Thinking Jewish Culture in America 9780739174470, 9780739174463

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Thinking Jewish Culture in America

Graven Images Series Editor: Leonard V. Kaplan University of Wisconsin, Madison 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 ever-changing 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

Thinking Jewish Culture in America Edited by Ken Koltun-Fromm

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books Excerpts from "Jew on a Bridge" and "Either/Or" from WAIT by C.K. Williams. Copyright © 2010 by C.K. Williams. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Text from GREAT HOUSE: A NOVEL by Nicole Krauss. Copyright © 2010 by Nicole Krauss. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. "Invitation" by Esther Cameron. Reprinted by permission of Esther Cameron. "Turbulence" by Pierre Joris. Reprinted by permission of Pierre Joris. Text from SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE OF PAUL CELAN by Pail Celan, translated by John Felstiner. Copyright © 2001 by John Felstiner. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thinking Jewish culture in America / edited by Ken Koltun-Fromm. pages cm. -- (Graven images) "All eleven essays have their roots in a symposium held at Haverford College in May, 2011."-Introduction. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-7446-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-7447-0 (electronic) 1. Judaism--United States--Congresses. 2. Jews--United States--Identity--Congresses. 3. Jews--United States--Intellectual life--Congresses. 4. United States--Civilization--Jewish influences--Congresses. 5. Jews--Cultural assimilation--United States--Congresses. I. Koltun-Fromm, Ken, editor of compilation. II. Koltun-Fromm, Ken, editor of compilation. authenticity, vision, culture: Michael Wyschogrod's The Body of Faith. BM205.K66 2013 305.892'4073--dc23 2013036344 TM 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

To Arnold Eisen and the students enrolled in Modern Jewish Thought at Haverford College, Spring 2011

Contents

Introduction Ken Koltun-Fromm

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Part I: About Culture 1 Jewish Peoplehood and the Nationalist Paradigm in American Jewish Culture Noam Pianko 2 Otherness and Liberal Democratic Solidarity: Buber, Kaplan, Levinas And Rorty’s Social Hope Akiba Lerner 3 Philip Rieff’s “Jew of Culture” and the Ends of Higher Education in America Gregory Kaplan 4 Reading a Book like an Object: The Case of The Jewish Catalog Ari Y Kelman Part II: Art, Literature, Culture 5 Beyond the Chasm: Religion and Literature after the Holocaust Claire E. Sufrin 6 Celan’s Holocaust: The Scene of Instruction for America Leonard V. Kaplan 7 Aura and the “Spiritual in Art” in the Age of Digital Reproduction Zachary Braiterman

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Contents

Part III: Theology and Culture 8 A Personal Partnership With God: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Pragmatic Theodicy Einat Ramon 9 “An Ethic of Suffering”: J. B. Soloveitchik as Pragmatist Jessica Rosenberg 10 Intersubjectivity Meets Maternity: Buber, Levinas, and the Eclipsed Relation Mara H. Benjamin 11 Authenticity, Vision, Culture: Michael Wyschogrod’s The Body of Faith Ken Koltun-Fromm Postscript: Thinking Jewish Culture in America Arnold Eisen

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Introduction Ken Koltun-Fromm

This volume thinks American Jewish culture in terms of multiple and complex pluralities, locations, and beliefs that inform Jewish identity in America. Yet rarely, if ever, have cultural theorists turned to American Jewish thought to help understand this complex dynamic of identity performance with all its divergent practices, gestures, performances, and rituals. The contributors to Thinking Jewish Culture in America argue that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture—now considered as a diverse array of reflective practices that never quite inhabit a singular space. Even more, this volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of Jewish culture. Thinking Jewish Culture in America explores how Jewish theorists “think” culture in all its diversity. By drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies, Thinking Jewish Culture enlivens the study of culture to include texts once considered beyond its disciplinary focus. This interdisciplinary dialogue is the guiding principle of all eleven essays included in this volume, which have their roots in a symposium held at Haverford College in May, 2011. With support and funding by the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College, the symposium in Modern Jewish Thought and Culture invited ten scholars (all but one include their papers here) to discuss current research in cultural studies and Jewish thought. The symposium honored the work of Arnold Eisen, now Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, whose work builds constructive bridges between Jewish disciplinary concerns. Chancellor Eisen includes a postscript to the eleven contributions to this volume. To be sure, the contributors have all drawn inspiration from Eisen’s research, but they also look to unexplored sources, offering models of cultural practices that move beyond Eisen’s own research interests. Think1

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ing Jewish Culture traverses new interdisciplinary developments so that Jewish thought becomes a transformative cultural practice. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Culture, together with Eisen’s postscript essay, each position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibilities of contemporary Jewish culture. These diverse essays in Jewish thought re-imagine cultural space as a public and sometimes contested performance of Jewish identity, and they each seek to re-enliven that space with reflective accounts of cultural meaning. How do Jews imagine themselves as embodied actors in America? Do cultural obligations limit or expand notions of the self? How should we imagine Jewish thought as a cultural performance? What notions of peoplehood might sustain a vibrant Jewish collectivity in a globalized economy? How do programs in Jewish studies work within the academy? These and other questions engage both Jewish thought and culture, opening space for theoretical works to broaden the range of cultural studies, and to deepen our understanding of Jewish cultural dynamics. Thinking Jewish Culture is a work about Jewish cultural identity reflected through literature, visual arts, philosophy, and theology. But it is more than a mere reflection of cultural patterns and choices: the argument pursued throughout Thinking Jewish Culture is that reflective sources help produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze. Culture is diverse rather than uniform, contested but not settled, and performed rather than inhabited. But this is certainly not how this term has been historically understood by researches and practitioners alike. Note how two of the most prominent sociologists of contemporary Judaism, Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, explain Jewish culture in terms of tradition and change. They appropriate Clifford Geertz’s well-known definition of culture as a “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols” to emphasize how a culture requires “inherited meanings,” but one that continually develops within changing environments. 1 But Geertz himself appeals to “a system of inherited conceptions,” implying a tradition of stability, permanence, and sedimentation. Culture arrives as a pattern of inheritance, and though Liebman and Cohen recognize how symbols must undergo meaningful change to stay relevant, those symbols nonetheless “retain their image as unchanging and immutable.” 2 Cultures do indeed change, as Geertz, Liebman, and Cohen all suggest; but those revisions become solidified as the accepted, transmitted meanings for the next generation. This story of continuity and change reads as a form of Weber’s routinization of charisma, where new meanings take on authority vested in formal institutions. Liebman and Cohen may account for cultural continuity and development in this way, but they do not engage a Judaism far more diverse, contested, and dramatic. Yet the authors of this volume believe that American Judaism is precisely

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this kind of culture, where hybrid identities, contested debates, and performative work comprise the very stuff of cultural life. Geertz’s appeal to inherited patterns of meaning, together with his sense of progress, have clearly influenced how Liebman and Cohen model Judaism as a culture. But this model has strong historical roots as well. Much of what theorists like Geertz think about culture derives from Matthew Arnold (18221888) and his Culture and Anarchy (1867-68), where he defined culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” But Arnold expands this elitist sensibility by demanding that culture “is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection.” Culture moves us, as Arnold personifies this domain, “to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that.” 3 This harmonious beauty cultivated “as an inward condition of the mind and spirit” would, as Raymond Williams points out, help mitigate against Arnold’s great fear: a lawless state of anarchy. 4 In Arnold’s view, one achieves a higher, more ordered self in community with others, and so perfection “consists in becoming something rather than having something.” 5 Culture is an achievement by selves yearning for harmonious perfection with others. This sense of cultivated refinement is quite close to the German notion of Bildung as the developed, respected personality of the European bourgeoisie. And this echoes the idea of culture as husbandry that Williams claims was its dominant sense until the early nineteenth century: culture as the “tending of natural growth” that, by analogy, comes to mean “a process of human training.” 6 Culture makes us human, so Arnold claims, and places us in an elevated condition of human perfection. This schema of human achievement ties Arnold’s well-known account of culture to the then burgeoning field of anthropology, and especially E. B. Tylor’s influential Primitive Culture (1871). 7 Tylor offers a more coherent, uniform sense of culture among “various grades” and “stages of development or evolution.” His is an assertive hierarchy of cultural success where “the phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable order of evolution.” This human achievement is secured rather than won. The ranking is tight and fixed because culture is too: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” 8 Where Arnold understood culture as an inner achievement worked out within community, Tylor’s culture is a scientific object “apt for the study of laws of human thought and action.” Culture is a recognizable, fixed, and uniform entity which the anthropologist can analyze, dissect, and judge from afar. The first step in the study of culture “is to dissect it into details, and to classify these in their proper groups.” Indeed, Tylor compares the study of culture to the field of husbandry, likening the classificatory details of culture to plants and ani-

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mal species. Here, culture does not train persons so much as delimits them as particular kinds of beings along an evolutionary scale. So Tylor recommends “comparing races near the same grade of civilization” because the generalization is true: “one set of savages is like another.” 9 In one sense, both Tylor and Arnold seek to protect the bourgeois values of (in Arnold’s succulent phrase) sweetness and light. 10 Yet Arnold’s progressive humanism envisions perfection for all; Tylor’s cultural categories put all in their place. Both Tylor and Arnold deploy the term “culture” to classify and protect cherished values of their prized English civilization. Tylor imagines culture as a kind of social network within which we find ourselves, whereas Arnold indicates how culture works upon us to cultivate desirable habits. Geertz appropriates these two senses of culture in his own definition, but this is a sensibility that Geertz too inhabits with others. Another contemporary view, voiced in 1972 by Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), echoes these definitional claims, suggesting just how ubiquitous and influential these views have become in the modern West. For Trilling, culture is the idea “of a unitary complex of interacting assumptions, modes of thought, habits, and styles, which are connected in secret as well as overt ways with the practical arrangements of a society and which, because they are not brought to consciousness, are unopposed in their influence over men’s minds.” 11 Here we recognize Tylor’s claim to cultural wholeness and uniformity (“a unitary complex”) together with Arnold’s progressive cultivation (“their influence over men’s minds”). But Trilling supplements these views with a significant qualification: culture works in the background, unconsciously, so that it never meets opposition from those so influenced by it. For culture to function as “a unitary complex of interacting assumptions,” it must remain uncontested. Culture for Trilling is neither the site of conflict nor the playground for competing visions of “the practical arrangements of a society.” Instead, it is an invisible power of social control. Trilling alludes to the spectral quality of culture as a persuasive yet concealed force of social habits and knowledge. But he also raises the problem of its location: where does culture actually reside? As Michael Walzer contends, “cultures don’t survive in people’s heads. They need bounded spaces and organized activities of this [institutional] kind.” 12 Contemporary social and cultural theorists are particularly worried about notions of boundaries and skeptical of organized activities. This is especially acute for those who wish to recapture an undercurrent of contested struggle that someone like Arnold wishes to avoid. Homi Bhabha explicitly raises this concern in the very title of his work, The Location of Culture (1994), as he foregrounds the peripheral and emerging communities that challenge Trilling’s appeal to unopposed influences. For Bhabha, culture is a “project” in which persons recreate the self through recognized performances. 13 This cultural work is not invisible but subversive as it decenters both Arnold’s “sweetness and light,”

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and Tylor’s hierarchical values of culture. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin extend Bhabha’s social critique to include diasporic communities, this time not as peripheral but as central locations of cultural contest. For the Boyarins, the Diaspora does not arrive from the periphery to upset the center; instead, culture in all its contingency and vitality happens beyond territorial markers. 14 Diaspora as cultural concept denies stable origins and uncontested domains. Appeals to the center, to cultural value and order, and especially to symbols as “unchanging and immutable,” represent instead overt political claims to power and legitimacy. With Bhabha and the Boyarins, culture is often a code word for repressive social control, or a form of ideological mystification that must be deconstructed and laid bare. We see this already “at the crossroads” of anthropology and history, where texts now are recognized as “embedded within regimes of power, as are the practices with which they are associated and the institutions that mediate their production, dissemination, and use.” 15 In the context of this edited volume on American Jewish culture, these works in cultural studies helpfully turn our attention to issues of location, contest, and performance as purposeful, creative, and emerging arenas of culture. We make culture, as Tim Ingold’s work on material weaving nicely argues, as much as culture makes us. 16 The point here is that cultural production is contested work, not insignificant play, and so it requires continual upkeep, constant struggle, and genuine performances of personal achievement. One recent work on ritual suggests how the cultural sensibilities that Trilling imagined as behind-the-scenes really do require daily acts of “world construction.” 17 For Adam Seligman and his co-authors of Ritual and Its Consequences, ritual is a vital mode of constructive engagement: it is “the creation of an order as if it were truly the case.” The world remains “fragmented and fractured,” and no amount of shared ritual will create “a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality ‘as it really is.’” Ritual performers construct worlds in the subjunctive register, “as if it were truly the case,” while ever mindful that nothing is “permanent, pure, and singular.” 18 Someone like E. B. Tylor could dissect and classify cultures because they were, for him, static objects of perceivable wholeness. But the authors of Ritual and Its Consequences remind us that cultural activity is meaning-making activity; it is a performative space of social contestation in which persons create worlds “as if it were truly the case,” even as they are more or less aware of their own contingent and limited selves. Culture is not a scientific object to be studied from the arm chair; it is an arena of performative struggle for identity. This is how the authors in this volume deploy and think about Jewish culture in America. They each, in their own distinctive ways, recognize and accept Marc Manganaro’s revealing insight that “models of culture are created, employed, elaborated upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored.” 19 Arnold, Tylor, the Boyarins, Bhabha, and certainly Trilling all exploit models

