlier anonymous one. Thus the term used for seeing in here is conversational spreading down the sight of a string to the light of a fuller treatment than can be accorded here. It’s really never equal to a false home and is not a place to re-treat what repeats to transform its departure. Even so . . . nerving the less . . . mobile chance . . . to look at where it twists . . . still worth bobbing here . . . in some parts of the water. As to the origin of this boat on the bus off track, it really is anthropology . . . just studying the presupposed invisibility of the observer to death as a countenance of resonating bright confusion. To make this point clearer . . . if the writing weren’t asked to cover itself as though that were its truth . . . it would cease to be acknowledged a virtuality we might live for.



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naiveté as I shall pose it here: How is it possible that humans were able to recognize a surface as potentially inscribable, or to rephrase this slightly, what origin can we imagine for the recognition of the inscribable surface? I draw attention to the artifice of such a question because I imagine a more reasonable mind might object to the assumption inherent in the question itself: that a moment in which the recognition of the inscribable surface was not possible preceded the moment in which it was, or indeed, that the recognition of an inscribable surface per se may be isolated as event within a concern for the origins and techné of writing. Consider though the sky or sheep’s liver imagined, as in the examples of Mesopotamian divination above, as surfaces that are inscribable only by some force outside of the human subject, as surfaces that we cannot inscribe: doesn’t the imagination of a surface that only the gods can inscribe isolate the question of the inscribability of a surface per se in the activity of writing, one that is tied intimately to our dramatizations of both an anarchival exteriority and emergent forms of subjectivity at play in the time of writing? Dismantle a peroration of the machine so learning how. Or should another version of this world, owing to our errors, depart just like that as the midst of our prophetic vision? With my Pop watching fake son while I play upon the Wii . . . burning down here in the juice we have elaborated . . . I was experienced by the Lord as a revelation to Him . . . I was a fork that He must chew . . . chew . . . choose from three diverging paths . . . this into that or abandoned to form a launch like pad for the grand opening bash of apocalyptic utterances. Like birds on a mention now we see through a mirror that in the future we will see eye to eye . . . incarnate . . . since we have relegated school to the future world as a dialogue between surprise and resemblance. On the very spot that I write that rickety bench that rickety bench I cannot read the impression it made and I deny it ever . . . that God would make His final form visible to a fully tenured faculty eye of the rational that blinked just once to dream of a great theophany . . . then opened eye to eye to some Robocop daiquiri just nixed in a lovey disc . . .

Turning the page (some thousand-odd years later) to the classical Rabbinic anthology of Midrash, Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, we see a similarly complex scene of divine and human inscription that intensifies the articulation of my question. There is, for the Rabbis of the Mekhilta, a seeming contradiction in Exodus 20:15. This verse occurs amidst the revelation at Sinai directly after God has spoken the first ten commandments, the mount quaking with revelation. At its most literal level the verse begins, “And all the nation saw the thunderings,” implicitly begging the question for the Rabbis of antiquity:

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How is it possible that the Israelites at Sinai visually apprehended a sound? Before turning to Rabbi Akiva’s remarkable response to this implicit question (which I shall examine in depth), it is worth noting that the question itself bears a certain artifice, since the verb “they saw” (“‫ )”רואים‬acts in the context of the verse as a whole upon “the thunderings, the lightnings, and the sound of the shofar, and the smoke of the mountain,” and could be easily read as a generalizing verb for the phenomena apprehended, an interpretation we might imagine the translators of the Jewish Publication Society’s 1985 Tanakh to be offering in their translation of the verb as “witnessed.”7 R. Akiva’s response however, that “they saw the fiery word emerge from the mouth of the Almighty and engraved upon the tablets,” that what they saw was the event of divine inscription itself, relies upon his reading of a pun in the biblical text that, like the Mesopotamian omens above, constellates a complex set of relationships between the surfaces of divine and human inscription.8 self-portrait entitled ‘narc as bird’ visible across the store . . . a clash in the car tint to enclose contact . . . spine of the Book of Jubilees too little to toast . . . and then blindly spread sunscreen on . . . fascinated by circles on the tin man’s face in the song so fat with surface. Them ruins are covert paws . . . as if . . . steeped for signing . . . they grew . . . attaching special meaning to the audience of this thought . . . a more intimate relation of touch to speech than our historical knowledge can explain or warrant. Note why the touch is visible as not quite a bearing when pointed to repeatedly point from the unmistakable vibrancy around your messed-up hair. When I can’t respond or commune with desire . . . cause so flipped . . . so weighed down with pride . . . its discernible only to the idea of my mind . . . whose action is raised by a stream of apologetics so lacking in pitch relation . . . it mistakes these cardboard forceps for the starting point of meaningful code. Into languages that reread the friends we don’t yet . . . or are waiting to friend . . . to discover that all departing mentalities when taking leave of their introductions apply the waiting on a scale to be . . . which . . . theorizes the origin of meaning.

The noun commonly translated as “thunderings” (“‫ ”קולות‬or “‫ )”קולת‬in the biblical verse is the plural of the noun for “voice” (“‫)”קול‬, a noun not uncommonly employed in its singular form as a reference to divine speech in the Hebrew Bible, and is interpretively literalized by R. Akiva to refer to the plural “voices” of the utterance of the first ten commandments that have just “emerg[ed] from the mouth of the almighty.” This notion of the multiplicity of God’s voice at the revelation at Sinai is a recurring concern for the Rabbis of the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael: their interpretation of the potentially un-



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necessary inclusion of the word “all” (“‫ )”כל‬in Exodus 20:1 (“And God spoke all of these words, saying:”) imagines “that God said the ten commandments in a single speech-act, which is impossible for flesh and blood [to do]” (312). That the words for “all” (“‫ )”כל‬and “voice” (“‫ )”קול‬are homonyms (“col” and “kol”) elides these two interpretations, the simultaneous singularity and multiplicity of the divine speech-act becoming, in R. Akiva’s reading, simultaneously the vision of the act of a divine inscription.

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This touch like speech we’re following is something even more reductive than saying it’s outside music . . . an exercise that beats you up until you grow up . . . fills the modern youth with the strength to never deserve their former validations. Struck dead on draft night and still you say the ministering angels of death cannot see God who like a sports metaphor imagines it picks you. Say it again no more metaphors but the evil reports on purity and impurity keep on circulating in the movie industry’s underworld as the underworlds keep on trucking in the movies metaphorically as concealed systems of power within community that threaten to chasm an individual’s relation to the law . . . thus sayeth the vigilante . . . a law unto themself. There are: the scoffers, the hypocrites, the scorners . . . evil reports blazing over wooded backyards to make that comfort real. Here’s how I like to begin: in a series of secret homebases scattered to thin my moral shortcomings to the fringes of transference . . . and though I particularly no longer permit myself to ball-bounce (a metaphorically constructed sports-playing with psychologically transparent leagues and players) . . .

R. Akiva’s interpretation of Exodus 20:15 does not, however, posit a metaphorical reading (that the nation sees God’s inscription) precisely at the expense of the more literal one (that they see thunder and lightening), but seeks to integrate the two readings into a symbolic whole. The verb R. Akiva uses for the act of divine writing (“‫ )”חצב‬in his interpretation, which I translated above as “engrave,” is predominantly employed in the Hebrew Bible in the contexts of hewing and mining, most often from stone. This choice of verb is particular to the prooftext from Psalms (29:7) that R. Akiva brings in support of his reading, “The voice (“‫ )”קול‬of God hews out [engraves with] (“‫)”ח[ו]צב‬ flames of fire,” which constitutes the only biblical verse in which this particular verb is used to describe the voice of God.9 R. Akiva’s use of this verb thus functions interpretively on both verses simultaneously: with regards to the verse in Exodus it revisions the revelation at Mount Sinai by conjuring a nation bearing that simultaneous visual and auditory witness particular to writing as they witness God’s inscriptive voice upon the stone of the tablets, hewn from the surface of the mountain itself, thunder and lightening His

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scribal implements; and with regard to the verse in Psalms, it resituates that verse within the folded time of God’s vocalized inscription at Sinai and reverses the pun which R. Akiva’s reading is founded upon, opening a rereading of the verse as “The thunder (“‫ )”קול‬of God engraves with lightning strikes.”

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and while I have particularly neglected the practice of predicting deaths of little children as a deterrent from sexual aberration . . . I continue to observe R.D. (Laing?)’s permission to return to a spasmodic folk-tale meadow of the no soap radio legend. This very same mode induced my friend to ask: why is training always repetition? Good question, right? I shutteth my eyes . . . genuinely looking to see far off into the opposite direction from where the food goes in continuation. And though it was prohibited to stare . . . he was just a half-naked twig repeating laundry for the lunacy it admits. The terrifying consortium of abstinence and the smell of the globe . . . to mend the climate by offering it a gift . . . as though the performance weight of healing was root crusted through charity and lovingkindness. Andrew formulates the stale doctrine this way: he says Lord to the photon . . . blows his glass for religious object (a food bong) . . . a mental patient slash organ donor privately offers some gift to a king . . . it is altogether doubtful whether it will be accepted . . . he or she then undergoes this diversion . . . that even should the ruler accept the gift . . . their wish to meet the giver remains far from certain . . .

R. Akiva’s imagination of the revelation at Sinai as a divine inscription that assimilates speech and writing, metaphor and literality, multiplicity and singularity, all collapsed paranomasically into an irreducible simultaneity, this vision is reinforced in what follows of the Mekhilta’s commentary on Exodus 20:15. Here Rabbi asserts that the revelation constituted for its witnesses an event of pure exegesis where precisely “as the speech-act emerged they interpreted it.”10 For Rabbi, to witness the writing itself of the outside is to collapse the deferral between text and its meaning which ordinarily constitutes interpretation, and to impossibly immediatize the interpretive act. Imagining revelation as the witnessing of the outside in the act of inscribing distinguishes revelation from the Mesopotamian divination discussed above which writes into the record of the outside having written, as well as, presumably, from the rabbinic act of interpretation. Rabbi, in the apparency of an exegetical gap in his own interpretation of the language of Torah (the language of a divine outside), expresses the desire for a transcendent exegesis, an interpretative act that would collapse the boundary between the surfaces of inscription which the human can not inscribe and those surfaces that the human has designated for inscription.



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this patient donor slash mental organ then gets obsessed with being received by the king . . . and adorns him or her self with all the dashed up subjecthood she or he can stand . . . that’s the end of the story and the end of the story is that its moral application intimates that it might be of great merit to your conception of your deeds and actions in this world. The bulk of repentance is for rethinking youth . . . something determined to be a choice to move away from . . . talents understood to be clustering at the messes to move towards. I therefore choose the language according to a theme of imagining thinking . . . as though once asleep . . . always asleep . . . since sleep cannot verify what was waking . . . we dream the residual senseimpressions as arising in the article that precedes them. Isn’t our own minds a kind of scarecrow here . . . insects formed only when they have just entered the tent . . . to limit our knowledge of some accession to power (potentially fascist) . . . this examination, shame and all, limited to imagining this. Exit the promise of (capital “I”) imagination (I am thinking here of the American Modernist poets who stayed in the USA) . . .

This revelatory experience of divine writing is, however, lest we forget the context of the verse itself, an experience of mortal terror, one that immediately drives the Israelites to distance themselves from Sinai and plead with Moses to serve as medium in their communication with what is outside, communicating God’s laws to them in God’s stead (Exodus 20:15–16). In this role, Moses is tasked not only with the spoken relay of God’s laws to the people, but also with the labor of producing a written transcription of these laws. And while the material specifications of Moses’s inscribed surface are not detailed, a distinction is clearly drawn in the biblical text between the human writing of an outside communication that Moses enacts and God’s act of divine writing. Moses’s writing of the laws which God has dictated is, in the narrative of Exodus, clearly an inauthentic copy and an insufficient prosthetic for divine inscription since, even after his transcription has been completed, God invites Moses to ascend the mount explicitly to receive “the stone tablets and the Torah and the commandment which I have written for you to instruct them” (Exodus 24:12). It is notable that though Moses reads the nation a reminder of their faith and covenant from the transcribed text he has just written, their construction of a golden calf during the absence of his ascension to receive the divinely inscribed text explicitly violates the eleventh commandment, the first commandment relayed through Moses’s transcription rather than through the revelatory experience of divine writing (Exodus 20:19). Human writing, unlike divine writing, bears the deferral of interpretation and in its polar dramatization of a movement between an outside and an interiority may be, in their

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having constructed a working hostility . . . resistance repeated in bitter disappointment as boundary . . . rather than the already reoccurring condition of a sub-linguistic syntax pulse and its historicity (ala Lezama Lima). This is the kind of equivocal wisdom we just can’t not answer back to . . . pleading to our publishers that they never stop deleting our Names as founding editors of this series. It’s the same inferiority uncertainty of a joint-re-consideration that attracts our magical performances addiction to public utterance. To partake in the great future revolution . . . to shape a churn’s goop . . . all flesh consumed without discrimination . . . reads into Han Solo’s stride . . . a ghostly spanner to service motes . . . when we awake we will be recorded into the complex mess falling from aborted heights. The very tissue of the season seems . . . based on a previous occasion we recall . . . to have performed poorly . . . ends offer on quoted stock . . . projected up on the moon with His finger . . . but you can’t start yet you are winning. To hire some arm . . . a warp grows persecuted as usual . . . a silent phobia wake-a-thon in the mouth of you your client . . . where we sleep. I seek to be paid . . . at regular intervals . . . a paid visit to visit you my friend . . .

indistinction, reexpressed (as they are in Exodus) as the very oppositional violation of what we thought we had inscribed and recorded. This midrashic imagination of an imminent, immediatized, divine textuality that omits the gap of interpretation directly articulates to me the question of what it might mean to recognize a surface as potentially inscribable. The theorization of an event of inscription in which there is no interpretive gap, where there is no dramatization of a movement of the outside to the inside in writing, is, when thought entirely, the theorization of a world prior to writing, and is itself a drama of exteriority and interiority only plausible through the techné of the inscribable surface itself. What, I imagine, is so unbearable to the Israelites in the Mekhilta’s notion of revelation as pure writing and pure interpretation is precisely the absence of this deferral or loss in writing as a movement between exterior and interior space. To recognize a surface as potentially inscribable is to fixate a space and duration as interior to the one who recognizes it, as interior to the time in which it is recognized. Here is a duration and space, we might say, that will hold, in some replayable form however fleeting, the record of that which the outside inscribes upon it. But the subjects and objects of these statements might be equally inversed, each mention of an interior replaced by an outside instead, for what permits this outside to perform in this drama of recognition except the very interior space of our metaphysical selves? As Derrida has written “no archive without outside.”11



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so I stay in grad school . . . and here I am accomplice from applying my witness of this alarm . . . that the upper ones are sustained by the splendor of the holy spirit . . . while the lower ones if they do not toil will starve. There are: the dilletantes, the popularizers, the resenters, pretenders . . . and due to the familia(l)r pleasures they derive in their bias against laypersons . . . they actually have the hardest time imperfecting their work. Eating peaches off some terribly pat trees . . . they choose the most expressive words to neatly riddle who is ‘really’ alive . . . and I contribute with the strength of my antipathies, dislikings, and weaknesses . . . but I might presuppose to have my theories about that. Like some ongoing prejudice stuck me as an observer . . . what does one do with that? . . . after all, we don’t vacuum in a vacuum. Before concluding this section I am part myself both before at after. The beauty of the lining of any throat is that it puts on lines in an air of speech. Graces . . . each geography . . . was once before famous . . . as a great beauty in the muddle of consequence. In other words . . . all who partook in this Midwestern town’s joyful suppression of the apocalyptists.

This indistinction in imagining the recognition of an inscribable surface fulfills R. Akiva and Rabbi’s transcendent desire for the collapse of a movement between an outside and interior in writing, while dramatizing precisely such a movement between the time and space of the recognizer and the time and space of the surface recognized. This double fulfillment is also, however, the same movement dramatized, the transcendent collapse playing the outside (a world prior) to the interiority of the movements of recognition (the emergence of interiority), and, confined only to its performance, it is produced as a drama of deferral and loss. I shall pause momentarily here after this rather tautological description of the meaning of imagining the recognition of the inscribable surface and its implications for understanding a relation between writing and the figure of what is outside to mark an interruption; I do so in the attempt to elucidate and expand this description by reapproaching it from a joined but differing angle. To think about writing through the question of the recognition of the inscribable surface is naïve because it elects to follow the implicitness of an outside in writing right back to its proposition of origin. Thinking then, if you’ll permit this naïveté, of an originary moment in which a surface is recognized as potentially inscribable but has yet to bear an inscription, I can identify a primary characteristic in the techné of inscription that denies the very possibility of such an originary moment. The primary characteristic of inscription as techné, that which allows it to be a record, is the material inseparability of its record and replay. That is to say that to read or replay the sequence of

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recorded marks of, let’s say, a typefaced phonetic alphabet inscribed with ink upon the pages of a book, one traces over the very material distribution of the marks that constitute that record upon the surface of their inscription.12 If we are to accept this structure of simultaneous and inseparable replay and record as a base structure of the technology of inscription, then to write the imagination of this originary moment (in which the potential of a surface of inscription has been recognized but does not yet bear record) is preclusively unimaginable, since the writing of the recognition of a surface of only potential inscribability would already be constituted by that which it replays. As such, the very conception of the recognition of a surface as potentially inscribable constitutes and is constituted by the drama of a record and replay of the writing of some prior originary structure.

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Sitting around with crowns on their strands . . . drinking the few remaining strands of relation to see the manner of their placing in one last line before the open tomb. Real apprehensive like . . . this open tune in sonar . . . its play some weird accomplice to steeping form before you pour . . . camp counselor mounts his pop-arts little deuce coupe slash . . . boogie nights style . . . you don’t know what I got. Would like a look from us to recoil into wicked people are charitable too . . . invisible merits attaining a nearness to poor visibility . . . pulled over . . . breathing guilt into the realizer. More junk than the picture should emerge . . . conversation with an unhinge searching hints of pathology for the fringe we’re absorbed in. Group-like . . . intention freed by interconnected expansion rather than erasure of the author . . . in the dignified condescension of any instance of any mission . . . the speech, we admit, may have been counterfeit, but the infinitesimal tears were really real. I want to encourage research and raise the standards of scholarly practice to a really high level . . . here’s to hoping we can reverse human aging and finally taste the crisp figment of heaven . . . we’ll all be articulate ministers . . . that is recognized authoritative spokespeople of our age.

It is particularly this prior originary structure of simultaneous replay and record, in all its unimaginableness, in its isolated dramatizations, that draws together these two attempts at describing the outside’s activity in writing. This prior originary structure is the inscribing of interiority itself, simultaneously hewn or engraved by the inseparable record and replay of a pure outside of which it is entirely constituted, and persisting eternally in the pure solitude of this loop. As the coming into being of interiority itself, as the very space and time of metaphysics and of subjectivity, it is the possibility of recognizing the inscribable surface and the author, so to speak, of the technology of in-



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scription that structurally constitutes and is constituted by its inseparable record and replay. It is through this structure, the imagination of an interior both irremediably removed from and entirely constituted by an outside, which, though it never ceases to inscribe itself refers always to its own artifice and impossibility as truth, it is through this structure that writing repeatedly dramatizes a contact with that which is outside of human subjectivity (figured as the record of its own origin), while simultaneously dramatizing the emergence of interior space.

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But the meek who are also really funny . . . a gutsy bunch who might just inherit the earth . . . or keep some hard and bitter shadow of it . . . will modestly yet wryly say they saw that coming . . . the impetuous grafting onto a spindle of energy . . . but from the limits of the stage the limits of monadic self . . . parentteacher meetings if you know what I mean . . . not to take away the com(m)a of my own responsibility of course. Wrapped in the wrecked but half-obscured circles of interpretation . . . there is a kind of double-vertigo to struggle with . . . a strange reproductive move to reproduce the move as somehow not memory. Fervent insistence to know the carry-on as it walks . . . or before we illicitly consume it. The flower pulpit I feel so intolerant of is the spiritual legacy of their latinate Names . . . latinate Names modes of transportation that make the generally stupid reign of the idea of the world as presiding over the circle it floats in . . . well . . . worth living. The quit then answers only as long as the interruption fostered in its supply . . . to think of a void . . . then think of a word . . . like wall st. . . . and watch it float there . . . the inferno of our spiritual legacy.

Perhaps we can now understand the Israelites’ horrifying anticipation of death from the revelatory exposure to pure inscription at Sinai as the threat of a writing which does not, in its pure immanence, dramatize its own radical exteriority as the production of an interior space, and in consequence will annihilate the repetition of the space of subjectivity. We might now also better understand the Mekhilta’s subsequent interpretation, that Moses’s humility is the characteristic which enables him to draw near to God’s revelation and serve as a scribe and communicative medium (when the rest of Israelites had to withdraw), as emphasizing a need for a radical dispossession of the interior space of subjectivity through meekness or humility as the condition for experiencing revelation as a pure writing and interpretation (342). It is this dispossession of the space of interiority as the space of subjectivity that will, the Mekhilta suggests, work “to finally reside the Shekhina [loosely translated as God’s presence] with mankind on earth.” The Mekhilta’s imagined utopian result of this emptying of interiority as the condition of Moses’s reception and

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transcription of God’s revelation is then a dream of a transhistorical origin event accessed through absenting the very cleft of interior subjective space. It is into precisely such a space, a space of pure interiority, that the Mekhilta understands Moses must “draw near” to in order to transcribe the law. Concerning the language of approach rather than arrival in Exodus 20:17, “and Moses drew near to the araphel (‫ )ערפל‬where God was,” the Mekhilta describes this approach as a movement inwards through “three divisions: darkness, cloud and araphel.”13 First, the “darkness,” Moses moves through is “from outside,” then the “cloud” is “from within,” and finally the “araphel” is (offering an overliteralized translation of the idiomatic “‫)”מלפני ולפנים‬ “in front of and within.”14 Here we see an explicit dramatization of access to the space of divine inscription as situated only by passing through and beyond the dialectical movement of outside to interior characteristic of human inscription. The Mekhilta draws this three-fold structure of “darkness, cloud, and araphel” from Moses’s Deuteronomic redescription of the Sinai revelation narrative (5:18). By framing Moses’s transcription through this retelling, in which Moses, contrary to the visual language employed in Exodus, consistently stresses the auditory nature of the revelation, we might infer an implicit investment on the part of the Mekhilta’s commentators in dramatizing the revelation as the experience of an originary and pure writing of the outside whose record replays itself in their own exegetical act of Torah study as divine worship. As Moses, in his renarration of the revelation stresses to the Israelites, “you heard the voice of words, and you saw no image with the exception of voice” (Deuteronomy 4:12).

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NOTES 1.  The prose poem “The Name: Visibility,” which I have intended to run alongside “Seeing Divine Writing” as though it were a later rabbinic commentary on the text, is an excerpt from the book Residual Synonyms for the Name of God, to be published by Ugly Duckling Presse this year. This excerpt (and the book as a whole) is composed as a rewriting of several texts of the Wissenschaft rabbinic scholar, Rabbi Doctor Arthur Marmorstein, who is also one of my maternal great-grandfathers. It is a highly liberal, and somewhat heretical rewriting (a transgressive practice which like all transgressions enacts a continuity) that splices one of my notebooks into my ancestor’s text, taking every homophonic and associative liberty arriving between the texts at the event of composition. It is an event and a liberty that treats the simultaneous record and replay of this ancestral past as both a dictating outside (in the Spicerian sense) and that which already constitutes the structure of my interiority. There is a analogic at work here, the scholarly approach to the study of Jewish texts submitted to the anarchic spiritualism of a secular poetics at a cultural moment in which, to my apprehension, the infinite is repeatedly dramatized as the finitely calculable, believing

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Seeing Divine Writing 31

it has undone a past in this completeness, but still working to retain a transfer of this erased structure in the drama of writing. 2.  Scott B. Noegel, Nocturnal Ciphers: The Allusive Language of Dreams in the Ancient Near East (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2007), 12. The lobus sinister refers to the liver’s left lobe, the particular grooves of which often play an important role in Babylonian extispicy omens. For a detailed overview of the sectioning and interpretation of the liver in extispicy practices, see Ulla KochWestenholz’s introduction in her Babylonian Liver Omens (Copenhagen: Carsten Niebuhr, 2000), as well as her chapter “Sheep and Sky: Systems of Divinatory Interpretation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, ed. by Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 447–69. For a description of the Mesopotamian practice of reading graphemes in the abnormalities of the liver, particularly in the lobus sinister, see Eckart Frahm, “Reading the Tablet, the Exta, and the Body: The Hermeneutics of Cuneiform Signs in Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries and Divinatory Texts,” in Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, ed. by Amar Annus (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010), 93–142. 3. Noegel, Nocturnal Ciphers, 14. For a brief and clear explanation of the multiple logographic-phonographic possibilities of graphemic clusters in Cuneiform writing see Frahm, “Reading the Tablet, the Exta, and the Body,” 93–95. 4.  The night sky is referred to as a “divine writing” across a cultural range of astrological practices in antiquity, while the liver is explicitly referred to as “the tablet of the gods” in Mesopotamian extispicy literature. See Koch-Westenholz, Babylonian Liver Omens, 13. 5. Westenholz, Babylonian Liver Omens, 462–63. 6. Noegel, Nocturnal Ciphers, 14 and 9. 7.  Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 114. 8.  All translations of the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael here are my own. However, I’d be remiss not to admit that at times my translations read to me as selective adaptations of Jacob Z. Lauterbach and David Stern’s translations in the Jewish Publication Society’s 2004 reissued edition of the text. See Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, trans. by Jacob Z. Lauterbach and David Stern (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010). Page numbers in endnotes refer to the recto Hebrew pages in that same edition, in this case Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 338. 9. To my knowledge the only other biblical use of the verb ‫ חצב‬to refer to inscription occurs in Job 19:24, in which Job, in his response to Bildad’s second speech, wishes that his own words were permanently inscribed. 10. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 338. “Rabbi” when used as a single proper name in Tannaitic literature refers to Yehuda HaNasi [Judah the Prince], redactor of the Mishna. My reading of Rabbi’s interpretation in the context of the Mekhilta’s discussion is somewhat glossed here, with several important complexities left unexamined. Linguistically, R. Akiva and Rabbi’s comments are strongly linked in the text through Rabbi’s repetition of R. Akiva’s language for the divine speech act emerging (“‫)”דיבור יוצא‬.

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11.  Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11. 12.  That the simultaneity of replay and record is a primary attribute of the technology of inscription can be seen clearly through a brief consideration of nineteenthcentury developments in sound recording. The main structural distinction between the mid-nineteenth-century phonautograph which inscribed a graph of the vibrations of sound and the late-nineteenth-century phonograph which replayed the same inscription is the depth of material surface to be inscribed (from charcoal paper to foil). This is to write that the recognition that the replay is in fact simultaneous to the inscribed record and can be materially retraced is essentially all that separated the two technological developments; and that early sound recording technology is a structural same to the technology of writing, of the genus “technology of the inscribable surface.” 13.  Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 343. 14. The phrase “‫ ”מלפני ולפנים‬is usually read as “the innermost,” its repetition functioning as emphasis, and can be used interchangeably with the “holy of holies” in rabbinic literature to refer to God’s inner sanctuary within the Temple. The literalization of the term in my reading of the Mekhilta takes the creative liberty of following upon the midrashic hermeneutic of overliteralization that I have shown earlier in this essay.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Frahm, Eckart. “Reading the Tablet, the Exta, and the Body: The Hermeneutics of Cuneiform Signs in Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries and Divinatory Texts,” Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World. Ed. Amar Annus. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010. 93–142. Koch-Westenholz, Ulla. Babylonian Liver Omens. Copenhagen, Den.: Carsten Niebuhr, 2000. ———. [Ulla Susanne Koch]. “Sheep and Sky: Systems of Divinatory Interpretation. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Ed. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 447–69. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael. Trans. Jacob Z. Lauterbach and David Stern. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010. Noegel, Scott B. Nocturnal Ciphers: The Allusive Language of Dreams in the Ancient Near East. New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2007. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010.

Chapter Three

Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin Jonathan Boyarin

The editors of this volume, Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm, posed the following questions to Jonathan Boyarin during a phone conversation in June 2015. Jonathan Boyarin then wrote the following after more sustained reflection.

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Why is the question of Imagining the Jewish God the wrong question (for you). The right question? It can’t really be the wrong question, but only because you have insisted for so long now that I address it. The fact that it consternates me (and that I am driven to this unusual usage!) doesn’t seem to make it the “wrong” question—though the discomfort you cause me with your persistence clearly reveals that it’s something I’d rather not talk about. Yes, part of the reason for my consternation is that it is so very hard for us to talk about God without invoking the question of “belief” or “existence.” I’m certainly not alone among practicing Jews in wondering, as Menachem Kellner’s book puts it, Must a Jew Believe Anything?1 And Howard Wettstein—a philosopher and, perhaps for that reason, much better than I at addressing this kind of challenge—does a great job of displacing the obsession with the question of God’s “existence.” What’s most revealing there is that his interviewer responds as though Wettstein were simply trying to avoid the question—he can’t quite respond to Wettstein’s explanation: “I have been speaking as if God were a person, and such is our experience. However, overlaying this is the sense, sometimes only a dim sense, that somehow God is beyond being a person, that we are over our heads in even raising the question. Do you sense a tension, one that, on the face of it, might make theorizing a tad difficult?”2 33

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“Over our heads,” Wettstein says, in raising the question of God’s existence. I think he might have responded more sympathetically to your question of how we “imagine” God (because his discussion is indeed about relationship and prayer), and in that sense again, I find myself perhaps less articulate or more reserved than the philosopher. But in any case it’s not only you, but with myself and, as it were, with God that I am reserved about this question. It makes me physically nervous even to have written that last sentence. Yes, I do feel way over my head writing as though I had some “relationship” with God, let alone a relationship in which I could choose what to share and what not to. Wettstein writes more positively in that interview of having had “the experience of God, for example in prayer or in life’s stunning moments.” Maybe he’s had more of those experiences than I have. I don’t even know whether having them or not having them depends on what you call “God.” And trying to write this, right now, evokes that heady sense of being in over my head. On one hand I seem to be making a statement that would, God forbid, “limit” God. On the other, for the first time in my life, I have a sense of transgression, yes, of wrongness, in even typing this Teutonic triagrammaton, as if somehow writing “G-d” instead would help me keep my footing. I don’t really think it would. As I said to you on the telephone (more or less; I think I said it much better then, because these things are easier to say to a trusted friend than to type into a computer), a large part of the difficulty I face with this assignment has to do with a respect for the concept of God (I don’t know whether here I’m speaking in any distinctive way about the “Jewish” God; more on that just below) sufficient to make anything I say positively about that concept necessarily miss the mark: any God worth the name would not be susceptible to my characterization or “imagining.” This doesn’t mean I think it’s wrong to imagine God or that I never do. It certainly doesn’t mean I find characterizations of God in Jewish literature, or the address to God in prayer, wrong-headed or meaningless. It does mean that I can’t deduce the Godhead from them. Here’s one more initial take on your topic: “Imagining the Jewish God” loads the question with the presumption that there “is” a Jewish God to be imagined—not so much (again) in the sense of positively asserting God’s existence (though that’s implicit, too) as in the presumption that there could be a God who is, somehow, distinctively Jewish. I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that there’s a God who’s Jewish, as opposed to, let’s say, a God who’s not. You meant something more like “How Jews Imagine God.” But isn’t that problematic, as well, in that it holds the set of “Jews” in some sense as a given? Or the phrase could even be taken to hint that all we’re doing is

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Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin 35

“imagining” a God who (again), so to speak, wouldn’t exist—less likely these days, when we are not as wont to dichotomize between what is and what is only imagined, but still, a possible reading. Why your question might, and presumably does, produce less consternation in others whom you’ve invited to speak to it is also an intriguing question. I think I suggested to you in conversation that, in effect, as far as my understanding goes, I have a hard time imagining what I might be able to say about any God worth speaking of. Yet I resist as well the idea of identifying my thought process here as any kind of negative theology—since that too is a form of “theology,” some kind of science, some way of knowing God. Clearly Jewish tradition, for the most part, does not share this reticence: it is, pace Maimonides, both fully willing to describe God in anthropomorphic terms and, at other times, to attempt conception via the negative direction of saying what God is not. Those traditions are by no means meaningless to me; on the contrary, they contain rich poetry and are indeed pertinent to experiences of transcendence that I have had—but very rarely, as I will describe—in the context of prayer. Nor, again, am I invested here in marking my, as it were, refusal to conceive God as any kind of advance in thinking or as something others should emulate. One might, for example, posit that a God anthropomorphized as a senior male provides an ongoing ideological support for patriarchy, and I have no interest in denying that. Well, of course, that’s not true. I am male and getting more senior by the day, and I suppose it’s a lot more comforting for me to imagine, thoughtlessly, a God with whom I might converse in Yiddish. Better stated: I have no principled basis for denying the thesis that a God anthropomorphized as a senior male provides an ongoing support to patriarchy. At the same time, however, I question what cognitive process is involved in re-“imagining God” as, say, female. Is this the substitution of a different, presumptively less repressive, marker for the figure of ultimate authority or of collective identification within a given group’s rhetorical system? Is there an implicit notion here that we can get the God we want, or that we in any case get the God we deserve? How contingent and human-centric, that is, can God-talk be and still retain any gravitas as a conception of something that is truly greater than us? At one pole, then, I seem to be describing a position that’s highly transcendentalist: Any real God is one we cannot speak of, so why try talking about it? At another pole, as you properly insist, God-talk is a fascinating and extremely important human phenomenon. And here, I am pretty well stumped as to why I have little to add. Imaginings of God are a perfectly legitimate anthropological topic, analogous to foodways, kinship, burial

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practices, relations with the (human) Other, and the like. But they have not been a significant aspect of my research, writing, or thought. Therefore, I seem to have only two brief vignettes to add—both deriving from my years of prayer at old Lower East Side synagogues. First: Around 1980, at the Eighth Street Shul between Avenues B and C, east of Tompkins Square Park—long turned into luxury residences, but still, if you’ll allow me the indulgence, “my shul”—a small group of us were standing around after services at the modest kiddush that, since arson had destroyed the downstairs meeting hall, was served in the entryway to the sanctuary. One of the older members—a bachelor who earned his living as a lawyer advancing applications for liquor licenses to the Alcohol and Beverage Commission, and who also served, albeit badly, as our Torah reader—was giving a short dvar torah about the weekly Torah portion he’d just read. At a certain point he began a sentence with, “And then, uh, whatchamacallit—God . . .” I was amused and have remained fascinated by that moment for almost thirty-five years now. What does it mean (to a non-mystic, at any rate) to forget the name of God? What, if anything, happens to “God” when that name falls into oblivion? I don’t have any answers. I do wonder, though, whether other readers will find the moment as striking as I did then, and still do. Second: A decade or more later, a few blocks away, at Rabbi Ackerman’s Mezeritsh Shul on Sixth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, I was sent up to lead the musaf prayer. At the time of the kedusha during the reader’s repetition of the Shemone esrei, I found myself—not so much exalted, as relieved from the burden of time and, I suppose, of gravity. I was there, man, ya know? Time didn’t matter, mortality didn’t matter; if the kedusha is the song of the angels, I was one of them. The next weekend—at a different synagogue—I described this experience to one of the eldest members of the congregation. He turned to me with a serious face: “Don’t you understand? You daven for forty years so you can have that experience once.” And I’m still waiting for it to happen again. Now, you actually asked me two questions here. I’ve been circling so far around the first question, trying to figure out why the question “how Jews imagine God” is one that, shall we say, would certainly stump me on a qualifying exam. But then you follow it up with the sentence fragment, “The right question?” At first I took that as representing, in classic essay form, an invitation to address the topic from either side—why is it the wrong question, or why is it the right question. Perhaps, however, the second sentence was really “What would be the right question (for you)?” In that case, let me say that a question I have found myself able to address, and one that seems close to your interests here, has to do with the dynamics of the putative divide

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Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin 37

between secular and religious Jews. When I look over a conference paper on this theme from 2009, titled “Growing up Not Religious and Not Secular,” a search for the word “God” produces only one hit—and that’s my interjection “my God!” at finding myself referring to things that had happened half a century earlier. That I could write so personally about the supposed dichotomy between “religious” and “secular” Jewish identity (one that I continue to view as imposed upon Jewishness by the terms of liberal modernity, although it is obviously also one that has been readily embraced by many Jews) without any substantive discussion of the divine suggests to me, in fact, that my resistance to your question is not a psychological quirk, nor even so much an expression, however inarticulate it may be, of a carefully articulated and principled position. Rather I would suggest it stands as a kind of primary evidence (once again, as Wettstein expresses very well, although he also seems to have more frequent experiences of contact with the divine in prayer than I do!) that a stance of principled not-talking about God is, for this one Jew almost certainly and there may be many others like me, a way of refusing to be drafted into the modern war between “skepticism” and “piety.” You might wonder why I sense the pressure of that draft. Decades ago— I certainly can’t place the source now—I read a more or less homiletical explanation of why we can know that the Torah was revealed at Mount Sinai. The answer was that our fathers told us. And how did they know? Because their fathers told them; to paraphrase William James, I suppose you could say the logic of this argument is: it’s fathers all the way back. But my father certainly never told me that the Torah was given at Sinai, so I do not even have this story to fall back on. In the academy it is assumed that we deny this account of revelation, though it doesn’t come up very often. I’m actually not sure whether this naïve account of revelation is assumed in the yeshiva world that I often move in—again, and this may be a bit of a surprise, it doesn’t come up very often. Nevertheless I do often feel the pressure of being somewhat of a double agent. That leads me directly to two more of your questions that I would like to take some time and space to answer. What intellectual figures in Jewish and non-Jewish thought inform your work and/or your spirit? Edmond Jabès, Walter Benjamin, the Kotsker Rebbe, and my friend Martin Land, a theoretical physicist who lives in Jerusalem. Doubtless more than those, and it’s slightly embarrassing that this very short list is all male, but I’ll stop there.

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I suppose you were looking for a slighter more elaborate answer than just those four names. Before I do, allow me a couple of comments on the form of this question as well. First, I love the category of “non-Jewish thought.” It reminds me of my brother Daniel’s story about a young Jewish studies scholar giving a job talk. He began by thanking all those in Jewish studies who had come out to hear him, and “all those in goyish studies as well.” He didn’t get the job. Still, now that I have tenure, it makes me think that maybe I could offer a seminar on “Major Non-Jewish Thinkers of the 20th Century.” Or, in a similar vein, write a book called The Gifts to the Jews, about all of the wonderful contributions that have been made by non-Jews to Jewish culture. It is telling, is it not, that we are still primarily concerned with reassuring ourselves and telling “the Other” that we have been net contributors and not net parasites, rather than being able to take for granted that our continuity was a worthwhile thing in itself, and on that basis show our appreciation for the way the Other has sustained us. Second observation: “my spirit?” I don’t know what that means. I’m glad the question included my work, because if it had only been about spirit, it would have baffled me as much as your first question did. “Spirit” has never been a category that made sense to me, or if it has, only in its restricted sense of something like a ghost, à la Derrida’s Specters of Marx3—a text that I return to again and again. Otherwise “spirit” almost always smacks to me of some kind of dualism—Platonic or Hegelian, I’m not enough of a philosopher to really mind the distinction. What is cognizable to me within the general usages of that term—ideas, poetry, the sense of things greater than yourself, “what is before and what is after, what is above and what is below”—these are all encompassed in what I like to think of as an enriched rather than reduced materialism. I don’t indulge often in talking about the “materiality” of cultural phenomena, for instance, because I don’t know what there is about them that isn’t material. I think this is related, in ways that I can’t fully articulate (I don’t mean I don’t have the space to do it, I mean I’m not capable of doing it), to my pudeur in talking about God. I simply don’t have access to the common language of “spiritual” experience. Jabès Waiting at Victoria Station for three days during a London air traffic controller’s strike, I met a friend from college who showed me a book she was reading: the Egyptian French Jewish poet Edmond Jabès’s Book of Questions.4 Back then I suppose I was more receptive to new reading material than I am now, and I followed up her suggestion. I found a book in English

Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin 39



made to look like a French one published by Gallimard—with plenty of white spaces, with short aphorisms scented with the wisdom of the desert, attributed by their author to rabbis never heard of in the rabbinic tomes. That first volume of many tells, along with the aphorisms, the story of a pair of Sephardi lovers doomed by the Nazis, but it tells it sparingly, details added reluctantly as if demanded by a reader who is more of an interrogator. This book, and others by Jabès, taught me that ethnography, too, cannot say everything and is best when it indicates both its own inventions and its own margins. Benjamin I have learned so much from him that I am altogether convinced I would not have known how to begin combining cultural anthropology with studies of Yiddish culture if I had not been presented with a copy of Illuminations5 in, I think, my second year of graduate school. He taught me that the memory of the past is a political issue in the present, and he gave me some starting pointers about how to speak substantively of a culture in ruins without attempting to restore it to an illusory wholeness (in that sense reinforcing what I had learned from above). He taught me much of the concept of an enriched materialism that I’ve just referred to—which could be glossed as a “Marxist theory of culture,” though I see no need now, decades later, to fit my thinking within Marxism. Perhaps most important (in this context), Benjamin linked memory to God in a way that not only made sense to me, but made it easier for the young materialist graduate student I was not to have to actively banish God. In “The Task of the Translator,” he writes:

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One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would imply not a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.6

Aside from the linkage here between memory and the divine, I just love that “probably.” It reminds me of what a Gerer Hasid friend of mine once said to me: “I don’t do what God wants me to do. I do what I think God wants me to do.” Which leads me to . . . Reb Menachem Mendl of Kotsk I need to say here that the text I’m inspired by is not by the Kotsker Rebbe himself—he left no writings whatsoever—but Abraham Joshua Heschel’s two-

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volume posthumous Yiddish work, Kotsk: In gerangl far emesdikeyt.7 Heschl’s work is deeply scholarly, and yet as he himself writes, it is the testament of a thinker who has always considered himself a Kotsker Hasid. Hence, I think of this book as “Heschel’s Kotsk,” and when I study it I try not to worry too much about whether I’m being taught by the Kotsker or by Heschel. Heschel warns at the beginning of the book, “Whoever spends an hour in the presence [of the Kotsker Rebbe] will never feel the sensation of selfsatisfaction again.”8 The book itself has a little bit of that effect: a relentless attack on ego as self-deception, and on rote practice as idolatry. “God loves new things,”9 reads one of Heschel’s chapter headings. The overall sense one gets is of a tremendous pressure placed on the Jew to strip away delusion and find the most direct path toward truth, even if that path is a ruthless one, as the most direct path toward God; as one rabbi in the Babylonian Talmud says, “The seal of God is Truth.” The pressure, as I say, comes at once from the double-bind of working very hard on the self in order to achieve selflessness, and on the requirement to continue following the commandments punctiliously but never automatically, always with new intention. The pressure seems to have been too much for the Kotsker himself, as he spent nearly the last two decades of his life shut up in his room. But, and perhaps it is worth saying at least this in a few words, the testament creates an almost infinite demand for existential consciousness in the present, without surrendering an iota of Jewish law’s dictates for behavior.

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Martin Land We met in the coffee shop of Reed College in the mid-1970s, and bonded over a shared sense that there was something profoundly lacking in the intellectual life of the school, and that lack had something to do with the school’s implicit but equally profoundly Protestant nature. I call my experience at Reed, doubtless echoing Adorno, “the origins of negative identification:” something’s not here for me, this place is not Jewish, I must be more Jewish than I realized, what am I going to do about that? In response, a great deal of my intellectual journey has been guided by the goal of figuring out how to make myself into a Jew, while succumbing neither to a romantic chauvinistic “faith,” nor indulging in the counter-triumphalism of imagining that finally now, in this generation, we would be able to get the balance just right where all our ancestors had failed. The shared examination of our dissatisfactions with an American liberal arts education developed into something of a shared Jewish critique of contemporary capitalist culture. Thus the long undergraduate bullshit sessions forty years ago have turned into long e-mail exchanges in the past decade, some of which we’ve been able to publish as shared ruminations on such top-



Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin 41

ics as time, Jewishness, racism, and the liberal state. Martin checks some of my tendencies to poetic excess (he’s much more skeptical of Messianic rhetoric than I have been, for example) and I know more Yiddish than he does, so it works out well. Like me, his thinking is grounded in a deep respect for the experience and wisdom of our ancestors. For both of us, that means that our conversation helps us to find something of the comfort of home in a world where we know ourselves to be homeless.

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If your present yeshiva turned sour and you could not find a substitute, would you then abandon Judaism and the Jewish God that supports and warrants Judaism? I’m drawn to the rhetoric of a God who needs us—as captured in the title of Heschel’s God in Search of Man10—but, as I think I’ve been suggesting above, aesthetically rather than intellectually (again, not a distinction I draw comfortably, but you’re pushing me, man). If the Kotsker is right and the seal of God is truth, then there’s no way I could “abandon God” and at the same time maintain the effort to make the most of the little time I have as a conscious, thinking, feeling being. (In my more pessimistic moments regarding the human future, I have toyed with the slogan, “Let us live today so that when it’s all over, we will have been the best species we possibly could.”) The category of “Judaism” is another one that’s highly problematic for me. In a sense it’s not an ethnonym—everyone knows that Jewishness is “more than a religion,” but to suggest that it’s a religion plus something else (culture, memory, collective identity) is also a distortion. If I was right in my initial apperception, at Reed College, that I had already been shaped more than I knew by the fact of being born into a Jewish family, then it seems logical to say that whatever I might purport to abandon, I would not stop being Jewish. I would like to say that the resources I have found for how to be Jewish, while responding at the same time to the imperative to be, to become a mentsh—those are highly contingent. Reb Dovid Feinstein’s yeshiva on the Lower East Side, which you mention in this question, has turned out to be a wonderfully congenial place for me to become more conversant with Rabbinic literature, and with people who devote their lives to studying it in a traditional setting. Since I started going there regularly (as regularly as having an academic job out of town permits) a few years ago, I have been struck by how little questions of faith and revelation interfere with the discourse of learning per se—or else, perhaps, how adept I am at negotiating whatever gaps in the discourse of faith and revelation there might be between me and some of my key interlocutors at the yeshiva. If God forbid it closed tomorrow or people there decided they didn’t like some of my views so much that I wasn’t welcome, I would mourn. But I love long walks in the city, too. And I still indulge sometime in fantasies

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of hermitage, where I finally get to produce my masterpiece, to be titled “The Last Dream of the Crazy Rabbi on the Mountain,” of which all I’ve written is, . . . and the names they gave us in the late years of those empires, Fig Tree and Date Tree and Apple Tree and Pear Tree, Sorele Rose Bush and Simkhe Sparkling Stone . . . and all the fun we had becoming American . . .

In sum, I’ve found Jewishness, mostly in some of its more “traditional” varieties, to be an excellent way of trying to live a human life, as well as a reasonably reliable point of access to the virtues of historical empathy and humility. And since I respect the power of genealogy so much, it makes a lot of sense for me to try to live that way. I like to think that if someone tried to force me by violence to deny God, I would resist at the cost of my life—whose present value is in any case not what it was twenty years ago, but which has moreover already been more rich than I deserve. But I might be kidding myself about that, and in any case this is not the same thing as an assertion of faith. In any case, my attempt to live something like a traditional Jewish life must be conducted without some of the traditional supports, such as the certainty of Revelation, as mentioned above, or the vision of reward in the World to Come—which, as the Babylonian Talmud suggests in Tractate Sanhedrin, is available to all of Israel but denied to those who deny it. The realm of freedom I find “engraved on the tables of the Law,” and the extraordinary privilege I have of participating in a traditional Jewish world without being fully bound by its strictures, are substantial compensation.

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NOTES 1. Menachem Marc Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006). 2.  Gary Gutting, “Is Belief a Jewish Notion?” The New York Times (March 30, 2014). http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/is-belief-a-jewish-notion/?_ r=0. 3.  Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994). 4. Edmund Jabès, The Book of Questions (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1991). 5.  Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969). 6. Ibid., 60. 7.  Abraham Joshua Heschel, Kotsk: In gerangl far emesdikeyt (Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1973). 8.  Ibid., 7. 9.  Ibid., 80.



Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin 43

10. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994. Gutting, Gary. “Is Belief a Jewish Notion?” The New York Times (March 30, 2014). http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/is-belief-a-jewish-notion/?_r=0 Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955. ———. Kotsk: In gerangl far emesdikeyt. Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1973. Jabès, Edmund. The Book of Questions. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. Kellner, Menachem Marc. Must a Jew Believe Anything? Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006.

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Part II

OUT OF LEVANT

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BIBLICAL AND RABBINIC IMAGININGS OF GOD

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Chapter Four

Classical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates of the Mishnah

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Jonathan Wyn Schofer

If we begin to examine the ways that Jews imagined the Jewish God through history, some might not consider the Mishnah, and particularly the halakhic tractates of the Mishnah (meaning, avoiding for the moment the great tractate Avot and its sagely maxims) to be a central starting point. Perhaps the flamboyant and wide-ranging examinations of the Talmudic gemara to the Mishnah might appear to be of greater interest, or the dynamic exegesis of midrash. Or, as I have focused upon in my early work on ethics and theology, the aggadic materials in the extra-canonical tractates to the Talmud, with rich stories as well as sagely sayings and scriptural exegesis, can be an entry to such historical studies. The Mishnah, though, is the canonical opening for legal and religious innovation in the period following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., and the Mishnah provides the basis for Talmudic commentary. The Mishnah, moreover, has extensive discussions of purity and holiness, and ways to maintain sanctity in the course of everyday life. In addition, key passages in the Mishnaic treatments of blessings, charity, holy days, currency and fraud, and judicial procedure are notable as moments in the halakhic tractates of the Mishnah that address themes usually found in anthologies such as tractate Avot and the extra-canonical tractates centered on ethical instruction. In other words, in these passages, law and sagely wisdom link to show connections between what we would call ethics, theology, and obligation. How do law, theology, and ethics interact in concrete examples of delineating specific duties and demands? Arguably the Mishnah is the most important and striking text in which we can see these interactions. The Mishnah, compiled in the late second and early third century CE, is intrinsically important as the great canonical anthology of law for Judaism, and study of the Mishnah can also provide a starting point for inquiries into the commentaries of the Talmuds as well as parallels and variants in the Tosefta and midrashic collections. 47

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Do the legal portions of the Mishnah contain their own theological and ethical components, extending and framing the law in ways that are similar to the aggadic tractate Avot? Yes, the halakhic tractates of the Mishnah present their own moments of building from law to address human impulses toward evil, the importance of Torah study, acts of kindness, respectful and just speech, the value of each person’s life and dignity, and the importance of judicial process that carries out appropriate punishment of the wicked. There is no single cluster of such teachings, but rather individual passages spread throughout the great compilation. Each offers a distinct element of the ethical life, and a distinct relation between law, theology, and ethical concerns. In their totality they present a full range of elements in a theological ethic that orients a rabbinic Jew toward ritual, civil, and criminal law.1

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MISHNAH BERAKHOT 9:5 The Mishnaic tractate Berakhot, or “Blessings,” centers on the recitation of blessings that affirm divine power in the world. The legal concerns here are in the realms of liturgy, ritual, and prayer, and the tractate does not set out human or social punishments for failure to carry out the prescriptions. In this sense, the realm of halakhah or Jewish law overlaps with guidelines for religion and prayer. At three points in Mishnah Berakhot, the halakhah addresses blessings regarding events that are bad or dangerous.2 In the third case, Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, the Mishnah prescribes: “A person must bless over evil just as he blesses over good.” The Mishnah supports and expands this prescription through central verses of the Shema, the recited affirmation of divine unity, which is one of the core foci of the early chapters in Mishnah Berakhot. Specifically, the Mishnah presents an exegesis of Deuteronomy 6:5, the command to love God with all of your heart, with all your nefesh, which is often translated as “soul” but here probably conveys “life,” and with all of your me’od, often translated as “might.” This midrashic account for blessing over evil sets out standards for fundamental orientations toward desire, money, and one’s own life that should be maintained toward God. The exegesis found here in the Mishnah also appears in the early rabbinic midrashic anthology Sifre Deuteronomy, chapter 32, which has a longer and more extensive discussion of Deuteronomy 6:5. The Mishnah’s statement might condense this longer passage to address key points in a concise manner: A person must bless over evil just as he blesses over good, as it is said: Love YHWH your God with all of your heart (levavekha), with all of your life, and with all of your might (me’odekha).3



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With all of your heart (levavekha): with your two inclinations, with the good inclination and the bad inclination. With all of your life: even if He takes your life. With all of your might (me’odekha): with all of your money (mamonekha).

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Another opinion, with all of your might (me’odekha): with every single measure (middah u-middah) that He measures out (moded) to you, give thanks (modeh) to Him tremendously (bim’od me’od).4

The very application of Deuteronomy 6:5 in this context is striking and notable. The ritual recitation of Deuteronomy 6:4–9 in rabbinic practice, prescribed in Mishnah Berakhot itself, make this passage arguably the most important and influential set of verses in Scripture for Judaism. The Mishnah invokes the command to love God with the totality of one’s self in order to set out a threefold commitment of the psyche, of the body, and of one’s resources. The concluding passage, opening with “another opinion,” adds that the command to love includes the call for gratitude toward God regardless of what God provides. In short, the Mishnah prescribes a full orientation toward the divine in the context of a world in which evil occurs. The midrash begins by invoking a primary category in rabbinic reflections on human good and evil, the yetzer, a noun whose root conveys “formation” and is often translated as “inclination” or “impulse.” This particular passage asserts that each human has two competing impulses, a good impulse and a bad impulse. This binary opposition frames the human heart as having to negotiate two distinguishable elements, one driving toward the good and one driving toward the bad. In the scriptural exegesis, the morphological detail that enables the interpretation is a somewhat unusual spelling of the word for “heart,” which is commonly lev with one bet (the letter “b” that may be pronounced “v,” as in this case). In Deuteronomy 6:5, the word “heart” is spelled levav, with a doubling of the bet. The exegetical move is to assert that this distinct spelling, in this case, conveys the following: just as the word “heart” or lev here has two appearances of bet rather than one, so too the heart has two things within it rather than one, and these are the good and the bad inclinations: “With all of your heart (levavekha): with your two inclinations, with the good inclination and the bad inclination.” The prescription, then, is to direct one’s entire heart to God. The challenge of course is to direct not only the good but also the bad impulses.5 How does one do so? This is a practical but not conceptual problem, as the key point is that the totality of one’s heart has to love God, even with the totality of good and bad impulses. The next component of the Mishnah’s exegesis of Deuteronomy 6:5 can be situated in relation to at least three historical and conceptual trajectories in Judaism: the concept of the soul or life (nefesh), the emergence of martyrdom as

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an ideal, and the practice of saying the Shema when being killed in persecution. The passage is quite compact: “With all of your life (nafshekha): even if He takes your life.” First, scholarly accounts of the concept of the nefesh, and the relation between nefesh and the body, tend to center on the strands of rabbinic thought that frame the nefesh as a “soul” and not only life or life-animating breath: a soul that has a complex relation to the body, a soul that hovers near the body for three days after death, and a soul that in later medieval Jewish thought gains further specification and complex conceptualization. The word nefesh, though, especially in early rabbinic texts, can have other meanings including “body” itself. For example, Sifre Deuteronomy 32, in one of its midrashic reflections on this passage, specifically interprets nefesh as guf or body. Here in the Mishnah, the term conveys a person’s life as a living body, not a soul potentially separate or needing to be distinguished from the body.6 Second, rabbinic Judaism had a multi-faceted response to the Christian development of martyrdom as an ideal, the sense that being killed by persecution of one’s commitment to God is valued as a high or ultimate fulfillment of life. Some rabbinic texts may articulate this ideal, including perhaps the commentary in the Babylonian Talmud Berakhot to Mishnah Berakhot 9:5.7 Other rabbinic texts portray rabbis as rejecting Roman persecution, and as maintaining their study and teaching in the context of oppression, but the texts do not present martyrdom as an ideal. Rather, death by Roman execution as something that brings fear and sorrow, and that demands reconciliation with and embrace of God’s decrees, judgments, and powers. The prescription that one must love God “even if He takes your life” might not in this context explicitly refer to martyrdom but rather any case when a person dies younger than expected or desired. In addition, though, in the larger context of both early rabbinic midrash in Sifre Deuteronomy 32 and later Talmudic commentary in Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 61b, this phrase is taken to prescribe that one focus on and strengthen one’s love of God particularly in time of persecution and death at the hands of imperial power. Martyrdom is not upheld as an ideal in itself, but love of God in moments of persecution and execution is set out in law. Third, this prescription to love God at the time of death by persecution comes to gain concrete expression in the Babylonian Talmud 61b, discussing this very Mishnah. A narrative of Rabbi Akiva’s death portrays him reciting the Shema at the time of his torture and death by the Roman empire. In fact, he is even portrayed as reflecting upon this Mishnah, the meaning of the exegesis and prescription, “with all your life: even if He takes your life.” The practice of reciting the Shema at the moment of death by persecution, as exemplified by Rabbi Akiva in the Talmud, became exemplary in Medieval Jewish communities and beyond.8

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Deuteronomy 6:4–5 presents first the command to “Hear” or “Listen,” and then the command to “Love” God. The prescription to love is followed by a triad of nouns: one is to love God with all of one’s levav, all of one’s nefesh, and all of one’s me’od. The exact meaning of each element, and the triad as a whole, is far less certain than we would like given the importance of these verses in Jewish practice and thought. The third element, one’s me’od, is particularly difficult to specify given that the word is commonly an adverb meaning “very” or “much.” What does it mean to love God with all of your “muchness?” A common scholarly translation of me’od is “might” but the first gloss or clarification presented by the Mishnah is “money.” The midrash in Sifre Deuteronomy 32 to this verse emphasizes the pairing of nefesh as guf or “body” and me’od as “money” to say that some people value their bodies and life more than money, others value their money more than their bodies or life, and Deuteronomy 6:5 prescribes that both should be oriented toward love of God, and moreover one should focus on whatever is valued most: those who love their bodies should love God with all their bodies, and those who love their money should love God with all their money. This expansion does not appear in the Mishnah, which presents the exegesis in a simple and compact form: “With all of your might (me’odekha): with all of your money (mamonekha).” The Mishnah presents “another opinion,” which concludes this exegesis with a focus on love of God regardless of God’s response to human action: “Another opinion, with all of your might (me’odekha): with every single measure (middah u-middah) that he measures out (moded) to you, give thanks (modeh) to Him tremendously (bim’od me’od).” This interpretation of Deuteronomy 6:5 focuses not on “evil” but on the possibility of judgment that might be harsh. The exegesis builds from the distinctly rabbinic notion that God has “measures” that God “measures out” to human beings, and most frequently those are the measure of justice (middat ha-din) and the measure of compassion (middat rahamim). The exegesis also presents several forms of wordplay on the difficult noun me’od in Deuteronomy 6:5, including the noun for measure (middah from the root m.d.d.), the related verb for measuring out (moded), and also a verbal form of the word “thanks,” whose root is y.d.h. but in this form also has a mem (“m”) and a dalet (“d”), and then a double use of me’od in its usual role as an adverb. The combination displays lexical expertise and a playful approach to both the serious exegetical challenges in interpreting scripture that is employed in ritual recitation, and the serious theological challenges raise by the Mishnaic law that opened the discussion. A Mishnaic legal prescription for saying blessings over evil, then, gains justification through a midrash upon Deuteronomy 6:5. This exegesis both supports the law at hand and sets out a number of values and ideas that cross over into the realm of moral psychology: the heart and its inclinations toward

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good and evil, overarching approaches toward embodied life and financial matters, and most importantly core or ultimate emotional responses that one is to maintain throughout each experience of the world as emerging from God’s measures of justice and compassion.

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MISHNAH PEAH 1:1 Mishnah Peah opens with an evocative first passage. The Mishnaic tractate addresses the “corner” of the field, which is left rather than harvested so that people in need can gather food. The Mishnah opens by naming five practices that “have no measure,” in other words five practices that do not have a limit regarding how much you can do: “These are things which have no measure: the corners of the field, the first fruits offerings, the appearances at the Temple, gemilut hasadim, and the study of Torah.”9 The five encompass several realms of rabbinic law and ethics. One realm is law regarding social and agricultural actions that continued and were refined in the time of the Mishnah and beyond: leaving the corners of the field unharvested for poor people to gather food.10 Two realms preserve laws and memory of practices that existed before the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed: sacrifices given based on the first fruit of the season, and pilgrimage by males to the Jerusalem temple for appearances at the festival holidays of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The Mishnah discusses these appearances in Mishnah Hagiga 1:1, building on biblical passages that include Exodus 23:17 and 34:23. The fourth realm moves beyond legal requirements to the ethical with a phrase that denotes acts of kindness: gemilut hasadim. The fifth realm is Torah study, which is also strongly emphasized in rabbinic ethical literature such as tractate Avot of the Mishnah. The Mishnah elaborates further on these connections between legal norms and exemplary ethical practices with a statement that presumes rabbinic accounts of God’s justice, also referred to as divine reward and punishment.11 Rabbinic theological images of reward and punishment have at their base a deceptively simple assertion, which is very much at odds with modern accounts of causation and cosmology: God rewards good action and character, and God punishes the bad. This simple assertion then appears with immense variation and complexity to address many different dimensions of life: explaining injustice and violence in the world, providing consolation, setting out reasons for carrying out legal and ethical standards, and asserting that the world has a basic order or theological presence. Rabbinic texts also state that human life is followed by death, decay, and then resurrection in a messianic time for the righteous in a “world to come” that is on earth. The notion that



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God rewards the righteous gains complexity in relation to worldly events when reward may come in this world or in the world to come. Rabbinic texts tend to value both this world and the world to come, but they reveal great concern that divine credit before God exists to support and justify life in the next world. Given this background, the second part of Mishnah Peah 1:1 names four actions for which a person benefits through God’s reward in this world and in the world to come. The terminology includes metaphors that have links to agriculture (a tree bears fruit that can be harvested, but the tree itself remains for the next year), but the core concepts are monetary notions of capital and interest:

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These are things for which a person eats their fruits in this world and the capital remains for the world to come: honoring father and mother, gemilut hasadim, bringing peace between a person and his fellow, and the study of Torah is equal to all of them.12

For these four actions, then, God’s reward both has a base of “capital” that is preserved for the world to come, but this capital gains “interest” or “fruits” that can be enjoyed in this world.13 One of the actions appears as a commandment in The Book of Exodus as part of the Ten Commandments: honoring father and mother. The other three are in the realm of ethics and Torah study: again the Mishnah emphasizes gemilut hasadim and study of Torah, and in addition the passage upholds “bringing peace between a person and his fellow.” These practices are not directly specifications of rabbinic law regarding the corners of the field, but rather they infuse the Mishnah with attention to interpersonal relations. Perhaps they convey that laws concerning the gleanings of the corners of the fields are not only law but also matters of honoring others, kind actions, and bringing peace. In any case, each of these three domains of rabbinic values—gemilut hasadim, bringing peace between other people, and the study of Torah—are strongly emphasized in Mishnah Avot and other ethical anthologies, and the halakhic tractates of the Mishnah conceptually connect with or draw upon those sources here at the opening of Mishnah Peah. The passage preserved in the second half of Mishnah Peah 1:1 was immensely influential in rabbinic culture. This material appears, often with expansions and developments, in several other rabbinic texts: in Tosefta Peah 1:1–4, in the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 127a–b, in the Babylonian Talmud Qiddushin 39b–40a, and also in the ethical anthology of the minor tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, Avot de Rabbi Natan, which is roughly speaking a commentary to Mishnah Avot.14

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MISHNAH YOMA 8:9 A short passage in Mishnah Yoma 8:9 sets out legal requirements for motivation regarding repentance and atonement. Two statements address important potential problems that can emerge in rabbinic ritual engagements with God as a deity that rewards right action and punishes wrong. Unpacking their significance enables us to address rabbinic conceptions of human action and of interventions in divine accounting: One who says, “I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent,” it is not sufficient for his part to carry out repentance.

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[One who says], “I will sin and The Day of Atonement will atone,” The Day of Atonement does not atone.15

The core prescription is quite direct. A person cannot plan to repent or to atone in order to sin and then face no consequence in divine accounting: if one does so, the repentance and atonement are denied. The possibilities of repenting before God, and the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, cannot be manipulated as excuses that enable sin before God. These prescriptions presume an understanding of human action before God that encompasses action defined in halakhah and beyond. The theological claim that God rewards good character and action, and punishes bad, brings with it a conception of human action. A given human action before God is not a single, discrete event isolated from others. Rather, a given action or state of character is part of a relationship with God such that a person acts and later God responds with reward or punishment based on an assessment of the action or state. In between act and response, the person has various possibilities for intervening in the divine accounting, which include prayer, repentance, and ritual atonement on The Day of Atonement. Death also may bring atonement.16 The excerpted passage in Mishnah Yoma 8:9 addresses human intervention in divine accounting. In simple and hopefully not overly simple terms, the key point is that rabbinic law, prayer, and ethical prescriptions set out intentional and culturally defined actions that enable a person to make up for sin, to metaphorically pay off debt or take on ritualized punishment for transgression. These actions may include prayer to God, payment or remedy for harm done, and distinct sacred days of self-affliction and fasting. Tractates Yoma and Taanit of the Mishnah are particularly focused on forms of atonement before God through fasting, and when the Jerusalem Temple existed, sacrifice.



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Mishnah Yoma 8:9 takes on the subtleties in the appropriate motivation that one must maintain in ones actions before God, at all times and especially when the possibility of significant transgression is at stake. The subtle treatment of premeditated sin in Mishnah Yoma 8:9 emphasizes that the Mishnaic understanding of divine justice includes an awareness of the complexity in human psychology and presents God as understanding and perceiving human thoughts, plans, and actions. Actions must be sincere, and interventions in divine accounting must also be sincere. If an individual or group seeks to maneuver the legal framework, the holy days, the prayers, and the rituals of repentance to seek loopholes in the procedures of divine justice, these maneuvers are denied. Mishnah Yoma 8:9 closes off the potential loophole that the possibility of atoning for sin can generate excuses to engage in sin knowing that later action might erase the consequences in the divine accounting. The Mishnah emphasizes that the human relation with God does not center on a simple mechanical notion of divine accounting and judgment that ignores human motivation, but rather God is aware of intention and addresses sincerity as well as attempts at manipulation even or especially when responding to ritualized behavior.

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MISHNAH BABA METZIA 4:10 Mishnah Baba Metzia 4:10 presents a highly specific way of extending rabbinic halakhah through analogy. Earlier passages in this chapter of the Mishnah, Mishnah Baba Metzia 4:1–4:9, address currency and procedures in buying and selling. The primary concern is fraud, denoted by the term ’ona’ah, particularly regarding defective currency.17 Mishnah Baba Metzia 4:10 then extends this concern with fraud and currency to the domain of speech: “Just as there is fraud (’ona’ah) in buying and selling, so too there is fraud (’ona’ah) regarding words.” The phrasing of this statement—“Just as . . . so too . . .”—is fairly common in rabbinic Hebrew, but in this case the analogy is arguably unexpected. On one hand, we might say that fraud in purchasing and sales is already fraud with words. On the other hand, we might know quite well that rabbinic ethical literature shows a great concern with proper speech and the dangers of improper speech, and the very notion of a dynamic relation between “Written Torah” and “Oral Torah” means that proper words are immensely important to rabbis, but we might doubt that the analogy between “buying and selling” and “words” really illuminates the situation. Mishnah Baba Metzia 4:10 elaborates the notion of fraud regarding words with three examples. The first example concerns the process of negotiating

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a purchase, which is directly related to the topics addressed earlier in the chapter, and two other examples extend the prescriptions regarding speech to concern for those who have gone through significant changes in their relations with other persons and with God: Just as there is fraud (’ona’ah) in buying and selling, so too there is fraud (’ona’ah) regarding words. One should not say, “How much [is the price] of this thing?” if he does not want to purchase it. If a man has enacted repentance, do not say to him, “Remember your past actions.”

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If a man is the child of converts to Judaism (ben gerim), do not say to him: “Remember the acts of your ancestors,” as it is written, “The temporary dweller (ger), you shall not wrong (toneh), and you shall not oppress him.”18

Fraud or ’ona’ah with words initially appears as false intention in the process of negotiating a price, showing a lack of respect for the time and demands of sellers, and also showing a lack of respect for the very process of buying and selling. The second and third examples highlight the commitments that a community makes to its own processes of change, in these cases repentance for sin and conversion to Judaism. If a person enacts repentance, then that process and that person should be affirmed. An act of fraud or wronging with words appears if another person denies the repentance and says that past actions, prior to repentance, need to be remembered and focused upon. If a married couple converts to Judaism and has children, then that process should be affirmed. An act of fraud or wronging with words appears if another person denies that conversion and says that past actions of ancestors who were not Jews, which would be sinful from the standpoint of Judaism, need to be recalled. The biblical verse supporting this final prescription focuses on the word ger, which in Biblical Hebrew means “temporary dweller” in Israel but in Rabbinic Hebrew means “convert” to Judaism. In addition, the prescription not to “wrong” (toneh) a ger is linked etymologically with the rabbinic term ’ona’ah: one should not wrong (toneh) by committing fraud (’ona’ah) with words to a person whose parent is a convert to Judaism (ger). MISHNAH SANHEDRIN 4:5 Mishnah Sanhedrin links law and ethics in the procedures of judicial practice. The Mishnah sets out specific phrases for “admonishing” or “exhorting” witnesses in both cases concerning monetary matters and in capital cases.19 The



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words to admonish the witnesses in capital cases strongly emphasize the difficult role of being a witness as a legal obligation. The passage also emphasizes the distinct value of each and every life, and the value of accurately finding the wicked to be guilty and worthy of punishment. As we have seen earlier, rabbinic law and ethics interact with rabbinic conceptions of God’s action in the world. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 does not emphasize God’s reward and punishment so much as the distinctive picture of a biblical God who creates Adam as the ancestor of all humanity, and in doing so the Mishnah upholds the value of each and every unique person. The exhortation also attends to a detail in the story of Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis to emphasize midrashically the significance of a person’s potential descendants. In addition, the passage employs a theological conception of Scripture as a heavenly entity that keep account of credits and debts in divine justice. The Mishnah situates human judicial procedure in relation to God’s justice and accounting, God’s creation of human beings, and God’s concern for those who are killed:

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How did they admonish the witnesses in capital cases? They would bring them in and admonish them: Perhaps you say what is a supposition, or a rumor, a witness from the mouth of another witness, or “from the mouth of a trustworthy man we hear,” or perhaps you do not know that we will test you with inquiry and examination. You must know that capital cases are not like cases concerning property. For cases concerning property, a person gives money and makes atonement for it, but in capital cases his blood and the blood of his descendants hangs on it until the end of the world, for thus we find regarding Cain who killed his brother, as it is written, The bloods of your brother calls out.20 It does not say blood of your brother but bloods of your brother: his blood and the blood of his descendants. Another opinion: the bloods of your brother: that his blood was scattered over the trees and stones. Therefore, Adam was created singly to teach you that anyone who kills a single life of the descendants of Adam, Scripture accounts it upon him as if he killed an entire world, and anyone who preserves a single life of the descendants of Adam, Scripture accounts it upon him as if he preserved an entire world. Also [Adam was created singly] for peace among human beings, so that a person will not say to his fellow, “My ancestor is greater than your ancestor,” and so that there will be no heretics who say, “There are many powers in heaven.” [Also Adam was created singly] to proclaim the greatness of The Holy One, Blessed be He, for a person stamps many coins with a single stamp, and all of them resemble each other, but the King of the Kings of Kings, The Holy One, Blessed be He, stamps all persons with the seal of the first Adam, yet no one of them resembles another. Therefore, every single one is required to say, “The world was created for me.”

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Perhaps you say, “Why do we need this distress? Is it not already said, [A living person who sins and hears this adjuration,] and he is a witness, or saw or knew, if he does not tell, then he must bear the consequences.21 Perhaps you say, “Why are we guilty of this person’s blood?” Is it not already said, When the wicked perish, there is joyous song.22

The Mishnah incorporates theology into legal practice regarding witnesses in capital cases. God’s creation of Adam, God’s concern for Abel, and God’s distinct formation of each person all in the Mishnah highlight the immense importance of each and every person as deserving correct judicial procedure. “Scripture” accounts the preservation of any single life as the preservation of a world. Each person is unique and valued as such, yet all people descend from Adam, so no person has greater ancestry than another. In the conclusion to the admonition, the passage emphasizes that God considers the act of not serving as a witness to be a sin in itself, emphasizing the legal requirement to serve as a witness in Leviticus 5:1, and also that the appropriate punishment of the wicked is itself a reason for joy.

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CONCLUSION As we return to the topic of our book, imagining the Jewish God, I emphasize that we have been examining highly canonical post-biblical sources that are part of the most important legal compilation for defining Jewish practice over the last two millennia. In this great anthology we have seen several ways that law, theology, and ethics interact. Mishnah Berakhot 9:5 justifies law regarding blessings with scriptural exegesis that sets out orientation towards God’s full involvement in the world. Mishnah Peah 1:1 extends the legal concern with acts that have “no measure” to uphold acts of kindness and study of Torah. Mishnah Hagiga 8:9 addresses motivation and intention in all action to prevent intentional sin and manipulation of ritualized repentance and atonement. Mishnah Baba Metzia 4:10 sets out an analogy between commercial fraud and three forms of aggressive or manipulative speech. Finally, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 prescribes for witnesses in capital cases norms for judicial procedure as well as respect for all lives. In each case, Mishnaic law builds toward theology and ethics in a distinct manner, showing both that law, theology, and ethics are connected in concrete ways for rabbinic Jews, and also that there is no single fixed procedure to generate or explain that connection. Rather, these five passages can provide concrete analytical starting points for investigation into theology as always related to halakhah and situated under, above, around, and extended beyond the law.



Classical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates of the Mishnah 59

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NOTES 1.  This study builds upon Jonathan Wyn Schofer, “Theology of Law: Rabbinic Literature,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Law, ed. by Brent Strawn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 400–407, and Schofer, “Ethical and Moral Duties in Rabbinic Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). A foundational work for examining law, ethics, and theology in Judaism is Louis Newman, Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). Other relevant works, with bibliography, that convey the current state of the field regarding key topics are Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Charlotte Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), Elizabeth Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), and Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). In addition, careful studies have built from these new foundations to address themes relevant to theology such as martyrdom in Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), the problem of evil in Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), and the death penalty in Beth Berkowitz, Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Studies developing these lines of inquiry, with attention to tractate Avot of the Mishnah and ethical anthologies in the extra-canonical tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, are Schofer, The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), and Amram Tropper, Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography: Tractate Avot in the Context of the Graeco-Roman Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Other recent studies of ethics and theology have examined social justice, charity, deontological obligations and duties, and exemplary models of sagely virtue. See Gregg E. Gardner, The Origins of Organized Charity in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Tzvi Novick, What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2010), and Aryeh Cohen, Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013). Given the exciting developments in the broader field of rabbinics, even the very way of defining ethics, law, and theology in rabbinic Judaism for handbooks and companions has had growth and change. See Nancy Levene, “From Law to Ethics . . . and Back,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, ed.

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by William Schweiker (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 188–96, Schofer, “Rabbinic Ethical Formation and the Formation of Rabbinic Ethical Compilations,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. by Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 313–35, and Fonrobert, “Ethical Theories in Rabbinic Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality, ed. by Elliot Dorff and Jonathan Crane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 51–70. 2.  M. Ber. 6:3, M. Ber. 9:2, M. Ber. 9:5. 3.  Deut. 6:5, emphasis added. 4.  M. Ber. 9:5. 5. Schofer The Making of a Sage, 86; Rosen-Zvi, “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity, 27. 6. Nissan Rubin, “The Sages’ Conception of Body and Soul,” in Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society, ed. by S. Fishbane and J. Lightstone (Montreal: Concordia University, 1990), 47–103. 7. Boyarin, Dying for God, 105–107. 8. Fishbane, The Kiss of God; Boyarin, Dying for God, 107. 9.  M. Peah 1:1. 10. Gardner, The Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Judaism. 11. Schofer, The Making of a Sage; Gary Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability. 12.  M. Peah 1:1. 13. Anderson, Sin: A History. 14. Avot de Rabbi Natan, Version A, Chapter 40; and Schofer, The Making of a Sage, 133, 250–251 nn. 36–37. 15.  M. Yoma 8:9. 16. Schofer, The Making of a Sage, 134–135, 251–252 n. 33. 17.  M. Baba Metzia 4:1–3, and Leviticus 25:14. 18.  Exodus 22:20; the Mishnaic passage is M. Baba Metzia 4:10. 19.  M. Sanhedrin 3:6 and 4:5; also see M. Sanhedrin 3:1 and 4:1, especially the opening lines, for the framing of cases concerning money as compared with capital cases. 20.  Gen. 4:10. 21.  Leviticus 5:1. 22.  Proverbs 11:10; the Mishnaic passage is M. Sanhedrin 4:5; see also Schofer, “Theology of Law: Rabbinic Literature,” 405–407.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Elizabeth, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Anderson, Gary. Sin: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Berkowitz, Beth. Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Classical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates of the Mishnah 61

Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. ———. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Cohen, Aryeh. Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Fishbane, Michael. The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Fonrobert, Charlotte. “Ethical Theories in Rabbinic Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality, edited by Elliot Dorff and Jonathan Crane, 51–70. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Gardner, Gregg E. The Origins of Organized Charity in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Levene, Nancy. “From Law to Ethics . . . and Back.” In The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, edited by William Schweiker, 188–196. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. Newman, Louis. Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998. Novick, Tzvi. What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature, SJSJ 144. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Porter, F. C. “The Yeçer Hara: A Study in the Jewish Doctrine of Sin.” In Biblical and Semitic Studies: Yale Historical and Critical Contributions to Biblical Science. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901. Rosen-Zvi, Ishay. Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Rubin, Nissan. “The Sages’ Conception of Body and Soul.” In Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society, edited by S. Fishbane and J. Lightstone, 47–103. Montreal: Concordia University, 1990. Schofer, Jonathan Wyn. “Ethical and Moral Duties in Rabbinic Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. ———. “Theology of Law: Rabbinic Literature,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Law, edited by Brent Strawn, 400–407. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. ———. “Rabbinic Ethical Formation and the Formation of Rabbinic Ethical Compilations,” in C. Fonrobert and M. Jaffee (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee, 313–335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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———. The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Tropper, Amram. Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography: Tractate Avot in the Context of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Yadin, Azzan. Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Chapter Five

What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God

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Kenneth Seeskin

There was a time when Bible scholarship and theology were indistinguishable.1 If you wanted to argue for a theological position, you showed that so far from advancing a new doctrine, you were only giving voice to what the revealed word of God put forth centuries ago. Theology, then, was both a theoretical and a hermeneutical discipline. But after centuries of trying to do two things at once, theology came to realize is limitations and concentrate on theory. The reason for the change is not hard to discern. The biblical text is so complicated, the varieties of expression so diverse, and ambiguities so critical that it is almost impossible not to find whatever doctrine you are looking for. Philo found Neo-Platonism, the rabbis found the principles that came to be expressed in the Talmud, Christians found the coming of Jesus, Maimonides and Aquinas found a version of Aristotelianism, pacifists found a rejection of violence, their opponents found the basis of just war theory, monarchists found a defense of kingship, republicans found a warning that kingship is inherently dangerous. From a Jewish perspective, it was Spinoza who tried to put a stop to this.2 The problem with conflating theology with Bible scholarship is that one winds up conflating meaning with truth.3 The theologian is trying to argue for the truth of a doctrine. His guiding assumption is that because the Bible is the word of God, its truth is a foregone conclusion. It follows that if he can find his doctrine expressed in the Bible, he has given his audience a powerful reason why they should accept it. Not surprisingly, Spinoza takes Maimonides as his primary opponent. In the Introduction to the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides argues that the subject matter of the Bible, which he identifies with ma’aseh bereshit (the Account of Creation) and ma’aseh merkaba (the Account of [Ezekiel’s] 63

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chariot) is no different from what philosophers treat under the guise of physics and metaphysics.4 If this is not clear at first blush, that is only because people have a natural tendency to take literally passages that are really parables or metaphors. For example, if the Bible says that the elders of Israel saw God, the meaning is not that they saw him with their eyes but that they apprehended God with their minds. If the Bible speaks of God’s throne in heaven, the meaning is not that there is a physical object supporting God but that God reigns supreme over everything else. Faced with the question of why there is no explicit mention of physics and metaphysics in biblical literature, Maimonides replied that Moses and the patriarchs discovered philosophy before the Greeks; the problem is that due to centuries of exile and oppression, their teachings were destroyed or forgotten.5 His project, then, was to restore these teachings to the position of respect they once enjoyed and in his opinion rightfully deserve. Although no biblical scholar today would give credence to such a story, it shows the length to which a thinker of genius was willing to go to justify his method. As Spinoza points out, Maimonides went even further, arguing that if science were to come up with a discovery that altered our understanding of the physical universe, he would alter his understanding of the Bible to take account of it.6 Against this, Spinoza argues that we have no right to assume that the Bible affirms what we have come to believe about God or the natural world. In his words:

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. . . in seeking the meaning of Scripture we should take every precaution against the undue influence, not only of our own prejudices, but of our faculty of reason insofar as that is based on the principles of natural cognition. In order to avoid confusion between true meaning and truth of fact, the former must be sought simply from linguistic usage, or from a process of reasoning that looks to no other basis than Scripture.7

If the literal meaning of a passage conflicts with the dictates of natural reason, the literal meaning cannot be overruled unless the reason for doing so is internal to the text. In short, the burden of proof rests not with those who read the Bible literally but with those who do not. It follows that if we want to understand what the Bible means, we have no choice but to approach it the way we would approach any other ancient text: by looking at the language in which it is written and the history of the people who wrote it. If there is no evidence that the ancient Israelites engaged in physics or metaphysics, then it is pointless to ask what they thought about philosophical disputes that did not arise until centuries later.