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of culture that in turn justify and reflect their ideological commitments. The authors of this volume are no different; they deploy models of culture that expand the influential reach of modern Jewish thought for Jewish cultural performance in America. In this sense, Thinking Jewish Culture continues the work by Sally Promey and David Morgan in visual culture. They too wish to expand the cultural arena, but here to include visual productions, such that “pictures are worthy of consideration as constituent, rather than subsidiary, elements of religious practice and experience.” Authors of Thinking Jewish Culture share their view that visual culture, like many kinds of culture, is a “dense range of meaning making.” 20 So too is Jewish thought as a production and reflection of those contested meanings of culture. Thinking Jewish Culture in America seeks to bridge thought and culture not to solidify, secure, or to make whole, but rather to inform a model of culture that is transformative, creative, local, and contested. In these senses, this volume supports a multicultural or even a cosmopolitan outlook that “challenges the priority of this monolithic identity in American history,” even if it might not share in its identity politics or notions of group solidarity. 21 This volume supports a cultural model in which Jewish identity is a contested performance worked out in local communities, in religious struggles, in material artifacts, and in ritual practices. Thinking Jewish Culture in America is cultural work, imagining boldly “as if it were truly the case” to inspire future performances of American Jewish culture. Each of the eleven contributions to this volume offer close readings of Jewish texts that engage weighty cultural dynamics in contemporary America, but the volume organizes these essays into three sections: About Culture, Culture and the Arts, and Culture and Theology. The opening section raises critical questions for understanding the dynamics of American Jewish culture, and the challenge, both ideological and material, to move beyond the notion of a static, fixed culture. Noam Pianko investigates how the Jewish nationalist paradigm shapes the agenda for American Jewry. The set of assumptions that underlie this collective identity—the Jewish people united by shared essentialist qualities, national history, and a collective mission—narrowly focuses on nationalism as Zionism in modern Jewish political thought. But this obfuscates the role that nationalism plays in the construction of Jewish identity both outside the land of Israel, and beyond Zionist ideology in the Diaspora. Pianko argues that Jewish conceptions of collectivity, often articulated through the language of “Jewish peoplehood,” are indeed rooted in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism. This heritage, in turn, constrains the ways that American Jews think about identity, for they inevitably gaze through the lens of identity rooted in essential characteristics, membership based primarily on descent, and homeland as Jewish cultural and political center. This mode of engaging American Jewish identity and culture reflects the dominance of a nationalist discourse over the past two centuries.

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Yet Pianko believes that the erosion of nationalist assumptions in a global era presents new challenges and opportunities for rethinking Jewish culture in America. This sense of looking beyond entrenched cultural borders also drives Akiba Lerner’s piece on redemptive hope. Like Pianko, Lerner believes that stable social markers no longer do the cultural work they once did. Inherited communal signifiers that at one time informed Jewish identity in America (anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Israel) are now either more fluid or no longer appeal to large segments of American Jews. Lerner engages Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan, and Emmanuel Levinas with the work of Richard Rorty, one of the great American pragmatists of the twentieth century. Drawing on Rorty’s proposal to separate the Enlightenment’s liberatory politics from its metaphysics, Lerner proposes that modern Jewish discussions of otherness be re-read—now through the lens of neo-pragmatism—as expressions of social hope. Such an emancipatory politics can best be realized through concrete acts of solidarity. Lerner contends that Jewish “otherness” offers new cultural possibilities for democratic solidarity and redemptive politics. Such redemptive hope is rarely found in American universities, so contends Greg Kaplan in his critique of Jewish studies within the American academy. Kaplan appropriates Philip Rieff’s account of “the Jew of Culture” to level sharp criticism at the economic and political structures of higher education, and the ways in which Jewish studies programs are complicit in valuing “the quantitative output of scholarship more than its qualitative significance.” Rieff’s “Jew of Culture” is both insider and outsider to this discourse, but she levels her subversive attack as “court jester, prophetic scold, and avaricious aristocrat all at once.” This ironic style of critical engagement, one that remains skeptical of all ideologies and universal orders, while still measuring culture against “the vertical in authority,” suggests a more honest role for American university departments in general, and Jewish studies programs in particular. Ari Kelman’s concluding essay to this section discusses the materiality of the Jewish Catalog (1973) as a physical artifact instead of a vehicle for conveying ideas. Kelman attends to the material conditions and concerns that produced the book, alongside its actual physical properties, to reveal a counter-narrative about its countercultural vision. Inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog, the Jewish Catalog was both educational and material; the editors understood their book as a tool for reinventing Judaism. Yet the publishers at The Jewish Publication Society interpreted their relationship to the bookishness of the Catalog somewhat differently, recognizing something they could both sell and help make the publishing house relevant. These divergent aspirations for the Jewish Catalog find expression in the book’s material properties, opening alternative ways for thinking Jewish material culture in America.

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The middle section on Jewish artistic production in America discusses how culture works in and through literature and the arts. Claire Sufrin’s essay explores how one can read novels as works of Jewish thought. She considers American Jewish theologians of the 1970s and 1980s who, in the wake of the Holocaust, emphasized meta-historical questions about God’s role in human affairs. Sufrin then turns to Nicole Krauss’ Great House as a novel of postHolocaust theological reflection. Her reading emphasizes the ways in which characters in the novel seek to make sense of their lives and the burdens they inherit from the past. Sufrin argues that Krauss’ work is both an argument for and a demonstration of constructive engagement with cultural legacy. Leonard Kaplan’s essay focuses on the poet Paul Celan, who has influenced a broad range of American poetry and cultural literacy. Celan defined anxiety and trauma as central to our times, and as inescapable experiences of a post-Holocaust society. His poetry is metaphysical and theological, but it also produces deep meditations on American culture. Kaplan’s essay explores the grounds that anchor Celan in an age of groundlessness, and at a time when Judaism is once again fragmented. His suggestive reading indicates that Celan captures the sensibility of a secular Jew with spirit. The final essay in this section turns from literature to the spiritual in art. Zachary Braiterman considers how religion appears through the photographic medium. He does this by way of recuperating Soloveitchik’s surprisingly receptive view of technological culture, and the relations among religion, technology, and art within his work. To be sure, these relations bear a direct impact upon American Jewish culture, but what does Jewish thought and philosophy look like? After considering the influence of Walter Benjamin’s work on photography, Braiterman looks at the sense of aura caught, technologically, in the “straight photography” of Alfred Stieglitz (the pioneer in America of art photography in the first half of the twentieth century), and then turns to the more pronounced sense of aura in the digital photography of Neil Folberg. A student of Anselm Adams, Folberg appropriates Judaism and Jewish “religiosity” directly into his work. Braiterman contends that, under the right affective and cognitive conditions, technologically enhanced digital images are both familiar and disorienting, worldly and other worldly, and these sensibilities inform Jewish culture in America. The third section in Thinking Jewish Culture in America seeks to bridge theological concerns with cultural dynamics. Einat Ramon discusses Abraham Joshua Heschel’s stubborn refusal to assign the primary responsibility for evil in the world in general, and for the Holocaust in particular, to God. Ramon shows that Heschel adopts neither “pagan” nor “naturalist” theodicies to explain evil, and even considers these positions idolatrous. Heschel turns instead to the American pragmatist William James to better formulate his theological response to radical evil. Rooted in pragmatic concerns for human experience, Heschel advances the more traditional Jewish idea that God par-

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ticipates in human suffering, as much or more so than human beings engage in the suffering of God. Jewish culture manifests and provokes this intimate relationship between God and persons. Jessica Rosenberg also turns to William James and his theory of the healthy and sick-souled to reveal how Joseph Soloveitchik’s account of suffering and Jewish law should be understood from within this tradition of American pragmatism. Both James and Soloveitchik draw sharp distinctions between a metaphysical view of suffering and suffering in human experience, and American Jews have long been sympathetic to this instrumentalist reading. Just as Lerner utilizes Rorty to recuperate Buber and Levinas within Jewish culture, Rosenberg weaves James’ psychology into Soloveitchik’s theology to recover the religious passions of Jewish cultural expression. Mara Benjamin argues that those religious passions can be usefully framed within the practice of maternal caregiving. She draws upon the parent/child relationship model to critically assess Buber’s and Levinas’ discourse of intersubjectivity, while focusing on the role of asymmetry and reciprocity in dyadic relationships. For Buber, the I-Thou relation is reciprocal and its normative form takes place between equals; Levinas’ critique and corrective to Buber’s “egalitarianism,” on the other hand, insists on the fundamental asymmetry in the relationship to the Other. Both accounts, however, implicitly assume that the normative encounter takes place between two adult males. Benjamin subjects both Buber and Levinas to feminist considerations of mothering to better address the complex and dynamic task of navigating both reciprocity and asymmetry in relation to young children. The essay demonstrates that making parental and maternal caregiving central, rather than marginal to an account of intersubjectivity, can open up new and useful questions for Jewish cultural thought. Reading the maternal alongside and against the intersubjective in Jewish thought, she concludes, can reenergize both culture and theology. If Benjamin turns to models of parental caregiving to re-engage modern Jewish theology, then Ken Koltun-Fromm recovers the visual practices underlying Jewish theological reflection, and the cultural borders such reflection engenders. He reads Michael Wyschogrod’s provocative theological work, The Body of Faith (1983), as visual discourse that discerns features of Jewish identity in material bodies. Wyschogrod transforms American Jewish culture into the physical location of God’s presence; culture is less the maintenance of practices or beliefs, and far more the visible exposure of God’s presence. Jewish culture is primarily a visual medium of divine revelation. Wyschogrod’s theology captures this visual certainty by exposing a distinctively Jewish visuality that recognizes God’s indwelling in the people Israel. Koltun-Fromm’s essay discusses the cultural dynamics of such visual claims to Jewish authenticity, especially as they relate to pressing contemporary concerns about cultural pluralism and conversion.

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Together these essays offer new resources for thinking Jewish culture in America. They provide critical visions of Jewish identity for both scholars and students, extending models of engagement between cultural studies and Jewish thought. Indeed, the great need for such a volume lies in this: Jewish thought is a cultural resource poorly understood and utilized, and scholars of modern Judaism ought to advance texts that help capture the vibrant dynamic of Jewish culture in America. This is what Thinking Jewish Culture in America performs, and in doing so expands the cultural resources for American Jewry. NOTES 1. Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli & American Experiences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 3. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. Matthew Arnold, Culture & Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1883), xi, 12, and 14. 4. Ibid., 12; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 113. 5. Arnold, Culture & Anarchy, 12. 6. Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, xvi; and Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87. 7. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (London: John Murray, 1871). 8. Ibid., 1 and 9. 9. Ibid., 1, 9 and 11. 10. Arnold entitles his first chapter in Culture & Society as “Sweetness and Light.” See Arnold, Culture & Anarchy, 5. 11. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 125. 12. Quoted in Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 203; see Michael Walzer, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 88–98, especially page 93. 13. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 12. 14. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, Powers Of Diaspora: Two Essays On The Relevance Of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 4-7 and 28. 15. Ra`anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow, eds., Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 4-6. 16. Tim Ingold, “Making Culture and Weaving the World,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 50–71. 17. Adam B. Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24. 18. Ibid., 8, 31, and 122. 19. Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6. 20. David Morgan and Sally Promey, eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xii and 15.