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What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 65

Despite the fact that people continued to conflate theology and bible scholarship well into the twentieth century, in the present climate, things have taken a decidedly Spinozistic turn: The two have become separate disciplines requiring separate training regiments and sets of skills. As with all developments of this kind, progress comes at a price. The more we view the Bible as a product of the culture that produced it, the less it can claim to be a foundational text for Jews and Christians of today. The difference between Maimonides and Spinoza comes to a head over the issue of anthropomorphism. That the Bible often describes God in human terms and never explicitly denies that God has a body is uncontroversial. So is the fact that its depiction of God bears little resemblance to the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God studied by philosophers. As far back as the Eleventh Century, the Rabbi in Judah Halevi’s Kuzari distinguished himself from the philosopher by saying that rather than a first cause of the universe, he believes in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who led the Israelites out of Egypt with signs and miracles.8 Behind the philosophical conception of God stands a principle first made explicit by Anselm: God is a being than which no greater can be thought. In Maimonides’s hands, this principle led to the claim that because we can easily conceive of a being greater than even the most glorified material object, the anthropomorphic descriptions of God cannot be understood in their literal sense for if they were understood that way, the Bible could not be talking about God and would relinquish its claim to being a sacred text. Granted that it may take years of study and a high degree of sophistication to see what the Bible is actually trying to say. Still, Maimonides continues, there is no reason to think that what the Bible says must be the same as what it means. Against this, Spinoza points out that neither the prophets nor their audiences possessed anything like the philosophic sophistication Maimonides is talking about. That leaves us with the central question of this essay: What can a document written in the ancient Near East teach us about God? To answer this question, let us look at the issue of anthropomorphism in greater detail. This is obviously not the place to review centuries of biblical scholarship on so broad a question. Let me therefore concentrate on three figures: Yehezkel Kaufmann, James Kugel, and my friend and former colleague Benjamin Sommer. I will devote most of my remarks to Sommer because his treatment of this material is more recent and goes into far more detail than anything that preceded it. Kaufmann’s chief contribution was to point out that there was a principled distinction between the religion of ancient Israel and that of its pagan neighbors. According to paganism: “There exists a realm of being prior to the gods and above them, upon which the gods depend, and whose decrees they must

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obey.”9 Whether we conceive of this realm as fate (moira), darkness, water, spirit, earth, or sky is immaterial: the point is that in the pagan worldview, the gods are not absolute. According to Kaufmann, rather than attempt to refute paganism, the religion of ancient Israel simply ignored it. There is no force or higher authority to which YHWH must submit or to whom he must answer. Thus biblical religion is based on the idea of trying to appeal to the will of God rather than trying to manipulate it. Unlike Maimonides, Kaufmann denied that biblical religion was the product of a higher level of understanding produced by a philosophic elite. He also denied that the biblical conception of God is more abstract than its pagan alternatives. In place of abstraction, he emphasized the idea ultimacy. When it comes to anthropomorphism, Kaufmann admitted that biblical religion did ascribe a human form to God; but he denied that it conceived of God as consisting of or being subject to the normal limitations of matter. As Sommer argues, it would be best to say that Kaufmann advocated a spiritual rather than material anthropomorphism for if God were composed of matter, he would be at the mercy of the same forces that govern sticks, stones, trees, animals, and everything else that we encounter in ordinary experience.10 For Kaufman, these things are creations of God rather than expressions of the divine nature. From a philosophic perspective, his position can be seen as a variation on Anselm’s insight: if God had to yield to a higher power, he would no longer be a being than which no greater can be thought and thus no longer worthy of the name God. In many ways, Kugel took a different approach, arguing that for ancient Israel, the spiritual is not something that occupies a separate realm from the one we do but something “perfectly capable of intruding into everyday reality, as if part of this world:11 This does not mean that people can confront God in the same way that they confront other people. Exodus 33:20 makes it clear that death awaits anyone who looks directly at the face of God. But in biblical literature, there is nothing to prevent God from taking on human form and talking to people in an ordinary manner. In particular Kugel calls attention to the ambiguity to the Hebrew term mal’akh, usually translated as “angel.”12 Although angels are often regarded as emissaries or messengers sent from God, Kugel maintains that in many instances, they are not lesser beings but rather God himself in a form accessible to humans. The most prominent example of this can be found in Genesis 18:1–14, where God appears to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre. As Abraham looks up, he sees three strange men standing near him. He prepares a lavish meal for his visitors, who magically know the name of his wife and ask about her. When one of the visitors predicts that Sarah will conceive a child in the next year, Sarah laughs to herself. The text goes on to say that God himself

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What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 67

answers Abraham, predicting that Sarah will indeed bear a son by next year. This has led many people to speculate that one of the three visitors who came to Abraham was actually God in human form. A similar scene is reported at Genesis 21:15–19, when an angel speaks to Hagar in the desert. At first the angel speaks of God in the third person saying that God has heard Ishmael’s voice; but without warning, the text shifts to the first person saying: “I will make a great nation of him.” In a similar way, when Jacob wrestles with the angel at Genesis 32:24–30, he names the place Peniel (the face of God), indicating that he was not struggling with an intermediary but with God himself.13 At Exodus 3:2, we are told that an angel appeared to Moses out of the burning bush; but once again the text suddenly shifts to the first person and has God speak to Moses directly. Finally, there is Judges 6:11–23, where an angel appears to Gideon while he is hiding from the Midianites. Again the angel begins by speaking of God in the third person, but soon shifts to the first: “The Lord said to him, ‘I will be with you.’” Where we see ambiguity between God and an emissary, Kugel argues that biblical characters come to see continuity: what first looks like a human being later turns out to be God himself, not in a form that poses a threat to human life, but in the form of a person entering their lives at a crucial moment. Kugel concludes that the dividing line between the spiritual and the physical is not clear, or at least not always respected.14 God can pop up anywhere and speak to a person whenever he wishes. Moreover, the fact that God is present at one place in no way prevents him from being present at another. This, at least, is how we should understand the Bible if, to use Kugel’s expression, we study the historical context and are not impaired by “theological blinders.”15 The biggest step is taken by Sommer, who begins his book by stating in no uncertain terms that the evidence that the God of the Hebrew Bible has a body is overwhelming. What he finds startling is not the idea that God has a body but the further claim that: “God has many bodies located in sundry places in the world that God created.”16 And, to go further, not only is this true but theologians who regard the Hebrew Bible as a foundational text must take account of it. As indicated above, it is uncontroversial that the Hebrew Bible describes God as having arms, feet, hands, a face, and a backside. The question is how to interpret the passages that say this. Even if we take off our theological blinders, interpretation always raises sticky questions. Although he does not cite Spinoza, there is little question that Sommer is following in his footsteps by assuming that in the absence of an explicit denial that God has a body, we have no choice but to interpret such passages literally. The difference is that while Spinoza agrees that the ancient Israelites conceived of God as having a body, he goes on to say that as a theological claim in its own right, the idea

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of an embodied God is unworthy of serious consideration.17 For Sommer not only is it worthy but it has much to teach us. Let us stick with the ancient Israelites for the time being. Are we sure we know how they understood literal truth? Modern astrophysicists tell us that the Big Bang occurred about fourteen billion years ago. Suppose someone were to ask whether this is literally true or employs a metaphor? The answer is that it depends on what context you view it in. The comparison between the origin of the universe and the explosion of a firecracker is crude at best. For someone who recognizes this, the comparison between a unique event and a familiar one is a shorthand way of referring to a large body of scientific information; for someone watching a television show about black holes, it is a literal description of something that happened a long time ago. Similar considerations apply to the comparison between a wire carrying an electric charge and the flow of water through a pipe or the wall of a cell and the wall of a house. Another way to see this point is to pick up a newspaper and start reading the account of a murder, diplomatic breakthrough, sports event, or fashion show. How long will it take before the author employs a metaphor to help us understand what happened? My guess is that it would not be long at all before literal truth gives way to an invitation to look at one thing in terms normally suited for another. That is how the human mind works. So if one asks whether something should be taken literally or metaphorically, the appropriate answer is that the distinction is anything but hard and fast. In a legal context it may be one thing, in a medical context something else, in a news broadcast something else again. One of the challenges we face in reading the Bible is that the context keeps changing. It is not just that we have different authors with different points of view but that we have a variety of genres in which the authors express themselves, e.g., epic narrative, historical narrative, legislative ruling, poetry, aphorism, and prophetic utterance. No modern literary scholar would argue that the sole or even main purpose of these genres is to assert literal truth. Sometimes they are intended to cajole, sometimes to inspire, sometimes to frighten, sometimes to inform. According to Spinoza, the main purpose of the Bible is not to assert truth at all but to motivate acceptable forms of behavior and prohibit others. To be sure, he paints in broad brushstrokes. But the lesson he is trying to impart is still important: we should be wary of picking up a text this diverse and thinking that it is committed to a metaphysical doctrine that we can uncover—or any doctrine at all. It is no secret that the Bible is not the only place in the sacred literature of Judaism where God is described in anthropomorphic terms. In the Talmud, God laughs, cries, studies Torah, wears teffilin, speaks to people directly from heaven, and plays with animals. For example, at Avodah Zarah 3b, we read:



What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 69

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Yet Rav Judah said in the name of Rav: “The day consists of twelve hours; during the first three hours the Holy One, blessed be He, is occupying Himself with the Torah, during the second three He sits in judgment on the whole world, and when He sees that the world is so guilty as to deserve destruction, He transfers Himself from the seat of Justice to the seat of Mercy; during the third quarter, He is feeding the whole world, from the horned buffalo to the brood of vermin; during the fourth quarter He is sporting with the leviathan as it is said, There is leviathan, whom Thou hast formed to sport therewith”? Said R. Nahman b. Isaac: Yes, He sports with His creatures, but does not laugh at His creatures except on that day.

Here we have to ask whether the anthropomorphic language should be taken as evidence that the rabbis were also committed to the idea of an embodied God or whether they are literary devices whose purpose is to drive home a point that is more practical than theoretical: the superiority of mercy to justice. The question of literal versus metaphorical truth becomes still more complicated when we realize that not only did biblical authors lack a consistent metaphysics, they also lacked a technical vocabulary with which to express their view of divinity. This leaves us guessing how to interpret words like “spirit” (ruach), “glory” (kavod), or “name” (shem). According to Kugel, ancient readers of the Bible, which is to say those closest to the text historically, never assumed that literal meaning was the default position.18 On the contrary, they assumed that the Bible is inherently cryptic so that when it says A, it might really mean B. This assumption is perfectly natural given that people do not always mean what they say or say what they mean. In some cases, it may take considerable effort to get from one to the other. So even if historical methods allowed us to get clear on what was said, as Kugel indicates, the question of what was meant is another story. And the question of what the editors and redactors who put the various sayings together meant another story yet again. To take a noteworthy example, Exodus 21:23 demands “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. . . .” Although the simple or plain sense of the text (peshat) appears to legitimate mutilation of the human body as a way of compensating someone for an injury, the rabbis never took this as the true meaning. This is all a way of saying that when dealing with a text as rich and varied as the Bible, meaning is not one-dimensional. As in Shakespeare, there are metaphors, parables, word plays, and a host of other devices that indicate that the same text can be read on a number of levels. The problem is that to avoid putting on theological blinders, modern readers, including professional scholars, often move to the opposite extreme by privileging what they take to be the plain or simple meaning. This, too, can

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lead to abuse. From the fact that the ancient Israelites were not acquainted with science or philosophy, it hardly follows that they were unable to see that language has many more uses than the assertion of literal truth. If they were capable of producing as rich and varied a document as the Bible, why not credit them with realizing that the assertion of literal truth is only one of a number of possibilities? Suppose that we were to take passages like “God walked with Noah,” “God is the shield of Abraham,” “God took Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand,” “Moses saw the backside of God,” or Psalm 2:7, which tells us tells us that David is the only begotten son of God. Not only must we ask whether these passages were intended to be taken literally, we must ask whether we possess a reliable way of determining where literal meaning ends and metaphorical begins. My claim is that there is no context neutral way to decide this—not for us and certainly not for them. Once context is taken into account, establishing hard and fast boundaries for literal versus metaphorical truth becomes almost impossible. Here it is instructive to note that the rabbis often preface anthropomorphic descriptions of God with the term kivyahol (as it were) to indicate that what they are about to say, though intended to be taken seriously, should not be understood as a simple statement of fact. Though biblical authors are not this explicit, why should we suppose that simple statements of fact were their only means of discourse? Sommer would no doubt reply that whatever the difficulties of drawing the line between literal and metaphorical truth, the evidence from both explicit statements and archeological artifacts leaves no doubt that the ancient Israelites thought of God as having a body. But here, too, problems emerge. What kind of body? Textual evidence forces Sommer to draw a distinction between the way God is described in J and E and the way he is described in P and D. The first model, which emphasizes fluidity, holds that God can “produce many small-scale manifestations of himself that enjoy some degree of independence without becoming separate deities.”19 Accordingly Sommer interprets Genesis 18 and similar passages as saying that while angels are part of God, they do not constitute all of God. In addition to entering human bodies or taking on human form, God also has the power to enter pieces of wood or stone. What is more, the manifestation of God that appears in one location is not necessarily the same as that which appears in another. Though some may think that such a conception of God sins against monotheism, Sommer says no: while God may have different manifestations, and each manifestation may exercise a limited degree of independence, at bottom it is the same God YHWH who is manifesting himself in each place.

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What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 71

By the time we get to P and D, however, things change. God dwells in heaven and from time to time comes down to a location on earth, e.g., the Tabernacle. While the Tabernacle is portable, according to P, any suggestion that God can be found outside the Tabernacle in pieces of wood or stone is heretical. By the time of D, God’s presence on earth is limited to a fixed location: the Temple in Jerusalem. We can see the difference by comparing Exodus 20:22–26, which says that sacrifices can be offered at any place where God causes his name to be remembered with Deuteronomy 12:5–14, which says that sacrifices can only be offered in a central location that God will choose. The first is compatible with God being in multiple locations, the latter is not. Although these conceptions of God differ, Sommer’s central claim is that both presuppose that God has a body. Again we must ask: What kind of body? No material object with which we are familiar can be in multiple locations at the same time and remain the same. If, on the other hand, God resides in heaven and comes down to earth periodically, is heaven a space contiguous with earth? If so, how does one space differ from the other? If not, does God’s body undergo change when he leaves one realm and enters another? Sommer, who never hides his sympathy for the fluidity tradition, responds by saying that God’s body must consist of “light but not of flesh, something like an intense fire, but not of some solid object that is burning.”20 By a body, then, Sommer does not mean a material object in the sense in which we normally use the term but rather “something located in a particular place at a particular time, whatever its shape or substance.” From this it follows that even though P conceives of God’s body as having the same basic shape as a human being, according to Sommer, God’s body differs from human ones by virtue of being immaterial.21 That is why in many passages the light of God’s body is so intense that it must be covered in a cloud in order not to damage those who come near it. While Sommer concedes that the Deuteronomic model gained ascendency, his preference for the fluidity model can be explained by the fact that it is easier to reconcile with divine transcendence. Why should we assume that an infinite God can only appear in one place? Why, that is, can God not manifest himself in Chicago as easily as he does in Jerusalem? The answer cannot be that the soil of Jerusalem exercises some form of constraint on God. Rather it would have to be that God has chosen to appear in Jerusalem and nowhere else. But if the body of God is present in Jerusalem, how are those who live elsewhere supposed to relate to him? Some will object that the idea of an immaterial body is a contradiction in terms because whether solid, fluid, or gaseous, a body is a composite made

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up of various combinations of smaller particles. While there are people who say that the soul “occupies” the body when the body is alive, no one would say that the soul takes on the same shape as the body in the sense that it has fingers and legs. In the case of God’s body, the situation is complicated by the use of ambiguous terms such as those referred to above. Even a cursory reading of the Bible shows that kavod is anything but univocal. At Genesis 33:18, when Moses asks to see God’s kavod, he clearly means something intimate with or identical to God, something that no other person has seen before. Thus Moses’ way of asking permission: “If I have found favor in your sight. . . .” God answers that he will cause all his goodness to pass before Moses but that no mortal can see God’s face and live. A few lines later we learn that the goodness that passes before Moses is in fact God’s kavod. This leaves open the question of whether kavod in this passage refers to God’s self or to a set of qualities that follow from or are closely associated with God.22 The most natural reading is that kavod is used in different senses and therefore refers to both. While there are some passages (e.g., Exodus 24:17) where God’s kavod refers to a blazing light, Sommer overstates his case by saying that Exodus 33 “must refer to a body” on the grounds that the passage ascribes bodily parts to God and puts God in motion.23 Why must it?—unless we assume once again that literal meaning is the default position so that anyone who interprets the passage as a parable must be mistaken. By contrast, at Deuteronomy 5:24, Moses quotes the people as saying that God showed the assembled multitude his kavod when he spoke to them out of the darkness on the mountain. Does this mean that the people saw what Moses could not see at Exodus 33 or is it rather the case, as Richard Friedman suggests, that in some cases, God’s kavod functions as a shield or mask that prevents humans from being injured by the blinding light of God?24 And, to stay with Friedman, why is it that after the dedication of Solomon’s Temple, no prophet is able to see God’s kavod directly? Finally, there are places where kavod refers not to God himself but to the honor or respect that is due God (e.g., 1 Samuel 4.21–2). When Isaiah (6:3) says that the whole earth is full of God’s kavod, he is not introducing his audience to a pantheistic theology reminiscent of Spinoza but saying that the whole earth reflects or testifies to the greatness of God. A similar ambiguity applies to shem. No biblical author would agree with Shakespeare’s Juliet that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. On the contrary, names are closely connected to the thing to which they refer and often tell us something important about it. At Psalm 7:18, YHWH’s shem refers to his quality of being righteous, at Psalm 145.21, YHWH and his shem appear to be identical.25 To return to the fluidity model, we saw that Exodus

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What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 73

20:22–26 maintains that sacrifices can be offered at any place where God causes his shem to be remembered. Again, by contrast, Deuteronomy 26:2 seems to say that it is not God who dwells in the Temple but his shem. This leaves us with two problems. The first arises from the unsurprising fact that the Bible is not consistent in the way that it portrays God and that it does not use critical terms like kavod and shem in a univocal fashion. Is the God who predicted that Sarah would conceive a son the same as the God who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind? No one knows for sure. Nor does anyone know the precise nature of the relationship between God and his kavod. In view of this, one has to wonder whether the original authors ever dreamt that scholars from a later age would comb the text in intricate detail trying to discern a coherent theological doctrine. Perhaps all they wanted to do was establish laws for how to worship God and direct people’s attention to the spiritual side of life. That would explain why, given the standards established by theologians, their language appears flexible and multivalent. At one point, the rabbis reflect on the fact that while the laws of Shabbat are many and complicated, the biblical foundation for them is minimal.26 This motivates them to say that the laws of Shabbat are like a mountain hanging by a thread. I suggest that the same can be said for the many attempts to construct a systematic theology from biblical texts alone. Though the Bible may stimulate theological inquiry and provide material for the theologian to consider, given the ambiguous nature of that material, any theology that we come up with will be more a construction than an interpretation. The second problem is closely related to the first. To the degree that we adhere to the fluidity model, we will have a hard time accounting for divine unity. As we saw, Sommer insists that the fluidity model is perfectly consistent with monotheism. But once again, questions arise. A modern jetliner is one plane even though it contains millions of different parts. My body is one even though it contains over two hundred bones, a dozen crucial organs, and millions of individual cells. In what sense is Deuteronomy 6:4 using the term when it says that God is one? Although a normal body cannot be in two places at once, as Sommer expresses it, God’s body, which is anything but normal, can. More specifically, God can be in this rock, which has been anointed, but not in that rock, which has not.27 But, says Sommer, if God wanted, he could be in both and still remain the same for the simple reason that neither his presence here nor his presence there exhausts his being. His body is not just fluid but infinitely so. Even if this were possible, we would still face the question of how to explain the relation between God and his presence or temporary manifestation in another thing. Granted that the latter does not exhaust the former, how exactly are they related?

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Sommer’s way of making sense of this is to describe God’s manifestation in another body as a hypostasis or emanation that exhibits some of the qualities of God but retains a separate identity.28 By a hypostasis, Sommer means “a quality or attribute of a particular being that becomes distinct from that being but never entirely independent of it.”29 It follows that God’s shem “embodies but does not exhaust God’s self, and it also maintains some degree of separate identity.” Here it is worth noting that while Plotinus uses examples like the dispersal of perfume, heat, or water to explain emanation, strictly speaking it refers to logical priority rather than physical interaction. When the first hypostasis nous emanates from the One, Plotinus insists that the One cannot think because as the source of thought, it must be prior to or above thought.30 As applied to God, this implies that if a body emanates from God, God himself cannot have a body. Eventually Plotinus’s notion of emanation led to the conclusion that because the One is the source of everything, it cannot be characterized at all—the central claim of negative theology as epitomized by Maimonides. Needless to say, Sommer is under no obligation to accept the doctrine of emanation in its original form. But he does have to tell us how the fluidity model is consistent with divine unity. It is possible for two things to be distinct but mutually dependent, for example, the heart and the lungs; but no one would say that one is a quality or attribute of the other. Conversely, a singer’s voice is a quality or attribute of the singer; but no one would say that the voice retains a separate identity. I offer this as another case where given the ambiguity of the biblical text, and the difficulty of deciding what is literal and what metaphorical, it is impossible to achieve the kind of clarity we demand if we want to uncover a metaphysical doctrine. Sommer is therefore right when he says on the last page of the book: “God’s fluid self and unity across multiple bodies are fundamentally incomprehensible to humanity.”31 We could achieve greater precision by appealing to categories like essence, substance, attribute, and accident—categories intended to explain things like identity over time—but to do so would be to put theological blinders back on and read the text through the eyes of Aristotle—exactly what Spinoza, Kugel, and Sommer warn against. The upshot is that if we stick with the fluidity model, we will soon find ourselves facing issues similar to those Christians face in trying to explain how God can be both one and three. To his credit, Sommer faces this consequence head-on: Some Jews regard Christianity’s claim to be a monotheistic religion with grave suspicion, both because of the doctrine of the trinity (how can three equal one?) and because of Christianity’s core belief that God took bodily form. What I have attempted to point out here is that biblical Israel knew very similar doctrines,



What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 75

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and these doctrines did not disappear from Judaism after the biblical period. . . . No Jew sensitive to Judaism’s own classical sources, however, can fault the theological model Christianity employs when it avows belief in a God who has an earthly body as well as a Holy Spirit and a heavenly manifestation, for that model, we have seen, is a perfectly Jewish one.32

As he goes on to say, the only significant theological difference between Judaism and Christianity lies not in the trinity or incarnation but in the idea of a dying and rising God. Yet surely it is not God who dies according to Christian theology but his son or earthly manifestation. While they present themselves as distinct persons in some respects, the standard account of the trinity maintains that they are united by a single will. In each case, the problem is how to balance the implications of unity with those of fluidity, and in each case, the answer is far from clear. It is time to return to our central question: What can a document written in the ancient Near East teach us about God? I join Sommer in resisting the historicist option according to which the only thing it can teach us is what people in the ancient Near East thought about God. I also want to resist the Maimonidean option according to which, the Bible is an esoteric document that conceals truths that were later made explicit by philosophers. Between these options there are a wide range of alternatives. A person who identifies with a religious tradition cannot ignore a foundational text and try to characterize God in purely abstract terms. By the same token, we cannot assume that the authors of the text were so privileged that we must accept their views without question. As we saw, the Bible does not present a consistent account of God or provide everything we need to formulate our own account. If God is a being than which no greater can be thought, the obvious question is how we understand greatness. Transporting ourselves to the ancient Near East, we can understand why someone would define greatness as the ability to appear anywhere in space at any time—even to appear in multiple locations if that is what is called for. All bodies other than God’s are limited in space and time. Because God is perfect, he is free of such limitation. We can also understand why someone would define greatness as the ability to occupy a separate realm more perfect than the one we have on earth. This conception too frees God from limitation, specifically that imposed by age, disease, hunger, or anything else than affects earthly bodies. If conditions on earth become intolerable, then God can always retreat to his abode in heaven and hide his face. To carry this analysis a step further, we can understand why a person like Maimonides would define greatness as not having a body at all. Whether in heaven or on earth, bodies occupy space. Because space is divisible, anything

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that occupies space must be divisible as well. Anything that is divisible is composed of parts. We saw, for example, that even a single body is made of bones, organs, nerves, and cells. If we were to divide a cell, we would find that it is made up of yet smaller components. Let us add to this that anything composed of parts owes its existence to external factors responsible for bringing the parts together. It follows that if God has a body, he must owe his existence to a superior being or beings, which is clearly absurd. Therefore God cannot have a body. Sommer objects that by denying that God has a body, Maimonides was trying to create a whole new religion.33 The truth is, however, that Maimonides was responding to the same challenge as that faced by biblical authors of whatever persuasion: trying to say why there is nothing greater than God. From his perspective, even if God’s body does not age and can manifest itself in multiple locations, the fact that it is a body at all disqualifies it from being something than which no greater can be thought. If Sommer is right, then Maimonides’s view represents a departure from that of his predecessors, but a departure is not the same as a new creation. Even if it is true pace Maimonides that the ancient Israelites believed that God has a body, it is next to impossible to say exactly how we should understand this. We saw that in the end, Sommer himself has to admit that the compatibility of fluidity with divine unity exceeds the limits of human understanding. I submit that even if per impossible we could resurrect the culture of the ancient Near East and ask them how they understood God, there would still be questions to ask and problems to solve. Let us grant that the ancient Israelites did the best job they could of trying to explain why God has a status that nothing else in the universe has. They had no inkling that a rival religion would emerge that makes the idea of an embodied God a central doctrine. Nor were they aware that Jewish thinkers would put forth arguments to show that embodiment of any kind is incompatible with unity. While we can appreciate their efforts, and applaud them for rejecting the paganism of their neighbors, any attempt to roll back centuries of thought and look at the world as they did should give us pause. What makes the Bible foundational is not that it provides us with definitive answers to questions but that it establishes an intellectual trajectory of which we are still a part. Instead of just reflecting the views of the culture that produced it, the Bible points the way to something different, something powerful enough to sustain a religious tradition for millennia to come. Perhaps the biggest step in that trajectory is taken by Isaiah (40:25), when the prophet asks in God’s name: “To whom will you liken me that I should be compared?” As he says a few lines earlier, the nations are as nothing before God and the cedars of Lebanon do not have sufficient fuel nor animals

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What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 77

to provide burnt offerings. I take the nations and the cedars of Lebanon as examples as if to say that nothing can be compared to God. If God is the creator of heaven and earth, then everything other than God is something that God stands over as a sculptor stands over his statue. How do you characterize something to which no comparison is possible? From a literary standpoint, you can stress that coming too close to God is dangerous and that even if you try to approach God from afar, you are taking a risk. From a philosophic standpoint, you can say that any attempt to make God the subject of a normal subject/predicate proposition is bound to fail. As a final step, you can say that the whole enterprise of trying to characterize God is misguided because the moment you think you have an adequate characterization, the moment God begins to fall neatly into categories derived from human experience, you have missed God completely. In keeping with the idea of trajectory, we can organize these responses as follows. First God has a body and talks to people directly. Before long, God’s accessibility to people begins to change. According to Friedman, throughout the course of the Bible, God appears less frequently and has less to say to people.34 Along with this, miracles, angels, and other signs of God’s involvement with Israel diminish as well. We can interpret this literally as evidence that a capricious and disappointed God has decided to hide his face or as evidence that Israel’s understanding of God has begun to evolve from something concrete to something more abstract. When the rabbis speak of God, they often employ epithets like gevurah (power), makom (place), or shamayim (heaven) to avoid making God the grammatical subject of their discourse. As we saw before, they also signal the reader that they are not necessarily asserting simple matters of fact. By the time philosophy enters the picture, predicating anything of God becomes suspect because by introducing a distinction between God and the properties he possesses, it compromises divine unity. Quoting Psalm 65, Maimonides concludes that the highest tribute we can pay God is to maintain a studied silence coupled with a profound sense of humility.35 This does not mean that prayer or other forms of worship should be discontinued, only that if we are honest with ourselves, we will see that all of the ways we have of reaching out to God eventually fall short of their goal. God is beyond any praise we can offer and any characterization we can formulate. From this vantage point, the idea of returning to an embodied conception of God is difficult to accept no matter how exalted its pedigree. The rejection of an embodied God goes hand in hand with the rejection of divinely infused hypostases that emanate from God. If God is the only thing in the universe whose existence is necessary, then everything else is a creation of God and by that fact alone, distinct from God. This is true whether we are

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talking about the highest angel or the lowliest earthworm. To be sure, Jewish tradition is littered with logoi, sephirot, special planetary alignments, magical names, magical numbers, magical implements, charismatic figures, holy shrines, and a host of other things thought to share in God’s uniqueness. Be that as it may, the clean alternative is to recognize, in concert with Isaiah 40, that compared to God, all such things are as nothing. There is one last issue to take up. From Augustine to Bachya, through Maimonides and Aquinas and into Descartes, there is a tradition of theologians who hold that if you think you have come to an adequate understanding of God, then you have missed God completely.36 This is another way of saying that if God is infinite, he can do whatever he wants. That we cannot understand how is just a fact about the limitations of human knowledge; in no way does it limit or restrict God. Descartes went so far as to say that this is true even for the laws of mathematics. To suggest that the truths of mathematics are independent of God is to treat him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and thus subject to the Styx and the Fates.37 As expressed by Maimonides, the typical scholastic position was that the eternal truths are inherent in the nature of things and thus do not result from a free choice of God.38 Descartes’s point is essentially the same as Kaufmann’s: such a view amounts to a return to paganism because it subjects God to a greater power. Rather than say that God cannot make a triangle whose angles do not equal two right angles, it would be better to say I cannot understand how God can make such a triangle. But who am I to say what God can or cannot do? This doctrine is controversial, and it is unclear how far Descartes meant to take it. Does it apply only to finite essences like triangles or does it also apply to the basic laws of thought like modus ponens? The answer would seem to be that it applies to everything or else we would be back in the position of subjecting God to the Styx and the Fates. How, then, should we understand God? Could God have rendered his own omnipotence ineffective? Could he have made it a good thing to deceive people who use their rational faculties correctly? Could he have made it so that having willed one thing, he had never willed it at all? Could he turn coldblooded murder into a virtue? There is no way to respond without calling into question our most basic intuitions about consistency and rationality. Once consistency and rationality are called into question, so too is the whole enterprise of theology. If God can do anything, then anything we say about him could be either true or false. In sum: if one begins one’s inquiry with the claim that God can do anything, then the inquiry will end before it ever has a chance to get going. The whole point of having a foundational text is to say that there are legitimate and illegitimate ways to think about God. Proponents of negative theology, of which I am one, maintain that most of the progress we make from that point onward



What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 79

is in identifying avenues of thought that are illegitimate—the most basic being the belief that God has a body. The rationale is that embodiment implies finitude and complexity, both of which are incompatible with divinity. Faced with a God whose power and greatness are beyond our comprehension, the only legitimate response is not a statement of doctrine but a Jobian confession of humility, which Maimonides describes as follows: When a man reflects on these things, studies all these created beings, from the angels and spheres down to human beings and so on, and realizes the divine wisdom manifested in them all, his love for God will increase, his soul will thirst, his very flesh will yearn to love God. He will be filled with fear and trembling, as he becomes conscious of his lowly condition, poverty, and insignificance, and compares himself with any of the great and holy bodies; still more when he compares himself with any one of the pure forms that are incorporeal and have never had association with any corporeal substance. He will then realize that he is a vessel full of shame, dishonor, and reproach, empty and deficient.39

Maybe this overstates things. Not everyone is likely to see herself as a vessel full of shame, dishonor, and reproach. We are, after all, part of the universe that God has created. But Maimonides is surely right to say that this is how the effort to know God ends and that this experience is part of what the Bible can teach us.

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NOTES 1.  Some of the issues touched on in this essay are also covered in a book forthcoming from the Jewish Publication Society of America entitled, Thinking about the Torah: A Philosopher Reads the Bible. 2.  Like many generalizations, this one should be qualified. For Jews who foreshadowed Spinoza as far back as the eleventh century and the interest in historical context that developed during the Renaissance, see Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993), 88–91. 3.  Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 88–89. 4.  Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 6. 5. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah 1. trans. by E. Touger (New York and Jerusalem: Moznaim Publishing, 1989), Idolatry, 1.3. See, too, Maimonides, Guide, 1.71, 175–76. 6. Maimonides, Guide 2. 25, 327–28. 7. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 88–89. 8.  Judah Halevi, The Kuzari (New York: Schocken, 1987), 1.11. 9.  Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Ancient Israel, trans. by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 21.

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10. Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71. 11.  James L. Kugel, The God of Old (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 36. 12.  Ibid., 6–7. 13.  Hosea 12 asserts quite clearly that it was God himself whom Jacob confronted at Peniel. 14. Kugel, God of Old, 24. 15.  Ibid., 99. 16. Sommer, Bodies of God, 1. 17. At Ethics 2P2, Spinoza does say that God is extended. This means that we can conceive of God (or Nature) as an infinite plenum of extended things interacting with one other according to known causal laws. This is a far cry from saying that God can enter the finite space of a particular body. 18.  James Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: The Free Press, 2007), 14. 19. Sommer, Bodies of God, 38. 20.  Ibid., 70–1. 21.  Ibid., 71. 22.  For a similar ambiguity, see John 1:1: “The logos was with God, and the logos was God.” 23. Sommer, Bodies of God, 60. 24.  Richard Elliot Friedman, The Hidden Face of God (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), 63. See, for example, 1 Kings 8:10–11, Psalm 104:2, Ezekiel 10:4. 25. Sommer, Bodies of God, 59. Both passages are cited by Sommer, though he interprets them as asserting an identity between YHWH and his shem. 26.  Chagigah 10a. 27. Sommer, Bodies of God, 141. 28.  Ibid., 59, cf. Friedman, The Hidden Face, 13. Note, however, that according to Ephraim Urbach, The Sages, trans. by Israel Abrams (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Press, 1979), 634, the rabbinic use of Shekhinah (presence), a word that exhibits ambiguities similar to those of kavod or shem, “is no hypostasis and has no separate existence alongside the Deity.” 29. Sommer, Bodies of God, 59. 30. Plotinus, Enneads, 5.2.1, 5.3.16, 6.7.17. 31. Sommer, Bodies of God, 145. 32. Sommer, Bodies of God, 135. 33.  Ibid., 136. 34. Friedman, The Hidden Face, 7. 35. Maimonides, Guide 1.59, 139–40. 36.  See, for example, Bachya ibn Pakudah, Duties of the Heart Vol. 1, trans. by Moses Hyamson (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1962), 111–112. 37.  Anthony Kenny, Descartes: Philosophical Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 18–19. 38. Maimonides, Guide 3.15. 39. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah I, Principles of the Torah, 4. 12.



What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 81

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bachya ibn Pakudah. Duties of the Heart, trans. Moses Hyamson. Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1962. Friedman, Richard Elliot. The Hidden Face of God. San Francisco: Harper, 1995. Halevi, Judah. Kuzari, trans. Isaak Heinemann. Oxford: East and West Library, 1947. Kaufmann, Yehezkel. The Religion of Ancient Israel. trans. by Moshe Greenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: Philosophical Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: The Free Press, 2007. ———. The God of Old. New York: The Free Press, 2003. Levenson, Jon D. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993. Maimonides, Moses. Mishneh Torah. trans. E. Touger. New York and Jerusalem: Moznaim Publishing, 1989. ———. The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Sommer, Benjamin, D. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. ———. Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. Urbach, Ephraim, The Sages, trans. by Israel Abrams. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Press, 1979.

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Chapter Six

The Bible as Torah How J, E, P, and D Can Teach Us about God Benjamin D. Sommer

In his fine contribution to this volume, my friend and colleague Ken Seeskin raises the crucial question: What role—if any—can the Tanakh have for modern Jewish theology? Given that we recognize the Tanakh comes from a culture quite removed from our own and makes assumptions about physics and metaphysics that were dated already a millennium ago, can it really teach us anything about God? This question is central for all biblical theologians, myself included, and Seeskin generously uses my book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel,1 to exemplify the challenges inherent in any attempt to learn truths from such an ancient text. In what follows, I would like to clarify the ways in which Seeskin and I both agree and disagree. Before I do so, however, many readers will find a summary of some aspects of my book helpful.

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RECOVERING AN ANCIENT DEBATE In The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, I present a view of divinity that I believe can be found in the ancient Near East, according to which deities differ from human beings because deities’ selves are fluid and unbounded. In the viewpoint of ancient Near Eastern worshipers and religious thinkers, deities could have multiple bodies, located simultaneously in heaven and in several earthly locations. (This becomes especially evident from ancient Near Eastern ceremonies intended to bring the real presence of a deity into its cult statue. The ancient texts that describe these ceremonies, usually referred in Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts to as “mouth-opening” or “mouth-washing” rites, make clear that their participants believed that the god or goddess literally came to be embodied by or housed in the statue. 83

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Because there were many statues of the same deity in various temples at the same time, it follows that a god or goddess often had multiple bodies that were physically—and not merely symbolically—present in more than one house.) Further, a deity’s self could fragment into more than one local manifestation. These manifestations or avataras (here I appropriate a strikingly fitting Sanskrit term to describe an ancient Near Eastern theology) were distinct from one another and could even be worshiped separately. Nonetheless, these local manifestations retained an underlying unity. While Ishtar of Arbela and Ishtar of Nineveh are appealed to separately in religious and legal texts, mythological texts speak simply of Ishtar. There are no stories of Ishtar of Arbela or of Nineveh; rather, when myths narrate Ishtar’s acts, they are speaking of all the local Ishtars. Similarly, separate cultic texts and cultic sites are devoted specifically to Baal Ṣaphon, Baal Ugarit, and Baal of Heaven, but when these three terms appear parallel to each other as the subject of a sentence, the verb used of them is in the singular, indicating that they are all the same deity, who is also known by the name Hadad. In short: There were several goddesses named Ishtar who were ultimately a single being, many Baals or Hadads who were one Baal Hadad. This conception of divine selfhood, which I call the “fluidity model,” appears not only in ancient Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Egyptian religions but also in the Bible. It can be found in the J and E sources from the Pentateuch.2 Further, we can detect it in sundry passages in the Psalms, prophets, and Samuel. It also appears in several ancient Israelite inscriptions discovered by archaeologists in the past century, which speak of “Yhwh of Teiman” and “Yhwh of Samaria,” just as biblical texts speak of “Yhwh in Zion” (Psalm 99:2) and “Yhwh in Hebron” (2 Samuel 15:7). In those texts the one God Yhwh has multiple cultic bodies; Yhwh can appear in small-scale manifestations that on the surface seem separate from the heavenly Godhead yet clearly overlap with It and never become autonomous beings. J, E, and related texts use several terms to describe the multiple bodies of God housed in various temples throughout ancient Israel. These include ‫“( מצבה‬stone pillar”), ‫ביתאל‬ (“betyl” or “divine house”), and ‫“( אשרה‬asherah” or “sacred tree, sacred wooden pole”), the first two of which also refer to earthly embodiments of a deity in ancient Near Eastern texts outside the Bible. It must be stressed that J, E, and related texts from the Tanakh regard these multiple manifestations of Yhwh positively; for them, these three terms refer to legitimate and beneficial cultic objects. (Other biblical texts, we will see, use these terms disparagingly.) These texts also speak of Yhwh’s multiple, small-scale manifestations or avataras on earth. J and E often refer to such a manifestation as ’‫מלאך ה‬. This term is usually translated as “Yhwh’s angel,” but in J and E it often refers to a manifestation of Yhwh rather than a messenger sent by Yhwh.

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The Bible as Torah 85

This entire way of thinking is completely rejected by the Pentateuch’s P and D sources, whose authors insist that God has only one body. (Thus the theological debate within biblical texts about divine embodiment was not whether Yhwh has a body; all biblical authors who address the issue directly or indirectly agree that God has a body.3 What they debate is how many bodies Yhwh has and where they are, or it is, located.) According to P and the closely related Book of Ezekiel, the divine body or ‫( כבוד‬kavod) came to dwell in the Tabernacle and, later, the Jerusalem Temple. (Ezekiel 8–11 further narrates God’s return to heaven shortly before the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE.) D and the historical books from Joshua through Kings, which follow D’s theology in many respects, also reject the idea of fluid divine selfhood found in J and E, but in a different way. The D authors insist that there is only one Yhwh, not several local manifestations in Temain and Samaria, Zion and Hebron. D dismisses the idea of local Yhwhs most emphatically in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: Yhwh, our God, is one Yhwh!”4 This line is directed against the view, popular among other Israelites, that there was a Yhwh of Zion and a Yhwh of Teiman who were all manifestations of the heavenly Yhwh; the famous first line of the Shema was originally directed, at least in part, against the fluidity model. In this respect D resembles P; indeed, D attacks the idea of divine fluidity even more strongly and openly than P does. But, against P, the D authors further assert that God dwells eternally and exclusively in heaven, never on earth. The Jerusalem Temple contains only a symbol of God’s presence that D calls the ‫( שם‬shem) or “name” of God; the Temple does not house God’s body. Unlike J and E, neither P nor D depict small-scale manifestations, emanations, or avataras of God in their narratives. The latter authors forbid Israelites from using the cultic items that J and E accepted as embodiments of God in local temples—that is, the ‫( מצבות‬stone pillars) and ‫( אשרות‬sacred trees or poles). In fact, both P and D require these items to be destroyed (Leviticus 26:1–2; Deuteronomy 7:5 12:3, 15:21–22). They insist that God’s presence (or, for D a symbol of God’s presence) can be encountered only in a single Temple. Both legislate that sacrificial ritual should be practiced only there. P and D are the dominant voices of the Pentateuch; together they account for about two-thirds of the Five Books.5 Further, the schools that produced them edited several other biblical books into their current form. As a result, it is exceedingly difficult to notice the Israelite fluidity tradition that they attempt to suppress. (For this reason I needed to devote eighty-one pages of Bodies of God to reconstructing it.6) But the fluidity tradition does not disappear from Judaism. It re-emerges in new forms and with new terminology later on. Examples from Late Antiquity include the notion of the heavenly being Metatron as a “little Yhwh,” as well as some rabbinic texts’ conception

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of the ‫( שכינה‬shekhinah, or “divine presence”) as a being who could have a discussion with Yhwh.7 In the Middle Ages this theological intuition goes further, especially in works of Jewish mysticism such as the Zohar and, in even more intricate ways, in Lurianic kabbalah.8 Kabbalistic doctrines of the ‫( ספירות‬sephirot) constitute highly complex versions of the notion that the divine can fragment Itself into multiple selves that nonetheless remain parts of an ultimately indivisible whole. The sephirot are usually conceived of as ten manifestations of God in the universe, as opposed to the utterly unknowable essence of God outside the universe. While some kabbalists view the sephirot as created beings distinct from God, most classical kabbalistic thinkers see in them, as Moshe Idel puts it, “an organic part of the divine essence” whose complex relationships with each other constitute “intradeical dynamism.”9 These ten sephirot interact in ways that seem to disclose a degree of individual existence—for example, in sexual ways. Yet kabbalists maintain that they are all part of the unity that is God. The whole doctrine of the sephirot is a late reflex of the ancient Near Eastern fluidity tradition. From the point of view of P, D, and, arguably, the redacted text of the Pentateuch, the Zohar’s doctrines are not only wrong but dangerous. But when viewed in light of the distinct theological voices of J and E, the doctrine of sephirot emerges as a return to an earlier model, a massively ramified elaboration of a biblical idea. As Seeskin mentions, I also admit that the existence of the Tanakh’s fluidity tradition shows something quite surprising: Jews usually regard two core ideas of Christian theology, the doctrines of incarnation and the trinity, as polytheistic imports into a religion based on the Tanakh. In the eyes of many Jews, to the extent that these polytheistic imports are central to Christianity, that religion can be regarded as disloyal to the Tanakh’s monotheism. But the existence of the fluidity traditions within the Tanakh itself shows that doctrines of incarnation and trinity may be of native Jewish origin and need not be seen as polytheistic at all. This is of course what Christian theologians argued all along, and we Jews need to acknowledge that historically speaking, they are right: The theological model these doctrines employ must be regarded as legitimate from a Jewish point of view, even though we disagree with all the specific claims of the doctrines themselves. Jewish philosophical texts, however, pick up and extend the Bible’s antifluidity tradition, especially as it manifests itself in D. In maintaining that God has only one body, which is in heaven and never comes to earth, D essentially renders God’s body basically irrelevant from the point of view of a human being in this world. On a practical level it is but a small leap from the view that God’s body is unrelated to our world to the view that God has no body at all, a view that in Judaism first finds expression in the writings of the medieval philosopher Saadia, and subsequently in the powerfully influential

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The Bible as Torah 87

work of Maimonides. Of course, in making this assertion, Maimonides does not consider himself to be joining a debate on the side of D against J and E; Maimonides regarded Moses as the only author of the Pentateuch, and he would have been appalled at the Documentary Hypothesis. But it is clear to us, eight centuries after his work was written, in a way that could not be clear to Maimonides himself, that Maimonides is a Deuteronomic writer. (Thus it is quite appropriate that Maimonides cites Deuteronomy much more often than any other biblical book in his philosophical work, Sepher Hammaddaʿ—more often, in fact, than the other four books of the Pentateuch put together. The same can be said of the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose affinity to Deuteronomy is even more pronounced.10) My brief summary has not done justice to the fluidity or the anti-fluidity traditions in the Bible. But I hope it has sufficed to exemplify the way I read as a biblical scholar and theologian: I look for elements of difference and discontinuity among the Tanakh’s constituent sources, and those elements of discontinuity within the Bible sometimes lead me to uncover elements of continuity between the Tanakh and later Jewish theology. Further, I read biblical sources as products of the ancient Near Eastern culture that produced them. Doing so allows me to notice whole worlds of thought that were at best dimly evident to someone unfamiliar with the literatures of Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, and Canaan. Those thought-worlds turn out to link up in surprising but clear ways with the ideas and outlooks of the classical rabbis, the kabbalists, and medieval Jewish philosophers. The irony in all this should be noted. Many religious Jews and Christians regard biblical criticism in its source critical and comparative/ancient Near Eastern modes as fundamentally irrelevant to religious reading of scripture, or even as inimical to it. But it precisely those aspects of biblical criticism that allow us to see the traditionalism of both the Zohar’s theosophy and of Maimonides’s rejection of divine embodiment—both of which might otherwise seem so radically new that one might dismiss the Zohar or Maimonides’s thought as simply non-Jewish.11 Source criticism and comparative study link Torah from the mid-first millennium BCE with Torah from the early second millennium CE, for of course the Zohar and Maimonides’s Guide are Torah for religious Jews.12 (Throughout this essay, I employ the term “Pentateuch” to refer to the Five Books of Moses, while reserving “Torah” to refer to Judaism’s sacred religious teachings through the ages.) Recognizing these links, then, helps to show that the teachings of J and E are in fact Torah, as are also the counterclaims of P and D. Consequently, appreciation of the varied theologies of embodiment in the Pentateuch can encourage modern Jewish thinkers to grapple with aspects of God that they otherwise might tend to ignore. For example, the fluidity traditions at once

88

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emphasize and problematize the sacrality of space and hence the place of the land of Israel, the city Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount in Jewish thought. They also point at once toward the personhood of God (who has a body and is in our world) and the utter otherness of God (whose embodiment is incomprehensibly different from ours). Thus these traditions make clear that God is at once nearby and impossible to grasp.13 Further, the very fact that the most sacred of Judaism’s texts, the Pentateuch, includes both the fluidity traditions and two different and to some degree contradictory rejections thereof suggests the impossibility of our ever knowing, much less articulating, the whole truth about God; the closest we humans can come to apprehending the fullness of divine reality may involve accepting or contemplating contradictory utterances. In short: an interpretation based on source criticism is religiously enriching for a modern Jew.

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READING FOR UNITY VS. READING FOR DISTINCT VOICES A fundamental difference between my approach to reading the Bible as a source for Jewish theology and Seeskin’s approach involves the extent to which we view the Tanakh or even just the Pentateuch as a unified work and the extent to which we view it as a collection of diverse yet identifiable texts. The very core of my method involves hearing ancient Israelite theological voices distinctly. While Seeskin acknowledges that the Bible has “different authors with different points of view,” by and large he does not attend to differentiation among these authors when he discusses my book. Having noted that the Bible does not use certain crucial terms univocally, he tends to disregard the univocal use of these same terms within the Pentateuch’s three main blocks of material (the J and E sources; the P source; and the D source). Seeskin notes that kavod and shem are used so variously that a literal reading of either term is unwarranted: for him, the equivocal or amphibolous use of terms such as these may constitute a signal by the biblical authors that these terms can have varied metaphorical meanings, or that what they intimate is practical but not theoretical knowledge. As a result, Seeskin writes (in the essay earlier in this volume), One has to wonder whether the original authors ever dreamt that scholars from a later age would comb the text in intricate detail trying to discern a coherent theological doctrine. Perhaps all they wanted to do was establish laws for how to worship God and direct people’s attention to the spiritual side of life. That would explain why, given the standards established by later theologians, their language appears flexible and multivalent.14

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The Bible as Torah 89

My analysis of the terms in question moves in a different direction. I aver that the terms shem and kavod are used consistently—not by the Pentateuch as a whole, but by the individual Pentateuchal sources respectively. I attempt to show in some detail that what P and the priest Ezekiel mean by kavod is surprisingly systematic and constant: For them, this term refers to the one, indivisible, incredibly effulgent body of God.15 This body has a particular shape (similar to that of a human), but not a particular size; the kavod can be gigantic enough to cover the whole top of Mount Sinai and to be visible to the people some distance away at the foot of the mountain in Exodus 24:16–17 (a P passage), yet it also can become small enough to fit onto the outstretched wings of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle.16 Non-priestly texts from the Bible, however, use this term in other ways, sometimes to refer to a particular physical avatara or manifestation of God, sometimes to refer to something more abstract or metaphorical, such as God’s honor.17 For D in Deuteronomy 5:24 (a verse Seeskin cites to show the variety of meanings of this term) kavod refers to God’s glory in the abstract sense, as the parallel there with the word “greatness” shows.18 But in D this term never refers to God’s self or to an avatara of the heavenly deity. Something similar is true of the term shem: the D source and the deuteronomistic historians influenced by D use this term consistently and repeatedly in a way that departs radically from other biblical documents. Where for many other biblical texts, God’s shem is an avatara that is God but is not all of God, for D it is most emphatically not God at all; rather, it is a symbol on earth of a God who dwells exclusively in heaven.19 If we look at a large number of verses indiscriminately, we see a non-systematic hodgepodge of uses that is of little promise for a theologian. But if we look at those verses source-critically (that is, in light of the Documentary Hypothesis), we can notice a theological debate unfold before our eyes. Delineating the contours of that debate can be of great interest and utility to a theologian. We can get an example of these contours by taking up a challenge Seeskin poses when he writes: To the degree that we adhere to the fluidity model, we will have a hard time accounting for divine unity. Sommer insists that the fluidity model is perfectly consistent with monotheism. But once again, questions arise. A modern jetliner is one plane even though it contains millions of parts. My body is one even though it contains over 200 bones, a dozen crucial organs, and millions of individual cells. In what sense is Deuteronomy 6:4 using the term when it says that God is one?20

When we read this verse from the Shema in light of the fluidity tradition, we realize that D means something different when it speaks of God as

90

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one than J and E (or the Zohar) imagine when they speak of God. The D source agrees with Seeskin that the fluidity model is not as consistent with divine unity as D requires right-thinking Israelite theology to be; indeed, that is the very point of D’s anti-fluidity pronouncement in Deuteronomy 6:4. At the same time, attending to the considerable number of biblical texts that espouse the fluidity model reminds us that God’s unity is not the core of biblical monotheism; rather, the core of biblical monotheism is God’s uniqueness—that is, God’s difference from everything else in the cosmos, whether heavenly or earthly, and God’s utter non-subservience to nature, matter, and physics. This, of course, is precisely the definition of monotheism in the first chapter of Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.21 It is also the definition of monotheism in Yehezkel Kaufmann’s Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit, whose lengthy treatment of monotheism can be seen as a fleshing out of Cohen’s first chapter with historical, philological, and comparative data.22 It is precisely the uncanny otherness of Yhwh— which is to say: monotheism—that J and E are so successful in conveying in their portrayal of the multiply embodied God. To be sure, as Seeskin writes, “Because space is divisible, anything that occupies space must be divisible as well. Anything that is divisible is composed of parts.” But the point that J and E are making is precisely that God’s body is thoroughly and unimaginably different from all other physical things: though Yhwh occupies multiple spaces, Yhwh remains a single deity.

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TORAH AS DOGMA VS. TORAH AS DISCUSSION In my retrieval of varied biblical theologies of divine embodiment, then, I construe the Bible as a work of Jewish theology in two senses, and decidedly not in a third sense. First, I associate the varied theological voices found in scripture with similar voices from rabbinic, medieval, and modern Judaism. (Thus, the use of shem in non-D, non-P literature is a forerunner of kabbalistic ideas of God’s manifestations in the world, while this same term in D leads toward the Jewish philosophical tradition.) Second, I read the Bible, and especially the Pentateuch, as a record of debate and thus as prototypically Jewish. Indeed, we may regard the Pentateuch, with its unavoidable and unresolved narrative and legal contradictions, as the first Jewish book. To speak with greater precision: in its embrace of controversy and multiplicity, the Pentateuch as recovered by modern biblical criticism can be described as the first rabbinic work.23 To be sure, the Pentateuch, unlike the Mishnah, does not identify the sages and schools of thought who express the varied views it preserves, but, no less than the Mishnah, the Pentateuch presents us

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The Bible as Torah 91

with passages that openly disagree with one another. Further, the Pentateuch does not attempt to hide those disagreements. On the contrary, the Pentateuch begins with two famously divergent accounts of the creation of the world, and each of these accounts begins with the classical syntax of an ancient Near Eastern creation epic: a temporal phrase (Genesis 1:1 and 2:4b), a parenthetical clause (1:2 and 2:5–6), and then a main clause (1:3 and 2:7). This same syntax is found in the opening of the Babylonian creation epics Enuma Elish and Atraḫasis. To someone familiar with norms of ancient cosmological narrative, the Pentateuch seems to begin twice in rapid succession. By using this syntax not only in its first narrative passage but a second time very shortly thereafter, the Pentateuch presents itself from its opening as an anthological work rather than a unified one. In one sense, the Pentateuch’s transmission of disagreement is even more extreme than the Mishnah’s: whereas the Mishnah often tells us which opinion is to be regarded as correct and which as incorrect, the Pentateuch provides no guidance on how to resolve its contradictions or how to decide which opinion to follow. In both the Pentateuch and the Mishnah, what we have before us is a record of ‫מחלוקת לשם שמים‬, of disagreement for the sake of heaven (to borrow a phrase from m. Avot 5:19). In both cases, the disagreement occurs within specific boundaries: The views of Israelite polytheists (of whom, scripture tells us, there were many) are not included in the Pentateuch.24 Similarly, the views of Sadducees, Essenes, and followers of Jesus as messiah are not included in the Mishnah except when they are specifically rejected. But within these bounds, blatantly opposite points of view are given voice in both the Pentateuch and the Mishnah. But there is a third sense in which one could construe the Bible as a theological work, and it is important to note that I do not construe the Bible as theology in this sense. I do not turn to biblical texts—or, for that matter, to rabbinic literature, or works of kabbalah, or texts from medieval or modern Jewish philosophy—with the expectation that they always give me propositional statements that convey accurate knowledge. Rather, the Bible’s propositional statements, its allusive, associative discourse and its rich debates on crucial issues constitute the beginning of a discussion. Further, the Bible sets an agenda for future Jewish theology, though of course this agenda is subject to expansion and some revision over the centuries. For Jewish theology, specific propositions (whether made by the Bible’s authors, by later voices in the tradition, or by ourselves) are of less import than the process of discussing these propositions. After all, what Deuteronomy 6:7–8 command us and what Joshua 1:7–8 and Psalm 1:2 recommend is that we should repeat Torah, learn it and meditate on it, but not that we must acknowledge everything Torah says as true. Similarly, accepting propositional knowledge is not the thrust of the oft-repeated verbs “teach” and “learn” in Deuteronomy; in

92

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almost every one of its seventeen occurrences in that book, the verbal root ‫ למ’’ד‬is concerned either with learning that results in awe toward God or with observance of the commandments. It is never associated simply with assent to a particular claim. The Pentateuch requires a process of reading the words of Torah, murmuring them, reciting them, and, by extension discussing them. Rabbinic texts, in turn, explicitly draw that extension. That discussion, to be the fullest Jewish discussion it can be, should include Israel’s earliest voices. This does not mean that a religious Jew must accept everything the Bible says as true, but it does mean that everything it says must be considered and demands a response.25 In short, the Bible, like the Mishnah or The Guide of the Perplexed or The Star of Redemption, is Torah, guidance (that is the basic meaning of the noun ‫תורה‬, just as the verb ‫ להורות‬means to teach, to guide, to send in a direction, to aim). All these works point us in specific directions, but precisely because of their variety they cannot serve as sources of propositional statements that must be affirmed.26 And here Seeskin’s views and my own converge. He writes,

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What makes the Bible foundational is not that it provides us with definitive answers to questions but that it establishes an intellectual trajectory of which we are still a part. Instead of just reflecting the views of the culture that produced it, it points the way to something different, something powerful enough to sustain a religious tradition for millennia to come.27

It follows that my main disagreement with Seeskin may be limited to the title of his essay (“What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us About God”). The crucial issue for constructive Jewish thought is not what the Bible teaches us, but how the Bible teaches us. In affirming that the Bible is sacred scripture, I am forced to accept the challenge of recognizing all its voices as my teachers. When J and E insist on the multiple and fluid embodiment of my God, they have something to teach me. I need not literally accept what they really did believe—that Yhwh was found at specific times and places in this world and not others. But I can recognize an insight about the uncanny, mysterious, and yet personal nature of God in these texts—an insight that guides me to embrace God’s human-like personhood and, no less, God’s wholly otherness. The views of J and E—and also of P and D and Maimonides—are crucial not because they are correct but because, even when missing their mark, they point us in appropriate directions. The question then becomes: if, as Seeskin rightly avers, we are on the trajectory that begins with the Bible, is this trajectory supersessionist or cumulative? That is, having moved forward on the trajectory’s path, do we regard the earlier texts as incorrect and hence irrelevant,

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The Bible as Torah 93

except as historical artifacts (similar to archaeological finds on display in a museum) or as objects of eisegesis (by which we force our “less primitive,” “more enlightened” views into it)? Or do we acknowledge that when heard in their own voice, they still have something to contribute, even when we don’t agree with significant claims that they make? Clearly, one Jewish answer to this question is that revelation is cumulative; the Bible is still worth studying for its ‫פשט‬, for the contextual meanings that emerge when we hear it in its own voice. If I am right that some sacred texts, understood in their own cultural settings as their first audiences understood them, put forward the fluidity model, then we need to acknowledge that the fluidity model has something to teach us. This is true even though the fluidity model is a minority opinion. The Mishnah and Talmuds preserve Shammai’s views because they are somehow valuable even though with exceedingly rare exceptions we do not follow his legal rulings. We can note something similar of Maimonides as his works have come to be canonized as sacred texts in Judaism: The Mishneh Torah did not become an authoritative legal code in the way the Shulchan Arukh did; it is preserved and studied in editions that include the ‫ נושאי כלים‬and the Rabad, commentators who often disagree with Maimonides and who fundamentally undo his project of composing a summary of the law without the debates that produced the law. Yet the Mishneh Torah as it functions in Jewish religious culture—a Mishneh Torah that includes Maimonides’s texts and the words of later authorities who reconstruct what he intended to supersede28—is still canonical, not in the sense that it provides norms of belief and behavior but in the sense that it shapes Jewish identity and helps form the conversation that is Torah.29 Precisely the same is true of the fluidity tradition, and of the varied texts found in the Bible as a whole: they are part of Judaism’s formative canon, though not part of its normative canon. We all agree that the Bible is not the last word in this conversation; no less crucially, it behooves constructive Jewish thinkers to recall that the conversation never leaves behind discussion partners and teachers whose surprisingly vivid and forward-looking voices have been recovered by modern biblical scholarship. The open-ended nature of the conversation that is Torah as I have described it raises further questions. How do we know which opinions or texts are part of Torah and which are outside it? As we look toward the past, the answers seem clear: the opinions of Israelite polytheists and of Sadducees and Essenes are part of Jewish intellectual history, but they are decidedly not part of the ongoing sacred conversation that generations of Jews have accepted as Torah. But what of the varied voices of Jews in the contemporary world? Can we decide which voices of our own day are out of bounds? Can an older work that was not Torah become Torah today? Can voices that

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were excluded or simply not heard by the scribes and sages who preserved Torah in the past, such as those of Jewish women, be reconstructed and thus admitted to the formative canon? A practical answer to one of these questions—“Which contributions to constructive Jewish thought in our own day are Torah?”—is quite straightforward: Come back in five hundred years and look around. What are religious Jews doing? What are they studying? What shapes who they are? That is Torah. Which contributions of twenty-first-century Judaism have they discarded? Which ones have they never even heard of? That is not Torah.30 In the year 50 CE, there was no criterion that allowed one to say which forms of Judaism were the right ones. On a purely theoretical level nobody could prove that the traditions of the Pharisees and the earliest rabbis were Torah, while the writings of the Qumran sect and the teachings of the Sadducees were not. But by the year 600, it had become clear that this was the case. There is no conclusive way to explain why the philosopher Philo’s first-century attempt to fuse Plato and Judaism did not become Torah while Maimonides’s twelfthcentury attempt to fuse Aristotle and Judaism did; but there is no denying that Philo’s writings (which were not preserved by Jews but came down to us because they were copied by Christian clerics) are not Torah while Maimonides’s writings (despite all the opposition to them during his lifetime) are. This approach suggests answers to the other questions just posed. It seems, at least in theory, that views that were once outside the bounds of Torah could come into it, if communities consisting of committed Jews adopt them as such, and if those communities successfully reproduce themselves over the generations.31 I see little reason to anticipate the entry of the Books of Enoch or the Dead Sea Scrolls into twenty-first Judaism’s formative canon, but it would be perfectly possible for committed Jewish communities to begin to study them not merely as interesting historical artifacts but as Torah. While this is unlikely for books that were placed outside the canon in antiquity, such a restoration is much easier for texts that were at once incorporated in the canon and obscured by its breadth—that is, for texts such as J and E. Jews still chant passages from J and E aloud; Jews have always studied these passages; some of their theological views, as we saw earlier, reemerged, albeit in new garb, in works of Jewish mysticism. As a result, their distinct voices, recovered by biblical critics, can be not only studied by academics as examples of literary history but embraced by religious Jews as providing guidance. Similarly, one of the most prominent elements of Jewish learning in the past several decades has been the attempt to recover and, more often, to re-create or imagine voices that are largely missing in classical Jewish texts, especially the voices of women. That attempt has not only occurred in the academy but has made inroads into a variety of religious Jewish settings as well.32



The Bible as Torah 95

Not every contribution of contemporary Jews, in short, will become Torah. According to a famous passage in Shemot Rabbah 47:1, the questions Jewish students ask their masters in every generation are Torah; they were already revealed to Moses at Sinai. At the same time, parallels to this passage in y. Pe’ah 4a [2:6], Wayyiqra Rabbah 22:1, and Qohelet Rabbah 1:29 and 5:6 indicate that only some answers students provide are Torah—specifically, those stated by keen-witted or experienced students in the presence of their master.33 Answers from less experienced students and comments made outside the hierarchical community of Jewish learning are not included in what God showed Moses.34 Together, these sources prompt the realization that there are no illegitimate questions—and this realization has much to teach contemporary Jews on the right. These sources also acknowledge that there are answers outside the bounds of Torah—and this acknowledgement has much to teach contemporary Jews on the left. Both groups, further, are forced to admit that all contemporary answers are, for the moment, merely potential Torah; only future generations will know what the canon will absorb and what it will reject. None of us will live to see the answer to the question, “Which contemporary voices are Torah?” But finding the answer is not expected of us. Our task is only to nurture, protect, and create Torah with as much honesty as possible, to live that Torah, to teach it, and to pass it on. We cannot complete that task, but we are not free to desist from it.

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NOTES 1.  Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2.  I refer here to the theory, widespread among modern biblical critics, known as the Documentary Hypothesis. According to this theory the Pentateuch combines several different sources that existed independently in biblical times. Scholars refer to the four main sources as J, E, P, and D; according to the Documentary Hypothesis, these documents told roughly parallel stories of Israel’s origins and early history and presented their own versions of Israel’s covenantal law. The P document was composed by Judean priests and the D document by Levites. The authors of J and E cannot be ascertained. The dating of the documents cannot be known, though the language of all four is pre-exilic. We can be sure that P and D crystallized over generations, and the same may be true of J and E. Some contemporary biblical critics propose new theories of the origin of the Pentateuch that jettison the notion of discrete J and E sources while basically accepting the distinction between P and D traditions. These scholars speak of non-P, non-D traditions where classical Documentarians speak of J and E. For my purposes in this essay, this difference is of no importance, since within the Pentateuch the fluidity tradition is found specifically in the texts outside P and D, however one names them. Because I find the Documentary model far more convincing than the

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more recent theories, I use the terms J and E, but an adherent of the later theories can substitute the term “non-P, non-D” for “J and E” without any significant change to the history of ancient Israelite religious ideas that I put forward. For elegant and convincing presentations of the Documentary Hypothesis, see Baruch Schwartz, “The Torah—Its Five Books and Four Documents,” [Hebrew] in The Literature of the Hebrew Bible: Introductions and Studies, ed. by Zipora Talshir (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2011), 161–226, and Joel Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, AYBRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). For the more recent theories, see Jan Christian Gertz, et al., T&T Clark Handbook of The Old Testament, trans. by Linda M. Maloney (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 293–360, and Konrad Schmid, The Old Testament: A Literary History, trans. by Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 79–95, 107–16, 131–40, 153–56, 173–77, 196– 202. On the debates among proponents of these approaches, see the especially helpful discussion in David Carr, “Controversy and Convergence in Recent Studies of the Formation of the Pentateuch,” Religious Studies Review 23, no. 1 (January 1997): 22–31, as well as Ernest W. Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1998), and Thomas Dozeman, Konrad Schmid, and Baruch Schwartz, eds., The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 3.  For a brief discussion, see Sommer, Bodies, 1–10. On the thoroughly anthropomorphic conception of God throughout the Bible, see further Yehezkel Kaufmann, Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit, [in Hebrew] 4 vols. (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Bialik and Devir, 1937–56), 1:221–44; Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 2 vols., trans. by D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962–65), 1:145, 219, 237, 287, 366; Mark Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87– 88; Ronald Hendel, “Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel,” in The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. by Karel van der Toorn (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 207–8; Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God. Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005), 31. On the consistently anthropomorphic conception of God throughout rabbinic literature, see Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” HTR 87 (1994): 171–95; Yair Lorberbaum, The Image of God: Halakhah and Aggadah, [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2004), 14–22, 292–335; cf. Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 34–35. 4.  For a discussion of the translation of this line, see Sommer, Bodies of God,  220–22. 5.  By my colleague Joel Baden’s count (personal communication), P accounts for 47 percent, and D for 17 percent. Disagreement concerning a verse here or a phrase there will not change these figures substantially, even for recent scholars who reject the Documentary Hypothesis; those scholars, we should recall, nonetheless largely accept the existence of P and D corpora in the Pentateuch. 6. Sommer, Bodies of God, 12–57 and 179–213.

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7.  Ibid., 126–29. 8.  Ibid., 129–32. 9.  Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 138–40; the quoted phrasing is from p. 139. 10. On Maimonides’s use of Deuteronomy in Sefer Hammadaʿ (that is, the first section of his Mishneh Torah), see Moshe Greenberg, Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 422–23. Similarly, Maimonides cites Deuteronomy approvingly more than any book in the Guide. He cites Genesis roughly as often as Deuteronomy in the Guide, but in a great many of those cases, his purpose is to explain away Genesis’s many anthropomorphisms, whereas he cites Deuteronomy for more positive reasons. See the indexes in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines, introduction by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 646–54. On the philosophical context of Cohen’s demythologizing reading of Deuteronomy (a reading that succeeds at understanding D’s ‫)פשט‬, see Kenneth Seeskin, Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 163–64. 11. In his essay in this volume, Seeskin writes: “Sommer argues that by denying that God has a body, Maimonides was trying to create a whole new religion. The truth is, however, that Maimonides was responding to the same challenge as that faced by biblical authors of whatever persuasion. . . . If Sommer is right, then Maimonides’s view represents a departure from that of his predecessors, but a departure is not the same as a new creation.” Seeskin is correct that in The Bodies of God I significantly overstate Maimonides’s disturbing newness. My assertion about the roots of Maimonides’s antianthropomorphism in D’s insistence that God’s body is never in this world should have led me to phrase my point more moderately and more accurately, which is to say, the way Seeskin phrases this point. On Maimonides as a Jewish thinker despite his surprising views of God, see my more sensible phrasing in Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition, ABRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 250, where I use the rabbinic idea of ‫ פוק חזי‬to acknowledge Maimonides’s status in Judaism; on ‫פוק חזי‬, see ibid., 126 and 247. 12.  For other examples of how compositional analyses allow us to discern parallels between biblical and postbiblical Jewish thought that otherwise are obscured, see Sommer, Revelation and Authority; Benjamin D. Sommer, “Reflecting on Moses: The Redaction of Numbers 11,” JBL 118 (1999): 601–24; Benjamin D. Sommer, “Dialogical Biblical Theology: A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologically,” in Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation, ed. Leo Perdue, Library of Biblical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), 43–50; Israel Knohl, “Between Voice and Silence: The Relationship Between Prayer and Temple Cult,” JBL 115 (1996): 17–30. For especially fine introductions to the multivocality of biblical texts and its religious import, see John Goldingay, Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), and Michael Carasik, The Bible’s Many Voices (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014). 13. On theological implications of the fluidity traditions, see Sommer, Bodies, 137–43. On the comparison to Friedrich Hölderlin I imply in my phrasing above, see 143.

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14.  See Seeskin’s essay in this volume. 15. Sommer, Bodies of God, 68–78. 16.  The Holy of Holies measures ten cubits by ten cubits (roughly five meters by five meters); the space on top of the outstretched wings was some fairly small fraction thereof. See Sommer, Bodies of God, 71–72. 17.  Ibid., 58–62. 18.  See my discussion of the term in ibid., 64. 19.  Ibid., 62–68. 20.  See Seeskin’s essay in this volume. 21.  Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, introductory essays for the second edition by Steven S. Schwarzschild and Kenneth Seeskin, translated with an introduction by Simon Kaplan (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995), 35–49, esp. 35. 22. Kaufmann, Toledot, 1:221–417, and the shorter version in Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. by and abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960), 7–149. For a lengthy defense of Kaufmann’s thesis (in a somewhat modified, more flexible form), see Sommer, Bodies of God, 145–74 and 259–75, and, more briefly, Sommer, “Monotheism,” in The Hebrew Bible: A Princeton Guide (edited by John Barton; Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). 23.  On the link between rabbinic exegesis and the complex layering of biblical texts as recovered by modern biblical scholars, see Moshe Greenberg, Al Hammiqra Ve’al Hayyahadut [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oveid, 1984), 345–49, and Jon Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism. Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 53–56. 24.  The possibility that a verse or two slipped through the ideological filters of the biblical authors and editors or were filtered only partially (Genesis 6.1–4, perhaps, or at least 6.1–2 and 6.4) does not overturn this statement. Nor does the observation that some texts are amenable to both monotheistic and polytheistic readings (e.g., Exodus 15.11; Psalm 82). Within the context of the Tanakh, it is clearly the monotheistic reading that is intended. See further Sommer, Bodies of God, 172 and 270 n. 99 25.  Cf. Norbert M. Samuelson, Revelation and the God of Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 219. 26.  As Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1955), 213, teaches: “The root of Jewish faith is . . . not a comprehension of abstract principles but an inner attachment to sacred events; to believe is to remember, not merely to accept the truth of a set of dogmas.” See further Carasik, Bible’s Many Voices, 17, who notes “the many places . . . where the Bible seems to demand that it be questioned.” 27.  See Seeskin’s essay in this volume. 28.  For the view that Maimonides intended his legal code to render the Talmud superfluous, see Moshe Halbertal, “What is the Mishneh Torah? Codification and Ambivalence,” in Maimonides After 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence, ed. by Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for Jewish

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Studies, 2007), 81–111, and, even more strongly, Shamma Friedman, “Rambam and the Talmud,” [Hebrew], Dinei Yisrael 26–27 (5769–70): 315–26. 29.  In other words, the Mishneh Torah is, to use Halbertal’s terminology, formative canon rather than normative canon. On this important distinction, see Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3–6. We may add that the same is true of the Bible. 30. On my use here of the talmudic dictum, ‫“( ופק חיז מיא עמא דבר‬Go out and see what the people are doing,” b. Berakhot 45a, b. Eruvin 14b, b. Menaḥot 35b), see further Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 125–27, 247–48. 31.  Indeed, as scholars have increasingly come to realize, it was precisely in this way that the Jewish biblical canon accepted for the past fifteen or so centuries crystallized: not through the decisions of authoritative scholars, but through the de facto decisions of various communities that endured, while other versions of the biblical canon (such as that of the Hellenistic Jewry responsible for the Septuagint) died out along with the less long-lasting Jewish communities that produced them. For this view of the development of the biblical canon, see esp. John Barton, Oracles of God: Perception of Ancient Prophecy in Israel After the Exile (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), 13–95. 32.  For examples of such inroads in various locations on the contemporary Jewish religious spectrum, see Andrea L. Weiss and Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, eds., The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (New York: URJ Press, 2008); Ellen Frankel, The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1996); Tamar Biala and Nehamah Weingarten, eds., Dirshuni: Midreshe Nashim, [Hebrew], Sifre Ḥemed (Tel-Aviv: Yedi’ot Aḥaronot and the Jewish Agency, 2009); Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007); and Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham, MA.: Brandeis University Press, 2005). 33.  On the notion of the keen-witted student in this rabbinic tradition, see David Golinkin, “The Meaning of the Concepts Watiqin, Watiq, and Talmid Watiq in the Book of Ben Sira and Talmudic Literature,” [Hebrew], Sidra 13 (1997): 47–60. 34.  Scripture, when not learned from an authoritative master, is arguably not scripture at all. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 138 and 144. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig’s recollection that as a youth he read the Bible “without the help of tradition, hence without revelation.” See Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. by Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), xxxvii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baden, Joel. The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. AYBRL. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Barton, John. Oracles of God: Perception of Ancient Prophecy in Israel After the Exile. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986.

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Biala, Tamar, and Nehamah Weingarten, eds. Dirshuni: Midreshe Nashim. [In Hebrew]. Sifre Ḥemed. Tel-Aviv: Yedi’ot Aḥaronot and the Jewish Agency, 2009. Carasik, Michael. The Bible’s Many Voices. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014. Carr, David. “Controversy and Convergence in Recent Studies of the Formation of the Pentateuch.” Religious Studies Review 23, no. 1 (January 1997): 22–31. Cohen, Hermann. Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism. Introductory essays for the second edition by Steven S. Schwarzschild and Kenneth Seeskin. Translated with an introduction by Simon Kaplan, introductory essays by Leo Strauss. AAR Texts and Translations, no. 7. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. Dozeman, Thomas, Konrad Schmid, and Baruch Schwartz, eds. The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research. FAT. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Frankel, Ellen. The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1996. Friedman, Shamma. “Rambam and the Talmud.” [In Hebrew]. Dinei Yisrael 26–27 [Mordechai Akiva Friedman Jubilee Volume] (5769–70): 315–26. Gertz, Jan Christian, Konrad Schmid, Angelika Berlejung, and Markus Witte. T&T Clark Handbook of the Old Testament. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. London: T&T Clark, 2012. Goldingay, John. Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987. Golinkin, David. “The Meaning of the Concepts Watiqin, Watiq, and Talmid Watiq in the Book of Ben Sira and Talmudic Literature.” [In Hebrew]. Sidra 13 (1997): 47– 60. Goshen-Gottstein, Alon. “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature.” HTR 87 (1994): 171–95. Greenberg, Moshe. Al Hammiqra Ve’al Hayyahadut. [In Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oveid, 1984. ———. Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1995. Halbertal, Moshe. People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. ———. “What Is the Mishneh Torah? Codification and Ambivalence.” In Maimonides After 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence, edited by Jay M. Harris, 81–111. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 2007. Hartman, Tova. Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation. HBI Series on Jewish Women. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007. Hendel, Ronald. “Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel.” In The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, edited by Karel van der Toorn, 205–28. Leuven: Peeters, 1997. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1955.

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Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Kaufmann, Yehezkel. The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile. Trans. and abridged by Moshe Greenberg. Chicago, IL: Chicago, 1960. ———. Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit. [In Hebrew] 4 vols. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Bialik and Devir, 1937–56. Knohl, Israel. “Between Voice and Silence: The Relationship Between Prayer and Temple Cult.” JBL 115 (1996): 17–30. Levenson, Jon. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism. Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. Lorberbaum, Yair. The Image of God: Halakhah and Aggadah. [In Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2004. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines, with an introduction by Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Muffs, Yochanan. The Personhood of God. Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005. Nicholson, Ernest W. The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1998. Rosenzweig, Franz. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. Edited by Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1961. Ross, Tamar. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005. Samuelson, Norbert M. Revelation and the God of Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schmid, Konrad. The Old Testament: A Literary History. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. Scholem, Gershom. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Schwartz, Baruch. “The Torah—Its Five Books and Four Documents.” [In Hebrew] in The Literature of the Hebrew Bible: Introductions and Studies, edited by Zipora Talshir, 161–226. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2011. Seeskin, Kenneth. Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Smith, Mark. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Sommer, Benjamin D. “Dialogical Biblical Theology: A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologically.” In Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation, edited by Leo Perdue. Library of Biblical Theology, 1–53, 265–85. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2009. ———. “Monotheism.” In The Hebrew Bible: A Princeton Guide, edited by John Barton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, [forthcoming]. ———. “Reflecting on Moses: The Redaction of Numbers 11.” JBL 118 (1999): 601– 24.

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———. Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. ABRL. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. ———. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. von Rad, Gerhard. Old Testament Theology. 2 vols. Translated by D. M. G. Stalker. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962–65. Weiss, Andrea L., and Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, eds. The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. New York: URJ Press, 2008.

Chapter Seven

Job, the Levantine Book A Beginning Guide through Human Perplexity1 Leonard Kaplan

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The December 7, 2015, issue of The New Yorker has a cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz depicting the Biblical Job, the central figure in the Book of Job fearfully trying to stomp out a small fire at the threshold of his cottage. Hidden behind some bushes an old man, presumably God, cackles to his amused angel sidekick: “At first, I was teaching Job a lesson, but now I’m just messing with him,” the caption reads.2

Figure 7.1.  “At first, I was teaching Job a lesson, but now I’m just messing with him.” Image Credit: Benjamin Schwartz/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank.

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The Book of Job, the subject of Schwartz’s New Yorker comic, is the story of Job’s trials with the Hebrew God. The story is well known. Satan, who is a messenger and who performs the role of adversary, has traveled the world. God in his Heavenly Court asks Satan to consider Job, a righteous man. Satan counters that Job is righteous only because he has thrived and received God’s protection. But if God removed his protection Job would blaspheme Him. God takes Satan’s wager. In a series of steps, all with God’s sanction, Satan destroys Job’s property, kills his children, and finally inflicts Job with excruciating pain. Job has three very good friends who arrive from distances to comfort him. But they challenge him, telling him that he must have sinned against God to experience such a terrible fate. The pain and the attacks from his friends put Job over the limit. He screams at God, cursing the day he was born. God hears and appears in a whirlwind. God does not answer Job directly. Rather he speaks of how busy he is maintaining creation and brags about his powers. Job remains silent.3 But how should we read Schwartz’s 2015 cartoon in the New Yorker? The history of popular culture—everything from Art Spiegelman’s provocative Maus series through the Charlie Hebdo affair—has taught us to treat comics seriously. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a parody, was used to inflame hatred and pogrom in the Pale in Kishinev. We know that parody and cartoons can affect consequences beyond any authorial intent. Who can know whether what we now consider trash will be important to someone at some later point. What, then, does the cartoon indicate about the Book of Job, its lasting influence, as well as we moderns who are still stricken and troubled by it? In the cartoon, Job anxiously opens the door to his cottage and stamps out the small fire that God has set. Job is an old man. His cottage is small. God is crouched down, a bit heavy but pleasantly so. He is fist bumping a smaller figure, one with wings. The angel has a kind of malicious grin on his/her face. The angel’s gender is unclear. God’s attempt to “mess” with Job, his prank, is to set a harmless fire. Fire is certainly mentioned in Job. But burning bushes recalls Genesis and its creation myth. Moses and that burning bush figure in every Biblical rendition of law giving from the mountain. The fire then is intertextual. The cartoon is pointing to the connection between Genesis where man is central and the Book of Job where he is at best just messed with by God. Man is mere minor entertainment, or so the cartoon suggests. It also suggests that even after God’s first big lesson to Job he still feels the need to “mess” with him. So who is this God: a practical joker, a perpetual harasser? The scene is bucolic with some vegetation—at least to hide God from view. This is no barren desert. Perhaps this suggests that God is no longer best understood as from the Levant—where the Book of Job supposedly takes

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Job, the Levantine Book 105

place—but rather a more European site and different time. The date of the cartoon’s appearance suggests an allusion to Solstice holidays, Christmas and Hanukkah for most of the New Yorker readership. God looks a bit like Santa Claus; published in December 2015, it is the season after all. Are there some theological messages in the date of the cartoon? Perhaps we have the God of the Book of Job messing around joined by a cherub with nothing better to do in all the human struggle and with the severe environmental attack on God’s creation? What a way to celebrate either Christmas or the Festival of Lights. How should we read: “At first, I was teaching Job a lesson, but now I’m just messing with him”? Perhaps the message is that Job is Everyman and that the best we can hope for now is to be messed with—no more lessons from God, just minor irritations. By representing the Book of Job as a comic, perhaps Schwartz is critiquing society more generally: that in our times the Book of Job is no longer a tragedy and a study in jurisprudence but a minor piece of amusement for people who have little time for more. And what of the words themselves? There is no gematria here. The language is after all English. So there is no letter substitution to create new or hidden meaning. Rather, the words remind one, not of Hebrew texts but of the substituted theology for many of those who escape the Pale and founded Israel in the 1920’s. Marxism became the new Bible, ultimately the God that failed. Does Schwartz here refer to Marx’s bon mot? History repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Is that what the caption means with God parodying his first trial of Job? Indeed, whatever else Schwartz’s comic rendition of the Book of Job signifies, the New Yorker cartoon suggests that this ancient text lives in our creative psyche. The interpretive problems that the cartoon raises express and mirror those of its source text. Hopefully contributing something to this centuries-long conversation, this essay will argue that the Book of Job challenges any belief that the Jewish God cares about humanity. Where Genesis establishes the natural world of God’s creation and man’s place within creation, the Book of Job disturbs any such belief of man’s privileged position in the world. God appears in the Book of Job and responds to Job’s lament and outrage. Why, Job screams, was I born to have to experience such suffering and such pain? It is a scream for the ages. The questions raised by the Book of Job make this ancient text a fertile “scene of instruction,” to use Harold Bloom’s terms, for imagining the Jewish God in today’s world. God is powerful in the Book of Job. He appears from the whirlwind in language that is perhaps as powerful as any in the western canon. This God roars at Job demanding an explanation for Job’s demand for His appearance. This desert God plays with Job and still acts the affronted figure. God’s pronouncements remain enigmatic despite committed human explanations for

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His behavior. All the explanations, for many of us, remain deeply unsatisfying. Even many of those commentators who by faith are committed to rationalize God’s actions have had trouble explaining His motives in the Book of Job. The God of the Book of Job continues to challenge our sense of God’s justice and mocks the promises of covenant with the Jewish people. If God can inflict the pain he visits on Job what does this mean for flawed humanity? Further, the narrator of the text is not a prophet. He intones no direct warnings to the people of Israel or any other people. Job, the figure, is not generally considered Jewish. But he is a righteous man, one of the few along with Noah in the Hebrew Bible. Why, then, does God appear in this Book of Job? What does he say to explain his behavior? Why do we continue to exalt such a God? Why do we continue to beseech him? Though these questions are perhaps unanswerable, I argue that the Book of Job poses them in ways that resound with us still today. I will not interpret the whole Book of Job. I will start with the frame story in Job. In this text we do not have “in the beginning.” We are in media res, the middle of things. The frame story sets the stage for the turn to God’s bluster from the whirlwind and Job’s response in the last part of the frame and immediately before the epilogue. After I look at the frame story and at God’s rant out of the whirlwind, I move to selected political and literary appropriations to bring that provocative text to date. My point will be that the God of Job continues to speak through and shape these texts. Yet we, unlike Job, had better respond psychologically, politically and metaphysically. This may be unfair to Job. He too lived in a world that posed theological, economic, epistemological and political aspects for even every day existence. If we do not, we may find ourselves back in the desert from which this Levantine distillation first drew its inspiration. I turn to two genres that rely on the Book of Job for a point of demarcation. Each genre, political theory and literary creation, have the political at their core. Each take the Book of Job beyond the theological explanation to equally pressing human concern culminating in resolutions that do not satisfy—just as the original story fails to assuage human anxiety. The Book of Job informs each appropriation just as each appropriation tells us something about Job itself. A central issue for the Book of Job and for its appropriation concerns what constitutes wisdom in each of the narratives. It is then our duty to gauge how different these definitions are from our own. FRAME STORY AND A BIT MORE The frame story, I believe, can help us get at the type of God imagined in the Book of Job.4 The scene shifts to God’s court surrounded as he is by his royal

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court. This so-called frame story has recently attracted theoretical attention where previously it had been dismissed as too simple. But we know that folk tales are not so simple. We are told that Job has property, animals for food and reproduction, a family of respectful sons and daughters, respectful servants. He is a prince or tribal leader, a sage. “And that man [Job] was greater than all, the dwellers of the East.” But even here there is debate. Maimonides, a celebrated twelfth century Jewish thinker, claims that Job was righteous but not wise.5 The Rambam states that Job “is not said to be wise or comprehending or an intelligent man.” How is Job not a wise man? And if he is not, then the story must be that there were no wise men in the region in the whole of the Levant. And if Job was righteous but not wise our image of Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith is completely transformed. For Judaism, then, we have a split that inheres in the Book of Job: faith and ritual on the one hand and striving for wisdom on the other. But no matter, Job was the man of this season. So Job is cast. We quickly shift to God, surrounded by his royal court: the equivalent of a modern day entourage. Satan—importantly, not yet the force of evil that he becomes in Christian theology, but rather, a messenger—appears before God. Robert Alter has it: “And one day, the sons of God came to stand in attendance before the Lord, and the Adversary [Satan], too came among them.”6 God is in command. And He says to Satan “From where do you come?” And Satan answered the Lord: “From roaming the earth and walking about in it.” What do we do with this question and answer? The commentaries make clear that Satan is a kind of prosecuting attorney, an angel of the Lord and a messenger. Does the Lord not know where Satan has been? And what he is up to? How active an agent is Satan here? How honest in his dealings with God and with others, humanity, the other angels? This is an open question–open for later literary developments in western sacred and secular literature. Is there a limit on the discretion of the office Satan seems to perform for God?7 And so here is God’s challenge: Have you considered my servant Job, he is the exemplary in every way? Sure, says Satan, who then takes on the famous wager with God: what will Job do when stripped of his material well-being; he will blaspheme God. Thus sayeth Satan. This is Satan’s intent. Job is the righteous man that you, God, say he is because he has everything he might want: family, status, wealth, health, and a place in the community to be an active political and religious leader. Take away the protection and he will fold. So says Satan whose view of humanity at least with respect to the exemplary Job is pretty tainted. So with God’s grant he acts to provoke, torture, and bend Job. Job is not just taken from the garden, as is Adam, but placed in physical and spiritual agony after Satan does his work. Whereas Adam did, in a sense,

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do wrong by eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, Job did not transgress at all. And he is sufficiently stoical, continuing to affirm God even after he loses his property and children. In quick order four messengers come to Job and inform him that he has lost his oxen and donkeys, then his sheep, followed by his camels and finally “a great wind came from beyond the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people [Job’s children], and they died.” While Job indeed laments his losses, he famously refuses to blame God for what has happened. “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord has taken. May the Lord’s name be blessed.”8 Job, we learn from his reaction to Satan’s deeds, is a reasonable man. He knows that children can die; that property can be lost; that life is hard; that grief is how humans deal with such situations. He deals with the loss of his children and property, his enraged wife (enraged for good reasons), as well as the refusal of his friends to accept that he is blameless. He knows because he is wise: wisdom that is marked by his acceptance of the catastrophic events that befell him and his knowledge that these horrible things could happen to other men. That wisdom becomes a stoic acceptance of these harms.9 These egregious acts, endorsed by God, are insufficient to test Job in this malicious game. God allows bodily harm, in the form of boils, to be visited on Job’s body. Physical pain destroys his capacity to endure the pain that God has sanctioned.10 Tort law in the United States may confound pain and suffering but the Book of Job clarifies the significant difference. What kind of God is this? This is not a trial in the sense of law or in the sense of the Akedah. In the latter case at least Abraham was told to do something, something horrible—but something. Job has evil inflicted on him with no reason that he can detect. And he nearly withstands the torture. This is not punishment: at least not in any conventional sense. So why does such bad things happen to such a righteous man? It cannot be because he is not a Jew. He observes all the rites and all the ceremonies. He is blameless. If the Jews are to be a beacon to the nations, Job is already exemplary in his part of the world.11 What, then, is God thinking? What are His intentions? We do not have access to God’s interiority. While James Joyce modeled stream of consciousness, the Hebrew narrator did not have that tool. We can only infer what is going on within. Moreover, if Maimonides is correct, God is one. Many of us have been taught by the Rambam that God is whole: He has no separate parts. So God, for Maimonides and for those of us that have accepted his analysis, God has no interiority because that would likely mean God’s experience might not be of a piece.12 Some contemporary Christian theologies even posit God as having no being but that non-being is displaced to something

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transcendent. We do have other pictures of God where the Godhead teems with energy, overflowing in creativity. But the God of Job does not show overflowing richness. God is very present as a character; he is playing a game with Satan—he loves me, he loves me not. But the wager with Satan is as much a game for the reader. How does the narrator expect us or want us to understand this terrible game? The notion of a Godhead is distant from the God rendered in Job. Robert Burt, a psychoanalytically influenced professor of law, has claimed that God longs for Job.13 We have commentary indicating God’s longing for humanity and of course prayers that reflect our longing for God. Yet I do not see that longing in this text. I see a God that ostensibly wants to prove that Job is righteous for righteousness sake. God wants to prove there is at least one human being in thrall. Burt draws on psychoanalysis to conjecture on the internal conflict that God expresses toward humanity. Fair enough. The Book of Job’s narrator certainly provides the material for understanding God’s ambivalence. So any notion of the fact and quality of human ambivalence as central to human emotional make-up is already reflected in this ancient text, and is no new discovery or invention by Freud or anyone else. Yet even this reading—that is, righteousness for the sake of righteousness— doesn’t explain why God chooses to mess so extensively with the man from Uz. Is God bored with creation? Nothing in the text suggests that. Perhaps God does need people. The philosopher Henry Frankfurt argues that the God of creation must be involved with humanity: “Thus, a wholly omnipotent being would necessarily be alone. . . . God needs a being other than Himself, he needs them in order to exercise His power at all meaningfully. But this means that for the meaningful exercise of his power, He needs a being over whom his power is not absolute.”14 Frankfurt further argues that, “Until there is coherent harmony between man and God, there is no universal order; that is, the cosmos is unfinished. God cannot complete His creation alone.”15 God does seem to need humanity at least as a plaything. The very wager with Satan points to that need. Consider my man Job. Why bother with such a wager, if Job and humanity are irrelevant to God? I am not taken with the belief that God is, as the New Yorker piece suggested, simply “messing” with Job, as a camp counselor messes with the campers. This makes the story worthless for imagining the Jewish God, if the project is committed to illuminating textual wisdom, manifest or hidden. So I do not think that God here is bored or just playing around through such motivations. Nor am I taken with the afterlife as answer to Job or a masochistically motivated humility. Jewish life I believe is life of the integrated mind and body. We are to live and love and cherish this life. This earthy life is not just a rehearsal for some lollypop afterward.

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Another interpretation—the strongest one, I believe—is that there may in fact be some evil to God. The Jewish author, commentator, thinker Arthur Cohen is of interest here: particularly his lecture at Brown University that resulted in his book, The Tremendum.16 During his talk Cohen claimed that in the wake of tragedies people and thinkers tend to create new views of how to understand God. Temple destructions elicited rabbinic responses. After the fall of the Second Temple, rabbis became the central figures in Jewish spiritual and intellectual life. Cohen does not make the point, but as a result, the Talmud was then formed and displaced the Bible as the central text to be studied. Philosophers came to the fore after the Inquisition and the expulsion from Spain. In these and other moments in history, Cohen argues, tragedy has forced the Jewish people to reevaluate their spiritual life, namely their conception of God. In the attempt to rationalize God’s unwillingness to intervene and mitigate horror, they adopt a new conception of God. In the wake of the Holocaust, Cohen asks, what new conception of God must Jews develop? What we do, according to Cohen, is develop a God that contains an aspect of evil. Cohen, who was if anything erudite about Judaism and much else, pronounced that God must now be viewed as an indwelling Godhead—and an aspect of that indwelling is evil. Here, too, we can enlist the help of psychoanalytic theory: namely, the concepts of perversion, narcissism, and the unconscious. Perversion, it is crucial to realize, no longer indicates solely sexual propensity. It has to do with intent. Perversion, says Robert Stoller—and his is still the best account—is the turning of the heart, distorting love into hatred. Let me repeat: Perversion is not a sexual deficit. Perversion is the use of love to hide and express hatred.17 This concept, further developed by Elizabeth Roudinesco, allows us to understand perversity as a concept not only limited to individual consciousness, but also something that an entire society can embody.18 Hitler’s Germany represented just such an exemplary perverse society. Roudinesco is very aware of the danger of overextending the concept: after all, you cannot literally place an entire society on the psychoanalytic couch. She points out the resistance to Stoller’s work and to others who worked with homosexuality, research that led scholars “to overlook the historical, the political, cultural and anthropological question of perversion.”19 Work that adopts these concepts can be instructive, if a bit wild. While I do not have God or his narrator on the couch—what a thought!—it does seem that God has abused his august position to twist any love he has for Job and to express hatred. This is how I understand his dealing with Job the righteous man. But further categories must be explored. Evil is a rather significant and analyzed category in Western thought. Susan Neiman has nicely commented

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on this concept.20 As she points out, Kant posited pure evil as action that intentionally creates harm to others for no particular reason. But such gratuitous infliction of harm is unusual. More often gain, envy, and resentment motivate action to which we ascribe evil as motivation. But God in the Book of Job seeks no gain, has no call for envy or jealousy. Does he inflict harm just because he can? That would be radical evil in Kant’s terms. I think that evil is caused by a flaw that the narrator embeds in God. I have mentioned the psychoanalytic theory behind perversion. Does God express his love through hatred of Job, humanity and creation itself? Is creation so imperfect and so troublesome that God has tired of it and therefore of humanity? In the 1970s, narcissistic personality disorders began to figure predominantly as a category in American psychoanalytic thinking. So perhaps Burt is more convincing than I am giving him credit for. God needs Job to show how fine he is; he is the worst characterization of a Woody Allen Jewish mother in this take. God needs Job to show off to Satan and his angels. If Job fails, God is damaged. Job exists for God. Why else is God so enraged in the whirlwind? Who dares call Me? Certainly we know that God knows who is calling and why he is calling. Moreover, how does this God, who is so busy taking care of creation, take time off for this puny creature who he has been busy tormenting through his agent Satan? After Sigmund Freud,21 we must also to speak about unconscious intent, intent where the actor is not in touch with the reasons for his action or is selfdeceived about his reasons. Whatever the scientific critique of psychoanalysis and whatever therapeutic validity, Western critical thinking has thoroughly absorbed psychoanalytic discourse. So if we just look at psychoanalysis we have some categories (perversion and narcissism) that might illuminate the narrator’s depiction of God. The narcissist—at least one type of narcissist—falls into fragmentation if he receives less than full regard: His very being is bound to the object of his need who must mirror love or all is lost. Picture the toddler playing in front of mommy. If she falls and mommy smiles and offers reassurance the child will smile and continue to play. If mommy is oversolicitous, the child may well cry out of fear of potential injury. But certain narcissistic personality disorders may exhibit real trauma if psychologically injured. One is rendered ripped if thwarted. This type of individual may decompensate and lose adult efficiency in any mature work. A different type of narcissistic disorder according to psychoanalysis is one who when thwarted rages against the offending party. So such a person will not fall apart but rather rage at the offender who dared to break the bond that tied him or her to psychological security. Do we have such a case with the God of the Whirlwind, a raging God?

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We have no indication that God loves Job, but rather he speaks with indifference later from the Whirlwind. Is he hiding his real view of his relationship with Job? God’s love is read into the text and I think not here. Does he want to teach Job and if so what and why so harshly if that is the aim? Abraham is given a task in his trial. Job is left clueless about the agency of his inflictions. Figuring God was the genius of the narrator. Every generation refigures God in its own image. Psychoanalysis informs my reading as the richest internal map we have for intuiting, i.e., fabricating God’s internal world. But let me continue with God’s response from the whirlwind. God’s appearance in the whirlwind is one of the most powerful dramatic sequences in world history: I imagine it as a gigantic tornado. Wind has figured in the Book of Job already, afflicting Job’s fortune at the outset. Job screams at God. What does God roar from the whirlwind? Don’t scream at me, you petulant child? And why does God ask, “Who is this who darkens counsel in words without knowledge?” Alter construes this as rhetorical, for God follows up: “Gird your loins like a man, that I may ask you, and you can inform Me. Where were you when I founded earth? Tell, if you know understanding. Who fixed its measures, do you know who stretched a line upon it?”22 Here follows the list of God’s creations, and more importantly of God’s secrets and perhaps mysteries even to God. God’s list is a detailing of creation’s phenomenal mysteries. Why is the sky blue, Daddy? Why the grass green? “Have the gates of death been laid bare to you, and the gates of death’s shadow have you seen?” And more mythically, “Have you come into the storehouse of snow, the storehouse of hail have you seen, which I keep for a time of strife, for a day of battle and war?23 Alter notes that this refers to mythical stockpiles that God maintains “for future combat against some unspecified cosmic foe.”24 But if God has enemies against which he must maintain vigilance then God is not only not omnipotent, but he may be vulnerable. There may in fact exist a higher power and Job does not have any sense of this. But except for Jewish Gnostics and certain Kabbalists most Jews through history did not read the implication of this cri de coeur and the further obligations that force themselves on God if he is to maintain his creation. Indeed, aspects of God’s demands on Job reveal both God’s breadth and God’s limits. Yet it appears that he can “fix the their rule (the laws of heaven) at least on earth.”25 So God demands of Job his rationale for dispute. And here is Job’s opportunity: He admits up front his worthlessness. Job refuses to offer any further response. So God continues his list of powers and obligations, but in a register different from nature by reducing eminence and pride to dust. No, Job cannot do this. And he has experienced this power from God. Unsurprisingly he cannot stabilize creation.



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THE EPILOGUE As could be expected, the Book of Job’s epilogue does not resolve the issues already at play, but instead complicates them further. God restores to Job his property and gives him new children.26 God rebukes Job’s friends for not trusting him and Job lives until a ripe old age. In Alter’s translation of the Book of Job, our tale ends with a Job who is satisfied with an enlarged view of God’s creation and God’s concerns. Yet the Book of Job’s seemingly tidy conclusion—which has produced pages upon pages of commentary—asks more questions than it answers. Why did God attack the friends for their disbelief? Is it possible to show further reinforcement for Job and also to warn others not to assume knowledge beyond their understanding? Indeed, why does he even grace Job with more and beautiful children? We know that he is righteous because we are told so from the frame story. So apparently his cursing of life is excused in God’s eyes. Why, then, has God been so harsh and why does He seem to think that his gifts to Job are adequate? And how is Job not traumatized so that his new abundance seems sufficient? We have no resurrection here, no promise of an afterlife. How, moreover, does this restoration such as it is to Job not reinforce the claims of his friends that God looks out for the righteous? Does God rebuke Job’s friends because they did not believe that Job is righteous? No easy answers here or in the commentary. God restores Job at least with wealth and family. Most commentators understand that the loss of original children must be accounted for, and even Maimonides suggests that the original children are restored. But why then the new names for the beautiful daughters? No, the original children are not resurrected. But why restore Job at all given the fact that he cursed creation and the day he was born? He invokes Leviathan too. Leviathan should destroy him and creation. Job knew of Leviathan before God invoked that dark force. A proposal: Job has learned that God is beyond his ken. Wisdom will not alleviate human suffering nor will it increase self-understanding. Job learns stoicism. Live your life and take what is given; or shut up, things can be made worse. The new children too may be taken and the pain follows. And then one dies, hopefully full of years. TWO NEW CHARACTERS It is worth introducing two characters in the Book of Job: one of whom— Leviathan—has been incredibly important for later texts that picked up and played with Job. Leviathan is as much a part of the Book of Job as Job him-

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self. Leviathan challenges the very stability of creation itself. Interestingly Satan drops out of the epilogue and Leviathan offstage assumes a strong presence in his very absence. God introduces Behemoth as a character made at the time he made humanity. Alter claims as do the rabbis that Behemoth is an intensified elaboration of the Egyptian hippopotamus but with mythological elaboration. He is in tune with the most recent scholarship that recognizes the origins of Leviathan in Ugaritic myth but has yet to account for the mythic status of Behemoth in any of the wisdom literatures beyond the Ugaritic. Behemoth is a creature that can swallow “a river at his ease, untroubled while the Jordan pours into his mouth. . . . Could you take him with one’s eyes, with barbs pierce his nose?” And then “Could you draw Leviathan with a hook, with a cord press down his tongue?”27 God himself tells us how tough it is to deal with Leviathan. Besides merely capturing him, God brags as to how he has made Leviathan into a pet. The rabbinic notion of Leviathan as alligator is laughable given the power that God claims for this force. “His sneezes shoot out light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of heaven. Firebrands leap from his mouth, sparks of fire fly into the air.”28 Alter remarks on the Job poet’s brilliance in envisioning such a power of such terrible nature and of such awesome beauty. Leviathan is grander than the power that many of us feel in the face of very dangerous storms or roiling oceans. We too feel our puniness and yet exalt in the face of such force. Leviathan, says God, is “the king of all the proud beasts.”29 God’s relationship to Leviathan and in fact to all creation is to maintain His work. Jon Levinson indicates how Leviathan is kept in check by God.30 But the rabbis, even though some claimed he was an alligator, knew the mythological power of the beast. They called on post-biblical literature where Leviathan defeats powerful angels and only with the help of God is he controlled. In some of these references Leviathan will be a meal for the righteous. So he lives still depending on the proof texts examined. God brags about the power of Leviathan, but Leviathan is kept in check only with God’s power. God’s claim that he alone controls this mythic force becomes significant when God is removed from political control over humanity and human governance is seized by human agency. The shift to modernity that marks this historical moment alters the appropriation of the Book of Job or political philosophy from theodicy to willed human obligation. Leviathan becomes an independent line from the Book of Job and how we imagine the God of Job to how we imagine the creature that God attests can disrupt creation and of course human organization. Thomas Hobbes sets this shift in tone and emphasis that was already prefigured in rabbinics where Torah is on earth and not in heaven. Leviathan as state can hold conflict in check or if not then chaos will surely follow. The God of Job in short has his hands full.



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LEVIATHAN AND THE ELABORATION OF THE POLITICAL Moshe Halbertal in his succinct and brilliant People of the Book recognizes the reach of the story of Job and the implications of Leviathan and the Book of Job for western political thought.31 In a short appendix he reviews the appropriation of Leviathan by both Hobbes and Spinoza: Hobbes the authoritarian and Spinoza the pluralist. Hobbes has been acknowledged as the first liberal state theorist, followed shortly by Spinoza’s response. Jonathan Israel has written a thousand-page book on the reception of Spinoza’s thought.32 I will not add to it here. Each were versed in the Hebrew Bible, unsurprisingly for Spinoza. Halbertal spots the significant issues for Hobbes: “From whence the scriptures derive their Authority” and “how do we know them to be the Word of God.”33 The Book of Job itself was apparently, in its first iteration, motivated by the political. This would have been understood by its first readers. Leo G. Perdue claims that the author of Job represented one political group striving for power in Jewish circles in exilic Babylon. Belief in the tradition had been undermined by historical events, including loss of kingship and exile. So the Book of Job represented radical transformation of tradition. Issues of theological, social, political, and economic justice were intentionally brought into play. Perdue dates the Book of Job to the sixth century BCE. Perdue thinks that the author of Job belonged to a group that was seeking to form an alliance with the priesthood. They were versed in the texts and wisdom literature of the time. Perdue sums up his position: “For the poet of Job, however, his group strongly contested the traditionalists. . . . A repudiation of former institutions and discredited religion would sweep away all rivalries, leading them to a new way of existing in the world in which leadership and therefore power and its accoutrements would be accessible to the new and radical sages.”34 The Book of Job is at once political, psychological, and anthropological. It fashioned a new creationist theology critiquing Genesis. The political motivation that propelled the Book of Job then became recapitulated when history necessitated new foundations for organizing human governance into a new form. Hobbes became the figure for this new foundation. Hobbes like the Job narrator had to cope with a fraught political order. Hobbes does not remark on the death of God but merely pushes God aside. But so did the rabbis after Yavneh. Remember the parable of the stove. God has ceased being historically alive, trapped in the Torah, open for commentary, but this God has not been an active player as interpreter in more than a few years. The political has been an aspect of the human from the beginning of creation and as such in the Bible all, in the desert, through Judges, Kings, and

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finally outside the Bible to the political in secular thought. After the Copernican Revolution, theology changed because God could not be in a heaven that no longer was scientifically justified. The Bible though strongly influenced the turn to the secular in its beginnings and even pluralism with Spinoza and into the twentieth century. Such is the continuation of Leviathan and the wisdom of the Book of Job.35 Hobbes is the first liberal state theorist and he invokes Leviathan is his most full-blown commentary on the Bible and on human governance. Recent interpretations of Leviathan understand that Hobbes’s reliance on the Hebrew Bible was perhaps more than merely a strategic use of that Testament. The history of human governance has not been pretty. Hobbes created the first liberal state in a time when religious wars were destroying the possibility of civil peace. His state was not notably democratic. For both Hobbes and Spinoza “the authoritative interpreter of Scripture is civil authority.”36 Hobbes according to Strauss would not limit the power of the throne even used for personal enjoyment. One may argue that Hobbes’s King had more power over human events than the rabbinic God, who could be heard and ignored. The Torah is in earth and not heaven. Hobbes’s God is above the law. Is the God of our imagined Judaism able to alter metaphysical law—the laws of thermodynamics, for example? Hobbes’s God is pretty powerful.37 Beyond Strauss, Menachem Lorberbaum for one argues that Hobbes along with Spinoza are the first to fashion political theologies.38 Recognizing Hobbes and Spinoza as political theologists draws a linear genealogy for the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt, and the Nazi regime. We continue to struggle in the Levant and throughout the world over the place of theology in our world. Moreover, we are in a world that has lost its faith in Enlightenment progress and could well lose its faith in pluralism itself. But how is this relevant to imagining the Jewish God? God’s Leviathan is still alive in the world and is there because he was created by God. If one does not accept this, then one does not acccept God as the God of creation. The consequence of that would entail going further than the Rambam and acceeding to Aristotle that God is not the creator. If God as the creator goes, can God as revealer go too? Why does Hobbes invoke the mythological beast Leviathan? (Perhaps the cultures of the Levant before the Hebrews were not so stupid themselves in figuring their various views of earthy threat to any human or geological order.) In any event Hobbes makes clear his sense that much of religion is based on human stupidity, particularly fear of the unknown populated by demons and other figures of terror. He specifically warned against the nature of metaphor and yet there is Leviathan the figure of a new founding myth for modern history.

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Creating the Leviathan and invoking the name of the monster that threatens chaos to creation is a move of ironic self-reflection. After the instantiation of the newly founded Hobbesian state the Bible will be denuded of power to claim the rich materials toward justice which will now reside in arbitrary state power. The sovereign will be the decider. There is better security under the sign of threatened chaos (Leviathan) than the civil unrest that Hobbes confronted in the world.39 So I am approaching a new category for the beginning of modernity with Hobbes and Spinoza to bring the imagining of the Jobean God to its current political state. Political theology, with its rank name because of its ties to Carl Schmitt, is initiated in Hobbes as authoritarian liberal and in Spinoza as pluralist liberal. Both sought to liberate politics from the gaze of theologies that undercut human security for Hobbes and religious choice for Spinoza. Each argued that the Hebrew Bible was constituted by parables that for Hobbes at least fogged the mind of the masses and encouraged superstition. Each eschewed the metaphoric out that would allow mundane readings of the Bible. Carl Schmitt critiqued Weimar and its downfall and all potentially liberal states as weak. Such states can only become prey to lobbying interests that will ultimately enervate state power, identification, and commitment. Schmitt critiqued Hobbes as establishing an inadequate, mechanical myth. Schmitt sectioned off political thought as ontological. It had its own sphere for theory and practice. The state he imagined was a state that, with a strong enemy, could provide the tension for commitment of its members. The state unlike Weimar could and in fact would be marked by its decisionism. Weimar was marked by its inability to act decisively.40 Reinhard Mehring, in his recent intellectual biography of Schmitt, makes this assertion: “He moved the question of legitimacy and of the foundations of the state into the field of ‘Political Theology’ and ascribed the limits set to political unity to the ‘Jewish’ influence. This makes Schmitt’s Leviathan book his most elaborate contribution to his ‘battle against the Jewish spirit in jurisprudence.’” His Hobbes studies are anything but the expression of liberal reservations; rather, they are a critical diagnosis of the fact that the attempt at the mythic foundation of the “total” state had failed. Schmitt blamed Judaism for the fact: The state had to present itself in the form of the Leviathan. Schmitt’s utopian idealization of the debates about the “total” moved beyond the modern constitutional state to the mythic beginnings of the symbol. If the Leviathan book, beyond being an intervention in contemporary debates, contains an answer to ultimate theoretical questions and constitutional credo, then this lies beyond the modern age and modernity. The Book of Job thus relativizes the Constitutional Theory of the Weimar period. Schmitt’s movement beyond modern ideas of a

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constitution to fundamental preconditions of statehood renders the legitimacy of the modern age problematic.41

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LITERARY APPROPRIATIONS OF JOB’S THE BOOK OF JOB I want to briefly review two other genres of writing each invoking the Book of Job for our imagining and thereby providing material for a summary statement. The first is a turn to a prophetic poem by the great Israeli poet H. N. Bialik, and then to a play on Job by a recent Israeli Jewish playwright Hanoch Levin. Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff is a Jewish author who grew up in Egypt at this same time as Jabès (who she knew growing up). She later spent time in New York City and became an important journalist in Israel. She rehabilitated the connotations that emanated from the Levantine.42 Previously and probably still today the term connoted a zone of multicultural duplicity and manipulation. She attempted to transform the term to one that signaled pluralism and rich interchange. A journal of Levantine studies was prompted in homage to her work. The challenge she set was to turn the area including Israel into the model promised in the Bible, a beacon to the nations. She is not the only figure appropriating the Levantine as a category for writing and for the political. In fact, Yonatan Ratosh went further. He challenged the notion of the legitimacy of Israel as the Jewish state. Only with the coming of the Messiah could such be invoked. He elaborated a notion of Canaanite Studies, claiming that civilization has lost much by the repression of Mesopotamian wisdom literature. But that is not why I posit Bialik and his poem, The Dead of the Desert here. This Bialik, not yet in Israel and not yet the founding father of Israeli poetics, posited a new mythos, not biblical but a counter to the biblical. Moreover, he wrote this epic poem in a classical Hebrew that Robert Alter contrasts favorably with the poet of the Book of Job. That poet according to Alter and others is the predominant poet of the Bible. First rate poetry, canonical by any reference point. H. N. Bialik was not of the Levantine stripe Kananoff called for. But in a significant sense perhaps despite himself and his Zionist commitments very much Levantine. Bialik was from Eastern Europe and a Zionist who was committed to Ahad Ha’am, “the ideologue of so-called cultural Zionism.”43 Bialik through his career transformed Biblical Hebrew into secular Jewish poetry. Miron also indicates that he was the father of appropriating the Hebrew Bible into prophetic poetry anew.44 I am drawing on Alter’s interpretation for my understanding of the poem. Bialik is said to have mastered the Bible and biblical Hebrew, though he be-

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came a secular Jewish figure in Israel and in the world. He did coauthor the important Book of Legends (a collection of rabbinic midrash), and he was sympathetic to Jewish theology even if he did not practice assiduously. Bialik is credited with bringing the ancient tongue alive for poetics—a dangerous game. The poem was written in 1902. Alter points to a 1925 letter Scholem penned to Rosenzweig, who cautioned that, “The power of the language is bound up in the name, and its abyss is sealed within the name. Having conjured up the names day after day, we can no longer suppress their potencies. We roused them, and they will manifest themselves, for we have conjured them up with very great power.”45 But how is Bialik intimating the Book of Job? Alter claims that The Dead to his count has 160 references to the Bible in the 234 verses in the poem. But for my purposes the references that intimate Job’s story are most instructive as counter myth to Job’s creation narrative. The poem itself presents dead formidable warriors. Though dead, these warriors thwart proud lions and cows, halting the asp’s “sibilant glide.” Even the eagle about to attack the carrion of the dead backs off. On looking closer the threatening bird “in sudden recoil sheathes his menacing weapons” and flies off “caught on the point of a speare one quivering feather remains.”46 Who are these dead warriors that even in death can frighten and conjure awe from the desert’s most deadly hunters. How have their bodies not decomposed? Alter indicates that they point toward the ten spies in Numbers 14 who reported to Moses the impossibility of seizing the land for which their reward was oblivion, and warranted the people to roam the desert for forty years. But these dead are not the same nor are their number. Vastly more. Again where is Job? These implacable troops have defied God and in death they still do so. They are not moldering after their defeat but remain: “Their foreheads are stubborn and bold, defying the wrath of the heavens, dangerous the bend of their brows where terrors lurk in ambush.” But they do not rot. They are hedged by God in this secret place noticed by a single rider who reports back and is informed by an elder: “These fathered the People of the Book of Job.”47 But they are not Jews. Nor is this like Ozymandias—they are there, they are remembered. They stormed the mountain, the residence of God and would do so again. Their pride and courage is unrelenting despite obvious futility of their chosen quest—unseating God. Alter recognizes Yeats’s “rough beast.” The desert though holds the Jobean power. The desert lives and shelters these dead. This is yet another creation myth. Where Job challenges Genesis, this challenges Job. Alter claims that for the most part the Bible does not conjure animal, vegetable or mineral. But the Book of Job does and so does Bialik’s Dead. James

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Kugel reproduces Job 28 in his The Great Poems of the Bible.48 In two pages we find iron, copper, molten fire, sapphire, gold, eagle, falcon, panthers, serpent, the ocean and the eagle personified, gilded glass, coral, crystal, pearls, all of which known to man and some used by man.49 So Bialik who knows his Job is very much within that text deploying animal and nature in all its variation. Not only the lion, the eagle, the asp, the jackal, the owl, the wild ass, tigers, the wind, indeed the whirlwinds, and on. And with power and lament: “Sometimes the desert swoons.”50 “The desert moans in its dream of the cruelty of eternal waste;”51 “The desert roars in its rage as it rolls in the fiery gulf. In dumb ululation wails;”52 “In that hour seized by a vibrant impulse the mighty phalanx awakes. . . . We are the brave! Last of the enslaved! First to be free! With our own hand, our hand alone, we tore from our neck the heavy yoke. . . . In the desert imprisoned, to misery abandoned by an avenging God, a mere whispered song of defiance and revolt. . . .”53 And finally the storm ends with the secret of that place undisturbed. What does this poem point to? It is not to the Book of Job but includes the Book of Job. Nor is it an allegory for a renewal of the Bible. The poem conjures eternity, but not the Messianic end game of the Bible. Its warriors are not new Zionists nor are they Biblical warriors.54 Alter and Dan Miron55 fit Bialiak into the consciousness of poetic modernity. But this is not the modernity of T. S. Eliot where the world will end with a whimper, not an apocalyptic bang. This world is not played out; it is not exhausted. The poem is a renewed, substituted mythos—a counter myth absorbing Job and the Bible into a world where the writer creates canon, and so posits a new vision for modernity. This vision, perhaps ironically for the Yiddish speaking Hebrew poet, recalls and recreates the Levantine out of which the Book of Job was created: a creation that artfully repressed a beast untamed but still hedged by an implacable God. Out of the Wilderness—a Levantine God and living dead soldiers willing to carry on the struggle, a Promethean action not passively awaiting God’s help. But what comes out of this wilderness? Bialik wrote the Dead from the Pale. He was imagining the new Jerusalem, the new Israel. But the dead soldier, no matter how noble, no matter how steadfast still at the appointed time proceeds to climb the mountain to depose God. Like Sisyphus the exercise is not only unavailing but ironically it is sanctioned by God. And like the way in which Job is originally hedged in by God, the Dead army is hedged and protected and mythologized by those who are external to the interplay and exhaustive, repetitive climb. Is there dramatic irony as well? Has Bialik realized that despite his new myth, an Israel without God is doomed to repetitive marching and action that will be unavailing

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without Divine intervention? Bialik may have seen more clearly the troubles down the road in this poem. He was as I have said not from the Levant. But he was very sympathetic to the so-called Oriental Jew when he came to live in Israel and he regretted their degraded status. Hanoch Levin, a left-wing Israeli sickened by the state’s handling of the Palestinian situation, invoked Job to express his discontent. Levin was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv in an ultra orthodox home. He was trained in philosophy and literature. He served in the army. He left orthodoxy, wrote critical social essays, poetry, and finally plays—many of which he directed himself. The dead as motif carries on in Levin’s The Torments of Job.56 But this is not Bialik’s noble, resolute, yet alive mythical dead. In Levin’s Job, matters are more forlorn. The play critiques Israeli society sentimentalizing nothing and nobody. Levin in his Job has little expectation from the poor for any idealized transformational possibility. In this way he reminds me of Genet who exalts Palestinian fighters when he lives among them. But at the end of his romance he pulls the reader up short. He makes clear that if these romanticized fighters ever gained political control, they would be no less repressive of those they have vanquished. Levin is even more critical. His Job opens at a banquet in Job’s house. Job describes the process that befalls a man surfeited from banquet enjoyment. He describes the eating process in biological terms resulting in farts and despair. But such an eater is renewed “born every six hours.”57 Still Job invites the poor to the feast when all the guests have finished stuffing themselves. The beggars attack the table lapping up the residue with passion. “Bones. Nothing but gnawed bones.” The guests may be sated but much is left: “We suck and suck. We go to it with devotion, diligently, deliberately. . . . Part of the juice, of course, comes from your spit. . . . To suck on a bit of bone that was once in the mouth of a contented swell—That’s not just a bone, it’s a pedigree as well.”58 That is the high class beggar expressing his pleasure. But other sets of beggars enter the scene where finally the Most Beggarly of Beggars finish the remains. This figure laments his lack of teeth. He only gets a poor remnant: “I can swallow what (the more august beggar) pukes without having to chew. . . .” This beggar is fading away but still holds on: “Be patient my friend, and somebody will surely puke in your hand. Well, somehow we manage to live, There’s a God in the sky, Tra-la-la, tra-la-lie, Maybe they will throw up for me on the way.”59 This scene foreshadows the denouement. But first following the classic text, messengers arrive in the now depleted banquet announcing the cumulative losses the biblical Job must face. First his property is lost—an iron mine collapsed in Lebanon, the police are investigating his accounts, and though

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protected by the emperor in Rome, that figure is deposed, replaced by another who announces complete confiscation. Finally, Job is informed that nothing is left. Bailiffs enter taking all of his property. And then religiously, following the ancient script, his children are wiped out as well by, in one case, a mighty wind, in another in an earthquake. Upon learning of his plight, Job’s friends enter the play both for themselves as actors and as a chorus for and against Job until they meet ends harsher than the biblical text. Eliphaz, for example, rebukes Job: “The whole world knows that Job is a righteous man. And yet. There is a ‘yet.’”60 Assaulted by his friends, Job regresses by imagining himself a baby in his father’s lap as Zophar rocks him. But this scene ends with hope, for God will save: “Behold my friends, the heavens are opening.” But hope is crushed and soldiers enter the scene. The officer in charge announces his authority from the new Emperor. He has intoned that he is the Emperor: “I am God, that is he the Emperor. You shall have no other gods Except me. . . . The God of the Jews is null and void, wiped out. . . . All those who believe in the god of the Jews will have a spit stuck up their rear.”61 Job refuses to comply; he will not renounce God despite the consequences. Job is skewered. His friends try to intercede; let him defame God in private, accept this bribe, but this is of no avail. In fact, they are tortured until they are forced to blaspheme themselves. Levin, understanding lines of authority and bureaucracy, has a circus ringmaster buy Job on the spit and sell tickets to the amused crowds to watch Job’s torture. Finally, too late, Job cries out that he will blaspheme as well. Job vomits and dies. At the end the Most Beggarly of Beggars reappears with “a little patience, and someone finally pukes. . . . There’s a God in the sky.”62 At the very end, the dead sing, “The scream dies in our breast; But there is mercy in the world. And we are laid to rest.”63 This is Brechtian, for sure, or akin to a Dostoevsky short story or a Kafka parable. Job is dead and the dead sing but there is no founding of a new myth; rather it is a parody of the old. Levin does Job in and the theater as well with his ringmaster currying favor even in the face of complicit pain for others. Does Levin think that Brecht’s political theater still can bring people into the streets disgusted and demanding justice? Reading the play evokes disgust. The imagery of vomit and shit and skewering are all designed to provoke repulsion. It is easy to think that the whole world assimilates the arts and critical creativity to mere entertainment. But we know if we think: Poetry, theater, novels, and hand-to-hand accounts of everyday terror and atrocity have made marks on the culture and politics at which such work is aimed. That is why such work is censured. Levin’s Job is still a provocation. The game has not played out. His hope is that the disgust may become remedied.



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TOWARD AN OPEN CONCLUSION OR WISDOM APPROACHED TENTATIVELY Can modern Judaism imagine the Jewish God without dealing with the Book of Job? Yes, but only if Judaism forgets the Hebrew Bible. So can we forget Job, like we forget Blanchot or forget Foucault or indeed forget the Jewish Jacque Derrida and remember the newest name, the newest star in the (Jewish) theological/philosophic firmament? Can we excise from the received text what we do not like, pick and choose the texts like food? Even Rosenzweig indicates the not yet when asked about whether he commits himself to particular mitzvoth. Bialik the poet of the new state of Israel in his time fused Job with the Greeks to constitute a new mythos beyond both Athens and Jerusalem. Bialik of Kishinev and the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’Am had hope. Bialik as he lived in Israel was not all that pleased by the politics that were being played out. Levin, whose Job rings with all the passion and wit of a Waiting for Godot, negates but points to no answer. Moreover, Levin’s play takes us to the present impasse of Middle East politics and the shift from Israel as a Messianic hope to Israel as an active political player. I have invoked Arthur Cohen and his call for reimagining the Jewish God as containing evil within the Godhead. The narrator of the Book of Job pretends no prophetic insight or demand. The God of the narrative written by human hands evokes a God who represents a projection of what God looked like out of the distilled Levantine. That God and the evil within is our evil and it is within the individual and within the Leviathan state—Israel very much included—now not as a beacon but as a Machiavellian, or should I say Hobbesian player. We should also hope that the Leviathan Israeli state invokes the Spinoza position and not the Hobbesian. Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff introduced the notion that Israel should acknowledge its Levantine roots and lead in forming a pluralistic middle Eastern world. Before her many, including the poet Yonatan Ratosh, provided what he called a Canaanite critique of a blinkered, isolated Israeli state. Ammiel Alcalay, poet and commentator, provides analysis for reimagining Levantine culture. Alcalay and Gabriel Levin, another poet, demonstrate the richness both in the past and still today that is manifest when in Levin’s words we journey in the Levant. The rabbis understood people have good and evil impulses, and this before Freud, long before. So imagining evil within the individual is canonic. But is it not blasphemy to imagine the figure of God as in part evil? No, not if we realize that we have made that figure. If we wish to reconfigure God individually or in politics, we must alter the world, personally and politically.

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So no whimper, no agenda for personal or political transformation, just an acknowledgment that the God in Job still instructs and we fail to listen to our detriment, no matter how much we pray or observe halacha. Amos warned us that ritual is not a way out. The Book of Job is canonical and has not been expunged from the Bible. Its brilliance is to challenge us beyond the narrators, and to imagine a God beyond passivity. Kant and Wittgenstein tell us that, but Job tells us more. Bad things happen to good people, and our actions, riven by perhaps impossible division, have consequences for Judaism and the world that halacha will never reach. The genius of the Book of Job is that it is there still, a warning. It and Ecclesiastes underline our human limits and rescue the Bible from desuetude. By including these works the rabbis assured that the Bible cannot be reduced to a Hallmark card. The Prophetic Book of Job and the wisdom literature safeguard humanity from narcissistic contentment. Bad is ‘round the corner; we know because we have a God that tells us so. But also because one must be a fool not to see that evil is at home and in the Levant. I cannot end the essay without a bit more commentary. The Book of Job is ancient in the Bible, likely scribal and undoubtedly distilled from a rich wisdom literature. I have picked particular fruit from the tree of Job. I have done an injustice to all the commentators who have added often brilliantly to both the issues I have raised and to more that I have not assayed. I think wisdom is key to the Book of Job. But wisdom is more than technique and technology. Is wisdom accepting the truth that we are alone in the world? We are post-Enlightenment: we no longer have so much faith in our collective wits. Individuals may do better on this score but wits are most often used individually for gain, in wealth, health, and then perhaps in recognition. Job had wealth and health and recognition. Fat good it did him. His wealth, health, and family were restored. Did he acquire knowledge? After God’s revelation Job had a much more refined sense of what was at stake in keeping creation going. He also learned that life has perhaps infinite forms that can be so easily subsumed under man in some assumed (from Genesis) right. The Book of Job points to what now seems part of our zeitgeist: everything in the material world touches or is in dynamic tension with everything else. The Book of Job has this wisdom at its core. God holds this all together. God is willing to mess with Job to teach Job (and us) what is a stake. Justice is not part of the material world; justice is humanity’s highest aspiration—or is it the good, or unlimited power, wealth and longevity? We have not invented the Jewish God, nor have we imagined the Jewish God to get humanity out of the environmental fixes, the economic fixes, the religious wars that have never ended, and the general squalor so many of our species are forced to endure. The Book of Job provides some resources to

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enrich our understanding of what we must come to know to ameliorate the human condition so more can enjoy life here on earth. But is the God of Job the God of the whole Bible? After the Holocaust, I think that Cohen in the Tremendum, a title and concept appropriated from Rudolph Otto, makes his case. Israel was established as a secular middle eastern state as a consequence of the Nazi horror. The forces that formed and animated that horror are not so far away in today’s world. The Book of Job can be read as philosophical anthropology. One theory is that human psychological transformation is not possible at all. We like animals can be stunned into silence, wonder, or trauma: just like Job. Another theory is that the kind of human suffering that can break a person is the measure of what is needed for any transformation, such as it may be. The Gnostics and many Orthodox and others still see this life as either a veil of tears or as a veil that hides us from the deeper reality that we might achieve in the next hyper life. Gnosticism connoted the actuality of secret wisdom.64 One significant strand in Job commentary is that suffering is necessary for human transformation. I acknowledge this fact as central to much philosophic anthropology. But it is not clear that transformation depends on suffering alone. Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah, and Jacob became Israel with no noted psychological suffering. Political transformation is even more problematic. Current conditions mandate resistance to keep the gains we have attained and not demand utopian institutional changes in today’s political world. Tomorrow? Many of us still have Frankfurt School aspirations: we are called progressives in the United States today. I fear for democracy in the United States and in the world, and I fear that we will not learn from what the Job sage taught: we can lose it all, so meditation and individual transformation will not be a possibility because we as a species have foreclosed possibility itself. Indeed, where will we find wisdom? For the sake of truth, I should add that, perhaps, there is possibly a fragment of Bontshe Shvayg—the character that Bruce Zukerman takes from I. L. Peretz’s parable and employs to reduce Job to no more than a parody—in the Godhead as well.65 Bontshe is a stunned fool in my mind but still a fool.66 We have no more wisdom than did Job and his friends, just better science in the service of technology. NOTES 1.  Acknowledgments. Peter Wehrle has long provided notable service in finding even esoteric work as staff of the Law Library of UW on this and other projects. Martha Kaplan, Phyllis Weisbard, Sonya Hansard Weiner, and Andrew Weiner all provided important editorial feedback on early drafts, beyond the call. Bill Sherman,

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my oldest friend and a first class poet read and provided input for instructive footnotes. Bill, who years ago told me about Melville’s early romantic novels, had me tighten my comparison of Melville and the Whale and Marx in the reading room in the British Museum in London. He made sure I properly cited Zukofsky’s (A). My colleague Professor Michael Fox, emeritus professor center of Jewish Studies at University of Wisconsin and an expert on Job, Ecclesiastes, and on Biblical literature in general, provided a very important review of an early draft that tightened my analysis. Josh Bucheister has provided professional editorial work through the various drafts of this manuscript. Lewis Freedman helpfully suggested that the paper be divided into sections suggesting Adorno’s style in Minima Moralia. That style can also be found also in N. O. Brown, Life Against Death, and goes back to Nietzsche in his aphoristic work. Finally, I particularly want to thank my co-editor Ken Koltun-Fromm for the work he put in on this essay and the volume as a whole, and I would like to thank the acquisitions editor Sarah Craig for her work on this essay and the volume as a whole. 2.  Benjamin Schwartz, “At first, I was teaching Job a lesson, but now I’m just messing with him,” New Yorker (January 7, 2015), 69. 3.  Since its publication, this vexing text has inspired endless commentary. It has been the subject of studies by N. H. Tur-Sinai, Norman C. Habel, David J. A. Clines, Bruce Zuckerman, Susan E. Schreiner, Carol Newsom, Robert Eisen, Samuel E. Balentine, Robert Alter, and C. L. Seow. This partial list merely scratches the surface of the cottage industry of interpretative work that the Book of Job has and likely will continue to generate. 4. This so-called frame story has recently attracted theoretical attention where previously it had been dismissed as too simple. But we know that folk tales are not so simple. Agnon for example writes about love, lust, and marriage in a so-called A Simple Story. Meir Weiss dedicated his work to just examining the simple frame story. Alan Cooper and Michael Fox have each recently analyzed the frame. Buber too commented on it citing the frame as an ironic prelude designed to interact against the poetic discourse that follows. 5.  Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University Press Chicago Press, 1974), 486–90. 6.  Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 12. 7. Prosecutorial discretion in the United States has always been an interesting problem. All discretion in government makes for difficult analysis. 8.  Old Testament scholar Samuel E. Balentine points out that the various attacks on Job’s fortune come from the four compass points and represent Job’s agricultural interests, his pastoral interests, and his trading interests. As Balentine comments, “these sequenced reports invite the reader to understand that the forces of the cosmos, heaven and earth, have been unleashed almost simultaneously on an unsuspecting Job.” See Samuel Balentine, Job (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2006), 56. The full compass of these events bring into play the range of forces that are understood to require at least some human understanding and accumulated wisdom. The events also delimit the nature of humanity’s lack of knowledge.

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9.  Much later in history Spinoza defines freedom as the acceptance of necessity. Job has already achieved that state of understanding. 10. Contemporary tort law talks about pain and suffering. Job exemplifies the difference. 11.  Noah was a righteous man and he was not a Jew. The rabbis named the Noahide code in his name. Job is another gentile righteous man. 12.  Much of Volume 1 of Maimonides’s The Guide to the Perplexed is committed to arguing that God is one and God has no body. 13.  Robert A. Burt, In the Whirlwind, God and Humanity in Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), Chapter Seven, 140–76. 14.  Harry G. Frankfurt, “On God’s Creation,” in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. by Eleanor Stump (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 139. 15.  Ibid., 141. 16.  See Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1981). 17. Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (London: Karnac Books, 1975). 18. See Elizabeth Roudinesco, Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). 19.  Ibid., 158–59. 20.  Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 21.  See Burt, In The Whirlwind, 140–76. 22. Alter, Wisdom, 161. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25.  Ibid., 162. 26.  Later commentary suggests that Job’s original children are restored. 27. Alter, Wisdom, 171. 28.  Ibid., 173. 29.  Ibid., 173–75. 30. Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). 31.  Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 32.  Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 33. Halbertal, People of the Book, 138. 34.  Leo Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 2007), 84 and 135. 35.  Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones, editors, Political Hebraism Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (Jerusalem and New York: Shalem Press, 2008), and Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism:

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The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Horace Kallen wrote his own interpretation of the Job story. See his The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1918). 36. Halbertal, People of the Book, 137. In Samuel it will be recalled God was the political authority of the people with Samuel as his “interpreter.” But to Samuel’s chagrin the Jewish people wanted a king like everyone else. God chides Samuel and allows kingship. Politics being mean then as now allowed Samuel to make Saul king, one of the few figures in the Bible who goes mad—recall the calling forth of the witch of Endor from her grave. The power of magic became taboo but I think never denied in its power in the Hebrew Bible. David himself was not an exemplary monarch, even though he was the Leonard Cohen of his day. The Nazis collected fine art, enjoyed food, wine, music, and high culture. Liberal thought should learn that the pursuit of culture is not tied to good governance or to human integrity-an old lesson. The history of Hebrew kingship was not exalted and frequently terrible. And the kings more often than not followed their personal predilections. David certainly ignored Nathan’s jibes. 37.  Thomas Pangel asserts that any theology on the Leviathan is rather thin gruel separated from the richness of its Biblical creation and from its rich source for wisdom. Hobbes to his mind is offering the worst possible world. See Thomas L. Pangel, “A Critique of Hobbes’s Critique of Biblical and Natural Religion in Leviathan,” Jewish Political Studies Review 4:2 (Fall, 1992): 25–98. 38.  Menachem Lorberbaum, “Making Space for Leviathan: on Hobbes’ Political Theory,” Hebrew Political Studies 2:1 (Winter 2007): 78–100. 39.  Kim Ian Parker clarifies Hobbes’s intention to invoke Leviathan as new myth. Hobbes, Parker underlines, invoked the story of Job as an Ur text to reinforce his displacement from Biblical authority to secular power while harnessing the power of the Bible to do so. This materialist reached into the sublime of western mythos to warn and threaten humanity with what is at stake in dealing with human affairs and humanity’s place in the world. The Book of Job is still with us, no matter “how we lay waste our powers.” Parker sums up Hobbesian figuration nicely: “A world ruled by leviathans are part of God’s marvelous works of creation and pose no threat to the orderly realm (Genesis 1 and Psalm 104). . . . In the Book of Job, the image of the Leviathan is stranger still, presenting as terrible in power and majesty but also part of God. . . . The Bible is politics, and politics is the Bible. There is only ‘one master,’ the leviathan, who unifies religion and politics. But in resolving the conflict between church and state, Hobbes creates another. In making the leviathan all-powerful, a terror to the mere mortal, a sublime figure beyond justice, Hobbes has created another monster, a monster of hegemony. The world has become, like the original drawing of the leviathan, a world where the sovereign is the people, and the people are the sovereign. Hobbes wanted a ‘Mortall God’ to control chaos, but, in creating the leviathan, he creates a monster god of political order.” See Kim Ian Parker, “That ‘Dreadful Name, Leviathan’: Biblical Resonances in the Title of Hobbes’ Famous Political Work,” Hebraic Political Studies 2:4 (Fall 2007): 424–447, especially page 447. 40.  This state would have the capacity to make unilateral and decisive action. The lapsed Catholic Schmitt appropriated the top down Catholic hierarchy toward the potential effectiveness and decisiveness of state action. Schmitt sought to mythologize the

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state beyond the inadequate Hobbesian attempts. Enemies only had to be strong and worthy, not evil. Schmitt carried the Greek agon to the nation state. Schmitt found many enemies as possibilities for future German state friction and solidarity, notably Russia or the United States. But Judaism was a prime target. His Leviathan describes that hatred. 41.  Reinhhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 356–7. 42.  See Deborah A. Starr and Sasoon Somech, Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 43.  Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 55. 44.  Alter himself cites Esther Nathan for the claim that Bialik’s The Dead of the Desert was also influenced by Russian symbolism’s use of themes of invigorating heroes from “frozen slumber.” See Alter, Canon and Creativity, 188. In The Dead Bialik attempts a new foundation, a new mythos for the coming state of Israel. But the mythos in the poem draws from both Athens and Jerusalem. 45. Alter, Canon and Creativity, 117. 46.  Ibid., 157, 101–02. 47.  Ibid., 98 and 113. 48.  James L. Kugel, The Great Poems of the Bible (New York: Free Press, 1999), 105. 49.  Ibid., 105–06 50. Alter, Canon and Creativity, 102. 51.  Ibid., 104. 52.  Ibid., 108. 53.  Ibid., 109. 54.  Alter traces various interpretative moves to allegorize the poem where snake, lion, and eagle stand in for Israel’s historical enemies, Egypt, Babylonia, and Rome. The hybrid allegorical/mythic reading is no better, as it dissolves the haskalah into stages. See Alter, Canon and Creativity, 130–31. 55.  Dan Miron, H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Modern Mode in Hebrew Poetry (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 56.  Hanoch Levin, The Labor of Life: Selected Plays, trans. by Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 57.  Ibid., 54. 58. Ibid. 59.  Ibid., 56–57. 60.  Ibid., 69. 61.  Ibid., 77. 62.  Ibid., 91. 63. Ibid. 64.  Gnosis has historically been subject to virulent abuse. Carl Schmitt appropriated its secret with his anti-Semitism, and using Harnack, imagined the Jewish God as lessor and not binding his version of Christianity. Gnosis also can lead to disparaging this world for a beyond that therefore rationalizes the suffering and injustice in this world—the only world humanity can know.

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65.  Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).  66.  See I. L. Peretz, The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. by Ruth Wisse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 146.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Alter, Robert. Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Balentine, Samuel E. Job. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2006. Baskin, Judith R. Pharaoh’s Counselors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983. Bialik, Hayyim Nahman and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitsky, The Book of Legends. Translated by W. G. Braude. New York: Schocken, 1992. Burt, Robert A. In The Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Clines, David J. A. Job 1–20. World Biblical Commentary Volume 17. Dallas: World Books, 1989. Cohen, Arthur A. The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust. New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1981. Cooper, Alan. “Reading and Misreading the Prologue to Job.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 46 (1990): 67–79. Eisen, Robert. The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Frankfurt, Harry G. “On God’s Creation.” In Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Eleanor Stump, 128–141. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Greene, Daniel. The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Habel, Norman C. The Book of Job: Commentary. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Halbertal, Moshe. People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kallen, Horace Meyer. The Book of Job As a Greek Tragedy. New York: Moffat, Yard and Co. 1918. Kugel, James. The Great Poems of the Bible. New York: Free Press, 1999. Levenson, Jon. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Levin, Hanoch. The Labor of Life: Selected Plays. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

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Lorberbaum, Menachem. “Making Space for Leviathan: on Hobbes’ Political Theory.” Hebrew Political Studies 2:1 (Winter 2007): 78–100. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Mehring, Reinhhard. Carl Schmitt: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Miron, Dan. H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Modern Mode in Hebrew Poetry. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Nemo, Philippe. Job and the Excess of Evil. Translated by Michael Kigel. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Newsom, Carol. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pangel, Thomas L. “A Critique of Hobbes’s Critique of Biblical and Natural Religion in Leviathan.” Jewish Political Studies Review 4:2 (Fall, 1992): 25–98. Parker, Kim Ian. “That ‘Dreadful Name, Leviathan’: Biblical Resonances in the Title of Hobbes’ Famous Political Work.” Hebraic Political Studies 2:4 (Fall 2007): 424–447. Perdue, Leo G. Wisdom Literature: A Theological History. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 2007. Peretz, I. L., The I. L. Peretz Reader, edited by Ruth Wisse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Rothenberg, Jerome, Harris Lenowitz, and Charles Dora, editors. A Big Jewish Book: Poems and Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978. Roudinesco, Elizabeth. Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. Schifferdecker, Katherine. Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Schochet, Gordon, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones, editors. Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought. Jerusalem and New York: Shalem Press, 2008. Schreiner, Susan E. Where shall Wisdom be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Seow, C.L. Job 1–21: Interpretation & Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2013. Starr, Deborah A., and Sasoon Somech. Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Stoller, Robert J. Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. London: Karnac Books, 1975. Tur-Sinai, N. H. The Book of Job: A New Commentary. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1957. Zuckerman, Bruce. Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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Chapter Eight

Job: Two Endings, Three Openings1

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Alicia Ostriker

From the wellspring of the Book of Job there flows a river of living waters of opposition to authority within Judaism that has affected all of Western history. The saying “two Jews, three opinions” marks Jewish culture as a culture that values argument. Is there another major religion in which human beings habitually argue with their God? Is there another major religion so preoccupied with dissent and with issues of social justice? The idea of interrogating God has streamed through Jewish literature for centuries. In the post-Holocaust world it assumes major proportions. A rabbi in Elie Wiesel’s The Gates of the Forest announces to his fellow concentration camp inmates, “I intend to convict God of murder, for he is destroying his people and the Law he gave them from Mount Sinai. I have irrefutable proof in my hands.” In I. B. Singer’s autobiographical In My Father’s Court, the boy Isaac asks himself, “What did the Emperor of everything, the Creator of Heaven and Earth require? That he could go on watching soldiers fall on battlefields?” In Malamud’s The Fixer occurs this dialogue: “‘Yakov,’ said Shmuel passionately, ‘Don’t forget your God!’ ‘Who forgets who?’ the fixer said angrily. ‘What do I get from him but a bang on the head and a stream of piss in my face.’” Woody Allen captures an abiding pattern in Judaism when he remarks, “To you I’m an atheist. To God, I’m the loyal opposition.” Sarah Ironson, the newly deceased Yiddishe-grandma of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, concurs: “You should struggle with the Almighty.” “Azoy toot a Yid,” she adds: “It’s the Jewish way.” Like Job, the Jewish writers who challenge God typically do so in tones of acute intimacy—as if engaged in a sparring match with a powerful and crude yet somehow amenable uncle. In attempting to understand this combination of intimacy and resistance, we may remember that historical Judaism originates in a slave rebellion and an advocacy of freedom that continue to resound in the aspirations and 133

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rhetoric of oppressed people throughout the world.2 The role of the prophets includes a steady attack on the corruptions of Israelite ruling classes, sparing neither kings nor priests. Notwithstanding the centrality of ritual in the Israelite community, Isaiah, for example, is the mouthpiece of a God who two and a half millennia ago says, “I hate, I despise your offerings” and demands that his people feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and help the oppressed. Social justice as opposed to whatever authority resists it, including the authority of God himself, is a core motivation in Jewish history. Following the destruction of the second Temple and throughout the history of the Diaspora, Jewish questioning has taken at least two different forms. As a marginal population Jewish writers have been social critics; and as a people whose survival depended on a Book and not a territory they developed intellectual institutions whereby a life of continual study and constant reinterpretation of that Book was the highest vocation to which a man (though not of course a woman) could aspire. This brings me, if I may be permitted a digression, to the question of Job’s wife. If Job represents human consciousness at a moment of crisis when orthodox piety is seen to be inadequate, what does his wife represent? In the legalistic terms which are so central to the book of Job, the wife does not even exist. As Harold Schweizer points out, “Job’s wife has never owned any of the ‘seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household.’” Consequently “her suffering remains redundant,”3 of no significance to the plot. She has no name of her own to begin with, and after her furious one-liner she never appears in the text again. But when I think of the supposedly happy ending, in which Job has ten nice new sons and daughters to replace the ones God killed off on a bet, I feel I am hearing a scream thousands of years old, or as if that scream inhabits my own throat. For I too am a mother. To me, the reparation offered in the epilogue is obscene. I imagine that one day Job’s wife (that is to say, collective womankind) will gather the chutzpah to question God the way Abraham did, the way Jeremiah did, the way her husband did. I try to imagine her confrontation with God, and what she demands as reparation.4 That day is not yet, and may not be for centuries. Yet the Book of Job asks me to imagine it. Perhaps the Book of Job asks me to imagine all those who have been silenced, all who have been consigned to non-entity, at last finding their voices, at last demanding response. The poor, the illiterate, the sexually deviant, the victims of war and violence, the animals, the earth itself . . . Second, the Book of Job compels me to see God as a being who changes— and changes in response to us, dust and ashes though we are. Jung’s Answer to Job develops this idea brilliantly to explain not only the advent, but also



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the failure, of Christianity. For Jung, the God of Job, and of the Old Testament as a whole, is “the totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence. . . . He is everything in its totality; therefore, among other things, he is total justice and also its total opposite.” But Jung asserts that “a curious change . . . comes over Yahweh’s behavior after the Job episode” in which it has become clear that “Job stands morally higher than Yahweh . . . the creature has surpassed the creator” so that the latter is forced into moral consciousness and ultimately must regenerate himself by becoming Man. “The encounter with the creature changes the creator.”5 Jung goes on to argue, however, that the attempt of Christianity to imagine a purely loving God fails, as is evidenced by the bloodthirsty apocalyptic visions at the close of the New Testament. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, with our knowledge of the history of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the centuries of devastating religious wars in Europe, not to mention the Holocaust, one can only agree. Writing in the 1950s, Jung was addressing, through the Job story, the dark side of both God and man in the wake of World War II. In a more recent version of the same idea, Jack Miles in God: A Biography depicts the God of Genesis through Kings II, and on through the prophets, as a being who is “not immutable,” who changes and develops, who responds to experience, and whose response to his encounter with Job is uncanny:

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God’s last words are those he speaks to Job, the human being who dares to challenge not his physical power but his moral authority. Within the Book of Job itself, God’s climactic and overwhelming reply seems to silence Job. But reading from the end of the book of Job onward, we see that it is Job who has somehow silenced God.6

The books that follow Job in the order of the Hebrew Bible are Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. Except for a few occasions in Chronicles, which repeat material from earlier books, God is spoken of but ceases to speak, and indeed to act. For Miles, the volatile and irritable Lord who has dominated human history goes into hiding. Is it a coincidence that God’s post-Job silence seems to duplicate on a large scale what happens after Genesis 22, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, on God’s orders? Following this famous and disturbing episode, the Lord never again speaks to Abraham. Can Job’s description of himself as “dust and ashes” be intended to remind God, and the reader, that Abraham uses the same phrase of himself in his bargaining-with-God episode (Genesis 18:27)? Miles’s subsequent book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, sees the Incarnation as a consequence of God’s need to take responsibility for evil: “The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay

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for it. Mythologically read, the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it.”7 Jewish ideas of how God may change in response to Man are different and varied. In Lurianic kabbala, tikkun olam, the repair or mending of a broken world which is also a broken Godhead, depends on human acts: the performance of commandments with kavanah, focused devotion, “raises the sparks” of divine light that have been captured and hidden within the material world, hastening the coming of the Messiah, the reunion of God with his Shekhinah, and the return of the entire universe to divinity. For contemporary activists tikkun olam refers to acts of social responsibility, not the larger cosmological realm of sacred acts—and on healing, not undoing, the material world as we know it. Orthodox Jews and scholars of Judaism alike dismiss this usage of the term as wildly untraditional. Yet traditions change, traditions grow. Can we be so certain that the realm of the spirit is distinct from the realm of the body? I cling to the conviction aroused in me by the Song of Songs, and experienced by lovers in all times and places, that the distinction is unreal. If a man and wife making love on the Sabbath model and even assist the union of God and his Shekhinah, it may well be that the performance of any good deed, any kindness, any act of compassion, accomplishes a portion of divine healing. In the book of Ruth, God’s chesed and human generosity are somehow two sides of a single coin. Shakespeare’s Lear comes to a comparable insight in the storm that shows him what a poor, bare, forked creature he is, and leads him to realize that he has taken “too little care” of the humble people of his realm: “Take physic, pomp,” he cries to himself,

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Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.

Is it only Lear’s madness that makes him imagine that human ethics can “show” something about heavenly ethics? As above, so below—and, yes, the reverse as well. The greatest aperture opened by the Book of Job is the doorway of moral choice, moral responsibility. According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God’s dream is not to be alone, but to have humanity as a partner. . . . By whatever we do, by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of redemption.”8 The rabbis who created Talmud dwell on a passage in Deuteronomy that describes Torah, at the crucial moment when the Israelites were about to cross the river Jordan into the promised land: It is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear



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it and do it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (Deut. 30:11–14)

The equivalent utterance in Christian culture, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), might well be an adaptation of this passage. What did the sages think this passage portended? They believed that it was up to them to decide what Torah meant, what the Law meant. There is a charming tale about a dispute between Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eleazar. Joshua, along with a majority of rabbis, took a more liberal view of a certain law, Eleazar a more strict view. Eleazar, appealing to God to vindicate him, said that if his interpretation was right, the walls of the study hall should fall in, a carob tree should uproot itself, and water should flow backward. All these miracles happened, but Joshua had the last word, by quoting “it is not in heaven,” at which point a voice from above announced that Eleazar had lost. The majority ruled. It is said that God chuckled at this result, declaring, “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.”9 The rabbinical mind was quite able to suppose that human beings could teach God a thing or two about ethics. One of the most beautiful midrashim in Talmud tells that when Jerusalem was sacked by Babylon in 587 BCE and the people were going into exile, all the patriarchs went in turn before the Holy One in heaven to beg that he would relent and permit the Jews to return to their land. They all pleaded their merit, but God refused. Then the matriarch Rachel came before him. She reminded God that when she was betrothed to Jacob but her sister Leah was married to him by trickery she ultimately forgave her sister and they were reconciled. If she, Rachel, could overlook such a betrayal, could not God overlook the wrongdoings of Israel? God then agreed to let the people return from exile after fifty years; and it was so. Could there be a finer example of human-invented ethics producing a shift in the mind of God? Something deeply ingrained in Jewish tradition seems to tell us, almost subliminally, that we cannot ultimately rely on God for moral guidance. We are in the world, and its problems are in our lap. Hillel is the sage who responded to the Roman who asked him to define Torah while standing on one foot. “Do not do to another,” he is said to have replied, “what you do not want done to yourself. That is the whole of the law. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.” He was also responsible for one of my favorite Jewish sayings: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? and if not now, when?” The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai may have had a similar idea in his early poem, “God has Pity on Kindergarten Children.” The poem begins with what sounds like pious faith, and turns tragic almost immediately:

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God has pity on kindergarten children. He has less pity on school children And on grownups he has no pity at all.10

But then it turns again, from what God will and won’t do for us into a survey of what we sometimes do for ourselves: crawl on all fours through the sand to the first-aid station. But perhaps, Amichai speculates, God will take pity on true lovers. Perhaps we too can do so, enabling their happiness to protect us. At the very end of his life, in “When I die,” Amichai imagines women washing his body, “And one of them will sing God Full of Mercy . . . to remind God that mercy is born of the womb.”11 Smilingly mocking the law by which men’s dead bodies must be washed by men, Amichai invites us to ponder the fact that the term rachmanes, mercy or compassion, a major attribute of the Holy One, is a cognate of the word for womb. “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue” (Deut. 13:20). Someone must choose justice. Someone must define it. If not we, who? In the Book of Job, God is unable to choose justice until Job challenges him—and even then we may remain skeptical. Is the restoration of one man’s fortunes and the provision of ten new children to replace ten murdered ones a sufficient answer to the evil and suffering in the world? Does it take care of human poverty, war, violence, and greed? It may be that the Holy One waits for us to issue our challenge. Perhaps God does not know how to be just until human beings demand it. Then he knows. Then he responds. Or perhaps, after all, what we name “God” is merely the laws of physics, the magnificent laws of physics, and then the adorable laws of biology. And finally, circuit by ticking circuit through the neural nets, the exquisite laws of conscience. Conscience, gradually evolving. Here is something that may finally command belief.

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NOTES 1.  This essay was previously published in Alicia Ostriker, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 134–42, and has been revised slightly for this publication. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press. 2.  See Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 3. Harold Schweizer, Suffering and the Remedy of Art (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 73. 4.  My fantasy regarding Job’s wife is in The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 235–40. The experience of having this fantasy in the fall of 1986 triggered the wrestling with the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition I have subsequently undertaken. Several passages in the present chapter are lifted from that book.



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5.  Carl Jung, Answer to Job (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9–10, 42–43, 66. 6.  Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996), 11. 7.  Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Random House, 2001), 12. 8.  Quoted as epigraph to Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). 9. See Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, eds., The Book of Legends/Sefer Ha-Aggadah: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash (New York: Schocken Books, 1992), 223. 10.  Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poetry (New York: Viking, 1986), 1. 11.  Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open: Poems (Boston: Mariner Books, 2006), 113.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Amichai, Yehuda. Open Closed Open: Poems. Boston, ME: Mariner Books, 2006. ———. Selected Poetry. New York: Viking, 1986. Jung, Carl. Answer to Job. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Lerner, Michael. Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Miles, Jack. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. New York: Random House, 2001. ———. God: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1996. Ostriker, Alicia. For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. ———. The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Schweizer. Harold. Suffering and the Remedy of Art. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997. Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

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Part III

CLINGING TO GOD

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THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

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Chapter Nine

The Repersonalization of God Monism and Theological Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination Jay Michaelson

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If, to the human mind’s imaginings, silence and solitude were vacancy?

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—Shelley, Mont Blanc

Histories of theology—of imagination, reason, myth, value, history, norm, and language—can themselves become a kind of theology. To many reflecting on the development of human theological imagination—Maimonides, Hegel, Aurobindo, James—there is a directionality, even a telos, to the story. Spirit comes to know itself; consciousness awakens to itself; reason displaces myth; and thus, the old ways of the past are improved upon, even transcended—even discarded. Sometimes, such supersessionism appears within theological discourses themselves, which posit a previous iteration supplanted as part of a Divine plan. The New Testament replaces the Old. The revelation of Judaism replaces the error of idolatry. “Long, long ago our forefathers were worshippers of idols. Now the Eternal is our God and we worship Him,” begins the Haggadah ascribed to Rav.1 Other times, however, theological discourses hang suspended between tradition and innovation, and insist that the new was actually present in the old—as in Maimonides, who preserves the authority of the mythic text by emptying it of literal meaning and replacing it with his allegorical interpretation, or as in pseudoepigraphic literature, which insists that a medieval innovation is Talmudic, or a Talmudic innovation is biblical. Bound by the authority of sacred text, theological discourses often deploy radical hermeneutical strategies to accommodate conservative textual traditions that they are, in fact, supplanting. A fascinating variation on this theme occurs in certain Kabbalistic remythologizations of anthropomorphic theology, which at once accommodate 143

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theological innovation and reject it in an ostensible return to earlier mythic norms. Paradoxically, Zoharic and Hasidic texts insist on their monistic, nondualistic theologies, but accompany them not with Zen-like iconoclasm or Maimonidean supercession but by radically polymorphous depictions of the Divine. Precisely where one might expect to find the least anthropomorphic and mythic language—in the context of nonduality—one finds the most. And all of this is accomplished by a radically syncretic theological move, insisting that the singular Divine is incomplete without plural manifestation, and that monotheism is not the entire theological reality. This essay focuses on how these texts conceptualize the relationship between what might be termed polymorphous theology—ways of speaking about the Divine that are ornate, elaborate, rich in symbol and myth—and nonduality. I begin by tracing four modes of Jewish theological imagination: henotheism, ethical monotheism, rationalism, and monism. Next, I turn to a small selection of Zoharic and Hasidic texts to explore the surprising ways in which these theological currents are accommodated. Insisting on both a (nearly) heretofore unknown radical monism and a radical explosion of theological polymorphism, Zoharic literature at once retrieves the henotheistic language of myth, and proposes a monism more radical even than that of the philosophers. And later, the Hasidic masters of Chabad at once fashion a rigorous monism and insist that the greatest “unity” occurs in the diversity of manifestation. Finally, I argue that the theological radicalism of those texts, which incorporates the greatest avodah zara of all—polytheism—within a nondualistic framework, does more than merely accommodate earlier mythic conceptions of the Divine. It provides a post-philosophical permission for the overwhelming majority of Zoharic textuality, itself a recovery and perhaps reification of myth. Not only are we never done with “earlier” strata of theological imagination, but precisely in the locations one might expect them to be cast aside, they are returned to center stage. The supercessionist model of one theology displacing another is thus itself replaced by a more permissive and inclusive theological imagination which might, in the contemporary moment, promote a horizontal as well as vertical pluralism. USABLE PASTS Long, Long Ago “Who is like unto you, YHVH, among the gods?” asks Exodus 15:11, suggesting on its face that other gods exist, notwithstanding the later commentators who protest that elim merely means “the mighty,” as in mighty earthly



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rulers. This is what Schelling usefully labeled henotheism, the belief system that holds that while there is one supreme God, there may be other gods as well, lesser but real—defeated by YHVH, to be sure, but still capable of putting up a fight.2 Henotheism was a theology of the multiple. “Idolatry” is so readily scorned in biblical literature—“They have mouths, but cannot speak; eyes, but cannot see”3—that one may forget the biblical period’s multiplicity of competing theologies. There were, at the very least, many ways to understand the braggadocio of Exodus, but it was certainly not bragging to an empty room. Our God defeats theirs in battle. Our God defiles the totems of theirs. This is a time of power. Monotheism in the sense of one God only had only recently awakened; biblical religion maintains within it the not-yet-shed vestiges of polytheism. YHVH is different in degree, but not unique in kind. As is well known, some of the oldest artifacts of Israelite civilization are statues of YHVH and his Asherah. The “High Places” torn down by Josiah (e.g., 2 Kings 18:4, 2 Kings 23:19) have been discovered and excavated. The myth that the Bible is bragging to an empty room has been utterly undone by archeology. Yahweh is the strongest of the gods, but other potencies exist as well. There is magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, all of which are efficacious— they are banned by biblical law not because they are false, but because they might be true. There are other gods, defeated in battle. And there are other gods venerated right alongside the Israelite one. Whether one imagines one’s spiritual ancestors among the priestly elite who destroyed the pillars of Asherah, or among those who constructed them, the scandalous henotheism of ancient biblical strata can scarcely be denied, even if it can be avoided.

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A Blessing or a Curse Henotheism, its plurality and magic, its cultic observances, is of course challenged by biblical texts with different theological agendas. Sometimes, this challenge takes the form of a direct rebuttal to henotheistic tendencies within biblical religion itself. For example, speaking of ritual fasting without ethical transformation, the God of Isaiah 58:5 asks rhetorically, “Is this the fast I desire?” Well, yes, according to other biblical traditions. In 2 Samuel 12:15–17, King David fasts for petitionary purposes. Ezra 8:21–23 suggests that fasting can bring divine protection. Daniel fasts to receive prophecy. Fasting is magical, it is talismanic, it is efficacious. The writer of Isaiah imagines the act as valuable for ethical refinement; we fast to introspect, to improve, to atone. But Isaiah’s ethical auditing of the pre-ethical power of magic is to misunderstand

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(deliberately?) the worldview of henotheism, magic, and “pagan” conceptions of power. Consider, as another example, the reluctant prophet Jonah, who unwillingly persuades the evil Ninevites (responsible for the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel) to repent. The Ninevites practice repentance as magic: they fast, and have their animals fast as well (Jonah 3:7). Like the sailors on Jonah’s boat who each pray to their own deities, the Ninevites understand YHVH as a henotheistic power god, stronger than others but capable of being appeased. To Jonah, they don’t “get it”—the “it” being the transition from fasting as magic to fasting as spur to conscience and behavior change. The final irony, of course, is that God’s rebuke to Jonah is that God cares for these 120,000 idiots—and their animals as well (Jonah 4:11). Ethical monotheism rejects henotheism as much as it does polytheism— and with it, the possibility of magical power. The God of ethical monotheistic imagination makes a different set of claims from the God of henotheism: a sole, solitary deity; a transcendent order; and the authority to demand according to a single truth. No more ritual self-starvation to appease the power gods—now, the One God demands righteousness and exclusivity. Awkwardly, the God created by the Bible’s fusion of henotheism and monotheism is jealous (henotheism) of other gods that do not actually exist (monotheism). He is jealous of a phantom, an illusion. Even if popular writers are right that ethical monotheism is the great Israelite gift to the world, its absolute morality leads inevitably to fundamentalism. There can be only one God, one chosen people; one God, one prophet; one God, one way to access Him (see, e.g., John 14:6). To a contemporary ear, the monotheistic God has liberal-seeming social values (feed the hungry, aid the poor) and conservative-seeming moral ones (absolute morality, right and wrong, us versus them). He is Blake’s Urizen, erasing the libertine Proverbs of Hell. This is both the God who commands the pursuit of justice and the God who hates fags, because both are consequences of the transcendent order (“natural law”) of which the One God is the only Creator. Perhaps this is why the imagined paganisms of pre-monotheistic history have such appeal for contemporary spiritual seekers: because the monotheistic God is, in much of the Western world anyway, still in charge, still smiting, still hurling thunderbolts. Can one blame today’s “pagans” for imagining a usable past that predates the imperialism of God? And not only New Agers; one might also see in Scholem’s move to mystical counter-history the anarchist impulse to overthrow the imperious sky god from his perch (together with His appointed messengers) and propose that earlier, less authoritarian elements persisted throughout Jewish history. And indeed, we will see shortly that Scholem was correct that the myths of henotheism did endure—despite the monotheistic attempts to audit them out of existence.

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Metaphor

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The term regel has many meanings. First, it signifies the foot of a living being. Next it denotes an object which follows another: “And all the people that follow thee” (l’raglecha) (Exod. 11:18). Another signification of the word is “cause,” as in “And the Lord has blessed thee, I being the cause” (l’ragli) (Gen. 3:30). Consequently, the Hebrew text, of which the literal rendering is “And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives” (Zech. 14:4) can be explained in the following way: “And the things caused by him (raglav) on that day upon the Mount of Olives,” i.e. the wonders which will then be understood.4

And then the auditing continues. If Isaiah rereads henotheistic magical texts as actually monotheistic ethical ones, then Maimonides rereads theistic imagination itself as a merely pedagogical tool of reason. Maimonides’s conundrum is well known: It is impossible for the anthropomorphic God to coexist with reason, but it is unthinkable that the canonical text is incorrect. Therefore, no non-anthropomorphic interpretation is too far-fetched, because no interpretation is as far-fetched as the possibility that the sacred text is wrong. Of course, Maimonides does not explicitly state that the rational readings of words (that regel indicates causality, for example) are the only ones— rather that there are many meanings to the word, and this is one of them. In theory, Maimonides, unlike Isaiah, maintains the earlier stratum of textual meaning. But to the philosopher whom Maimonides addresses himself in the Guide, it is clear that the non-anthropomorphic one is correct and the others are of merely pedagogical or metaphorical value. The Torah speaks on multiple levels, and the philosopher understands that the lower levels are merely figures of speech, or rather, methods of communication to those not yet aware that, of course, God does not have legs. Ironically, Maimonides’s reason is itself an act of imaginative rereading—and a stretched one at that, imputing his distinctive pedagogy to texts which, even he must surely have suspected, predated both the substance and process of Aristotelian philosophy. The imputation of the rational is itself imaginative. It is also still common today. The ten plagues may be scientifically explained. The laws of kashrut are laws of hygiene. The taninim are the dinosaurs. Even the crossing of the Red Sea can be explained with recourse to meteorology. Such rationalistic readings of biblical legend often have an apologetic purpose, to defend the seemingly supernatural to the scientifically minded (including, first and foremost, the one doing the defending). But they are possessed of the same irony: explaining away imagination, by an act of imagination. By way of personal anecdote, I recall reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in high school, and wondering how it was possible for a civilization of intelligent people to actually believe that constellations were

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transmuted heroes and that gods lived up on a tall mountain. This, after all, is how idolatry had been explained in my Jewish education: peh lahem v’lo yedaberu—they have mouths but speak not (Psalm 115:5). In college, reading the Iliad, I wondered if I had misunderstood the world of the mythological, since in Homer, Athena seems more like a spirit of wisdom who enters into the heart of the hero than some separately-ontologically-existing goddess who shows up now and then. Now I “understood” that the gods on Olympus were mythical depictions of psychological realities, and far from being less sensible than the One God of monotheism, they resonated more with actual experiences of being “taken over” by love, lust, anger, or flashes of wisdom. Some days Dionysus, some days Apollo. This reading made sense of the text, but what kind of sense, and to whom? Psychologization is yet another modern technique for translating the pre-rational into the rational, flattening the otherness of the text while attempting to harmonize, syncretize, and explain. Perhaps the most absurd manifestations of this tendency are found in pseudoscientific discourses such as “Intelligent Design,” which seek to harmonize biblical teaching with an imagined aspect of scientific discourse, or perhaps scientific-sounding rhetoric. But they are not different in kind from the apologetics of Maimonides and nineteenth-century Reformers—or, for that matter, homiletical psychoanalyses of Moses’ inferiority complex and the family dynamics of the patriarchs and matriarchs offered in religious contexts as “uncovering” the “depth” of the Torah, as if that depth is excavated rather than projected. The stilted dialogue of this literature (some of which has sold in the millions) betrays a psychological anachronism. But the same movement of imagination is also found in respectable, even inspiring, biblical parshanut. Rather than encounter the alien otherness of the sacred text, the interpreter substitutes a familiar inner landscape. All of these erasures are actually two instances of a similar enterprise: the creation of a “usable past.”5 That effort implicitly (and correctly) supposes that the past, in itself, is not particularly useful. We have no idea what it is to be an Iron Age Canaanite, and even if we did, what good would it do? Thus philosophy (even if it does not quite erase the non-philosophical meanings of the text, as part of Maimonides’s project of concealment6) and psychoanalytic readings substitute their meanings for unknowable past ones, replacing earlier strata with more “developed” ones. Unlike Midrash, this act of imagination is, we might say, an imperial one. It colonizes the text, replacing its values (known or unknown) with those of the interpreter. Such exercises of imperial imagination are so widespread that we take them for granted. Even the most benign pastoral attempts to “explain” biblical text in readily understandable terms (scientific, philosophical, psychological, whatever) are often erasures of biblical imagination rather than accommoda-



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tions of it. Some passages put up more resistance than others—it is hard to psychoanalyze the sprinkling of blood—but all may be translated somehow, which is to say, re-imagined, de-imagined. MONISM AND POST-MONISM

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Zoharic Theosophical Accommodationism Among the plenitude of post-Maimonidean Jewish theological positions, we turn now to monism and post-monism. In Aurobindo’s imagining of theological history, and the various forms of quasi-scholarly syncretism (including “the perennial philosophy” and some naïve readings of James) that have come in his wake,7 this turn is, itself, a supercession: Monism is said to be the summation of all prior theological thinking. It has also been argued, again theologically, that monism, despite its commitment to the immanence of the Divine, is a further philosophical step of depersonalization. First multiple spirits in nature, then one spirit in the sky to rule them, then one spirit only, then not even a “spirit” but an abstract and non-anthropomorphic principle, and then, finally, everything. By becoming everything, God becomes even more like nothing; by becoming infinitely present, God becomes infinitely distant. But not only do I not wish to make such claims, I wish to show how monistic texts themselves rebut them. To be sure, monism does appear, on the Jewish theological scene, shortly after the spread of medieval rationalist philosophy.8 But monism appears in medieval Kabbalistic texts within and alongside radically non-monistic, mythic theological utterances. On the one hand, the new and audacious doctrine of the Ein Sof beyond the sefirot seems to create a kind of conceptual space for a quasi-philosophical Godhead lying beyond the sefirotic pleroma that not only behaves according to the Maimonidean One, but goes beyond its philosophical structure and into a panentheistic monism. And yet on the other hand, theosophical Kabbalah rejects Aristotelian conceptions of the One as accounting for the entirety of the Godhead and devotes far more attention to the multiple; the God of the sefirot changes, shifts in and out of balance, and is amenable to theurgical praxis. The symbolic structures of Zoharic Kabbalah thus attempt an accommodation of both philosophy and myth. Some of the earliest strata of what might be termed theosophical accommodationism appear in the work of Saadia Gaon, whose conception of the kavod nivra is one of the earliest presentations of an emanation that both is and is not Divine.9 The kavod nivra exists to solve the same problem as the Maimonidean rereading of sacred text: the scandal of anthropomorphism. But

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it does so in a very different way. As the name implies, the kavod nivra is a created entity, and has physical attributes. At the same time, it is the bearer of Divine revelation—the image of the Divine as glimpsed by prophets. For Saadia, unlike for Maimonides, the theophanies of the Bible are not metaphorical; they are actual revelations. But they are revelations of (or conveyed by) the kavod nivra. Anticipating the functions of the sefirot, Saadia’s mythic innovation exists to solve a similar problem to Maimonides’s: how to maintain both a philosophical God and an anthropomorphic revelation. A similar structure exists in the Zoharic corpus, which differentiates between (and yet insists on the unity of) the Ein Sof and the sefirot. As with Saadia Gaon’s kavod nivra, the theosophical Kabbalistic system of the sefirot preserves both the Oneness of the Divine and the henotheistic and monotheistic mythic realities (not metaphorical or allegorical) not just of revelation, but of all manner of Divine emotions, attributes, and actions. Together with the partzufim, the anthropomorphic speculations of the Idra Rabba, the Zoharic modality of theurgic parallel (“as above, so below”) and other conceptualizations of Divine plurality, the sefirot create a theological polymorphism that is even more radically diverse than henotheism and anthropomorphic monotheism, precisely because it has granted itself “permission” since in the end, kula chada, all is one, anyway. Yet even as theosophical Kabbalah magnifies and multiplies the polymorphism of Divine plurality, it intensifies the insistence on Divine unity. Not only monotheism but monism becomes a mantra of this literature. “God fills all the worlds and surrounds all the worlds” (memaleh kol almin u’sovev kol almin), the Zohar says many times.10 The same corpus of texts thus includes both a radical monism and an entire symbolic structure of multiplicity and complexity: the pleroma of the sefirot, the repeated angelology from Hechalot and Merkavah texts, myths, rabbis with magical powers, anthropomorphism, correspondences. These multiplicities enable the engine of Zoharic theurgy to run. Psychological complexity is not dissolved, but projected onto the Divine. The many correspondences between “below” and “above” depend upon the complexity of both. But what is the theoretical basis, if any, for this phenomenon? One of the most famous Zoharic texts on this question occurs in the introductory material to the Zohar, at Zohar 1:2a. The well-known text begins by quoting perhaps the quintessential utterance of conventional religion, Isaiah 40:26, which exhorts “Look at the stars and ask who created these? (mi bara eleh)” This, as Heschel would later articulate, is the Romantic birthplace of religious consciousness: the human gazes skyward, is awestruck, and is moved to ponder who created the stars—mi bara eleh.