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21. Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, 3; for a discussion of cosmopolitanism, see David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Matthew. Culture & Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1883. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Boustan, Ra’anan S., Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow. “Anthropology, History, and the Remaking of Jewish Studies.” In Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, edited by Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky and Marina Rustow, 1-28. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. Powers Of Diaspora: Two Essays On The Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Cohen, Steven, and Arnold Eisen. The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Ingold, Tim. “Making Culture and Weaving the World.” In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, edited by Paul Graves-Brown, 50-71. London: Routledge, 2000. Liebman, Charles, and Steven Cohen. Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli & American Experiences. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Manganaro, Marc. Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Seligman, Adam B., Robert Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. The Visual Culture of American Religions. Edited by David Morgan and Sally Promey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray, 1871. Walzer, Michael. “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest.” In Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, edited by David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, 88-98. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. ———. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Part I

About Culture

Chapter One

Jewish Peoplehood and the Nationalist Paradigm in American Jewish Culture Noam Pianko

Expressions of American Jewish culture are quite diverse. Yet, one of the few articulated principles often called upon to bridge religious, geographic, and political differences is a shared commitment to “Jewish peoplehood.” The concept of peoplehood, introduced into American Jewish culture by Mordecai Kaplan in the 1940s, invokes a fundamental belief in a sense of solidarity uniting global Jewry despite differences of religious practice, cultural context, and definitions of Judaism. As a result, Jewish peoplehood serves the critical function of articulating individual and collective Jewish identity in the performance and practice of American Jewish culture. The term’s recent revival in contemporary American Jewish culture demonstrates the enduring relevance and significance of this relatively recent innovation in thinking Jewish culture. Because of the centrality of the term in shaping American Jewish culture, peoplehood offers a helpful window into the process of negotiating Jewish identity through the creation, and ongoing refinement, of a key term. This volume’s cultural studies approach provides an opportunity to explore a new perspective on the study of Jewish peoplehood—specifically, one that problematizes the representation of the concept as a static and unchanging ideal in Jewish history. Contrary to the presentation of this term, the emergence of peoplehood represents an innovation in thinking Jewish culture in America. The word peoplehood itself, as well as the conceptual models of Jewish collectivity it offers, emerged at a particular time and place as part of Mordecai Kaplan’s effort to recast Jewish identity in the United States. For Kaplan, the search for a vocabulary to identify a Jewish paradigm of collectivity reflects this thinker’s negotiation with American cultural attitudes toward 15

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ethnic groups and Zionism’s critique of diaspora Judaism. In other words, Kaplan’s peoplehood is a record of his struggle to reconfigure the relationship between various competing forces influencing American Judaism, including European nationalism, Zionism, and American identity politics. The historical construction of Jewish peoplehood demonstrates precisely the “performative struggle for identity” which this volume seeks to analyze. 1 Moreover, the study of the term peoplehood highlights the process of how American Jewish thinkers, and their diverse audiences, imagine themselves and their relationship to competing identity categories and cultural expectations. The overlooked tension between peoplehood’s transhistorical claims and its historical origins sheds light on American Jewish culture as an innovation that “help[s] produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze.” 2 This chapter historicizes the origins and evolution of Jewish peoplehood by demonstrating the term’s close links to modern nationalism. Both concepts share the foundational assumptions of the nationalist paradigm of collective boundaries. (I use the term nationalist paradigm to differentiate my interest in the broad logic of collectivity implicit in the discourse of nationalism from the very narrow connotations of nationalism as it is generally used today to refer to the pursuit of political sovereignty.) 3 The second half of the paper demonstrates the ongoing influence of nationalism and Zionism in shaping the meaning of peoplehood. THE NATIONALIST PARADIGM AND JEWISH PEOPLEHOOD In 1882, the French theorist Ernst Renan famously defined a nation as a “soul, a spiritual principle” with a sense of solidarity built on “sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, a shared program to put into effect.” 4 Over a hundred and thirty years later in the United States, the authors of The Case for Jewish Peoplehood: Can We Be One?, 5 defined Jewish peoplehood as “sharing a mission or a purpose with an extended family with whom we have a collective history and a shared language of faith, ritual and culture.” 6 A tremendous historical, geographic, and contextual gap separates Renan’s “nation” and this recent definition of “peoplehood.” Nevertheless, these two notions of collective solidarity share fundamental assumptions. A common essence or principle, a historical narrative that emphasizes shared experiences and tragedies, and a vision of a collective future goal define Renan’s nation and contemporary articulations of Jewish peoplehood. While recent proponents of peoplehood root the concept in two thousand years of Jewish history, American Jewish formulations of solidarity demonstrate a far greater reliance upon modern theories of nationalism than ancient concepts of Am Yisrael (The People of Israel).

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The existing narratives of American Jewish identity and collectivity cannot explain the theoretical similarities between European nationalism and American Jewish culture. Scholars of European nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular, view Renan’s work as a foundation for understanding European and Zionist conceptions of collectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In contrast, scholars define American Jewish culture as built upon a very different set of assumptions based on the desire to integrate into the United States as a religious minority. Jewish culture in the United States is defined in opposition to the theories of nationalism that shaped European, and later Zionist notions of Judaism. American Judaism, scholars contend, left nationalism behind in their attempt to integrate into the United States as a collective defined by religion rather than nationality. Based on this interpretation of modern Jewish political and cultural history, the particularism and separatism of European nationalism has little role in shaping American Jewish thought and culture. 7 The scholarly tendency to remove nationalism from American Jewish culture obscures the importance of nationalist discourse on American Jewish culture. Jewish conceptions of collectivity, often articulated through the language of “Jewish peoplehood” in the American context, owe many of their fundamental assumptions and identity logic to nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism. Furthermore, the close link between American concepts of peoplehood and Zionism’s definition of Jewish nationalism challenges the historiographical contours of modern Jewish politics. Modern Jewish historians divide Jewish culture neatly into two categories: first, Zionist culture, built around the framework of nationalism; and second, varieties of diaspora Jewish cultures, rooted in the quest for Jewish integration and acceptance as a religious minority. As an exemplar of the later strategy, American Jews rejected the category of nationalism as a mode of cultural self-definition to facilitate the process of acculturation in a country far more tolerant of religious minorities than expressions of minority nationalism. American Zionism is the exception that proves the rule. American Jews embraced Zionism only after leaders such as Justice Louis Brandeis equated Jewish nationalism with emulating American national ideals, rather than as a separatist nationalist ideology that insisted on a distinct Jewish national identity and expected diaspora Jews to return to the homeland. The dichotomy between thinking about Zionist and American Jewish cultures through two radically different lenses is misleading. Nationalism— broadly defined as a set of assumptions about collectivity and group identity—shaped, and continues to shape the agenda for Jewish life and culture in both the United States and Israel. This essay attempts to investigate the enduring role that the nationalist paradigm—specifically the vision of the Jewish people as a clearly bounded group united by shared essentialist qual-

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ities, a national history, and a collective mission—plays in American Jewish culture. The most obvious example of the relationship between modern Jewish politics and nationalism is the emergence of Zionism and the ideology of the state of Israel. Yet, nationalism’s influence transcends the limited definition of the ideology linking ethno-national communities to states. Nationalism, understood more broadly as a worldview that divides humanity into discrete populations based on specific characteristics, constructed the primary lens for analyzing and explaining collectivity in the modern era. Indeed, the building block of fields from sociology, history, and economics all adapted the nation-state as the primary organizing principle for the study of individuals and societies past, present, and future. The organization of modern Jewish political ideologies into nationalist and diaspora integrationists obfuscates the role that nationalism plays in the construction of Jewish identity outside of Zionist ideology. The historiographical distinction between these two paths in modern Jewish politics suggests a clear boundary between Jewish movements that embraced nationalism, and those that rejected nationalism as the primary mode for defining Judaism in the modern world. Nationalism has thus emerged as one of two paths in modern Jewish life: the State of Israel represents the path of nationalism, and American Jewish culture emerges as the opposite pole of diaspora and religious identity. 8 This claim reflects the conflation of two concepts, nationalism and statism. In order to appreciate the far broader impact of nationalism, it is necessary to untangle these two concepts. Statism, the belief that each ethnonational group has the right to territorial sovereignty, emerged after World War I as an increasingly critical component of national identity. 9 The assumption that the existence of a state is the basic, and most important right for each national group solidified only in the second half of the twentieth century. As Renan’s above quotation indicates, the meaning of nationalism in the late nineteenth century did not underscore the quest for a state. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century theories of nationalism highlighted a number of other factors. While definitions varied, a number of key assumptions about national groups developed. Nationalities possessed a unique and unifying essence that distinguished each group from one another. As Renan explained, the cohesive national spirit or essence emerged primarily from a shared history of heroic achievements and tragedies. Each nationality, based on their unique past, worked toward a shared mission that emphasized the boundaries between groups in the present. Other definitions of national boundaries, especially those developed by Central European theorists such as Herder, added family ties of descent and origins in a particular territory to the mix of what makes up a nation.

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So the rise of nationalism as the dominant ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth century shifted conversations about identity toward preserving boundaries, determining the unique essence of a particular group, and narrating a collective history to demonstrate a shared past uniting members of a group. From this starting point, the definition of collective national identity highlighted static boundaries between national groups who shared an internal homogenous culture. In order to justify the claims of cultural homogeneity, nationalist writers and leaders emphasized grand narratives of history that privileged collective action and essential traits rather than diversity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation. Many of the constitutive elements of national membership had precursors in pre-modern notions of Jewish collectivity. However, the purpose of these elements shifted to emphasize stable boundary markers instead of ambiguous notions of membership, cultural unity rather than diverse expressions, and a single unifying mission rather than multiple (and at times conflicting) narratives of communal meaning. 10 To put it another way, national history replaced God and the interpretation of God’s revelation in the formation of Jewish collectivity in the modern era. The pressure to claim an ancient national past, to identify an essential and particular collective mission, and to distinguish insiders from outsiders introduced a rupture from pre-modern notions of collectivity. This logic of nationalism, completely distinct from the ways in which it could be leveraged for the political objective of statehood, influenced both “national” and “religious” definitions of Judaism. The dominance of nationalism as the organizing principle for American Jewish collective identity can be seen in the origins and popularity of the term “Jewish peoplehood.” PEOPLEHOOD AS AMERICAN INNOVATION Perhaps the most widely embraced term for discussing Jewish collective identity in American Jewish life and thought is peoplehood. The term is almost completely absent in the Israeli context. Instead, modern Hebrew uses the word am (people/nation) as a synonym for nation. 11 The divergent vocabulary—peoplehood and people/nation— would seem to reflect a very different relationship to the idea of nationalism in the Israeli and American Jewish contexts. American Jews rallied around peoplehood because the term avoids the association of Judaism with nationalism. 12 The existence of two very different terms could thus be understood as reflecting the two paths of modern Jewish politics. But the origins of the term peoplehood, and its move into the center of American Jewish discourse, reveals nationalism’s enduring role in shaping the underlying logic of American Jewish discourse of identity and collectivity.