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The Zohar, of course, rejects this conventional interpretation and goes in an entirely different direction, interpreting mi (who) and eleh (these) as referring to Binah and the seven lower sefirot, the singular/hidden and plural/manifest aspects of the Divine. I quote the passage here in Daniel Matt’s translation:

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When the Concealed of all Concealed verged on being revealed, it produced at first a single point, which ascended to become thought. Within, it drew all drawings, engraved all engravings, carving within the concealed holy lamp a graving of one hidden design, holy of holies, a deep structure emerging from thought called Mi, origin of structure. Existent and non-existent, deep and hidden, called by no name but Mi. Seeking to be revealed, to be named, it garbed itself in a splendid radiant garment and created Eleh. Eleh attained the name: these letters joined with those, culminating in the name Elohim. Until it created Eleh, it did not attain the name Elohim. Based on this mystery, those who sinned with the Golden Calf said Eleh Elohim Yisrael. . . . Through this mystery, the universe exists.11

Inside this bit of Kabbalistic wordplay are a number of profound shifts in the relationship of Jewish thought to the question of immanence. The Divine name Elohim is normally understood as a cognomen of Binah. Here, however, Elohim is split into two aspects: Mi, the concealed, and Eleh, the revealed “garment.” Only the two together—the concealed and the revealed, the transcendent and the immanent—constitutes Elohim. Moreover, eleh is, of course, the plural, and carries with it the resonance of the Golden Calf, and Aaron’s pronouncement of eleh elohim yisrael, “Here are your gods o Israel.” Elsewhere in the Zoharic literature, eleh is a stand-in for polytheism and idolatry in general. (It may also, as Yehuda Liebes once said to me, be a punning reference to Allah.) So, what this passage is saying is that God is not God (or at least, Elohim is not Elohim) without both the singular and the plural—perhaps, we might gloss, the monistic and the polytheistic. Each aspect is half of the total. God is not complete without idolatry? For the Zohar, this is not a unique pronouncement. Zohar I:49a, to take but one example, states that the letter Heh (cognomen of Malchut) “is called Asherah, after the name of its spouse, Asher,” and that the prohibition on planting an Asherah is actually just a prohibition on planting a second altar next to the one already established. The ban on the name Asherah is only temporary, while the Shechinah is in exile: “this one is not ‘called happy’ by other nations, and another nation is set up in its place.” And indeed, the altar of avodah zara may even be more authentic or appropriate than the built one: “the real altar is one that is made of earth, as it is written, ‘An altar of earth you shall make for me.’”12

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Surely, however, for the overwhelming majority of Jewish theistic imagination, not to mention legal norm, it remains quite a jarring proposition to state that absolute, singular monistic or monotheistic transcendence is equally right and equally wrong as polytheistic/henotheistic, plural immanence. This is not the supercessionist “our ancestors used to worship idols, but now we set them aside and worship God,” as in the Talmudic excerpt quoted earlier. Rather, it is “our ancestors used to worship idols, but they were only half right. Now we include both the polytheistic and the monotheistic.” That radical non-supercessionism maintains not only henotheism but polytheism itself as an equally correct half-description of the Divine reality. If the Elohim of this Zoharic passage is made up both of singular (mi) and plural (eleh), hidden and manifest, transcendent and immanent, then the monism it reflects attempts an integration (or perhaps merely juxtaposition) both of a radically anti-materialistic monotheism and a radically materialistic polytheism/ polymorphism. This post-monism is not simply “All is One”; it is a nonduality that comprises duality and unity, monotheism and polytheism.

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Hasidic Nondualism A second instance of post-monistic theological accommodationism occurs in Chabad Hasidism, which insists upon yesh and ayin,13 form and emptiness, as the two inseparable aspects of the nondual reality. Even more than the Zoharic statements above, the more radically monistic utterances of Chabad Hasidism articulate a monism so rich that it becomes theologically problematic for normative Judaism. Historically, as with Zoharic monism, there are many possible reasons for this development in Early Hasidism. Perhaps the slide toward a radical acosmic monism has its own momentum. Perhaps the exhaustion in Sabbateanism of the theologically polymorphous aspects of Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalah led to the subsequent radicalization of the monistic ones; perhaps early Hasidic masters had grown dubious of the baroque sefirotic formulae of Lurianic and Sabbatean Kabbalah, and thus turned instead to a simpler radical monism. Or perhaps (though I think this is more likely true of neo-Hasidism than of Hasidism itself) this turn coincides with the emphasis on ecstatic experience as contrasted with abstruse speculation. Though Dov Ber of Lubavitch clucks his tongue at the delusions of ordinary people believing they are experiencing bittul hayesh,14 there is nonetheless a congruity between a ready form of ecstatic experience and the more radical acosmic monism that became prevalent, especially in early Chabad. Perhaps the “pneumatic experience” of early Hasidism, with its unitive phenomenology, led to an increased forthrightness regarding the monistic consequences of the doctrine of the Ein Sof.



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For whatever reason, Chabad Hasidic texts are particularly straightforwardly monistic. The Tanya, for example, says: There is no change at all: just as God was alone before the creation of the world, so God is alone after it was created. And so it is written, “You were the same before the world was created; You have been the same” without any change in God’s essence or knowledge.15

This is indeed a radical monism: here explicitly, God is the only thing that is. The world itself becomes imaginary, and the imagined God is the only thing that is real. There is not even a Cordoverian rock “filled by Divinity”—there is no rock at all, since God is alone, now as before creation. R. Schneur Zalman is equally straightforward about his rereading of sacred text. Unlike Maimonides’s rhetorical ambiguity, the Tanya straightforwardly and univocally interprets theistic text in a monistic way. For example, here is the Tanya’s rereading of Deuteronomy 4:35—“And know this day, and take it unto your heart, that YHVH is God, there is nothing [or none] else beside Him”:

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It was necessary for Scripture to warn, “And know this day and take it unto your heart” and so on, so that it should not enter your mind that the heavens and all their hosts and the earth and all that fills it is a separate thing in itself, but that the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the whole world like a soul clothed in a body.16

R. Schneur Zalman takes as a given that ein od milvado does not mean there is no other god but God—surely, the reading which accords with the Biblical imagination we touched on earlier—but that there is nothing at all besides God. Perhaps taking a cue from Maimonides, he goes even further in positing a pedagogical method in holy writ. Not only is the Torah stating that nothing exists beside God, but it is emphasizing that contemplative practice of the mind and heart is necessary to thoroughly absorb its truth. The Torah is not simply stating the truth; it is prescribing the method for understanding it. The Alter Rebbe’s foremost disciple, Rabbi Aharon of Staroselse, has a much more detailed and rigorous theology, though it takes place generally within R. Schneur Zalman’s general contours. Yet R. Aharon is somewhat more evasive: In truth, the worlds do not have any essence of their own, because everything is God’s blessed power alone, and in truth there is nothing devoid of God and nothing beside God whatsoever. And all the worlds which appear to be are only from the side of concealment in yesh which appears to be, but in truth everything is his power without any change.17

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Notice here, in R. Aharon’s simultaneously rigorous and evasive quasiphilosophical reasoning, a certain ambivalence regarding the more radical acosmism of his teacher. On the one hand, there is “nothing beside God whatsoever.” On the other hand, the worlds do have at least an appearance from the perspective of yesh, and perhaps a manifestation atop their nonexistent essence. Even in R. Aharon, there seems a reluctance to forthrightly state that the apparent world is pure illusion. This is the case throughout R. Aharon’s corpus, which, at great length, attempts to square the circle of panentheistic monism on the one hand, and the polymorphous world of the sefirot on the other. Radical panentheism has the same potentially world-denying trajectory of transcendent monotheism. Maimonides, for example, is at pains to justify the continued observance of the mitzvot for essentially pedagogical reasons: although no longer necessary for the philosopher’s own enlightenment, the philosopher recognizes that they are still essential for that of others. But this is an instrumentalist hedge; conveniently, the only people who have transcended the need for physical commandments are also the ones who see their continued communal importance. The commandments, as part of the world of form more generally, have no intrinsic value. A similar conundrum is present in some Hasidic texts. For example, consider this perplexing parable from the Keter Shem Tov:18 You should understand regarding the Holy Blessed One, that the whole earth is filled with his glory, and there is no place devoid of God. Wherever a person is, the Glorious Blessed One is found there. So why must his prayers be received by angels that go from heavenly palace to heavenly palace, and so on? A parable: There was a wise and great king, and he built an illusion [achizat einayim] of walls and towers and gates. And he commanded that people should walk with him by means of the gates and castles, and commanded that treasures of the king be scattered at every gate, so one could walk to one gate and back, and so on. But when his beloved son tried hard to go to his father the king, he saw there was no barrier separating him and his father, because all was illusion. And the meaning is clear: that the Holy Blessed One fills the earth with His glory, and every movement or thought is from Him. Even the angels and the palaces all are created from His blessed essence.

The parable begins with what is, by the time of its composition, the standard refrain for Jewish panentheism: melo chol ha’aretz k’vodo, understood in its theologically nondual sense, and ein od milvado, understood in the same way (the latter phrase has recently become a popular Israeli bumper sticker). The same question we have posed here is then asked: If the Divine is everywhere, what is the meaning of the (mythic) doctrine that angels relay prayers? Surely, if God is right here, no intermediary is needed.

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The answer provided is enigmatic. A king builds a “deception of the eyes”— very well, the world is all illusion. The king uses the illusion in order to become finite, to relate to the people walking within it and finding “treasures of the king” throughout; thus, most people relate to the Divine in dualistic terms. Only the sage (the son) sees through the illusion—notably, not because of his philosophical acumen but because of his desire and devotion (he “tried hard”). Does the son still make use of the gates and castles, the angels and palaces? It seems that he does not—or at least, the parable does not say. The answer to the question posed by the text is that prayers must be relayed because of the finitude of human consciousness, which can be transcended through devotion. Note, though, that if the gates and castles are transcended, so are the “treasures.” What, then, for a religion committed to the value of those treasures?19 Arguably, even the Tanya’s imagery is susceptible to many interpretations. God fills the world as the soul clothed in a body? But the body exists, and is other than the soul. Is that the case for the world and God? If Elohim is Hateva, as the Tanya elsewhere states, does that mean that the natural world is Elohim—glossed as the constricting aspect of Gevurah? Or is there some reality to the physical world that is similar to the reality of the body to that of the soul? Of inferior ontic status, to be sure, but nonetheless an existent. Even at what I would propose are the outer reaches of pre-twentieth-century Jewish monism, there exists a tension with more traditional, or at any rate older, forms of theological imagination. One wonders if R. Schneur Zalman in fact believed that Deuteronomy meant for its audience to set monism upon their hearts, or if there was an understanding that the Ein Sof was one way of seeing, the pshat deity of the Torah another. The seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe offers another solution to the crisis of worldly meaninglessness in the face of the Divine omnipresence by expanding on Chabad’s concepts of dirah b’tachtonim and avodah b’gashmiut,20 that the Divine dwells below, and that materiality is the site of worship. For R. Schneersohn, the highest unification takes place on the lowest rung of existence21 precisely because there the plurality, as well as the unity, is seen as God. This is similar to the Zoharic insistence that eleh is not to be transcended but is, in fact, essential to the completion of the Divine. Here, the summum bonum is not an abandonment of mochin d’katnut but a progression from it, to more and more episodes of mochin d’gadlut (here R. Aharon again makes use of the metaphor from Ezekiel of ratzo v’shov, running and returning), to, finally, a paradoxical unification on the unitive and the non-unitive. It may be debated to what extent this move is philosophically tenable. It may simply be a retreat into a kind of unresolved paradox: Nirvana is samsara, and that’s that. As theological imagination, however, it results in a rich Hasidic immanentism about which Shaul Magid has lately written22 in terms

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of the notion that the transcendent may be “incarnated” (in Magid’s understanding of the term) in the finite. It also stands, conceptually, as an “answer” to world-negation,23 though perhaps not quite the seed of a world-affirming humanistic mysticism, in Buber’s memorable (if somewhat aspirational) presentation.24 Such an answer may not have been necessary, sociologically speaking. In practice, even the more quietistic trends in mysticism generally coexisted with the normative traditional life of engagement with the world. One must search hard for exceptions (e.g., the Kotsker Rebbe, possibly). Generally, the householder orientation of mainstream Judaism, the orientation of many mitzvot toward justice and societal harmony, the commitment to traditional theism of God involved in the world, and a traditionalist rejection of rationalist monotheism all, no doubt, contribute to this phenomenon. The juxtaposition of the transcendent mi with the immanent eleh is more than a mere theological coincidence. Enabled by a monistic permissiveness, in contrast to a monotheistic restrictiveness, Jewish panentheisms allow for mythic-theological expressions that have scandalized traditionalists for centuries, even in their non-heretical forms. Indeed, as I shall shortly suggest, it is possible that the traditionalists are right to be concerned. Perhaps the juxtaposition of polymorphism and monism is a theological solution to a sociological question, more than a textual or philosophical one. Today, however, that solution may be of interest for other reasons.

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POSTMODERN PANENTHEISTIC MESSIANISMS In this concluding section, I wish to explore one contemporary aspect of these theologies of both/and for constructing “vertical” (that is, temporal, within traditions) and “horizontal” (that is, among traditions) pluralisms in a postmodern context. First, as contemporary readers of theologically imaginative texts, we are apt to re-psychologize or re-metaphorize the mythic images they propose, even if we have no apologetic interest and are simply trying to comprehend them phenomenologically. Indeed, it is perhaps hard even to imagine the non-psychological and non-metaphorical understandings of such texts. Was the Divine family of zeer anpin, arich anpin, et al., ever “really” meant to exist as a set of ontological entities? Or was it always understood to be a symbol, as Scholem seemed to propose, seen-through by the theistic as well as the non-theistic imagination? Notwithstanding the persistence of religious fundamentalisms in our own day, with all their unreflexive reification of psychological events into ontological certitudes, it seems difficult today even to imagine the serious belief in the literal. This is perhaps understandable: In the



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series of imaginings that constitute Western theology, the contingent nature of human consciousness seems refracted through the historical circumstances which birth its most elaborate inventions. That which lies beyond the cone of historical conception is quite literally unimaginable—one is reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous utterance that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic. Notwithstanding its claims to universality, theology remains within the penumbra of the conceivable. Thus myth becomes nothing more than a manner of speaking. But is that all? By way of replying in the negative, I suggest a quick comparative look at a very different post-monistic theosophical polymorphism: Advaita Vedanta. Vedanta—or, more properly, the “Neo-Vedanta” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—faced similar, albeit distant, social and ideological challenges to those addressed by Zoharic Kabbalah and Hasidism. NeoVedanta, like the Zoharic material, sought to reconcile a mythic (poly-) theism with monism; and it, like the Hasidic sources, sought to reconcile worldly engagement with the view that life is but a dream. So, on the one hand, Vivekananda tells the seeker that “You, as body, mind, or soul, are a dream, but what you really are, is Existence, Knowledge, Bliss. You are the God of this universe. You are creating the whole universe and drawing it in.”25 But on the other hand, Vivekananda also maintained a vivid Hindu polytheism (though arguably, not as devotionalistic as Ramakrishna’s) and the worldly activism that would bring his monism to the West, where it heavily influenced twentieth-century Western spirituality, the New Age, the 1960s rhetoric of “all is one,” and, among many other outgrowths, third wave neo-Hasidism. Vivekananda’s teacher Ramakrishna offered a similarly multiperspectival solution to the question of monism and theism: When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive—neither creating nor preserving nor destroying—I call him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active—creating, preserving, and destroying—I call Him Shakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and the Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion . . . The Divine Mother and Brahman are one.26

Ramakrishna’s claim that the impersonal God and the personal God are mere differences in conception (“When I think of the Supreme Being . . .”) gives a kind of ontological permission to the vast and ornate Hindu pleroma, and to engagements with the world that marked both Ramakrishna’s and Vivekananda’s own spiritual careers. Given that everything is one, it can more readily be multiple.

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As Jeffrey Kripal has described in depth, such post-monisms enable a specific kind of world-affirmation in a postmodern capitalist-spiritual marketplace: a coexistence of this-worldly humanism (or consumerism) with the claim to spiritual awakening, by way of the Tantric notion that enlightenment is to be found within the world, rather than beyond it.27 It is easy to critique the flaccidity of a have-your-cake-and-it-eat-too contemporary spirituality that accommodates yogic techniques to fitness regimens and meditation to corporate boardrooms. Yet that same malleability is a kind of ontological pluralism which enables social engagement, multiple modes of relationship, and the multiplicitous nature of worldly occupations. This kind of post-monism also allows for a certain kind of imaginative theological freedom that is polysemous with respect to “God” and thus antithetical to theological rigidity. The projections of the human imagination are now given a space to play, as it were. Different “stages” of theological imagination are not superseded, with the older contorted into the newer, or the newer read backwards into a preposterous past, but accommodated, given place. The henotheism of the Bible, both YHVH the sky god and the deities he defeats in battle, is part of the eleh which is part of the proper conception of the Elohim. The spiritual food pyramid, with whatever one’s particular theological position is conveniently placed at the top, is replaced by a rejection of diminishment. It is also possible to imagine a horizontal pluralism accompanying these vertical ones. Of course, traditional texts maintain the qualitative difference between Judaism and everything else; notoriously, the same Tanya that advances radical monism also advances an ontological difference between Jewish souls and non-Jewish ones. But from the perspective of a contemporary theological imagination, if eleh is indeed part of Elohim, then multiple religious discourses might be understood as, in the well-worn analogy, multiple fingers pointing at the moon—even if they are pointing at different moons. We have seen evidence of such forms of horizontal pluralism in “third wave” Neo-Hasidism,28 influenced as it is by the Vedanta-influenced spirituality of the 1960s (not least the unitive nature of the psychedelic experience) as well as contemporary progressive politics and ethics. That such spirituality is a kind of pastiche, or perhaps bricolage (as I have proposed elsewhere), does not render it inauthentic; on the contrary, such a mode seems of a piece with the esoteric both-ands we have reviewed here. Of the many messianic visions available within the Jewish corpus, such a theological position favors that of Micah 4:1–5, that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. For let all the peoples walk each one in the name of its god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever.” This non-triumphalist messianism, in which peoples each walk in



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the names of their gods, provides an alternative narrative to the supercessionist messianism in which one form replaces all other ones, and is enabled by a post-monistic theological polymorphism that accommodates a plurality of religious expressions, both vertically within a single tradition, and horizontally among multiple ones. Pluralism coexists with redemption.

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NOTES 1.  BT Pesachim 116a. 2.  Schelling’s neologism was later popularized by orientalist Max Müller. See Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion: As Illustrated by the Religions of India (London: Longmans, Green, and CO., 1878). 3.  Psalm 135:16. 4.  Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. By Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), I:23. 5. The term originated with Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” which appeared in The Dial in 1918. http://www.archive.org/stream/dialjournallitcrit6 4chicrich#page/337/mode/1up. In the Jewish context, see David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 6. See Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, trans. by Jackie Feldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 49–68. 7.  On this debate, see essays collected in Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism & Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Robert Forman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); as and Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology & Mysticism, in Mysticism & Philosophical Analysis, ed. by Steven T. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–74. 8.  The causal nexus between these two events is, of course, the subject of much dispute between Scholem (see, e.g., Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [Philadelphia: Schocken Books, 1941], 205–25) and a subsequent generation of Kabbalah scholars. 9.  Saadia Gaon, Books of Beliefs & Opinions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Treatise II, Chapter 10. 10.  See Zohar III:225a, for example. 11.  Zohar I:2a. See The Zohar, trans. by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 12.  I am indebted to Rabbi Jill Hammer for this interpretation of the Zoharic text. See Jill Hammer, “An Altar of Earth: Reflections on Jews, Goddesses and the Zohar,” Zeek, July 2004, http://www.zeek.net/spirit_0407.shtml. 13.  I have developed this point at more length in Michaelson, Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Boston: Trumpeter, 2009), 65–70. 14.  R. Dov Ber of Lubavitch, Tract on Ecstasy, trans. by Louis Jacobs (Hertsfordshire: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), chapter 3.

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15. R. Schneur Zalman of Liady, Tanya¸ trans. By Nissen Mindel (New York: Kehot, 1973), 164. 16.  R. Schneur Zalman, Tanya, 161. 17.  R. Aharon of Staroselje, Shaarei HaYichud v’haEmunah, (Hebrewbooks.org, 2012), 2b–3a (my translation). On acosmism in Chabad, see Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 49–57; and Louis Jacobs, Seeker of Unity: The Life and Works of Aaron of Starosselje (Hertsfordshire: Vallentine Mitchell, 1966), 90–110. 18.  Keter Shem Tov, 51b (my translation). 19.  Those values may be traditional, as in the performance of halacha, or humanistic, or ethical. On the problem of quietism, see Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Jay Michaelson, Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Boston: Trumpeter, 2009), 206–09. 20.  See Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent, 14–16. 21. See Faitel Levin, Heaven on Earth: Reflections on the Theology of the Lubavitcher Rebbe (New York: Merkoz L’Inyonei Chinuch, 2002), 75–78. 22.  Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 15–30. 23.  See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 228–50; Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, “Man’s relation to God and World in Buber’s Rendering of the Hasidic Teaching,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. by Paul Arthur Schillp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, Illinois: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 403–34. 24. Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 84–100; and Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 232–33. 25. Vivekananda, Living at the Source: Yoga Teachings of Vivekananda (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), 4. 26. Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. By Swami Niktananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekandanda Center, 1984), 32. See John B Carman, “Conceiving Hindu ‘Bhakti’ as Theistic Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. by Steven T. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 191–225. 27.  Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 16–24, 107–08. 28.  See Shaul Magid, “Between Paradigm Shift Judaism and Neo-Hasidism: The New Metaphysics of Jewish Renewal,” Tikkun, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter 2015): 11–21.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Genesis 3:30 Exodus 11:18, 15:11



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Deuteronomy 4:35 2 Kings 18:4, 2 Kings 23:19 2 Samuel 12:15–17 Isaiah 40:26, 58:5 Zechariah 14:4 Jonah 3:7, 4:11 Micah 4:1–5 Psalm 115:5 Ezra 8:21–23 John 14:6 BT Pesachim 116a Saadia Gaon, Books of Beliefs & Opinions, II:10 Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, I:23 Zohar I:2a, I:49a, III:225a Keter Shem Tov, 51b R. Schneur Zalman of Liady, Tanya R. Aharon of Staroselje, Shaarei HaYichud v’haEmunah, 2b-3a. R. Dov Ber of Lubavitch, Tract on Ecstasy, chapter 3. Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, translated by Swami Niktananda. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekandanda Center, 1984. Vivekananda, Living at the Source: Yoga Teachings of Vivekananda. Boston: Shambhala, 2001.

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Secondary Sources Buber, Martin. Hasidism and Modern Man. New York: Horizon Press, 1958. ———. The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. New York: Horizon Press, 1960. Carman, John B. “Conceiving Hindu ‘Bhakti’ as Theistic Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, 191–225. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1960. Elior, Rachel. The Paradoxical Ascent to God. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Forman, Robert, editor. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Halbertal, Moshe. Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, translated by Jackie Feldman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Hammer, Jill “An Altar of Earth: Reflections on Jews, Goddesses and the Zohar.” Zeek, July 2004, http://www.zeek.net/spirit_0407.shtml. Idel, Moshe. Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Jacobs, Louis. Seeker of Unity: The Life and Works of Aaron of Starosselje. Hertsfordshire: Vallentine Mitchell, 1966.

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Katz, Jacob. “The Suggested Relationship between Sabbatianism, Haskalah, and Reform.” In Divine Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998. Katz, Steven T., editor. Mysticism & Philosophical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. ———. Mysticism & Religious Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Levin, Faitel. Heaven on Earth: Reflections on the Theology of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. New York: Merkoz L’Inyonei Chinuch, 2002. Magid, Shaul. “Between Paradigm Shift Judaism and Neo-Hasidism: The New Metaphysics of Jewish Renewal.” Tikkun, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter 2015): 11–21. ———. Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity and the Construction of Modern Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Matt, Daniel. The Zohar, Volume One. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Michaelson, Jay. Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism. Boston: Trumpeter, 2009. ———. “Kabbalah and Queer Theology: Resources and Reservations.” Theology and Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2012). Müller, Max. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion: As Illustrated by the Religions of India. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878. Rapoport-Albert, Ada. Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666– 1816. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011. Roskies, David. The Jewish Search for a Usable Past. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Philadelphia: Schocken Books, 1941. ———. The Messianic Idea in Judaism. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Shatz-Uffenheimer, Rivka. Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. ———. “Man’s relation to God and World in Buber’s Rendering of the Hasidic Teaching.” In The Philosophy of Martin Buber, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, 403–34. La Salle, Illinois: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Chapter Ten

The Word of God Is No Word at All Intimacy and the Nothingness of God

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Shaul Magid

When Jews talk about God, what exactly are they talking about? One of the most ubiquitous proclamations about Judaism is that it is a religion where the word, in particular, the word of God, or the Torah as the word of God, stands as the central component of its notion of the covenant. From the words of the psalmist who proclaims, With the word of God the heavens were made (Ps. 33:6), to the plethora of occurrences of “va-yomar Adonai” “and God said” in Scripture to the repeating Koranic trope “God said be, and it is” (Quran 2:117, 3:47, 6:73) that seems to mirror the rabbinic imagination, the divine word stands to define the Jewish understanding of itself and the world. The way to God, the way to know God, the way to obey God, in normative Judaism is by obeying the word of God expressed in the Pentateuch and the prophets refracted through rabbinic interpretation. The sages even suggest that the word is that which creates proximity between the human and the divine, the very fact of the human as God’s image (Gen. 2:26).1 But this word of God is not limited to God speaking to Israel or even the speech of the prophets. For the rabbinic sages, the word of God extends much further. For them, the word of God is the tool of creation itself. God does not only create with the word, God creates from the word. The word of God, in rabbinic teaching, becomes almost like the Prime Matter (hyle) in Plato’s Timaeus; the world is the product of eternal unformed matter that is formed through a creator. Rabbinic midrash seem oddly unabashed when it states “God looked into the [words] of Torah (that is, God’s own words) and created the world.”2 If so, when were those words created and how are they different than God? The early Hasidic master Dov Baer of Mezritch echoes much earlier teaching that may have its roots in Platonic teaching when he writes at the conclusion of his Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, “It is known that by means of letter combinations (zerufei otiot) all of existence came to be.”3 In some way the basis for this locution and its 163

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later mystical refraction is rooted in the mishnaic tractate Ethics of the Fathers which denotes Torah, God’s word, as one of the things that exists before creation.4 The Torah’s pre-existence, does it also imply co-eternality?5 Is the word of God, God? Or is it something between God and the world?6 The two events in Scripture and later Jewish sources where the word of God reaches its most acute and heightened state are creation and revelation. In these two moments in time, one cosmic and the other mythic/historical, God’s word resounds as the communicative tool that in the first case brings about existence and in the second case communicates God’s will to Israel. Concerning creation the rabbinic sages are drawn to the divine word as a tool of creation itself. The sages comment on the fact that in the story of creation Gen. 1:1–31 the word “va-yomer” “And God said” appears ten times. From here they suggest that creation transpired with “ten utterances” (‘eser ma’morot) of God, ten divine speech-acts, each pushing the divine from non-existence (eyn sof, which can be translated as divine non-existence) to existence (creation). In a sense, God brings Godself into existence through the utterance of divine speech. What may have generated such a reading is that this word “va-yomer” is intransitive as opposed to transitive. That is, in the creation story “And God said,” has no direct object, as in the many other cases where we read “va-yomar Elohim le or ‘el-Moshe” (And God said to Moses etc.). Only in one case in the creation story, Gen. 1:28, is the term “vayomer” transitive, directed to Adam and Eve, instructing them to pro-create. It appears, then, that the intransitive nature of the term in creation is not used as a tool of communication, but almost as a vehicle for productivity, e.g. God said, let the land bring forth every kind of living creature . . . (Gen. 1:24). The second great disclosure of the divine word in Scripture comes in Ex. 20 with the verse, God spoke all these words, saying I am the Lord your God . . . ,” the scriptural description of revelation. Here the divine word is not “vayomer” (God said) as in Genesis but “va-yidaber,” (God spoke). In the latter case there are words that follow I am the Lord your God . . . whereas in the case of Genesis what follows is an action God said, let the land bring forth every kind of living creature . . . In the case of revelation there are those who hear whereas in the former case the utterance is not meant to be heard but to initiate activity. There is thus a difference, or so it seems, between saying “va-yomer Adonai” and speaking “va-yedaber Adonai” although Scripture is less consistent here than we would like it to be. In any case, as close readers of Hebrew scripture, early Christians were acutely attuned to the word of God as the operating system of both creation and revelation. Thus the Johannine gospel, a polemical text likely written by Jewish-Christians sometime in the early second century CE, places Christ, as the arbiter of redemption, into the orbit of the divine word. In fact John

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1:1 offers quite an Israelite and even later rabbinic declaration when it states, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God (John 1:1). Many suggest this is influenced by the term Logos in Philo and other wisdom literature but there is no reason to view John 1:1 as distinct from rabbinic teaching. Both Jacob Neusner and Daniel Boyarin, in different ways, suggest a logos theology among ancient rabbis, one where Torah as the word of God becomes a subject of linguistic incarnation.7 As we move to John 1:14, however, everything seems to change as “the word becomes flesh.” The body, Jesus’ body, replaces, or fulfills, the word.8 John continues, The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:17). It is beyond the scope of my topic to discuss whether this is a shift in degree or kind, whether this is the ur-history of what would much later be the “parting of the ways.” Suffice it to say that the ostensible substitution of Jesus’s body for the word of God in John does shift the earlier emphasis on divine word. Before the Christ-event, God was only word and thus arguably the word contained all that God was, or all that humans could know God to be. Given this all-too-brief synopsis of the centrality of the word of God in the scriptural and rabbinic imagination I want to devote the remainder of my talk to how this is largely subverted in kabbalistic and Hasidic literature.9 Jewish mystics, like mystics in other traditions, often favor the apophatic, or the experience of absence in regards to divine experience. That is, access to the divine is through dimensions of human experience that extend beyond the physical, somatic or, in our case, the linguistic. The tension that one can almost feel in the kabbalistic imagination arises from its complete acceptance of the seemingly cataphatic scriptural and rabbinic models of God’s word while at the same time, working under different epistemological assumptions, rejects that cataphatic model while often never doing so explicitly. These assumptions undermine the very claims being made by the rabbis that God’s word, as transmitted to Israel or as proclaimed as a mechanism of creation, is the vehicle of the divine/human encounter. What becomes operative is a kind of linguistic apophasis whereby language is maintained yet stripped of its communicative content. Below I will examine this hermeneutical move in a series of kabbalistic and Hasidic texts revolving around two distinct but connected interpretive acts; the first regarding creation and the second regarding revelation. In regards to creation, the “ten divine utterances” that serve as the vehicle of creation in rabbinic literature, the transition from non-existence to existence, is rooted, in the kabbalistic imagination, in a “closed utterance” ma’amar satum, an instance of wordless, or perhaps, silent, speech that contains within it the entirety of that which will come in creation.

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The term “ma’amar satum” first appears in a Talmudic discussion of Hebrew orthography commenting on the fact that the letter “mem” when written in the middle of the word is open at the bottom and when written at the end of word it appears in what is called its final form which is orthographically closed.10 The Talmud then suggests, “open mem, closed mem, open utterance (ma’mar) closed utterance (ma’amar).” On this passage the canonical commentator Rashi notes, “There are things upon which is it permitted to expound and there are things for which it is a commandment to conceal such as the ‘works of the chariot’ [a euphemism for esoteric matters].” Thus the closed utterance represents for Rashi concealed esoteric matters, precisely those matters the kabbalists seek to reveal by means of concealment.11 It is the paradox embedded in what we may call “silent speech” that enables the kabbalists to read the cataphatic knowledge of God through God’s word to the apophatic word that is no word, the speech that is silent. When God speaks what comes out is . . . nothing. Regarding revelation, the sages long noted that the first word in Genesis “Bereshit” begins with the second letter of the alphabet (bet) thus suggesting a missing aleph. This missing aleph has inspired many mystical readings including the notion of Adam Kadmon, or Primordial Man. Adam, beginning with the letter aleph, is envisioned as a cosmic structure that precedes creation, a cosmic body that hovers between the nothingness of God and the corporeality of creation. Relevant to our concerns, the letter aleph is also the first letter of revelation “I (Anoki) am LORD your God. . . .” Here it has been suggested that the missing aleph in creation is revealed in revelation. But what exactly is the aleph revealing? Below I explore these two motifs; the silent speech (ma’amar satum) of creation and the soundless or silent aleph of revelation to illustrate the subversive linguistic apophasis that renders God’s word as no word at all. In its elaborate description of creation, better rendered here as cosmogony, the Zohar reads as follows: Bereshit (‫—)בראשית‬a revealed word combined with a concealed word (‫)בכלל מילה סתימאה איהו מילה גליא‬. Rabbi Yose said, “Certainly so! I heard the holy lamp (R. Shimon bar Yohai) say so, that ‘bara’ (‫ )ברא‬is a concealed word, closing, not opening, it was not, did not, exist. Enveloping everything was tohu (confusion/chaos, Gen. 1.2, likely representing the Greek hyle primordial unformed matter) and as long as tohu reigned, the world was not, could not, exist. . . .”12

The Zohar here appears to correlate the word “bara” (which is really the first syllable of the first word in Genesis Bara-shit) with the “ma’amar satum,” the silent speech that does not create but houses that which will be created.

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The chaos (tohu) in creation in kabbalistic nomenclature often refers to the sephirah of hokhma or wisdom, the second highest sephirah of the sephirotic tree that still conceals and does not reveal. Creation only occurs when the word “bara” becomes, through rearranging its letters, “‘eiver” or sexual organ, by means of a play on the words in Genesis 2:4 that originates in rabbinic midrash, These are the generations of the heaven and earth when they were created (be-hibre’am) which is rendered be-Avraham. The remainder of the zoharic passage is not relevant to our concerns. What is relevant, I submit, is its use of the first syllable of the first word in Scripture (bara) as an illustration of the silent speech out of which all creation emerges and by doing so translates the ambiguous “ma’amar satum” of the closed “mem” in Talmud Shabbat into a cosmic trope whereby the silent word, the word that is no word, or as the Zohar prefers, its very existence is that “it was not, did not, exist,” initiates all that follows. Rashi’s comment in Talmud Shabbat that the orthographic closed “mem” points to esoteric matters arguably opens the door that the kabbalists readily walk through. The idea introduced in the Zohar that the silent word is the house of all being that is not yet being, the silence out of which generates all being, becomes a common trope in subsequent kabbalistic literature following the Zohar. In doing so, this idea problematizes the declarative notion of God’s word as the vehicle of creation (God speaks and the world comes into being) or at least adds to it that the first word of God, the word that houses all subsequent words, the primordial word, is silence and thus no word at all. The Zohar elsewhere teaches, “Before creation the name was concealed in upon itself (satum be-gavei). On this the Hasidic master Zev Wolf of Zhitomir notes, “All of the specific fragments or specifics of the name (peratei ha-shemot) and that which describes it (kinuyim) were concealed in God’s essence (azmuto).”13 The concealment is the silence, the closed mem, the ma’amar satum. Language as a tool of communication, and differentiation, is housed in language that is silence. Here then the silence of the “ma’amar satum” is not the absence of a word, that is silence without a word, but it is a word of a different kind, an apophatic word. This is how the medieval commentary on the Talmud Afikei Yam renders the Talmudic passage in b.T. Gittin that states, “The house of Rabbi Yishmael taught, Who is like you, among the gods (elim) (Ex. 15:11), ‘who is like you among the silent ones (illumin).”14 The context of the Talmudic passage is praising God for self-restraint, for hearing blasphemy and not reacting. But Afikei Yam uses it as an illustration of the “ma’mar satum” to say “Who are you, God, whose word is silent?”15 There is another thread of this notion which unites the silence of the word that is no word equating the “ma’amar satum” with housing evil.

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This will bring us to the early nineteenth-century Hasidic master, Nahman of Bratslav. But before that I want to briefly look at a passage from the late kabbalistic work of the nineteenth-century Lithuanian mystic Yizhak Izik Haver Waldman. In his work Or Torah Waldman introduces the binary of “ma’amar patuah” (open utterance) as representing good and “ma’amar satum” (closed utterance or, as I have been saying, the word that is no word) as representing evil.

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The entire purpose of creation is to return the evil to the good by means of freechoice. . . . And this is what our sages say “open mem, closed mem, open word, concealed word.” (b.T. Shabbat 104a). This means that the world was created from the utterance of God’s mouth (‫ )במאמר פיו יתברך‬and this is all the side of good that is rooted in the three foundations represented in the word “amar” (AMR—fire, water, wind) and these are three books upon which the world was created. This includes the three letters of the Tetragrammaton, excluding the last letter “hey.” They are completely [rooted] in the good. Evil was created at the end and is embodied in the fourth letter of the Tetragrammaton. Here the demonic “other side” has dominion, as it says, her feet descend to death (Pr. 5:5). This is the foundation of earth [in addition to fire, water, wind] that “has no substance whatsoever.” And this is the “ma’amar satum,” where holiness (kedusha) is removed [lit. ascends] and it is all the existence of the demonic (sitra ahra).16

One of the curious aspects of this text is the way it connects, or even identifies, the highest level of the cosmos, “ma’amar satum” also likened in some medieval sources to the sephirah “keter” (which sometimes refers to the infinite eyn sof itself) to the final letter of the Tetragrammaton (hey) which represents malkhut, the lowest realm of the cosmos.17 In many kabbalistic sources God communicates through malkhut, a cosmic realm, or sephirah, that is viewed as being empty of substance, a pure vessel to Israel and the world. So in Or Torah Waldman suggests that the place of evil, created at the end, is housed in the final “hey” of the divine name, or malkhut, which exists because “the good ascends [from it]” leaving us with a classic Neoplatonic notion of evil as privation.18 As an aside, common to kabbalistic nomenclature, privation here is actually the product of an expulsion, or ascension, of the good; privation is thus a consequence of loss, sometimes through divine contraction (zimzum), sometimes through ascension (histalkut). What is interesting here for our concerns is that this place that has no substance, the place that houses evil, is also called the “ma’amar satum” the word of God that is no word, the highest realm of divine apophatic language. And instead of being situated at the top of the cosmic chain only to be followed by the nine lower utterances, “va-yomar,” now the word of God that is no word is at the bottom of that chain and is placed in malkhut, precisely where God communicates to the world.



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In the Lurianic and later Sabbatean tradition the closed “mem” as “ma’amar satum” is broken, and thus opened, before zimzum, that is, as a prelude to creation, as a way to enable the “good” light to depart from the “mem” while the evil remains within it. This is then tied into messianic times when evil will be nullified and the “mem” can once again be closed within itself.19 Silent speech is now not only that which initiates creation but, as we will see below, serves as the vehicle of revelation and as suggested here, is reinstated in the messianic end-time. Before exploring the valence of silent speech further, however, I want to briefly look at what the Hasidic master Nahman of Bratslav does with the divine closed utterance, the “ma’amar satum.” Typical of a Hasidic master, Nahman of Bratslav’s interests lie in the devotional nature of this realm of silent speech rather than its cosmic structure as is more common in kabbalistic literature. We will see, however, that within his devotional rendering of “ma’amar satum” we find an interesting nexus between the word of God is that no word and the word of prayer that is no prayer. In homily #12 in the second volume of Nahman’s collected teachings Likkutei MoHaRan, published posthumously in 1811, Nahman exhibits his Hasidic fideism by warning his reader about the danger of depending on one’s intellect which, for Nahman, here quite close to Luther will always lead one astray.20 This is his introduction to the necessity and efficacy of prayer. In order to explicate the importance of prayer Nahman cites the origin of the “ten [divine] utterances” of creation in the mishnaic tractate Ethics of the Fathers mentioned above. Each utterance embodies its own dimension of divine glory and each one has its own boundaries or limits such that they do not emanate to the demonic forces. Nahman continues: But know, these demonic forces also must receive their life-force from God, even the filthiest of places and houses of idolatry must receive their life-force from God. Therefore, know that they receive them from the “ma’amar satum,” this is “Bara-shit (Bereshit) ma’amar satum.” This utterance includes all the other utterances and all of the others received their life-force from it. The glory of God that is specific to this “ma’amar satum” is concealed within the deepest concealment. . . . It is impossible for evil to receive life-force from the other utterances, as it is written I will not give glory to another (Is. 42:8).21

The notion that silent speech, the ma’amar satum, houses evil, in Nahman’s locution, gives evil its life-force, is articulated much earlier. Nahman’s originality begins when he reads this into the object of prayer. Prayer, of course, is a human speech-act directed to God using words of prophecy or its liturgical variation, in some sense, using God’s words to address God. There are traditionally three categories of Jewish prayer that constitute the frame

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of the eighteen benedictions (amidah or standing, silent prayer) recited thrice daily: Recognition or affirmation (God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), thanksgiving (hodaya), and beseeching (bakasha). All are prayers of words using the language of Torah. Thus prayer is really giving God’s words back to God. But there is another form of prayer articulated here that has no words other than “ayeh!” literally “Where?” Nahman writes, “For ‘(ayeh) where is the place of God’s glory’ alludes to the glory of God’s highest utterance, the “ma’amar satum.” One could only rightfully, or perhaps in Nahman’s mind, justifiably, ask “where” is God in the place where God is ostensible absent, or silent, the place of the silent speech, the “ma’amar satum.” The prayer of “where?” is the human correlate of the word that is no word, it does not acknowledge God, it does not thank God, it does not beseech God for one’s needs, it is a prayer that searches for the absent/silent God in the place where evil resides, as if to say, perhaps, if God is not there, God is not anywhere? On that reading it is the call to faith that borders on nihilism. It is thus a kind of anti-prayer that is the highest prayer of all. Indeed for people like Nahman it is all or nothing, God must be even in the place of evil, or God is not even in the place of the good. For him, evil as privation is a non-starter. In fact, it may very well be the beginning of heresy. The notion of silence as speech in regards to prayer appears elsewhere. For example, the anonymous Sabbatean text “And I Came Today to the Foundation,” (Ve-Avo ha Yom el ha-Ayin) likely written by the eighteenth-century century rabbi Yonatan Eybshutz, reads the verse in Psalm 150 Every soul praises you (kol haneshama te-hallel yah) not by reading neshama (soul) as neshima (breath), that is Let every breath praise God (this is how it is usually translated) but neshama as sh’mama (silence), thus Silence is praise.22 The notion of silence in Nahman’s text takes on a dual meaning. On the one hand, silence is deficiency, as the psalmist writes, They have mouths but cannot speak. (Ps. 135:16). On the other hand silence is the highest form of divine speech, the “ma’amar satum.” In fact, they are close to the same thing; evil has no words because it is housed in the word of God that is no word. Nathan Sternherz of Nemirov, Nahman’s erstwhile disciple and scribe, suggests that this prayer-question “where?” is not a state of disbelief but rather the prayer-question itself. “Where are you, God?” is an affirmation of belief, an affirmation of the divine presence in the very silence, that is, evil, the very absence that generates the question. Because God resides in the place where evil is housed, and by asking “Where?” we acknowledge that reality, repentance as the turning away from evil, is possible. I am less interested in confessional reactions to this claim than the fact that for Nahman the quintessence of the prayer-question, the prayer that is not simply speaking God’s words back to God, culminates in the word “where?”



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the expression that addresses the silent speech where evil resides and from where everything emerges. The silent word is thus not the absence of speech but its most lofty articulation. I now move to the second prominent locus of the word of God in Judaism, revelation. In one very provocative Hasidic text, the word of God that is no word, the silent speech of creation, the “ma’amar satum,” has a correlate in the aleph, the letter that has no sound, in the second great moment of divine communication, the theophany at Sinai (Ex. 20). Here the divine word appears more blatantly communicative, minimally communicating the Ten Commandments or at least the first two, maximally communicating the entire Torah. The theophany begins, or perhaps reaches its apex, in Ex. 20:1 And God spoke (va’yidaber) all these words (et kol hadevarim), saying, I am the Lord your God (Anokhi Hashem Elokekha). In his collected teachings Zera Kodesh (Holy Seed) the Hasidic master Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Rupshitz (1760–1827) cites his teacher, Menachem Mendel of Rymonov (1745–1815) as follows: As I heard in the name of the master from Rymanov on the verse, One thing God has spoken [two things have I heard] (Ps 62:12). It is possible that we only heard the letter alepf of anokhi from the mouth of God . . . To understand these holy words which are like a hammer that shatters a rock and also to understand how this relates to the verse, Face to face God spoke to you (Deut. 5:4). And it is written, you saw no shape when God spoke to you (Deut. 4:15) except a voice. Perhaps we can understand this from the words of our predecessors, who suggested that the verse I will place God before me always (Ps. 16:8) is a great principle of the Torah. We need to understand why this specifically is such a great principle of the Torah? Regarding devotion this is central. It is written in pietistic literature that the Tetragrammaton (‫ )יהוה‬is hinted in the letter aleph (‫)א‬ which has the form of a bet (‫)ב‬, two yods and a vav in the middle. The numerical value of this (10+10+6=26) the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton. This is also hinted in the human face. Two eyes as two yods, and the nose as the vav. Thus the human face takes on the form of the letter aleph. This is what is meant by in the image of God the human was created (Gen 9:6). For in the form of the human is engraved the aleph that gestures to the Tetragrammaton (‫)יהוה‬. . . . And this is what is meant by “this is a great principle of the Torah.” When we merited standing in that place (Sinai) and heard the voice project from the letter aleph we became absorbed [in it] and the form of the letter aleph was thus revealed to us. This is what is meant by they saw the voices (Ex. 20:15). That is, they saw that which is heard, they saw the form of the letter aleph that gestures to the Tetragrammaton (‫ )יהוה‬and they understood that this is also the form of their face. . . . This is the meaning of face to face God spoke to you (Deut. 5:4). The voice which is the aleph is the form of a human face and in the vowel (patakh) they saw the form of the nostril, this is face to face God spoke to you, nevertheless you saw no shape when God spoke to you (Deut. 4:15), God forbid, only a

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voice of the letter aleph, as it is written and in my flesh I see God (Job 19:26). By means of this they understood all the 248 positive commandments and then 365 negative commandments. . . . 23

There is much to unpack in this suggestive text but given my limited focus I want to highlight only a few points.24 First is the notion of the aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet that is silent (without the addition of a vowel) the first letter of Anokhi (I am) as the lemma of revelation as opposed to the bet, the second letter of the alphabet that initiates creation (Be-reshit). Here Naftali Zvi suggests that the experience at Sinai was not one of hearing God’s word since what was revealed was only the silent aleph, the letter that has no sound. He then introduces a series of seemingly contradictory biblical texts regarding that revelatory experience. For example, the traditional rendering of the verse, One thing God has spoken [two things have I heard] (Ps 62:12) is that God spoke I am the Lord your God and Israel heard two things simultaneously, I am the Lord your God and You shall have no gods before me. They could not bear the power of the divine word and asked Moses to listen and then convey to them the rest. Naftali Zvi’s reading is that God revealed the silent letter aleph and they saw, or realized, two things. First, the aleph is the Tetragrammaton through orthographic deconstruction of the letter into its composite parts (two yods and a vav) which holds the numerical value 26, equal to the Tetragrammaton. Second, Israel saw in the deconstructed aleph (two yods and a vav) their own faces, thus confirming the opaque verse, face to face God spoke to you (Deut. 5:4). Yet, this vision of sorts revealed no shape, as God has no form, and this is indicated by the aleph that has no sound. What Israel “saw” was the realization of the divine in the flesh of their own faces, the composite aleph designating their two eyes and nose. The final sentence, “By means of this they understood all the 248 positive commandments and then 365 negative commandments,” in some way can be viewed as Naftali Zvi understanding the radical implications of his reading and thus pulling back, as if to say, this experience of the word that is no word, the letter that has no sound, is still the realization of the law. How so? The Talmudic sages suggest that the human body contains 613 limbs and sinews corresponding to the 613 commandments. Hence, according to Naftali Zvi, when Israel experienced the aleph and realized it was a reflection of their own collective face, the vision of the sound, as Ex. (20:18) states, they saw the voices, they came to recognize in that silence the embodiment of the law as reflected through the aleph as a mirror of their physical form. They did not see the divine form but realized the divine nature of their own form (the form of the letter aleph that equals the value of the Tetragrammaton) through the silent letter. Lest we think that the experience of the aleph alone would leave Israel with a revelation without content, something suggested by both Franz

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Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem in different ways, Naftali Zvi suggests the law is conveyed bodily through the divine aleph as the mirror of the human form. The word is no word, the letter has no sounds, but the content of divine will is conveyed nonetheless. In its bodily realization, an interesting example of Hasidic incarnationalism, the law is an expression of the human, or more precisely the divine in the human.25 By way of conclusion, I want to reflect briefly on a few possible implications of my reading of these texts in relation to God in the Jewish imagination. I mentioned at the outset that the mystical tradition was engaged in a kind of subversion of traditional notions of the word of God through an act of linguistic apophasis, using language, usually a tool of communication, to convey non-substance. This is different than, say, Martin Buber’s I-Thou that suggests some kind of non-lingual meeting of intimacy that can define one’s relationship to God. The kabbalists are much too invested and embedded in traditional discourse to make Buber’s meta-linguistic leap which is why, perhaps, Buber had little interest in Kabbalah calling it the “gnosticization” of the Jewish myth.26 And I would suggest that the kabbalists are even more radical than the quasi-traditionalist approach of Abraham Joshua Heschel who makes the richly provocative suggestion that the “Bible itself is a midrash [on revelation].”27 Looking elsewhere we find Emmanuel Levinas who, in his essay “Revelation and the Jewish Tradition,” suggests that we must examine the ontology of revelation before any discussion of its content. That is, investigating the phenomena of revelation must precede the question of what exactly revelation conveys. Coming close to Heschel, Levinas writes, “The reader in his own fashion, is a scribe. This provides us with a first indication of what we might call the ‘status’ of Revelation; its word coming from elsewhere, from outside, and simultaneously dwelling in the person who receives it . . . the totality of the true is constituted from the contribution of multiple people . . . the voice of the Revelation, as inflected, precisely by each person’s ear, would be necessary to the ‘Whole’ of the truth.”28 Later Levinas writes, “The Revelation is a constant hermeneutics of the Word, whether written or oral, discovering new landscapes, and problems and truths fitted into one another.”29 This approach essentially opens revelation by focusing on its ontological status as a frame, but not a replacement, of its content, which may be simply as Levinas puts it “not a mystery that dispels clarity, but one that demands greater intensity.”30 It enables a more pluralistic and progressive articulation of tradition that remains in concert with revelation, making revelation an ontological moment of meeting that then must be continually pried open through the hermeneutical task of reading scripture, “The listener becomes the scribe.” Here too one might turn to Levinas’s notion on intimacy which posits a

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communication founded on silence, “a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret.”31 Elsewhere he writes about “love as voluptuosity” whereby intimacy is a “dual solitude, closed society, the supremely non-public . . . it is a society without language.”32 In that moment of intimacy, language, word, yields to what he calls a “spontaneous consciousness.”33 Language is lost because it is no longer needed, intimacy is the transcendence of language as a communicative tool. I wonder whether, in fact, our texts would support an argument that suggests the plasticity of revelation and creation as a moment of intimacy whereby language transcends language. In his Ideas, Edmund Husserl notes that “expressing oneself . . . is always expressing oneself about something.” (Ideas #7).34 What do our texts think God is expressing when God expresses silence through a voice (the “ma’amar satum” or the aleph)? In his reading of Husserl’s theory of language, Derrida writes as follows, “But why does using words get mixed up with the determination of being in general as presence?”35 The distinction of voice and words may illuminate the “ma’amar satum” and the aleph. What does the former say, what can the former mean, without the latter? Is it an opening for humans to put the words onto/into the divine voice? That would be the liberal view of Heschel and Levinas, maybe even Buber. Or is it perhaps something else? Above I have been defining the “ma’amar satum” and the aleph as silence as the word of God that is no word, the letter that has no sound. This is perhaps because I was falsely assuming that speech and word are inextricably connected. Can the closed speech (“ma’amar satum”) of creation be the sound without a word in the aleph of revelation? Can revelation be precisely that moment where God is silent, where it is the silence that is the moment of Levinasean intimacy? And if revelation is that moment where God makes Godself known to the world (the aleph of ‘Anokhi completes the bet of Bereshit), where creation creates from the letters (the pre-lingual) and revelation is the silence (post-lingual), where does God actually exist in and through language? This divine speech, God’s word that is no word, the voice that contains no word, at creation and at Sinai, reflects back on the listener. But what does the listener hear? Or better, does the listener hear? On Derrida and to some extent Levinas’s reading, it is the voice as an exemplar of consciousness. And that is its universality. That is universality. What is made from that consciousness, through many kinds of hearers is something else, it is the vocation of human beings not the word of God. The directive speech at Sinai, “And God said, I am God,” is no different than the declarative speech of creation, “Let there be.” And in declarative speech, what matters is the voice and not the words. In this sense revelation does not complete creation but rather brings the world

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to a place of intimacy that existed in the pre-lingual creative space (the ziruf otiot or letter combinations of Dov Baer of Mezritch mentioned earlier). Like creation, Torah consists of words (the nine lower utterances) which are all housed in the “ma’amar satum,” the voice, or consciousness, that is the universal. Torah is thus many human words that grow from the wordless voice, or consciousness, of the aleph, which is also God (who is often called alufo shel olam—literally, “the aleph of the world”). In this case the Bible or the story of the meeting between God and the world through the meeting of God and Israel is not a midrash on revelation (Heschel) as midrash implies that there are words, or a text, that one can expound upon. Midrash suggests that the voice of Sinai, the aleph, is transitive speech. But according to Naftali Zvi, Israel only heard the aleph which has no sound and is no word. In some way Naftali Zvi makes the aleph of revelation (Anokhi) intransitive like the “ma’amar satum” of creation. Thus hearing God’s word is an experience of intimacy that tells us nothing in particular, or about the particular. How can it (even if it enables one group of listeners to somehow intuit the law in her body by seeing their faces in the silent aleph)? But it does tell us everything about the universal. In fact, it is the universal. Thus the liturgical expression of that moment of revelation, God choosing Israel “from the nations” can only really be “God chooses Israel with the nations” since all that is conveyed is the intimacy of the universal. But that “everything” that is conveyed is, in some sense, also nothing (and thus it cannot be particular since all particularity is humanly created). Hence the kabbalists call God nothing/no-thing (eyn sof). Perhaps here we have arrived at the dark alley where mysticism and atheism meet. What separates them is whether to deploy the hyphen; nothing or no-thing. The aleph and the “ma’mar satum” do not open revelation, or creation, nor do they close it. All they can do, and admittedly this is quite a lot, is, as Levinas suggests, capture a moment of voluptuosity, an instance of “spontaneous consciousness” where word is no longer welcome. For God to truly reveal Godself to Israel, God cannot speak. To do so would be, for our kabbalists, both unspeakable, and unthinkable. NOTES 1.  See as cited in David Novak, Judaism and Zionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 114. Maimonides makes a similar claim when he describes the three dimensions of human speech. See Maimonides, Maimonides Treatise on Logic: The Original Arabic and Three Hebrew Translations (New York: American Academy of Jewish Research, 1938), 59. 2.  Genesis Raba to Genesis 1:1. For an elaboration, see Zohar 2:161a.

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3.  Dov Baer of Mezritch, Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, ed. by R. Shatz-Uffenheimer (Jerusalem: Magnus, 1990), 335. 4.  Mishna Avot, 5:1. 5.  See my “The Case of Jewish Arianism: The Pre-Existence of the Zaddik in Early Hasidism,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism, ed. by B. Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 97–110. 6. See Jacob Neusner, The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity is Formative Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), and Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 112–50. 7.  See Neusner and Boyarin in note #6. 8.  See my discussion of this motif in Hasidism in my Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 9.  Much has been written on this. See, for example, Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah,” Diogenes 20 (1972); Shira Wolosky, “Gershom Scholem’s Linguistic Theory,” in Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 21 (2007): 165–205; Moshe Idel, “Reification of Language in Jewish Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Language, ed. by Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 42–79; Elliot Wolfson, “The Body of the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 479–500; Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), chapter five. For a recent study of Kabbalistic use of language and writing, see Patrick Koch, Human SelfPerfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-Literature of Sixteenth Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2105), 104–131. 10.  B.T. Shabbat 104a. 11.  This paradox is developed by Wolfson in many studies. See, especially, the extensive analysis in Language, Eros, Being. 12.  Zohar 1.3b. 13.  See Zohar 1:29a and Zev Wolf of Zhitomir, Or Ha-Meir (Jerusalem, 1995), vol. 2, 219a. 14.  B.T. Gittin 56b. 15.  Yehiel Michel Rabinowitz, Afikei Yam (Vilna, 1905) to Gittin 56b. 16. Waldman, Or Torah #137. 17. On keter and eyn sof, see Arthur Green, Keter: The Crown of od in Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the correlation between malkhut and eyn sof, see my “Early Hasidism and the Metaphysics of Malkhut in Yaakov (Lifhitz) Koppel’s Shaarei Gan Eden,” Kabbalah 27 (2012): 245–68. 18.  See, for example, in Gershom Scholem, “The Feminine Element in Divinity,” in The Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken, 1991); and Yoram Jacobson, “The Feminine Aspect in Lurianic Kabbalah,” in Gershom Scholem: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Fifty Years After, ed. by Peter Schaefer and Joseph Dan (Tubingin: Mohr Siebeck, 1993). 19.  See Yehudah Leibes, Sod ha-Emunah ha-Shabta’it (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1995), 63, 64.



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20.  On the similarities between Luther and Nahman on fideism and the question of certainty see my “Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Jewish Piety,” in Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 205–28. 21.  Likkutei MoHaRan (Brooklyn, NY: Hasidei Breslov, 1976), 19d–20c. 22.  See Yonatan Eybshutz, Ve Avo ha-Yom ‘el Ha-Ayin, in Rabbi Yonatan Eibeschutz, And I Came This Day Unto the Fountain, ed. by Pawel Maciejko (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2014), 45. 23.  Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Rupshitz, Zera Kodesh (Pshemishl, 1904), 2:40a-40b. 24.  For another reading of this text see Benjamin Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 89–96. 25.  On incarnational thinking in Hasidism, see my Hasidism Incarnate, chapter one. Also see Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, chapter five, and Moshe Idel, Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Continuum Books, 2007). 26.  On Kabbalah more generally Buber writes, “What is evil is not the mythicization of reality that brings the inexpressible to speech but the gnosticization of myth that tears it out of the historical-biographical ground in which it took root.” Martin Buber, “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” in The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1988), 249. 27.  See Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1955), 185. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. by Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 133, 134. 29.  Ibid., 138. 30.  Ibid., 133. 31. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 155. 32.  Ibid., 264, 265. 33. Ibid. 34.  Edmund Husserl, Ideas (New York: MacMillan, 1962), #7, 61–63. 35.  Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 74.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boyarin, Daniel. Borderlines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Dov Baer of Mezritch. Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, edited by R. Shatz-Uffenheimer. Jerusalem: Magnus, 1990.

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Eybshutz, Yonatan. Ve Avo ha-Yom ‘el Ha-Ayin, in Rabbi Yonatan Eibeschutz, And I Came This Day Unto the Fountain, edited by Pawel Maciejko. Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2014. Green, Arthur. Keter: The Crown of Od in Jewish Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man. New York: FS&G, 1955. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas. New York: MacMillan, 1962. Idel, Moshe. “Reification of Language in Jewish Mysticism.” In Mysticism and Language, edited by S. Katz, 42–79. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jacobson, Yoram. “The Feminine Aspect in Lurianic Kabbalah.” In Gershom Scholem: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Fifty Years After, edited by P. Schaefer and J. Dan. Tubingin: Mohr Siebeck, 1993. Koch, Patrick. Human Self-Perfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic MusarLiterature of Sixteenth Century Safed. Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2015. Leibes, Yehudah. Sod ha-Emunah ha-Shabta’it. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1995. Levinas, Emanuel. “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition.” In The Levinas Reader, edited by S. Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. ———. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Magid, Shaul. “Early Hasidism and the Metaphysics of Malkhut in Yaakov (Lifhitz) Koppel’s Shaarei Gan Eden,” Kabbalah 27 (2012): 245–68. ———. Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. ———. “The Case of Jewish Arianism: The Pre-Existence of the Zaddik in Early Hasidism.” In Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism, edited by B. Ogren, 97–110. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Maimonides, Moses. Maimonides Treatise on Logic: The Original Arabic and Three Hebrew Translations, edited and translated by I. Efros. New York: American Academy of Jewish Research, 1938. Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Rupshitz. Zera Kodesh. Pshemishl, 1904. Nahman of Bratslav. Likkutei MoHaRan. Brooklyn, NY: Hasidei Breslov, 1976. Neusner, Jacob. The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity is Formative Judaism. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988. Rabinowitz, Yehiel Michel. Afikei Yam. Vilna: 1905. Scholem, Gershom. “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah,” Diogenes 20 (1972). Sommer, Benjamin. Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Wolfson, Elliot. Language Eros, Being. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. ———. “The Body of the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 479–500. Zev Wolf of Zhitomir. Or Ha-Meir. Jerusalem: 1995.

Chapter Eleven

Who Is God?

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Lenn Goodman

At a conference not long ago I stumbled upon a book by Yochanan Muffs, a Bible scholar deeply learned in the literature of the ancient Near East. The Personhood of God champions what Muffs calls a literary reading of the Hebrew canon.1 If God breathed life into clods of earth to create humanity, Muffs aims to reciprocate, by breathing new life into the Godhead. The biblical God, he urges, is a personality, not a dead abstraction. “The poet, like God, is a spiritual realist who brings the spirit down to earth and structures it within the inner laws and limits of reality. The person who originally rejected words and their limits returns to these very words after having experienced the infinite, and with a magic touch refreshes and breathes into these words some of the experience he has just tasted.”2 The poet Muffs singles out is a mystic who has seen reality “in all its clarity and horror,” yet “like the Jew,” “affirms the goodness of existence.”3 Such poets are ready “to strip words of their protective covering.” They “penetrate the very core of reality,” reaching, if they do not “return blind or go mad,” the “oceanic feeling” so often sensed at the heart of ecstasy. But this mystic, being a poet, struggles to convert “oceanic feeling into a structure of permanence, a structure that sustains him in the moments of darkness that follow the vision.”4 “Poetry,” Muffs writes, “in its attempt to combine the opposites— the limitless and the limited, the ineffable and the spoken, the spiritual and the libidinous—may seem to many as a paradox to be rejected.”5 So biblical poetry is too regularly set aside as “silly,” or foolishly swallowed whole by those who glimpse its sanctity but miss the paradox sprung from the poet’s need for “compromise between what is seen and what can be said.” What faulty readings or faulty readers miss is that although poetry is “more exact than most human speech” it is also, “by its very nature indeterminate . . . a kind of eloquent stammering.”6 179

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Biblical poetry for Muffs, and midrash secondarily, seeks to “break through to a realm of experience that is ultimately ineffable . . . to establish grounded on earth a ladder whose head reaches to the heavens.” The inevitable compromise comes in making words a vessel in which “the infinite is encapsulated in the bounded.”7 Like Maimonides, Muffs sees the rabbinic sages taking up the prophets’ parable in allegories of their own. All images that reach for God, Maimonides argues, are broken by their inadequacy.8 Yet their shards still mark a pathway. For Muffs, by contrast, there is no seeing beyond the unsteady images reflected in a prophet’s eyes. Where Maimonides sought to decode scripture’s intimations of Infinitude, Muffs, restive in a philosophic frame, redirects us to the images themselves, dying them deeply, as though to ensure that nothing remains to be seen or said beyond what prophets utter, since their messages bear the marks or scars of direct encounter. True, the Sages took up the prophets’ poesy. But to Muffs that means not that rabbis freely adopted and adapted prophetic images, working creatively with a received repertoire—as Plato freely molded the methods and motifs of Greek myth making. To Muffs the rabbis’ play with the fire of prophetic poetry reveals not the subtlety and assurance of sophisticated readers who know where and how a figure leads and what its limitations are (let alone how the congeries of biblical anthropomorphisms, as Maimonides charts them, self-deconstruct to point toward the purity of God’s perfection with no residue of the lack that human notions ordinarily entail). What Muffs finds in the rabbinic appropriation is confirmation of a primal tension: “Religion has to become institutionalized. . . . Institutions impose a certain rationality on an essentially irrational phenomenon. . . . The rabbis certainly knew what they were doing when they divided their time between poetry and law, for these are the two indispensable poles of reality: rationality and feeling, form and freedom. . . . what is not Halakhah in the Talmud is poetry . . . . One who avoids it does so in fear; one who takes it literally is a fool.”9 But are these two idioms, juridical and expressive, really poles apart? Haven’t we learned, if not from Spinoza then from Locke, that law and civility are not the antitheses but the avenues to freedom? Isn’t it time we learned as well (pace the romantics and the crabbed reductionists who set them off) that healthy reason does not exclude valuing, feeling, or creativity—and that sensibility is not antithetical to good sense but its precondition—and vice versa? Haven’t we noticed in all our anthropological and juridical studies that law, too, speaks the language of ritual and symbol?10 Have we forgotten that Moses calls his Law a song (Deuteronomy 31:19, 21, 22, 30, 32:44)?11 Or are we so stuck in pigeonholes, unable to turn around and see what Rav Kook so clearly saw, that “Just as there are laws in poetry, there is poetry in laws.”12

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God, not poetry, tops Muffs’s agenda. Poetry is the lever he wields in hopes of prying open minds desensitized to biblical poetics by historicism, legalism, or literalism. Hence his narrowing the range of poetry to the inspired.13 Hence, too—despite his nod to Otto and the horrors of the numinous—his focus on the Hebrew prophets’ bold, affirmation of life. His aim: to defeat the philosopher who would reduce the living God to “bloodless abstractions,” a perfect being, tailored to mathematical deductions but alien to encounter.14 To stand in a place where we can confront God’s personhood, Muffs argues, we must admit change within the Godhead. Nibbling the old chestnut that calls mystical experience ineffable, he traces poetic stammering not to human finitude but to its Subject: It is not our eyes that are blinded by the sun. The flickering is there not here; the paradoxes lie not in our deficiency but in God. Didn’t the prophets see God from many angles? Isn’t it true, Muffs argues, again echoing Maimonides (a paragon of what he disowns), that “The image of God in the Bible is not a monolith; the divine persona is refracted through a wide range of personal prisms. Isaiah sees God as a city sophisticate; Ezekiel as a country bumpkin.”15 “Bumpkin” is strong language. But Maimonides does rate Ezekiel’s rustic visions rather below Isaiah’s urbanity.16 But that urbanity, if we resolve the Rambam’s image, signifies just the sophistication Muffs finds troubling. Maimonides is more open minded. He hears authenticity in Ezekiel’s oracles and cites with approval the Mekhilta’s making a baseline of Ezekiel’s epiphanies when it assigns the least handmaid at Sinai a vision no less than Ezekiel’s. The real problem here is the equation of word and object: If prophets paint God in varied hues, must God Himself then vary? Is God to be the mere reflex of experience? The work of synthesis, finding or forging coherence in disparate images, is a philosopher’s labor—and thus, for Muffs, derivative, missing the molten heat of primal encounter. But doesn’t the Torah itself seek coherence when it links God with truth and justice, mercy and love?17 And haven’t we heard that there is risk and wrong in chasing molten gods? The hymn Anim Zemirot, sung at the close of a traditional Shabbat service, often by a child, voices a steadier, more Maimonidean, response to transcendence, at once embracing and bracketing the images of biblical (and midrashic) poetry that shone in the morning’s liturgy: The songs I sing, the melodies I weave           Bespeak my love of You . . . . I can recount Your glory,          But Your love is what I crave . . . . I see Your splendor’s gleam,          But You remain unseen. So with epithets and figures          I name what I know not.

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Through the prophets in Your servants’ council          You showed some likeness of Your splendor. In Your works they traced Your might and majesty,          Portrayed You not as You are but through Your acts. Their varied visions sought Your likeness,          But beyond every image, You are One—          Ancient of days in judgment, Tresses gleaming black in battle,          A warrior helmeted, Arm outstretched in combat,          Your right hand bringing triumph18— Or as a lover, black curls drenched with dew,          Gleaming in the night . . . . Your chief word is Truth . . . .19

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The poet20 echoes the Psalms (119:160) in calling truth God’s chief word, the unifying theme of revelation and burden of every epiphany—truth as justice and ultimate reality, justice as wisdom, beauty as grace.21 To the poet/prophets of the Torah, revelation is normative at the core, not despite the power of the numinous but through it: God’s law is the consummate theophany. But praxis does not exhaust the truth. For norms have their source in God and take their motive power from love and understanding, a love of nature and the world, including human nature and the human world, seen as God’s creation. Contrasting prophecy with mysticism, at least in its most familiar form, and rejecting the cliché of ineffability, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: Unlike mystical insight, which takes place in “the abyss of the mind,” in “the ground of consciousness,” prophetic illumination seems to take place in the full light of the mind, in the very center of consciousness. . . . The prophet’s will does not faint; his mind does not become a mist. Prophecy is consciousness and remembrance of the scandals of priests, of the callousness of the rich, or the corruption of judges. . . . The Inspirer in whose name they spoke was not a God of mystery, but a God Who has a design for history, Whose will and law are known to His people. The prophet is not a person who has had an experience, but one who has a task. . . . The noetic character of the prophetic experience is, furthermore, reflected in the noetic character of prophetic utterance. Unlike the stammering of the ecstatic or the language of negation of the mystic, the prophet’s word is like fire, like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces.22

Men like Moses, Muffs acknowledges, still tracking Maimonides, “did not fall on their faces in manic possession like some later prophets. . . . their confrontation with the Divine was through the ‘clear mirror’ of speech rather than the ‘dark mirror’ of ecstasy.”23 Muffs seems here to bow in the direction of

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Who Is God? 183

Heschel, who was, after all, his predecessor at Jewish Theological Seminary. But the hoary dichotomy still stands, that Heschel tried to dissolve: What Moses hears from God are canons of law and justice, character and holiness. Yet, Muffs adds, after Sinai Moses went veiled, as if the epiphany rivaled rather than revealed God’s law. Moses’ face was so radiant that he had to wear a mask (Exodus 34:29–35)—“masks,” Muffs writes, “have always been placed on the faces of all profound religious statements, which are often couched in an irresponsible, poetic, yet eternally evocative manner.”24 Is the Torah a mask? Is it irresponsible? The Talmud (B. Yevamot 49b) has it that Manassah executed Isaiah for claiming to have seen God (Isaiah 6:1, 5). Hadn’t God told Moses, “a man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). Only fancifully, Rashi writes, did any prophet “see” God. The Talmud registers tactfully: “All the prophets saw in a dark glass, but Moses in a clear glass.”25 Maimonides understands the glass here (specularia) not as a mirror but as a lens: “a barrier of glass or crystal or any other transparent material that does not show things in place and in detail, as is explained in the science of optics. The object does not appear just as it is. But the Sages call the very transparent barrier that concealed nothing from Moses ‘a pellucid lens.’”26 There is always a barrier, Maimonides holds, between human minds and God. Vices and even passions like anger, grief, or lassitude cloud our view or eclipse it. For most prophets, imagination is both a portal and a barrier. But Moses’ vision was unimpeded by any flaw of mind or character and undistorted by the medium of imagination, although inevitably, scaled to the finitude of human reason. Imagination was the clouded lens of other prophets’ visions; but Moses saw through the clear lens of reason, unreliant on imagination to mediate his encounter with God. That is what the Torah means in saying, “God spoke with Moses face to face as one person speaks with another” (Exodus 33:11). Moses’ prophecy, in its maturity, was no blind impulsion like Samson’s, and no riddling apparition like Jeremiah’s seething pot. That is why the Torah sets Moses above all other prophets, even Abraham, who broke with pagan piety to conceive a universal God. For, building on Abraham’s moral sense and animadversions of transcendence, Moses could articulate a system of law and a way of life. But such articulacy, in law, morals, and cosmology, for Muffs, masks God’s changing face. The God Muffs offers, “grows and learns through tragedy and experimentation.” He “makes mistakes and actually learns from them.” Only such a God can “become a model for man.”27 That sounds more Deweyan than Mosaic. Aiming to “remythologize” the Torah,28 Muffs silhouettes an active, creative, nature-transcending God against the lurid backdrop of Mesopotamian pantheons, where gods bound by fate and nature impatiently await

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sustenance by their worshipers.29 Israel’s God, by contrast, “is not a slave to nature or to matter.” “Neither fate nor magic controls Him. Destiny is not prior to Him.”30 Rather, “it is He who determines the laws of heaven and earth (Psalm 19). He does not contend with fate or time . . . . He was not born and does not die (Habakkuk 1:12). He does not sleep (Psalm 121); and He has no need of sacrifice and offerings (Psalm 50).”31 We can see why the Torah calls an Israelite’s offering minḥa, a gift, and how the sacrificial cult yields to prayer, morals, and meditation—practice and thought encircling and enriching one another. The prophets set justice and mercy above the Temple service. They castigate worshipers who presume that propitiation obviates righteous living.32 Genesis canonizes the rejection of child sacrifice in its narrative of the binding of Isaac. Gods who demand the sacrifice of love and truth and trust are shocking to the prophets’ sensibilities, where love, truth, and trust are constitutive in what is sacred. Muffs contrasts the Torah’s moral clarity with the words of an ancient Mesopotamian: “What is good in one’s sight is evil for a god. What is bad in one’s mind is good for his god. Who can understand the counsel of the gods in the midst of heaven!”33 Pagan gods will disagree and quarrel. When Homer dramatizes conflicts of values as a conflicts among the gods, we can see how a pagan pantheon may render moral or legal coherence difficult—perhaps impossible, as J. J. Finkelstein argued.34 The same is true of a coherent scheme of nature. Hence the historic alliance of monotheism with the sciences in disenchanting nature. But even in the Torah Muffs sees a God who changes his mind and learns from his mistakes. Now who is being trapped by literalism? Is a fickle God who does not know His mind any better than multiple gods who quarrel? Biblical poetry dramatizes the human condition through its story of exile from Eden. It revises ancient tales of a global flood to project its striking idea of God’s covenant with nature, promising stability—“seedtime and harvest, heat and cold, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). God’s pledge to stand aside even when humans succumb to ugly weaknesses is part of that larger covenant, with the rainbow as its ever-renewed emblem. Are we to think God literally regretted creating what He had called good—and very good once there were humans? (6:6). Did the same God who was ready to spare the Cities of the Plain for the sake of ten innocents literally regret making a world filled with creatures whom He blessed and commanded to be fruitful? Can we sustain the contrast of the Torah’s God with the Mesopotamian pantheon if we think God knew so little of His creatures’ nature as to be surprised at their wrongdoing—or if we imagine that the human condition resulted literally from two ancestors’ eating a piece of fruit they’d been warned to leave alone?

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Who Is God? 185

When Moses ascends Sinai, his moment is not some formless frisson but a forty-day sojourn, learning and receiving the Decalogue, an epiphany crystalized in imperatives. God’s expectations were not unclear; the theophany, not ineffable. God calls Himself erekh apayim (Exodus 34:6), affirming His forbearance just when Israel needs it most. How literal shall we be about those words? Does erekh apayim mean that God keeps His nose cool? Would it sound more stately but prove just as awkward if we said God does not let His anger overwhelm Him? Is the Decalogue a poetic precipitate of oceanic infinitude? The words Moses hears are as clear as the writing on the tablets: Retribution is not always sudden. Wrongdoers often get time to change course. That thought is no mere reflex in the wake of an encounter but a reflection on the workings of justice within nature. We readily assume God always knew Abraham’s character, trusted His friend just as He was trusted by him (Isaiah 41:8; 2 Chronicles 29:7). So the “trial” of Abraham, told to offer up his son, must have been meant to show the world (or Abraham himself!) what trust is made of, not to show God what He already knew. We can handle the thought that God knows timelessly. The Gnostic Marcion, reading the Torah at violent crosspurposes to its own, makes its God a liar, ignorant, vacillating, thieving, mocking, weak, and unjust, addicted to the light of candles and the fat of oblations, an author of ills, ever seeking to remedy his divine ignorance by experimenting with his hapless creatures. It was in answer to such libels, as Arthur Marmorstein explained years ago, that the rabbis pressed the psalmist’s thesis (echoed in Anim Zemirot) that God’s chief word is truth. Their choice of that verse preserves the impress of the goad that provoked their response.35 For it links God’s justice with his truth: Thy chief word is truth, and thine every judgment is universal justice (Psalm 119:160). Toying and experimenting of the kind that Marcion denounced would betray more than divine ignorance. It would impugn God’s justice.36 The same can be said if unfairness is found in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, as it was by Marcion. The Sages remind us that the doors to repentance swing shut only after many a chance to change course has been rejected or ignored.37 Maimonides echoes that thought and bolsters it with Stoic and Mu‘tazilite precedent: Psychological commitment and political momentum tied Pharaoh’s hands ever more tightly and made a change of course increasingly difficult. The narrowing of Pharaoh’s degrees of freedom is the just punishment of vicious choices freely made and genocidal policies embraced and enforced by his people. Thoughtful human agency, correspondingly, is justly rewarded by enhanced degrees of freedom, as Ben Azzai said: “One mitzvah draws another in its train” (M. Avot 4.2). God does, in a sense, mock evildoers—since they sow their own misfortunes. That is the seed of

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prophetic irony, treating the outcomes of choices as though they were the motives, drawing into view the hidden cost of rotten intentions. The dynamic of human actions shows God’s justice at work in human lives (Psalm 92:6– 10)—a worldly karma, not divine weakness or neglect, as Marcion charged. Biblical trials, the Rabbis argue, reveal not God’s ignorance but the mettle of the righteous. This they do, not by painting patriarchs and prophets as little plaster paragons of virtue but by finding among their actions under challenge and duress paradigm cases of virtue’s use—letting history define it not abstractly but ostensively.38 So Rabbi José of the Galil, glossing “God tested Abraham” (Genesis 22:1), played on nissa, “tried” or “tested”: God made Abraham His banner (nes), His ship’s pennant. The prooftext: “You gave those who fear You a banner, to flourish in the cause of Truth” (Psalm 60:6). Reading truth as justice, R. Jose rounds on Marcion’s charges: The ‘akedah did not mend God’s ignorance but “confirmed His justice in the world.”39 Likewise with God’s regret on finding frailty in Noah’s generation. Regret is one form of discovery. But we miss the point if we picture God changing course in a fabled antiquity and elide the changes called for in ourselves, in the real now. “There is no doubt,” Muffs writes, “that God appears in the Bible as a person possessed with a wide range of emotions: concern, joy, sadness, regret, and chagrin, among many others.” True. “Any drama is a clash between personae”—as “any good literary critic” knows.40 Muffs is right that any instructor in the elements of drama will urge his students to begin with conflict. But the Torah, although it does address some dramatic situations, is no epic or theater piece. What’s revealed here is the Shekhinah. Euripides could forge a gripping drama of Medea’s story, but only by motivating her in the slaying of her children. Milton, in the same way, could build an epic on biblical themes, but only by motivating Satan’s fall— enough, in fact, to give Blake a hook for his romantic reading of Paradise Lost. Plato, not a bad critic or dramaturge himself, knew the rules of drama well enough. That’s why he worried about poetic tales of the gods. How much that poets paint reflects their knowledge, and how much aims to raise passions for their own sake? There’s no more need to take literally Noah’s drama, or Job’s, or Jonah’s, than to think God hammered out a metal sky to roof the earth. But to read the Torah as poetry—as we must—is no license to imagine that the God it introduces learns from failed experiments. We humans do at times fall short of God’s expectations. But the fallibility is ours, and the expectations are norms, not anticipations. To paint them as emotions is part of the poetry. But if we’re to take the Torah seriously, we can’t ignore what Moses calls heaven and earth to witness in his last song: God is “the Rock whose work is perfect. All His ways are justice. . . . Is He at fault? No. His children’s is the flaw”

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Who Is God? 187

(Deuteronomy 32:1–5). God didn’t blink, we did. Yet we remain His beloved children (cf. Isaiah 46:4 and its application universally at B. Sanhedrin 38b). Muffs plays a game of contrasts, setting off the faces and facets he sees in the Torah’s God against images of the needy, greedy gods of Mesopotamia, who swarm “like hungry flies” at the post-diluvial sacrifice of Utnapishtim. He finds the pinnacle of the theology entrained by such pagan notions in Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, a deity that knows and loves only itself: “How can a being that is absolute, self-sufficient, eternal, and unchangeable love anyone or anything but itself?”41 Aristotle’s God is not alone in facing such charges. Maimonides, too, stands in the dock, a whipping boy for all philosophical theologians: “a God who is presented in terms of absolute perfection, noninvolvement, self-sufficiency, and omniscience is not a valid model for human behavior.”42 The list of epithets is rather loaded by including “noninvolvement”—“omniscience” was added, perhaps, for its overtones of overdetermination and the smothering of human freedom. But it’s hard to see what the God of Aristotle, or Maimonides, has in common with the gods of Gilgamesh. And what has become of Plato’s argument, at once poetic and philosophic, that God, being Goodness Itself, would not begrudge the gift of being.43 Clearly, if theology aspires to say what is worthy of the divine,44 what is esteemed worthy varies with the insight of the beholder. To Epicurus, recognizing divine perfection meant seeing that what is blessed and immortal would live untroubled and untroublesome, in perfect ataraxia. To the Stoics, divine perfection meant concern. Thus Stoic faith in pronoia, divine providence. As for Aristotle, granted Nous is self-focused as well as self-sufficing, it is love of Nous that moves the spheres and spurs becoming in as many ways as there are natural kinds, sustaining the cosmos in its everlasting cycles of becoming. The love that moves the spheres makes their unceasing motion a visible emblem of perfection, expressing the yearning of lesser minds to emulate the pure actuality of the highest. All change becomes a choric dance, the paradigm of aspiration. So not every conceptualization of the divine is cold and lifeless, and not every deity, even in pagan philosophy is as lifeless and passive as might seem. Biblical portraits of divinity are lined up by Muffs opposite their reflections in the mirrors held up to the text by diverse scholars: Yehezkiel Kaufmann, on this account, chronicles the revolution that freed divinity from the tyranny of external forces. His work brings into high relief the Hebraic ideals that overcame pagan enfeebling, allowing scripture to reveal “in all its depth the dimension of divine power.”45 Heschel takes God’s power for granted and focuses on “God’s love of man and involvement in human life.” Kaufmann must yield to Heschel, “the psychologist of divine emotion,” alive

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to the “surge of feeling and desire” that expresses and shapes God’s love into “an actual choice”—the choice of Israel.46 But “power and love alone are vague and incoherent.” They reach concreteness “in the realm of law,” where the “assertion of power” links with “loving consideration of the rights and the uniqueness of every human self”—giving “the teeth of power” to the “noble aspirations” of love, but tempering “the objective norms of the law book” with “the necessary sympathy” that alone keeps law from “the very injustices” it was meant to prevent.47 It is in recognizing the centrality of balance in the law that Ephraim Speiser “the sociologist of divine justice” “made his real contribution to biblical studies.”48 Speiser is the sociologist where Heschel is the psychologist and Kaufmann the metaphysician.49 The biblical authors are made party to these contrasts or caricatures. Muffs finds a synthesis of the disparate types when Jeremiah equates knowledge of God with creative imitation of God’s moral middot.50 Here are his prooftexts, the Hebrew rendered consistently with his reading: “Only in this should one glory: to know Me well, since I, the Lord do love, justice, and equity on earth. For in these do I delight” (Jeremiah 9:23). But the passage continues with the caution that circumcision in the flesh is not enough, hearts, too, must be circumcised (v. 24). That means the mind. Behavior alone does not suffice. Indeed, the moral choices Jeremiah’s God demands are quite impossible without guidance by the mind. Muffs cites Jeremiah’s rebuke of Jehoahaz: “Are you king because you have more cedar? Your father ate and drank and dealt justice and equity, and all went well for him. He upheld the rights of the poor and destitute, and it was well. Is that not what it means to know Me? saith the Lord” (22:15–16). But again the verse that follows turns to the seat of feeling and understanding as the necessary guide of the action Muffs prizes, which the king has failed to show: “You have a heart and mind only for ill gotten gains and shedding innocent blood, violence and corruption.” Jeremiah goes on to warn the king that he will die unmourned, his obsequies no better than those of an ass, his body dragged outside the city gates and left to rot (vv. 17–19). Love of the poor and justice done to their oppressor lie at the heart of Jeremiah’s message. But effective love seems to demand knowing the laws of history and nature, through which God’s rule and acts are manifested. Jeremiah’s moral and intellectual calls are inseparable from each other. Reducing a prophet’s message to its moral, social, or political expression isolates the fruit from the tree and robs action itself of the fervor that would energize it, besides cutting it off from the guidance sound and just action requires. Muffs is clearly uncomfortable with the theology of divine perfection. At times his discomfort dissolves into a string of ad hominems—



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The spiritual aristocrats will say, in their arrogance, “If the Divine is perfect, all-knowing, and above the fetters and limitations of reality, I will attain the same attributes; I too can achieve liberation from reality.” These holy spirits, however, usually collapse in their attempt to transcend their creatureliness, the limits inherent in their bodies and souls. The rest of humanity will find such an ideal totally unrealistic and will not even attempt an approximation.51

Muffs endorses our humanity. But not every direction in which humanity points or leans charts a wholesome course. And humanity must mean more than mere humility. It’s well to know our limitations. But realism must mean more than knowing what they are. Surely it should include awareness of our strengths and discernment of the differences between strengths and weaknesses that masquerade as strengths. Isn’t it God Himself who calls us to transcend our limitations and be holy (Leviticus 19:2)? Omniscience and omnipotence are prickly abstractions, not unlike those anti-submarine mines at times seen rusting in some navy yard, bristling with protrusions any one of which, when touched, might sink a ship. Do polemics bar one from asking what can be meant by a notion like omniscience? Maimonides took a passing shot at that elusive target when he reasoned that God’s knowledge must be less like a discoverer’s and more like an inventor’s, not falling short of the particulars it projects, as his neoplatonic confreres presumed.52 Glossing a line from the Psalms, “Will He who planted the ear not hear and He who formed the eye not see?” (94:6–9), he suggests that God knows particulars in the same way that He sustains their being, eminently, as the scholastics would put it, or as he puts it with homely candor and disarming directness, the way the smith who makes a needle must know something about sewing. Maimonides twits the would be Aristotelians who confine God’s knowledge to universals by reminding them that on Aristotle’s account universals exist only in their particulars. It’s pretty clear that God’s knowledge does not accrue by experience and is not derived by abstracting from individual cases. Similarly, we can say that omniscience would not need to sample, sifting foreground from background. So we can see why Maimonides took God’s knowledge to be utterly unlike our own. Spinoza took up the challenge of saying something meaningful about omniscience, and its counterpart in governance, when he called the conatus providence.53 That thought touches on omnipotence as well. God’s efficacy would not amount to doing various sorts of tricks. Theologians, as Stephen Barr remarks, see God’s living unity in an infinite act of understanding, embracing all reality54—so the penchant of the human mind for synthesis may suggest something about God’s perfect unity. And we can venture a step further if we see love, too, embracing all reality, and thereby catch a glimpse

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of God in action—although thought and action are alike in God, their unity reflected in small in the human image. It’s a weightier and more delicate a task, perhaps, to inquire what divine knowledge credibly might mean than to damn as elitists those who seek human ways to touch or share that wisdom and practice the generosity it commands, intellectually as well as socially and affectively. The struggle such a search entails must be a part of what it means to wrestle with God. If the Torah is to be our guide, as its name clearly portends, it’s very clear when it portrays God as a person that what is meant is not a human person. And the Torah’s portrayal of God as a person self-deconstructs, as Maimonides showed, and points beyond itself, as language must do when it wrestles with divinity. God, we know, did not sit for a portrait. Yet He did leave us a miniature, with pretty clear instructions about not mistaking the image for the Original. Is there is really more authenticity in imaginative than conceptual encounters with divinity? Is it even wise to force a sharp division between reason and imagination? Kant saw a false dichotomy here. Aristotle, who honored the distinction, still grounded reason’s work in footings set by imagination. The mind, as his Homeric simile put it, marshals the forces gathered in experience and gives them field promotions to the rank and responsibilities of conceptual thinking. But when it does, they no longer remain mere images.55 If there’s anything to be learned from the varied voices of biblical and rabbinic narrative and dialectic, it is this: that different idioms can point in the same direction. Biblical poetry often reaches out philosophically—most metaphysically when God tells Moses that He shall be called I am (Exodus 3:13–15). But the Torah is philosophical in many another encounter—as when Moses asks to see God’s glory and God lets him see His works and not His face, as Maimonides glosses the passage (Exodus 33:18).56 Drama fuses with philosophy when Moses begs God to preserve his errant people, to remember His covenant and give Egypt no cause to crow that Israel was rescued only to her cost (Exodus 32:11–13). Moses lays his own hopes on the line: “Now, if Thou wilt bear with their sin—If not, pray blot me from the book Thou hast written” (32:32). The aposiopesis highlights the poignancy of the moment. But the drama still demands conceptual work. Moses has declined God’s offer of a new people to lead (32:10). He asks God to erase him not just from history but from His book, and God bows to that audacious, self-sacrificing ultimatum—but then takes the lead, by affording Moses a glimpse of real sovereignty and the synthesis of justice and mercy at its heart: God is no gold casting, no toy of human whimsies. Human hopes and fears cannot reshape reality. Even God’s chosen priest cannot redefine who saved Israel from Egypt.

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The portentous encounter—Moses advocating for Israel, God offering to start over with a new chosen people, and Moses tendering his own erasure— is not lessened by our knowing that God stands far above chaffering and will take no bribe and show no favoritism (Deuteronomy 10:17). Still less will the Creator of the universe fear shame at the charge of having trusted Israel too far. As if to invert Moses’ appeal to God’s pride, God will tell a later prophet where His pride rests: “Rejoice, children of Zion. . . . Never shall My people be shamed” (Joel 2:23, 26). Israel is God’s pride. God’s good name rests on Israel’s praises. But Israel does not create God, as if poets, or artisans, smelters of gold, or of ideals, possessed the power or the right to define the God of history. God’s face will not be seen. God will defend Israel’s honor, but Israel will not define God’s glory. When we read of the assembly at the foot of Mount Sinai dancing before the golden calf and calling it the god that brought them out of Egypt (Exodus 32:4), are we reading poetry, parable, or philosophy? We miss the power of the poetry if we miss the philosophy at the heart of that poignant dramatic irony. Philosophy can be a kind of poetry, reaching for words, but hardly stammering. Plato uses poetry powerfully, not just in the myths of Gyges and Er, or the myth of the Cave, or images like the ladder of love, or graphic illustrations like the Line that charts the phases of knowledge against its counterparts in value and reality, but also in his use of dialogue and internal monologue—and hindsight, filled with dramatic ironies, since his readers know the background and the fate of Glaucon and Adeimantus, Pericles and Charmides. They know how it was that Cephalus really built his fortune. Every poet has a store of poetic values and an armory of tropes that distinguish artful speech from the steady flow of prose, weaving formal and aesthetic values into the cadences of words, or smelting thought and form into some new alloy with its own strengths and truths to reveal. We can see such artistry actively at work in the Torah’s delight in wordplay—as in the psalmist’s play on shuva, return, and sheviteinu, our captivity (Psalm 126:4), or in Abraham’s unwitting forecast at the foot of Mount Moriah, little knowing, when he evasively told Isaac that God would see to the offering, that it was God’s true character that would be seen that day. Philosophy, like poetry takes many forms. And, contrary to popular rumor, paradigms don’t govern thought but serve it. That’s as true of philosophical insights as it is of false and vicious paradigms like the invidious and sexualized stereotypes of race. Just as images of forbidden or despised practices and dispositions projected on the ethnic other persist in bio-science and anthropology, whether in Hippocratean, Darwinian, eugenic, or sociobiological terms,57 the concepts that reach out philosophically toward God’s transcendence and catch some facet of God’s Truth attain a kind of unity and continuity, whether

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borne along in the monism of Parmenides or Spinoza, the intellectualism of Aristotle or Maimonides, the emanationism of Plotinus or the Kabbalists, or the dynamism of the Stoics or Bergson. Not that these philosophers all whistled the same tune. All were reaching in the same direction. And just as we give too little credit and respect to the seriousness of poets if we exempt them from the claims of truth (and argument),58 we make too much of the rigor of philosophers if we ignore their frailty, their readiness to fall in love with partial visions, seizing on an insight and failing to detect its weaknesses, perhaps because it is their own. I know of no philosophical system that escapes all weaknesses—not just lacunae but internal tensions of the very type that we philosophers aspire to overcome. Simon Van Den Bergh counted some forty “Contradictions in Aristotle’s System.”59 There’s some overlap in the list, and some of the inconsistencies he listed are not quite that. But it is true that Aristotle failed to reconcile, say, his sense that some real possibilities will never be realized with his avowal that any real possibility must be realized at some time. Again, while Spinoza hardly deserved A. E. Taylor’s abuse for his presumed “incoherencies,” it is true that even this most exacting and rigorous philosopher did not escape the cross pressures of his own motives, overstating his case against the human freedom he would seek to redefine and liberate in the final part of the Ethics, and waxing a bit too hot against the idea of purpose that remains the mainstay of his ontology. Philosophers, like poets, are human. But that fact does not warrant refusing to take their reflections seriously, any more than the errors and illusions of the senses justify ignoring their testimony. What is called for in both cases is careful, critical scrutiny, openness to what we can learn while remaining on guard to see where we can do better or see farther. It’s often said that we humans are symbol making animals. That thought deserves some nuancing. We make symbols because we crave meaning and often think we’re pretty good at finding it. We’re also story telling creatures. Animals don’t do that. The cat may complain, and bees may signal to their hive mates which way to fly for nectar. But there is no moving on from such crude elements to a larger whole, from evidence, say, to explanation. In storytelling, the symbols we deploy or devise are typically meant to hang together. They connect events or voice a theme that experience seems to signify. Stories connect the elements of experience into thoughts and claims about realities, and into higher order structures—as histories, arguments, explanations. Language externalizes and seeks to objectify what is subjective. Context, background, and expectation are called on to support a claim to meaning. In all the arts we find a thrust toward higher order structure and a falling back on shared idioms or conventions—if not a more heroic effort to create such terms, formal and material. The painter, sculptor, or composer

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rarely sets out or sets down a single note or dab of color, an isolated grain or shapeless pebble. So here too there is a counterpart to syntax and semantics, even in nonce usages of terms, and usages that are stipulative, hermetic, ambiguous, or suggestive. The drive toward larger structures and higher orders of significance echoes the human longing for completeness. It is seconded by our fluency with abstractions that seek to govern far larger realms than experience alone can embrace. Hence the birth of theory in science, religion, history, literature, and other arts. The artist may be content to capture or reach for the moment. But even in so doing he stakes a larger claim, aware that the fullest meaning of the moment may escape the net of symbols cast for it. That’s the price of dealing in abstractions, verbal, plastic, musical, or gestural. But implicitly in any art, as one tells or paints the hunt, or writes an epic or a sonnet, or tries to catch the majesty and danger of the sea in music, or the mystery and meaning of a human face, one lays claim to the universal goal of art, vested in the value brought to experience by the very act of its pursuit and capture and communication. One pays the price of abstraction but gleans the profit too, by finding value in the very act of meaning making. Even in particularity and immediacy, one seeks and sees and finds the wholeness of the universal, the majesty of the infinite in this grain of sand. The same is true in science, history, and religion. The practictioner no less than the marketer seeks to paint a picture, tell a story, find a pattern in events. Implicit in all such efforts is the drive toward wholeness that all story telling, picture painting, sculpture making, singing, or theorizing bears. Not that every painting must be cosmic or ever story incomplete until it’s made an epic—or a film or mini-series. Not every joke must be a shaggy dog story, and not every homily deserves to be a church. Painters know when an oil is finished, and writers know without Aristotle’s help that plot is the soul of drama and that a well told tale has a beginning, middle, and end. But the roundedness of a story or a ballad and the self-containedness of a sculpture lays claim to a completeness in which modesty links hands with self-assertion: Here is what I have and can present to save and share the moment or the mood, the insight or epiphany I address. No claim to absoluteness need be made, but there’s always a claim, be it ever so self-effacing, to adequacy, a claim to touch the truth and say that this is how things are. That claim points and leads to higher ambitions, braving larger heights. So science prizes theories that are more general—broader in scope, if thinner, given the abstractions they project to gain that scope. The practice in the natural sciences today is to keep explanations natural—explain nature comprehensively but always in its own terms, nature here understood as the realm accessible if not to the senses then at least to reproducible experiences: What

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is reputable is repeatable; what can’t be measured or controlled is suspect. The project of natural science has gained assurance and accelerated its advance since the renaissance, with well noted and well deserved success and widely marketed technical and technological spinoffs that few would willingly or prudently surrender. But what the natural sciences have no means to gauge or meter has often, and in some quarters increasingly, seemed fanciful or worthless. Yet value can’t be weighed in scales or measured with the yardstick bolted to the counter—although that fact has not inhibited all attempts. Values worth retaining, we’re often assured, can be gauged by the efforts or expenditures made in their behalf; those that elude such metrics are products of all too human skills of self-deception. Flushed out into the open air and registered, say, in political or economic activity, values do become measurable—or so the story goes—perhaps even controllable, once recognized as the products and projections of human whims and wishes. Hence the newest recension of the ancient Sophists’ dream, wedding Nietzchean axiology to American pragmatism, the scientism of E. O. Wilson60 or Bernhard Rensch61 to the arts of public relations and marketeering. Value, we’re assured, is our own invention. But value itself, as distinguished from its subjective surrogates, slips out the door on hearing itself dismissed as unreal and being, like God, tellingly, beyond control. There’s no value, we’re told, without a valuer, and that smirking would be tautology makes value the notional creation of an already notional subject. So there’s no truth in valuing, no right or wrong appraisals. All human strivings pursue fantasies, self-projected, ultimately delusional. That dismissal of value judgments, practical or speculative, aesthetic, or even technological, lies at the heart of scientistic hubris, refusing to accept the limits inherent in an otherwise brilliant, successful, and indeed valuable enterprise. Yet the very gesture of dismissal is incoherent. It is itself a value judgment. Setting aside scientistic triumphalism, we must acknowledge some objective truth about values, as we do, at times, when we’ve learned some life lesson, grasping the truth about a friend, or humanity at large, or making a mid-course correction of what we’ve realized were dangerous patterns of choice—as Abraham did, on discovering that human sacrifice cannot be the highest worship of the highest God. The fact of corrigibility was Plato’s favorite lens for showing that there are facts about values. Values, like numbers, cannot be seen; and Euclidean figures are composed of lines with no thickness. Yet we know many truths about such figures, and about numbers too—truths we cannot control. The same, we learn, as we grow morally (and aesthetically!) is true of values. Here too are truths not accessible to the methods of natural science—although not foreign to the enterprise of the sciences. For in all the sciences knowing is a value, and that makes intellectual honesty a virtue. In any human enterprise—

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building a house, a theory, managing a garden, an orchard, farm, aquarium, or planet—knowledge and sensitivity are needed beyond what may seem pragmatically required, larger constructs of theory and explanation that point to larger structures of reality, beyond what seems immediately pertinent, and larger realms of value to be heeded if we hope our house, or theory, garden, aquarium, or planet will survive and thrive. Science, in other words, points beyond itself. Its search for wholeness need not stop at nature’s boundaries. Indeed it cannot, unless science is to prove an empty business, unmotivated by any larger idea of truth, undisciplined by the recognition that truth is an absolute and no arbitrary projection, safe from the self-serving lies that led Lysenko, say, to sacrifice Vavilov on the cruel altar of Stalinist hubris—immolated but undestroyed. Here, in the natural sciences, we see a special case, of Plato’s larger finding: the Socratic truth that the unexamined life is not worth living.62 If truth is a value that natural science cannot discover by its usual methods but must inevitably presuppose, then natural science cannot be self-contained. And truth is not the only such value. So are all the values guiding theory choice—comprehensiveness and simplicity, economy and elegance, even coherence and consistency. Those last are formal values and a priori. They steer scientific work, but the sheer data of experience cannot vouch for them. Empiricists like to think of them as abstractions, generalizations. But where did we acquire the right to generalize or even to invoke the kind of analogies that can guide discovery? We’ve already used the category of the universal, which was to be derived. The value was present already, pointing quietly, smilingly, toward its home in the absolute. We value scope, whether in metaphysics, theology, or epistemology. Other things being equal, there’s value in a larger theory, and meaning in an account that links one facet of experience with another, not reductively, as though the aim were the conquest of literature or music or religion by science, or of them all by politics or economics,63 but constructively, so as to build a science alive to its aesthetic dimensions and its theological implications and applications.64 Is our penchant for completeness an arbitrary bias or projection; our yen to connect the dots, a vestige of our evolutionary past? It’s more than that, I think. What we seek in any story is not just length but coherence. Paradox cannot compete successfully with comprehensiveness, not just by arbitrary preference but because the formal flaws of paradoxes sap them of truth, while the formal beauty of coherence lends the strength of verisimilitude. Least of all can incoherence stand on its own unsteady legs when it dresses up as comprehensiveness and pretends to find a universal meaning in the very idea of absurdity. There’s a rhetorical appeal in that cynical posture. But it comes a crupper on its mockery, the attempt to forge coherence out of incoherence. Illogic trips it up.

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That was the unspoken faith of Socrates, renewed by Kant in the moral realm, with the argument that false maxims cannot be made a rule. But in science, as in philosophy, the integrated account will always best the uncollated surds. And when a theory is retired and replaced, it will be by those that take coherence further, stitching into what we grasp some fold or tatter of experience not yet taken in.65 The unity we seek in any quest for coherence and consilience is, as I believe, just one of the many facets in which we see the face of God. Visionaries of all sorts, I think, see diverse faces of divinity. Scholars may celebrate the differences in much the way that collectors and connoisseurs may savor the peculiarities of a wine or prize the oddities in a stamp collection. But the philosopher’s task is no less valuable: to see how and whether and to what extent these pieces of the human puzzle fit together, taking cognizance of all that is authentic, open to diversity, but ready to filter—as Abraham, our earliest natural theologian did on seeing that holiness cannot abide with evil and that only universal justice, charity and mercy can cohere in an account of a universal God. If God is everywhere, He will not be located geographically. Aristotle’s notion of pros hen equivocity may be helpful here, alongside his project of saving the phenomena, which G. E. L. Owen showed is not just about appearances but also about what can be salvaged in the outlooks of the many and the wise.66 The core idea of pros hen equivocity, is that goodness and being are predicated in multiple, parallel ways. For what makes for the reality of any being is what makes it good as the sort of being it is. It is in this way, perhaps, that God permeates reality. The thought at the core of that idea, I suspect, is what Isaiah says in quite a different idiom: “The fill of all the earth is His glory” (6:3). All that is real expresses God’s wisdom and intent, each being and each kind of being in its own way. As for saving the opinions of the many and the wise, when they can be saved, this means that any insight is potentially truth bearing. The test lies in its coherence within itself and with all the rest of what is known.67 Religion can begin in a variety of places. For some it amounts to an attempt to pierce the veil of death, perhaps in hopes of finding a better world than they’ve known, or rejoining loved ones, or gaining protection from spirits that seem not fully and safely departed. For others religion is a search for the source of suffering and the means of overcoming it, or coping with it, or at least giving it a meaning. In Judaism, religion takes root in an appreciation of being, gratitude for what it gives, and admiration of its beauties, be they marvels of design or simpler splendors like those of a sunset—or the openness of a human face. Science matters in a religion of this sort, but so do art and caring. Piety joins the God of Genesis Himself in celebrating nature’s beauties and seeking to sustain them. Such efforts may take political or so-



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cial form, well guided or misguided, aiming to put into practice the motives poets voice in their praises and painters try to imitate. Whether in practical or aesthetic or intellectual efforts, focus is humanly critical, acknowledging the finitude that God transcends. For the philosopher, the practical or aesthetic focal point will be resolved not pragmatically but paradigmatically: this bud or leaf, gazelle or lion cub, is emblematic of a larger grace than even the widest gaze can contain. But, insofar as the varied visions of God’s face come into registry, the work of scientists and poets, humanists and prophets, are seen to be only artificially fenced apart. The poet-prophet and scientist philosopher all read from the same text, which is not a book but a world: Bless the Lord, O my soul! Lord, my God, how great You are, Wreathed in beauty and splendor, Wearing light like a garment, Spreading the sky like a curtain. His rafters laid above the waters, He makes the clouds His chariot, Traveling on wings of wind, And makes the winds His messengers, Fire and flame His servants. He set the earth on its footings, Never to give way And made the deep its garment. The waters rose above the mountains, But at Your roar they rushed away, Fled at the sound of Your thunder. Mountains rose. The waters sank, To their appointed valleys, The bounds you set, not to be breached, Never again to shroud the earth. But released, by You, in springs, And streams that make their way between the hills, Watering every wild beast, That onagers may slake their thirst. Up above, birds of the sky, Giving voice among the boughs, As You water the hills from on high, Sating the earth with the fruits of Your labor, Growing grass for the beasts, Crops for human beings to till, And bringing forth bread from the earth, And wine to gladden the heart,

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Oil to make a face shine, And bread to sustain human life. The trees of the Lord drink their fill— The cedars of Lebanon that He planted, The trees where the birds nest, And the stork, in her home in the pines, Lofty hills for the ibex, Rocks, a refuge for coneys. He made the moon, marking the seasons, The sun, that knows when to set, As You bring on the dark and night falls, When all forest animals prowl, And lions roar for their prey, Asking God for their food. At sunrise they slink off, To couch in their dens, And a man can go out to work And labor until evening comes. How abounding Your works, Lord— Each one wisely made! The earth is filled with Your creations. Here, the sea, vast, wide reaching, Teeming with life, Creatures countless, gliding, tiny and great, Ships making way, And the whale You fashioned to play there, All looking to You to feed them on time. You give, and they gather, You open Your hand, and they are well sated. You cover Your face, and they panic. Take back their breath, and they perish, Turn once more to dust. For You loose Your breath to create them, Renewing the face of the earth. Infinite glory to the Lord. May He ever delight in His works, Whose glance sets the earth trembling, Whose touch makes hillocks smoulder. While I live will I sing to the Lord, Praise Him tunefully, while I endure. Let my musings, then, please Him. My joy is in the Lord. Let the earth be done with wrongdoers, And the wicked will be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Hallelujah! (Psalm 104)68



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NOTES 1. Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005). 2.  Ibid., 106. 3.  Ibid., 104. 4.  Ibid., 105. The term “oceanic feeling” was coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud, of December 5, 1927. Freud, in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, labeled such a sense of limitlessness (and the related if somewhat contrary feeling of connection with all things) a symptom rather than a potential source of enlightenment, a fragment of infantile consciousness, not a mainspring of religious energies. Although the Muslim phenomenologists of mystical experience often speak of a dialectic between opposing senses of elation or inflation (inbisāt) and angst or constriction (inqibād) W. T. Stace holds that mystical experience, if authentic, mature, and pure, is unitive: “The most important, the central characteristic in which all fully developed mystical experiences agree, and which in the last analysis is definitive of them and serves to mark them off from other kinds of experiences, is that they involve the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor reason can penetrate.” The Teachings of the Mystics, 14–15. Stace deserves credit for dispelling the sense of something misty about mysticism and unhorsing the confusion of mysticism with the occult or the paranormal. But the box in which he hoped to capture and contain mysticism has a trap door kept shut only by bringing his thesis close to tautology: Any experience of ultimacy or of a core or higher reality that does not prove unitive (as may seem quite beside the point in many a trancelike state entered into in tribal or traditional contexts), any polytheist epiphany like those of Homer’s heroes or those Catullus invokes in celebrating Cybelle and Attis, any that is suffered or enjoyed in sensuous, somatic, or imaginative emotions (like the visions of many biblical prophets, or those of, say, St. Francis, St. Theresa, or John of the Cross)—risks branding as inauthentic or immature. And by placing mystical experience beyond what reason can “penetrate,” Stace takes back with one hand what he gave with the other: Evidently there is something mysterious or occult in mystic experience at its purest. 5.  Ibid., 106. 6.  Ibid., 107. Compare Heschel on stammering and ecstasy, as quoted above. 7.  Ibid., 107. 8.  Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed I, ed. by Salamon Munk (Osnabruck: Zeller, 1964), Introduction, especially Munk 1.4a. 9. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 108–09. 10.  Legislative particularity is always underdetermined by the broader purposes of a law. It is here that ritual takes hold, making every law the vehicle of symbols that express, evoke, and structure, reinforce and in a way even create an ethos. See Lenn Goodman, God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 193–214. 11.  Moses also calls God his song (Exodus 15:2). 12.  Rav Kook, cited in Azar, “Keter Torah,” Luaḥ Eretz Yisrael (1912) in Yehoshua Be’eri, Ohev Yisrael bi-Kedushah 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: H.Y.K.H., 1989) 4.48, quoted

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in Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 65, 244 n.26. 13.  Cf. Frederick Clarke Prescott, The Poetic Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1922; repr. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1983). 14. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 101. 15.  Ibid., 97. 16.  Moses Maimonides, The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics 4 (Shemonah Perakim), trans. by Joseph I. Gorfinkle (Charleston: Forgotten Books, 2012), citing Mekhilta to Exodus 15:2. 17.  See Goodman, God of Abraham, chapter 1. 18.  Commenting on the Song at the Sea, Rabbi Judah, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva, says, “God showed Himself in full battle dress, a warrior, girded with a sword, mounted, armored, wearing a breastplate and bearing a spear and a shield.” He had no need of these things, but that is how He appeared (Mekhilta de R. Ishmael, Shirata 4). The Song specifies the Lord is His name in the same verse that calls Him a man of war (Exodus 15:3) to make it clear that this was the same God who appeared “as a loving elder,” as it was later thought (see Exodus 24:10 and Mekhilta de Shimeon ben Yoḥai, p. 81). 19. See the Hebrew text in orthodox prayerbooks, e.g., Ha-Siddur ha-Shalem, ed. Philip Birnbaum (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1949), 415–20. The translation here is my own. 20.  Identified as the mystic and philosopher Rabbi Judah of Regensburg (d. 1217). 21.  See Lenn Goodman, In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Account (Amherst, NY: Humanity Press, 2001), chapter 9, “Moral, Religious, and Hypostatic Truth.” The poet also echoes the Song of Songs, of course, and multiple midrashim. 22.  Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 358–60, echoing Jeremiah 23:29. 23. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 108. 24.  Ibid., 109. 25.  Cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12. The Aramaic understands the glass as a mirror. 26.  Maimonides in his Commentary on the Mishnah, at Kelim 30.2. 27. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 100. 28.  Ibid., 193. 29.  Ibid., 11–12. 30.  Ibid., 55. 31.  Ibid., 12–13. 32.  As Jacob Milgrom shows in the Anchor Bible Leviticus, the sacrificial ritual of the desert Tabernacle, presaging that of the Temple in Jerusalem, projects a symbolism with moral purity at its core. 33. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 38, citing “I will praise the lord of wisdom,” trans. by William Pfeiffer, ANET 435; cf. Goodman, “Ethics and God,” Philosophical Investigations 34 (2011), 135–50. 34.  Ibid., citing Finkelstein, “Bible and Babel,” Commentary 26 (1958), 440 ff. See Goodman, God of Abraham, chapter 1.

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35.  See Arthur Marmorstein, “The Background of the Haggadah,” in Studies in Jewish Theology: The Marmorstein Memorial Volume, edited by Joseph Rabinowitz and Myer S. Lew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). 36.  Cf. Maimonides, Guide III 24. 37.  Exodus Rabbah 13.4, B. Shabbat 104a, Yoma 28b, etc. Marmorstein, 27; cf. B. Sanhedrin 91a, Genesis Rabbah 61.6. 38.  “The Rabbis,” Muffs writes, “in their wisdom, tell us the sins of the saints. In this they follow the Bible [citing Yitzhak Heinemann, Darkhei ha-Aggadah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1949–50) 49 ff.]. They even add sins that the Bible does not tell us about. All this is done with the Genius of a master pedagogue. An educational model has to lend itself to imitation” (176). True enough. But it’s not the sins that we’re to emulate! Rabbinic midrash, in fact, often overlays biblical candor about the failings of our culture heroes with an embarrassing coat of whitewash in service to homiletic (or even chauvinistic!) agendas that quarrel with the texts that it covers over and obscures. 39.  Genesis Rabbah 55.1; Midrash Tanhuma 44.6 to Genesis 22:1. Akiva and other Sages argue that God left Abraham free to choose his course, lest it be said he acted in bewilderment. 40. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 2–3. 41.  Ibid., 13. 42.  Ibid., 176. 43. Plato, Timaeus 29e-30a. 44.  See Plato, Republic, in Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 379; cf. Deuteronomy 32:3. 45. Muffs, The Personhood of God, 83. 46.  Ibid., 84. 47. Ibid. 48.  Ibid., 84–85. 49.  Ibid., 85. 50. Ibid. 51.  Ibid., 176. 52. Maimonides, Guide III, in Dalalat al-Hairin, 3.19–21. 53. Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise, in Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925), Part I, chapter 5. Cf. Spinoza’s argument that we know God thinks because individual thoughts are modes expressing God’s nature in determinate ways, Ethics II 1. 54. Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame: University Notre Dame Press, 2003), 224–25. 55. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics: Topica, trans. by Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), II 19; cf. Goodman, In Defense of Truth, 194–200. 56. Maimonides, Guide I, 21, 38.

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57.  See L. E. Goodman and M. J. Goodman, “‘Particularly Amongst the Sunburnt Nations . . .’—The Persistence of Sexual Stereotypes of Race in Bio-Science,” International Journal of Group Tensions 19 (1989), 221–43, 365–84. 58.  See Goodman, In Defense of Truth, chapter 7, “Truth in Art.” 59. Averroes, Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, translated by Simon Van Den Bergh as The Incoherence of the Incoherence (London: Luzac, 1954), 2.215. 60.  See E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998), 240; “The Biological Basis of Morality,” The Atlantic April 1, 1998. 61. See Bernhard Rensch, Homo Sapiens: From Man to Demigod (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). 62.  Readers of fiction might take note, in this regard, of the unexamined writing on the walls in Allegra Goodman’s novel Intuition. 63. Compare Ben-Ami Schafstein’s sage observation that psychotherapy can be analyzed in terms of politics or economics—and vice versa. The Dilemma of Context (New York: NYU Press, 1989). One can as easily reduce anthropology to politics as move in the opposite direction. There is no privileged bottom to any reductive program. 64.  Reductive enterprises may look attractive. But often that means destroying or ignoring what attracted explanatory interest to begin with. 65.  See Goodman, In Defense of Truth, esp. chapter 5, “Induction and Reality” and “Toward a Synthetic Philosophy,” in Hava Samuelson and Aaron Hughes, eds., Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 101–18. 66.  G. E. L. Owen, “Tithenai ta Phainomena,” in J. M. E. Moravcsik, ed., Aristotle: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 167–90; reprinted from Aristote et les Problèmes de la méthode (Louvain: Symposium Aristotelicum, 1961), 83–103. 67. See Lenn Goodman, Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Goodman, In Defense of Truth, esp. chapter 9. 68.  Translation, once again, is my own.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Posterior Analytics: Topica, trans. Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960 or in Jonathan Barnes, ed. The Complete Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, based on the W. D. Ross, ed. The Oxford Aristotle. Averroes. Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), trans. Simon Van Den Bergh. London: Luzac, 1954. Barr, Stephen. Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Notre Dame: University Notre Dame Press, 2003. Goodman, L. E. “Ethics and God.” Philosophical Investigations 34, no. 2 (2011): 135–150. ———. God of Abraham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

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———. “Moral, Religious, and Hypostatic Truth.” In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Account. Amherst: Humanity Press, 2001. ———. Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “Toward a Synthetic Philosophy.” Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Hava Samuelson and Aaron Hughes. Leiden: Brill, 2014. ———. “Truth in Art.” In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Account. Amherst: Humanity Press, 2001. Goodman, L. E. and M. J. Goodman, “‘Particularly Amongst the Sunburnt Nations’: The Persistence of Sexual Stereotypes of Race in Bio-Science.” International Journal of Group Tensions 19 (1989): 221–243, 365–384. Heschel, A. J. The Prophets. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Maimonides, Moses. The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (Shemonah Perakim). 1912. trans. Joseph I. Gorfinkle. Reprint, Charleston: Forgotten Books, 2012. Maimonides, Moses. Dalalat al-Hairin (Le Guide des Egares—Guide to the Perplexed, ed. Salamon Munk. Paris, 1856–66. Reprint, Osnabruck: Zeller, 1964, 3 volumes. Marmorstein, Arthur. “The Background of the Haggadah,” Studies in Jewish Theology: The Marmorstein Memorial Volume, ed. Joseph Rabinowitz and Myer S. Lew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. Mirsky, Yehudah. Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Muffs, Yochanan. The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image. Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2005. Owen, G. E. L. “Tithenai ta Phainomena.” Aristotle: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1961, ed. J. M. E. Moravcsik. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967. Plato. Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Prescott, Frederick Clarke. The Poetic Mind. 1922. Reprint, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983. Rensch, Bernhard. Homo Sapiens: From Man to Demigod. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. Schafstein, Ben-Ami. The Dilemma of Context. New York: NYU Press, 1989. Spinoza, Baruch. Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt. Heidelberg: Winter, 1925. Wilson, E.O. Consilience. New York: Knopf, 1998. ———. “The Biological Basis of Morality.” The Atlantic, April 1, 1998.

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Chapter Twelve

Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn

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Randi Rashkover

Jewish theology, particularly in the United States, is at a crossroads. On the one hand, traditional Judaism and Jewish monotheism are on the rise. On the other hand, many liberal Jews find themselves unable as Mordecai Kaplan expected to accept the traditional account of the God of the bible and the rabbinic tradition. Ultimately however, this divide is not new. Its history can be traced all the way back to the pantheism crisis around the work of Baruch Spinoza. In its wake, modern western Jewish thought has struggled to develop rational and coherent accounts of the Jewish God. If consequently it is the goal of this volume to present new accounts of Jewish theology, the primary contention of this essay is that to do so one must first contend with this central challenge otherwise known as the theologico-political problem. More specifically, I will examine this problem as it was taken up and responded to by a number of twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who advocated instead a turn towards a theological realism or theology of divine revelation. By theopolitico-political problem I mean to refer to Spinoza’s insistence upon the separation between philosophy and knowledge of the objective world and the spheres of human life including but not limited to ethics, politics and religion. Implicit in this separation of the spheres of rational knowing and human political, religious, ethical existence is a determination of the latter as an expression of mere subjectivism, fantasy and the desire for power in contrast to the former taken to be the unique arena of rational knowledge or objective understanding of the eternal laws of nature. That Spinoza’s separation of the spheres sent shock waves through the courts and salons of Western Europe is an understatement challenging in its path the legitimate authority of church, state and even the individual enlightenment philosopher seeking to outline a rational account of ethics and human happiness.1 Needless to say, Jewish thinkers in particular felt challenged to respond to and provide a different account of the relation 205

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between reason, knowledge and the human condition and one that could speak more authentically to the nature and action of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish tradition. Arguably, the turn to theological realism in the work of Rosenzweig, Strauss and others developed in part as an effort to offer such a new account. Unfortunately, this turn to theological realism and to the notion of a dramatically transcendent and nearly wholly other God did not succeed in overcoming the challenge presented by the theologicopolitical problem. In the following I will take up Rosenzweig’s work as an example of this problem and argue further that a repair of the Rosenzweigian response is required. In the final section of the essay I will present a proposal for a new approach to Jewish theology that I maintain will not succumb to the challenges of the theologico-political problem.

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THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL PROBLEM In the preface to the 1965 translation of his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Leo Strauss remarked that he found himself and Jewish thought generally speaking “in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.”2 While as Jerome Copulsky points out, Strauss coined the phrase to describe “the problem of the Jew lost in the non-Jewish modern world”3 he also understood that the so-called Jewish polemic with the non-Jewish world had its roots in Spinoza’s separation between philosophical knowledge of a single and eternal Substance and the sphere of human self-preservation and desire. If, as Copulsky remarks, “the Enlightenment had really vanquished religion intellectually [then according to Strauss], “Spinoza’s critique stood at the beginning of that project, ‘orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.’”4 While an exhaustive account of the relation between Spinoza’s philosophical account of God, substance and truth and his analysis of religion, ethics and the state exceeds the bounds of this essay I will identify the contours of the theologico-political problem as it arises in Spinoza’s work so that we may understand the fundamental problem it poses to Jewish thinkers in particular. The core of Spinoza’s philosophy is his account of God. Spinoza begins this account with an analysis of the category of “substance” or what “must be in itself and be conceived through itself.”5 As things that are in and conceived through themselves, substances are the bases for their own attributes that characterize the “what” of any substance. However, for Spinoza, reality is exhausted by one and only one substance. If there were two substances, these two would have to consist of different attributes or attributes that bear nothing in common with one another. But, Spinoza reasons, substances with nothing

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Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn 207

in common cannot cause each other and therefore a substance can only cause itself. Moreover, substance is infinite because there is only one substance and to be finite would mean that this one substance would be limited by another substance of the same nature, but any other substance of the same nature would be the same as this one substance. Consequently, substance also has infinite attributes or there are an infinite number of ways for substance to be or express itself in reality. As infinite and constituted by an infinite number of attributes, substance or God not only necessarily exists but is eternal. What about the existence of particular things? There is a difference according to Spinoza between natura naturans and natura naturata. The former includes God and God’s infinite essences. The latter consists of modalities or “affects.” If God has infinite attributes, these attributes are expressed in infinite numbers of ways and these ways can produce realities that are particular, changing and come in and out of existence. Regardless, nature, Spinoza argues, “has no fixed goal . . . all things in nature proceed from all eternal necessity and with supreme perfection.”6 What then of persons? According to the Ethics, human beings are modalities of two divine attributes; thought and extension. On the one hand, the human is a modality of divine thought, i.e., one of the ways divine thought thinks. On the other hand “ideas” have corresponding objects because God’s essence is always existence. Therefore the “idea of the human mind” has an object, “an actually existing thing,” which is the body. The human mind is the sum total of the ideas of the affections of what the body feels and the body determines the range of human knowledge. Accordingly for Spinoza there are three levels of human knowledge; sensory knowledge, reason through common notions, and intuition. The first level consists of epistemological activities of relating repeated sensory experiences through memory and imagination. This knowledge, reliant as it is on external forces working on the affections is confused and inadequate. The second level or reason reflects the active use of the mind as it generates common notions and in particular the causal relations between them. By contrast to sensory knowledge, reason identifies commonalities or real agreements between things in nature through the active exercise of the internal mind and can therefore generate adequate ideas of objective reality. The third and highest level of knowledge is the intuition which as the knowledge of God’s thought and extension is the highest (and most rare) form of knowledge. According to Spinoza, intuition is the key to human tranquility in nature and the antidote to the perpetual limits of the human body and mind within a world of external forces it cannot control. It is synonymous with the intellectual love of God since as Spinoza says, “[T]his kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the

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essence of things.”7 According to Sanem Soyarslan “it would seem that intuitive knowledge is both more immediate as it grasps adequate ideas in ‘one glance’ and attends unlike reason to the ‘essences’ of things and not only their causal relations. . . . As we see here, the starting point of intuitive knowledge is adequate knowledge of the eternal necessity of God’s nature.”8 For our purposes it is important to note the relation of the second and third forms of knowledge to the life of the human who lives with her emotions and in a world she takes as changing and temporal. For both reason and intuition, knowledge is sub species aeternitatis or under the perspective of eternity. By employing common notions, reason regards things “as necessary, not as contingent” and “as truly—namely, as they are in themselves.”9 This is all the more the case with respect to intuition. This means however that adequate knowledge does not include or reflect the reality of the human knower or subject in time. Indeed, through reason or apprehension of the common notions, the individual becomes “objective” to herself. As Soyarslan explains, “such an understanding allows us to attain a general scientific knowledge of Nature and our place in Nature, obtain a detached and objective viewpoint from which we can rise above our imaginative knowledge of things (including ourselves), and thereby, remove our errors.”10 With intuition the level of detachment from subjective experience is even higher still for here, “I see—in one single intuition”11 that I am in God and conceived through God. Of course Spinoza’s Ethics is an attempt to outline a standard of action for persons commensurate with adequate knowledge. Not surprisingly however the essence of ethical action is precisely the “detached viewpoint” since as Soyarslan says, “it figuratively speaking, enables us—to approach ourselves and our emotions from the outside.”12 Nonetheless, such a position is hard to achieve and while Spinoza argues that ethics can constitute a foundation for social and political life, it does not function as the primary impulse for the state. Rather, as Spinoza explains in the Theological Political Treatise, it is desire and in particular, the desire for self-preservation which constitutes the primary impulse of politics and religion since persons are more easily determined by their passions than they are by their reason and its objective and eternal understanding. In the Theological and Political Treatise Spinoza says, If all men could be easily led by reason alone and could recognize what is best and most useful for a state, there would be no one who would not forswear deceit for everyone would keep most religiously to their compact in their desire for the good, namely the preservation of the state. . . . However is it far from being the case that all men can always be easily led by reason alone, everyone is drawn away by his pleasure, while avarice, ambition, envy hatred and the like so engross the mind that reason has no place therein.13



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Politics in other words works in most instances in the service of the passions. If persons opt to forego some personal desire in order to participate in the state, this is most often not because they use their reason but because they wager that safety and security are higher desires than other more idiosyncratic needs. Most importantly for us, Spinoza’s understanding of the desire-driven character of the state directly informs his understanding of biblical Judaism and the biblical God. According to Spinoza, we can find an excellent example of a thriving state by examining Israelite society. The primary difference between it and a modern state concerns the role of God as the state sovereign such that the Jews of the Mosaic covenant pledged their natural rights to him. Still, Spinoza maintains, they did so not on rational grounds but because the God who redeemed them from slavery demonstrated a concern with their security and welfare and promised to aid them as a material society now and in the future. And he says, “God did not enter into [the covenant] until the Jews had had experience of His wonderful power by which alone they had been, or could be, preserved in a state of prosperity.”14 There are several problems with Spinoza’s account of Judaism. First, Spinoza maintains that Israelite society is rooted in and ultimately governed by the desires and needs of the people. It is not essentially a rational society. Second and even more important here is Spinoza’s insistence that the events described in the biblical narrative are imaginative in nature and not necessarily true philosophically speaking. Briefly said, the God of the Jews is not the God of substance and the description of this God in the Hebrew Scriptures is not philosophically accurate. Judaism, its politics and its theology are relegated to the sphere of subjective desire. This is not to say that they do not in Spinoza’s view make a contribution to analyses of politics and religion but in and of themselves they do nothing to alter the fundamental status of politics and religion as contingent upon the dynamics of human need over and against human objective reason. The theologicopolitical problem is here set in motion. KANT AND TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC Many Jewish philosophers turned to the work of Immanuel Kant to help develop their philosophical and theological response to the Spinozistic challenge.15 Like many Jewish thinkers, Kant was concerned that reason improperly understood would lead to “materialism, fatalism, atheism . . . skepticism.”16 While Kant’s work is typically understood as a response to Humean skepticism, he was deeply aware of the impact of Spinoza’s thought on what he took to be the crisis of the Enlightenment. As Omri

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Boehm argues, ““It is first with the B-Preface, written in the context of the Pantheismusstreit, that Kant presents the Critique as the (only) answer to atheism, fatalism and Schwarmerei (all terms that by 1787 have become the distinctive marks of Spinozism and of the Streit); and it is first here that he pledges to deny knowledge, “in order to make room for faith.”17 According to Boehm, Kant considered the separation between reason and traditional beliefs supported by Spinoza’s philosophy to constitute the single most significant threat to the success of the Enlightenment world-view. While undoubtedly, Kant held that reason should thrive, it should not and need not do so at the expense of political authority or traditional beliefs. Newtonian science had to be reconciled with morality. To demonstrate this however, required a Copernican revolution in how we think about knowledge. At the heart of this revolution would be a recalibrated understanding of the relationship between the knower and the known or between subjectivity and objectivity. If according to Spinoza, knowledge and therefore true experience meant the eternal truth of objective reality, Kant disagreed and maintained that ‘experience’ is a product of both subjectivity and objectivity as they are apprehended through the two faculties of the human knower; understanding and sensibility. Kant’s analysis began with recognition of the fact that we have and use a priori ideas which we take to correspond to objective truth. But how could we have such a priori ideas if knowledge arose out of sense perception first and how could such notions conform to objective knowledge? The answer Kant maintained is that “we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves have put into them.”18 Consequently, there is a correspondence between our a priori notions and what we know. Knowledge is a product of what we contribute to experience through the understanding and what we perceive by way of sensibility as the two work in tandem. Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. . . . If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they



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can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.19

With this realization Kant determined that knowledge conforms to two different kinds of logic; general logic and transcendental logic. The former concerns the rules of thought generally speaking while the latter concerns the rules (categories) provided by the understanding of the knowledge of objects. Transcendental reflection therefore is the exercise of identifying the categories of our objective knowledge or what constitute the (subjective) conditions of the possibility of knowledge when by knowledge Kant meant “scientific knowledge” or Newtonian science. Kant’s determination of the role of transcendental logic in the determination of knowledge constitutes his greatest contribution to the effort to overcome the essential binary distinction of the theologico-political problem since it offers a first step towards articulating how the knower and the known, the subject and the object constitute inextricable elements of what is considered to be knowable or intelligible experience. This is not the same as saying however that Kant’s particular brand of transcendental reflection will by itself resolve the Spinozistic problem as the tension between Jewish thinkers and Kant’s thought over the course of the next two hundred years attests. While Kant is famous for arguing that unlike his Humean and Spinozistic predecessors, he provides a critique of theoretical reason that “makes room for faith,”20 i.e., the faith associated with practical reason or morality, the success of his effort to demonstrate the commensurability between the two spheres is highly questionable. Briefly stated neither the moral law nor its postulates needed for performance of the law to be rational are knowable through theoretical reason. In effect, moral reason and theoretical reason have to do with two different aspects of reality; the first with the noumenal sphere of freedom beyond causality and the second with the realm of appearances or objectivity determined by the combined labor of the understanding and sensibility.21 Undoubtedly however, moral action must make sense and be possible in the world of appearances since this is the world we know and in which we act.22 To mediate between our moral effort and our knowledge of this world and therefore help us to understand that our moral effort is possible despite the fact that it does not comport with the laws of science, Kant argued that we must postulate the ideas of the highest good, God and immortality. Ultimately however, the postulates will not suffice to render

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our moral action meaningful since as noted, they are not apprehensible by theoretical reason and cannot show how our moral activity is possible in the world of appearances but only allow us to hope that it is. Morality and nature are as far apart in Kant as they were in Spinoza such that Kant’s thought offers Jewish thinkers little hope for overcoming the theologico-political problem. This coupled with the fact that whatever God Kant’s philosophy ‘made room for’ it was certainly not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures who acted in history and revealed particular laws to a particular people.23 If Jewish thinkers were to find a resolution to the theologico-political problem, they would have to develop a different account of the ratio of the subject-object relation.

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ROSENZWEIG Like many Jewish thinkers before and after him, Franz Rosenzweig was concerned to redraw the map of human knowing in general and theological knowledge in particular. Like Kant, Rosenzweig also sought to challenge the tendency by religious thinkers to issue present theological claims as representations corresponding to objective reality. Many twentieth-century Jewish and Christian theologians took Kant’s critique of the arguments for the existence of God as sufficient justification to challenge what they saw as the essential dogmatism implicit in these so-called rational assertions. However, Rosenzweig soon challenged representationalism in general or what he referred to as “essentialist” or “unhealthy” thinking. In his essay the “New Thinking” Rosenzweig argued that essentialism is an epistemological dead-end.24 The obsession with the language of being, forces us to use propositional claims such as “x is y” as signaling the truth of correspondence. But to say that “x is y” is no longer to speak of “x” but rather of “y.” We have, in the very exercise of identifying “x” lost “x.” Representationalist claims are subject to a perpetual falsification by ‘experience’ and a resulting skepticism which undermines their apparent value as contributors to knowledge production. Rosenzweig’s solution was to illuminate a “healthy human understanding”25 where knowledge claims are recognized as practical responses to our encounters with God, world and others. Healthy understanding is a narration or response to events or things that happen to us; a meeting between subjectivity and objectivity. The healthy understanding Rosenzweig said, “can wait, can keep on living, has no ‘idee fixe.’”26 Knowledge is a documentation of what takes place which is temporal and changing. If knowledge means describing what happens to us, then knowledge is a mode of speech-thinking on the grounds that it does not maintain the pretense of accurately describing a presumed external object. Knowledge is understood as a response to a prior

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“call” or event and as a “response” knowledge happens in forms of conversation. Representationalism’s confidence in fixed or finite claims which are said to correspond or represent an external reality aims has been repaired it seems by an appreciation for the relational, interactive and changing nature of the claims we make. Moreover, speech-thinking in Rosenzweig’s account is specifically theological since our very receptivity to any “other” is a result of our original receptivity to the one who as wholly other both creates and loves us. Speech-thinking is a thinking in and with God. It constitutes therefore the centerpiece of Rosenzweig’s account of the theological rationality of the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e., his attempt to demonstrate the correlation between a science of knowing and the Jewish tradition which would directly overcome the Spinozistic challenge. But what does Rosenzweig’s non-propositional speech-thinking look like and how does it help Rosenzweig to develop a theology which comports with the details of the God of the Hebrew bible and Jewish tradition? As early as 1917, Rosenzweig linked his interest in promoting Jewish learning with the effort to render Jewish texts intelligible to a non-Jewish public forging what he took to be a new path for the “Science of Judaism.”27 Only a Science of Judaism he maintained would imbue the study of traditional texts with “the fresh breath of a great scientific life”28 or demonstrate what became his later association between speech-thinking and scriptural hermeneutics. If however, a negotiation between philosophical discourse and a science of Jewish learning constitutes a key feature of Rosenzweig’s intellectual agenda, it is also the case that Rosenzweig’s hermeneutics presents an unresolved tension between two different reading strategies. In her book, Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity, Mara Benjamin highlights this conflict as it appears in Rosenzweig’s scriptural hermeneutics specifically between his insistence upon the theologically-substantive character of the Hebrew Scriptures on the one hand and upon the exclusive hermeneutical privilege of the Jewish reading community on the other. According to Benjamin the tension appears when we juxtapose the role of scripture in the Star with its role in Rosenzweig’s later writings on biblical translation. Benjamin reads the Star as a testament to the centrality of divine revelation, the transformative event in the life of persons and world. In the Star she maintains, philosophy works as the “silent prognostication” of revelation and response, narrative and liturgical hope; the verbal testimonies to a dramatic and singularly meaningful event. If revelation gives rise to speech it is she maintains speech in the service of a theological call and we find this call announced in and through the Hebrew Scriptures. Taken alone, revelation is content-less; a call rooted in the dramatic otherness experienced in the encounter with divine reality.

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Still, the biblical text as Benjamin details is understood and appealed to by Rosenzweig as an expression of this content-less revelation giving rise to the paradox of the Star’s account; “on the one hand the bible was to be the literal manifestation of the divine revelation on the other hand, revelation for Rosenzweig would always escape any definitive content.”29 In the Star, the bible is at once an “unmediated source of [a] truth”30 which nonetheless exceeds language and cannot be conveyed in definitive content. This obscurity around the sacred character of the text aside, Rosenzweig’s Star attributes a theological meaning to the biblical text which he illuminates through a method that Benjamin labels “re-writing.” Picking and choosing texts and arrangements of texts that convey the theological realism apparently expressed through the text, Rosenzweig issues his own version of the text; a “canon within the canon” in the name of earmarking the theological call and event which in his estimation constitutes its essential meaning. However, the theological realism of the Star’s scriptural hermeneutics operates as only one of the two dominant approaches to the biblical text presented in Rosenzweig’s work. Over time and as evidenced in Rosenzweig’s essays in biblical translation, Benjamin maintains, “the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish reading of it began to form a component of Rosenzweig’s eccentric political identity.”31 If as she claims, the “Bible became for Rosenzweig the site for declaring the Jewish contribution to German history and culture” (contra the influence of Luther’s translation), it was the reading Jewish community who determined the very meaning of the text itself. . . . As he entered into his late period of writing, Rosenzweig used scripture as the vehicle not for an argument for greater integration . . . but to articulate a critique of German identity. . .”32 In other words, if as I have suggested, at one time Rosenzweig may have sought a reconciliation between Jewish learning and a science of knowing—a negotiation between the two as commensurate standards or generators of intelligibility, his later writings shift focus asserting instead that more polemical claim that Judaism may itself, become the originary source of the intelligibility of German culture. Ironically, Rosenzweig’s thinking comes to resemble the very “Jewish people theology” he challenged in his essay “Atheistic Theology” and which he originally sought to replace with a science of theological and/or philosophical objectivity.33 The meaning of the biblical text comes to be associated with the privileged status of Jews who read it. We see similar themes announced by Rosenzweig in his letters on Jewish learning where he speaks about text study as the vehicle for expressing the desires of the Jewish community. “Desires are the messengers of confidence”34 he tells us as he details how communal study lends expression to the community’s hopes and dreams.

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Ultimately therefore, Rosenzweig’s biblical hermeneutics is reducible to one of two claims: “an unknowable God is God” or “the community who desires God is the community who desires God.” Unfortunately, neither offers a helpful interpretation of the scriptural text. This is because both reading strategies function as assertions which determine meaning prior to and regardless of engagement with the text. While such an account of Rosenzweig’s hermeneutics as hinged upon two fixed claims may be surprising in light of his account of speech-thinking as “relational,” it is not difficult to explain why his scriptural rules do not reflect his otherwise nonrepresentational mode of speech-thinking. Simply stated, Rosenzweig’s repair of representational thinking is incomplete. By incomplete I mean that Rosenzweig’s account of “relations” transpires within the terms of two un-reflected upon representations. There are two gateways to recognizing this problem in Rosenzweig’s thought. The first route, takes up Rosenzweig’s concern to salvage human individuality out from under the apparently totalizing logical Absolute of German idealism. A second route focuses on Rosenzweig’s concern to salvage “God” detailed in my book Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics. However, the same philosophical flaw emerges in both analyses. Rosenzweig abandons the work of transcendental logic insisting that it is incapable of addressing the three facticities (God, world, and self) we apparently cannot know. Undoubtedly, when contending with matters of what we do not know, transcendental logic, properly understood, takes for granted that that which we do not know constitutes an element of logical and at least hypothetical consideration anticipating the possibility of its coming to be known at some future time. Undoubtedly, we may think productively about matters we do not have definite knowledge of and in so doing recognize the extent to which they nonetheless operate within a logical discourse through which they achieve a level of intelligibility. Nonetheless, Rosenzweig uses the occasion of doubt around these three elements to reposition philosophical thinking away from transcendental reflection. Benjamin Pollack’s book Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy argues for Rosenzweig’s interest in the development of a philosophical system generative of a science of cognition in the tradition of Kant, Schelling and Hegel. Still, as Pollack details, Rosenzweig identified what he took to be the fatal flaw of his critical and speculative predecessors, i.e., the failure of their logical systems to include apprehension of the individual, finite person. Consequently, he sought to develop a system which could afford recognition of the particularity of the finite self as part and parcel of an absolute knowledge of All. As early as 1916, Rosenzweig emphasized the

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extent to which for him, the individual generates “truth.” This early determinism repeats itself in the Star of Redemption’s identification of the reality of death as the signifier of human individuality or vehicle for an immediate, unexamined intuition into our selves. Still, for Rosenzweig, this insight is at once an insight into a nothing since what we know exceeds and is outside of logic. It is a particular nothing and Rosenzweig contrasts it with the account of nothing in Hegel’s Science of Logic. The latter, Rosenzweig maintains is no authentic nothing since as a universal nothing it presupposes a universal and absolute being. By contrast, Rosenzweig moves from the immediate account of death as the signal for the irreducibility of persons to assert the analogous irreducibility of God and world, the three elements which, he claims, following Kant, we know we do not know. Ironically, however, it is Rosenzweig’s account and not Hegel’s which waxes overly deterministic. For as Pollack says, “Rosenzweig states that unlike the ‘single Nothing’ of his predecessors, the ‘threefold ‘Nothing’ that has emerged for us through the breakup of the All into the three fundamental kinds of beings ‘contains within itself the promise of determinability.’”35 How can epistemological “nothings” constitute the prospect of determinability or intelligibility? Interestingly enough Rosenzweig deploys a kind of transcendental analysis in the Star. If he says Kant sought to articulate the conditions or rules for the possibility of that which we claim to know, Rosenzweig says he seeks to determine the conditions of the possibility of what we do not know. How do we know what we do not know? How might we “think” that which we do not “know”? This is not an unreasonable question. Surely, as mentioned, transcendental logic permits an investigation into an unknown. Such an investigation registers as a series of hypotheses, i.e., speculative inferences around a particular object of consideration, inferences that vary depending upon the possible lines of logical relations or rules at work in the relation between this object and other intelligible objects. Not surprisingly, Rosenzweig himself refers to the silent elements as hypotheses awaiting actuality. In the Star he says, Hypothetical—that is the word which clarifies that strange appearance of the pieces of the universe for us. Not one of these pieces has a secure, an alterable place; a secret If is inscribed over each. Behold God exists and is existing life; behold: the world exists and is inspired configuration; behold; man exists and is solitary self. But don’t ask how these three elements find their way to one another.36

But Rosenzweig’s “hypothesis” is not the same as an hypothesis of inferential consideration. We know this because Rosenzweig’s account of the transcendental procedure starts with a pre-determined description of the “nature” of each of the elements. While we do not it seems know persons, we know what it is that we do not know, i.e., we know what in the Star amounts

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Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn 217

to the meta-ethical self and it is this self Pollack says that “must transform itself into a fast logical and methodological rule for knowledge.”37 How paradoxical; that which we do not know is nonetheless not only that which we can describe but a “that” which thereby as describable constitutes the “rule” for thinking. To speak of the acquisition of knowledge is to speak of the individual asserting itself in the world and not surprisingly, finding itself and only itself in its midst. Of course the same is true for a theological reading of the Star. There Rosenzweig argues that while we do not know God, something remains and this something which remains can be described. We can speculate about the nature of the God we do not know. As noted, Rosenzweig maintains that the God so described is hypothetical only. However, the theosophical account here offered plays a more substantive role than a hypothesis naturally would. Indeed, it gives rise to a theological realism which becomes determinative for both persons and world. It is the silent, hypothesized God who by virtue of the “promise of determinability” becomes the basis for the theo-logic of command or call, which qua divine is both apparently determinative and yet necessarily non-propositional on account of the presupposed difference between it and persons. Consequently, instead of permitting a logical investigation into matters unknown, Rosenzweig posits these unknowns positioning them as untested premises from which knowledge is inevitably deduced. In the end, Rosenzweig’s analysis results in one of two outcomes. Either: a) reality and knowledge are constituted by a “theo-logic,” or b) knowledge and reality are constituted by the repeated response of human persons. In either case, Rosenzweig’s speech-thinking as a science of cognition sustains a perpetual polemic between two unfounded premises and it is precisely this polemic which we find in Rosenzweig’s hermeneutics and which prohibits him from offering a viable correlation between philosophy and the Jewish tradition and Jewish learning. Rosenzweig’s account of the divine-human relationship waxes antinomous asserting at once the absolute reality of a God whom we cannot know but who commands us on account of his theological alterity together with the absolute autonomy of a human desire uniquely prescriptive with regard to the particulars of the divine command given the unbridgeable gap between the divine and the human. The toll of this antinomy is high. Rosenzweig’s account of obedience stumbles in the face of a mystifying claim to authority. Indeed, Rosenzweig insists that the God of revelation is a commanding God and there is an inextricable link between Gebot and Gesetz. Law (specific laws, Gesetz) he says in the Builders, “must again become commandment (Gebot).”38 Nonetheless, Rosenzweig concedes that “even for him who observes the Law, revelation is

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not what you call law-giving.”39 Rosenzweig’s position on revelation seems to preclude the possibility of law-giving at Sinai. Specific norms are at best good guesses of divine intent and at worst, projections of human wishes. Rosenzweig has painted himself into a corner because he takes for granted an infinite-qualitative difference between the divine and the human—a fundamental “Nein” in the relationship between the two which registers as inevitably antinomous particularly with respect to Jewish accounts of legal observance and knowledge acquisition. If Rosenzweig is correct that nonrepresentational thinking happens in relations rather than thinking that qua finite takes itself to be fixed, he has not applied his own corrective extensively enough. In the end, Rosenzweig’s speech-thinking is not “thinking” but mere opining or asserting and this applies directly to his analysis of the Jewish God. Rosenzweig’s un-reflected upon appeal to a theological realism fails to undo the challenge of Spinoza’s singular identification between reason and substance. How then might speech-thinking become thinking? This would require subjecting the residual and assertorically presented representational presuppositions around the unknowable infinite God and the finite receptive persons to reflection. But what does this mean?

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JEWISH THEOLOGY AND TRANSCENDENTAL REFLECTION For some help we can turn to an early essay by Hegel entitled, “Faith and Knowledge.” Here Hegel introduces readers to what he takes to be the unfortunate binary generated by modern philosophical thinking from Kant to Jacobi to Fichte. Interestingly enough this binary is the same as the one we found in Rosenzweig’s account of the divine-human relationship. Specifically, in the wake of Kant’s critique of reason, reason is a) determined as safe from skepticism on account of its functioning within the limits of intuition, i.e., reason is “finite” and b) reason cannot extend as far as the so-called “supersensuous.” Indeed, a God can and must be postulated but neither this God nor the “realm of the supersensuous,” i.e., the noumenal are realms about which finite human reason can acquire any real theoretical knowledge. And Hegel says, The enlightenment in its positive aspect was a hubbub of vanity without a firm core. It obtained a core in its negative procedure by grasping its own negativity. Through the purity and infinity of the negative it freed itself from its insipidity but precisely for this reason it could admit positive knowledge only of the finite and empirical. The eternal remained in a realm beyond, a beyond too vacuous for cognition that this infinite void of knowledge could only be filled with the subjectivity of longing and desiring.40

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The Enlightenment’s insistence upon the unknowability of the divine before the bar of human reason amounts to the claim that reason in general is finite. By finite, Hegel means that reason remains caught in the repeated tendency to hold at least some claim about itself as fixed—in this case, the claim that reason does not achieve knowledge of the supersensuous. Kant and others’ insistence on this particular determination, i.e., the insistence upon circumscribing what they take to be the limits of reason and its attending claims reflects a persistent representationalism in its own account of itself. But of course, we have seen exactly this model in Rosenzweig’s residual representation of the wholly other God and the finite receptive person. Hegel’s identification of the weakness of reason offers a useful diagnosis of Rosenzweig’s speech-thinking. Moreover, if reason fails on account of its unwillingness to exhaustively investigate its own assertions, this same reason may be repaired when just such an investigation takes place. Still, what kind of investigation is called for? For the solution Hegel ironically returns to Kant. Admitting that Kant overly circumscribes and renders representational the difference between the phenomenal and the noumenal, Hegel also admits that it is Kant’s great insight that representations are epistemologically valuable not as claims that exhaustively represent an objective truth in reality but rather as operations of thinking or expressions of procedures for discerning intelligibility. For Kant, as discussed above, logic in general is the study of the rules or principles of reason. Transcendental logic refers to the rules at work in the knowledge of objects. Consequently, the science of transcendental logic is an investigation into the rules or principles with which objective judgments are made. Judgments regarding objects reflect “synthetic” activities exercised by the understanding, such synthetic activities which qua routinized are rulings or universally exercised methods or procedures of judgment-formation. Kant’s universalization of the categories aside, his transcendental logic offers a first and major step in resolving the problem of representationalism because it shifts philosophical focus away from an investigation into “what” something “is” toward an inquiry into “how is it thinkable”? In “Faith and Knowledge,” Hegel follows Kant’s lead and says, “In the judgment the absolute identity is merely the copula ‘is’ without consciousness. It is the difference whose appearance prevails in the judgment itself.”41 Nonetheless, Hegel continues, the “is” veils what is in fact, a synthetic relation between subject and predicate. “In Kant the synthetic unity is undeniably the absolute and original identity of self-consciousness, which of itself posits the judgment absolutely and a priori. . . . This original unity of apperception is called synthetic precisely because of its two-sideness, the opposites being absolute one in it.”42 Undoubtedly, Hegel’s reference to

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synthetic activity as a unity reflects the Schellingian-informed idealism of his early years. As he matured, Hegel emphasized that “synthetic activity” means the identification of the logical relation between subject and predicate and not simply the unity of them. If, however, Hegel recognized the virtues of Kant’s transcendental logic he also recognized the extent to which Kant retained the representational distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal—a division that in Hegel’s mind signaled a refusal to investigate the transcendental logic of the absolute or infinite. Kant’s transcendental investigation Hegel says is formal only, applied only to subjective reasoning. The upshot for Hegel is that Kant’s account perpetuates the binary division between the two, delimiting in advance reason’s full capacity for self-reflection and inquiry. A transcendental analysis of finite reason not only needs to investigate claims regarding the limits of finite reason but must also investigate the negative claim regarding the relation between finite reason and an apparently unknowable infinite. To say in other words that finite reason is not the infinite constitutes as much of a judgment as any positive assertion around finite reason. As readers of Hegel’s Science of Logic know, transcendental investigations into claims around the relation between the finite and the infinite (being and quantity, quality and quantity) generate innumerable accounts of the rules or logical relations between the two as presented by the judgments we make about them. The infinite is no longer bracketed off from transcendental investigation but included by virtue of its negative and thereby in a logically relevant relation to the finite. Where does this Hegelian analysis leave us with respect to our attempt to articulate a post-Spinozistic Jewish theology which honors the God of the Jewish scriptural and textual tradition? Let us review our steps: We began with the crisis around the discourse of theology and the arena of human affairs generated by Spinoza’s privileging of the strict association between reason, objectivity and eternal truth. We next reviewed Rosenzweig’s effort to negotiate between philosophy and the Jewish tradition by way of his account of speech-thinking as it operates in the Hebrew scriptures and in the language of the Jewish tradition such that reason is no longer functional in relation to an objective world alone but an exercise in the relation between the knower and the known. It is in this context that Rosenzweig presented his account of a wholly other and real God whom we encounter in the experience of revelation. Our review of this effort exposed Rosenzweig’s retention of fixed and un-reflected upon claims concerning both God and persons. His efforts to the contrary, Rosenzweig’s speech-thinking could not succeed in establishing the rationality of either God or persons thereby offering no resolution to the theologico-political problem.

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However, we are now in a position to offer a working hypothesis regarding the conditions for a post-Spinozistic Jewish theology. Appropriating Rosenzweig’s recognition of the engagement between subjectivity and objectivity in language in general and in the Jewish tradition on the one hand, and yet also recognizing the significance of Hegel’s reparative account of Kantian transcendental logic on the other hand, we can identify a portrait of rational Jewish theology as an exercise of applying a transcendental analysis of the claims about God articulated in the Jewish tradition. Given the above analysis, we now know that to be rational speech-thinking must operate as an analysis of the rules of reasoning Jews deploy when they read Scripture and/ or articulate the theological claims operative in the tradition. Thinking with the discourse of the tradition must mean a reflection on method, “all the way down” we might say. Anything less will as we have learned be tantamount to the retention of an unexamined, irrational remainder. Speech-thinking in other words means the engagement with the Word or tradition as that “word” is thought about by us. This is the case just as much with the scriptures as it is with the tradition overall. No “infinite qualitative difference” separates even an infinite commanding Word from those who witness to it for the infinite word is none other than the very modes and means by which we engage it by way of our judgments and the rules which express the relations within them. So understood, thinking with the Word can never be strictly dialectical—referring in the end to a (an ontologically predetermined) God it cannot reflect upon since as transcendental, thinking with the Word reflects upon our ways of talking about (and with) God and does not refer to discourse tensed by the absolute ontological otherness of the one with and about whom we speak. But then what can we say about the language of scriptural discourse or religious propositions? In light of our above analysis we must concede that religious propositions or representations be recognized as exercises or enactments of rules of reasoning and this is the case as much with theological claims as it is with any other kind of claim. Indeed, persons speak in the language of propositions or judgments and such speech presents an authentic engagement of persons and their (religious) world. Acceptance of conventional discourse makes sense only when representations are understood practically speaking, as the way people speak in and with their world and theoretically speaking as the enactment of rules or realizations of laws. Such a condition applies not only to specific representations issued by a tradition but to more apparently definitional claims such as “God is just” in Judaism. So understood, “God is just or God loves us” in Judaism means “God is just” textually or “God loves us” in the way we speak in and with God throughout the tradition and therefore in the very logical relations expressed in these

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judgments. It no longer makes sense to think of these claims as holding a privileged ontological significance. In this sense, we can both know more and less about God than what the infinite-qualitative distinction in Rosenzweig suggests. Surely, we know “less” in the sense that we cannot “know” a transcendent God who is “wholly other.” What we can “know” is “how we think” about a God whom we speak of in ordinary discourse (i.e., text, liturgy, dogma, halakha, aggadah). The philosophical meaning we can assign to any such statements has all to do with their relation to other things we say and other things we know. One need not negate a qualitative difference between God and persons but only recognize that any qualitative difference is also a qualitative relation. In Hegelian terms, talk of a qualitative difference between the infinite and the finite is the same as talk of the relation between them since quality is for Hegel always logically relational.43 In slightly more concrete terms this means that when speak of creator, we do so in relation to creature and indeed, in relation to all else that we include in “ordinary” discourse. What we say about God is challenged to “logically” fit with other things we say, though of course what we say does not necessarily exhaust what God is, only what we “know” about God “logically” at any point in time. Still, such an account is not at all tantamount to a scriptural/linguistic fideism when we understand that language (including the language of text) is tensed by what Charles Peirce referred to as “indexicality.” What we say is inextricably linked to the world (yes, of “facts”) which we live in and of course, this is why what we say changes (albeit slowly and often only when a problem forces it to). Still, how is the ongoing relation between language or word and world discerned? One might argue that indeed, this is the work of the oral study of the text or tradition. Here we can appeal to and then build from Moses Mendelssohn’s analysis of the difference between the written text (valuable in its repetition for transmission only) but dependent upon ongoing study for its “meaning” (i.e., its value for the community). Oral study operates as a kind of transcendental investigation into the patterns of relations of the Word in the “world” illuminated when readers reflect transcendentally upon their reading. For Mendelssohn, study of the text is study of the relation between the text and the world as this relation is construed by a community of readers whereby neither text nor reader are immune to the world within which they speak and operate. Language is both natural and cultural and both offer constraints against a fideism which would result in large measure from a misconstrual of the “meaning” of the text with its fixed character as “written” only.44  So understood, Jewish theological reflection is an inevitably changing and ongoing activity stimulated by changes in the community and changes in the



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world encountered by the community. That it is a rational exercise which documents the inevitable relation between human knowing and the world in which we live is a testament to its ability to respond to and lay to rest the Spinozistic problem for Jewish philosophy and theology.

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NOTES 1.  For the definitive discussion of the impact of Spinoza’s thought on the intellectual culture of his day see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2.  Leo Strauss, Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. by E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1. 3.  Strauss, Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 15. 4.  Jerome Copulsky, “Spinoza and the Possibility Condition of Modern Judaism,” in Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology, ed. by Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 39. 5.  Baruch Spinoza, Ethics in The Essential Spinoza; Ethics and Related Writings, ed. by Michael Morgan, trans. by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 4. 6. Spinoza, Ethics, 26. 7.  Ibid., 51. 8.  Sanem Soyarslan, “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness: The Power of Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in The Moral Philosophy of Spinoza, ed. by Andrew Youpa and Matthew Kisner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), 17. 9. Spinoza, Ethics, 53. 10.  Soyarslan, “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness,” 12. 11. Spinoza, Ethics, 52. 12.  Soyarslan, “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness,” 12. 13.  Benedict Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. by R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1951), 204. 14. Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, 219. 15.  Such a list would include among others, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. 16.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 32. 17.  Omri Boehm, Kant’s Critique of Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10. 18. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 23. 19.  Ibid., 22–23. 20.  Ibid., 29. 21.  For Kant’s discussion concerning the relation between the concepts of practical reason and the noumenal sphere in contrast to the concepts of theoretical reason as determinative of appearances only see Immanuel Kant, Critique Practical Reason, trans. by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1956), 54.

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22.  For Kant’s discussion of this matter see his account of the “typic of practical reason” in Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, 70–74. 23. In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant offers a scathing critique of Judaism as a form of political expression alone and incapable of fostering the moral disposition on account of its statutory laws and earthly conception of God. For this discussion see Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 116–18. 24.  In the “New Thinking” Rosenzweig says, “That someone would not at all want to say: everything ‘is’ . . . does not enter her mind. But, in the ‘what is?’ question directed at everything, lies the entire error of the answers. If an is-sentence is to be worthy of its utterance, then it must always introduce something new after the ‘is’ which was not there before. Thus, if one asks such is-questions with respect to God and world, then one must be surprised that the I shows up—what else is left over!” Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” in Franz Rosenzweig Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. by Paul. W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2000), 116. 25.  Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 123. 26. Ibid. 27.  Franz Rosenzweig, “Concerning the Study of Judaism,” in On Jewish Learning, trans. by Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 49. 28.  Franz Rosenzweig, “Concerning the Study of Judaism,” 51. 29.  Mara Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 20. 30. Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s Bible, 40. 31.  Ibid., 21. 32.  Ibid., 105. 33.  Describing what he referred to as “Jewish people theology” Rosenzweig says, “Here recent decades produced a change. A representation of people developed, not without contact with that older concept of peoplehood of German Idealism, yet nevertheless essentially new, which granted to it, the rank of an eternal existent. He who is able to see through the pseudo-naturalist wrappings of the race idea, to which this idea owes its broad popularity, recognizes here the striving to transform the concept of peoplehood in such a way that the people obtain the right to exist simply from their existence, independently of their factual achievements . . . Carefree and without consciousness, . . . the people now lives its life, the question of the meaning of this existence seems to have lost its justification.” See Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, 16–17. 34.  Franz Rosenzweig, “Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” in On Jewish Learning, 69. 35.  Benjamin Pollack, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 138. 36.  Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. by Will. W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 83. 37. Pollack, Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task, 155.



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38.  Franz Rosenzweig, “The Builders: Concerning Law,” in On Jewish Learning, 85. 39. Ibid. 40.  G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. and ed. by Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 56. 41. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 72. 42.  Ibid., 71. 43.  See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. by A. V. Miller (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 109–116. 44. In Jerusalem, Mendelssohn describes the difference between the written and oral character of law and says, “Each of these prescribed actions, each practice, each ceremony had its meaning, its valid significance; each was closely related to the speculative knowledge of religion and the teachings of morality and was n occasion for a man in search of truth to reflect on these sacred matters or to seek instruction from wise men. . . . Man’s actions are transitory; there is nothing lasting, nothing enduring about them that, like hieroglyphic script, could lead to idolatry through abuse or misunderstanding. But they also have the advantage over alphabetical signs of not isolating man, of not making him to be a solitary creature, poring over writings and books. They impel him rather to social intercourse, to imitation and to oral, living instruction . . . [in this way persons ] find occasion for inquiring and reflecting . . .” Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. by Allan Arkush (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983), 119.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Mara. Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Boehm, Omri. Kant’s Critique of Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Copulsky, Jerome. “Spinoza and the Possibility Condition of Modern Judaism.” In Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology, ed. by Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Hegel, G. W. F. Faith and Knowledge, trans. and ed. by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. ———. Science of Logic, trans. by A.V. Miller. New York: Prometheus Books, 1991. Mendelssohn, Moses. Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. by Allan Arkush. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Critique Practical Reason, trans. by Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1956. ———. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965, 32. ———. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960.

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Pollack, Benjamin. Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rosenzweig, Franz. “Concerning the Study of Judaism.” In On Jewish Learning, trans. by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1955. ———. “The New Thinking.” In Franz Rosenzweig Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. by Paul. W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2000. ———. The Star of Redemption, trans. by Will. W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Soyarslan, Sanem. “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness: The Power of Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics.” In The Moral Philosophy of Spinoza, ed. by Andrew Youpa and Matthew Kisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Spinoza, Benedict. A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. by R. H. M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1951. ———. Ethics in The Essential Spinoza; Ethics and Related Writings, ed. by Michael Morgan, trans. by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006. Strauss, Leo. Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. by E. M. Sinclair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Chapter Thirteen

The Perils of Covenant Theology The Cases of David Hartman and David Novak

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Martin Kavka

For the vast majority of the Jewish theological tradition, to imagine God is to imagine a God who acts in the history of the people of Israel, either for their sake (if they do what God commands) or for the sake of their enemies (if Israel departs from the divine commandments, the mitzvot). This is the overarching logic of the covenant between God and the people Israel; the terms according to which God will act in one way or the other are its content. At many places in the Jewish theological tradition, the status of the people of Israel in history becomes an index for its observance of the covenant. If Israel is thriving, then it must be observing the covenant; if Israel is suffering, it must be departing from the covenant in some manner. History can scarcely bear the weight placed upon it by the view of God as the one who determines Israel’s status, and indeed it not might be able to bear it at all. Perhaps it is too difficult to detach the Holocaust from accounts of divine punishment. Perhaps the faults that must lead to an individual’s or people’s suffering are too inscrutable or disproportionate to the suffering. Perhaps such a view of meaning-laden history seems like a recipe for what David Hartman called a “manic-depressive framework,” as Israel’s status in history oscillates from one extreme to another: “One day God loves me. The next day God judges me guilty. In the Six Day War, He is my lover. In the Yom Kippur war, He rejects me. When a child is killed in a bus accident, He punishes me. And when someone is miraculously saved in an operation, He loves me.”1 To avoid these difficulties requires imagining Jewish theology differently, and it requires arguing against any and all Jewish theologies that prioritize a notion of the covenant that is theocentric, meaning that it places God and God’s authority at the center of Jewish theology. In theocentric understandings of the covenant, God has the power to decide the criteria by which Jews should flourish in history (the mitzvot that Jews should observe). However, humans 227

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only have the power to either acknowledge divine authority (by doing the mitzvot, as understood by a community’s theological authorities) or suffer as time moves forward (by not doing the mitzvot). Since the publication of an article on Abraham Joshua Heschel in 2006, I have been constructing philosophical arguments against such theocentric accounts, and have been insisting that we must reconceive the covenant in anthropocentric terms, and attend to the legitimate complaints humans in religious communities may and will have against either the covenantal form or the community that interprets it.2 Most recently, in early 2015, I published an article on the covenant theology of the Reform Jewish theologian Eugene Borowitz, in which I argued that his theocentric account of the covenant between God and the people of Israel was both badly argued and arbitrarily applied.3 Borowitz’s theology was badly argued because it insisted, without any firm basis, that God was driving the sociological shifts that led to Jewish flourishing in the West in the 1950s and 1960s; Jews’ affirming the importance of Jewish communal life was, for Borowitz, really “a reaffirmation, in contemporary terms, of the Covenant of Sinai.”4 It was arbitrarily applied because while Borowitz was quite willing early in his career to revise the content of the mitzvot in order to relieve the pain of the agunah, the woman whose husband refuses to grant her a religious divorce, he was unwilling until 2010 to sign the writ of ordination for lesbian and gay candidates for the rabbinate at Hebrew Union College, the seminary of the Reform movement in Judaism, where he taught. My argument against Borowitz’s covenant theology is, at best, only an argument against understandings of covenant in the Reform denomination. It might be possible, after all, for theologians in other denominations to offer a better theocentrism. And so, I promised in that article a more thoroughgoing critique of theocentric understandings of the covenant. I will fulfill that promise here—taking one further step in making space in the Jewish theological tradition for anthropocentric notions of the covenant, in which humans for better or worse wrest control of their own history from God (and thus become more responsible for it)—by turning to the primary non-Reform covenant theologies that were developed in the late twentieth century, those authored by David Hartman (1931–2013) and my teacher David Novak (1941–). As I will show, both of these models of covenant theology fall apart. Hartman’s theology, for all of his attempts to neutralize the threats and promises of linking religious Jews’ status in history to divine blessings and curses, is simply unable in the final analysis to deal with the vicissitudes of Jewish history. He thus cannot present a compelling motive for any Jew to abide by any covenantal system (or for any non-Jew to convert into Judaism and begin to see herself as in covenant with the God of Israel). Novak’s covenant theology is superior to Hartman’s. Because Novak emphasizes that the covenant and its commanded way of life

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fulfill humans’ true needs, he turns to halakha as the site where flourishing is made and unmade. Halakhic interpreters are the ones who play a large role in determining whether Jews flourish in history; this gets God off the hook in a way that Hartman’s thought could not. Halakhic development, within the bounds of tradition, is the avenue for coping with the mismatch between humans’ desires to be in covenant with God and the halakhic interpretations that threaten the fulfillment of those desires. Nevertheless, the superiority of Novak’s covenant theology to Hartman’s does not mean that Novak’s is free from fault. In order not to fall prey to the anthropocentrism that results from lingering for too long on debates about what human needs are and how they are best fulfilled, Novak’s covenant theology ends up implying that members of a covenanted community who get the short end of the halakhic stick—women, queerfolk, and others who cannot be fully equal members of that community—are always in the wrong. The covenant will always claim to know them better than they know themselves, and thus always reserves the right to decide that their claims to have been harmed by the community are not genuine. Thus, while human desires can reshape law for Novak, they can only do so within limits that are as arbitrary or damaging as Borowitz’s. Before continuing with a treatment of these two philosophical theologians, it might be prudent to respond preemptively to readers who wonder why I do not treat more widely known and esteemed Orthodox theologians, particularly Joseph Soloveitchik. After all, he seemed neither to need God to enter history, nor for history to provide for his flourishing. One of the historical persons who instantiated Soloveitchik’s ideal type of “halakhic man” was his grandfather, R. Elijah Pruzna, who, interrupted in prayer by a doctor who informed him that his daughter would shortly die, made sure to complete his prayers (said twice, once wearing tefillin in accordance with the rules established by the eleventh-century rabbi Rashi, and once wearing another set of tefillin in accordance with the rules established by Rashi’s grandson, Rabbenu Tam), before entering his daughter’s room. For Soloveitchik, “we have here great strength and presence of mind, the acceptance of the divine decree with love, the consciousness of law and judgment, the might and power of the halakhah, and faith, strong like flinty rock [ke-ḥallamish tzur; cf. Deut. 8:15].”5 Just as the people of Israel were craving water in the desert and were satisfied by Moses’s drawing water from the rock at Massah and Meribah by striking it as God’s instruction (Ex. 17:6, described as “flinty rock” at Deut. 8:15 and 32:13), so did R. Elijah Pruzna’s faith provide sustenance for him in his time of need because his concern with God remained hierarchically more important than his concern with his daughter and her impending death. However, such stories of moral saints can be of little help to those who fall short of the ideal type. Furthermore, such stories of moral saints can be of little help to even the greatest of minds. Even Soloveitchik, after all, needed God to enter history,

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as his 1956 address on suffering and the Holocaust, entitled “It Is The Voice of My Beloved That Knocks,” made clear. He saw the creation of the state of Israel, its military victories, and the public support for the state among assimilated Jews (and an increasing share of religious Jews) as evidence that history is indeed the arena of divine action. From all that, Soloveitchik inferred that “the era of divine self-concealment [hester panim] is over.”6 As a result, for me to describe quasi-Stoic interpretations of the covenant such as Soloveitchik’s is for me to describe a covenant between God and persons who do not, and perhaps could never, exist.7 I therefore treat in this essay two theologians who are human enough, and therefore wise enough, to know that if they were to write about the covenant between God and the people of Israel, they could not evade discussing the meaning of history and the flourishing of Jews.