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Mordecai Kaplan highlighted the term peoplehood in his 1948 book, The Future of the American Jew. 13 The success of the term has helped solidify Kaplan’s legacy as one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers. Surprisingly, however, peoplehood was not Kaplan’s initial choice of vocabulary. Indeed, his most important book, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), refers to Jews as a “nation” or “nationality.” Over the next two decades, Kaplan gradually shifted away from nationality toward peoplehood as the key term in his writing and thinking about Jewish collectivity. Kaplan did not switch from peoplehood to nation because his own thinking about collectivity changed dramatically. Instead, Kaplan realized that the connotations of nation, and especially the Jewish nation, had changed. After 1948, referring to Jews as a nation confused Kaplan’s conception of nationality with the statist notions that had become dominant upon the founding of the State of Israel. For Kaplan, nationalism shifted to a concept linked to the establishment of the state of Israel. While Kaplan supported the founding of the state, he rejected the policy of statism introduced by David Ben Gurion. As stated earlier, statism underscored the existence of the state as the single most important element in defining Jewish nationality. The normalization of this definition of Zionism—a significant departure from the diversity of prestate Zionisms—rendered diaspora Jews unable to gain full recognition as part of the Jewish nation. 14 Peoplehood emerged out of Kaplan’s frustration with the evolving meaning of nationalism. While he felt compelled to introduce new terminology, Kaplan remained committed to the conceptual vocabulary of the nationalist paradigm which shaped his thinking about Jewish collectivity. Judaism as a Civilization, Kaplan’s first and most comprehensive articulation of Jewish collectivity, relies primarily on the term nation and nationality to define Judaism and Jewish solidarity. As a result, Kaplan’s thinking about Jewish collectivity internalizes three fundamental elements of nationalism: a territory, an essential mission, and a national history. Chapters such as “Judaism as a Nation” indicate Kaplan’s debt to European Jewish cultural Zionists, especially Achad Ha-am. 15 The criteria of Jewish nationhood share the agenda outlined by European intellectuals in the cultural Zionist camp. Members of the Jewish nation shared a connection to a particular land and its associated texts/culture. The Land of Israel was one of the constituent parts of Jewish national identity. A shared national homeland provided a link to the past of the nation, as well as a necessary place to ensure the continuity of the distinct Hebrew culture. With Achad Ha-am, Kaplan rejected the idea that Jewish life in the diaspoora had no future. But they both viewed the future of diaspora life as deeply reliant upon the homeland as the cultural center and focal point necessary to galvanize diaspora communities. The homeland, and eventually the state, was a means for supporting the nation rather than the highest expression of nationalism. 16

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Territory was crucial for Kaplan because only a homeland center could galvanize the particular mission of the Jewish people. Like Achad Ha’am, Kaplan believed that Judaism’s tradition of ethical monotheism would enable its national movement to overcome the intolerance and chauvinism that characterized other nationalisms. He looked to Jewish sources to demonstrate the specific set of moral claims about the meaning of collectivity that defined the essence of Jewish political life. Of all the various types of nationalism, Jewish notions of solidarity are the most tolerant and open to multiplicity. In fact, the unique essence of Jewish nationality is its dedication to universal harmony. Jewish nationalism finds the ideal balance between particular concerns and universal commitments. As the exemplar of a tolerant and pluralistic vision of collectivity, Jewish nationalism serves as a model of the most ethical form of nationalism. Kaplan thus included a version of chosenness even while he explicitly distanced himself from the idea that Jews were somehow superior to other groups. Jews had a unique mission—to demonstrate to other national groups the most progressive form of group solidarity. Nationalist writers create a narrative of the nation’s past to highlight and trace the unique origins and ideals of particular groups. Indeed, Ernst Renan, the early theorist of nationalism, argued in his seminal essay that, “Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are.” 17 Viewed in this context, Kaplan’s long historical opening to Judaism as a Civilization has an important role to play. Kaplan provides a version of a Jewish national history that grounds claims for cohesion by demonstrating the historical roots of the particular Jewish family and the endurance of certain key principles. The ancient history of the Jews, told as the story of Jews shaping their own identity in contrast to other groups, underscores another important aspect of the nationalist narrative—the claim that the Jewish people had the ability to shape historical developments and to act as a collective agent in the evolution of ideas and social movements throughout time. The historical sections of Judaism as a Civilization shape the essential message of Judaism to model an ethical paradigm of nationalism. In narrating the transformation from pre-modern notions of collectivity into the logic of nationalism, Kaplan shifts the substance of Jewish cohesion from God to history, from commandment to value, and from the belief in particular redemption to the fulfillment of a universal mission. Kaplan’s most significant contribution to American Jewish life and culture was the translation of nationalism into American Jewish discourse. Peoplehood provided a blank canvas upon which American Jews could make national claims without the stigma of standing out as a national minority group. The centrality of the homeland, the essentialized conception of Jewish contribution to political thought, and the clear separation between Jews and non-Jews all emerge from the foundations of modern nationalism. While Kaplan later took issue with Zionism’s equation of nation and state, his

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rejection of the term nationality does not reflect a shift away from the intellectual assumptions of nationalism. They remain central in Kaplan’s thinking and, through his new term peoplehood, spread to all corners of American Jewish culture and identity. 18 This observation suggests a historical irony with great relevance for considering the significance of Jewish peoplehood in American Jewish culture. Kaplan’s most innovative thinking was his integration of religious functionalism with nationalism. Ironically, however, the aspect of Kaplan’s work that has gained the most currency in American Jewish life is not his religious thought. Instead, the notion of peoplehood, most closely linked to the pieces of his thought borrowed largely from European nationalism, is considered Kaplan’s great contribution to American Jewish thought. The reception of Kaplan’s notion of peoplehood indicates that belief in collectivity as articulated through the prism of the nationalist paradigm remains more compatible with the worldview of American Jews than Kaplan’s theological claims. THE CASE FOR PEOPLEHOOD (AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL) Over the last two decades, there has been a renewed interest in the expression and practice of peoplehood. A close look at the recent rhetoric of Jewish peoplehood indicates the enduring influence of the nationalist paradigm decades after Kaplan’s shift from nationhood to peoplehood. But, Kaplan’s initial struggle with nationalism’s association with statism has been overshadowed. The fundamental definition of Jews as a unified, bounded group with a center in the State of Israel remain axiomatic assumptions for scholars and communal leaders. A close look at several recent examples of communal effort to articulate peoplehood provides a window into the continuities and discontinuities of peoplehood. In 2009, Jewish communal leaders Misha Galperin and Erica Brown published The Case for Jewish Peoplehood: Can We Be One? The book, distributed to thousands of lay and professional leaders at the United Jewish Communities General Assembly, offers a helpful lens for analyzing the discourse of peoplehood at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The authors argue that an essential sense of Jewish unity and peoplehood is necessary to “make a strong case for Jewish continuity.” 19 True to the Kaplanian paradigm of articulating Jewish peoplehood, The Case for Peoplehood builds on the foundations of nationality by emphasizing an essential mission, ancient textual sources read as shared history, and a familial conception of group ties. Galperin sums up these key themes of his vision of peoplehood in a subsequent article. In language that echoes the key nationalist themes of family, essence, and mission, Galperin writes,

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We need to be part of an extended family with a vision, a unique mission in the world. Part of that mission involves seeking social justice for all people. More of that mission involves nurturing Jewish literacy, Jewish values and Jewish solidarity with Israel and Jews the world over. 20

The Case for Peoplehood also implicitly highlights the mythic past and the centrality of the homeland. For instance, the book intersperses biblical justifications for explaining Jewish life. Jews, the authors argue, should continue in the spirit of Joseph, who was a dreamer who “carried out a program of activities that would respond to and complement his vision and shape the future.” 21 This vision of the future—one the authors seem to identify with— places Jews on the vanguard of social justice and universal concerns. The Jewish nation’s particular mission, echoing Kaplan’s initial articulation of Jewish nationality, is to embrace a vision of particularism that best promotes universal harmony and justice. One important difference from Kaplan’s initial definition of Jewish peoplehood is that contemporary notions demonstrate a far greater integration of Israeli statism. Indeed, for a number of scholars and writers, Jewish peoplehood and Israel have emerged as almost synonymous terms. The use of peoplehood and political support for the state of Israel as overlapping terms suggests that the distinction Kaplan hoped to emphasize has been largely ignored. 22 As a result, assessments of levels of collective solidarity are difficult to distinguish from support for the state of Israel. Kaplan’s fear that his definition of Jewish nationality as a cultural, linguistic, and moral set of ideals would be confused with political support for a state has been realized despite his success at transforming the language of collectivity. Mainstream definitions of peoplehood have evolved along with nationalism to blur the difference between national identity and state sovereignty. The interchangeable nature of support for the state and Jewish solidarity has been further nourished by the Jewish Agency of Israel’s embrace of peoplehood as an integral part of their mission. Historically, the Jewish agency stood for promoting aliyah and state-building—two of the key aspects of post-1948 Jewish nationalism that compelled Kaplan to replace nationality with peoplehood as his key term for Jewish collectivity. Under Natan Sharansky, the Jewish Agency has now adopted the American Jewish term, along with attempting to popularize the relatively obscure Hebrew analogue, amiut. The Jewish Agency, in the words of its executives, has the goal of being the convener for a conversation about Jewish peoplehood. The rhetorical fusion of peoplehood and support for the state of Israel offers Israeli leaders several advantages. Once official Zionist organizations, such as the Jewish Agency, realized the need to soften the statist aspects of their vision of Jewish nationalism, peoplehood offered an alternate, softer, vision of Jewish nationalism already accepted by the American Jewish estab-

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lishment. Facing the reality that the State of Israel will not ingather all of the diaspora Jews, and the growing concerns about the distancing of American Jews from Israel, the Jewish agency can use peoplehood as a less demanding and diaspora-friendly version of Zionism. Peoplehood acknowledges a shift from the Jewish Agency as an organization rooted in political Zionism’s rejection of diaspora Jewry to one that accepts cultural Zionism’s vision of Israel as the organizing principle of diaspora Jewry. The move toward a peoplehood agenda does not address the potential challenges of reconciling the ideals of a Jewish state committed to democratic ideals and universal principles. Aware that social justice and universal causes have come to define the Judaism of many American Jews, Brown and Galperin invokes the mission of justice that serves as the primary value of Jewish particularism. Whether or not the Jewish Agency is the center of Jewish activism toward universal justice is never addressed. Indeed a modified form of statism exists in perfect harmony with the rhetoric of ethical nationalism. This blurs the distinction that Kaplan insisted on preserving. Ben Gurion’s statism put the needs of the state as the primary ends of Zionism. This clear objective frustrated Kaplan, who saw a tension between becoming a nation-state like all other nation-states, and building a new paradigm of nationalism that supported national groups as a path toward tolerance. Kaplan rejected the term nationalism when he realized that Ben Gurion’s vision of statism had emerged as the dominant definition. The embrace of peoplehood by the Jewish Agency, and other institutions and writers who view the state at the center of peoplehood, rejects any potential conflicts between what they see as the Jewish universal mission and the belief that the state will be the engine for achieving this goal. The contemporary rhetoric of peoplehood erases the very tension between ethical nationalism and particularism that motivated Kaplan’s insistence on distinguishing peoplehood from nationhood. The increased interest in peoplehood over the past decade in the American Jewish community has corresponded with the emergence of the Birthright Israel program as the most visible communal expression of American Jewish identity. Now in its thirteenth year, Birthright Israel has sent over 300,000 young Jews to Israel for a ten-day immersive trip. For many Jewish leaders, the trip is one of the great glimmers of hope in an American Jewish community facing what many see as a crisis of continuity. Scholarly studies of the trip promote the positive impact of the experience on participants. Alumni tend to be more active in Jewish communal life, marry other Jews, and seek ways to engage Judaism. While scholars debate the short and longer term impact of the program, few commentators have analyzed the significance of the program’s foundational assumptions about American Jewish identity and the meaning of Jewish collectivity. In particu-

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lar, the program’s rhetoric and goals demonstrate the enduring control that nationalist paradigms of identity continue to exert in American Jewish life. What does the program, and its tremendous embrace by Jewish communal leaders, indicate about the attitudes toward Jewish collectivity and identity? The history of the name and concept of Birthright is telling. Yossi Beilin, an Israeli politician and thinker, developed the concept and name of the program. The intellectual roots of the program in Israel already suggest that this philanthropic endeavor emerges from a world view deeply rooted in nationalist assumptions. That visiting Israel should be the primary Jewish act of young diaspora Jews reflects the centrality of a visit to the national homeland in shaping the identity of American Jews. The vision of aliyah is replaced by the affirmation of Israel’s centrality as cultural center, educational anchor, and hub of the nation’s activities. A few days in the intensity of Israeli life provides an inoculation against the failures of diaspora Jewish education. Because of the deep roots of cultural Zionism in American conceptions of peoplehood, this logic made complete sense to American Jews who have internalized a nationalist paradigm from the discourse of peoplehood. Imagine how absurd a reverse pilgrimage would sound. The very notion of a trip like this only makes sense when Israel’s centrality is axiomatic and unquestioned. The construction of the trip as a modified experiment of Achad Ha-am’s conception of a cultural center is further reinforced by the name chosen for the program: “Birthright Israel” highlights descent and national homeland in defining the basic criteria of collective Jewish identity. While applicants who have completed the conversion process are eligible to apply, the program name highlights a criterion that elevates descent or blood ties as the primary criteria of national membership. The association of birthright with visiting the homeland reinforces the principle negation of the diaspora in nationalist ideology that gives priority to homeland populations. From the marketing, to the goals, to the study of the program, the Birthright phenomenon is an intervention against the perceived process of denationalization. The trip responds to the perception that collective boundaries have blurred, Jewish unity has fragmented, and Jews lack a shared past and future vision. In the face of this crisis of collectivity, the program seeks to create a transformational experience that will revitalize American Jewish culture by offering young Jews an intensive dose of national pride and social cohesion. Birthright is an experiment in whether or not intensive resources can preserve the presumed ingredients of Jewish collective identity: homeland and familial bonds shaped largely by modern nationalism. From many of the studies of the program, the strategy is successful. Yet, there are some hints in the cracks that emerge in preserving a nationalist framework. Shaul Kellner’s study of Birthright raises the fascinating reaction of many of the program’s participants. The tourists, as he calls participants,

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often see through the gaps between the program’s message and the Israel they experience. The disconnect between a program framed in a nationalist paradigm and experienced through a different set of identity assumptions raises a key question addressed in this chapter’s conclusion: cultural trends sparked by globalization have shifted the construction of collective identity from ethno-racial and territorial lines toward voluntary associations and dispersed social networks. Can these trends be mitigated, and even reversed, by reemphasizing older nationalist paradigms of identity performance? CONCLUSION Renan’s answer to the question “what is nationalism” argues that nationalism serves a crucial (and beneficial) force in the present. At the same time, Renan was somewhat unique among theorists of nationalism in his claim that nationalism is a temporary phenomenon. Indeed, his 1864 speech presciently foresaw the possibility of a future European confederation that would replace nationalism’s particular orientation with far more cosmopolitan definitions of identity: The nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end. A European confederation will very probably replace them. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and only one master. 23

Today, nationalism, even within Europe and certainly beyond, remains a potent cultural and political force. However, global forces have triggered a process of denationalization that is reshaping economic, political, cultural, and social processes. Establishing the connection between American Jewish culture and theories of nationalism is crucial to recognize the forces eroding assumptions about identity and collectivity. A discussion about the changing role of nationalism on American Jewish identity is impossible when the two are seen as largely disconnected from one another. The tension in Renan’s writing between the contemporary reality of nationalism and its uncertain future remains a relevant issue. Modern Jewish culture and thought effectively translated Judaism into a nationalist paradigm to meet the intellectual and social expectations of Western modernity. One successful example of this phenomena is the emergence of peoplehood, a model of collectivity that emphasized national characteristics such as a shared history, a set of essential values, and a mission. Nationalism’s pervasive influence over popular and scholarly conceptions of collectivity normalized Jews as a group. However, the very axiomatic elements of the logic of

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nationalism that enabled Jews to articulate their identities in categories parallel to non-Jewish experiences face new challenges from new frameworks that highlight the local and the global as opposed to the national. These trends suggest that the nation-state has reached the end of its hegemonic position in shaping politics and group boundaries, for the assumptions of nationalism are no longer axiomatic. While states remain important players on the international scene, they are unable to control national cultures or to assume homogenous populations within their boundaries. Global processes directly undermine the axiomatic values of homeland, distinct tribal groups, and particular missions championed by nationalist thought. Despite the erosion of nationalism’s assumptions about individual and collective identity, Jewish leaders and intellectuals have not seriously considered the implications of the transition from a national to a global framework for thinking Jewish culture in America. Since the construction of Jewish peoplehood and culture has been so deeply shaped by nationalism, the growth of alternative organizing logics of individual and collective identity formation presents a particularly serious challenge to Jewish thought. But, the costs to ignore the historical links, and now contemporary ruptures, between nationalism and American Jewish culture is tremendously high. The argument that only a unifying collective essence can “make a strong case for Jewish continuity” assumes the endurance of an identity logic that no longer shapes the cultures within which Jews live and think. 24 Definitions of solidarity and Jewish collective culture face two possible options. The first is to continue to assert a nationalist paradigm of collectivity that emphasizes unity, shared past and future, and essential mission. For this strategy to work, Jewish thinkers and leaders will have to wage a constant struggle against broader cultural trends that undermine the normative ideals of nationalist claims. A second possibility is to reconsider the assumptions about Jewish collectivity in light of changing notions of identity. Defining the Jewish people as a collective based on the logic of nationalism emerged as a significant shift in the modern period. Indeed, pre-modern conceptions of the Jewish people were built upon interpretive communities and religious myth rather than national values and history. A shift toward a global perspective raises a particularly difficult set of issues for thinkers interested in finding new paradigms for articulating the meaning of Jewish peoplehood. Scholars tend to view identity as constantly shifting and hybrid in nature. Multiplicity and fragmentation do not provide a stable foundation for affirming essential characteristics or enduring bonds. As a result, one of the core challenges for thinking Jewish culture in twenty-first century America is how to justify a sense of Jewish collectivity without the reliance on the nationalist paradigm that supported peoplehood throughout the last half century.

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NOTES 1. See the Introduction to this volume. 2. Ibid. 3. For a more in-depth description of the evolution of Jewish nationalism from a broad approach to thinking about Jewish collectivity, and to a far more specific focus on creating a nation-state, see Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 4. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 41. 5. Erica Brown and Misha Galperin, Can We Be One? The Case for Jewish Peoplehood (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009). 6. Ibid., 3. 7. See, for example, Naomi Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea (New York: Ktav, 1975), 26. Cohen, like other scholars of American Zionism, makes a clear distinction between European nationalism and American versions of Jewish nationalism. However, this distinction is based largely on the equation of Zionism and statism. A broader look at the nationalist paradigm of collectivity suggests overlapping paradigms of what it means to be part of the Jewish people. 8. See Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 9. See Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 1-26. 10. Nationalism certainly does not introduce the concept of boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. In fact, a series of rigid barriers separated pre-modern Jews from their neighbors. Legal restrictions, theological differences, and economic disabilities ensured rigid external boundaries. The introduction of voluntary identification with Judaism, introduced in Western European thought by the Enlightenment, dismantled (to various degrees depending on place and time) the external markers of Jewish collectivity. Paradoxically, in fact, the loss of externally enforced boundaries contributed to the emergence of a new set of identity markers far more rigid and essentialist in their formulation than pre-modern models. 11. The connotations of the concept Am Yisrael (the People of Israel) has changed over time. The Brown, Driver, Briggs Biblical Lexicon defines the term as meaning “family” or “tribe” in the Biblical context. The modern Hebrew Even-Shoshan Dictionary defines the word am as equivalent to le’um (nation). The precise definition reflects the nationalization of the term’s meaning: “the great collection of people that share one place of origin, a shared history and for most of the population also a spoken language and the majority is concentrated in a specific state.” See Abraham Even Shoshan, Hamilon Hechadash (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1988), 524. 12. Daniel Ehrenkrantz, “The Primacy of Peoplehood: Mordecai Kaplan’s Concept Remains as Radical, and as Powerful, as Ever,” Contact: The Journal of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life 10/3 (2008), 3. 13. Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York: Macmillan Company, 1948). 14. See Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 95-135. 15. The primary difference between Kaplan’s work and his European influences was Kaplan’s interest in religious ritual as an integral part of creating Jewish national culture. For Kaplan, as a rabbi and an American Jew, the secularism of European cultural nationalism relied too heavily on language and not nearly enough on religion’s role in ensuring solidarity without intolerance for the American context. 16. See Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, for more on Kaplan’s vision of Jewish nationalism. 17. Renan, “What is a Nation?” 52 18. My interpretation of Kaplan’s use of the term peopelhood instead of nationality differs than the one proposed by Daniel Ehrenkrantz in “The Primacy of Peoplehood.” Ehrenkrantz views the shift as a way of going beyond nationalism. But the more accurate explanation is that Kaplan was going beyond a very specific kind of nationalism associated with statist aspirations of Zionism and the intolerance of European nationalism during World War II. Peoplehood was

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thus Kaplan’s attempt to continue to promote a more authentic nationalism that he had advocated for since the first decade of the twentieth century. 19. Brown, Can We Be One?, 2. 20. Misha Galerpin, “Continuing a Peoplehood Debate,” The Forward, July 11, 2011, accessed, July 16, 2013, http://forward.com/articles/140337/continuing-a-peoplehood-debate/. 21. Brown, Can We Be One?, 180. 22. See, for example, Jack Wertheimer, “Generation of Change: How Leaders in their Twenties and Thirties are Reshaping American Jewish Life,” (Avi Chai Foundation, 2011). 23. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” 42. 24. . Brown, Can We Be One?, 2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Erica, and Misha Galperin. Can We Be One? The Case for Jewish Peoplehood. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009. Cohen, Naomi. American Jews and the Zionist Idea. New York: Ktav, 1975. Ehrenkrantz, Daniel. “The Primacy of Peoplehood: Mordecai Kaplan’s Concept Remains as Radical, and as Powerful, as Ever.” Contact: The Journal of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life 10, no. 3 (2008). Galperin, Misha. “Continuing a Peoplehood Debate.” The Forward, July 11, 2011. Accessed July 16, 2013. http://forward.com/articles/140337/continuing-a-peoplehood-debate/. Kaplan, Mordecai. The Future of the American Jew. New York: Macmillan Company, 1948. Mendelsohn, Ezra. On Modern Jewish Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pianko, Noam. Zionism and the Roads Not Taken. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Shoshan, Abraham Even. Hamilon Hechadash. Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1988. Wertheimer, Jack. “Generation of Change: How Leaders in their Twenties and Thirties are Reshaping American Jewish Life.” Avi Chai Foundation, 2011.

Chapter Two

Otherness and Liberal Democratic Solidarity Buber, Kaplan, Levinas And Rorty’s Social Hope Akiba Lerner

How might Jewish cultural performances of otherness contribute to furthering redemptive hope in the twenty-first century? As America becomes increasingly more diverse, questions about the role of otherness, culture, and citizenship are central for thinking about the intersection of religious and ethnic identity in relationship to political philosophy. This essay focuses on the potential ethical usefulness of otherness for democratic citizenship by putting modern Jewish intellectuals into conversation with Rorty’s neo-pragmatic social hope as an alternative libratory model for expanding the boundaries of how to think about a liberal democratic “we.” Modern Jewish thought and culture—particularly as reflected upon by thinkers like Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan—provides an essential entry point into twentieth century uses and abuses of the concept of otherness as a form of redemptive hope. The great cultural achievement of these Jewish intellectuals was that they helped change how to think about the intersection between personal identity, ethical obligations, and Jewish culture. Their ability to provide new approaches for thinking about personal identities in relational terms should continue to inform twenty-first-century discussions on the role of religious identity within our increasingly globalized and multi-cultural democratic societies. The endeavor by Buber, Kaplan, and Levinas to create an ethics based on encounters with Thou-ness/otherness, when placed together with Rorty’s neo-pragmatist vision of social hope, provides new theoretical resources for strengthening a sense of democratic “we-ness” based on a redemptive poli31

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tics of social responsibility. Putting Rorty’s neo-pragmatism into conversation with modern Jewish thinkers can contribute to answering the challenge of translating an appreciation for otherness—as expressed within Jewish cultural performances that disrupt the hegemony of majority cultures—into broader twenty-first-century liberal democratic ideals of citizenship and social hope. The endeavor by Jewish intellectuals to create an ethics based on encounters with Thou-ness/otherness, together with Rorty’s neo-pragmatist vision of social hope, provides theoretical resources for a renewed sense of moral life, plus a redemptive politics based on radical social responsibility. Placing the notion of otherness in the service of democratic solidarity, however, brushes against the historical grain from which Jewish intellectual discussions of otherness initially emerged. Buber’s, Kaplan’s, and Levinas’ writings on otherness were part of broader intellectual shifts within Western intellectual culture that increasingly looked to a phenomenology of otherness as a method for translating religious discourses of messianic redemption into secular and often less politically radical discourses of philosophical anthropology and political philosophy. Although this twentieth-century historical shift toward a greater concern for otherness reflected a growing ethical demand to counter the hegemony, imperialism, and totalitarian impulses within Western culture, nevertheless, my interest in this essay is to raise questions about the future of phenomenological and cultural ideals of otherness for furthering human emancipation in the twenty-first century. For example, do concerns with recognizing otherness help foster greater social hope? Should our efforts toward achieving redemption revolve around the hope of one day arriving at a moment in which all differences between individuals and peoples are overcome, or is redemption about a greater celebration of the complex mosaic of human cultures? Most theorists of culture start from the premise that—as discussed by Ken Koltun-Fromm in the introduction to this volume—the performance of cultural identity gives meaning in the present by both connecting to the past while offering a sense of hope for how things might be in the future. For Jewish thinkers like Buber, Kaplan, and Levinas, however, Jewish cultural performances are more than just modes of individual or communal affirmation of a particular nomos. For these thinkers the contextual performance of Jewish otherness is also in the service of ethical imperatives based on the future ideal of one day establishing a world based on justice, love, and compassion. Without this broader redemptive hope, cultural performances run the risk of reinforcing what Buber warned can become just another form of “national egoism.” 1 Despite concerns for sectarian expressions of “egoism,” the performance of Jewish culture still has a role to play in enacting redemptive space and time. When stripped of the “husks” that have accumulated over history due to what Buber and Kaplan warned were the ossifying effects of “Rabbinism,” Jewish culture is still a relevant foundational source for re-