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Whatever the denomination of the theologian, Jewish covenant theology in the late twentieth century results from the advances made by Jewish philosophy at the beginning of that century in its portrayals of God. In opposition to what appeared to be hyperrationalist reductions of God to a Kantian postulate, various works of Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886– 1929) suggested that Jews could either directly experience God in their freely decided actions (Buber in the mid-1910s: “the unconditioned deed reveals the hidden divine countenance”), indirectly experience God in and through their social bonds (Buber in 1919: “God is truly present when one person clasps the hand of another”), or confidently posit that an encounter with divine love is the ground of one’s own subjectivity (Rosenzweig in 1921: revelation’s “first audible word is ‘I’”).8 In all of these scenarios, God is not an impersonal commander, or a personification of the ideal of reason; God is someone who comes into relation with Jewish individuals in their lives. Jewish covenant theology in the US from 1960 onward takes this theme of relationship and makes it the leitmotif of the covenant at Sinai. For example, as Eliot Dorff has written in a classic article on covenant in Judaism: Perhaps the most important advantage of the Covenant theory over the alternatives [viewing Jewish law through secular legal theories] is that it clearly expresses the relationship between God and the Jewish people on which Jewish law is built. The ultimate attraction of Judaism in general and Jewish law in particular is that it enables the Jewish people to relate to God as they understand him. Through Judaism they aspire to incorporate holiness in their lives, to capture the divine element which gives direction to life and makes it worth living.9

None of the contemporary Jewish covenant theologians depart from this model. However, despite the fact that Dorff doubtlessly made this statement intentionally vague in order to cover a plurality of covenant theologies, it



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is important to attend to its vaguenesses, for they are the motors of Jewish theology. Does God give direction to an individual’s life, or to a people’s? What happens to an individual, or a people, when they do not follow divine direction? To what extent is an individual’s or a people’s relationship with God limited by their understanding of God? To what extent does humans’ lack of understanding of God serve to forestall questions of theodicy, or of God’s intervention in history? These are the questions that were deeply important to David Hartman during his career, in part for biographical reasons. In the introduction his 1978 collection of essays, Joy and Responsibility, Hartman wrote that after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, he made aliyah to Israel, against the advice of his teacher, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, because “my soul was aflame; my thirst for the living God of History was insatiable.” However, after Israel’s defeat six years later in the Yom Kippur War,

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I again rediscovered the age-old message of Jewish history, the uncertainty, loneliness and isolation, and the concern for survival. In contrast to the triumphant experience of redemption of the Six Day War, after the Yom Kippur War I rediscovered the tragic dimension of Jewish history. I felt like writing to Soloveitchik, “Perhaps you were right.”10

From this point, Hartman’s theology was not only aimed at showing the compatibility of the halakhic life with philosophy (as he argued in his 1976 Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest), but also with working out how to maintain the halakhic life while free from the pain that the switchbacks of history could cause. In this latter respect, Maimonides too came to Hartman’s aid. In a relatively early essay, “Sinai and Messianism,” Hartman turned to Maimonides’s notion of causality to buttress the view that while God was the ultimate cause of history, he was not the proximate cause of any historical event.11 Humans were the proximate causes of historical events for Maimonides, and so Hartman deemed the Maimonidean approach to be beneficial insofar as it placed humans and their free decisions at the center of history. Nevertheless, this move thrust humans into a relationship with contingency that they might not have all wanted. As soon as God is no longer the direct cause of each and every historical event—the God who is, as Richard Rubenstein termed it, the “Lord of history”12—then the kind of religious belief that results “undermines the security characteristic of belief in a fixed, divine historical plan.”13 But if one had to choose between this insecurity and the emotional rollercoaster of having God enter history, for Hartman the choice was an obvious one for the former of these two options. (Hartman at one point in this essay did claim that the choice between his own Maimonidean paradigm and a more

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Nachmanidean one in which history can always be broken by divine rupture “depends predominantly on one’s spiritual sensibility.”14 Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine not getting sick on such a theological rollercoaster.) On the other hand, by detaching God from history in this manner, Hartman also ended up endorsing Maimonides’s claim, made in the Guide as well as in the Mishneh Torah, that humans’ suffering was their own fault. Hartman’s purpose in doing this was to move the impetus of the halakhic life from a life that is good because it pleases God to be obeyed, to a life that is good because it is a path of free self-making. As Hermann Cohen (whom Hartman did not cite) had noted, the religious life is centered on the production of the truly free human subject through repentance (teshuvah): “repentance should be a realizing action of the will, which elevates the person to the individual I,” morally autonomous over and above empirical causes.15 Hartman in effect made repentance the engine of the halakhic life, by linking what is recognizable to readers as the spirit of Cohen with the text of Maimonides: “Man who lives by God’s law experiences renewal not through vicarious relationship or passive acceptance of God-given provision, but through seeking and discovering within himself new capacities for moral change. Central to Maimonides’ philosophy of history and concept of hope is the belief that man can always do teshuvah.”16 But Hartman did more than describe the halakhic life as engaging in practices that encourage repentance and self-transformation. He also seemed to assume (not unlike Cohen!) that moral change had the full rein to determine whether one’s life would go well. A saint can be persecuted, after all, and a scoundrel can thrive. Such are the ironies of history. Hartman, however, did not admit to such ironies: “Torah trains the believing Jew to recognize the power of teshuvah to alter his political and economic condition by reminding him that his communal, material life is determined by his normative behavior.”17 To a certain extent, he could not have done otherwise. As long as the halakhic life is not one of utter passivity before God, there is no other active work on oneself that the halakhic life can accomplish.18 Nevertheless, Hartman need not have made the Maimonidean assumption that as long as an account of the halakhic life assumes a tight connection between the practices in which a person engages and the quality of life that results from engaging in such practices, then it must also assume a tight connection between a poor quality of life and doing wrong practices. For I am not the only determiner of my situation. Life is filled with situations in which others have power over me. Sometimes, only luck determines whether I reap the rewards that I believe I deserve for my action. Maimonides was simply blind to such facts, as is made clear in the section of the Mishneh Torah on fast days, which Hartman quotes: “As the community cries out in prayer and sounds an alarm

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when overtaken by trouble, everyone is bound to realize that evil has come upon him as a consequence of his own evil deeds, as it is written, ‘Your iniquities have turned away these things and your sins have withheld good from you’ (Jeremiah 5:25), and that his repentance will cause the trouble to be removed.”19 Hartman had earlier cited this text near the end of Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest, correctly summarizing it as claiming that “no suffering is perceived as accidental; God’s will addresses man through what is normally perceived as being accidental.”20 In “Sinai and Messianism,” he full-throatedly endorsed it. When one speaks or quotes those Maimonidean words, or words like them, to someone who has lost a family member to terrorism—whether a suicide bombing or a school shooting—or to a survivor of sexual assault or abuse, one speaks obscenely. I insist that this is a non-controversial claim, and that the burden is not on me to explain why. (Do I need to argue with those who implicitly believe that a six-year-old child was responsible for the gun use of other members in her community? Do I need to argue with those who implicitly imagine that there is a precise length of the hemline that immunizes a woman from rapists, and know why it is not one millimeter less?) As Hartman wrote in the introduction to the 2012 volume From Defender to Critic, which reprinted the early essays contained in Joy and Responsibility as well as additional essays, he was no longer “the defender of traditional halakha” that he was in the 1970s.21 And this is certainly true, although even in the 1970s Hartman could make the non-traditional statement that “individuals can share halakhic aspirations even though these are not concretized through halakhic guidelines.”22 However, the development in Hartman’s writings from the 1980s onward only seems to make his theology of history more difficult to maintain. Hartman continued to maintain that God was detached from history in his magnum opus, the 1985 A Living Covenant, pointing to the famous aggadah from B. Baba Metzia 59b that proclaims that the Torah is not in heaven in order to describe the rabbis of the Talmudic period—and henceforth us—as “no longer requir[ing] prophecy or divine intervention by signs and wonders in order to discover how to apply the living word of God.”23 (In one of Hartman’s last books, The God Who Hates Lies, he also used various aggadot to ground the claim that the Jewish “tradition could live not through its claims of absolute truth based on revelation, but on the lived reality of the Jewish peoples experience of that truth.”24) Yet once again, such detachment made it impossible for him to negotiate the theological problems that come up in the analysis of human suffering. In a key chapter in A Living Covenant, Hartman took up Maimonides’s analysis of Job in The Guide of the Perplexed. For Hartman, the turning point in the book of Job is not quite that Job realizes that he was wrong to criticize

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God because he is “but dust and ashes” (42:6). Such submissiveness to God remains inadequate to the contours of the covenant between God and Israel because it denies the power of the human intellect: “The covenant that invites mutuality cannot be characterized by an acceptance of defeat in which our rational and ethical sense are violated.”25 Instead, Hartman claimed that

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the turning point in his [Job’s] distress comes when he realizes that the greatest happiness consists in knowing God. In comparison, all the things that he had previously supposed constituted happiness—such as possession of wealth and many children—are unimportant, and so he does not need to impute enormous iniquities to himself in order to account for their loss.26

Hartman’s prooftext for this is from the end of Guide 3.23, where Maimonides wrote that if one knows that God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge, then “every misfortune will be borne lightly.”27 This was perhaps a strange prooftext to have chosen, although it certainly clearly articulated the upshot of Maimonides’s analysis of the Book of Job. What Hartman claimed about the narrative of Job in the block quote above is indeed a paraphrase of what Maimonides claims at the beginning of that chapter of the Guide.28 But once Hartman quotes the end of that chapter, which emphasizes the difference between God’s knowledge and human knowledge, a reader would be justified in scratching her head. How it could possibly be the case that, if happiness consists in knowing God, then knowing that God is unlike humans—a negative knowledge—might serve to help us bear misfortunes? Hartman used language that refers to Job’s discovery of a new “larger spiritual vision,” “meaning to existence,” and “joy” as a result of his “theocentric focus,” which established a new life “that cannot be destroyed by the vagaries of human fortunes.29 But such talk is quite un-Maimonidean. As Charles Raffel has argued in his classic article on the concept of providence in the Guide, Maimonides used the Book of Job to argue that while virtue cannot guarantee happiness, theoretical knowledge can: “true and permanent providence is reserved for Job only after he has experienced the ultimate realm of theoretical wisdom and perfection” (emphasis mine).30 Hartman’s language of “spiritual vision” suggests that simply knowing the difference between God and humans is sufficient to bring the kind of joy that can make one resistant to the emotional effects of one’s experiences of pain. However, what Maimonides argued for was the necessity of moving ever further down the path of self-perfection, since only the acquisition of theoretical knowledge of “everything concerning all the beings that it is within the capacity of man to know” could guarantee happiness.31 Whether this is a real possibility for any human except Job, or Maimonides’s more customary example of Moses, is doubtful. As Josef Stern

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points out, “Maimonides says of Moses that ‘he was greater than anyone born of man.’ Note: not anyone else born of man but anyone born of man. To be in Moses’s state of an acquired intellect is not to be human.”32 Hartman insisted, unlike Stern, that the intellectual life that Maimonides described was more than a regulative ideal. Hartman thought that such a life is possible for humans, and humans have the ability to reap the emotional benefits of that life quite quickly. How such a claim is grounded in the Guide is not explained in A Living Covenant. In other words, what becomes necessary after showing the gap between Hartman and Maimonides is answering the question of what life might be like during the time before one has acquired the ultimate in theoretical wisdom, if such acquisition is even possible. Hartman assumed that for the halakha-observant philosophers who follow Maimonides, “their theocentric love for God can sustain them in the darkest moments of historical tragedy.”33 Nevertheless, it is quite possible that those persons, if they exist, find no such sustenance or only momentary and fleeting sustenance. The emotional effects of tragedy and suffering can and will always return, as long as one is not a perfected intellect of the sort that Maimonides described, as long as one has “a desire for a relationship with God”34 and either does not have that relationship now or, given the contingencies of history, is skeptical of maintaining it in the future. The second half of A Living Covenant deals with the relationship between God and history, and contains some sections dealing with how the halakhic life responds to suffering. So it would seem that Hartman knew he was vulnerable on these issues. And yet, for all that Hartman knew that he had to treat them, the resolution of them is dissatisfying. Once again, an individual’s suffering is implicitly grounded in the faults of her own character. While it is always possible that one has caused one’s own suffering, it stretches credulity to say that this always must be the case. (Think of the examples mentioned earlier in this essay.) In A Living Covenant, the prooftext is not Maimonides, but the Talmud, namely a sugya from B. Berakhot 5a that begins “if a man sees that painful sufferings visit him, let him examine his conduct. For it is said, ‘Let us search and probe our ways, and return [nashuvah] to the Lord’ (Lam. 3:40).” For Hartman, this means that “the covenantal spirit of Sinai . . . is broadened and deepened when it is discovered that suffering can energize us to strive actively for moral renewal.”35 Yet how does this occur? If moral renewal cannot make us immune to the ability of historical events to harm us, because we have not yet acquired perfected intellects—if the ideal of the perfected intellect always remains ideal—then how are we energized? If we are not energized, how is the covenantal spirit broadened? If the covenantal spirit is not broadened, then what is the appeal of the cov-

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enant over and above the anti-Maimonidean possibility that divine authority simply means that we must submit to it? At this point, Hartman simply gave up. He had no choice but to appeal to mystery. “The end of wisdom includes knowing the limits of what one can fully judge,” he wrote.36 And yet as long as that end of wisdom includes countenancing the assertion that the survivor of abuse is in all likelihood responsible for his having been abused, the end of Hartman’s wisdom is obscene. In a discussion of mourning, Hartman claimed that while “death remains a violation of all one’s longings for the reasonable and just within human life,” the halakhic requirement to recite barukh dayan emet when receiving the news of someone’s death “can be seen as a means of affirming one’s determination to continue to live by the covenant despite every disappointed expectation.”37 By this point, however, the motivation for any such determination is no less murky than it was in the 1970s when Hartman closed “Sinai and Messianism” with a description of “the enduring mystery of man’s relationship to God” and a claim that “man bears witness to God’s presence in history by persevering in the struggle for justice.”38 Hartman rightly pointed out in the 1970s that broad Nachmanidean hopes for God entering history and redeeming the world are psychologically destabilizing. The image of a God who can be directly involved in human history is not good for us. Hartman’s Maimonideanism, which saw creativity and rational expression as part and parcel of the human side of the covenant, was an attempt to neutralize the threat of this image. But it fell into its own problems from which it never quite escaped as Hartman’s thinking developed, and as he rewrote many of his essays. To have stayed close to Maimonides would have been to say that there was no assurance that the aims of the halakhic life anyone could realize with the possible exception of the rare religious genius. But to have departed from Maimonides explicitly would have required constructing a theology from the ground up that explained both the purpose of the covenant and the feasible upshot of the halakhic life given the constant possibility of suffering and disappointment. Instead of a coherent covenantal theology, what the reader of Hartman’s works gets is a fantasy. The covenant can indeed fulfill its aims for the believer in the short term (i.e., in life, and not at the moment of the believer’s death), and through the force of Hartman’s will, this is called “Maimonidean.” That fantasy is fascinating, and one wishes that it might have been developed without the Maimonidean vestments before Hartman’s death in 2013. As far as I can tell, Hartman showed the way to begin constructing such a theology only in one sentence in his corpus, in The God who Hates Lies, where he claimed that halakha “presents the soul who seeks intimacy with his or her God a wide range of opportunities to set that God before one constantly.”39 In a book that still cites Maimonides more often than any other authority, such a



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de-rationalized notion of covenantal intimacy retains a frisson of heterodoxy, because the language of “set that God before one” implies that God becomes palpably present for the believer through halakhic observance. It will fall to the next generation of theologians to try to explain how God comes to presence in halakhic acts, and how a believer might verify that it is actually God with whom one is intimate, as opposed to a figment of one’s imagination. Such suspicions are ironically Maimonidean, rooted in the difficulty of articulating how we might possibly know that we know God. But one possibility of responding to such a difficulty is to turn not to the more detailed portraits of a God who encounters humans (as in Buber and Rosenzweig)— for that might remain too abstract and numinous to make any philosophical or theological sense—but to the more concrete image of a God who encounters the people of Israel in and through the commanded act, and who encounters them in that manner for their own good. This has always been, to my mind, the motor behind David Novak’s understanding of the covenant, which reads divine command as an expression of divine love. Novak’s theology is slippery and complex, and it is desirable for me to give an alltoo-brief two-paragraph précis of his thinking, and my role in debates over its meaning and use, before establishing both its superiority to Hartman’s as well as its limits. As Randi Rashkover and I have argued, Novak’s theology is a response to what he takes to be the existential difficulties of life in a secularized society.40 In Novak’s story, I want to affirm me—to take me as I take myself. But no social or political system is able to accomplish this recognition, since I relate to others through the medium of positive law—which can never understand me, but only the abstracted person. Thus, the desire for recognition must always be a theological desire, for if recognition is possible, only God can do the recognizing. God’s recognition of an individual—the presentation of one to the other—occurs in divine law. God promises blessings for observance of the commandments of the law; an individual finds the comfort in being known concretely by God and in having an ordered world that is there or her or his flourishing, if she or he observes the law. Since the mid-1970s, Novak’s figure for this combination of a personal relationship and the apparent impersonality of law has been the covenant between God and Abraham.41 It is a site of recognition; after the Akedah, the name of the site where Abraham sacrificed the ram in Isaac’s stead is YHVH-yireh, “The Lord will see” (Genesis 22:14) and the Jewish tradition associates divine vision with knowing (see Exodus 2:25). And just as God knows Abraham, Abraham knows God. In Genesis Rabbah 39:1, Abraham calls out from the depths, “Could it be that the world has no leader (manhig)?”; God, in reply, makes himself

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known to Abraham by showing himself and saying “I am the leader and the lord (’adon) of the world.” So begins God’s revelation to Abraham, and his satisfaction in being known is, for Novak, exemplary. “Without the revelation whereby God personally elects him through a promise and establishes a perpetual covenant with him and his progeny, Abraham’s cry would have been the epitome of futility, an unheard cry in the dark, a dangerous gamble, an exercise in wishful thinking.”42 For God to be lord of the world, for Novak, is for God to deserve that authority on account of having ordered the world. Only living in accordance with the natural order of the world—which does not contradict halakha (although the halakhic system also contains laws for which there are no reason)—can lead to an individual’s flourishing. Much of Novak’s work in applied Jewish ethics has been an articulation of the policy positions that in his view follow from natural law; they have largely but not entirely overlapped with those of theoconservative Catholic natural-law thinkers associated with the journal First Things (where Novak sits on the editorial board). Rashkover and I have argued that it is possible to articulate a “left Novakianism” on social issues such as sexual ethics by following Novak’s theological method.43 In response, the Catholic scholar Matthew Levering has claimed in his book on Novak’s thought that Novak’s method was inextricable from Novak’s political positions, and so Novak’s students could not differ from those positions without “significantly reformulating his theology of revelation, election, theonomy, the image of God, and natural law.”44 Levering is perhaps right that in that introduction, Rashkover and I did not fully articulate how we followed Novak’s method and thereby justified our conclusions. Specifically, we did not give adequate details there about we both at that time took to be the necessarily nonpropositional nature of divine command (in other words, God’s transcendence over language). That theological claim motored our departure from Novak’s notion of theonomy and the political positions that in his view follow from it.45 In the paragraphs that follow—without speaking for Rashkover—I expand on another (inadequately detailed) premise of our account of ourselves as left-Novakians: a life lived in accordance with divine law must also look at the quality of that life in order to assess whether that law (or an authoritative interpretation of that law) is indeed well-ordered, in order to assess whether the covenant is worth affirming. If Hartman was unable to deal with the disordering effects of suffering, Novak, in my view, is unable to deal with the possible disordering effects of law itself. As soon as one takes those into account, the image of the God who covenants with the people of Israel threatens to become irrelevant, and perhaps even useless. No longer does it make sense to imagine God as the orderer; instead, it is people who order, so that their talk about God not be immediately nonsensical.

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Such a response to Novak’s work is most clearly defensible upon examining his 2000 book Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory. Like the broad theological system that has appeared piecemeal over Novak’s career, the argument of Covenantal Rights requires a good deal of unpacking, if not only to show its superiority to Hartman’s theology. Covenantal Rights is an argument to Jews (secularized or not) to uphold traditional understandings of the covenant, because the renewed government of Jewish law in civil society “can only come when there is a true renewal of the covenant by the vast majority of the Jewish people with their God.”46 But this messianic desire for society to be regulated by Jewish law is paired with an argument to all secular or secularized folk that they should judge a polity whose citizens see themselves as covenanted to God to be more satisfying than a society grounded on a liberal version of the social contract.47 In the introduction to the book, Novak claims that liberal states are fundamentally weak ones because citizens do not have the kinds of thick communities that would allow them to genuinely trust each other. As a result, “the social contract itself is insufficient to protect us from the anarchy most of us correctly fear.”48 It is only when we see our rights as founded upon God’s rights over us—on a theocentric notion of divine authority—that citizens can have a clear account of the purposes of their actions, and that they can be securely confident that their fundamental needs will be satisfied. Novak is keen to be clear that he is not arguing for a theocracy; he argues that a covenanted polity does exactly what liberal polities aim to do, but better. Thus, while covenanted polities are not grounded in the need to keep their citizens from harming one another, as liberal polities have been since Hobbes, even a covenanted polity must protect its citizens from harm, yet it can do so while respecting the fragility of human efforts to improve their world. Vignettes—sometimes not much more than apparently casual asides—appear in Covenantal Rights with regularity to remind the reader that his concerns in this regard are widely shared. Novak mentions that the first experience of the benefits of law comes “when we go to public authorities to protect us from being harmed by somebody else. For many, it is their childhood experience of going to some adult for protection from the neighborhood bully.”49 The twentieth century’s experience with Marxist nations was a “colossal fiasco” as a result of the failure of such nations to deliver on their “utopian promises.” This was not because of anything unique to Marxist policy, but rather because its secularism blinded it to what Novak takes to be the fact that “the final victory of true justice belongs to God alone.”50 Such vignettes show that Novak knows that he has a somewhat tough sell to his audience, because its members are so secularized, whether they are Jewish or not. As a result, one can say that the success of the argument

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of Covenantal Rights—secularized folk turning to religious tradition—is premised on something like a right to give up rights. Secularized folk have a right to enter into covenant with God and thereby cede rights that they previously presumed to have (when they were good liberals and saw the protection and expansion of political autonomy as the purpose of a polity). Once a person decides—autonomously, lest the covenant be tyrannical—that his or her rights only make sense in the context of God’s prior rights over that person, he or she then commits to familial duty and procreation, and various communal ends. He or she then proclaims that the goodness of the covenant is greater than that of more anthropocentric and expansive accounts of rights, which have shown themselves to be just so much false consciousness. My point in articulating this node of Novak’s thought in Covenantal Rights is that he, unlike Hartman, is interested in telling a story about how we come to know what our rights are for (responding to divine commands) and about how we come to know what covenantal life can provide for us. Once we know that, we can decide to enact our right to give up rights, and start telling a story about the ontological nature of rights: Their being is due to God, and their purpose aims at God. As a result, the covenantal life has its power not simply on the basis of a claim about divine authority or divine command—as is the case in Hartman’s thought—but on the basis of a reasoning process that a person might make outside the covenantal life. For this reasoning process to be successful, the person outside the covenanted community must have evidence that the claim about divine authority is true. Thus, a formal account about God’s nature, or one about humans as made in the divine image, is powerless to persuade; it already requires that the audience for that account be inside the covenanted community. The force of claims about the goodness of the covenanted life, and the way in which God comes into relation with a person and/or a community through that life, must rely on empirical considerations that we can observe (or testimonies that we can trust), or on historical occurrences whose meaning and significance we can debate, whether or not we are members of covenanted communities. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant argued that the moral law could be thought by reason, and thereby could show itself to be unconditionally necessary simply as a result of formal analysis.51 For Novak, however, because the argument about the goodness of the covenant is made to those who are outside of the covenant, the covenant can only show its necessity concretely, in history. In other words, the people of Israel have historical reasons for accepting the covenant. Such a claim about the covenant is longstanding in Novak’s theology. In an essay from the 1980s, “Natural Law, Halakhah, and the

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Covenant,” Novak grounded this claim in two classical rabbinic texts. In the third-century commentary on Exodus known as the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, the text comments on Exodus 20:2 (“I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt”) by imagining God saying to the people of Israel, “May I rule over you?” The people of Israel respond “Yes, yes” on account of God’s liberation of them from slavery. Similarly, B. Shabbat 88b registers the people of Israel’s autonomous acceptance of the covenant (Esther 9:23) in response to their having been saved from Haman’s plot to exterminate them.52 But if in that essay, past actions were good reasons for the people of Israel to accept the covenant, in Covenantal Rights Novak argued that the covenant’s future consequences are good reasons for accepting the covenant. While the primary reason for the commandments is to bring us into relationship with God, it is also the case that such relationship-talk cannot ignore the fact that “the function of many of the commandments, even most of the commandments . . . is to fulfill human needs. . . . If these needs are sufficiently understood, then, can they not be seen as our rights which is expressed in our desire for God to direct us in paths that lead us to our own true ends?”53 In other words, even if the covenantal life has an ultimate goal (relationship with God), talk about this goal cannot ignore, as Hartman did, the fact that other more prosaic goals matter. Members of covenanted communities therefore have the right to make claims on God (or on human lawgivers or law-interpreters) to fulfill these needs. This raises the issue of how we might know that our needs are being fulfilled, as well as the issue of the authority that any individual might have to determine what her or his proper needs are, or in what the fulfillment of such needs might consist. These are exceptionally thorny issues. Certainly, I can be mistaken about what I need in life. Those of us who have known and loved addicts know intimately how such an error works and the destruction that such error can wreak. Yet just as certainly, I can have some say about what my needs are and what might constitute their fulfillment; there are some ways in which I know myself better than a doctor, a judge, a religious authority, or even a teacher might know me. In the halakhic tradition, this is most apparent from laws allowing violation of certain halakhot for the sake of extending one’s own life. Thus, if a sick person demands food even though a doctor says otherwise, the sick person has authority in this situation; the prooftext for this is Proverbs 14:10, “the heart knows its own bitterness” (B. Yoma 83a). In Covenantal Rights, Novak argues that the Jewish tradition incorporates Jews’ needs and answers them, and that it sets limits on what counts as a genuine statement of need. First, the covenant is for my needs. In a long commentary on a Talmudic discussion of the place of petition in prayer,

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Novak claims that the mitzvot cannot be understood outside of the cause of prayer, our “need, expressed in desire, calling for a recognizable response in” the community in which we live.54 Novak roots his claims in texts from the Midrash on Psalms as well as Abraham Ibn Ezra’s medieval commentary on Exodus, from which we might infer from the fact that Exodus 19:19 begins “Moses speaks and God answers” (as opposed to “God speaks and Moses answers”), that revelation “at least in part, consists of Moses presenting before God what he thought were the legitimate needs of the people to be claimed from God.”55 Indeed, Numbers 9 details a complaint made by some Israelites that they were unable to observe Passover because they had come into contact with a corpse; Moses advocates for them before God, and God authorizes Moses to legislate a makeup Passover for those persons one month later. In such cases, the Torah’s goodness is upheld, for Novak, by virtue of God’s recognition of the justice of the people’s claims, a recognition that can be performed (in the case of Numbers 9) by adding new law to divine teaching. However, there will also be occasions when my needs are not answered. Even though revelation consists in part of the people of Israel presenting their needs to God (through Moses), it only consists of this in part. While there is a measure by which we can assess the goodness of covenantal life, Novak just as insistently claims that there are and must be limits to invoking such a measure. After all, “God is the final judge, and since revelation is at this time still in process, God’s judgment is made according to often mysterious criteria.”56 For example, in the case of the Shoah, Novak affirms the right of the Jewish community to be angry at God on account of mass death, but does not affirm any community member’s right to abandon religious belief as a result of that anger: such a move would only torpedo any hope for the efficacy of the pursuit of justice.57 In addition, there are some occasions when my needs should not be answered, for example when I proclaim that my own needs for (homo)sexual expression trump traditional notions of the family and my duty to procreate within a traditional family structure. For such a person, the tradition affirms that “homosexual unions can be regarded as only unjustified diversions from the fulfillment of communal duty, which they preclude by design.”58 So someone who follows Novak is committed to the following claims. The covenant is, in part, for the sake of fulfilling human needs. While we do not have the right to test whether the covenant actually satisfies our needs in all cases, we do have the right to assess whether it satisfies our needs, and in particular our need for justice, in certain cases—particularly, but perhaps not only, when individuals’ needs cohere with the needs for the community to perdure over time through procreation. In addition, we have the right to be angry at God when our needs are not met, although we seem

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to have no right to do anything in addition to expressing our anger in some of those moments. In other situations, we do not even have that right: tradition renders unjustified a gay person’s anger at either God or the tradition. Such commitments raise fascinating questions, which to my mind, Novak has not fully addressed in his work. What is the criterion for distinguishing between legitimate questions of whether covenantal life satisfies the needs of those living in accordance with the mitzvot, and illegitimate forms of such questions? When does one get to grapple with the tradition in a way that is praiseworthy? What is the criterion for distinguishing between just and unjust anger? What is justified anger for, if anything? Novak’s philosophical theology legitimates such questions. Having the right to ask them is a key part of membership in a covenanted community, for a sine qua non of membership in such a community is that neither the covenant nor the theology that legitimates it appear to be tyrannical. But can it be possible for someone in a covenanted community to do more than ask questions about the covenant? Is it possible for someone—for example, the Orthodox lesbian in a heterosexual marriage who cannot ask for a divorce, for both personal and halakhic reasons59—to give a different understanding of the covenant, against present religious authorities? I believe that Novak unwittingly affirms this possibility in the last chapter of Covenantal Rights, which treats the rights that a member of a covenanted community has over and against the community itself. There, he persuasively argues that the primary thing that a community owes its members is protection from harm to one’s body and to one’s possessions. (As stated earlier in this essay, this is part of the “human” function of the covenant; it is in this chapter that Novak writes briefly about the pain of bullying, and the possible redress for such pain.) But this is not the sole thing that a community owes its members. This chapter reaches its rhetorical and argumentative apex in a section entitled “The Right to Social Inclusion,” in which Novak argues that covenantal life “involves a high degree of interpersonal responsibility within the covenant, not only to fulfill basic individual needs, but also to include as many as possible in the social practices of the community.”60 And yet people cannot be included on their own terms, since a liberal revolution, anthropomorphic as it would be in Novak’s eyes, would overthrow the divine basis of the covenanted community. Nevertheless, women can be included in covenanted communities to a greater extent than they had been in the past. Novak’s example here is that of women-only prayer (tefillah) groups, in which women can lead prayer and read Torah (circumventing halakhic proscriptions on men hearing women’s voices chant Torah); unlike some other traditionalists, Novak endorses such groups.61 How to balance the claims of tradition and the right to inclusion is at issue here; working this issue out involves a close

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reading of the section of Covenantal Rights that treats community members’ right to be protected from harm.62 The primary text analyzed here is the treatment in M. Sotah 9 of the ‘eglah ‘arufah (the heifer with a broken neck) in Deuteronomy 21. The biblical passage deals with the issue of what to do when a murder victim is found but whose murderer is unknown. The elders of the town nearest the murder victim are to break a heifer’s neck in a wadi, and then wash their hands over the calf, affirming that they neither murdered the victim nor know who did; this ritual will absolve their guilt. The Mishnah is puzzled as to why the biblical passage would have assumed that anyone might have thought that the elders of the town are guilty. Are leaders of a community immediately under suspicion when a corpse shows up nearby? So it hypothesizes that the biblical text means to say something like the following: “It is not the case that he [the person found dead] came to us for help and we sent him away without food; it is not the case that we let him go without escort” (M. Sotah 9:6). On such a reading, the elders understand their responsibility for a physical harm in terms of a social harm that they might have committed (but did not in this case). Novak’s gloss on this passage is as follows: “What we see here is the assumption that it is the right of every person, especially vulnerable strangers, to have the protection of the local authorities in the dangerous business of travel.”63 Such protection seems pro forma, as if the Mishnah is simply looking for the bare minimum that community leaders must do for someone—some food, an escort—if they are not to be taken as accomplices to his murder, should he later be found dead. And yet, the right to food and the right to escort, as minimal as they are, are still significantly more than nothing. Both of these rights are rights of a member of the covenanted community not to suffer what Orlando Patterson termed “social death,” in which the person suddenly becomes an outsider by virtue of being judged to no longer belong to the community.64 As Novak hypothesizes, the function of such a ritual as the ‘eglah ‘arufah is not simply to exonerate the elders from something that they might have done, but also for the elders to perform their attitude towards crime for others in their community: But the statement of exoneration prescribed in the Torah could be concerned with the right of potential victims to know that criminals are properly punished by society. That means that these potential victims have reasonable assurance that society has done everything possible (within the limits of justice) to effectively deter the commission of crimes in the first place, as well as the assurance that if they are the victims of crime, then their deaths will be avenged by society.65

Food and escort are therefore, for Novak, symbols of a community’s care for its members, and even the least of those members, those who are most

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likely to be victimized by others. (Again, the aside about bullying is relevant.) Stopping physical harm requires social inclusion, refusing to inflict social death on any member of the community. The right not to suffer social death is continuous with the ethos of many rabbinic texts that proscribe shaming members of one’s community.66 Given the inability to clearly delineate between physical harm and other kinds of harm—whether the failure to receive hospitality, the enduring psychic toll of having been bullied, or being excluded or marginalized in a community on account of one’s sex or on account of the nature of one’s sexual desire—it stands to reason that when an understanding of the covenant is understood to have caused harm—and not just physical harm—that the covenant has failed to show its goodness, and therefore there are no longer good reasons to accept that understanding of the covenant as binding. A covenantal theology that is interested in maintaining the credibility of its claims to be good might therefore proceed from listening to the testimony of members of covenanted communities who attest to having been harmed (emotionally and mentally) at the hands of the community and its leaders—in listening for ways that law has failed them. Certainly, questions will arise in this process. What really counts as being harmed, and what is better described as mere unhappiness or churlishness? What counts as harm? A sermon? A refusal to sign semikha? A refusal to include women in the rabbinate? A refusal to include openly gay people? Noncelibate gay people? Transfolk? What is the extent of the authority of the person who says “I have been harmed” vis-à-vis the community, and how might a community develop a typology of such authority on the basis of the nature of the harm that is claimed? These are the questions legitimated by Novak’s theological method—whether they are asked by Novak, by other traditionalists, by Orthodox feminists who want more women to have the title rabba, by liberal feminists, by gay and lesbian Jews, by others who have received the short end of the covenantal stick, or by all of these people as they might fight for justice for haredi victims of sexual abuse and their families.67 In such cases, Jews in covenant with God will not be far from liberal Millians who see that power can be used “to prevent harm to others”68 although they might very well disagree whether that is the only legitimate use of communal power or not. They will act on their knowledge that the right to give up rights is always coupled with the right to give as justified an account as possible that the covenant might be—or must be—understood differently if it is to be worth affirming, and if it is to truly meet the needs of community members. Phrased somewhat differently, the right to give up rights is still a right. God’s, or religious authorities’, rights over me are contingent upon my acknowledgment of those rights, and so the right to give up rights is also the right to suspend my affirmation of this or that present understanding of the mitzvot.

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A traditionalist such as Novak may bemoan liberal Judaism (or liberalism in general) on account of its “simplistic egalitarianism, which is totally at variance with the tradition both generically and specifically.”69 But a traditionalist such as Novak should also acknowledge that a community cannot be blind to the harm that it does its members, and may, on traditional grounds, atone for its acts of social death. To acknowledge that does not entail leaving tradition behind for liberalism; it is to say that the boundary between liberalism and tradition is not always as firm as our contemporary culture wars portray it.70 Perhaps such atoning will occur through deposing a community’s halakhic authorities; perhaps it will occur through halakhic inventiveness; and perhaps, most sadly, it must occur through abandoning certain halakhot. The boundaries of the tradition, and the legitimacy of its future moves, cannot be known in advance. (Similarly, the boundary between a genuine claim of having been harmed, and a spurious one, cannot be known in advance.) They can only be made and remade over time, as Jewish communities pin those boundaries down and move it as members of those communities find better and more persuasive language to attest to their having been harmed by understandings of the covenant, and as Jewish theologians find better ways to respond to such harm—as they must if their claims about the goodness of the covenant are not to appear cheap or passé. To imagine God as a lawmaker is to imagine God as authoritative, but as Novak makes clear, it is also to imagine God as someone whom I can (sometimes) complain and seek redress, on whom I can make rightful claims. This is already a sizable advance on Hartman’s Maimonideanism, which imagines God’s authority to be total. But as one fills out Novak’s image of God with textual analysis, the details of his image recede. For unless God directly enters history, the response to the complainer will not come from God; it will come from the other members or her or his community. As a result, in order to solve the theological problems that arise from the suffering of members of covenanted communities, it is less helpful to imagine God than it is to imagine the community as the site of grappling over tradition, of listening to each other, and of either ignoring or addressing the harms that have been made in the name of the covenant. Perhaps when theologians were imagining God, they were imagining persons all along.71 NOTES 1.  David Hartman, “Hartman on Human Autonomy: A Response to Landes’ Review,” Tikkun 2.1 (1987): 124. 2.  Martin Kavka, “The Meaning of That Hour: Prophecy, Phenomenology and the Public Sphere in the Early Heschel,” in Religion and Violence in a Secular World:

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Toward a New Political Theology, ed. Clayton Crockett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 108–36. 3.  Martin Kavka, “The Perils of Covenant Theology: The Case of Eugene Borowitz,” Journal of Jewish Ethics 1.1 (2015): 92–113. 4.  Eugene Borowitz, “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 64. 5.  Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Ish ha-halakha—Galui ve-nistar (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1979), 70; Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1983), 77–78. 6.  Joseph Soloveitchik, “Qol Dodi Dofeq,” in Be-Sod ha-yaḥid veha-yaḥad [In Aloneness, In Togetherness], ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusalem: Orot, 1976), 362; Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek: It Is the Voice of My Beloved That Knocketh,” trans. Lawrence Kaplan, in Fate and Destiny: From Holocaust to the State of Israel (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 2000), 35. 7.  There is also the issue of whether Soloveitchik’s ideal type of halakhic man is actually a good analysis of the Jewish tradition. Elliot Dorff described “Soloveitchik’s approbation for continual emotional restraint” as “more in line with Prussian, pietistic Protestantism than it is with Judaism.” See Dorff, “Halakhic Man: A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 6.1 (1986): 91–98, quotation at 96. For Novak and Hartman’s critiques of Soloveitchik’s thought, see Novak, “Heschel on Revelation,” in Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, eds, Randi L. Rashkover and Martin Kavka (London and Grand Rapids, MI: SCM/Eerdmans, 2008), 37–45, esp. 39–41; Novak, “The Role of Dogma in Judaism,” in Theology Today 45.1 (1988): 49–61, esp. 52–54; Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1 (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2001); “Where Did Modern Orthodoxy Go Wrong?”, in The God who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2011), 130–57; “Abraham’s Argument: Empower, Defeat, and the Religious Personality,” in From Defender to Critic: The Search for a New Jewish Self (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012), 157–75, esp. 161–63. 8. Martin Buber, “Jüdische Religiosität,” in Der Jude und sein Judentum, ed. Robert Weltsch (Gerlingen: Lambert Schneider, 1993), 72; Buber, “Jewish Religiosity,” trans. Eva Jospe, in On Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1967), 89; Buber, “Cheruth,” in Der Jude und sein Judentum, 120; Buber, “Herut,” in On Judaism, 151; Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 193; Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 173. 9.  Elliot N. Dorff, “The Covenant: The Transcendent Thrust in Jewish Law,” in Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality: A Reader, ed. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75. This article originally appeared in a 1988 issue of Jewish Law Annual. 10.  David Hartman, Joy and Responsibility: Israel, Modernity, and the Renewal of Judaism (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute 1978), 6; see similar concerns in “Soloveitchik’s Response to Modernity: Reflections on ‘The Lonely Man of Faith,’” in Joy and Responsibility, 228–29. For evidence that this was a concern of Hartman’s

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even late in his career, see the text cited at note 1, as well as The God Who Hates Lies, 176–80. 11. See Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 410 (2.48), quoted in “Sinai and Messianism: A Halakhic Model for Understanding God’s Relationship to History,” in Joy and Responsibility, 240–41. That essay is reprinted under the title “Learning to Hope: A Halakhic Approach to History and Redemption,” in From Defender to Critic, 127–53. 12. See Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), esp. 52–54 and 131–42. 13.  Hartman, “Sinai and Messianism,” 242; see also “Learning to Hope,” 140. See also “A Covenant of Empowerment: Divine Withdrawal and Human Responsibility,” in From Defender to Critic, 177–85. 14.  Ibid., 253. This sentence does not appear in “Learning to Hope.” 15.  Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen Judentums (Darmstadt: Melzer, 1966), 236; Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Ungar, 1972), 202. 16.  Hartman, “Sinai and Messianism,” 247; “Learning to Hope,” 145. As Steven Kepnes has noted, Cohen’s failure to cite Maimonides at this point in Religion of Reason is puzzling. See Steven Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 71. 17.  Hartman, “Sinai and Messianism,” 246; “Learning to Hope,” 144. 18. A theologian might describe the halakhic life as active work on the world, as opposed to on oneself. However, then one would be a liberal Jew who rejects much of halakha because it has no effects on the world, so this was not a possibility for Hartman. 19.  Ibid., emphasis mine. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Ta‘niyot 1.2, in A Maimonides Reader, ed. Isadore Twersky (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1972), 114. 20. David Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976), 210. The passage is also cited in A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1985), 243. See also the elision of issues of theodicy in Hartman’s most compact statement of his covenant theology, “A Covenant of Empowerment.” 21. Hartman, From Defender to Critic, xiv. 22.  Hartman, “Halakhah as the Ground for Creating a Shared Spiritual Language,” in Joy and Responsibility, 145. See the revised version at A Heart of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999), 105. For Hartman on halakha, see Shaul Magid, “Hasidism, Mitnagdism, and Contemporary American Judaism,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era, eds. Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 292–94. 23. Hartman, A Living Covenant, 33. 24. Hartman, The God Who Hates Lies, 33. 25. Hartman, A Living Covenant, 14. 26.  Ibid., 128. 27. Maimonides, Guide, 497, quoted in Hartman, A Living Covenant, 128.

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28.  Ibid., 492–93. See also Robert Eisen, The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43–77. 29. Hartman, A Living Covenant, 128. 30.  Charles Raffel, “Providence as Consequent Upon The Intellect: Maimonides Theory of Providence,” AJS Review 12 (1987): 65. 31. Maimonides, Guide, 511 [3.27]. 32.  Josef Stern, The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 329. 33. Hartman, A Living Covenant, 129. 34. Hartman, The God who Hates Lies, 177. 35. Hartman, A Living Covenant, 196. Ken Koltun-Fromm, in personal correspondence, is kind enough to remind me that Hartman’s decision to use this Talmudic prooftext rather than the passage from Mishneh Torah in “Sinai and Messianism” should not be seen as just a taste for variety. To say that suffering should move us to examine our conduct is not the same as saying that it should so move us because we are always at fault for our own suffering. In my opinion, the Talmud’s quote from Lamentations—as well as Hartman’s failure to revise the relevant section of “Sinai and Messianism” near the end of his life (as he revised other sections of Joy and Responsibility)—minimize the difference between pre-1980 Hartman and post-1980 Hartman. Still, Koltun-Fromm is correct to note that a difference remains. 36.  Ibid., 203. 37.  Ibid., 268. 38.  Hartman, “Sinai and Messianism,” 256; “Learning to Hope,” 153. 39. Hartman, The God who Hates Lies, 177. 40. Some of the following sentences are drawn from Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover, “Introduction,” in Tradition in the Public Square, xviii–xix and xxii. 41.  See David Novak, “A Theory of Revelation,” in Law and Theology in Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1976), 1–27, esp. 19–22; Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115–38. 42. Novak, Election of Israel, 132. 43.  See Rashkover and Kavka, “Introduction,” xvi, xxxiii. 44.  Matthew Levering, Jewish-Christian Dialogue and the Life of Wisdom: Engagements with the Theology of David Novak (London: Continuum, 2010), 137 n36. 45.  However, we had done that in previous work. See Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover, “A Jewish Modified Divine Command Theory,” Journal of Religious Ethics 32.2 (2004): 387–414. 46.  David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 218. 47.  Describing Novak’s doctrines of messianism and eschatology is tricky. On the one hand, there are many places in his writings where it seems that part of what it means for Jews to live traditional lives is that they thereby come to deserve redemption, and even perhaps that they inspire non-Jews to convert. On the other hand, Novak also affirms divine transcendence by affirming the discontinuity between history and the messianic future. Both of these views appear in The Election of Israel, 154–58.

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48. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 7. 49.  Ibid., 190. 50.  Ibid., 88. 51. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160–164 [5:27–30]. 52.  David Novak, “Natural Law, Halakhah and the Covenant,” in Jewish Social Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28. 53. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 67. 54.  Ibid., 62. 55.  Ibid., 69. 56.  Ibid., 70. 57.  Ibid., 104. Novak has also remarked briefly on post-Holocaust anger in Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 246–47. 58. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 171. This is part of a much longer discussion of family and sexuality in Covenantal Rights (166–79); Novak’s concern with homosexuality as a threat to the Jewish family goes back at least to 1980. See the exchange of letters with Robert D. Schwartz, MD in Sh’ma 11 (1980), 2ff. Novak’s endorsement of psychotherapy as a technique for reorienting or sublimating same-sex desires, mentioned in that exchange, appears to continue to this day. See Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Interview with David Novak,” in David Novak: Natural Law and Revealed Torah, eds. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 132. 59.  One example of such a case is featured in the documentary Trembling Before G-d (dir. Sandi DuBowski, 2001). 60.  Ibid., 197. 61.  Ibid., 203. For a good report of how controversial women’s tefillah groups were in the waning years of the twentieth century, see Sylvia Barack Fishman, “Negotiating Egalitarianism and Judaism: American Jewish Feminisms and Their Implications for Jewish Life,” in Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, eds. Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 170–74. A full analysis of the relationship between halakha and feminism in Novak’s corpus is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is relevant to note that in the 1990s, Novak’s daughter Marianne helped to start a women’s tefillah group in Saint Louis; in the fall of 2015, she began study at Yeshivat Maharat, the Orthodox yeshiva that ordains women as clergy. 62. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 187–92. 63.  Ibid., 191. 64. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 44. 65. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 191. I am not sure whether I should endorse Novak’s interpretation as a report on the Mishnah. As Novak himself notes, the Mishnah goes on to say that “when murderers increased, the [rite of the] ‘eglah ‘arufah was abolished” (M. Sotah 9:9). For Novak, this is because the character of the leaders had regressed. But since M. Sotah 9:8 involves a discussion of the conditions under which the rite is not performed because there are witnesses to the murder, and since 9:9 continues by mentioning a notorious murderer of this time (Elazar ben Dinai,



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known as ben ha-ratzḥan, “son of the murderer”) it seems that the rite was abolished because the murderer was known to the community, and was therefore unnecessary. That being said, I certainly prefer Novak’s interpretation to the one that is most easily authorized by the surface of the Mishnaic text. 66. See Jeffrey Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 67–79; Jonathan Crane, “Shameful Ambivalences: Dimensions of Rabbinic Shame,” AJS Review 35.1 (2011): 61–84. 67.  See Rachel Aviv, “The Outcast,” The New Yorker (November 10, 2014), 44–55. 68.  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 13. 69. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 202. 70.  For another example of this, see Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 71.  My thanks to Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm for inviting me to be part of this volume, and for their excellent editorial stewardship. I am especially grateful to Ken Koltun-Fromm for encouraging me to indulge my theological proclivities despite my self-identification as a ger, as someone who sojourns with the Jewish people but who does not identify as a member of that people. My student Josh Lupo pushed me to greater clarity, and I am grateful to him for a lengthy conversation about this essay. Audiences at Brown University, Temple University, and Lehigh University gave immensely helpful feedback that I am still processing. My thanks to Paul Naḥme, Nicholas Friesner, Steve Bush, Mark Cladis, Nathaniel Berman, Fannie Bialek, Lila Corwin Berman, Laura Levitt, Rebecca Alpert, Elliot Ratzman, Aryeh Botwinick, Hartley Lachter, Monica Miller, Chris Driscoll, Nitzan Lebovic, Dena Davis, Jodi Eichler-Levine, and especially Jessica Carr.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aviv, Rachel. “The Outcast.” The New Yorker (November 10, 2014): 44–55. Borowitz, Eugene. “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community.” In Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 59–68. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002. Buber, Martin. Der Jude und sein Judentum, edited by Robert Weltsch. Gerlingen: Lambert Schneider, 1993. ———. On Judaism. Translated by Eva Jospe. New York: Schocken, 1967. Cohen, Hermann. Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Darmstadt: Melzer, 1966. ———. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated by Simon Kaplan. New York: Ungar, 1972. Crane, Jonathan. “Shameful Ambivalences: Dimensions of Rabbinic Shame.” Association for Jewish Studies Review 35:1 (2011): 61–84. Dorff, Elliot. “The Covenant: The Transcendent Thrust in Jewish Law.” In Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality: A Reader, edited by Dorff and Louis E. Newman, 59–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “Halakhic Man: A Review Essay.” Modern Judaism 6:1 (1986): 91­–98.

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Eisen, Robert. The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. “Negotiating Egalitarianism and Judaism: American Jewish Feminisms and Their Implications for Jewish Life.” In Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman, 163–90. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999. Hartman, David. A Heart of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999. ———. A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism. New York: Free Press, 1985. ———. From Defender to Critic: The Search for a New Jewish Self. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012. ———. “Hartman on Human Autonomy: A Response to Landes’ Review.” Tikkun 2:1 (1987): 121–24. ———. Joy and Responsibility: Israel, Modernity, and the Renewal of Judaism. Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 1978. ———. Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2001. ———. Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976. ———. The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2011. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kavka, Martin. “The Meaning of That Hour: Prophecy, Phenomenology and the Public Sphere in the Early Heschel.” In Religion and Violence in a Secular World: Toward a New Political Theology, edited by Clayton Crockett, 108–36. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. ———. “The Perils of Covenant Theology: The Case of Eugene Borowitz.” Journal of Jewish Ethics 1:1 (2015): 92–113. Kavka, Martin and Randi Rashkover. “A Jewish Modified Divine Command Theory.” Journal of Religious Ethics 32:2 (2004): 387–414. Kepnes, Steven. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Levering, Matthew. Jewish-Christian Dialogue and the Life of Wisdom: Engagements with the Theology of David Novak. London: Continuum, 2010. Magid, Shaul. “Hasidism, Mitnagdism, and Contemporary American Judaism.” In The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era, edited by Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak, 280–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Macedo, Stephen. Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Maimonides, Moses. A Maimonides Reader. Edited by Isadore Twersky. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House.

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———. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1956. Novak, David. Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. “Heschel on Revelation.” In Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, edited by Randi L. Rashkover and Martin Kavka, 37–45. London and Grand Rapids, MI: SCM/Eerdmans, 2008. ———. Jewish Social Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. Law and Theology in Judaism. New York: Ktav, 1976. ———. “On Homosexuality: To Robert Schwartz.” Sh’ma 11 (no. 201): 3–5. ———. The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. “The Role of Dogma in Judaism.” Theology Today 45:1 (1988): 49–61. ———. Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raffel, Charles. “Providence as Consequent Upon The Intellect: Maimonides’ Theory of Providence.” Association for Jewish Studies Review 12:1 (1987): 25–71. Rashkover, Randi L. and Martin Kavka. “Introduction.” In Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, edited by Rashover and Kavka, xi–xxxiv. London and Grand Rapids, MI: SCM/Eerdmans, 2008. Rosenweig, Franz. Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. ———. The Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Rubenstein, Jeffrey. The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz. First edition. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1966. Schwartz, Robert D. “On Homosexuality: To David Novak.” Sh’ma 11 (no. 201): 2–3. ———. “On Homosexuality: To The Editor.” Sh’ma 11 (no. 201): 5–6. Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov. Be-Sod ha-yaḥid veha-yaḥad [In Aloneness, In Togetherness]. Edited by Pinchas Peli. Jerusalem: Orot, 1976. ———. Fate and Destiny: From Holocaust to the State of Israel. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 2000. ———. Halakhic Man. Translated by Lawrence Kaplan. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983. ———. Ish ha-halakha—Galui ve-nistar. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1970. Stern, Josef. The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. “Interview with David Novak.” In David Novak: Natural Law and Revealed Torah, edited by Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, 89–139. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

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Chapter Fourteen

Freud’s Imagining God David Novak

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THEORY AS NARRATIVE Sigmund Freud was, arguably, the most prominent and the most influential modern atheist. However, unlike many modern atheists who dismiss theism or belief-in-God as an unnecessary and unfalsifiable hypothesis about the world, Freud did something more radical. He attempted to deconstruct the biblical narrative, in which God is the creator of humankind, and reconstruct from its remains a counternarrative, in which humans are the creators of God. This was very much a theoretical enterprise. Moreover, the theory is not about the narrative, the theory is the narrative in a self-reflective mode. Although Freud used the language of contemporary social science, he was doing much more than the other social scientists were doing then (or are still doing now). Freud was formulating a myth. Now by “myth,” I do not mean its usual connotation that designates either a conscious lie or an unconscious delusion. Instead, I use the term “myth” in its original denotation (mythos in Greek), which designates a master-story of human, even cosmic, origins. The value of this kind of master-story (like a good theory) is heuristic, not indicative. That is, it presents an ontological foundation for explaining an entire way of life to those who accept the myth’s truth and order their lives accordingly. As such, it is more than a hypothesis that can be tested experimentally. It is even more than a scientific paradigm which, although it explains a whole range of facts, is still limited to the specialized discourse of scientists nonetheless.1 And a myth is even more than a “world-view” (Weltanschauung), which is usually the way individual thinkers look at the world before them from their limited, historically conditioned perspective.2 Like hypotheses, paradigms, and world-views, myths are not empirically demonstrable; i.e., they explain the data they refer to; they are not explained 255

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by them. But, unlike hypotheses, paradigms, and world-views, myths are not invented or constructed; rather, they are received or inherited from prehistoric sources. Some myths are then formulated and reformulated, which requires a great thinker like Sigmund Freud to do it insightfully. Indeed, Freud’s reformulation of the Oedipus myth (which the Greek playwright, Sophocles, first formulated in Oedipus Rex over two millennia earlier) was accomplished with Darwin’s help. Finally, though Freud invented or created psychoanalysis, whose methods he used to interpret the Oedipal myth, he did not create the myth any more than a patient or a psychoanalyst creates the mythological material that emerges out of the unconscious. One could even say that both are revelations.3 Later, philosophical interpretations might come from those who have listened to these myths deeply and reflectively. Note what Freud says about his mythology: “We do not share the belief that myths were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge . . . that they were projected on the heavens after having risen elsewhere under purely human conditions.”4

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FREUD’S COUNTER-BIBLICAL NARRATIVE Already in Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud was constructing a master story about the origins of human sociality. And, as was the case in his last great book in 1939, Moses and Monotheism, Freud was consciously constructing his master-story to counter the biblical master-story. In fact, a straight line goes from the 1913 book to the 1939 book, which might be seen as the sequel to the earlier book. Moreover, both books are primarily in dialogue with anthropologists, who are the social scientists Freud wanted to be taken seriously by. That is why, it seems, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud invokes anthropological treatments of the biblical narrative much more than actually invoking the text of the Bible itself (let alone the Jewish tradition of biblical exegesis). That notwithstanding, we should examine that other master-story when questioning how persuasive Freud’s master-story is on key points, especially Freud’s views on the origin of morality.5 Bringing the biblical story into this examination of human origins is because Freud himself chose his narrative over the biblical one. In this paper, I try to counter Freud’s master-narrative with the master-narrative he tried to counter. Here I shall argue for the greater coherence of the biblical story than Freud’s, especially in terms of its teachings on normative questions, religious and moral. Freud began to construct his master-narrative on what he calls “an historic explanation,” which is “a hypothesis of Charles Darwin about the primal so-



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cial state of man. From the habits of the higher apes Darwin concluded that man too lived originally in small hordes in which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.” Then he quotes directly from Darwin’s The Origin of Man:

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[J]udging from the social habits of man as he now exists, the most probable view is that he originally lived in small communities, each with a single wife, or if powerful with several, who he jealously defended against all other men . . . the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community . . . The younger males being thus driven out . . . when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close breeding within the limits of the same family.6

At this stage of the construction of his master-story, Freud seems to be positing that incest is what might be called the “original sin,” because what he calls “incest dread” leads to the prohibition of incest itself. Hence its prohibition is not an “innate instinct.7 But this cannot be taken as the origin of moral law, since “incest dread” is not a response to a commandment. Incest is not an act one ought not do because one has been commanded not to do it. In the talmudic interpretation of the biblical narrative that Freud is countering, “exogamy” (literally, “marrying out”) is presented as a positive moral norm: “a man shall cleave [ve-davaq] to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The negative moral norm is derived from the first part of the verse: “therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother,” which is taken to mean that humans ought to seek their mates outside their immediate family.8 Freud’s “incest dread,” however, is not the kind of moral dread or fear the Bible talks about when indicating a negative commandment, a “thou shalt not.” There, “fear” (yir’ah in Hebrew) means to restrain oneself from performing an act, especially because of why the act is not to be done.9 Moreover, even though violating a negative commandment presupposes an offense against the source of the commandments, and entails negative consequences (i.e., punishment) from that source, the commandment only functions morally when its reason, not its presupposition nor its consequence, is what primarily motivates the subject of the commandment to refrain from doing what he or she has been commanded not to do. Conversely, the dread of the brothers of which Freud speaks, which prevents them from engaging in sexual relations with their mothers and sisters, is not the kind of fear that prevents a person from doing something because this act is contrary to what is right and good for human beings, which is the reason it is prohibited. In Freud’s view, though, the brothers are afraid to have sexual relations with their mothers and their sisters because it is dangerous to appropriate

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the possessions of somebody more powerful and vindictive than themselves. Hence avoiding incest is not because it is bad for those to whom it is done and to those who do it. Instead, one avoids incest because he must protect himself from the wrath of a jealous, possessive father. That is why we have to look for the origin of moral law elsewhere in Freud’s master-story. Now Freud is not satisfied with just leaving the story at the level of avoidance of the cruel, vindictive, murderous father, whose sons flee his prevention of their social-sexual maturity by keeping all the women in the horde for himself. He thus develops the next chapter of the story as follows:

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One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly. . . . This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model [Vorbild] for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him, and each acquired a part of his strength . . . this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began [Anfang nahm], social organization, moral restrictions, and religion.10

At this point, Freud sees the origin of law as a body of moral restrictions emerging from a compact among equals. Here the equality among the brothers is hard won, because they have all equally killed their oppressive father, and they have all equally divided up his remains so that each of them might obtain some of the father’s formerly total power. Many years later, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud elaborates on this theme, speaking of “[t]he memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together and the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile—led at least to a union among them, a sort of social contract [Gesellschaftsvertrag]. Thus there came into being the first form of a social organization . . . in short, the beginnings [die Anfänge] of morality and law.”11 Later on in this narrative, Freud concludes that “giving equal rights to the brothers ignores the father’s wishes . . . Here social laws became separated from others which . . . originated directly from a religious context.”12 But what is this religious context wherefrom a different kind of law emerges than the law which emerges from a social contract among equals? How did this religious context come to be? Again, in Totem and Taboo, Freud imagines the origin of religion to be because “the original democratic equality of each member of the tribe could no longer be retained . . . a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of gods,” which he speaks of as “the edification of the murdered father from whom the tribe now derived its origin.” This leads to “the institution of paternal deities the fatherless society gradually changed into a patriarchal one.”13 Now “patriarchal deities” are most certainly law-giving gods. So, the difference



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between the origin of secular law and the origin of religious law is that secular law emerges from among equals and applies to them equally.14 Religious law, conversely, is rooted in the inequality of God and his human subjects who, it might be said, are all equally unequal before this transcendent God. Elsewhere, Freud argues that the secularization of law is an “advantage . . . to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin [Ursprung] of all our obligations and precepts of civilization.”15 Freud is convinced that this new godless morality makes “these commandments and laws . . . lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well.”16 Yet even Freud had to admit, nonetheless, that without a divine sanction, “purely reasonable motives can effect little against passionate impulses [leidenschaftliche Antriebe].”17 Indeed, what force does a moral law have if we think it was made by persons essentially no different from ourselves? And, if moral law is, therefore, changeable, what prevents humans from changing it, even abolishing it, when it no longer (in Freud’s words) “serve[s] their interests”?18 In fact, at times of great political and cultural crisis, such relativism actually works against our truly perennial human interests, for it provides a rather puny bulwark against God-substitutes like Hitler, who claim to restore the old security people used to find in the old religions. So, it would seem, even for Freud’s interests as an Enlightenment rationalist, that the old religious-moral absolutes, which have a long history of rational interpretation that doesn’t attempt to overcome their origins, that these old absolutes would be a more effective bulwark against the type of new, idolatrous despotism that drove Freud out of Vienna, and which murdered members of his own family as well as over one third of his people. However, one cannot invoke the old God and his Law as a bulwark against the new gods, unless one believes in the true reality of this God and his Law.19 Regarding this belief to be what Plato called a “noble lie” is insufficient.20 God’s Law only functions cogently and effectively when it is a foundation, which is different in kind from a merely useful hypothesis. THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION Finally, this brings us directly to the fundamental question of religion, i.e., the God question. Now there is no doubt that Freud’s atheism is central to his philosophy. (Whether it is central to his clinical praxis is arguable, however.) Yet unlike so many modern atheists who can’t understand how anybody could have ever believed in God, Freud takes the religious recognition of God very seriously, for this recognition fulfills a very strong and persistent human need (Bedürfnis in German, and a favorite word of Freud’s). Freud sees gods and God to be the human projection on to reality of a replacement for the

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omnipotent father whom the first humans had just killed. Their motive in killing him was because his continued dominating presence was depriving them of their own independence, which means, fundamentally, their inability to become fathers themselves, since the primal father kept all the women to himself. Nevertheless, Freud imagines that the brothers also regretted what they did to their father. But why? Wasn’t their father an insufferable, selfish, violent, dangerous threat to their lives? Why not good riddance? So Freud seems to answer this obvious question as follows: “The situation created by the removal of the father . . . must have brought about the extraordinary increase of longing for the father [Vatersehnsucht].” That is because “the brothers who had joined forces to kill the father had each been animated by the wish to become like the father.” But, he goes on to say: “this wish had to remain unfulfilled. No one could or was allowed to attain the father’s perfection of power, which was the thing they all sought.” So there was “a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of gods.”21 Along these lines, elsewhere Freud says that the human person “creates for himself [schafft sich] the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate . . . [t]he defense [Abwehr] against childish helplessness . . . a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion [Religionsbildung].”22 What did the primal father do for his sons and not just against them so that they should miss him, despite what he had done to them and what they had done to him? Well, what the father did was to protect them from other fathers, from the forces of nature that he could handle as a powerful male better than his boys, and protect them from each other (in a way that Adam couldn’t protect Abel from Cain). That is why, it seems, the sons project an ideal being on to external reality who, over time, becomes greater and greater than the primal father ever was.23 However, what took humankind so long to figure out how their prehistoric ancestors had deluded themselves and deluded their descendants? Well, it would seem that, as far as Freud is concerned, humankind could only wake up from this delusion with the quantum leap of modernity during the Enlightenment. For this is when humankind (actually, only West-European humankind), at the time of the French revolution, killed off the royal father (i.e., Louis XVI) and then divided up (at least in principle) his absolute sovereignty among all the citizens in the form of equal rights for the republican sons. Based on this revolutionary trajectory, Freud was convinced that enlightened reason will ultimately triumph over blind faith. Nevertheless, Freud’s modernist optimism evidenced in his 1927 book on religion, The Future of an Illusion, is very much toned down in Moses and Monotheism, finished in 1939, after escaping the Anschluss that drove him out of Vienna by the most unenlightened, irrational Nazi despotism.



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THE DIVINE LAWGIVER-JUDGE Perhaps what Freud missed in the history of religion, certainly in the history of Judaism (the religion he was born into and never formally renounced membership in), is that God is not primarily thought of as Saviour, especially insofar as God’s saving activity is largely seen to have been done in the irretrievable past or to be yet done in the radical, unpredictable, messianic future. Instead, God is seen primarily to be Lawgiver (noten ha-torah in Hebrew), who does not save humankind from the world, but rather gives humans a modus vivendi to live in the world without being done in by the world. Therefore, the original sin in this area of human life is the type of autonomy that presumes we humans can totally govern ourselves as if we created ourselves. Yet how can we be beholden to ourselves, if we have not created ourselves? Isn’t any maker greater than what he or she has made? Moreover, this kind of radical autonomy presumes we humans come from nowhere and are bound for oblivion. But doesn’t that make our human attempts to live rationally, i.e., purposefully, exercises in futility, since the rest of the world seems to be irrational and purposeless, if not absurd? It shouldn’t be forgotten that the same Lawgiver God who gave humans “justifiable [tsaddiqim] statutes and laws” (Deuteronomy 4:7) is the same God who created a lawful universe lawfully. “He commands [tsivah] and it comes to be; he spoke and it endures.” (Psalm 33:9) Surely, this view of God does not provide the balm Freud thought the human projection of God has provided deluded religious believers. For the Lawgiver God is also “the judge [ha-shofet] of the whole earth” (Genesis 18:25), who not only gives the Law, but who enforces the Law by severely convicting those who have violated it, and whose exonerating mercy is mysteriously unpredictable. Substituting anything or anybody else for God the Lawgiver is what is called “idolatry” in the Bible. It is the sin of wanting “to be just like God” (Genesis 3:5), which means that God has been totally replaced as God. Of course, the only way God can be replaced is by being permanently displaced, i.e, to be killed. And, though Nietzsche didn’t coin the phrase “God is dead” (Gott ist todt), his is by far the most well-known formulation of it.24 Freud’s counter-biblical narrative seems to be influenced by the idea of the death of God, whether he actually took it directly from Nietzsche or not. But Nietzsche is much more radical than Freud, who often talked like an Enlightenment optimist, speaking of transposing the transcendent God into immanent human reason (which he even named logos).25 Conversely, Nietzsche stresses that once God has died (presumably having been killed by modern man), humankind is thereby on its own, without a rudder in a fundamentally irrational world, without any way to return to our premodern, enchanted

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existence. Any attempt to understand our power to be an evolving increase of our power over the world, Nietzsche would regard as a return to a god, however modernized that god becomes. More brutally honest than Freud, Nietzsche understood the risk atheists must take if their atheism is to be truly radical, instead of sublimating the longing for the old dead God above us into a new god who is within us.26 Indeed, isn’t the modern notion of “autonomy,” not so much the projection of human power on to a superhuman being, as Freud following Feuerbach frequently asserts, but rather the reduction of the biblical God into god-like human beings, who can direct themselves into a future of their own making?27 Nietzsche will allow us no such refuge with any idealized, immanent god. One could say that the basic philosophical choice when it comes to the God-question is between the living God of the Bible and Nietzsche’s dead god. Freud’s attempt to somehow or other replace the biblical God with human autonomy is an insufficient alternative. As Nietzsche seems to have pointed out in his critique of Kant and Hegel), you can’t throw the biblical God out of the front door, and then bring this God’s rather feeble replacement in through the back door.28 Such a process of mere reinterpretation overemphasizes the power of human autonomy to sustain a coherent human existence in an otherwise incoherent world, and it underemphasizes the enduring power of the God of whom the Bible speaks and who still speaks through the Bible.

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NOTES 1.  See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 43–51. 2.  The notion of Weltanschauung and its limitations is most famously put forth by Hegel. See Phenomenology of Spirit, nos. 599–600, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 365–66. 3.  Note Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 35: “[T]he return of the repressed is the Freudian counterpart to biblical revelation, both equally momentous and unfathomable, each ultimately dependent, not on historical evidence, but on a certain kind of faith, in order to be creditable.” 4. Quote from his 1913 paper, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Freud on Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 136. 5.  In Hebrew, the word dat means both “law” and “religion,” probably reflecting the view that all true law is rooted in God’s wise will. Also, the Latin words for “law” (lex) and “religion” (religio) might well have the same root, ligare, meaning “to bind,” i.e., to obligate. Here too, this probably means that only God has the right to originally obligate as the giver of the original law (Urgesetz in German). 6.  Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage Books, 1946), 162–63.

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7.  Ibid., 161. 8.  Babylonian Talmud: Sanhedrin 58a. Whether or not Freud actually knew this rabbinic treatment of Genesis 2:24, he used this same verse to illustrate the value of exogamy in his 1912 paper, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” trans. J. Riviere, Collected Papers (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 4:205–08. 9.  Palestinian Talmud: Berakhot 9.7/14b. 10. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 183; Freud, Totem und Tabu (Frankfurt am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 1991), 196. 11.  Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. K. Jones (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), 104; Freud, Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion (Frankfurt am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 1975), 89. 12.  Ibid., 153. 13. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 191–92. 14. Since, for Freud, the institution of the incest taboo preceded the religious invention of God, with its inherent equality of humans before God, it has a kind of pre-religious, secular character (ibid., 186). Furthermore, Freud notes: “With the institution of paternal deities the fatherless society gradually changed into a patriarchal one. The family was a reconstruction of the former primal horde and also restored a great part of their former rights [früheren Rechte] to the fathers.” Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. J. Strachey (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 164), 192; Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion (Frankfurt am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 1993), 204. 15. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 66–67. 16.  Ibid., 67–68; Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 144. 17.  Ibid. 68; Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 145. 18. Ibid. 19.  Ibid, 43–44. Here Freud argues against the German philosopher, Hans Vaihinger, who had argued in his 1923 book, Die Philosophie des Als Ob [The Philosophy of ‘As If’], that there is value in maintaining views we know are fictitious. For Freud, once such views are unmasked as cover-ups of real, but repressed, events, their value, whether theoretical or practical, is thereby lost. 20. Plato, Republic, 414C. 21. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 191; Freud, Totem und Tabu, 203. 22. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 35; Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 127. 23.  Ibid., 47. 24.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part 2. 25.  Note Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 89–90; Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 156: “Our god Logos is perhaps not a very almighty one [but] . . . we have one sure support [Anhalt] which you lack. We believe [glauben] that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power [Macht] and in accordance with which we can arrange [einrichten] our life.” 26. Thus Zarathustra (who seems to be the voice of Nietzsche himself), after his proclamation of the death of God, proclaims: “I teach you the self-transcending man [den Uebermenschen]. Man is what must become something to be surpassed

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[überwinden]. What have you done to overcome him?” Also Sprach Zarathustra, 3, Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967), 1:549 (my translation). Surely, this is more radical than the type of enlightened, progressive, immanent humanization of God that Freud was still advocating as late as 1927 (before the Great Depression and before the rise to power of Hitler, both of which occurred thereafter during his lifetime). 27. For the importance of the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, in Freud’s thinking, especially his thinking about religion, see Hewitt, Freud on Religion, 15–17. In general, Hewitt’s book gives the most thorough representation of the complex thinking of Freud and his disciples on religion. 28. Note his remark in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, no. 253, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 147: “Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing! The ‘beyond’ absolutely necessary if faith in morality is to be maintained.”

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Babylonian Talmud. 20 vols. Vilna: Romm, 1898. Freud, Sigmund. Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion. Frankfurt amMain: Fischer Verlag, 1975. ———. Der Zukunft einer Illusion. Frankfurt am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 1993. ———. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. K. Jones. London: Hogarth Press, 1939. ———. The Future of an Illusion. Trans. J. Stachey. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964. ———. “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.” Trans. J. Riviere. In Collected Papers, vol. 4. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. ———. Totem and Taboo. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Vintage Books, 1946. ———. Totem und Tabu. Frankfurt am-Main: Fischer Vrelag, 1991. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hewitt, Marsha Aileen. Freud on Religion. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. ———. Werke. 2 vols. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967. Palestinian Talmud. 7 vols. Jerusalem: n. p., 1959. Plato. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992. Vaihinger, Hans. Die Philosophie des Als Ob. Leipzig: Meiner, 1923. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.

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Part IV

INSCRIPTION

GOD IN JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

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Chapter Fifteen

God of Language Michael Marmur

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SHOULD, CAN, AND MUST Attempts to imagine and articulate God are bound to fail. At stake is the quality of the failure, and the responses which the attempt generates among readers and interlocutors. The long and varied history of Jews imagining God has tended to display the tension between what those inclined to participate in this fraught exercise should say, what they can say, and what they must say.1 Jews faithful to an understanding of the normative claims of Judaism are often driven by a sense of what kind of attitude to God is appropriate. In fact, the assumptions made as to what constitutes the irreducible normative core of a Jewish conception of God have changed greatly over time and between groups. Nonetheless Jews, both members of the elite and of the rank and file, have often been driven by a sense of what one ought to think about and how one ought to relate to God.2 This normative thrust can be exemplified by Bachya ibn Paquda, the first section of whose eleventh-century Duties of the Heart opens with his assertion that “the wholehearted acceptance of the Unity of God—the root and foundation of Judaism—is the first of the gates of the Torah.”3 He then proceeds to elicit ten dimensions of this concept from his interpretation of the Shema. Bachya, and many like him throughout Jewish tradition, blurred the distinction between a conception of God posited as an axiom and one arrived at as a conclusion of reflection. In either case, there is a core belief. He asserts that a person who does not have this understanding of the arch truth of religion, namely the unity of the Divine, will be capable neither of deed nor faith. For Bachya, a Jew is under an obligation to believe in the reality of the existence of the Creator, that He is our God, that He is a true 267

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unity, and that we are to love Him wholeheartedly. These are all normative doctrines we should affirm. The should fulfills a number of functions. It acts as a measure of the clarity of thought—if you think about this well, you will reach the right conclusion. It therefore also provides a criterion for error—if you have not reached this conclusion, something has gone wrong. Parallel to truth and error, normative statements serve an educational function. If we raise our children surrounded by these assertions affirmed both in moments of transcendence and in mundane parlance, the normative can also be formative. In constant tension with the drive to declare what is perceived as the unchanging truth of the tradition, is the imperative to address this of all issues with the utmost honesty. Here the call to assert what one should say is tempered by an acknowledgement of what one can say in good faith. It is often the case that an understanding of God which is appropriate for a certain generation or group becomes impossible as circumstances change. Generations of Jews grapple with the need to reject images and explanations of God which are impossible for them to accept. The basis of this rejection, often characterized as weakness of will by detractors, may have a basis in logic, or science, or morality, or experience. However explained, the idea is that there are moments when the should is countered by the can. The theological orientation of Mordecai Kaplan was strongly influenced by his sense of what can be said by a person exposed to the insights of modernity. He was prepared to state that certain traditional formulations had become impossible, and preferred an honest acknowledgment of this fact to any amount of acrobatic apologetics. As he states in The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion: The fact that the nature of God is beyond our understanding does not mean that we can afford to think of Him in terms that are clearly not true in accordance with the highest standards of truth. Our conception of God must be self-consistent and consistent with whatever else we hold to be true. . . . We must insist that whatever we say or think about God shall be in harmony with all else that we hold to be true.4

Consequently, Kaplan argues, if our scientific world view denies the possibility of miracles, that aspect of the traditional portrayal of God must be impossible for us. Attunement to what can be uttered is not a new preoccupation. There is a remarkable tradition to be found both in the Babylonian Talmud and in its parallel from the Land of Israel.5 It contains the suggestion that while Moses had described God as “The Great God, the Valiant and the Terrible” (Deuteronomy 10:17), in the wake of the destruction of the Temple Jeremiah omit-



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ted “the Terrible” (in Jeremiah 32). Then Daniel, in view of oppression and exile, omitted “the Valiant” (in Daniel 9). The Talmudic tradition embeds this teaching in an essentially conservative framework, lauding the Men of the Great Assembly who rehabilitated the abandoned epithets. But both versions include a justification of the actions of Jeremiah and Daniel. They acknowledged that God is a God of truth, and so deception and obsequiousness are not options. I can only say about God what can be said in honesty and integrity. There is a third dimension which helps define the ways in which God has been described in Judaism for millennia. Here the emphasis is not on the dictates of tradition, nor yet on the imperatives of consistency and integrity. Rather, this expression of God is the result of a profound urge, be it intellectual or meditative, ecstatic or prophetic, to attest to the reality of God. Here what is foremost is not a sense of what ought to be said, nor an acknowledgment of what can be uttered. Rather, the experience is that of Amos in the Bible, forced to respond to the roaring of a lion. This is a truth which must be spoken. As an exemplar of this third response—that of the person who must testify to God—I turn to a remarkable statement made by Martin Buber concerning revelation. Eschewing an “orthodox” understanding of that term, he asserted that: the human substance is melted by the spiritual fire which visits it, and there . . . breaks forth from it a word, a statement, which is human in its meaning and form, human conception and human speech, and yet witnesses to Him who stimulated it and to his Will. We are revealed to ourselves—and cannot express it otherwise than as something revealed.6

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Abraham Joshua Heschel’s account of the God whose name must be spoken includes a description of that moment when the spiritual fire breaks forth: A tremor seizes our limbs; our nerves are struck, quiver like strings; our whole being bursts into shudders. But then a cry, wrested from our very core, fills the world around us, as if a mountain were suddenly about to place itself in front of us. It is one word: GOD. Not an emotion, a stir within us, but a power, a marvel beyond us, tearing the world apart.7

All three of these motivations for imagining and articulating an understanding of God—should, can, and must—have within them an element of constraint. The first sets out the requirements of “tradition,” even though this tradition itself changes through time. The second constraining force is that of one’s own understanding of the world, and one’s own conscience. Third, one is called to be true to an experience or an insight, even if it flies in the face of tradition and conventional truth.

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In relating to the sheer diversity of ways in which God has been imagined and represented in the course of three thousand years of Jewish creativity, it is worth paying attention to the interplay between these three categories—the normative, the acceptable and the irresistible. When a tradition in the Babylonian Talmud warns of a sorry end for anyone who claims that God is lenient, it is immediately followed by what appears to be a competing view, according to which divine mercy is suited to the nature and capacity of each recipient.8 The doctrine of God’s perfection demands a rejection of the possibility of Divine laxity or inconsistency, says one voice, and I have a Biblical verse to prove it. No, retorts the other view, I have another verse whose interpretation allows for the idea that God’s judgment is tailored to each person’s dimensions. It is possible, of course, to read this exchange as a clash of exegetical insights, or to harmonize the two positions. I prefer to read it as a moment in which the should comes up against the can, and perhaps also the must of theological discourse. An example of this kind of conflict among contemporary Jewish thinkers is furnished in Heschel’s final work, in which he indulges in some rare explicit polemics:

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The reality of God is antecedent to all idea and values comprehended by man. It is a mistake to start with a human model and then seek to accommodate God to it. Martin Buber’s declaration “Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he did not murder his enemy” must be contrasted with the Kotzker’s statement “A God whom any Tom, Dick, and Harry could comprehend, I would not believe in.”9

In terms of the categories presented above, Heschel is criticizing the tendency to privilege the can over the must. He identifies Buber here with a humanizing trend within contemporary theology, one which begins with I and only then sets out in search of Thou. Heschel’s quotation of Buber is accurate, but like all quotations it is selective. In the same autobiographical passage from which Heschel quotes, Buber admits that he comes to translate or interpret Biblical passages, he does so with “with fear and trembling, in an inescapable tension between the word of God and the words of man.”10 In Buber’s self-understanding, then, the can did not always hold sway over the must (although typically the normative thrust of traditional belief was denied a veto right). Between these great thinkers, and indeed within each one, the should, the can and the must will be found in tension with each other.11 This tension is not played out between wholly distinct and impermeable categories. First, each of them bears significant internal tensions of its own. So we may feel

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called by tradition to affirm the unity and indivisibility of God, but we also know that the tradition as it has come down to us speaks of distinct Divine attributes and emanations. This is a tension within the normative category. And when it comes to what one feels able to affirm, and what one is called to acknowledge, human beings are often torn between competing and contradictory instincts and insights. The three domains—should, can, and must—come into contact with each other as God is sought and described. The encounter can be distressing, but it can also yield important insights. Franz Rosenzweig argued that “[t]here is only one truth. No honest man can pray to a God whose existence he denies as a scientist.”12 To use our terminology, the can of scientific plausibility comes into conflict here with the normative demands of regular prayer, and perhaps also the uncontrollable urge to pray. What should I do if the God I can believe in is not the God I face? Among modern Jewish thinkers, the figure of Hermann Cohen comes to mind as an example of a person whose commitment to the different dimensions of his approach to God were in tension. In 1907 Cohen confided in a letter: “I have a fate of a peculiar sort. Others may sacrifice their intellect. I must sacrifice my emotions. As you know, my heart and my feelings respond deeply to the emotional aspects of our religion; but abstraction is my fate.”13 Particularly in the final decade of his life these “emotional aspects” came to exercise a strong influence on his abstract thinking. The categories seep into each other. This essay looks at various ways in which language, as understood by philosophers, linguists, and others, impacts the way God is imagined and understood. The starting point of this investigation is my frustration with the inadequacy of much of what passes for discourse about God. When such discourse is reduced to crude binarity—God either exists or does not exist; God either speaks or does not speak—it ceases to hold any interest, and it promises little prospect for a breakthrough in understanding. The God I experience and intuit, the God I strive to understand and perceive as somehow turning to me, addressing me—this God is not found in the binary hide and seek. Many complex and essential aspects of existence don’t fit into the ontological straitjacket according to which something either exists like the Eiffel Tower, or it simply doesn’t exist. This kind of thinking has little to say about love or loyalty or hope, let alone God. WHY LANGUAGE? Like many who have gone before them, recent Jewish thinkers have used terminology and insights borrowed from contemporary science and theory in

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an attempt to speak compellingly about God. Bradley Shavit Artson sets an ambitious agenda, setting process thought the task of “making sense of what exists given our knowledge of relativity theory, quantum physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and neurology, psychology, history, religion and literature.”14 For Artson these disciplines act as both a limitation and a springboard. They limit the extent to which a believing Jew can adopt the creedal orthodoxies of previous generations, because their truths demand attention. In parallel, they provide Artson with a vocabulary with which he can express his own ideas about God. The can is in conversation with the should and the must. For Arthur Green, it is one of the disciplines mentioned in Artson’s litany which serves as a central motif in his Radical Judaism. Green sees in the evolution of species “the greatest sacred drama of all time.”15 In his theology he employs some of the terminology of evolutionary biology, combined with direct statements of what he can and cannot accept relating to God and profound parallels drawn from the Jewish esoteric tradition. I believe that recent work in linguistics and related topics has much to offer Jewish theology. The connection between Jews and the study of language is by no means a novelty. In George Steiner’s formulation, “[s]tarting with Genesis 1:316 and continuing to Wittgenstein’s Investigations or Noam Chomsky’s earliest, unpublished paper on morphophonemics in Hebrew, Jewish thought has played a pronounced role in linguistic mystique, scholarship and philosophy.”17 He regards it as no accident that, in his formulation and with the exception of Saussure, “the master-players in the critique of language, in philosophic and formal linguistics have been Jews or of Jewish origins.”18 Suggesting a historical or cultural link between the Jews and modern research into language is one thing. Speculating that this link may be of theological significance is quite another. For many experts in the field, it is reasonable to assume that such a possibility would be greeted with ridicule or with alarm. Hence, for example, Steven Pinker is keen to point out that his concept of the “language instinct” “is compatible in principle with the billiard-ball causality of the physical universe, not just mysticism dressed up in a biological metaphor.”19 I want to engage in theology dressed up in a linguistic metaphor. I maintain that new insights into the nature of language garnered through scientific research and philosophical exploration offer new vistas for anyone interested in reflecting on God in a Jewish context. I believe that new insights into the essence of language may offer new ways of thinking about what we mean when we talk about God. I make no claim to expertise in these scientific and philosophical fields, and look forward to the engagement and response of those who do.



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PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Eugene Borowitz has expressed the conditions setting out the bounds of contemporary theological discourse in terms of past, present, and future:

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An idea of God set before Israel must . . . meet the criterion of history past, present and future. It must demonstrate that it is an authentic development of the Jewish past. It must be logical enough in contemporary terms and standards to make the present generation want to live by it, and its content must be such that this life is recognizably Israel’s life of Torah before God. It must also be willing to stand before the judgment of the lives of the generations yet to be. Past, present, and future; the aggadic freedom is given—but the responsibility is great.20

For Borowitz, any new language for discussing God is anchored both in the extent to which a new idea of God resonates with normative assertions from tradition, and the degree to which the idea is likely to engage and inspire generations not yet born. If the suggestion that there is something important to be said about God and language is to be substantiated, it needs to show evidence of past resonance, present relevance and future significance. Benjamin Gross has charted the preoccupation of Jewish thought with issues of language and speech from the earliest times to the present day. His survey ranges from Biblical descriptions of creation as a speech act (from Genesis 1:2 to Psalms 33 and 119) to Hellenistic and Rabbinical literature of the Jews, rationalistic and kabbalistic trends in the Middle Ages, Hasidism and then to the thought of Mendelssohn, Krochmal, Rosenzweig, Levinas, Kook and more.21 He suggests that there is something essential about the phenomenon of language that makes it particularly fascinating for Jewish culture. He points to the fact that language accentuates a contradiction between the inner and outer realms. It lives both within each person and yet depends on a system and a reality which cannot be wholly self-referential.22 I believe that this aspect of language, its surfacing of the tension between the inner and outer domains, has contributed to its theological centrality. Maren Niehoff has suggested that “Philo is the first Jewish thinker known to have developed a theory of language.”23 In her presentation, Philo conceives of language as a Divine emanation, one which underpins or constitutes the basic structure of the universe. Divine language, quite distinct from human language, is ideal in the Platonic sense, incorporeal and difficult to perceive. To the extent that it is perceived, it is seen rather than heard.24 She then goes on to make a fascinating assertion: “These ethereal characteristics of Divine language suggest its congeniality to, of not identity with, God Himself.”25 That language is an emanation, a dimension of the Divine or even in some sense the Divine itself is a concept often repeated in the Jewish esoteric

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tradition. Joseph Dan makes this point clearly in his discussion of the concept of God’s Holy Name. Here “language stops being a means and becomes an independent divine essence, in which language and divinity are united. The holy name of God is not an expression of the divine: It is the essence of divinity itself.”26 Not all agreed with this radical notion—indeed, among the great Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages there was a variety of opinions about the provenance of language, human or divine.27 But from the Biblical source to midrashic musings, from the esoteric imagery of the Book of Creation and the Zohar28 to the minimalist claims of Maimonides,29 the phenomenon of language has been understood in Jewish culture as a fundamental aspect of the relationship between divinity and humanity. To give one example among several, in the approach of the pietists of Ashkenaz in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “[l]anguage . . . is indeed the only and the perfect vehicle to bring man into touch with the divine truth, provided that one completely rejects its limitations as a means of human communication.”30 In his recent dissertation on the role of language in the thought of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch, Evan Mayse has provided a magisterial account of the way in which language is at the heart of the Maggid’s approach. As he explicates the kabbalistic roots of Rabbi Dov Baer’s philosophy of language, Mayse notes that the Maggid emphasized a “basic point about the nature of language: human speech has essential power precisely because it is an expression, or perhaps better, an embodiment of divine speech.”31 Elsewhere he explains that for the Maggid “[h]uman speech gives articulation to an otherwise silent God, but this capacity for language is itself an embodiment of an aspect of the Divine.”32

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LANGUAGE AS A MODERN PREOCCUPATION The link, then, between God and language has Jewish roots both deep and wide. In 1772, the year of the Maggid’s death, Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language was published.33 In the years which have ensued, attempts to provide a systematic and scientific account of the origins, functions and essence of language have been a prominent feature of the European modern project. The linguistic turn, often linked to the work of Frege and the later Wittgenstein, challenged the notion that there is any basis for meaning or truth beyond the bounds of language. The de-divinizing impact of this linguistic turn has been set out with force and clarity by Richard Rorty, who describes the epoch-making significance of the rise of the modern idea that truth is “made rather than found.”34 Things in space and time, exist beyond human mental

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states. However, “[t]ruth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind. . . . The suggestion that the truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a human being who had a language of his own.”35 For Rorty and many others, that age has definitively passed. In our disenchanted world, the true nature of language is not a bridge to God but rather proof that such a God is impossible and unnecessary. God does not put the words of truth into our mouth. Rather, our mouths create possible worlds, seen and unseen. Deity is a turn of phrase. While the extreme claims of the linguistic philosophers have been challenged (even damned by Bertrand Russell as “a curious kind of arid mysticism”36), the impact of this and other processes of desacralization is still felt keenly. A question for a contemporary Jew alive to recent currents of research and debate is: can the involvement of God in discussion of language be anything other than obfuscation? A Jew living in the shadow of the Holocaust must also ask what possible meaning can be given to the notion of God who speaks to us or to whom we speak in language. Emil Fackenheim spoke of a commanding voice of Auschwitz, forcing the Jew of today to grapple with the almost unbearable tension between the should of the past and the can of the present.37 Philosophy and history provide contemporary challenges, then, to the notion that God can be imagined with recourse to language. However, new developments in areas such as evolutionary linguistics also offer very rich fields for theological reflection. Suggesting that one field of human endeavor has parallels with another runs the risk of being imprecise and dilettantish. This is a risk worth running—just as God proves to be quite elusive when described or discussed, so too does the phenomenon of language. Language is universal and thoroughly particular. It lives within and beyond the individual. The tools of its enaction, oral or literal, are simple: all one needs are throat, lips, teeth, tongue, and palate (seen in kabbalistic and Hasidic sources as the “five places of articulation”)38; a writing implement and some basic material to write upon; letters in an alphabet. Yet from these elements an endless range of possibility is made possible. Indeed, while debates continue to rage among scholars as to the precise dynamic by which universal grammar or its equivalent takes hold among language learners around the world,39 here, too, is an example of how a limited set of materials, in this case rules of language, become the building block for infinite permutations. Attempts to understand the phenomenon of language provide potential vistas for theological discourse. Take rules, for example. Are the rules of a language to be understood as human constructs, protected by conservatives

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and undermined by rebels, instruments of convention and power? Or are we to posit the idea that behind particular rules of particular languages there are some formal qualities understood innately by most people that reach out beyond cultural variegation? This is a major area of debate within linguistics, but that is not my current concern. Rather, I want to suggest that this discussion—about normativity, historicity, universality—may illuminate discourse about a commanding God. Consider this statement by Edward Sapir: “The fundamental groundwork of language—the development of a clear-cut phonetic system, the specific association of speech elements within concepts, and the delicate provision for the formal expression of all manner of relations—all this meets us rigidly perfected and systematized in every language known to us.”40 That this statement is disputed in some quarters should not deflect us from considering its theological potential. Groundwork, system, expression of relations—these may be building blocks for thinking and talking about God. The God of the Bible (if such a reductive expression may be allowed) commands obedience to a commandment issued from Sinai. Might it be that this commandment expresses rules of language? Are the rules of a putative universal grammar to be seen as the Noachide laws of language? Language is a celebration of humanity and a consideration of its boundaries. Often presented as mankind’s greatest invention (described as such in the subtitle of a recent work by Guy Deutscher41), it hardly meets the standard criteria for being considered either as clearly and exclusively human or in any meaningful sense an invention. There is a profound humanity to language, expressed beautifully by Hans-Georg Gadamer in terms which also point to a domain beyond the human: language is the real medium of human being, if we only see it in the realm that it alone fills out, the realm of human being-together, the realm of common understanding, of ever-replenished common agreement—a realm as indispensable to human life as the air we breathe. As Aristotle said, man is truly the being who has language. For we should let everything human be spoken to us.42

Biolinguists are looking at language in evolutionary terms. Languages unfold. They develop. They do not fall out of the sky ready formed. This evolutionary language has Jewish resonances. Elliot Wolfson suggests that the zoharic kabbalists provide an “imaginary account of the linguistic evolution of God’s becoming as a process of spermatogenesis. . . . On this account, language in its originary comportment expresses—graphically and phonically—the impulse to overflow, to procreate, the limitless will willfully limited by the infolding of the other enfolded in the self . . .”43 The infolding of language may offer an insight into the unfolding of God.

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Language has been a subject of concern and interest in modern Jewish thought. In a self-referential comment in his Star of Redemption, for example, Franz Rosenzweig noted that “the entirely real linguistic expression of language” is “the central part of this whole work.”44 His approach to language has been the subject of research and reflection.45 Another example of engagement with the phenomenon of language from within the canon of contemporary Jewish thought is to be found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In an essay entitled “Language and Proximity” described as “pivotal” by one critic,46 Levinas sees language as “fraternity, and thus a responsibility for the other, and hence a responsibility for what I have not committed, for the pain and the fault of others.”47 He suggests that beyond the content of particular acts of communication, language implies proximity (with all the ethical dimensions he understands to go along with that proximity). Inherent in language is the “first saying” of turning to one’s fellow person. He ends his essay with a declaration: “The first saying is to be sure but a word. But the word is God.”48 More recently Sam Fleischacker has offered a pungent critique of theologies of wordlessness, and suggested that Jewish thought is much more amenable to the concept of God in language. From an avowedly traditional and observant position, he makes the philosophical case for “an understanding of language as bearing God’s presence in its mystery, as a meeting place for God and humanity rather than a purely human product.”49 Torah is the place where, if we choose to give it authority, the word of God in all its mystery can be encountered. In 2015 Sara Friedland Ben Arza published a book in Hebrew on the role of speech acts in Jewish tradition.50 In addressing both a wide range of Jewish sources and the theories of Austin and Searle, her work provides important support for a claim I am trying to advance in this paper: that the way language is being thought about today has Jewish parallels and resonances, and that there is something important to be gained by thinking about God in relation to the fascinating and elusive phenomenon of language. To cite one example, she suggests that language serves two distinct roles, from Genesis on. One is generative, creative, essential, and its concerns ontological: language creates. The other is indicative, suggestive, referential: language represents. As I read this distinction, it mirrors a distinction to be found in the ways in which the word God is employed. God creates and God symbolizes. The great questions about God—essence, uniqueness, communicability, mystery, commandment—have parallels in recent discussions about language. Jews (and Christians, too51) in search of new ways of imagining God should pay attention to discourse about language. When Heidegger declares that language speaks,52 the resonance seems hard to ignore. It is not that we

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speak language, but that language speaks. It is not that we imagine God, it is that God imagines. The act of ordering, processing, creating, expressing, unfolding, referring—this act, or phenomenon, or process, or gift—might God be there, in still, small language? As the Jewish God is re-imagined in our day, this question deserves exploration.

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RECIPROCITY An opinion of the third-century Palestinian sage Rabbi Yochanan is preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, and it has become a staple of Jewish liturgy ever since. He expressed the view that the central liturgy of every prayer service, the Amidah, should begin with the recitation of one verse, Psalm 61:17, and end with the recitation of another verse, Psalm 19:15.53 The first of these verses reads: Adonai, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your glory. The second reads: May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, Adonai my rock and my redeemer. Our first verse is a remarkable statement of interaction between God and the individual person. It is God’s prerogative to cause my lips to open, and then my mouth will reciprocate with words of praise. I beseech God to take the initiative to allow me to offer praise. If the verse which acts as coda to the Amidah prayer54 has an element of reciprocity, it is in the opposite direction. In the reading of one classical medieval commentator, the individual speaker brings the words of the mouth and those words left unuttered in the hope that that they will be pleasing to God who is both a source of strength in the act of speaking, and a redeemer from error.55 It may be however that the term “redeemer” connotes a more active role. It is not that God will expunge my errors, words mis-spoken and unspoken, but rather that the bringing of these words and thoughts as a sacrifice may activate the redeeming God.56 Many other verses in the Bible link language with God. One of particular interest is Proverbs 16:1, which can be translated as: The dispositions of the heart belong to a man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. This verse is often interpreted to refer to the gulf between intention and speech.57 Like the verse from the nineteenth psalm, this verse relates both to thought and speech. The verse might have attributed unexpressed ideas to God and actual performed speech to humanity, but in fact the order is reversed. These biblical verses involve a number of dichotomies: the human and the divine domains; actual and potential language; influence and initiative. The description of God as ma’aneh lashon, pure response in language, offers a powerful image of reciprocity. The psalmist’s statement (Psalm 139:4) “Be-

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fore a word is on my tongue, you know it completely,” suggests a direct line of influence. God provides the script. But verses such as those from Psalms 19 and 61 and Proverbs 16 offer a more subtle dynamic. We act upon God who empowers us to act upon God. In 1916 Walter Benjamin published an essay entitled “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In the essay Benjamin rejects both what he calls a bourgeois and what he terms a mystical theory of the word. In the former, a word is an arbitrary signifier for some distinct meaning. In the latter, the word is the essence of the thing signified. In opposition to both of these representations, he offers a reading of the early chapters of the Book of Genesis. He suggests that in the second account of the creation, man is not created from the word, but rather invested with language as a gift and elevated above nature. In his reading, the bestowal of language is a way of setting language free from the Divine act of creation: “God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is creator.”58 The language is the same, but this does not make Man into God, since the infinity of human language is somehow limited compared to “the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word.”59 What does humankind do with this facility of language? In Benjamin’s remarkable imagining, all of inanimate and animate nature is involved in language, seeking to communicate their meanings. Adam the namegiver responds to this communication. No stranger to paradox, Benjamin suggests that language also necessarily represents a symbol of that which cannot be communicated. Towards the end of this difficult and important piece, Benjamin offers this formulation: “The language of an entity is the medium in which its mental state is communicated. The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs through the whole of nature from the lowest forms of existence to man and from man to God.”60 Language, liberated from God, gives creativity to Man, who then reads the vestigial Divine language in all things and speaks it back to God. Arguably influenced by his burgeoning relationship with Gershom Scholem,61 Benjamin provides an image with strong links to the Jewish esoteric tradition.62 The reciprocity of the human and the divine through language is described here as a kind of cycle of creation and completion. God is in the thoughts we think, in our efforts to understand what the world is telling us, in the way we speak the world back to its creator. In this image, all words are loan words. Language is freed from Divine service and frees us to think and name. It allows us to relate to the Divine in nature and to offer it up back to the Divine. God is here immanent and transcendent,

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absent and present, parallel and incommensurable. God exists as sure as these words exist. God in this account is not to be believed, but to be recited. Almost a century after Benjamin’s dense and challenging essay, Michal Govrin wrote a poem in Hebrew, published at the back of a book in which she and Jacques Derrida discuss the meaning of prayer. In her poem Govrin uses the structure of a penitential prayer from the High Holydays that places the people of Israel and God in counterpoint as “us” and “you”—for we are Your people and You are our God, we are Your children and You are our Father, we are your servants and You are our Master. In Govrin’s version (no translation of which is currently available), You are the voice and we are your speech / You are the voice and we are your letters. . . . As the poem proceeds, “we” are described as the tongue, the lips, the teeth which effects this “kol,” this Divine potential voice. In the final stanza she turns to God: See your speech rise in us from the world See your voice calling from our lives See us writing you day and night May these words be on your tongue Thou shalt not forget63

Here themes of visible language and a world latent with the language of God are combined with an interventionist posture. If in the biblical account of revelation a synesthetic moment in which the people saw voices is described (Exodus 20:15), here there is, as it were, a reverse revelation. We speak the world back to God.

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METAPHOR In a recent work on Jewish theology, Steven Kepnes contrasts the Maimonidean view of metaphor with that of Rabbi Judah Halevi. While the former shows disdain for metaphor, which is seen to be trivial and worthless, the latter is seen to understand the risk inherent in such an approach. Kepnes links Halevi with Aquinas in the Middle Ages and with a range of modern philosophers of language who have a higher regard for metaphor. He dwells on the contribution of Ricoeur, who he understands as offering a way of reading both the literal and the secondary reference of a metaphor. If Maimonides would prefer to dispense with the husk of metaphor, Halevi and his ilk understand that the kernel cannot live without its husk. Clothing God in metaphor helps us understand God’s similarity to and difference from the mundane things to which God is compared.

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This reading of metaphor in theological discourse helps advance Kepnes’s agenda—an uncovering of the limitations of “ethical monotheism” and a renewed emphasis on hermeneutics. As he states: “Once we recognize the Torah as a holy text full of metaphoric language and a metaphoric field of signs pointing to and bringing close to the holy God, the main issue is how to unlock the divine dimension within the Torah’s metaphors.”64 When we talk about God we are using metaphors. Any ambition to strip away the imagery and to be left with the naked truth is wrongheaded. “Theologians . . . need to recognize that any quest for greater and greater degrees of literalness is a wild-goose chase. All the significant assertions of theology are expressed in language that is irreducibly metaphorical.”65 All of this is convincing, but it fails to take into account the insights into metaphor being offered by linguistics and their theological implications.66 I do not intend to dive into the choppy waters of debate about metaphor raging among contemporary linguists, although I fear I may get splashed in the sentences which follow.67 Metaphor concerns the relationship between the more concrete and the more abstract. Guy Deutscher claims that it is “the only way we have of dealing with abstraction.”68 Language takes words for things in the physical world and turns them into increasingly abstracted terms, often to the point where the original context is lost. In Steven Pinker’s memorable phrase, “metaphor provides us with a way to eff the ineffable.”69 Engaging in hermeneutical analysis of particular examples of sublime literature is one way of reflecting on truth and morality and beauty. To this kind of activity we might add reflection on language itself. Let us consider a particularly strong and embodied God metaphor. Exodus 15:3 provides one of the most famous and challenging descriptions of God: Adonai is a man of war; Adonai is His name. What is one to make of a metaphor so male, so bellicose, so embodied? A wide variety of strategies have been employed in reading this verse over the centuries. The Mekhilta suggests that God appeared to the children of Israel in different forms or guises, and that this diversity raised the possibility of dualist polemics. Consequently, the verse states that the same God who appears at the sea is God in other contexts, too: “It is He who was in the past and He who will be in the future.”70 For Abarvanel in the fifteenth century,71 the need to find another way of relating to the gross anthropomorphism leads him to spectacular hermeneutic acrobatics. He offers two readings of the verse that involve a radical decontextualizing of the words. In one, Moses is speaking of God to Pharoah, and therefore says: Adonai, you man of war, His name is Adonai. The other reading suggests that the verse poses a rhetorical question. Could it be that God is a man of war? Clearly not, for this is God we are talking about. If the

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strategy of the Mekhilta is to neutralize the potential misunderstanding stemming from God’s diverse manifestations, Abarvanel’s approach is to reject the metaphor altogether and to seek another way of reading the verse. I want to suggest another kind of reading. We might read the verse as saying—in order for Adonai to be the God of abstraction, Adonai must also be a man of war. Or better: that Adonai once perceived as a conquering warrior, that is our Adonai. All abstraction in human language is made from the mulch of metaphor. Chunks of the physical world are broken down and become conceptual soil. The song at the sea is saying: as language tends to abstraction, so our imagination of God draws on our own experience of the world and then evolves. As the specifics decompose, our God language is composed. Rather than bypass or ignore the metaphor, we are called to acknowledge it as a necessary part of human language. Numbers 7:89 is usually translated in the following way: And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was on the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim; and it spoke to him. There is, however, an anomaly in the Masoretic tradition, such that the word medabber is rendered middabber. The grammar implies a reflexive form, as if God was not speaking to Moses, but rather (if such a thing could be said) to God. Rashi suggests that indeed God was talking to God’s self, and that Moses was overhearing this Divine language. Here is a moment of Mosaic revelation. Rather than hearing distinct instructions addressed to him, he is eavesdropping the perfect non-metaphorical unaccented language. But when he comes to express what he has heard, the inevitable mechanisms of human language are bound to pertain.

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TO THE FUTURE Eugene Borowitz set out criteria by which any idea of God should be measured. In this essay I have attempted to look at the relationship between God and language in terms of traditional tropes and contemporary approaches. What of the future, the communicability of any of the ideas described here? A male Jewish child is entered into berit milah, a term that bears significant ambiguity. A number of leading kabbalists dwelt on the idea of a covenant of the word.72 I believe that a Jew of tomorrow will be called to enter daughters and sons into a covenant of the word, one in which a feeling for language can be used to promote curiosity, humor, humanity, and an appreciation for the unfolding of processes within the world.73 As children mature, and if they are blessed with health and intelligence, it should be possible to pass with

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them through a process tending to greater abstraction. When the generation to come uses language in a way beyond our current imagination, then the job of imparting language can be said to have succeeded. Any articulation of God able to make a difference in the lives of twentyfirst-century women and men will need to grapple with a perennial tension— between the abstract and the embodied, the universal and the particular, the descriptive and the prescriptive. This era of human history has seen the worst excesses of “doublespeak,” language employed in the service of evil. It is also experiencing an unprecedented rate and degree of change in our understanding of language, both “artificial” and “natural.” I believe that in the life of all human beings there is a spark of divine language, residue of creation, a commandment to articulate the world back to its creative force. I believe no less strongly that this language cannot be experienced in generality. God may be Language, but I can only speak a language or two, because I am not God. Language is a life force. An English translation of Genesis 2:7 may read: God created Adam dust from the earth, breathing into him the spirit of life, so that Adam became a living being. In the Aramaic translation known as Onkelos, that last phrase is rendered: Adam became a speaking spirit.74 Language is indeed life, and while that is a universal commodity it can only be expressed in specificity. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a man whose biography and philosophy intersects with many of the themes touched upon in this article, once wrote that “[t]he way you use the word ‘God’ does not show whom you mean—but, rather, what you mean.”75 The God I mean is not only a what. It involves a dimension of proximity, of personality. I agree with Louis Jacobs’s declaration: “I certainly believe in a personal God with all the qualifications that are required. . . . Human personality is the highest form of being that we know. Therefore, we describe God in terms of a person, meaning the incomprehensible One, Who brings the world into being and Who is the One with whom we can communicate.”76 “All the qualifications that are required” for my notion of a personal God are stringent. I don’t want to give up on the search for a “who,” but I am nervous about the myriad ways in which this can be corrupted and misappropriated. God does not tell me to slay the infidel, or the order in which to light the Hannukah candles, or how to vote in the next elections. Rather, God commands me to make meaning, to construct frameworks using the least visible and most durable of materials: language. The material is durable, but it changes and adapts to different environments. To speak this language well is to sing to God a new song. An accusation of moral neutrality may be leveled at this notion of God found through language, but this accusation can be overcome. Indeed, a

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morality based in responsibility towards the Other may be indicated through language, that primordial vehicle of proximity. In the drama described by Walter Benjamin, the natural and human domains are calling out to each of us, speaking to us. “But there is none to strain his ear or to rouse his heart.”77 In the Jewish imagination, God is latent in language. It follows that the act of prayer may take on a resonance many moderns no longer hear. According to a tradition ascribed to the Ba’al Shem Tov, God’s instruction to Noah to make a sky light for the teva, the ark, is understood as an instruction to shed light on the teva, the word in study and prayer. Among its other functions, prayer also provides an opportunity to engage in “pure” language, to speak God back to God. If the generation which comes after our own is attentive to the calls of the natural world; is engaged in moral discourse; is attuned to creativity; finds a vocabulary of prayer and practice; if that generation has a multilingual identity while being rooted and fluent in a mother tongue; if it strives to eff the ineffable—then there is a chance of meeting Borowitz’s third and sternest test. Mine is an unabashedly liberal image of God. God speaks, but the content of our overhearing is inevitably human and bound by context. While I believe that there are better and worse ways of being in the world, I have trouble proving, or even trying to prove, that my moral instincts overlap completely with the content of God’s self-conversation. No person speaks God’s perfect language. I know that gross perversions of humanity have been perpetrated with impeccable grammar. I know, too, that languages die, and am alarmed at the prospect that we may fail to teach it well to our children. More than languages die, they change, and as a liberal I prefer one measure of vitality over ten measures of pedantry. Does this God of language exist? Language exists, and it calls us to make meaning exist. Does this God of language command? Language demands to be learnt, and to be employed. Does this God of language punish? Failure to hear the call of the Other can yield a heavy price. Can this God of language be desecrated? Many of the most perverse desecrations of the divine in our era have had at their root a desecration of language. Is this God of language a discernibly Jewish God? The phenomenon of language transcends barriers and defies restrictions, but the actuality of language is realized in specificity. Any religion or culture can only ever be a language, rather than Language itself. In this language, as a medieval commentary points out, a Hebrew word for language—safah—has the same numerical value as Shekhinah, the presence of the Divine.78 Just as the Jewish infatuation with the divine dimensions of language offers rich theological and cultural potential, it also is fraught with dangers, already intuited by Gershom Scholem in the 1920s. Scholem, probably influenced by



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his deep friendship with Walter Benjamin, wrote a letter to Franz Rosenzweig in 1926 in which he warned of the apocalyptic potential in the revivification of the Hebrew language.79 Like Scholem, I believe that the revival of the Hebrew language is one of the most significant, powerful, exciting, and complex developments in modern Jewish life. The Hebrew renaissance is replete with spiritual potential. Much of it is still to be realized. Three times a day I am called to call God to allow me to call out to God in praise. I do not find it possible, nor do I find it necessary to respond to that call each time with the words of the Eighteen Benedictions. But that call brings the should, the can, and the must of my attempts to imagine and articulate God into focus. We (or at least I) should look for new ways to articulate and venerate a God of unity and creativity. We (or at least I) know that some traditional formulations cannot be adopted with integrity. We (or at least I) cannot step away from the lure of this spiritual reciprocity, a naming and being named, a speaking and being spoken. Thrice daily I call and am called to speak the world to the God of language.

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NOTES 1. That there are different modes of talking and thinking about God is hardly an original insight. To cite one example, “the differentiation between what can be stated about God and what can be experienced about God” is noted in a letter by Franz Rosenzweig. See Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken, 1953), 243. I should, can, and must thank a number of people for discussing aspects of this project with me, while excusing them from any implication of complicity in its arguments. Among those with whom I have had an opportunity to use language to discuss language are David Aaron, David Ellenson, Art Green, Melila Hellner-Eshed, Dow Marmur, Miriam Marmur, Ariel Evan Mayse, Michal Muszkat-Barkan, and David Myers. 2.  In my formulation here, “ought” and “should” are used synonymously. 3. Bachya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, Duties of the Heart (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1970), 55. 4.  Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 20–21. 5.  BT Yoma 69b; PT Berakhot 7.5 11c. 6.  Martin Buber, Eclipse of God—Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 135. 7.  Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955), 78. 8.  BT Babba Kama 50a-b. See Maimonides’s Commentary to the Mishnah, Avot 3.15. 9. Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), 292–93.

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10.  Quoted in Paul Arthur Schilpp & Maurice Friedman (ed.s), The Philosophy of Martin Buber (La Salle: Open Court, 1967), 33. 11.  For an example of a critique of the “can” of Reconstructionism from the perspective of the “ought” of traditional monotheism, see Louis Jacobs, We Have Reason to Believe (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1957), 13–22. 12.  Quoted in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Franz Rosenzweig—His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken, 1953), 209. 13.  Quoted in Samuel Hugo Bergman, Faith and Reason (New York: Schocken, 1961), 41. 14.  Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2013), 1. 15.  Arthur Green, Radical Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 16. 16.  The text (cited in the following note) reads 11.11, but this is clearly a misreading of I.III. 17.  George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 60. 18.  George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 281. 19.  Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 317. 20.  This is taken from a 1957 essay, “The Idea of God,” in Eugene B. Borowitz, Studies in the Meaning of Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2002), 41. 21.  Benjamin Gross, Berit HaLashon (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 2004). 22. Gross, Berit HaLashon, 6f. 23.  Maren R. Niehoff, “What Is In a Name? Philo’s Mystical Philosophy of Language,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2, no.3 (1995): 220. 24. Philo, Migr. 48. 25.  Niehoff, “What Is In a Name?” 224–5. 26. Joseph Dan, “The Name of God, The Name of the Rose, and the Concept of Language in Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Mysticism, Volume III: The Modern Period (Northvale: Jason Aaronson, 1999), 132. See also Gershom Scholem, On the Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton: Jewish Publication Society/Princeton University Press, 1987), 332. 27. See Aron Dotan, “Rav Saadiah Gaon Al Hithavut haLashon,” Tarbiz 65 (1996): 237–49; Aviram Ravitzky, “Tefisat Halashon shel haRambam: Filosofia veHalakhah,” Tarbiz 76 (2007): 185–231; Josef Stern, “Language,” in: Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (New York: Scribner’s, 1987), 543–551; Irene E. Zwiep, Mother of Reason and Revelation: A Short History of Medieval Jewish Linguistic Thought (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1997), especially 107–61. Zwiep notes (p. 10) that “Jewish scholars, either choosing or compromising between reason and revelation, alternatively attributed the genesis of language to mankind, to God, or to a joint venture of both parties.” For perspectives beyond the Jewish context, see Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York: Bantam Matrix, 1970), 120–51.

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28.  See for example Yehuda Liebes, Torat haYetzira shel Sefer haYetzira (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2000), 111–20. For an extended and profound discussion of language within texts, see Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 29.  These are summarized in Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006), 155–78. 30.  Joseph Dan, “The Ashkenazi Hasidic Concept of Language,” in: Lewis Glinert (ed.), Hebrew in Ashkenaz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 22. 31.  Evan Drescher Mayse, Beyond the Letters: The Question of Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch, (PhD, Harvard University, 2015), 173. 32. Mayse, Beyond the Letters, 545. 33. Mayse, Beyond the Letters, 164. 34. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. 35. Rorty, Contingency, 5. 36. In the introduction to Ernst Gellner, Words and Things (London: Penguin, 1959), 14. 37. Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970). 38.  See Mayse, Beyond the Letters, 217–218. 39.  For some fascinating presentations of recent thinking about language designed for non-specialist readers, see Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention (New York: Picador, 2005); and Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages (London: Heinemann, 2010); Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994); and The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2007). For a recent rebuttal of the position advanced by the Pinker-Chomsky axis, see Vyvyan Evans, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For a recent rebuttal of one of Deutscher’s key claims, see John H. McWhorter, The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 40.  Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1949), 22. 41. Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language. 42.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 68. 43.  Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 284. 44.  Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 188. See Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially 92–100. 45.  See for example Barbara E. Galli (ed.), Cultural Writings of Franz Rosenzweig (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 23–57; Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, 57–104; Silvia Richter, Language, Philosophy and Judaism

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in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig (PhD, Heidelberg University, 2011), especially 139–265. 46. William Large, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing (Manchester: Clinamen, 2005), 3. 47. Emmanuel Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof, 1987), 123. 48.  Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” 126. This notion of language implying, or being predicated on the existence of the Other is a theme developed in Sartre’s 1944 essay “Aller et Retour,” and revised and nuanced in Sartre’s later thought on this theme. See Christina Howells, Sartre’s Theory of Literature (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979), 178–95. 49. Sam Fleischacker, “Words of the Living God,” https://kavvanah.wordpress. com/2014/11/02/sam-fleischacker-words-of-the-living-god-part-ii/, 6. The Jewishborn Max Picard was much concerned with questions of language and silence from a theological perspective. See particularly Max Picard, Man and Language (Chicago: Gateway, 1963). 50.  Sara Friedland Ben Arza, Yehi—Milim Ke Ma’asim (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2015). 51.  See Gerhard Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language (London: Collins, 1973); Hans Küng, Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 502–508. 52.  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper, 2001), 188. 53.  BT Berakhot 9b. 54.  See also BT Berakhot 17a. 55.  This is the reading of Rabbi David Kimhi on this verse. 56. See Nahum M. Sarna, Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms (New York: Schocken, 1993), 94–96. 57. Michael V. Fox (ed.). Proverbs 10–31 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 605–608. 58.  Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1970), 323. 59.  Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 323. 60.  Ibid., 331. This idea, and the entire article, is discussed and compared with Adorno in Rodrigo Duarte, “Benjamin’s Conception of Language and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia, 46, no.112 (December 2005): http:// dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0100-512X2005000200015. 61. Moshe Idel, “Abraham Abulafia, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin on Language,” in Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and TwentiethCentury Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 168–75. 62.  For a striking parallel with a teaching of Rabbo Solomon of Lutsk, see Mayse, Beyond the Letters, 198. 63. Jacques Derrida & Michal Govrin, Guf Tefillah (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2012), 150. Michal Govrin, untitled poem. Copyright © 2012 Michal Govrin. Michal Govrin has kindly given her permission for this poem to be quoted.

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64. Steven Kepnes, The Future of Jewish Theology (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 180. See also Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 2003). 65.  Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 102. 66. For an attempt to read Christian theology through the prism of cognitive linguistics, see Robert Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics (Leuven: Peeters, 2014). 67.  For an excellent review, see Andrea L. Weiss, Figurative Language in Biblical Prose Narrative: Metaphor in the Book of Samuel (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–34. See Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 68. Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language, 142. 69. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 277. 70.  Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael Shirata, Chapter IV (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), vo.1, 189. 71.  See Abarvanel on Exodus 15. 72.  See for example, Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel of Acre’s Commentary to Sefer Yetzirah, Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Shaarei Orah, Introduction: Sefat Emet to Shemot, 1901. 73.  I want to thank the editors of this volume for suggesting that here is another potential point of contact with the thought of Eugene Borowitz, for whom the covenant has been a central motif in his contemporary non-Orthodox Jewish theology. For his own musings on the limitation of language, see Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant—A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), especially 269–72. I believe that a new renewal of the covenant will need to look again at language and what it represents. 74.  I am grateful to Melilah Hellner-Eshed to pointing this out to me. 75.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 50. 76.  Quoted in Joshua A. Haberman, The God I Believe In (New York: Free Press, 1994), 65. 77. Zohar III.58a. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955), 145. 78.  Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel of Acre, Commentary to Sefer Yetzirah, Chapter One. 79.  The letter is discussed in Annabel Herzog, “‘Monolingualism’ or the Language of God: Scholem and Derrida on Hebrew and Politics,” Modern Judaism 29, no.2 (May 2009): 226–38.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Artson, Bradley Shavit. God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology. Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2013. Avis, Paul. God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and the Language of Man.” In Reflections, edited by Peter Demetz, 314–22. New York: Schocken, 1970. Bergman, Samuel Hugo. Faith and Reason. New York: Schocken, 1961. Borowitz, Eugene B. Renewing the Covenant—A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991. ———. Studies in the Meaning of Judaism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2002. Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God—Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1952. Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. New York: Bantam Matrix, 1970. Dan, Joseph. Jewish Mysticism, Volume III: The Modern Period. Northvale: Jason Aaronson, 1999. ———. “The Ashkenazi Hasidic Concept of Language.” Hebrew in Ashkenaz, edited by Lewis Glinert, 11–25. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Deutscher Guy. The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. New York: Picador, 2005. ———. Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Heinemann, 2010. Dotan, Aron. “Rav Saadiah Gaon al Hithavut haLashon.” Tarbiz 65 (1996): 237–49. Duarte, Rodrigo. “Benjamin’s Conception of Language and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.” Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia, 46, no.112 (December 2005): http://dx.doi .org/10.1590/S0100-512X2005000200015  Ebeling, Gerhard. Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language. London: Collins, 1973. Evans, Vyvyan. The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fackenheim, Emil L. God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Fleischacker, Sam. “Words of the Living God.” https://kavvanah.wordpress. com/2014/11/02/sam-fleischacker-words-of-the-living-god-part-ii/ Fox, Michael V., ed. Proverbs 10–31. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Friedland Ben Arza, Sara. Yehi—Milim Ke Ma’asim. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2015. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Man and Language.” In Philosophical Hermeneutics, 59–68. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Galli, Barbara E., ed. Cultural Writings of Franz Rosenzweig. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Gellner, Ernst. Words and Things. London: Penguin, 1959. Gibbs, Jr., Raymond W., ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gibbs, Robert. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Glatzer, Nahum N., ed., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. New York: Schocken, 1953. Govrin, Michal. “You Are the Voice.” In Jacques Derrida & Michal Govrin, Guf Tefillah, 150. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2012.

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Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Gross, Benjamin. Berit HaLashon. Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 2004. Haberman, Joshua A. The God I Believe In. New York: Free Press, 1994. Heidegger, Martin. “Language.” In Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 185–208. New York: Harper, 2001. Herzog, Annabel. “‘Monolingualism’ or the Language of God: Scholem and Derrida on Hebrew and Politics.” Modern Judaism 29, no.2 (May 2009): 226–38. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. A Passion for Truth. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. God In Search of Man. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955. Howells, Christina. Sartre’s Theory of Literature. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979. Idel, Moshe. “Abraham Abulafia, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin on Language.” In Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, 168–75. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. ———. Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Kepnes, Steven. The Future of Jewish Theology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Küng, Hans. Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Jacobs, Louis. We Have Reason to Believe. London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1957. Kaplan, Mordecai M. The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Kellner, Menachem. Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. Large, William. Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing. Manchester: Clinamen, 2005. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Language and Proximity.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, 109–26. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof, 1987. Liebes, Yehuda. Torat haYetzira shel Sefer haYetzira. Jerusalem: Schocken, 2000. Masson, Robert. Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics. Leuven: Peeters, 2014. Mayse, Evan Drescher. Beyond the Letters: The Question of Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch. PhD, Harvard University, 2015. McWhorter, John H. The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Niehoff, Maren R. “What Is In a Name? Philo’s Mystical Philosophy of Language.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2, no.3 (1995): 220–52. ibn Paquda, Bachya ben Joseph. Duties of the Heart. Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1970. Philo of Alexandria. Volume IV. Loeb Classical Library Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932. Picard, Max. Man and Language. Chicago: Gateway, 1963. Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. ———. The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2007.

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Ravitzky, Aviram. “Tefisat Halashon shel haRambam: Filosofia veHalakhah.” Tarbiz 76 (2007): 185–231. Richter, Silvia. Language, Philosophy ad Judaism in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig. PhD, Heidelberg University, 2011. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. London: Routledge, 2003. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Sapir, Edward. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1949. Sarna, Nahum M. Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms. New York: Schocken, 1993. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Aller et Retour.” In Situations I, 189–244. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Schilpp, Paul Arthur, and Maurice Friedman, eds. The Philosophy of Martin Buber. La Salle: Open Court, 1967. Scholem, Gershom. On the Origins of the Kabbalah. Princeton: Jewish Publication Society/Princeton University Press, 1987. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Grammars of Creation. New Haven: Yale, 2001. Stern, Josef. “Language.” In Cohen, Arthur A., and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds. Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, 543–51. New York: Scribner’s, 1987. Weiss, Andrea L. Figurative Language in Biblical Prose Narrative: Metaphor in the Book of Samuel. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. Wolfson, Elliot R. Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Zwiep, Irene E. Mother of Reason and Revelation: A Short History of Medieval Jewish Linguistic Thought. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1997.

Chapter Sixteen

Location, Location, Location Toward a Theology of Prepositions

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Rebecca Alpert

I learned about God and grammar at about the same time in my life, ironically from the same person. Evelyn Farrar, my fifth-grade elementary school teacher, taught me in class to diagram sentences and in private conversation encouraged me to think about being religious. The grammar lessons were more important to my secular Jewish mother, but as a result of my newly discovered interest in religion she agreed to send me to Hebrew school. Although neither God nor grammar have been central preoccupations of my adult life, I have on occasion pondered their connections. I have come to the conclusion that God is best discovered through the prepositions we use when we talk about God.1 (From feminist theologians I learned to avoid referring to God with pronouns; another important element of what I’ve come to think of as grammatical theology.) In reality, conversations about parts of speech have not been overtly referenced in most Jewish (or any other) theological writing.2 With the exception of feminist concerns with pronouns, Harold Schulweis’s predicate theology, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s argument that God is a verb, the subject is rarely broached in the Jewish world. Yet every theological perspective depends on grammatical understandings. The term God (and its Hebrew derivation, Elohim) is, after all, a noun. We also call God Adonai (Sovereign) in deference to the ancient Hebrews’ avoidance of using God’s proper name, Yahweh (or YHVH to be more polite), nouns all. While other nouns (the One, the Almighty, the Creator) are also used descriptively, an important strand of Jewish theology assumes God to be unknowable and indescribable. To these thinkers, God is abstract and distant; it’s beyond humans’ power to understand God’s ways. Our job is simply to listen, do, and obey. This is the Yahweh who spoke to Job out of the whirlwind to inform him that his suffering was simply the way the world works, 293

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and who made it clear to Moses that human beings could only see God from behind. Maimonides’s language of negative theology describes this metaphysical and philosophical view of God well. I would only suggest here that this kind of theological approach requires the exclusive use of unmodified nouns in reference to God. The only acceptable modifiers would by definition be those that describe indescribability, such as ineffable and inscrutable. Another, and today more common, strand of Jewish theology relies on understanding God by adding adjectives in order to make a personal connection to a more knowable, immanent, present God. Thus God comes to be described through positive human qualities like creative, compassionate, just, peaceful, powerful, loving, and tender, or the ones we fear: punitive, wrathful, jealous, or angry. This is the God of the psalms, the liturgy, kabbalah and Midrash, the God with whom we can connect and who connects to us through rewards, punishments, and demands that we be our best selves. This theological approach requires the use of a wide variety of adjectives through which God comes to be known. Martin Buber uses the adjective eternal but also the (second person) pronoun “Thou” to address God. Feminist theology requires that we pay attention to third person pronouns. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, God has been referred to as He and referenced with nouns that tend to conjure images of men: shepherd, King, and Father, for example. Some Jewish feminist theologians experiment with thinking about God as She, Queen, Mother, and liberal Jews have today incorporated those images in their liturgy. These nouns (and pronouns) fit more with a personal theology; adding “she” along with “he,” for example, is a good reminder that pronouns are not abstract but rather evoke powerful images of an anthropomorphized deity. Although avoiding referring to God with “he” and “she” is my personal preference, using both simultaneously opens us to the possibilities of gender bending and complexity that transgender activists demand we attend to. Although most Jewish theology is based on the (unremarked upon) use of adjectives, nouns, and pronouns to describe God, two Jewish theologians have used grammatical tropes to do theology. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi has encouraged us to think of God as a verb, and consider the possibility that to be a good Jew is to do god-ing. Schachter-Shalomi wanted us to treat God not as a stagnant thing, but as alive and moving: I have for many years encouraged my students to think of God as a verb. Imagining God in terms of action, of process, opens up new ways of connecting to the infinite. . . . We can begin to imagine a “godding,” a process that the universe is doing, has been doing, and will continue to do . . . as part of that universe we are “godding” in everything we do.3

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The most sophisticated use of grammatical construction is the predicate theology of Harold Schulweis. Schulweis wants to take the implications of Mordecai Kaplan’s naturalist theology one step further. Schulweis agrees with Kaplan that seeing God as an omniscient and omnipotent force in the universe or a personal God who rewards and punishes compromises God’s goodness and cannot resolve the problem of evil. But Schulweis questions Kaplan’s definition of God as the Power that makes for salvation. Because that perspective views God as a subject (noun), he argues, it does not sufficiently deal with the problem of God as an actor in a post-Holocaust world, where the Power to make for salvation was absent, or as Buber suggests, in eclipse. A post-Holocaust theology, Schulweis argues, must abandon notions of God as a subject, even one as abstract as a Power or Force. Rather, we must turn the sentence around and put our energies into what he calls predicate theology: doing and being “godly.” Making predicates the focus of our theology means rather than saying God is a Power, or God is Love, we should put our energies into acting lovingly and powerfully—“mercy, caring, peace, and justice are godly” (123). We also find godliness in “creativity, truth, compassion” (131). As part of his description of how predicate theology works, Schulweis noted: “the key preposition in predicate theology is not ‘in’ or ‘beyond’ but ‘with’” (139). This notion struck me as important; enough to form the basis of my own theological grammar. Perhaps the best way to understand theological concepts is not as nouns or pronouns, verbs or adjectives, subjects or predicates, but through which preposition was “key” to each theological understanding.4 Each theological approach is, like predicate theology, dependent on a unique preposition for its expression. Abstract metaphysical approaches to theology see God as “beyond” or “above,” “outside” or “over.” In a variation on that theme, the God of the deist comes “before.” Those with more personal theological approaches to God as Friend (feminist theologian Judith Plaskow comes to mind here) imagine God as “near” or “close to” or “alongside.” Immanentist theologians may also connect to God with prepositions like “in.” The transnaturalist will find God “through.” Or God may be “among” or “together with” us as Schulweis imagines, or as Buber suggests the connection “between” I and Thou. Personal theologies may also see God as operating “for” or “on behalf of” individuals, the Jewish people, humanity or the entire planet. In these perspectives, “to” and “from”—the relationship with God, matters. Each of these prepositions tells us more about how a theologian perceives God’s work in the world than the tomes that have been written about Jewish theology. Prepositional theology also leaves room for two other approaches not often considered. The Jewish secularist will be “without” God, and the atheist,

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“against” God. I consider these positions theological because they take a stance on where God is or is not found. These perspectives truly need to be taken into account, as at least half of those who currently identify as Jewish will find resonance with these views “of”/approaches “to” (or “away from”) God. And being “against” God is a stance that was certainly taken by Abraham, Jonah, and later rebbes and teachers who knew arguing against what they saw as God’s injustice was fundamental to being a Jew. Why put so much value into prepositions? To paraphrase the Kotzker rabbi, “God dwells where we let God in.” Where people locate themselves in relationship to God is key to our understanding of how God is in the world, and more significant than what or how or who God is (or isn’t). Prepositional theology shifts our focus of attention to how words connect, and gives us greater capacity to connect to others and ultimately to God, by whatever name you wish to call him or her or it. And while it’s often said that the devil is in the details, to my mind it’s in the details, like prepositions, where God truly dwells. Small things do matter a lot in how we live our lives and how we seek to understand our place in the scheme of things, and it is the goal of Judaism (and all religions, for that matter) to help us figure that all out. Furthermore, the things we don’t notice because they are too small or insignificant should be more important to us. As a short person who has often gone unnoticed and someone who cares about the poor and marginalized, I resonate deeply to the idea that paying attention to the least among us is part of what we need to do to improve the world. It is, after all, the stone the builders rejected (let us imagine because it was too small or considered insignificant) that is in fact, the cornerstone. A prepositional theology opens us up to that understanding. Prepositional theology also appeals to me because I find it a comfortable way to understand transitions I have made during my lifetime. When I was young, imagining God as that which exists “between” everything really worked for me, and I still find Martin Buber a compelling teacher. And in my years as a card-carrying Reconstructionist, I found Kaplan’s “through” and Schulweis’s “with” to work well for me as I sought compassion and justice for the world alongside my fellow Jews. As someone who currently identifies as secular, seeing myself as being “without” God is a way for me to remain in the theological conversation. These days, I sometimes also find myself not only “without” but “against” particularly when the Israeli government and its supporters make me so angry that God has become my last resort conversation partner. In the end I lay claim to it all: a prepositional theology of with and without, through and between and sometimes against. I encourage you to figure out which prepositional theologies are right for you.



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NOTES 1.  This paper of course is limited to English language usage. I hope it provides a case study for considering these questions in other languages as well. 2.  Murray J. Harris, Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012) is an exception. 3.  Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 20. 4.  Harold Schulweis, Evil and the Morality of God (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1983).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Buber, Martin. I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner, 1958. Harris, Murray J., Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012. Kaplan, Mordecai M. Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of Jewish Life. New York: Schocken Books, 1967. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide for the Perplexed, volume 1. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman M. Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Schulweis, Harold. Evil and the Morality of God. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1983.

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Chapter Seventeen

Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God

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Noam Reisner

John Milton’s Paradise Lost memorably retells in epic form the Genesis story of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise, while attempting to “assert the eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (I. 24–5).1 The epic is as much a product of Milton’s unique imaginative vision, as it is of seventeenth-century English history and politics. Brooding over the defeat of the republican cause, and what he considered to be the English people’s slavish return to the yoke of monarchy following the Restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, Milton crafted a rich and complex poetic theodicy, drawing on a wide range of biblical and extra-biblical materials in formulating a mythic account of mankind’s collective struggle for liberty in a world riven by Satanic forces of deception and bondage. A crucial aspect of Milton’s audacious project is to represent God as an epic character who argues in His own providential defense, sets out His decrees of grace and free will, and oversees the unfolding of His foreknown plan, as Adam and Eve fall, and are finally redeemed by the loving mercy of the Son. From the start, Milton’s portrayal of God in the poem drew heavy critical fire. Even Milton’s fiercest admirers had to admit that some sort of defense had to be mounted against the potential blasphemies and logical non-sequiturs of such a portrayal. Milton’s younger contemporary, the poet Andrew Marvell, noted in his dedicatory poem to Paradise Lost that although the “the argument / Held me a while misdoubting [Milton’s] intent” (lines 5–6), as he read on, he grew to like Milton’s “project, the success did fear. . . . Lest he perplexed the things he would explain, / And what was easy he should render vain” (lines 12–15).2 Perplexity aside, one way to rescue Milton from opprobrium in his presentation of the Christian God in the poem was to acknowledge the impossibility of the task Milton set himself, while praising the failure as a mark of humility. When Joseph Addison commented in Spectator 299

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315 (1 March 1712) that Milton’s majesty forsakes him “in those Parts of his Poem where the Divine Persons are introduced as speakers,” as John Leonard shows, he really meant this as a compliment. Addison goes on to remark: “One may, I think, observe that the author proceeds with a Kind of Fear and Trembling, whilst he describes the Sentiments of the Almighty. He dares not give his Imagination its full Play, but chooses to confine himself to such Thoughts as are drawn from the Books of the most Orthodox Divines, and to such expressions as may be met in with in Scripture.”3 Addison’s comment is interesting because it is one of many instances in the history of Milton criticism where a discussion about the epic’s poetic propriety inevitably slips to address Milton’s Christian orthodoxy. As Addison hints, Milton’s poetic approach to God is appropriate in its ill-matched hesitancy because it is an apt expression of a Protestant hermeneutic which shrinks from the remote, angry God of the Hebrew Bible in “Fear and Trembling.” When it comes to Milton’s God, questions of literary decorum are finally of minor consequence. This became abundantly clear when the two giants of twentieth-century literary criticism, C. S. Lewis and William Empson, addressed themselves to this problem. Lewis, a devout Christian, famously remarked: “Many of those who say they dislike Milton’s God only mean that they dislike God: infinite sovereignty, by its very nature, includes wrath also.”4 For his part, William Empson, an atheist with an axe to grind, agreed by confessing his hatred of the Christian God and rejoining that Milton should be admired for “struggling to make his God appear less wicked than the traditional Christian one.”5 As with Lewis so with Addison. Where Addison was defending Milton’s poetry, he was really defending his theology, because like most other Christian readers of the poem he could sense and worry about the potential heresies which appear to reduce the infinite majesty of God into debatable doctrine, and introduce a Socinian or Arian antitrinitarian subordination into the poem’s overall conception of deity.6 Although both are called God in the poem, the Father and the Son in Paradise Lost serve very distinct narrative and didactic functions as epic and even heroic characters, and whereas the Father is shown to be (at least by reputation) infinite, omnipotent and omniscient, Milton’s Son, created within time, is clearly not coeval with the Father. This is a problem for most orthodox Christian readers, because Milton’s God the Father speaks throughout the poem from the Hebrew Bible’s perspective of a paternal but remote God, who chastises and condemns His creatures for their sins. Milton shows God the Father to be capable not just of love, but also of devastating hate,7 and has him resort at times to petty, absurdly human petulant language, as in the notorious lines where God, reacting to his own foreknowledge about man’s trespass, cries out, “whose fault? / Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me

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Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God 301

/ All he could have” (III. 96–8). Moreover, once Milton allows the Son as a subordinate narrative person to carry the weight of the poem’s Christian moral about loving mercy in volunteering to redeem man from under the wrath of this petulant God, it leaves God the Father locked away in his anger and the sort of Hebraic legalism which calls for “rigid satisfaction, death for death” (III. 212). At this point, the temptation some might feel to call Milton’s God Hebraic or even Jewish risks playing into the anti-Semitic hands of those who would condemn Milton with Ezra Pound for his “beastly Hebraism.”8 Such an uncaring, remote and irascible God can only be “Jewish” in his apparent legalism and Hebraic patriarchal authority, and is therefore patently archaic, unchristian, and finally a literary failure (not necessarily in this order). This rather crude and quite wrong portrayal of Milton’s God nevertheless haunts the poem’s continued reception, and like most distortions, it is partly based in truth. There is no question that Milton’s God the Father is thoroughly Hebraic, if by Hebraic we mean that His monistic and legalistic representation is largely built on scriptural echoes of the Hebrew Bible and the occasional Hebraic syntactical turn of phrase running against the grain of New Testament concepts and paraphrases. Moreover, while Milton and his contemporaries would have most likely understood the claim about God’s Hebraic scriptural character, they would have been unhappy by the suggestion that this somehow makes Him “Jewish” in any meaningful theological sense. Part of the problem here arises from a confusion in terms and categories. The adjective “Hebraic” and “Jewish,” while obviously related, are quite distinct, especially within Protestant thought and practice. Tracing Jewish theological concepts in Milton’s poem, for example about the law or the workings of grace, is not the same as tracing Milton’s actual use of Hebrew words and names at key moments in the epic to lend his English a certain Hebraic-biblical gravitas. Moreover, given that Protestant culture to which Milton was heir too was steeped in Old Testament exegesis, such a distinction becomes almost impossible to draw in practice. Indeed, neither the doctrinal nor the rhetorical aspect of Milton’s Hebraism is directly related (at least not intentionally) with his Arianism, though it is tempting of course to recognize Milton’s Socinian heterodoxy as finding expression and support within what Jason Rosenblatt, for example, has discussed as Milton’s “Hebraic monism,” particularly in the middle books of Paradise Lost.9 Finally, none of the above renders Milton’s poem or his representation of God in any meaningful sense “Jewish,” neither as a term of prejudicial criticism, or as a term of praise. Milton’s Hebraism, and especially his Hebraic God, should be aligned with contemporary debates about anti and philo-Semitism in seventeenth-century England, but such a vexed enterprise depends on reading into Milton’s poem typological and emblematic

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notions of the Jews as an elect nation fallen from God, and of the Reformed Christian as the true heir to the Jewish covenant of grace. In 1655 Cromwell convened the Whitehall Conference to debate the readmission of Jews (specifically the wealthy Dutch Jewry of Amsterdam) into England. Although advocates for readmission appealed primarily to millenarian, theological, and negative legal arguments, the real reasons for this sudden rise in philo-Semitism in some English republican circles were mostly driven by political, mercantile, and economic necessity. Nevertheless, this was no doubt helped by a general atmosphere in which tolerance towards Jews was increasingly defended on historical and theological grounds, because, as Douglas Brooks points out, this was a transitional period in which “the conflation of imaginary Jews and ‘real’ Jews suddenly becomes possible.”10 Jason Rosenblatt, for example, has made a very strong case for viewing John Selden’s (1584–1654) prolific rabbinic studies as central in showing the way for many of his contemporaries, among them Milton, to rethink the Judaeo-Christian legacy as one of shared moral values, gifted to mankind in paradise before the Fall, and then after the Fall and the flood to Noah’s descendants.11 The Jewish law, as Milton himself was to demonstrate in his controversial writings on divorce, had now become for many Protestants the proper context within which to understand the Gospel message about charity, grace, or brotherly love. Even the Pauline texts, so central for the formation of Protestant sensibility, could be restored within certain readings to their original Hebraic-Hellenic mode of thought. As a large body of work on the Hebraic origins and character of the Pauline epistles has already shown, the sort of “Hebraic monism” Rosenblatt for example argues for in Milton’s prelapsarian vision of human society in Paradise Lost is in fact thoroughly in line with New Pauline theology, which seeks to read the Reformation Paul in his original Hebraic-Hellenic context, stripped of centuries of Augustinian and Neo-Platonic dualist commentary.12 These ideas did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Selden may have been unique in the extent and sympathy of his rabbinic studies, but this was made possible to begin with by a long-established patristic and finally Protestant tradition of scriptural commentary that necessarily synthesized Hellenic and Hebraic ideas. Just as Philo Judaeus was indispensable to the early Greek fathers in the formation of Christian-Platonic theism, so were the Rabbis, and especially Maimonides (as well as several leading medieval Muslim philosophers), indispensable for Aquinas and other Christian scholastics in thinking about the Divine Names and attributes, as well as to many later Christian humanist scholars when thinking about more philologically advanced hermeneutical practices.13 As Jeffrey Shoulson has shown in his in-depth analysis of the many continuities within Hellenic-Hebraic culture, it is at times impos-



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sible to know when a given theological idea is Christian, Hellenic or Jewish.14 Milton was heir to a Reformed culture that relied heavily on Old Testament exegesis and rabbinical lore in establishing its internal system of typological hermeneutics.15 He was a Hebraist not by design, therefore, but by default, and given the culture in which he was educated and interacted with all his life, he could scarcely have avoided assimilating certain Hebraic concepts to some degree even if he wanted to. What is remarkable, however, is the extent to which Milton drew on the Hebraism inherent in Protestant culture to formulate his own critique of that culture. To quote Shoulson, there is an “uncanny recapitulation” of the rabbis’ “radical reformulation of post biblical Judaism . . . in Milton’s innovative refashioning of post-Reformation Christianity.”16 What we today construe as Hebraic in Milton’s patterns of thought and language is therefore not opposed to Christianity as Milton understood it, but thoroughly implicated in its Reformed belief system, which Milton sought to reorder and shape anew. Milton’s angry God in this respect is no exception. If God is angry, it is because fallen man has merited such anger. As Luther explains in many of his sermons, the God portrayed in the Hebrew Bible under the old dispensation of the Abrahamic covenant, naked of his Word, utterly abhors the sins of man. Only through the reliable promise of salvation given to man freely through the saving power of the Word made flesh can Christians find relief from sin in God’s grace. In his commentary on Psalm 51:1, for example, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness,” Luther writes:

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The people of Israel did not have a God who was viewed “absolutely,” to use the expression, the way the inexperienced monks rise into heaven with their speculations and think about God as He is in himself. From this absolute God everyone should flee who does not want to perish, because human nature and the absolute God . . . are the bitterest enemies. . . . We must take hold of this God, not naked but clothed and revealed in His Word; otherwise certain despair will crush us.17

For Luther, revelation moves historically from the words of the law to the words of the Gospel. If the New Testament reveals the God who saves, then the God who commands and condemns is to be found in the Hebrew Law, broadly understood not as a set of rules, but as a state of mind. Luther’s repeated references in his teachings to the “law” that binds and terrifies, especially in his celebrated commentary on Galatians from 1535, has often been misread under a further misreading of Paul to suggest somehow that Luther viewed the “law” with Paul as a Jewish anachronism. But as Stephen Westerholm argues persuasively in Luther’s defense, when Luther thinks of the law as binding for Christians, he is thinking neither of the Decalogue

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nor of natural law, but of Scripture, which defines “not what we can do, but what we ought to do” within the perpetual spiritual movement between the commandments of the Old Testament and the promises of the New.18 For Luther, the movement between the two covenants along the Pauline axis of the Hebrew letter and the Christian spirit does not discard one for the other, but re-inscribes the latter within the former in the unfolding of what Luther elsewhere calls the “grammar of grace” or “grammar of salvation.”19 While the Jew inevitably becomes in this scheme a prototypical warning for the backsliding Christian, who always risks falling from God’s grace back into the bondage of the letter, it is the in-spirted letter, first recorded in Hebrew Scripture and then transformed under the promise of grace, that itself saves. Milton, though hardly a Lutheran, very much conceived of God within this broadly Protestant tradition, which sought to differentiate between the hidden Hebraic God of the Old Testament, and God as He is revealed through the mediatory agency of Christ, the Word made flesh. The two become mutually codependent aspects of deity that are central to the Protestant religious experience, and are central to Milton’s thinking about God as well, notwithstanding his fundamental quarrel with Luther and Calvin on the crucial matter of free will. Milton drew special inspiration from the central Lutheran idea that an intuitive natural law was given to mankind in its state of prelapsarian perfection, but which man then forfeited through sin. After the Fall, sinful man became bondsman to the law, which only the saving power of Christ can abrogate and redeem. The Hebrew Bible serves in this scheme to highlight for the Christian believer the scope and context of human sinfulness, whereas the Gospel offers the Pauline corrective of realizing personal redemption through an interiorizing of the Hebraic covenant as centered on the human will, raised from its infirmity by the grace of God. On this point, of course, Milton departed from the orthodox Augustinians in the Reformed tradition. In line with the Dutch Arminians, Milton strongly believed in the centrality of God’s decree of free will, exercised rationally as an expression of mankind’s divinely given conscience, both in holding humanity to account for its primal trespass, and as offering all men and women a renewed choice after the Fall in newfound obedience and repentance. Or as Milton’s God says in Paradise Lost, speaking of both the fallen angels and man, “Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere / Of true allegiance, constant faith and love?” (III. 102–4).20 Throughout the 1650s, before beginning work on Paradise Lost, Milton labored on a dense systematic theological treatise in Latin, De Doctrina Christiana, in which he set out many of his doctrinal beliefs. Following the accepted formula for such treatises, Milton arranges his theological discussion in a descending topical order, from metaphysical reflections about divine ontology

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Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God 305

and epistemology, down to discussions about man’s relationship with God, to end finally with discussions about Church governance and civil affairs. The treatise is in parts orthodox, but quite heretical in others, especially in its discussion of creation as being ex-Deo rather than ex-nihilo, in its mortalist anthropology, and in its strident rejection of the Trinity as a non-biblical, scholastic innovation. Milton opens the treatise, as is the norm, with a chapter on God and divine ontology. However, Milton’s approach to this conventional topic is highly unusual. Whereas most Protestant systematic theologians rest with Calvin in claiming axiomatically that the knowledge of God (cognitio Dei in Calvin’s Latin) necessarily depends on, and flows from, knowledge of the self, Milton goes out of his way to consider first the possibility and consequences of unbelief. This is because, unlike Calvin, Milton’s entire theological project rests on the central idea that man has a duty to exercise his God-given conscience, or “right reason” (recta ratio), in either rightly recognizing the existence of God as the prime cause of being, or facing the consequences of altogether betraying that choice in rejecting God and therefore denying one’s own imputed divinity. This is the cornerstone of Milton’s scriptural understanding of ethics, where, put simply, “Unless God existed, there would be no distinction between right and wrong.”21 Moreover, unless man exercises his God-given free will “in love and worship of God, and likewise in their own salvation . . . the love we offer to God is worth absolutely nothing.”22 The implications of this view on Milton’s hermeneutical practices throughout the treatise, and in Paradise Lost especially, are far-reaching and profound. As Michael Lieb explains in his extensive analysis of these implications, “Milton creates a world in which one may never rest content with the simple assertion of doctrinal principles. Rather, one must contend with proof-texts, interpret them, and understand what they disclose on their own terms.”23 Milton’s dynamic principles of ethical exegesis draw then on a rich Protestant hermeneutical tradition, where, to quote William Perkins (1558– 1602), Elizabethan England’s premier Calvinist theologian, “the supreme and absolute meane of interpretation, is the Scripture itself.”24 At the same time, however, Milton’s quasi-rabbinical insistence on the active agency and moral accountability of the Christian reader, exercising his God-given rationality rather than merely relying on an ill-defined, super-imposed act of irresistible grace, sets him apart from the Calvinist-Protestant mainstream. This dynamic approach directly informs the ways in which Milton conceives of God in the De Doctrina manuscript, and later adapts these conceptions into poetic practice in Paradise Lost. If Milton’s God in the poem comes across at times as shockingly human in his pseudo-biblical emotional interventions, then the burden of interpretation is on the reader, who has to negotiate his or her own emotional responses to what they understand or expect God to be.25

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Milton upholds in De Doctrina the orthodox view that what we know of the hidden God of the Hebrew Bible is strictly limited to what God has revealed of Himself in an accommodated manner through the sacred texts, since “God, as he really is, far outstrips human thought, let alone perception.”26 However, while Milton goes on to reject the use of anthropomorphism and anthropopathy in any extrabiblical, speculative discussion about God, he does concede that “as to what is proper or improper for God, let us not demand a weightier authority than God himself.”27 The humanness, or even lowly worldliness, of accommodated scriptural language is a commonplace in Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings on the authority of the Bible, but Milton, who believes in the creative agency of informed rational readers, takes this a step further. While he rejects any philosophical speculation about God that resorts to anthropomorphic or anthropopathetic reductions of God’s unknowable majesty, he does condone any literary expression of that majesty which accords with Scripture, and in particular the Hebrew Bible: “It is therefore better to contemplate God and mentally imagine him . . . as Scripture does, that is, the way he offers himself for contemplation; and we should consider that he would have said of himself, or wanted written down, nothing that he did not want us to ponder about him.”28 Milton’s Latin phrase, “animo concipere,” translated above as “mentally imagine him,” might be rendered more literally as “to conceive of him in our minds.” Milton here is not only thinking about how we conceive of God when we read the Bible, but how our mental contemplation of His being can be carried over creatively into other spheres of worship which might rely on anthropopathy, not as a belittling figure of reduction, but as a rational expression of faith grounded in Scripture. To support this claim, Milton goes on to cite a number of instances in the Hebrew Bible where God is shown displaying human-like emotions of anger or regret, and then rejoins that such use of anthropopathy, being sanctioned by God himself, is not inappropriate, because “emotions in a good man are good, and equal to virtues; in God they are holy.”29 In short, if Milton’s God in Paradise Lost feelingly gives voice to his deep anger and disappointment at man’s betrayal of his “umpire conscience” (III. 195) in disobeying the sole command before the Fall, such outbursts are biblically appropriate, and serve an important didactic and ethical function within the poem’s wider argument about liberty and moral accountability. It is noteworthy that Milton embeds his claims about anthropopathy in De Doctrina within a network of biblical proof-texts, most of them Hebraic, which precisely depend on the reader’s ability to follow Milton’s interpretative reasoning as part of an exercise in the reader’s, not Milton’s, “right reason.” It is within these intellectual contours that Milton’s literary treatment of the divine persons in Paradise Lost becomes theologically intelligible, if not

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Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God 307

aesthetically defensible. After opening Book III of the epic with a famous and moving invocation to holy light, which soon reverts into an autobiographical reflection on the poet’s blindness, Milton literally presumes to “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (III. 54–5) by having his reader imagine “the almighty Father from above. . . . High throned above all height” (III. 56–8), discoursing with the Son about free will, divine justice, and the promise of saving grace for those able and willing to repent. This imaginative exercise is fraught with difficulty, but it largely depends on the reader’s ability to recognize the scriptural context within which the unfolding of the divine plan takes place in a language which is at once remotely biblical, but also direct and profoundly accommodated; Milton’s God after all speaks English, not Hebrew. As I have argued elsewhere, Milton goes out of his way in these passages to invest what God says in plain declarative English with the ineffable power of God’s hiddenness. He does so by framing the divine speeches with traditional apophatic imagery, suggesting something of the extraordinary accommodation to fallen human capacity taking place within the aesthetic experience of reading and making sense of the poem.30 The God who calls man “ingrate,” and defensively objects, “they themselves decreed / Their own revolt, not I” (III. 116–7), is the same God whom the angels next hail in the theophonic terms of Exodus 24:16 as, “Immutable, immortal, infinite, / Eternal king; thee author of all being. . . . Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitst / Throned inaccessible” (III. 373–7). In other words, Milton creates, or represents rather, two distinct divine presences in his portrayal of Heaven. There is the God through whose voice Milton ventriloquizes his own personal doctrinal beliefs and ideas, grounded in his reading of Scripture, and then there is the hidden Hebraic God of biblical revelation, awful, majestic and aloof, whose mere evoked presence in traditional imagery forces the reader to confront their own fallen remoteness from the Creator, and their utter dependence on the inspired narrator’s mediatory function in guiding them through a scriptural understanding of divine providence. The problem for most orthodox Christian readers of the poem, therefore, is a double one. Not only are they asked to accept a literary representation of God the Father, where what He says is at once both literal and somehow mysterious, but they are also expected to relate what God says to the Son’s searching questions about mercy as somehow retaining the dialogic tension between them. The Father in Milton’s poem begets the Son within a specific moment in uncreated time (“This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son” [V. 603–4]), and notwithstanding the inevitable paradox this involves, it does leave Milton’s poem not just with two distinct divine persons, but with two distinct divine epic characters. The Heavenly Council does not give the impression that God is talking to Himself, but rather that the Father, alone

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in his pre-causal foreknowledge, is in literal dialogue with His Son, whom He created to act as an expression and the instrument of His will within creation. For orthodox Christians, the mystery of God ultimately manifests in His persons. Since antiquity, the mysteries of the Trinity, and the relation of its persons to one another, served both to inspire faith-driven rational contemplation of God, as well as to frustrate it. At the outset of his desperately rational treatise on the Trinity, Saint Augustine famously warns those “who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason,” not to quibble with the rational non-sequiturs of his reflections on the Trinity, as these would be nothing short of “sophistries.”31 In so far as the Trinity, as a theological concept, notoriously resists rational explication, its reduction into narrative form and causality, where two of its persons interact with one another as narrative characters, drains the mystery of its agnostic power. One more aspect, therefore, in which Milton’s God the Father suddenly becomes remarkably Hebraic, or even Jewish, from a theological view point is that he is thoroughly monistic in his paternal singularity. For Milton, however, restoring God to His Hebraic monistic integrity was a way to save Him for, not from, what he believed was a pristine form of Reformed Christianity. Milton arrives at this conception of God through a strict adherence to an imaginative model of Scripture, rigorously and rationally interpreted without “sophistries,” expressing what he believed to be the one true sense of God’s Word. Moreover, as with the discussion of man’s possible and permissible knowledge of God, the emerging antitrinitarianism of Milton’s thought, explicit in De Doctrina, implicit in Paradise Lost, ultimately extends not just from his desire to confront his readers with complex ethical choices of interpretation, but chiefly from his didactic need to present his readers with a model act of unconstrained, redemptive free will. The Son for Milton, although as yet not incarnated, has to be different from God, because he already embodies potential human nature in a state of perfection. In De Doctrina, Milton explicitly endorses the Socinian position on the persons of the Trinity by appearing to cling, as all Protestants must, to the words of Scripture as the only “yardstick of faith.”32 Given that there is indeed very slim scriptural support for the belief in a Trinity of divine persons who are one, Milton finds it fairly easy to conclude, unequivocally, that the Son, being generated as a matter of external efficacy from the Father, is therefore distinct from, and subordinate, to the Father. While the Son pre-exists creation, and is the logos made flesh through which God creates all things, he is nevertheless neither coeval nor co-essential with the Father. Fending off centuries of patristic quibbles about the essence of the Son’s godhead, Milton builds his antitrinitarian polemic through a Pauline commentary on Psalm



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2:6–7: “Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” This verse, as Milton well knows, features centrally in a number of the Pauline Epistles which speak figuratively of Christ’s divinity, especially in Acts 13:32–3, Romans 1:4 and Colossians 1:18, all of which Milton cites. The act of begetting, as Paul shows, is not to be understood literally, but figuratively as one of adoption, elevation or exultation. However, just as the reader is expecting this argument to yield the obvious conclusion that the Son is therefore only figuratively subordinate to the Father, Milton typically turns this argument on its head and concludes that since the verb “beget” (gigno) is not to be understood literally, neither is it to be understood essentially. God does not generate the Son out of natural necessity, but as a free act of divine will, endowing the Son with divine nature. In other words, any talk of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as One co-essential God is necessarily figurative. If God and the Son are one, they are one only by name and imputed association, never essentially and substantively: “One and another cannot be of one essence; God is one being, not two; one essence belongs to one being, and so does one subsistence, which is nothing else than substantial essence.”33 These ideas are not unique of course, and have a long history within the heretical margins of the Church’s history. Milton is here relying heavily on the Racovian Catechism of 1605 (a Latin version of which was sent to England in 1614),34 but these views were also routinely fed by rabbinic and Islamic theological and philosophical writings, which Christian antitrintiarians often drew on for support. Especially remarkable in Milton’s case is how close he comes to echo Maimonides, who precisely uses the argument against the misapplication of homonyms in the biblical texts to decry against the absurdities of the Christian Trinity: [. . .] you must understand that God has no essential attribute in any form or in any sense whatever, and that the rejection of corporeality implies the rejection of essential attributes. Those who believe that God is One, and that He has many attributes, declare unity with their lips, and assume plurality in their thoughts. This is like the doctrines of the Christians, who say that He is one and He is three, and the three are one.35

Although there is no evidence to suggest that Milton was drawing directly on Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed in De Doctrina (though he may well have read Maimonides in Latin), the echo is sufficiently strong to suggest how later Christian readers could sense the Hebraic rationality behind Milton’s Socinian theology and recoil from it. Especially relevant to Milton is Maimonides’s logical insistence that any figurative corporeal discussion of God risks being understood literally, thereby assigning to the One God

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multiple essential attributes. For Milton this important Aristotelian qualification, resting on Aristotle’s definition of God as Prime Mover in Book XII of the Metaphysics, offered an opportunity: The Son, as an extension of God’s will within time, represents, and later literally embodies, God’s immanence within the created order. If God, as Aristotle argues, is pure being, or entelecheia, as well as the efficient and primary cause of all things that proceed from him, then the Son, as God’s instrument within time, is necessarily a pure act of God, embodying the potentiality of all things and the essential character of rational choice. This last point bears directly on Milton’s poetic and narrative strategy in Paradise Lost. In wishing to safeguard the monist integrity of God by setting Him apart from the Son within a distinct field of Hebraic-scriptural images, Milton not only invites a literal understanding of the Son as a subordinate character who is not coeval with God, but more crucially invites the reader to reflect on what the Son says in his own distinct epistemic field of reference. In other words, Milton wants the Son’s freely chosen decision to save humanity from the wrath of the all-foreknowing father to stand out as an emblematic model for fallen man’s exercise of right reason in matters pertaining to salvation. Milton sets before his readers, on one side, the Hebraic tonality and idiom of God’s Old Testament majestic presence, demanding satisfaction for humanity’s trespass, and on the other side the Son’s comforting words of mercy, steeped in the New Testament’s language of redemption. After the Father declaims ominously that man “with his whole posterity must die, / Die he or justice must; unless for him / Some other able, and as willing, pay / The rigid satisfaction, death for death” (III. 209–11), then Son replies: Behold me then, me for him, life for life, I offer, on me let thine anger fall; Account me man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee Freely put off, and for him lastly die Well pleased, on me let Death wreak his rage; Under his gloomy power I shall not long Lie vanquished; thou hast given me to possess Life in myself for ever, by thee I live . . . Then with the multitude of my redeemed Shall enter heaven long absent, and return, Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud Of anger shall remain, but peace assured, And reconcilement; wrath shall be no more Thenceforth, but in thy presence joy entire. (III. 236–44, 260–5)

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Echoes of the Pauline Epistles come thick and fast in the Son’s declared choice to offer himself to atone for the sins of man. This has the curious effect of the Son effectively citing, in first person, the words whose flesh he will become, as it were, after the Incarnation, testifying to his three-fold mediatory role as prophet, priest and king. The entire sequence, as Alastair Fowler points out, rests on Anselm’s theology of “satisfaction,” whereby Christ fulfills the law by offering to atone for man’s culpability and ransom humanity from bondage.36 But, again, the resulting antitrinitarian subordination of the sequence, where the Son movingly addresses his Father in second person, as if pleading for His foreknown approval, precisely suggests it is only after the Son shall return at the end of time to Heaven with “my redeemed” that God’s Hebraic wrath under the law shall abate. It is the Son who invests in Milton’s poem the Jewish idea of the atonement, as one of propitious sacrifice under the law, with the Reformed notion of an act of faith that supersedes and fulfills the law. As a consequence, Milton’s God the Father remains the God of the Hebrew Patriarchs who demands strict obedience, but whose inscrutable commands incite from His creatures works of faith that can only ever be fulfilled literally, and never metaphorically. Milton’s Pauline outlook, however, seeks to convert the literalism of the Abrahamic covenant into a metaphor of grace, for which the Son becomes both the tenor and the vehicle. It is within this fertile scope for metaphor that Milton’s poetic vision comes to life. The sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22:1–18 has always served as a type for the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ. However, in having the Son quote and revise Exodus 21:23 (“And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life”), in offering “life for life,” not as punishment, but as a redeeming act that will finally destroy death itself, Milton effectively shows how the Son’s choice serves to redeem the Father’s Hebraic language from the rigor of the lex talionis. This may leave Milton’s God the Father trapped in Hebraic legalism, but the resulting unified vision of deity which emerges from the poem as a whole is resoundingly and consistently Pauline in its exploration of the terms of bondage and liberty under which humanity must labor to finally redeem itself. Milton’s God is unified not essentially, therefore, but ethically, His monism finding expression in the reconcilement of hierarchies and opposites within a single divine and rational will working within time and human history. Milton’s God may be Hebraic by partial theological design, therefore, in his ethical monism and occasional legalism, but that in itself does not say very much, either about Milton’s actual knowledge and use of Hebraic sources in Paradise Lost, or about Milton’s feelings about the Jews as a people more generally. These last two aspects of the Hebraic question in seventeenthcentury England, however, are intimately related, and help clarify much about

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Milton’s broader attitude to the latent Hebraism within Protestant culture and theological discourse, which inevitably shaped his great epic as well. Despite Milton’s deep regard for, and dependence on, Selden’s rabbinical scholarship, Milton had none of Selden’s reconciliatory, aloof temper.37 Where Selden is inclusive in his aloof scholarly belief in the shared ethical outlook of Jews, Christians, and even Muslims, Milton seeks to exclude and condemn all idolaters—from Jews and Muslims, to papists and royalists—who represent in his view a fundamental betrayal of right reason. The Jews for Milton especially were a fallen people because they were trapped, as he saw it, in perpetual error. In the opening of De Doctrina, Milton repeats a familiar anti-Semitic Christian refrain, which argues that the only reason the Jews have persevered “through so many centuries of changing fortunes,” was not only “to pay the penalty for their sins but, much more, to provide all over the world a living and lasting witness to God and the truth of the scriptures.”38 Interestingly, someone like Selden would not have disagreed, except of course that he would have understood the issue of bearing “witness” (testamonium) differently. Where for Selden this meant that the Jews were the guardians of sacred law and ancient moral wisdom, for Milton their very existence as outcasts from Christ testified not only to what they originally gained under the Old Testament, but chiefly to what they had lost in the advent of the New. At the root of this latent anti-Semitism was an attempt to differentiate between the story of ancient Israel as a type for the story of Protestant England on the one hand, and the story of the Jews as a people fallen from God on the other. Where the providential story of the biblical Israelites was salutary, the historical story of the Jewish people’s diaspora was a cautionary tale for England’s backsliding nation.39 Puzzlingly, Milton kept silent on the question of the Jews’ readmission into England in 1655. Perhaps he had more to lose than to gain by going against Cromwell’s philo-Semitic political and economic imperatives. Whatever his thoughts on this vexed question, however, it is highly unlikely that Milton felt any need to include the Jews in England’s Christian Reformed republic, or that he believed their wished-for conversion was somehow immanent. If Milton’s theological, political and poetic imagination was grounded in Hebraic patterns of thought, these were widely diffused and set to work within a thoroughly Protestant outlook. Even the antitrinitarianism Milton came to adopt later in life was finally a reflection of his Protestant commitment to a rational interpretation of Scripture. James Dunn, one of the most cited exponents of the New Pauline theology in the twentieth century, has repeatedly made the point that Judaism, rightly understood, preaches “good Protestant doctrine: that grace is always prior; that human effort is ever the response to divine initiative; that good works are the fruit and not the root of salvation.”40 Milton may not have thought of Jews as good Protestants, but



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he strongly believed they offered a type whereby righteous Protestants could see themselves as good Jews, the bearers of a “better covenant” of grace. As the Archangel Michael explains to fallen Adam towards the end of the epic, So law appears imperfect, and but given With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better covenant, disciplined From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit, From imposition of strict laws, to free Acceptance of large grace, from servile fear To filial, works of law to works of faith. (XII. 300–6)

In narrative terms, God is finally a secondary character in Milton’s great epic. The poem’s main concern is with the human tragedy of loss of Paradise which led to what Milton believed was a “world of woe, / Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery” (IX. 11–2), in which humanity has struggled through ever since in “servile fear.” The ultimate function of Milton’s Hebraic God is to set out the scriptural terms through which to weigh the choice laid before Adam and Eve in the garden under the law, subsequently transformed into a law of grace, as humanity continues to struggle for inward and outward liberty in the fallen world, hoping to reclaim one day “A paradise within thee, happier far” (XII. 587).