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demptive thinking. The redemptive core within Jewish culture is, according to these thinkers, the revelatory enactment of inter-subjective encounters, righteous actions (Gemilut Hasadim), and recognition between individuals. For Buber, Kaplan, and Levinas, the unique ability of Jewish culture to help facilitate inter-subjective encounters that liberate individuals from their isolation continues to provide the foundation from which messianic hope springs. Historically, the philosophical category of otherness developed mostly as a phenomenological signifier for those mystical and ineffable qualities within individuals that make them mysterious, different, and sometimes alien. Part of what makes concerns with otherness so problematic and alluring for intellectuals who have rejected the West’s emphasis on “monadological individualism” is that the category of otherness has served to demarcate the boundaries of subjectivity. 2 The original libratory impulse that defined the intellectual efforts of thinkers like Buber and Levinas to place encounters with an Other/Thou at the center of their work reflected a post-Cartesian turn toward inter-subjective relationships as an alternative to the alienation of a purely solipsistic individualism. Starting with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, otherness initially represented the negation to the egoism of a consciousness defined purely as being-for-self. Struggles with otherness are the very source within Hegel’s system from which spirit (Geist) marches toward greater actualization and recognition within the world, culminating in the eventual sublation of this dialectical struggle at the end of history. In phenomenological terms, by giving the self an external referent of negation, otherness helps to affirm the self as, Buber put it, “over and against” the other. Hegel’s template of existential encounters and struggle with otherness as the path toward overcoming alienation had both political and metaphysical consequences that shaped modern Jewish reflections on the historical meaning of Judaism as part of a minority culture. The redemptive association with encounters of otherness was further developed by post-modern theorists who saw otherness as the source for overcoming the legacy of Western imperialism, both metaphysical and actual. In reaction to the nihilistic impact of historicism, Nietzschean vitalism, social Darwinism, anti-humanism, and Fascism in the early part of the twentieth century, the revolutionary and erotic appeal of otherness as a metaphysical category beyond the imperialist and reductionist grasp of Western rationalism served an important historical role by making philosophy more ethically relevant. 3 Following through on Marx’s demand that “the point is to change” the actual world order, however, proved to be a lot harder. With the later post-modern popularizing of otherness by thinkers like Levinas as an alternative to the West’s emphasis on “totalizing” metaphysics, theoretical identification with the ineffable and exotic qualities of otherness increasingly became a form of secular inner-worldly asceticism that could serve as a substitute for engaging in real world redemptive politics. 4

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To think Jewish culture has always involved boundary crossing that reinforces the specificity of a Jewish identity with reference to, and perhaps dependence on, a contextual relationship with the otherness of the surrounding dominate cultures. One of the central tensions Buber, Kaplan, and Levinas confronted as modern philosophers was how to present a vision of Jewish culture that could continue to serve as a beacon for libratory consciousness and politics in the modern world without simply falling into the pretense of arguing for yet another version of universal cosmopolitism. Additionally, their struggles with their own personal commitments to the meaning of performing Jewish culture (such as whether to wear traditional clothing, ritualistic observances, or other overt signifiers of “Jewishness”) informed their approach to otherness. The meaning of performing Jewish culture was always mediated through an ongoing dialogue with the dominate Greek and Christian philosophical traditions, traditions which Jewish intellectuals always embraced as central to their own personal cultural identification. Despite the libratory impulses behind the philosophical category of otherness, however, I question in this essay if a continued emphasis on venerating otherness as a basis for either personal or collective religious identity can continue to serve the same redemptive hopes in the twenty-first century for overcoming alienation, imperialism, and globalization. A related ambivalence over the ability of Jewish cultural performances to help reinforce ideals of redemptive hope also defined earlier twentieth-century Jewish intellectual debates over the continued relevance of Jewish culture. Underneath Jewish intellectual apologetics for the continued vitality of Jewish culture lurked a deep ambivalence over how to think about the historical exclusion and outsider status of Jewish culture. Are Jewish cultural performances about affirming this sense of separation, or should Jewish cultural performances be reinterpreted in more universal, redemptive terms? Their ambivalence helps us to better appreciate the dialectical tensions in deploying the phenomenological category of otherness as a way to further redemptive hope. JEWISH PARTICULARISM: BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM Although the actual category of otherness in Jewish thought is more of a late modern concern (in reaction mostly to Hegelianism), arguments in support of Jewish particularism within the universalistic terms of philosophical thinking has defined the history of Judaism’s centuries-old dialectical engagement with the legacy of Athens. 5 The question of how to reconcile Judaism to the legacy of Athens, while retaining an emphasis on Judaism’s distinct contributions, defined most Jewish intellectual reflections on the meaning of Jewish culture in the modern era. In the modern period this dialectical engagement with the legacy of Athens found expression through Jewish intellectual

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efforts—most notably among the Maskilim and other practitioners of Wissenschaft des Jundentums—to affirm Enlightenment goals of furthering liberation through the recovery of resources overlooked within Judaism. For modern Jewish intellectuals—such as Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Graetz, Moses Hess, Herman Cohen, Franz Rosensweig, Mordecai Kaplan, Leo Strauss and Abraham Joshua Heschel (to name a few of the most prominent)—writing about Jewish particularism was always intended to strengthen the uniqueness and relevancy of Jewish intellectual identity, but always with the goal of demonstrating how the externally perceived exotic nature of Jewish traditions, practices, and texts were in fact in the service of larger redemptive goals for all humanity. 6 Affirming while reacting against the modern Jewish embrace of the Enlightenment’s libratory ethos, Buber’s, Kaplan’s, and Levinas’s appeal to Thou-ness/otherness was additionally part of a larger project among modern Jewish intellectuals to recover Jewish particularism as a complementary and alternative ideal for furthering the secular humanistic quest for greater autonomy, universal rights, and social liberation. 7 The “historic mission” of Jewish particularism is, in the words of Moses Hess, “the leaven of the social world” that serves the larger goal of universal redemption by modeling a commitment to the particular tradition of messianic redemptive hope for all humanity. 8 Consequently, the performance of Jewish cultural particularism—even if understood differently by both insiders and outsiders—was ultimately in the service of universal redemption. Following on earlier polemical defenses of Jewish particularism as a covert “leaven” for universal liberation, the twentieth-century American Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan further contributed to these efforts by specifically linking Jewish otherness to, in his words, “hope in a divine redemption.” 9 A culture based on this hope for redemption and “universal brotherhood of all men” additionally gives Judaism, according Kaplan, a unique and central role in the struggle to strengthen democracy within the modern world. 10 Unlike previous linkages of Jewish cultural otherness to messianic hope by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Heinrich Graetz and Moses Hess, Kaplan changed the discussion over Judaism’s role for inspiring universal redemptive hope. Perhaps emboldened by the relative tolerance of America, Kaplan went further than earlier Jewish thinkers by insisting that Jewish otherness was legitimate in its own right as an expression of a distinct Jewish civilization. According to Kaplan, there is an important distinction to be made between cultural otherness and religion within Jewish civilization. 11 “Judaism as otherness”—in contrast to “Jewish religion”—signifies, Kaplan argued, the more “organic inter-relation” within Judaism’s distinct “social heritage.” 12 “Jewish otherness” refers to those “non-transferable” modes of social existence that, according to Kaplan, “differentiated and individualized”

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Jews from other peoples. Just as the individual has distinct qualities that separate them from the social whole, so too otherness serves as a signifier for collective qualities among a people who share a common culture that distinguishes them from other peoples or nations. 13 The rational justification for this cultural otherness, however, lay in what Kaplan claimed was Jewish civilization’s role in contributing and strengthening liberal democratic values. 14 The link Kaplan proposed between Jewish otherness and the American ideal of liberal democratic citizenship blazed new trails for thinking about Jewish culture and identity within liberal democratic societies. According to Kaplan, the otherness of Jewish culture wasn’t just something to be tolerated; it actually contributed to liberal democratic goals of liberation and self-actualization. Cultural otherness serves as an extension of individual autonomy and what Kaplan referred to as each individual’s inalienable “inner freedom.” Additionally, Jews share with Catholics a “hyphenated” identity that necessarily locates them as both separate and within America’s liberal democratic culture. The benefit for democratic societies in having Jewish and Catholic citizens is that, according to Kaplan, their hyphenated identities perform a mode of resistance to the “cultural homogeneity” demanded within most nation states. 15 This form of resistance to “cultural homogeneity” ironically makes Jewish and Catholic otherness commensurate with the championing of autonomy and freedom within liberal democratic societies. The redemptive hope within these religious cultures both affirms the autonomy of the individual by linking their “inner freedom” to God as the force for freedom, while also providing an ideal of greater unity and brotherhood for all humanity. Cultural performances that resist “cultural homogeneity” ironically contributed to a greater redemptive unity. The cultural performance of Jewish otherness is reflective, according to Kaplan, of a deeper psychological struggle that all individuals go through within society. Religious culture functions to help individuals mediate between, in Kaplan’s words, “self-consciousness” and the “oblivion of self” by providing a language of “inter-relatedness” that allows “man the consciousness of his own unity.” 16 Drawing on the insights from the discipline of anthropology, Kaplan believed all individuals were faced with the same task of overcoming anomie by reconciling themselves to a larger collective nomos. Religious cultures, however, both help with this reconciliation and affirm individual autonomy as distinct from broader universal cultures. According to Kaplan this “rhythm of alternation” allows individuals the autonomy of experiencing themselves as both radically other from the national culture as well as radically imbricated within the social whole at the same time. 17 The performance of Jewish culture thereby gives expression both to a broader civilization and the interiority of individual participants within a larger democratic culture. Religious cultures that inform individual performances of otherness provide an essential counter-harmonizing force that bal-

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ances out the pull toward the extremes of either the nomos of national conformity or the anomie of individual alienation. But Kaplan was not just arguing for the fact of otherness. Even more, Jewish otherness has a central ethical and redemptive role to play within history. Echoing Moses Mendelssohn and Hess, Kaplan claimed that “Jewish otherness” has universal and civic applicability by creating a culture that reflects and inculcates a providential commitment to redemptive hope. Purely secular national cultures, according to Kaplan, are ultimately deficient when it comes to maintaining this ultimate sense of hope. Accordingly, the cultural performance of otherness follows a dialectic of both carving a space for distinct hyphenated identities while also affirming a more universal impulse toward unity. Preserving the “otherness” of Jewish culture, however, was more than just about preserving a pre-modern sectarian identity from the cosmopolitan melting pot of America. In contrast to the “clannish” ideal of “separation,” Jewish otherness represents the possibility of a more “organic” inter-action between the “individuality of Judaism” with the larger dominate national culture. 18 Part of what makes the American experiment unique within history is that it represents the idea of a national culture and unity based on the defense of its own potential negation: a national unity forged out of a mutual defense of individual rights and autonomy. Jewish otherness additionally has a role to play within the larger drama of America’s liberal democratic project, according to Kaplan, by helping individuals mediate the dialectical “harmonious interplay of individualism and collectivism.” 19 The performance of Jewish culture functions as an essential force within the rich mosaic of cultural unity. Just as the celebration of autonomy is the paradoxical foundation for America’s national unity, so too the performance of Jewish otherness is part of the central dialectics between “individualism” and “collectivism” at the heart of America’s national unity. Just as the strength of democratic unity is paradoxically predicated on protecting the individual rights of citizens, so too Jewish culture as a signifier for otherness affirms the potency of America. Accordingly, the essential indicator for the moral vibrancy and ultimate hope for democratic civilization will depend largely on whether or not America will become increasingly inclusive of the “cultural hyphenism” embodied by religious identities. 20 As an extension of this paradoxical and liberal American faith in the right to express one’s autonomy and pursue individual happiness, the “cultural hyphenism” of Jewish and Catholic cultures plays an essential role by performing a form of hyphenated individualism within the heart of a larger democratic civilization. To embrace this type of “hyphenism” of identity is to embrace the promise of two different Zions, or two different, yet interconnected redemptive hopes: the biblical promise of covenant that went forth from the Zion of old, and the promise of the new Zion being created in

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America. Both of these Zions are defined by a vision of hope and promise for reconciling the individual to the collective whole. The barometer for measuring the health of autonomy within American culture is intimately linked to the health of maintaining distinct religious cultures that provide horizons of hope by giving meaning and purpose to individual sacrifices and hardship in the present. As Kaplan states in the chapter titled “Hope,” located in The Future of the American Jew, the function of religion in modernity is “to preserve our morale, by keeping before us the vision of the brotherhood of man as the mundane goal of human effort.” 21 According to Kaplan, what continues to define the unique contribution of Jewish culture in the modern world, and specifically within America, is its “faith in the future” that one day unity and harmony will be established for all peoples. This sense of purpose and mission has the pragmatic consequence of affirming within the storms of personal or collective despair a “will to live” that helps, according to Kaplan, to “protest against the notion that life is meaningless.” 22 The gift that Judaism can contribute to America’s democratic enterprise is a pragmatic resilience and hope that the same redemptive spirit that drives America to find national meaning through the veneration of freedom and individual initiative is ultimately reconcilable with the ideals of Biblical salvation. 23 Kaplan goes on to point to the unique legacy of Judaism’s resistance to idolatry and tyranny as foundational for the fight to maintain liberal values in the modern era. 24 The otherness of Jewish culture may appear foreign and strange to outsiders, but its true essence is a desire to create rituals and traditions that provide a model for affirming every human being’s “inner freedom.” In Kaplan’s words, If democracy is to hold its own in the struggle against anti-democratic forces, political freedom must be sustained by an inner freedom, a freedom of the spirit. . . . We Jews may not have played a considerable role in the shaping of the political instruments of democracy; but from the time that our fathers identified God as the Power that brought us forth from the ‘house of bondage,’ freedom became part of our religious tradition with which we sought to inform our personal habits. The understanding of the close relationship between freedom as a state of mind and freedom as a condition of society is what Jews are in a position to contribute to the struggle for democracy. . . . For, in democracy’s struggle for survival, the decision will rest upon the extent to which those who fight under its banner will possess inner freedom. What is this inner freedom? . . . . It is the unyielding refusal to recognize the legitimacy of brute force, or to bow before its authority. This inner freedom . . . makes his whole life one long protest against all the brute forces that would interpose obstacles to the achievement of his worthiest aims. 25 (emphasis mine)

This inner freedom at the heart of Judaism’s redemptive hope is how the performance of Jewish culture connects to the performance of America’s

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democratic culture. According to Kaplan the modern world has witnessed a revitalization of a particular type of “pagan” metaphysics based on the celebration of “brute force” as a signifier for the “inevitable triumph of blind fate.” 26 Jewish culture directly inculcates democratic values through observing rituals and discourses that affirm the individual’s “inner freedom” as a redemptive form of hope in the power of liberation from “blind fate.” To counter the modern resurrection of, in Kaplan’s words, the “pagan notion of the dominance of irrational forces and the inevitable frustration of human hope,” Jewish culture (such as the yearly celebration of freedom of bondage during Passover) provides a counter-cultural ideal of resistance and perseverance. In contrast to “pagan” revelry in the “dominance of irrational forces” (a thinly veiled reference to social Darwinism and the rise of Fascism), the essence of Jewish culture inculcates the everlasting hope and fortitude to withstand “the blind forces of nature that endanger them and against the irrationalities and brutalities of their own human nature.” 27 God, according to Kaplan, is no longer an external super-natural force that controls the world, but rather is commensurate with the “inner freedom” within each individual who yearns for liberation from all forms of bondage. Because Jewish culture has developed around a celebration of God as the redemptive force that makes possible the overcoming of brute force for the actualization of inner freedom, Jewish culture, at its core, provides a more ancient grounding to America’s own experiment in the freedom of democracy and religious co-habitation. Judaism’s commitment to “inner freedom”— as expressed through a Jewish culture that revolves around a God who liberates the enslaved from bondage—can only survive so long as it remains committed to the more universal struggle for democracy. The struggle for democracy in the modern age needs the otherness of Judaism’s culture of commitment to redemptive hope in order to resist the temptation of succumbing to the pagan celebration of “blind fate and brute force.” Conversely, Judaism needs the support of democratic Enlightenment culture to reinforce a shared vision for the universal brotherhood and inalienable rights to freedom for all peoples. In sum, for Kaplan Jewish culture has essential resources to assist in the struggle for democracy, and joining in the universal struggle for democracy is essential for affirming the future of Jewish cultural identity. Kaplan’s quest to preserve/celebrate/elevate the distinct otherness of Jewish civilization was part of a broader emergent tension among most twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals over how much to affirm Jewish otherness as either compatible with modern liberal culture, or as a form of resistance and opposition to the “cultural homogeneity” of the surrounding dominant society. For Kaplan the mixing of Jewish otherness with the great hope for American tolerance and inclusivity represented a whole new possibility for Jewish culture. Conversely, in Europe Jewish intellectuals faced a rising tide

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of xenophobia in which Jews were increasingly viewed as representing a dangerous otherness that was both metaphysically and physical threatening, and hence needed to be removed. Within the European context the premodern religious threat of Jewish culture undermined the possibility of achieving the true unity of overcoming distinctions between “Jew and Gentile” (Galatians 3:28) as promised for many Christians as the barometer for achieving ultimate redemption. Franz Rosenzweig argued that the presence of Jewish culture has historically stirred up hate because it serves as a reminder of an alternative redemptive hope that challenges the hegemony and telos of Christian and Islamic empires. In the modern period this perceived threat by Jewish otherness metamorphosed into nationalistic and racial anxieties. The Europeans simply did not share America’s redemptive hope of forging a universalism premised on the strength of protecting an individual’s autonomy and identity commitments. OTHERNESS AND THE CRISIS OF REASON The rise of fascism within Europe ironically led many secular Jewish intellectuals who rarely identified with Judaism to re-think Jewish culture in terms that fit in with their critiques of modernity and bourgeois society. Judaism became less about religion and more about a symbol of otherness that existed as reminder of historical resistance to the legacy of Western metaphysics. In the words of secular Jewish theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “the existence and way of life of the Jews throw into question the generality with which they do not conform.” 28 According to the analysis of post-Enlightenment anti-Semitism by the Frankfurt School, for fascist and nationalist forces, “the mere existence of the other is a provocation.” 29 Accordingly Jews, as the main cultural signifier for this otherness, represented a “provocation” by their mere existence to what the Frankfurt School identified as the “totality” of Western civilization. 30 For these intellectuals Jewish culture became an idealized signifier for preserving a form of revolutionary resistance to the hegemony and totalitarianism of Western culture. 31 In response, Jewish intellectuals within the Frankfurt School and elsewhere increasingly constructed an ideal of Jewish cultural performance as representing a form of resistance to the threat of extermination from “totalitarianism”—both political and metaphysical. Rather than simply claim that Jewish culture was amenable to the spread of Western Enlightenment ideals through the expansion of liberal capitalism, for some members of the Frankfurt School (Franz Rosensweig, Walter Benjamin, and other early twentiethcentury Jewish intellectuals), the idea that Jews and Judaism represented an inherent source of potentially subversive otherness was increasingly em-

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braced as a method for revitalizing new forms of leftist Jewish cultural identity in the service of a broader humanitarian ideal of redemption. Like Kaplan, some of these intellectuals identified the key revolutionary component of Jewish culture with serving as chosen guardians for this unique vision of redemptive hope. Unlike Kaplan, however, the Jewish intellectuals who remained within the more contentious world of European political philosophy increasingly viewed the essence of Jewish culture as representing an otherness that was fundamentally incompatible with the perceived Enlightenment civilizing goals of subsuming all particularism within European universalism. The continued presence of Judaism as a “dark riddle” that refuses to be superseded can offer hope to all cultures that wish to resist totalitarian impulses that were increasingly engulfing the political and cultural landscape of the West. 32 For many of these secular Jewish intellectuals who had become disillusioned with the redemptive promises of Marx’s dialectical materialism, a return to Judaism as a form of otherness and cultural resistance offered some measure of hope that the hegemony and brutality unleashed by modern nationalism and imperialism could be symbolically resisted, at least in the cultural realm. The combined intellectual, romantic, and nationalistic revolts against the Enlightenment’s metaphysical and political legacy presented Jewish intellectuals new challenges and opportunities. 33 The challenges for Jewish intellectuals mostly came from romantic and European nationalists who similarly yearned to recover a Volk otherness or “spirit” (Volkgeist) that—to the consternation of European Jews—often entailed an undermining of the emancipatory rights Jews gained as a result of the bourgeois and communist revolutions. 34 Conversely, the combined assaults on the Enlightenment legacy and legal regimes of universal rights also inspired Jewish intellectuals to generate a “new thinking” (Rosenzweig) about Judaism’s distinctive intellectual tradition that focused on connecting Jewish otherness to the social libratory impulses still raging throughout Western civilization. Although the “crisis of reason” in the early part of the twentieth century (mostly as a result of the first World War) contributed to unleashing fascist “revolutions of nihilism,” it also allowed Jewish intellectuals to break free from Wissenschaft des Judentums and other forms of Enlightenment rationality as the only legitimate method for justifying Jewish culture as compatible with modern society. 35 The task for Jewish intellectuals no longer had to revolve around stripping Jewish culture of its pre-modern superstitious and tribalistic taint in order to make a case for Judaism as a worthy “religious” (contra Kant) identity for citizens within modern nation states. 36 As part of a broader recovery of Jewish culture, Martin Buber emerged in the early part of the twentieth century as one of the leading voices among both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals interested in encounters with otherness as an alternative to Enlightenment metaphysics. Following on Hegel’s

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Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the struggle for recognition and desire for overcoming alienation locates encounters with otherness, according to Buber, at the heart of what it means to understand human relationships, and our relationship with the divine. In my next section I turn to Buber’s phenomenology of hope through otherness. MARTIN BUBER: SELF, OTHER, AND SOCIETY Buber’s and Levinas’s recovery and celebration of Jewish particularism as a signifier for cultural otherness both drew upon and contributed to twentiethcentury critiques of Western metaphysics and Enlightenment. In this section I offer a brief re-reading of Buber’s approach to subjectivity. For Buber, a renewed openness to mystical experience in the early part of the twentieth century gave new life and meaning to Jewish culture as a means for furthering messianic hopes. 37 Buber’s philosophical anthropology started from a combined mystical and pragmatic desire to establish an alternative model of subjectivity that went beyond simple subject/object dualism. Buber staked out a new middle path along the “narrow ridge” between the depths of “collective” and “individual egoism” that broke with previous philosophical models of subjectivity which either posited the individual as radically alone in the world (Descartes), or subsumed within a larger totality of impersonal world historical forces (Hegel). 38 For Buber the self is constituted through the tension of existing both at a distance from and an intimate closeness to otherness. 39 Inter-subjective encounters with a particular Thou/otherness provided an alternative basis for evaluating individual affirmation. As Buber states, For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished . . . in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other, between men, that is, pre-eminently the mutuality of the making present—in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other—together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation and confirmation. 40 (emphasis mine)

Unlike Kaplan’s appropriation of “Jewish otherness” as something already given by a pre-existing social context, Buber starts from inter-subjective encounters as the foundations from which personal identity develops. Buber’s phenomenological twist is that, in the same way that existence precedes essence, so too each individual only comes to an understanding of itself as distinct through his/her relationship with an other. As Buber puts it in I and Thou, “I require a You to become; becoming I, I say you.” 41 Subjectivity emerges both with reference to the transcendence that comes from the mystification of otherness while also pointing toward an immanence enacted

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through solidarity. We gain our own sense of personal transcendence by realizing that we are not the other; yet without the other, we lack a transcendental referent necessary for constituting the self. In Hegelian terms, the resolution of dialectical struggles comes from achieving identity based on a consciousness of both being-for-self and being-for-other. Accordingly, Buber proposes that we start with our initial phenomenological moments of presence in which we experience the hope for recognition from those with whom we are capable of establishing a genuine relationship. All love, care, and ability to hope in ultimate redemption inductively stems from our original moments of intimacy established through I-and-Thou relationships. One of the most interesting things about the messianic hope that emerges through Buber’s philosophical anthropology is that it straddles the divide between maintaining a formal modernist model of subjectivity (based on maintaining the distinction between self and other) while also critiquing modernist approaches to subjectivity (particularly those of Descartes and Kant) that placed a greater emphasis on maintaining the “objective” distance between self-other/self-world. Levinas was to later correctly sum up Buber’s critique of metaphysics and epistemology in the following terms: Truth, therefore, is not grasped by a dispassionate subject . . . but by a commitment in which the other remains in his otherness. Although the Absolute could not be attained for the philosophers of antiquity except by means of contemplative detachment, and the impossibility of the latter is precisely what led to the separation of being and truth in the Parmenides of Plato, commitment, for Buber, is what gains access to otherness. . . . Thus the problem of truth raised by Parmenides is resolved in terms of a social or inter-subjective relation. 42