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NOTES 1. All references to Paradise Lost are to Alastair Fowler, ed., Milton: Paradise Lost, 2nd edition (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1998). 2.  Poem reproduced in Fowler, Paradise Lost, 53–54. 3.  Quoted and discussed in John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 482. 4.  C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 126. 5. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 11. See also the introduction to Paradise Lost by Alison G. Moe and Thomas H. Luxon in Dartmouth College’s The Milton Reading Room (www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/ readin_room/). 6. See John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why it Matters,” in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–91. 7.  For the theological importance of divine hate in Milton’s poem, and its intellectual provenance, see Michael Lieb, ‘“Hate in Heav’n’: Milton and the Odium Dei,” ELH 53.3 (1986): 519–39. 8.  Ezra Pound, Make it New (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 109.

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9.  Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 71–137. 10.  Douglas A. Brooks, “Milton and the Jews: ‘A Project never so seasonable, and necessary, as now!,’” in Douglas A. Brooks, ed., Milton and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–12, 6. 11.  Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 12.  For the New Paul see the pioneering work of E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), and Sanders, Paul, the Law and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); see too James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). See however note 18 below. 13.  For the extensive syncretism informing the early humanist biblical enterprise see Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 14.  Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, & Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 15.  See Golda Werman, Milton and Midrash (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995). 16. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, 5. 17.  Martin Luther, Collected Works, 55 vols., eds. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Saint Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1958–67), vol. 12, 312. 18.  Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 29. It is important to note that among the different “misreadings” of the “Lutheran” Paul, Westerholm includes many of the New Pauline perspectives. This does not alter the fact, however, that Milton may well have responded to the underlying Hebraic monism of Paul in ways which Luther did not, and which anticipated in some respects later modern Pauline theologians who then attempted to attribute such Hebraism to Luther as well. 19.  See for example Luther’s Commentary on Galatians 3:10, “When you read in Scripture . . . about the patriarchs, prophets, and kings that they worked righteousness, raised the dead, conquered kingdoms etc., you should remember that there and similar statements are to be explained according to a new and theological grammar. . . . For reason should be first illumined by faith before it works.” See Luther, Works, vol. 24, 267–8. 20.  For an informed account of Milton’s theology of free will and his Arminian outlook on the Fall see Dennis R. Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 21.  The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume VIII: De Doctrina Christiana, Part 1, ed. and trans. John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25–27. All references to Milton’s De Doctrina are to this edition. 22.  Ibid., 97–9. 23.  Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 69.

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24.  William Perkins, The Works of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ . . . William Perkins, 3 vols. (London, 1626–35), vol. 2, 651. 25.  The most influential account of the complex interpretative dilemmas elicited by Milton’s poem remains that of Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Palgrave, 1997), especially pages 208–40. 26.  De Doctrina, Part 1, 27. 27.  Ibid., 29. 28. Ibid. 29.  Ibid., 31. 30.  See Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 212–23. 31.  Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. by Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), 65. 32.  De Doctrina, Part 1, 127. 33.  Ibid., 137. 34.  An English version of the Catechism was published in Amsterdam in 1652, and was apparently licensed by Milton. See Gordon Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 98–101. For some of the wider political implications of Milton’s unrepentant antitrinitarianism see Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and Antitrinitarianism,” in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171–85. 35.  Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. by M. Friedlander (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 67. 36.  See Fowler, Paradise Lost, 180. 37. See Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi, 88–90. Ironically, as Rosenblatt argues, Milton’s famous catalogue of Semitic idols and devils in Book I of Paradise Lost is much closer to Maimonides in its utter “negation of surrounding cultures,” than it is to its primary source in Selden’s inclusive and detached De Diis (88). 38.  De Doctrina, Part 1, 27. 39.  See the essays by Achsah Guibbory, Linda Tredennick and Rachel Trubowitz in Brooks, Milton and the Jews. 40.  James D. G. Dunn, “The Justice of God: A Renewed Perspective on Justification by Faith,” Journal of Theological Studies 43 (1992): 1–22, 8. See also Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul, 183–4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine, Saint. The Trinity. Trans. Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press, 1991. Bentley, Jerry H. Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Brooks, Douglas A., ed. Milton and the Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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Campbell, Gordon, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie. Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Danielson, Dennis R. Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Dunn, James D. G. “The Justice of God: A Renewed Perspective on Justification by Faith.” Journal of Theological Studies 43 (1992): 1–22. ———. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Dzelzainis, Martin. “Milton and Antitrinitarianism.” In Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Milton and Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 171–85. Empson, William. Milton’s God. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 2nd edn. 1967. London: Palgrave, 1997. Leonard, John. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667– 1970. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Lieb, Michael. “‘Hate in Heav’n’: Milton and the Odium Dei.” ELH 53.3 (1986): 519–39. ———. Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Luther, Martin. Collected Works. 55 vols. General eds. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann. Various translators. Saint Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1958–67. Luxon Thomas H., and Alison G. Moe, eds. The Milton Reading Room. www.dart mouth.edu/~milton/readin_room/. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide for the Perplexed. Trans. M. Friedlander. 2nd edn. New York: Dover Publications, 1956. Milton, John. Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1998. ———. The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume VIII: De Doctrina Christiana, 2 Parts. Ed and trans. John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Perkins, William. The Works of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ . . . William Perkins, 3 vols. London, 1626–35. Poole, William. Milton and the Idea of the Fall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pound, Ezra. Make it New. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. Reisner, Noam. Milton and the Ineffable. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Rosenblatt, Jason P. Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. Torah and Law in Paradise Lost. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Rumrich, John P. “Milton’s Arianism: Why it Matters.” In Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds. Milton and Heresy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 75–91.



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Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977. ———. Paul, the Law and the Jewish People. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983. Shoulson, Jeffrey. Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, & Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Werman, Golda. Milton and Midrash. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Westerholm, Stephen. Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.

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Chapter Eighteen

Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d ‫יוסל ראקאווער רעדט צו גאט‬ Elissa J. Sampson

MAKING MEMORY MATTER

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In 2007, Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d premiered in New York as a new Yiddish play based on a story about a Chasidic Warsaw ghetto fighter.1 The original story begins, in English translation: “In one of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, preserved in a little bottle and concealed amongst heaps of charred stone and human bones, the following testament was found, written in the last hours of the ghetto by a Jew named Yosl Rakover.”2 A powerful fictional piece, the story had been submitted and then printed in the Israeli Yiddish journal Di Goldene Keyt in 1954 without attribution to its author Zvi Kolitz. Its subsequent international post-war reception was as putatively authentic posthumous

Photo courtesy of the author.

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eyewitness testimony.3 The tale ends with its protagonist invoking a traditional religious understanding of hester panim—the prior withdrawal or concealment of God’s face from humans—to explain heavenly silence. Yet even as a fictional character Yosl Rakover’s response serves to both undermine and reinforce belief through a dialogue in extremis. Here, an affirmation of God’s withdrawal from human affairs gets coupled with an affirmation of belief so as to give its improbable hero Yosl the right to speak to God about questions of divine justice, human suffering, and the pervasiveness of evil. Especially in its current dramatic form—written, acted, and produced by Dovid Mandelbaum, artistic director of the adventurous New Yiddish Rep troupe—the Yiddish “Yosl” paradoxically serves as a potential marker of the continuity of Jewish life amidst the brutal rupture of tradition. The playwright, who is an atheist, ideally wanted religious, Yiddish-speaking audiences to engage with the play, particularly when staged in synagogue venues for Jewish commemorative contexts such as Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and Tisha B’Av (a day of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temples). God’s relation to his people and to human evil thus remains at the center of an earlier fictional Holocaust story that refuses to die. If we ask what makes its recapitulation as a Yiddish play possible today, we first need to account for the story’s earlier reception, in which Yosl Rakover’s dialogue with God was translated, catapulted to the attention of worldwide audiences, and included in anthologies of Holocaust stories. A reprise of the basic storyline shared in its innumerable translated versions seems to be in order. “Yosl” is not, as one might imagine, a retracing of the biblical story of Job. The start of Job’s woes can be traced to a bet between God and Satan that leads to Job’s initial acceptance of undeserved, unnatural calamity. After first accepting that burden, Job, when further tormented, eventually reaches his wits’ end and then points to God as the cause of his undeserved suffering: “Know now that God hath subverted my cause, and hath compassed me with His net. Behold, I cry out: ‘Violence!’ but I am not heard; I cry aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:6–7). Although brought to see the folly of judging God and eventually rewarded for repenting of that hubris, Job in effect suffers from a profound crisis of belief amidst grievous affliction. In our tale, Yosl is a prosperous, pious, happily married Gerer Chasid whose world falls apart due to human agency. We read Yosl’s depiction of watching his six children die en route to the Warsaw Ghetto and in the Ghetto itself. His journal chronicles his thoughts when he reaches his end in the uprising of 1943 by choosing a martyr’s death while fighting for a Ghetto resistance that is about to be extinguished. Yosl, unlike Job, understands his suffering as a Jew as not impinging on his belief in God precisely



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because that suffering is caused by humans. God’s earlier withdrawal from the human world in hiding a divine countenance—understood to have happened already in biblical times—means that there is no Divine intervention to save humans from other humans. By extension, there is no protection for God’s people from extermination by human agency. In short we have a different, if related, problem. So what is it about Yosl’s suffering that specifically entitles him to talk with God? Yosl invokes Job’s initial acceptance of God’s judgment when he states: “Now my hour has come, and like Job I can say of myself—naked shall I return unto the earth, naked as the day I was born.”4 Indeed, Job’s initial response was:

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naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither; God gave, and God hath taken away; blessed be the name of God. For all this Job sinned not, nor ascribed aught unseemly to God. (Job 1:21–22)

The implied contrast is obvious since accompanying this is Yosl’s unswerving protestation of a continuing belief that will not be shaken: “Here then, are my last words to You, my angry God: None of this will avail You in the least! You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to make me cease to believe in You.”5 Yosl turns back the comparison with Job, rejecting the notion that sin or punishment is involved: “I do not say, like Job that God should lay His finger on my sins so that I may know how I have earned this. . . . ”6 For Yosl is unlike Job in averring that when humans seek to exterminate other humans “it is no longer a question of [divine] punishment for sins and transgressions.”7 The character’s appeal stems from his shame at being human as much as his unshakable faith in God. Its affect, in the words of the playwright, is “cathartic” and not just on its audience. As Dovid Mandelbaum said in an interview with me, “I’ll quote you that line: ‘what I felt, more than envy was shame, that I wasn’t a dog, but a man.’ Often when I rehearse and when I’m on stage as well, I break down at that point and cry; it expresses the universality of the existential dilemma.”8 For author, playwright, and audience, Yosl Rakover’s precious legacy of Jewish “values” shifts eyewitness testimony into a conversation about traditional moral beliefs. Neither meek nor complaining in his impending choice of Kiddush HaShem (a martyr’s death), Yosl Rakover’s account of continuing devotion and belief explicitly asserts that his harrowing experiences have earned him a right to talk with God, if not to receive a response. In moving across so many boundaries, this story of steadfast tested belief and attendant refusal of disbelief had been welcomed by a widening circle of readers, not only Jewish. Its reception indicates that the story can be reassuring to the

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reader yearning to believe that there indeed was a Chasidic fighter whose faith persisted at the Warsaw Ghetto’s end. Or, to the reader regarding it as an insightful fictional vehicle that conveys larger truths.

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A STORY OF A STORY This paper then is an engagement with Yosl Rakover Speaks to God, a 1946 Yiddish publication whose post-life prior to its appearance as a newly created Yiddish play includes a religious and philosophical commentary by Emmanuel Lévinas9 from 1963, republished as part of the story’s more recent emergence in an edited Pantheon edition created by German journalist Paul Badde in 1999. In this story of a story, the story itself and the themes it touches upon grow along with its reach after the War. The Rakover story has been read and argued about in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French, English, Danish, Japanese and many other languages, a tribute to its staying power as well as the pervasiveness of its post-war distribution and translations. Although in theory by 1955 historian Michel (Micha) Borwicz, writing in a Yiddish journal, had established that the account was fictional,10 nonetheless, an author was clearly an unaccepted presence in a story that had already taken on its own life. If the very appearance of an author undermined the story as testimonial, this long-lived, ongoing controversy as to authorship implies that Zvi Kolitz’s very existence was not permitted to contravene the story’s truth claim that its protagonist had sufficient piety to permit arguing with God. As its shifting title indicates, it is problematic to find a definitive text given the story’s peregrinations. Like the proverbial claim made in advertisements for the Yiddish theater production of King Lear, over the years Yosl Rakover has been “translated and improved” as translations and adaptations moved from language to language. If authorial intent cannot fully ground understandings of any text’s reception, how much more so where an author’s existence was typically denied? Lévinas stepped into this earlier breach when the story was not yet properly identified with an author. In a 1955 radio broadcast and 1963 article, Lévinas identified the Yosl Rakover story as anonymous fiction, but opined that the story was exceptional in its ability to expound a truly Jewish understanding of belief in God in response to the Holocaust, a topic to which we will return.11 If anything, the story’s continued resonance as a Jewish theodicy (or far better said, anti-theodicy since it does not look to justify God’s existence) permits arguments about the “truth” of its first person testimony claims to be laid aside so that it can be viewed as an authentic fictional response.

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Arguably Yosl Rakover Speaks to God belongs to the small genre of Yiddish Holocaust testimonial literature written for a Jewish audience right after the War that was eventually adopted into a larger Holocaust canon. I argue here that the ability of this story of an unknown fictional Chasid to remain alive and literally in play demonstrates how a redemptive commemoration of mass tragedy as consonant with deep belief can foster a dissemination that “travels” across languages, countries, and artistic forms. I also argue that something related but different happens in that reception, when the story invokes a specific religious vocabulary, whether through Lévinas’s theological reading, or by being brought closer through its recent staging in its native tongue. As a 1991 New York Times book review by author Jonathan Rosen noted, “‘Yosl Rakover Talks to God’ [is] a work of fiction styled as a memoir of a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, [which] embodies the tension between history and invention that seems to increasingly haunt popular accounts of the destruction of European Jewry.”12 According to Badde, Roskies and others,13 in 1946, a Buenos Aires Yiddish newspaper published the story Yosl rakovers vendung tsu got [Yosl Rakover’s Appeal To God] in its Yom Kippur edition with a byline by Kolitz.14 Yet once the story was subsequently published without a byline, Kolitz’s authorship was seen as implausible at best. The son of a rabbi, Kolitz left Lithuania at age seventeen and three years later came to Palestine where he spent the War years with the Irgun, a right-wing Jewish militia. He never set foot in the Ghetto nor did he know anyone who had been imprisoned there.15 The story starts out with the conceit that it is a newly found, unearthed testimonial written by a religious fighter who remained a devout believer even as he recorded his imminent death. Re-typed and labeled as a “Testament from the Warsaw Ghetto,” the text was submitted anonymously in 1953 to Di Goldene Keyt, Israel’s best known Yiddish literary journal, whose editor Avrom Sutzkever was a famous poet and partisan of the Vilna Ghetto. Thus, the story’s plausibility was enhanced by Sutzkever’s imprimatur and by its enthusiastic reception by poet Jacob Glatstein.16 Sutzkever edited and published the story in 1954 without byline or headline but included its initial words. The motif of testimony as a response to Jewish communal tragedy was already familiar to his journal’s readers as was the recent unearthing of Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw Ghetto diaries and Yitzkhak Katznelson’s “Song of the Murdered Jewish People.” By 1955, the Yosl Rakover story became transformed through translation into German for a radio script broadcast on Radio Free Berlin, which led to its subsequent embrace by Thomas Mann. It thus escaped the confines

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of Yiddish Holocaust literature to assume a new life as meaningful popular Holocaust literature for Jews and non-Jews. Lévinas’s response was to publish in 1963 Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu, based on his own 1955 radio broadcast responding to the story’s translation into French after the Radio Free Berlin broadcast.17 He opined that an obviously fictional story—“vrai comme seule la fiction peut l’être”—expounds a truly Jewish understanding of belief and justice that shifts the ability of humans to be moral interlocutors with God in response to the Holocaust. Hence, Lévinas proposes a God whose believers nonetheless persevere by knowing that justice is found in God’s words and teachings. For Lévinas, “God manifests Himself not by incarnation but in the Law.”18 Or, “To love the Torah more even than God is to gain access to a personal God against Whom one may revolt, which is to say, for Whom one can die.”19 Put another way, in the original story and its dramatization, this anti-theodicy is the powerful legacy of a Jewish moral and religious tradition that requires Jews to sometimes question the justice of God’s decrees. Lévinas picks up theologically what Yosl voices:

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I can say that my faith in Him has not altered by a hairsbreadth. In earlier times, when my life was good, my relation to Him was as if to one who gave me gifts without end, and to whom I was therefore always somewhat in debt. Now my relation to him is as one who is also in my debt. And . . . I consider that I have the right to admonish Him . . . something unique is happening in the world: hastoras ponim—God has hidden his face. God has hidden His face from the world and delivered mankind over to its own savage urges and instincts. . . . But this does not mean that the devout among my people must simply approve what is ordained and says, “The Lord is Just and His Decrees are Just.” To say that we have earned the blows we have received is to slander ourselves. . . . God is blasphemed when we blaspheme ourselves.20

As Leon Wieseltier suggested in his afterword to Badde’s edition, one possible approach in Holocaust collective memory is a religious understanding of Jewish mass tragedy which locates it in a continuum of Divine punishment as a part of exile, of goles.21 The concept of hester panim (the concealment of God’s face) is also subject to long-standing debates as to whether it is an early manifestation of Divine punishment or a test of faith for God’s chosen people.22 The Holocaust as genocide raises these stakes sharply. Most religious Jews use the term Kadoshim (holy ones/martyrs) to refer to its Jewish dead. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that some religious authorities see the Holocaust as a reply to Jewish transgression and sinful behavior, although not necessarily on the part of those who perished.



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This long-time and extant tension in the interpretation of Jewish suffering, framed within Jewish collective memory in the rhetoric of the religious tradition, is the assumed background to Yosl Rakover’s continual assertion that he is not indicting either himself or the Jewish people in invoking the term hastoras ponim (hester panim).23 While Wieseltier states that the novelty of the Rakover story is that “Theologically, . . . [its] accomplishment . . . is to have stripped the hiddenness of the Divine between 1939 and 1945 of its punitive dimension, so as to let it stand as an act of celestial cruelty,”24 that this story provides any sort of indictment of God is not apparent to either Emmanuel Lévinas or to Dovid Mandelbaum as its interpreters. An appeal (vendung) to God is not an indictment; here its novelty is based on the moral right of the interlocutor. In the face of the aphorism (attributed to survivors) that there is no God after Auschwitz, some of the broader resonance of Yosl Rakover’s story—for whom belief remains even as he admonishes—seems to be in seeing him as an updated Job who is attuned to a crisis of humanity peculiar to modernity. The story also supports a narrative in which being Jewish is redeemed, in part by depicting Judaism as holding God to the highest moral standard, embodied in a people, a way of life, and in Jewish law and its sense of justice.

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And before I die I want to speak to my God once more as a living man . . . who had the great but terrible honor of being a Jew. . . . I am proud to be a Jew—not despite the world’s relation to us, but precisely because of it. I would be ashamed to belong to the people who have borne and raised the criminals responsible for the deeds that have been perpetrated against us. . . . I am happy to belong to the unhappiest of all people in the world, whose Torah embodies the highest law and the most beautiful morality. Now this Torah is the more sanctified and immortalized by the manner of its rape and violation by the enemies of God. . . . I believe in His Laws even when I cannot justify His deeds.25

In thus memorializing overwhelming tragedy through reworking a Jewish traditional response to persecution, Yosl Rakover was no longer a passive victim. Rather, he was in Kolitz’s words a “creditor,” who testified that human dignity and morality could be combined with an enhanced belief in the justice of God’s laws. Lévinas approvingly quotes the “Talmudic” lines: “I love Him. But I love His Torah more . . . God commands religion, but his Torah commands a way of life. . . .”26 a formulation that continued to influence Lévinas’s thought.27 Arguably, Lévinas’s redemptive framing of the story’s fictional origins ultimately helped the restoration of its religious authenticity as a type of testimony.

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LÉVINAS’S CONCEALED FACE

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In 1955, Lévinas, who like Kolitz was trained as a misnagid (a non-Chasidic, Orthodox Lithuanian Jew), presciently proclaimed Yosl Rakover as Jewishly authentic: “this text is the bearer of Jewish learning, discretely hidden but unerring, and it expresses a profound and authentic experience of spiritual life.”28 Lévinas’s intervention in writing about a fictional story supports what he saw as its pre-War, truer, Jewish understanding of God as religiously insightful, precisely in posing arguments about hester panim. As both Lévinas and Wieseltier indicate, Rakover’s discussion with God necessarily engages the paradigmatic topos of khurbn, the destruction of the First and Second Temples with its attendant punishments and exile. In attempting to use and move beyond that frame, the question posed is whether there can be such a thing as too much punishment. By leaving humans to themselves, God makes humans responsible for the misery that they cause. If Kolitz subverts hester panim to explicitly proclaim the Jewish people as not deserving der khurbn—the Destruction known in English as the Holocaust29— as punishment, Lévinas pushes that argument into one in which humanity is forced to deal with the consequences of its untrammeled behavior. When Lévinas states “God manifests Himself not by incarnation but in the Law,” he distinguishes a properly Jewish response from Christian doctrine on incarnation precisely in regard to suffering, sin and forgiveness.30 The ability of humans to argue with a God who is distant, who has no distinct human form, instead allows for a non-puerile argument about law and justice to be construed concerning the moral nature of a world in which humans are responsible for their behavior. What is the meaning of the suffering of innocents? . . . In the moment when He withdraws from the world and veils His face, as Yosl says . . . “When the forces of evil dominate the world, it is, alas, completely natural that the first victims will be those who represent the holy and the pure.” The God Who veils His face is neither . . . a theological abstraction nor a poetic image. . . . Suffering in its specific Jewish sense . . . never takes on the value of a mystical expiation for the world’s sins. The situation of the victims of a world in disorder, which means a world in which the good cannot triumph, is suffering. It reveals a God who renounces any manifestation of Himself that would give succor, and calls on man in his maturity to recognize his full responsibility. . . . The just man who suffers for a justice in which there is no victory is the living embodiment of Judaism.31

Hence in a response formulated in opposition to Christian doctrine, no reward or expiation is received for gratuitous suffering; rather, this religion only



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offers truth for adults. Lévinas’s response eventually led to critical attention from Catholic theological circles who sought to engage with Lévinas’s sharp questions as to the higher standard required by a God of law and justice as seen through the lens of this story (see Franz Jozef van Beeck). When Lévinas questions the mercy and love that an incarnate Christian God has shown, he inverts a traditional Christian critique of Jews (and their “Old Testament” God) as more interested in a love of the law, than in the law of love. It is also possible in reading Lévinas to connect the impact of the concealment of God’s face with a need for humans to offer an overt gaze in his ethics of witnessing. A recognition of obligation here seems to hint at Lévinas’s arguments elsewhere about witness requiring a voluntary acceptance of the face of the other, an argument that Judith Salverson32 and Liz Saltzman,33 among others, have used in trying to make sense of second- and third-hand witnessing. Saltzman quotes Lévinas to the effect that in recognizing the other, “thus the face says to me, you shall not kill.”34

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TRAVELING BACK: RETURNING YOSL TO MAMA LOSHN Sixty-five years after Yosl Rakover Speaks to God was written, a dialogue with God on justice remains central to how it is newly playing out in Yiddish theater, an art form in which remembrance can pull upon a large repertoire to reinforce, contravene and trump conventional interpretations. The Yosl Rakover story insists that the unspeakable Ghetto experience could have produced a traditionalist Jew become partisan fighter whose last words articulate Jewish pride and belief as he appeals for Divine justice for others. Its belated return to its native tongue builds on its earlier reception as well as opening it up Jewishly through recontextualization into a language that has its own history of juxtaposing, if not reconciling, traditional belief to modernity’s incursions even as it references historical tragedy and persecution. An unlikely, melodramatic plot fits right into the Yiddish theater tradition. Indeed, the notion of appealing to God with a theater audience at hand did not start with “Fiddler on the Roof.” Yosl’s nonstop affective monologue offers an articulate, deeply Jewish rendering of a world that is already so morally topsy-turvy so as to allow almost anything to be possible when addressing the Riboyno shel Oylem (Master of the Universe).35 God is at the heart of such Yiddish expression, whether in prayer, conversation, or theater dialogue that depicts religious protagonists and Jewish life. A Jew speaking Jewish (the literal meaning of Yiddish) knows something about speaking directly to God.36 Riboyno shel Oylem is a form of address that constitutes “an exclamation addressed to God, whether to beseech, to demand or to

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complain, or as one addressed to someone one is talking to.”37 God does not necessarily get off lightly in a language known for its intimate familiarity with tragedy. Although God is an unheard respondent, God is assumed to hear all: as Yosl Rakover insists, this God talk is not always phrased in the language of supplication and penitence. Tellingly, Yosl Rakover’s talk with God is set in the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto. Here, in its linguistic fullness, a performance in Yiddish credibly shifts an ostensibly invisible audience into that very moment of sustained anguish and religious belief.38 It’s worth mentioning that the inherent equivalency of Jews with Yiddish does not just apply to Chasidim in pre-War Galicia or in contemporary Boro Park, Brooklyn. The very ability to speak Yiddish was so naturalized as a Jewish identity that it served as the ideological basis for secularists who helped shape its explosion into theater, news media, and literature. Yiddish secularism—as a term, identity, and ideology—only makes sense if the language is understood as roughly congruent with a culture and a people. A further complication is that a Yiddish speaker is the culture bearer for a language replete with religious references. Obviously this naturalized understanding of Yiddish has been particularly challenged in the post-War years, not least because most Ashkenazic Jews outside of the Chasidic world increasingly don’t speak the language. While the role of Yiddish as a Jewish lingua franca has fractured (particularly in its relationship with Hebrew as the language of a people), the role of the Yiddish speaker as culture bearer remains important in both secular and religious Jewish life. As Yiddish has become the object of academic study, another related phenomenon has emerged: not all fluent Yiddish speakers are Jewish. Indeed, Shane Baker, the New Yiddish Rep’s lead actor and translator, is not Jewish. And this is not a puzzle. New Yiddish theater can draw on a repertoire grounded in encounters with modernity that has creatively encompassed linguistic and other fraught baggage in dealing with vicissitude, tragedy, displacement, loss, and God. A century has now passed since Sholem Asch’s controversial “God of Vengeance” had a Jewish brothel keeper as its protagonist/villain.39  If staging Yosl Rakover in Yiddish makes its own sort of sense, its setting presents a different sort of challenge. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a once famous symbol that needs its own resurrection in a Yiddish play despite its compelling history. Immediately after the War, far from the Warsaw Ghetto revolt being derided as futile, its armed resistance against its final liquidation in 1943 by Nazi forces made it into the most fitting heroic symbol with which to commemorate the War’s dead. But the Ghetto has now faded in collective memory along with the need to contravene a once prevalent image of Jews

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quietly submitting to death.40 Ironically if the preferred story was once one of Jewish secular partisans, the Ghetto’s ability to represent the Holocaust has become eclipsed not only by Auschwitz, but by a multiplicity of stories in which the very fact of survival is now seen as resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto also has to compete with the vivid, heroic imagery of popular films like Defiance or Inglourious Basterds. Moreover, for many Jews, Poland is the place where Jews once lived and Auschwitz, the place where they died;41 a Jewish museum was recently opened in Warsaw (facing the Ghetto monument since the Ghetto itself was razed) in large part to contravene that very proposition.42 Vividly reinserting into collective memory the Warsaw Ghetto as a place of heroic tragic sacrifice is an important consideration at a point when the active memory of the Ghetto uprising had largely been kept alive in formal annual commemorations by aging, secular Yiddish-language circles and at a few kibbutzim. Yet not the least of the claims inherent in staging this story for the first time is that the Yiddish theater itself remains a living tradition. This retelling of a story of Jewish resistance in the language in which the story was written, the language spoken by the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, re-sutures memory. Although translation is immediately provided, the Yiddish speech provides access to Yiddish theater’s deep repertoire used to portray East European Jewish life’s cultural tropes and shared references, memories and history. Yiddish theater portrayed tradition in varied ways in Europe and especially in New York; Second Avenue became the Yiddishe Rialto at the height of immigration (roughly one third of East Europe’s Jews immigrated prior to 1924). Portrayals of traditional and other responses to collective and individual tragedy were part of a repertoire that could invoke a Yiddish finely-tuned in this regard. The successful revival of the story of Yosl Rakover owes some of its affective power from being played in Yiddish, an invocation that also points the audience back to the great catastrophe which numbers Yiddish itself—as a language, culture and moral resource—among its greatest losses. Refusing the effacement of the history in which the tale is grounded, the play succeeds through using the very language and the symbolic framework in which the resistance to that genocide was understood and fought. Other claims are being made as well: that Yiddish theater’s storied history, its ability to invoke and contravene both modernity and tradition (even as it paid the bills by doing shund), does not need to be frozen as entertainment turned into nostalgia, or by being performed only in translation. Yiddish theater keeps on living only through addressing remembrance in innovative ways within a tradition that pushes it to grapple with existential issues such as Yosl Rakover’s.

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THE PLAY The transformation of the narrative into a Yiddish theater piece started with a reading in 2007. Dovid Mandelbaum saw that the story needed paring down: “Although it was very well received, I realized it was simply too much. After a while the nature of the material was such it was one blow too many and you don’t want to leave your audience punch drunk.”43 Interpreted by a theater troupe that deliberately avoids anything smacking of popular Yiddish musical theater, Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d is presented in Yiddish as a rapid-fire monologue played with a minimum of props. Simultaneous English supertitles are provided.44 In New York, it has played in some very alternative theater venues, that is to say synagogues, with appearances in Florida, Jerusalem, and more recently on college campuses. It has also played in English at theater festivals in Montreal and Rome. Interestingly, it has played to these audiences apparently without regard to the authenticity of its first-person truth claims. Time may mute debates over authenticity but not entirely preclude them.45 The cognitive confusion once generated by the published story, concerning whether its testament was one of lived memory, seems avoided through its current presentation as theater. Dovid Mandelbaum suggests that a theater audience is almost transparently aware of the fictional nature of productions as well as their ability to resonate as truth. This may well be the case. I’d suggest that the New Yiddish Repertory Theater has also taken care to position the performance in ways that, aided by the passage of time, help to create an appropriate distance from the question of first-person testimony. While the program given to the audience does not present the testament by Yosl Rakover found in the Warsaw Ghetto’s ruins as explicitly fictional, the performance itself does so through immediately signaling its own theatricality. The first words seen on the supertitle screen alert the audience that the performer expressly adapted for the stage a story written by Zvi Kolitz. These English words are prominently displayed as supertitles that even Yiddish speakers are obliged to notice. The performance starts with the audience hearing a loud artillery barrage as the English text appears: “Warsaw April, 1943.” Only then does the Yiddish monologue begin with its religious protagonist speaking out loud what he is rapidly writing (later there are moments in which Yosl addresses the audience more directly). There is also another distancing: the production itself gives no hint that there is anything at all controversial about this story being fictional. Theater amplifies Yosl’s instantiation; he becomes “real,” tangible, and credible precisely in the context of performance even as its staged nature undergirds that performance. The audience is reeling with him as shots ring out. Yet in patently staging a fictional religious character such as Yosl Rakover

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more than fifty years after the story was written, the play bypasses prior fierce debates as to whether God exists after Auschwitz. Yosl Rakover’s stage presence matter-of-factly imparts to an audience the utter irrelevance of asking whether God, as it were, died in the Warsaw Ghetto. In other words, that classic theological question is not even in play in the play. It is obvious to audiences that Chasidic belief in God did not die there or at Auschwitz. Like resistance itself which has largely been redefined to include the very act of survival in the face of inhumanity, the very persistence of belief or adherence to life-risking practices in the name of that belief, is unsurprisingly now seen as heroic, particularly among religious Jews. Rather the audience is swept powerfully into a riveting monologue that offers immediate access to Yosl’s articulation of respectful and insistent belief in extremis. Kolitz’s insertion of a religious figure to articulate a Jewish moral stance in questioning God gives his story a proven staying power and moral appeal. As an interlocutor who has earned the right to talk frankly, Yosl is perfectly positioned to articulate the paramountcy of justice and law as the basis for belief. Yosl is not arguing about God’s existence, power, or name: the Merciful One—El Rachum v’Chanun, Merciful and Gracious as described in the public prayer recitation of the 13 Attributes of Mercy. Nor does Yosl issue a direct call for God’s vengeance or blame God for human actions. His questions starkly implicate a world in which humanity’s ability to be inhumane to other humans has been unleashed. Situating these questions in the Warsaw Ghetto context permits them to be universalized even as they are rendered in profoundly culturally specific ways. The play’s affect, cathartic or otherwise, is doubtless deeply and distinctively experienced by its performer, who literally embodies its cultural references. Dovid Mandelbaum has changed the text “I, Yosl, son of David Rakover of Tarnopol, a follower of the Rabbi of Ger and descendant of the righteous, learned, and holy ones of the families Rakover and Maysels,” so as to substitute Trzebina, the name of his family’s town, at the same time re-designating Rakover as a Bobover Chasid whose mother’s family name is Klagsbad. The blurring of post-memory’s borders with that of identification from active performance seems to take a hard toll. When interviewed Mandelbaum indicated his own relief at the point when Yosl recites the prayer Shma Yisrael, since it means a welcome death is coming. As the theater troupe seeks a younger audience, a play that newly resurrects the Warsaw Ghetto by clearly using testimonial fiction to urgently convey that experience of extremis through intimately describing it to God (and audience) makes sense given its overall affect and messages. Although Mandelbaum also sees himself as directly talking to those who have lived through this experience, he is insistent that the point of the

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performance is “the universality of the existential dilemma . . . and that no one deserves this to happen.”46 Yosl’s belief in appealing to God by invoking His standard of justice sustains his questions and humanity in the face of the inhuman.47 At its most universal, the play is dedicated to the heroism of “Righteous Gentiles” who aided Jewish partisans and others. Their explicit acknowledgment in the program is a response to genocide past and future. The story, recast as a play, opens further to a universalized reading that underscores the continuing existence of genocide and its relation to agency, testimony and remembrance. Salverson, a playwright and academic, asks how writing a play should work in deliberately invoking that context. The puzzle she is trying to tease out is how to do the sort of mimesis that can—in Adorno’s terms—allow the performer to name the illusion, and not rob a subject of happiness, that is of the ability to speak back.48 Ideally the audience and actors can participate through knowing their distance from the subject even as they acknowledge the difficulty of maintaining it. That distance can be a way of letting go that acknowledges continuing loss and pain as a matter of basic respect. When loss is named, the world can be re-entered. Perhaps most importantly to Salverson’s audience and actors, she assumes that the narratives she tells are “broken” and risky to hear.49 Dovid Mandelbaum has usefully approached these same risks by presenting this story of Yosl Rakover in the context of Yiddish theater. Much like Saltzman’s examples of subverted, redirected archaic art forms whose indirection allows a distanced yet present relation to a previous narrative of violence, the new use of Yiddish theater marks it as a piece of commemorative art appropriate for showing especially on Yom HaShoah and Tisha B’Av.50 That it is shown in modern orthodox synagogues as well as in theater venues and festivals speaks to the multiple types of work that this New Yiddish Repertory Theater production does. Its potential multi-generational audience mix includes Jewish non-Yiddish speakers, young male Chasidim, non-Jews, and those who were caught in the Nazi genocide. It thus needs to anticipate different types of identification with Yosl Rakover’s story. A befitting pious respect is also signaled orthographically since G-d is the preferred convention for many religious Jews. For the audience, the “turn” toward identification happens fast. The audience is instantly keyed in by the sound of shooting that punctuates Yosl’s opening words as he appears wearing blood-stained tzitzis (talis koton, a ritual undergarment). A martyr is about to die and everything hangs on the tale that he rapidly inscribes as he talks to God and audience. In those frozen stolen moments, the performer and audience are bound together before reaching an anticipated denouement. The audience is tied to a world of

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credible belief in a fictional character and his relationship to God through the art of making the improbable real by virtue of performance. Wieseltier is correct that the story is heavy-handed as art; although the play is far more intense, its storyline is tighter due to the judicious editing of repetitious sections and a controlled sense of timing.  The staging of the play (unlike the story) has another burden: it has to create distance by making clear that fiction is being presented as a vehicle for imparting greater truths. A focus on the performative forces its own moral calculus due to the immediacy of audience participation. For some, the play’s affect is cathartic in providing a direct portal as it were to a world of Jewish genocide. As Salverson implies, the audience is far from passive here; the performance of stories of genocide can force an urgent type of third-hand witnessing with its own attendant moral dilemmas. Salverson, as a playwright, offers up a complex discussion of Lévinas on evidence and testimony that may be fairly summarized as follows: a witness’s human experience necessarily exceeds a performance of testimony including in service of evidence.51 Nor is a given response to that performance inevitable. The limits of self-identification even in embodying one’s own experience are starkly drawn here. Her reading of Lévinas stresses that humans exceed any particular thematization including that of victim or survivor. Similarly, Mandelbaum’s play speaks to the need for ethical limits even in the performance of fictional testimony and witnessing. Hence Mandelbaum’s decision to edit the script so as not to leave his audience “punch drunk.” Yet even with the profound respect for subject and audience this implies, both Salverson and Mandelbaum appear to value a transformation in which an audience member’s experience can potentially shift that person’s future relationship to the world. That transformative potential can be sensed as well in Lévinas’s insistence that the acceptance of responsibility for recognizing the other must be a voluntary gesture, since it is impossible to know what will ensue. While for Salverson and Mandelbaum staging plays with “broken” stories cannot and does not redeem past suffering, both actively look to use memory’s lessons to prevent future tragedy. REMEMBERING DEBATING WITH GOD Trying to understand Yosl Rakover in his native idiom and outside it, we wander in a landscape re-shaped by der khurbn and its broader reception. The dissemination of Kolitz’s 1946 story of a testament of belief happened before a language or form, Jewish or otherwise, for Holocaust memoirs and memorialization was fully set in place. Nevertheless, as the word khurbn

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connotes, his story participates in a Yiddish language genre, comprising materials composed primarily by those who had been part of that experience. A collective memorialization in Yiddish of Jewish genocide started during the War in various ghettos and immediately after, in Europe’s D.P. [Displaced Persons] camps by the communities that experienced it.52 Typically these communal activities had some recourse to a language and religious vocabulary of Jewish communal tragedy that was referenced in historical testimony,53 theater productions,54 memorial services, religious liturgy, and published journals, books, poetry and literature. Once survivors emigrated from Poland, one well-documented activity was the publishing of yizker-bikher, collective memorial books assembled by landslayt of now destroyed towns that often incorporated the memoirs of immigrants as well.55 Der khurbn is at the center of a larger debate, Jewish and otherwise, about remembrance that centers on the question, “Whose story is it?” Yosl Rakover’s story brings into focus the question of shared meaning in pulling out redemptive readings. Although troubling in their own right, redemptive narratives can become resources for the articulation of meaning in the interpretation of large-scale, tragic events. Remembrance necessarily brings into focus the story’s relation to narrator and audience. In this case it brings questions of belief and religious interpretation—couched in Jewishly specific ways—to a broader audience. It also brings into sharp focus the question of art and fiction in historical representation. Der khurbn will remain within the living memory of those caught in that genocide—who nevertheless survived—for only a few more years. The power of their live, direct testimony remains central to many public manifestations of remembrance. This implies a tension in future practices, which already increasingly rely on captured recollection (e.g., videos) and/ or of testimonials relying on the records left by direct witnesses. If history is pressed into service as a guide in these matters, memory’s portrayal and its collective remembrance in fiction, theater and other arts—through practices which engage in eliciting and mediating testimony’s reception and affect— will play an increasing role as well. The Rakover story’s appeal touches on its direct use of aspects of the Jewish tradition that appear to grant license to Jews to admonish or even indict God. If we are indeed authorized heirs to a legacy best seen in a pursuit of justice, it is hard not to be bolstered by a narrative where God is held to the highest moral standard. Like the deeply resonant story of the Auschwitz BeisDin (rabbinic court) against God told by Elie Wiesel (and now viewed as apocryphal),56 Yosl Rakover’s testament also represents the best of the Jewish tradition, in which a higher morality can be invoked against a God who instilled it in his chosen people.



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Nor do these narratives become ahistorical merely because they are presented primarily in media and modes outside those of conventional histories. The credibility of historic representations, including in collective memory, is at stake in their creation, performance, and in attempts to guide and control their reception.57 As suggested above, the story recast as a play opens further to a universalized reading that underscores the continuing existence of genocide and its relation to agency, testimony and remembrance. The redemptive, even in varied secularized and universalized forms, is grounded in a religious discourse of moral values that at its best attempts to give some larger meaning to mass tragedy through its explicit inclusion in history and memory. By responding that the outcome of large scale tragedy and suffering informs and shapes the future, redemptive narratives draw upon and partake of a vocabulary and commemorative rituals that offer inspiration from what can be seen as the good and/or the godly. I fully recognize that redemptive narratives are all too easily channeled into pathways politically and otherwise repugnant to my own values. Jewish victimhood per se does not confer the innately comforting moral status that Yosl Rakover proposes inheres in Jews as a love of justice. Nonetheless, the power to have a dialogue with God about morality and justice allows the articulation of questions that are at the heart of communal self-understandings about being Jewish. This power brings religiosity, morality and remembrance into daily life in an age in which genocide has not disappeared. I find seeing the play a fitting and compelling way to remember der khurbn precisely because of how it speaks Jewishly to the broader debates it brings in its wake. Even as the Holocaust experience itself has become shared “heritage,” claiming a museum of its own in many American cities, how to remember remains an agonizing question.58 I need to grapple with a Jewish religious vocabulary and repertoire of responses to collective tragedy even as I respond to the more universal questions that the play broaches. REMEMBERING REMEMBRANCE Unlike Passover, der khurbn has no finalized religious ritual requirements per se other than that of a communal obligation to the memory of the dead. That obligation is often met through its explicit insertion into existing memorial prayers or days of mourning, a practice followed by many religious Jews, and/or through its commemoration as an official day of mourning. In 1953, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) simply declared that Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day) would be observed on a date (although not a month) devoid of particular historic or religious associations.

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Historian Yosef Yerushalmi famously portrayed Passover’s commemoration as fitting a prescribed model of collective memory labeled “Zakhor.”59 Understood as a repeated biblical commandment enjoining collective remembrance, Zakhor is imparted and instantiated through the temporal and religious structuring of the literature and practices of commemorative holidays and days of communal mourning.60 Passover brings the weight of past enslavement into active performed memory through scripted annual ritual reenactment: the eating and sharing of the bread of affliction is an explicit religious obligation even as Passover’s fit with religious pluralism and progressive social justice has expanded its potential secular repertoire in North America. Such traditional religious understandings draw on the whole of a Jewish past in which past and present events unfold in a non-linear fashion. Yerushalmi portrays collective memory as necessarily selective in its search for meaning, and reliant on an ahistorical framing established in rabbinic, medieval and early modern written accounts. Here Jewish history exists in opposition to a Jewish memory that is no longer fully accessible due to modernity’s ruptures. Yerushalmi insists that Zakhor’s invocation to remember has been transformed by a Jewish intellectual embrace of modernity that welcomes historiography’s distancing of collective memory through impulses such as its linear rendering of time.61 Historiography, as a form of remembrance outside of faith, can usefully seek meaning in history through interrogating how events are portrayed across epistemes. Nonetheless, ordinary folks ignore historiography, prefer fictional portrayals of the Holocaust, and in doing so, regress and return to collective memory and its attendant myths. Thus Yerushalmi bemoans that: The Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any historical event in Jewish history, but I have no doubt whatever that its image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible. Much has changed since the sixteenth century; one thing curiously remains. Now, as then, it would appear even where Jews do not reject history out of hand, they are not prepared to confront it directly, but seem to await a new metahistorical myth for which the novel provides at least a temporary modern surrogate.62

Holocaust fiction is aligned here with collective memory. Its opposition to history provides “a new metahistorical myth,” thereby ironically eliding with what Yerushalmi portrays as a stubborn and persistent Jewish refusal over time to choose the real (that is history’s truer offerings and explanations). So here I’m exploring a story of Jewish Holocaust memory whose appeal arguably lies in offering its audience an account of an abiding, if renegotiated, faith in God. Yet Mandelbaum’s dramatization simultaneously invokes Yosl Rakover’s fictional story in ways that permit the coexistence of a broader



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remembrance of genocide and of a “Holocaust survivor’s” story so as to address at once Jewish collective memory and broader humanistic concerns. Tracing how that account has traveled and played out in multiple renditions, I suggest that a binary opposition of collective memory to historical truth does not actually serve us well.63 Challenging Yerushalmi’s classic model, I note the possibilities inherent in newer post-Yerushalmi approaches to Jewish studies which suggest that the dynamics of collective memory should be within history’s purview. Approaching history as a type of narrative with its own constraints, I suggest that a story which spoke to Lévinas as eliciting a larger truth about God can be a meaningful subject of historical scrutiny. This approach is different from Wieseltier’s stance. He defends “Yosl Rakover Speaks to God”—which he views as heavy-handed art—by defending the right of fiction and collective memory to shape Holocaust remembrance.

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The inauthenticity of Zvi Kolitz’s story is the inauthenticity of art; and art was not retired even by the incalculable atrocity of 1939–1945. Kolitz did not witness the extermination that his narrative describes, he imagined it, and—this especially infuriates his critics—in the first person; and for this some of his critics have accused him of forgery . . . such is the founding presumption of fiction. To seek the true, it leaves the real. . . . And the imagination has always been an indispensable instrument for the consideration of tragedy, not least because its point of regard is not empirical. . . . Regarded in the light of the Jewish tradition’s pessimism about the exile, the Holocaust is chillingly coherent.64

The itinerary of Yosl Rakover’s story subverts easy categorization. Dwight Conquergood cites Michel de Certeau to highlight the powerful fluidity of stories that enables them to cut across borders.65 I have aimed here to show how practices that shape the nomenclature and language of Holocaust remembrance can be negotiated in ways that subvert ostensibly clear oppositions: secular versus religious; collective memory versus history; fiction versus authenticity; original text versus translation; unique claims of Jewish memory versus universalized understandings of genocide. Among other things, the play is an impressive riff on how collective memory, imaginaries and constrained visions, can take new and old forms after the collapse ensuing from collective disaster.  WHY PLUMB THE DEPTHS? Why dwell on a fictional story from the depths that quixotically has become successfully incorporated into contemporary Yiddish theater? What gives it

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its staying power? If collective tragedy and ensuing individual calamity are a deep, albeit known, part of human experience, then the vocabulary and repertoire needed to address it collectively are not stock items. That such responses are bought at a very high price is evident in their very creation. The arbitrary and gratuitous aspect of calamity is salient whether seen in the Biblical story of Job or in its 2010 Coen Brothers update, A Serious Man. In an age when we constantly strain against the infiltration of prophylactic memory into personal lived experience, such stories—especially when acted—can feel all too real. I deeply value the chilling honesty that I impute to Job’s anguished voice. He tells his interlocutors that he is being arbitrarily punished for having lived a righteous life and only wants to die. Job disdainfully scoffs at proffered platitudes which insist that God strikes down the wicked and rewards the good. Similarly, Yosl’s avowal of his right to invoke a Jewish standard of divine moral justice strikes me as a hard-won conclusion and not merely ideological turf. In an unjust world, positing that God can be called to account in accordance with His own standards of justice allows the world to be re-imagined, whether through Divine intervention or through human agency. The play explicitly opens up those broader imaginative possibilities. Yosl is not just a vehicle for raising questions. Yosl rides Dovid as much as Dovid portrays Yosl. Ultimately, Dovid is a credible (and voluntary) heir struggling and engaging with a tradition whose moral underpinnings in the face of genocide are at stake along with its continuity.66 Catastrophe often has human agency as its root, and humans have undeniably fouled their own nest in many different ways. Yosl Rakover’s appeal to God’s standards of justice as a consequence of faith held in extremis allows for a recalibrated questioning—Divine or otherwise. It opens up a dialogue with the audience as to whether such future inhumanity is truly inevitable. Yosl’s argument for me is ultimately about the right to question the absence of justice while affirming the dictate “Justice, Justice Shall Thou Pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). NOTES 1.  The form “G-d” is used in the title of the play whenever its adapter and performer David (Dovid) Mandelbaum controls publicity. It indicates his desire that the performance be accessible and welcoming to religious Jews accustomed to this oblique usage. 2.  See Zvi Kolitz, “Yosl Rakover Talks to God” in Yosl Rakover Talks to God with Afterwords by Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier, translated by Carol Brown Janeway from the edition established by Paul Badde (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 3.

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3.  See Paul Badde, “Zvi Kolitz,” in Yosl Rakover Talks to God (New York: Vintage International, 2000). 4.  Kolitz, “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” 8. 5.  Ibid., 24. 6.  Ibid., 9. 7. Ibid. 8.  See Elissa Sampson, “Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d: Interview with David Mandelbaum, Artistic Director, New Yiddish Repertory Theater” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011), 6. 9.  See Emmanuel Lévinas, “Loving the Torah More Than God,” in Yosl Rakover Talks to God with Afterwords by Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 79–87. N.B. This is a translation into English of Lévinas’s earlier 1955 text “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu.” See footnote 17 below. 10.  See David G. Roskies, “Dividing the Ruins: Communal Memory in Yiddish and Hebrew,” in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, edited by David Cesarani & Eric J. Sundquist (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge Press, 2012), 86. 11.  See Franz Jozef van Beeck, “My Encounter with Yossel Rakover,” in Yossel Rakover Speaks to God; Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith, edited by Zvi Kolitz (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1995), 43. 12.  See Jonathan Rosen, “A Quarrel and a Prayer,” The New York Times, (November 19, 1999). 13.  See Badde, “Zvi Kolitz.” Also see Roskies, “Dividing the Ruins.” 14.  Badde, “Zvi Kolitz,” 70. 15.  Nor did Kolitz immediately go back to Europe when he found out after the War that the Jews from his hometown of Alytus had been brutally exterminated. Although born into an Orthodox (non-Chasidic) rabbinic family, Kolitz also made no claim that he was always religious. His unwelcome and discredited arrival seems to have only partially staunched the flow of unattributed and multiply-translated versions showing up in Holocaust anthologies, anonymous quotes, and pedagogical material into the twenty-first century. Jonathan Rosen called the story of the story, “Borgesian.” See Rosen, “A Quarrel and a Prayer.” Even when Kolitz was informed about editions, he apparently did not check translations or stop editorial changes. See Badde, “Zvi Kolitz.” 16.  Badde, “Zvi Kolitz,” quotes Sutzkever as stating that, “The piece haunted us so much . . . it seemed so genuine that we didn’t think to ask any questions” (58–59). 17.  Emmanuel Lévinas, “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu,” in Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme, edited by Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, copyright Albin Michel, 1963). Original edition, 1955. 18.  Lévinas, “Loving the Torah More Than God,” 85. 19.  Ibid., 87. 20.  Kolitz, “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” 9–10. 21.  See Leon Wieseltier, “A Privation of Providence,” in Yosl Rakover Talks to God with Afterwords by Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 93–95.

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22.  The commencement of God’s concealment is associated with Biblical idolatry or sin in Deuteronomic verses and commentary. “And the Lord said unto Moses: Behold, thou art about to sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go astray after the foreign gods of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake Me, and break My covenant which I have made with them. Then My anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide My face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall come upon them; so that they will say in that day: Are not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us? And I will surely hide My face in that day for all the evil which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned unto other gods” (Deuteronomy 31:16–18). 23.  Leon Wieseltier sees Rakover’s protest as a theological innovation which disassociates hester panim from Divine punishment as provoking Lévinas’s response. See Wieseltier, “A Privation of Providence,” 93–95. 24.  Wieseltier, “A Privation of Providence,” 95. 25.  Kolitz, “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” 16–18. 26.  Lévinas, “Loving the Torah More Than God,” 84. 27. Richard Cohen takes up this argument in his book, Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), where he claims that Lévinas connects the concealment of God’s face with that of recognizing the other’s face in the ethics of witnessing. 28.  Lévinas, “Loving the Torah More Than God,” 80. Also see his original piece published in French, Lévinas, “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu,” from 1963, which reprints his 1955 text. 29. In using a definite article, der khurbn in Yiddish refers to the Holocaust (known primarily in Israel but increasingly elsewhere as the Shoah, a translation of the Greek term Holocaust which refers to an all-consuming incendiary blaze). Khurbn like many older religious terms used today has much theological resonance. Before World War II, it referred primarily to the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Some religious Jews therefore use the term der khurbn Europa to distinguish it from that specific usage. It has also been used in connection to communal disasters such as the Chmielnicki Massacres and the Triangle Fire. 30.  Lévinas, “Loving the Torah More Than God,” 85. 31.  Ibid., 81–83. 32.  See Judith Salverson, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Land Mines,” in Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma, edited by Sharon Rosenberg, Roger Simon, and Claudia Eppert (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 59–74. 33. See Liz Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006). 34. Saltzman, Making Memory Matter, 43. 35.  “Elijah’s use of ribbono shel olam in Abbahu’s midrash is typical of how the phrase commonly functions in Hebrew and Yiddish: as an exclamation addressed to God, whether to beseech, to demand or to complain, or as one addressed to someone one is talking to, the way one says ‘For God’s sake!’ in the middle of an English

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argument. English speakers’ knowledge of the expression probably comes mostly from the original Broadway production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ where Tevye is given the lines: ‘Master of the Universe, You promised to make the seed of Abraham as the sands of the seashore and as numerous as the stars of the heavens! Lord of all worlds, thank you very much. But don’t you think it’s time to choose someone else?’ In Yiddish, one can also turn the words into an ordinary epithet for God by putting the masculine definite article der in front of them, so that, for example, one can say, ‘Az der riboyno shel oylem vil, iz altz meglekh,’ ‘If God wants it to happen, anything is possible.’” Philologos, Dec 24, 2008, http://forward.com/articles/14780/whosemasters-of-the-universe-/. 36. I personally prefer the term “Der Eybershter,” (the One above); see http:// www.jewish-languages.org/jewish-english-lexicon/words/8. 37.  See Philologos, “Whose Masters of the Universe,” 2008. Among other things, Yiddish relies on a somewhat variable use of Hebrew words and expressions. While linguists typically describe Yiddish’s loshn kodesh (Hebrew and Aramaic) component as comprising 15 percent of its vocabulary, this varies considerably upwards for speakers engaged on religious topics. 38.  When Joseph Friedensohn, the editor of Agudas Yisroel’s journal Dos Yidishe Vort was interviewed for the Forward’s online Yiddish video program, “A Guest at the Forverts,” he told his internet audience that Yiddish was the most appropriate medium for Torah study. “In terms of the Torah, Jews should speak their own language. That’s why Torah-Jews used and wrote Yiddish.” Friedensohn’s 2011 statement reflects an understanding that Yiddish uniquely serves as a linguistic culture-bearer for Jewish religious thought pulling in words, expressions, concepts, and imagery from its large expressive religious vocabulary and framing. See A Guest at the Forverts—Joseph Friedensohn. Editor Boris Sandler (New York: The Forward, April 28, 2011) http:// forward.com/video/303005/a-guest-at-the-forverts-joseph-friedensohn/. 39.  This is not to imply that most Yiddish productions in their day took on weighty themes. Quite the opposite: Yiddish theater was quite well known for its ubiquitous shund (trashy) productions that paid the bills.  40.  The importance of resistance has played out in different ways. For many years the living, that is to say survivors, particularly in Israel were rebuked if they had not been a part of an active resistance movement. Depicting living through the Holocaust itself as a type of resistance is a tension seen early on that has surfaced more largely as a post 1967 phenomenon. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Warsaw Ghetto experience offered a powerful story of an impossible and heroic organized resistance and martyrdom. In contrast, the national narratives of Israel’s Hebrew speaking heroes of 1948 and those of later wars embodied an ethos of the new Israeli secular Jew, a fighter grounded in national territory. Di Goldene Keyt’s Yiddish readership was arguably already out of step with a new national literary consciousness in 1954. In describing the contentious nature of publishing in Hebrew on the Holocaust in 1954, Tom Segev writes simply, “The Holocaust was then, still, to a large extent taboo.” See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. by Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 264. Kolitz’s story having made the jump out of Yiddish and into Europe when it did allowed it to immediately gain far

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more visibility and traction; much Holocaust literature only became published after the Eichmann Trial in 1961. 41.  Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). 42.  This is likely to change again with the recent inauguration of Warsaw’s new POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, situated across from the Ghetto memorial. 43. Sampson, Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d: Interview with David Mandelbaum, 4. 44.  In earlier synagogue productions of Yosl Rakover (see playbill Figure 18.1), English translations and titles were projected more simply and dramatically onto a nearby scrim. In New York, the professional competition is the relatively well-known Folksbiene troupe which uses more elaborate supertitles and plot summaries in English and Russian for its productions. 45.  In the years immediately following the War, a vocabulary for describing der khurbn was less developed and the experience much rawer. Since the hero died in the Ghetto, it would have indeed been obvious that the actor couldn’t have been Yosl Rakover if it had been staged in the 1950s but the audience may have presumed Yosl Rakover to have been a real, deceased fellow person. Thus, it seems possible that a theater piece in the 1950s might well have run into some cognitive difficulties. 46.  In the interview, Dovid Mandelbaum talked about his sense of responsibility to audience members who had lived through the War’s genocide. “In some ways I feel a burden of imparting to the audience a cathartic experience which for many of them is an experience that they have lived through and cannot recall; and perhaps if I’ve done my job properly they get some sense of the horror of it, the cruelty of it.” See Sampson, Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d: Interview with David Mandelbaum, 6. 47.  Precedents can be seen in paradigmatic Biblical stories of bargaining with God. With Abraham, it is in regard to the number of righteous people needed to save Sodom from destruction. Noah’s bargaining elicited a promise not to destroy the world again. Moses’ bargaining, among other things, gave the Jewish people, a second set of the Ten Commandments. 48.  Salverson, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Land Mines,” 69. 49. Salverson summarizes Ora Avni’s work to point out that second-hand witnessing is risky for both audiences and performers. Salverson writes: “Ora Avni has written that we need to take seriously what it means to speak and listen to accounts of violence, particularly systemic violence perpetrated on a state-sanctioned scale (1995). The risk for the listener—a risk present from the first moment of the encounter with testimony—is a complete reimagining of oneself in relation to one’s community in a way ‘that defies storytelling, “lifting to consciousness,” or literalized metaphors’ (Avni 1995, 213).” See Salverson, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Land Mines,” 60. 50. Saltzman, Making Memory Matter. 51.  Salverson, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Land Mines,” 61–62.

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52.  Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). 53. Ibid. 54. Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999). 55.  From a Ruined Garden, second edition, translated, edited, and introduction by Jack Kugelmass & Jonathan Boyarin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 56. Jenni Frazer, “Wiesel: Yes, We Really Did Put God on Trial.” The Jewish Chronicle [London, U.K.], (September 19, 2008) (TheJC.com). 57.  This is not to imply that historical and other representations of the past are simply arbitrary. As historian Wulf Kansteiner points out, “Memory studies offer an opportunity to acknowledge that historical representations are negotiated, selective, present-oriented, and relative, while insisting that the experiences they reflect cannot be manipulated at will.” See Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory no. 41 (May 2002): 179–197, especially page 195. 58.  See Vivian M. Patraka, “Spectacles of Suffering: Performing presence, absence, and historical memory at U.S. Holocaust museums.” In Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Also see Patraka, Spectacular Suffering. Additionally see Andrea Liss, “Artifactual Testimonies and the Stagings of Holocaust Memory,” in Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma, edited by Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert (Lanham, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 117–134. 59.  See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). 60.  Yerushalmi writes: “The Hebrew Bible seems to have no hesitations in commanding memory. . . . Altogether, the verb zakhor appears in its various declensions in the Bible no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times, usually with either Israel or God as the subject, for memory is incumbent on both. The verb is complemented by its obverse—forgetting. As Israel is enjoined to remember, so is it adjured not to forget. Both imperatives have resounded with enduring effect among the Jews since biblical times. . . . Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.” Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 5. 61.  Here is Yerushalmi on historiography and the past: “When I spoke earlier of the coincidence of the rise of modern Jewish historiography and the decay of Jewish memory, I had in mind the specific kind of memory of the past, that of Jewish tradition. But hardly any Jew today is without some Jewish past. Total amnesia is still relatively rare. The choices for Jews as for non-Jews is not whether or not to have a past, but rather—what kind of past shall one have.” See Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 99. 62. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 98. 63.  A “Memory Studies” focus on historical accounts as narrative shows that history also relies on collective memory although historians do not always acknowledge their discipline’s participation in that project.

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64.  Wieseltier, “A Privation of Providence,” 89–90. 65.  Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review No. 46 (2 T174: 2002): 145–156. 66.  See Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, Responsa from the Holocaust (New York: Judaica Press, 2001). Rabbi Oshry, who was in the Kovno (Lithuania) Ghetto, wrote the questions and answers that were posed to him on scraps of paper, buried them in cans, and was able to find them after the War. These collected Responsa are both chilling and humane in imagining any future human survival, let alone one that is morally viable.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Badde, Paul. “Zvi Kolitz.” In Yosl Rakover Talks to God. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review no. 46 (2002): 145–56. Feldman, Jackie. Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. Frazer, Jenni. “Wiesel: Yes, We Really Did put God on Trial.” The Jewish Chronicle. London, UK: TheJC.com, September 19, 2008. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory no. 41 (May 2002): 179–97.  Kassow, Samuel D. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Kolitz, Zvi. “Yosl Rakover Talks to God.” In Yosl Rakover Talks to God: Afterwords by Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier. Edition established by Paul Badde. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Kugelmass, Jack and Jonathan Boyarin, editors and translators. From a Ruined Garden. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu.” In Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme. Edited by Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, copyright Albin Michel, 1963. First edition 1955. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Loving the Torah More Than God.” In Yosl Rakover Talks to God with Afterwords by Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Liss, Andrea. “Artifactual Testimonies and the Stagings of Holocaust Memory.” In Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma. Edited by Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, 117– 34. Lanham, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Oshry, Rabbi Ephraim. Responsa from the Holocaust. New York: Judaica Press. 2001. First edition 1983.



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Patraka, Vivian M. “Spectacles of Suffering: Performing presence, absence, and historical memory at U.S. Holocaust museums.” In Performance and Cultural Politics. Edited by Elin Diamond. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Patraka, Vivian M. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999. Rosen, Jonathan. “A Quarrel and a Prayer.” The New York Times, November 19, 1999. Roskies, David G. “Dividing the Ruins: Communal Memory in Yiddish and Hebrew.” In After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence. Edited by David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist. Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge Press, 2012. Saltzman, Liz. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago: University of Chicago, October 2006. Salverson, Judith. “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Land Mines.” In Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma. Edited by Roger I Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, & Claudia Eppert, 59–74. Lanham, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Sampson, Elissa. “Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d: Interview with David Mandelbaum, Artistic Director, New Yiddish Repertory Theater.” New York: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2011. Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992. Van Beeck, Franz Jozef. “My Encounter with Yossel Rakover.” In Yossel Rakover Speaks to God; Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith. Edited by Zvi Kolitz. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1995. Wieseltier, Leon. “Privation of Providence.” In Yosl Rakover Talks to God with Afterwords by Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle and London: University of Washington, 1996. First edition 1982.

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Chapter Nineteen

“Don’t Forget the Potatoes” Imagining God Through Food Susan Handelman

Prayer for peace, and grace, and spiritual food, For wisdom and guidance—for all these are good, But don’t forget the potatoes.

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—“Prayer and Potatoes,” J. T. Pettee1

Yes, indeed, let’s “not forget the potatoes” when we talk about how Jews imagine God. Judaism, needless to say, has its many holiday feasts and fasts, intricate laws of kashrut and blessings to be said over foods, along with endless rabbinic commentary about it all. (We all know the familiar quip: “How do you sum up the meaning of all the Jewish holidays? ‘They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat’”). As contemporary food writer Ruth Reichl puts it: There is “a subtext in every tale we tell about food.”2 But had I been asked to write for this volume years ago, I would have dealt with epistemology and philosophy, and forgotten those potatoes. Here, I am going to make my way back to them. In my earlier academic career, I researched the connections between rabbinic hermeneutics and postmodern literary theory, and engaged with figures such as Scholem, Benjamin, Levinas, Rosenzweig, and Derrida. They, like me, were modern intellectual Jews struggling with Jewish tradition, theology, and contemporary philosophy. Later, I realized I had missed something critical: the imaginative creativity of rabbinic Jewish exegesis, of the “Oral Torah (Torah she-be-al’ peh, lit. “Torah of the Mouth”) is mediated through the personal and living teacher-student (Rav and talmid) relationship. Classical Jewish “texts” are not just abstract webs of language, documents of cultural history, or theological narratives—but rhetorically self-conscious “pedagogical” performances. They enact and engender that teacher/student relationship. 347

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I chose a university career because teaching felt to me as much my vocation as scholarship. So I went on to research the mentor/disciple relationship in my “Make Yourself a Teacher”: Rabbinic Tales of Mentors and Disciples (2011). In the introduction to Make Yourself a Teacher, I cited the following daring “food” parable from the Midrash:

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Another explanation of, “And he gave to Moses, when he finished talking with him upon Mount Sinai, two tablets of Testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God” [Exod. 31:18]. . . . It is written: “For God gives wisdom (hochmah). Out of His mouth comes knowledge (da’at) and discernment (tevunah)” [Prov. 2:6]. Wisdom is great, but greater still is knowledge and discernment. So God gives wisdom. But to him whom He loves, “out of His own mouth” comes knowledge and discernment [. . . ] R. Yitzhak and R. Levi discussed this verse. One said: “It can be compared to a rich man who had a son. The son came home from school and found a platter of food in front of his father. His father took a piece and gave it to him . . . but the son said: ‘I only want the piece which is in your mouth.’ The father gave it to him from his own mouth, because he was so beloved.” [. . . ] Another explanation of “For God gives wisdom”: You find that when Israel stood ready to receive the Torah on Mount Sinai, they wanted to hear the Ten Commandments from God’s own mouth. R. Pinhas ben Hama, the priest, said: “Two things did Israel ask of God—to see His likeness and to hear from His own mouth the Decalogue, as it says, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’” [Song of Songs 1:2].3

In this midrash, “seeing” God is connected to eating and kissing, a “giving from the “mouth” which signifies deep love and intimacy—in other words, to a teaching that is not just externally spoken with the lips or read on a page, but comes from even further: from “inside the mouth,” “spirit to spirit,” “breath to breath,” inner soul to inner soul, and penetrates deep into the body.4 I would dare say that this “piece which is in your mouth”—this intimate connection and the hunger for it—is the ultimate religious meaning of all the food concerns, laws, rituals, images, and metaphors permeating Biblical, Midrashic, Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and Hassidic literature. Simply put, food has a central place in the ways that Jews have hungered for, known, and imagined God. So in this essay, I would like to explore that “Torah of the Mouth” more literally than I ever have before, and inquire how Jews imagine God “through the mouth”—through food. With the recent rise of “Food Studies” and “Food Theory” in academia, scholars have begun to look anew at the history and cultural meanings of Jewish food. There is a mass of new ethnographic and anthropological work on Jewish foodways—not to mention the proliferating Jewish cookbooks on the

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bestseller lists, and popular cooking television shows. But philosophers and theologians, after all, also have to eat . . . or there would be no philosophy. What does that mean on a deeper level? What’s the connection between food, philosophy, and faith? Here, I’m not going to use the tools of history, anthropology, semiotics, or cultural studies. These have been employed quite well by others engaging this topic.5 Instead, I want to build on insights of two figures who have inspired me in their writings about food: one a Sephardic rabbi and one a non-Jew. It’s the rabbi of whom I will mostly speak, but I preface my discussion of his work with some brief words about and from the non-Jew: M. F. K. [Mary Francis Kennedy] Fisher (1908–1992). Originally from Whittier, California, she was a pioneer of twentieth-century food writing. W. H. Auden famously remarked about her: “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”6 The rabbi, Yéhouda Léon Askénazi, lived during the same era (1922–1996). He was born in Oran, Algeria to a long line of rabbis and kabbalists. After World War II, he immigrated to France and became a leader of post-war French Jewry and one of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He is usually referred to by the name “Manitou”—a nickname he acquired as a young man in the French Scouting movement. (In NativeAmerican language, the name “Manitou” signifies “Great Spirit” or “the Big Chief.”) I will refer to him that way from here on. Because Manitou’s works have not yet been translated from French and Hebrew into English, he is not as well-known as his colleagues in post–World War II France, in what came to be called the “Parisian School of Jewish Thought” (L’Ếcole de Pensée Juive de Paris): Emmanuel Levinas, Éliane Amado Levy-Valensi, Elie Wiesel, Albert Memmi, Andre Neher, and other such luminaries. So I hope this essay will serve a kind of introduction to him, as well. At first glance, of course, the California food writer and Sephardic rabbi seem like an “odd couple.” Yet both M. F. K. Fisher and Manitou deeply pondered, each in his or her own way, the relationship between our physical and spiritual hungers. Each one’s life and work was far more complex than any simple labels. French culture, though, was a critical part of each of their identities. From her first marriage in 1929 until well into her later life, Fisher spent many years living on and off in France, which became a second home. Like Manitou, she suffered in Europe from the rise of Nazism and World War II. During her life, she published twenty-seven books. The three which established her reputation and are counted among her best came out during World War II: Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), and The Gastronomical Me (1943). They reflect its turmoil, her personal struggles, and meditations on love, loss, and life. Food is the ostensible subject, but as she once said, “I do not consider myself a food writer.”7

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In 1943, in the midst of the war, and after the death of her second husband by suicide after an excruciating illness, Buerger’s disease, which led to amputation of his leg and ceaseless pain, Fisher penned one of the most eloquent and famous passages in all food writing: People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggles for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, and unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I’m really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. . . . I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling you about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness. There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wild or more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity. There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.8

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The rest of my essay here is a “Jewish commentary” on this remarkable passage. If there is any comparable quotation that sums up Manitou’s sense of the relation of food and spirituality, it might be this: It is through food that I know I have a Creator. Through food I experience the permanence of my relation to the Creator. If I stopped eating, I would cease to exist. Food is the continuation of the gesture of Creation; it is what maintains me in life. There is yet deeper spiritual meaning: in feeding myself, I spiritualize the material. I transform it into soul. The fact of eating is the religious act par excellence. That’s why, in every religion, the important rituals always connect to food.9

World War II was also a traumatic and formative experience for Manitou. Afterwards, he dedicated his life to repairing for his generation the massive rupture in Jewish community, faith, philosophy, and ethics that had occurred in the Nazi era. He also well understood how in “the dread fact that we must

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“Don’t Forget the Potatoes” 351

eat” there is a “communion of more than our bodies.” For him “this dread fact” provides the very foundation of Jewish faith and moral consciousness, as we’ll see. I might also say, a bit tongue-in-cheek, that it’s not accidental a rabbi from France, with its decidedly gastronomic culture, would write brilliantly about food and God. After all, France produced both Descartes—the founder of modern philosophy who famously argued, “I think, therefore I am”—and, one hundred years later also Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century creator of the gastronomic essay. It was Brillat-Savarin who first said the famous words: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”10 (M. F. K. Fisher, in fact, was the acclaimed English translator of Brillat-Savarin’s classic 1845 work, The Physiology of Taste.) Or, as a contemporary French-Jewish rabbi and teacher of mine likes to say every Passover: “The Rabbis understood that in order to change your consciousness, you have to change your menu.”11 Like M. F. K. Fisher, Manitou’s life traversed different cultures and continents. In the years before World War II, when Fisher was taking boats back and forth across the Atlantic between her homes in California, France and Switzerland, trying to find herself as a young wife and writer in an increasingly unhappy marriage, Manitou was a young man studying in a traditional yeshiva in the multicultural French colonial city of Oran and in French secular high school. He then studied Kabbalah in Marrakesh, along with philosophy and psychology at the University of Algiers, and early on was known as a brilliant and outstanding scholar.12 All that came to an abrupt end with the German victory over France and rise of the Vichy government, which ruled Oran till 1942. After the allies liberated Algeria, he was drafted into the French Foreign Legion, fought the Germans, and was wounded in Strasbourg. Then began the second phase of his life: immigration to France after the war; studies in philosophy and anthropology at the Sorbonne and University of Paris; and marriage to a woman who had lost all her family in Auschwitz. He then began his life’s work of rebuilding the traumatized Jewish community of France and trying to guide the perplexed of his generation.13 In Manitou’s writings about food and Judaism, which I’ll examine in depth below, he also employs a special method of analysis which he learned from his greatest teacher in France after the war, the brilliant Russian-Jewish refugee scholar, Jacob Gordin (1896–1947). Gordin, wrote Manitou, represented for me a type of a cultural synthesis on very high level between traditional Jewish culture and European culture. Jacob Gordin was a great Talmudist, Kabbalist, and philosopher who made us discover the possibility of a relation between general thought and Jewish tradition, a relation formulated according to the criteria of Jewish tradition. We rediscovered the importance of Jewish tradition in universal culture.14

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“Returning to Hebrew” was one of the key principles he absorbed from Gordin, which we will see at work in his analysis of food, faith, God, and Torah.15 He defines this “return to Hebrew” in philosophical terms as the “rehabilitation of the immediate intuitions of Jewish consciousness as a coherence of thought.”16 That is, one does not place the epistemology or philosophicalcultural heritage of Western thought as the higher criteria by which to then judge or interpret Judaism; rather one retains these “immediate intuitions of Jewish consciousness” and thought as primary, and then filters Western thought and other cultures through it.17 FOOD AND FAITH: I EAT, THEREFORE I AM CREATED

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After Abraham’s guests, the travelers, had eaten and drunk, they stood up to bless Abraham. But he said to them, “Did you eat of what was mine? You ate of that which belongs to the God of the Universe [El Olam] Thank, praise and bless the One who spoke and created the universe.”18

Manitou’s methodology in the two essays I’ll now discuss is characteristic of the approach he learned from Jacob Gordin. We’ll see how he takes a verse from Hebrew scripture or a rabbinic source, elicits those “immediate intuitions of Jewish consciousness” and then “translates” them psychologically, philosophically and anthropologically into Western categories. Then he “re-translates” back into specifically Jewish categories of thought from the Jewish legal and mystical traditions. At the same time, the re-translation critiques the limits of the Western philosophical categories and supersedes them. There is a coalescence of the several levels, even as he expresses complex ideas in seemingly simple terms. This way of teaching and learning also served his larger religious, philosophical and educational goals in post–World War II France. And ultimately it will lead to us not forgetting those potatoes. The first essay, “Foi et morale” (“Faith and Ethics”) comes from a volume in French of Manitou’s collected writings on the Jewish holidays, Ki Mitsion II: Le calendrier hébraïque. The second is from a collection on the weekly liturgical biblical reading, Ki Mitsion I: notes sur la paracha. In the first piece, he examines the biblical idea of Creation and ties it to ethics and eating. The second comments on Chapter 1 of Leviticus and analyzes the food sacrifices in the rituals of the ancient Jerusalem Temple. The first takes a philosophical approach; the second is more anthropological and psychological. At the beginning of “Foi et morale,” he probes the meaning of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, by noting that the biblical assertion in the first lines of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” is a foundation of Jewish thought. No news there of course, but he goes on

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to refine the nature of this assertion: The Bible, he says, is not concerned here to “prove the existence of God” but rather to stress the nature of God as “Creator.” Why is that distinction important? Here is his “translation” into philosophical language: this assertion also confirms our “manner of being in the world” as that of a “creature”; and being a creature means that I exist only because I have received the gift of being that brings me into existence and sustains me as such. Furthermore, to bestow existence on something outside the self is also the fundamental moral act: “The foundation of moral consciousness also begins here: to recognize oneself as created, as having been given existence gratuitously by the Creator. The project of our lives, then, becomes to morally earn that existence.”19 Now, where are we constantly reminded of the fact that we are not autonomous beings, not self-created? Food! Food, “the need to constantly nourish and sustain ourselves, reminds us of our finitude in a way no abstract philosophy can.”20 Yes, even the philosopher has to eat. Without that nourishment, there is neither “I think” nor “I am.” Or in Manitou’s words: “[T]he fundamental experience of being created comes from the fact that a person has to eat in order to live”; and “the presence of the highest values depends, at the end of the day, on the fact of physical and food . . . that’s a philosophical scandal and true mystery.”21 We begin to see the movement back and forth between Jewish thought and philosophy, and the implicit critique of philosophy in favor of those potatoes.22 The next part of “Foi et morale” further addresses the relations among food, philosophy and religion, and then re-translates the whole back into the traditional Jewish discourse of midrash. One could, says Manitou, first try to present creation as a philosophical idea. Indeed, there is a great theological and philosophical tradition of “proofs for the existence of God” that also try to demonstrate the world was created. Yet, as he notes, that evidence only persuades those who are sensitive to the postulates of rationality, and who already agree on certain principles of causality—in other words, to a certain family of intellectuals. But he claims that religious truth—which he defines here as “a coherent system of religious thought” that is “universal,” i.e., “that is accessible to everybody”—can’t attach its message to any particular intellectual method or philosophical school of thought. In fact, there are many intellectual systems in which the metaphysical notion of creation has no place at all.23 In sum, Jewish tradition can’t make the intellectual conviction of the creation of the world, or attachment to any one philosophical system, the foundation for religious consciousness. (In one of his typically ironic aphorisms, Manitou is reported to have defined a theologian as “a philosopher who tries to persuade himself that he’s a believer.”24 Varying philosophical systems, he

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adds, can be a secondary means to clarify something more fundamental and universally accessible to Jewish religious consciousness. That, he defines as “a primary piety” which comes about directly by knowing oneself as a creature, i.e., not as an autonomous being. Everyone, whether intellectual or illiterate, feels the subjective, immediate, and urgent experience of bodily hunger and the need to eat; knowing oneself existentially as a creature by virtue of this need to eat is a basis for this “primary piety.”25 So far Manitou. Obviously, though, not all the many writers, philosophers, theologians, and gastronomes who have written about eating have come to the same conclusion. One could instead decide to become an Epicurean, a Stoic, a glutton, an ascetic—or see food as a simple mark of our tragic mortality . . . and nothing more. The contemporary literary critic Sandra Gilbert, in her recent book The Culinary Imagination, interprets Brillat-Savarin’s famous “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” precisely in that sense:

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That he ate at all—that he had to eat and had to eat food that had once been alive—is of course tautological, yet crucial. Like all of us, Brillat-Savarin ate what he was himself: As a mortal being, he ate other mortal things, he ate mortality. Thus what he ate was what he was. He ate because he was, and he was because he ate. He resided, like the rest of us, on the food chain.26

Manitou, though, has reframed that sense of mortality (“I am because I eat”) through a Jewish perspective to connect food, faith, and ethics. He now proceeds to subsume the philosophical language back into traditional Jewish discourse by citing a famous midrash about Abraham’s teaching his radical new belief in the one God to the guests he would invite and feed in his tent. Let’s first look at the biblical story, then the midrashic commentary, and then Manitou’s interpretation of it. In Genesis, the Bible describes Abraham’s various wanderings, one of which involves a stay in Beersheva: “And he [Abraham] planted a tamarisk tree (eshel ‫ )אשל‬in Beersheva; and he called (va-yikra) there on the name of the Lord (Havayeh), the Everlasting God (El Olam).”27 In the midrashic commentary to this story, the ancient Rabbis characteristically probe this seemingly simple verse and ask: What was this tamarisk tree that Abraham planted, and why was it so important to note its name? What’s the relation between the first and second part of the verse, between this tree and Abraham’s calling there on the name of God? What do the different Hebrew names used for God (Havayeh) and (El Olam) here mean? The Rabbis offer answers by playing on the words and letters for “tamarisk-tree” (eshel), and those for the verb “to call” (from the Hebrew root ‫“ קרא‬kara”). There are various versions of this midrash, but here is the most well-known and complete from the Talmud, Sotah 10a–b:28



“Don’t Forget the Potatoes” 355

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“And he [Abraham] planted a tamarisk tree (eshel) in Beersheba” [Gen 21:33]. Resh Lakish said: “This teaches that Abraham made an orchard (pardes) and planted in it all kinds of choice fruits.” R. Yehudah and R. Nehemiah disagree over this interpretation: One of them said that it was an orchard (pardes). The other said that it was an inn for lodging [pundak—also interpreted elsewhere as the Hebrew word eshel: ‫אשל‬, the letters alef, shin, lamed as an acronym for akhilah, shtiyah, linah: “food, drink, lodging.”] Now, we could accept the reasoning of the one who argued it was an orchard, because the Biblical verse here says: “and he planted.” But in the opposing argument—that it was an inn—what could the verb “and he planted” mean?—But actually, there is also proof for that interpretation of the verb [“and he planted”] because, it is also written elsewhere in the Bible, “And he shall plant the tents of his palace . . .” (Daniel 11:45) [using the word “planting” for “tents”]. “And he called there on the name of the Lord (Havayeh), the Everlasting God (El Olam).” Resh Lakish said: “Don’t read/vocalize it as ‘and he called’ (‫ויקרא‬ va-yikra)—but instead as ‘and he made to call’ (‫ ויקריא‬va- yakr’i).” This teaches that our father Abraham caused [‫ ]היקריא‬the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, to be uttered by the mouth of every passer-by [hikr’i; lit “he caused to call”]. How so? After his guests, the travelers, had eaten and drunk, they stood up to bless Abraham. But he said to them, “Did you eat of what was mine? You ate of that which belongs to the God of the Universe (El Olam). Thank, praise and bless the One who spoke and created the universe.” [interpolations mine]

At first glance, the midrash is enigmatic and confusing: Why does it interpret the Biblical verse of Gen. 21:33 non-literally? Why interpret the tamarisk tree (eshel) as an orchard of fruits, or an inn, or a tent? And how do those places—meant to attract and serve guests—relate to the next part of the verse about Abraham’s calling on the name of God as El Olam? “El Olam” can be translated as either “Everlasting God,” or more literally “God of all the world” (in Hebrew, olam can mean both “world” and “everlasting”). Manitou proposes the following interpretation, in line with his thoughts above on God, food, ethics, and philosophy: Abraham does not instruct his guests through intellectual argument or philosophical speculation. Instead, he teaches by personally giving them hospitality and food (not forgetting the potatoes). Then he directs his guests to thank the One to whom they owe the meal, to thank the One who “perpetuates their being” as creatures. In other words, he makes them discover God as their Creator, the Being who endows them with being. Food, which enables them to perpetuate their existence, helps them recognize God as the Being who gave them that existence. In sum, he writes, “the midrash makes the fact of feeding and nourishment the vehicle of religious experience.”29

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Or, to put it another way, food becomes a way of “imagining the Jewish God.” Food creates a relation to and recognition of the Creator and of my personal Creator—not through abstract philosophical speculation but embodied practice, including verbal blessing and the social practice of sharing it with others. As Elyakim Simsovic, one of Manitou’s veteran students and editors, puts it: Eating contains the passing on of creation, is continuation of creation. I connect eating to the Creator. To eat is to know I am created. I owe my existence to somebody else, to another. Abraham recognized his creator. The Creator made a place for me in his world; to invite guests is to give them a place in my world, and therefore is the ultimate kindness. Abraham sat and shared with others in eating.30

THE PERFECT MEAL: FOOD AS PLEASURE AND FOOD AS ATONEMENT

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“When the Holy Temple was in existence, the Altar atoned for Israel; today, a person’s table atones for him.”31

M. F. K. Fisher concluded the famous quotation I cited above with the words, “We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of hum