The use of philosophy to distance the subject from external objects gives us the knowledge of I-It relationships, but what it lacks is the deeper understanding from the intimacy of relationship with another person. 43 The hope of achieving authentic individuality comes through the revelation of presence (Gegenwart) between individuals engaged in the intimacy of a reciprocal “address and answer.” 44 The greatest truth we can discover about ourselves is found through a life devoted to solidarity with precisely that which is finite, namely other finite fallible human beings. In contrast to the emphasis on the individual as an isolated distinct monad (as championed by most existentialist philosophers like Heidegger), 45 Buber alternatively proposed that, In an essential relation . . . the barriers of individual being are in fact breached, and a new phenomenon appears which can appear only in this way: one life open to another . . . the other becomes present not merely in the imagination or feeling, but in the depths of one’s substance, so that one experiences the mystery of the other being in the mystery of one’s own . . . this very void penetrates the existence and permeates its deepest layer. 46

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The “mystery of the other” creates a “void”—an opening in existence itself— through which individual finitude touches on infinity by the communion with the “other being in the mystery of one’s own.” In contrast to mystical “doctrines of immersion,” the point is not the subsumption of the finite into the infinite. 47 Rather, the mystery of the infinite affirms the finitude of self and other without the dialectical transcendence of their somatic inscription into a static state of Being beyond the world (as promised by what Levinas identified as the Parmenidean/Plato epistemology of alienation). 48 In other words, we affirm our finitude through our relationships with others, and thus are given a revelation of what we may legitimately hope for: dialogic recognition with a particular Thou which can then serve as the potential grounding for future hopes in dialogue and recognition with other persons. Dialogue is authentic when both parties overcome their mutual positions of representing an alien other while maintaining their distinctiveness. This new redemptive hope through inter-subjective relations is only achieved through mutual resistance to the philosophical temptation of using a subject/object paradigm to strip otherness of its mystery. The important thing is the hope of maintaining the otherness of the other, while at the same time creating genuine moments of reciprocal recognition. This, of course, is the greatest phenomenological challenge, as Buber makes us aware, since philosophical language and knowledge are based on terms designed to overcome the “mystery of the other.” The encounter with otherness captures a hope for recognition, but it can also represent a threat of anomie that leads to cravings for “objective” terms in order to mollify the uncanny feelings when encountering something that is experienced as other. We simply cannot help the fact that most of our initial encounters with otherness are experienced as threats, or at least they stimulate feelings of discomfort. The cultural solution Buber proposed was to view these moments of anomie and potential terror as invitations to dialogue. Through genuine dialogue comes the revelation of hope that future encounters and dialogue will turn the terror of otherness into something which borders on the divine. Buber’s dialogic philosophy can also be re-read as providing a model for liberal democratic hope that, through dialogue between citizens, bridges will be created between the self and other that allow for greater mutual recognition and confirmation. Accordingly, from a pragmatic perspective, the hope generated through dialogue has the redemptive potential to expand our circles of civic trust. That which is transcendent becomes immanent, and vice versa, through individuals coming together in order to make a commitment to maintaining a conversation that will hopefully outlive their particular contributions. When we resist the imperialist temptation to make the other person accept a single final vocabulary, the respect for the distinct otherness of those engaged in a dialogue can become a representation for the hope that future encounters will generate future dialogue, and thus potentially widen the cir-

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cles of mutual affirmation. By engaging in dialogue the alien qualities of otherness both decrease and increase through the mutuality of recognition: they decrease because genuine dialogue creates solidarity, but they also increase because real recognition necessitates that the individuals involved respect the boundaries and integrity of the other person as a “Thou” who thwarts our impulses for domination and assimilation. This is how Buber’s dialogic philosophy pragmatically serves liberal democratic values of tolerance and civil rights. Rather than merely recognize the individual rights of the other as a distinct monad in competition with the rights of other monads, otherness itself becomes part of affirming liberal democratic notions of citizenship. The process of bringing other voices into our liberal democratic conversation is one of the ways in which we perform the messianic hope of expanding genuine dialogue to those who may initially appear foreign or alien. Just as Kaplan provided a vision of Jewish culture that could link inner freedom with a redemptive hope in the fraternity of all peoples, so too Buber gives us a phenomenological reformulation of otherness that reconciles individual needs for affirmation with the messianic impulse for greater solidarity. One of the more innovative qualities of Buber’s dialogic philosophy is that it both reinforces traditional constructions of subjectivity while at the same time undermines the purity of a solipsistic “I.” Although Levinas was correct to later point out that Buber’s version of subjectivity retains a modern existential emphasis on the importance of a distinct “I,” 49 Buber repeatedly affirmed that the most important things we can come to know about ourselves, external objects, and other people, occur within a context of a non-instrumental encounter (Begegnung) and mutual address. Buber’s concern for how the self is present to an other did point the way toward a post-metaphysical emphasis on the self as imbricated within the context of relationships. 50 In the next section I briefly look at Levinas’s distinct contribution to this evolving narrative over self and other that both changed the direction of Jewish thought and more broadly contributed to fundamental shifts within Western intellectual discourse between cultural otherness and political philosophy. LEVINAS AND REDEMPTIVE HOPE More than any other Jewish intellectual, Emmanuel Levinas elaborated on the correlation Buber established between encounters with otherness and subjectivity. 51 As part of his overall project of translating “Hebrew into Greek,” the recovery of otherness within the weightiness of phenomenological discourse was central for Levinas’s post-Holocaust mission of explaining how Jewish particularism can contribute to universal redemptive goals. 52 In order to explain the universal redemptive impulse within what he referred to

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as “Jewish humanism,” Levinas followed Buber in focusing on the phenomenology of encounter as the building blocks toward what he identified as the “true object of hope,” namely, “Messiah or salvation.” 53 Like Buber, for Levinas our encounter with the other—or alterity—is the pre-condition that allows for an ethical self to emerge. In Buber’s philosophical anthropology the revelation of Thou-ness/otherness is an address to the self to take responsibility; and through responsibility for the other, commences the internal dialectics between the egotistical part of ourselves that seeks individual preservation through a “setting apart” and “taking possession” of the other, in contrast to acting as “persons” who find affirmation through genuine relationships. 54 Levinas elaborated on what Buber identified as the dialectics between egotism and personhood by adding his own phenomenological emphasis on otherness as the pre-existing context from which the self initially emerges. According to Levinas, the self emerges through its prior responsibility for otherness that exists before the moment of cogito. 55 Levinas states, “my uniqueness lies in the responsibility I display for the Other.” 56 We emerge within a horizon of contextuality that pre-conditions our subjectivity. The “revelation of the other” is a “trace” for the infinite that creates a revelation and rupture within the fortress of our “egology.” 57 Alterity not only exists before the self emerges, but also serves to negate the self by representing an infinite overflow that points to the limits of our categories of reason. 58 We most affirm who we really are when we respond with a biblical, “Here I am” to the needs of the other, not when we remove ourselves from the world and reflect on infinite Being from within our solitude. 59 In contrast to an “imperialist subjectivity” 60 resulting from Cartesian solipsism, for Levinas the other is prior and exists at an “asymmetrical height” over the ego’s task for selfpreservation. The ideal of the ego as affirmed through the dominance created by “objectivity” is replaced with a counter ideal of self-actualization through demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice for the other. This rupturing of the self by encountering alterity, ironically, simultaneously allows for a re-constituting of the self through what Levinas referred to as the “heteronomy” of a “responsibility overflowing freedom.” 61 Levinas broke with traditional constructions of subjectivity by proposing that the ethical self is constituted through a sacrificial deference toward the other. This sacrificial ideal of a self living in debt to the other defines, according to Levinas, what it means to embrace a “Hebraic” culture verses a “Greek” one. According to Levinas, the legacy of philosophy that runs from Plato to Hegel is premised on the idealism that the social phenomena of desire and discord will end when otherness eventually becomes dialectically subsumed within the “totality” of the “same.” 62 To counter the imperial “sameness” of Western ontology, Levinas proposed a phenomenology that sought to rehabilitate an appreciation of otherness as symbolizing a “multi-

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plicity in being, which refuses totalization.” 63 The “possibility of reality as multiple” 64 constitutes, according to Levinas, an alternative understanding of the inter-subjective relationships between self and other that resists all totalitarian impulses. 65 In more pragmatic terms, Levinas’ ethics can be reinterpreted as representing a concern with the implicit “imperialism” of having to view other people as essentially the same in order to care for them. 66 For Levinas real ethics begins, not by affirming that we possess the same rational human self (as assumed by liberalism’s focus on the universal rights of man), but instead through a recognition and celebration of the multiplicity of our differences and otherness. Levinas has been praised for having provided an account of ethics that focuses on the recognition of otherness and “multiplicity” as an alternative messianic hope. An ethics based on the veneration for otherness at a “height” over the self distinguished Levinas’ approach to subjectivity from Buber’s. 67 Although he drew heavily on Buber for his own understanding of subjectivity, Levinas was concerned that even Buber’s model of I and Thou retained some of the “commercial relation” of a formal reciprocal exchange between monadic selves. According to Levinas, the “economy” of reciprocal recognition within Buber’s model of I-Thou relationships is a good foundation, but simply does not rise to the heights of disinterested ethics. 68 We best express the depths of our ethical commitments, so argues Levinas, by demonstrating a “gratuitous” willingness to suffer and to put the needs of the other person above our own. 69 Where Buber was relatively more accepting of the dialectics involved in the “I’s” egoistical impulses, Levinas placed greater emphasis on the heteronymous command to overcome what he viewed as the inherent “violence” within both subjectivity and ontology by advocating deferential service and saintly sacrifice for the other. 70 Humanistic ideals of autonomy emerged, according to Levinas, from a model of subjectivity based on the idea that peace and harmony will arise from the mutual recognition of our egotistical desire for violence over the other. Additionally, in the name of autonomy, Western humanism has championed the creation of institutions—legal, educational, medical, etc.—designed around the assumption that to be fully human is to be freed from preexisting social ties. Humanism starts with the assumption that the individual emerges from what John Rawls referred to as the “original position” of being fundamentally unencumbered, isolated, and thrown into an economy of competition with other monadic selves. Within this view, only a self capable of severing its connections to the other—or others—has the autonomy and freedom to engage in genuine self-fashioning. Therefore, connecting and relating to the other can only occur through reciprocal “contracts” in exchange for mutual self-preservation and/or happiness. The other only has worth to the extent that it participates in the “economy” of desire. Consequently, the

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subjectivity given to us by the modern world is always engaged in the epistemological “violence” of objectifying and evaluating the other in relationship to competing needs and desires associated with each individual. Levinas proposed a counter hope that we can best overcome the contained violence of secular liberalism by embracing the irrational sacrificial model of giving “bread taken from one’s own mouth.” 71 Levinas was part of a chorus of theologically oriented thinkers who argued that—in contrast to Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal—viewing oneself as ethically obligated to a particular person and/or people is a better model for serving humanity’s redemptive aspirations. The particularism of “Jewish humanism” is in fact, Levinas argued, a “universalism” because it prioritizes the command to care for the other above the violence of philosophy and modern subjectivity. Maintaining a dialectics that both celebrates otherness, while also contributing to the hope for universal redemption, is what it means to participate, according to Levinas, in “Jewish humanism.” Additionally, in contrast to liberalism’s view of the self as always engaged within an economy of competing needs, Levinas looked to Jewish culture and “Jewish humanism” as promoting an alternative understanding of the self as already ethically obligated to subordinate individual needs for the other. We are already and always imbricated within a heteronymous context of relationships and obligations to other people that goes beyond the boundaries of modern liberal citizenship. 72 Embracing the redemptive hope that comes from encountering otherness can help shatter the monadic shells of alienation by bringing the individual into contact with the infinity of otherness that can never be contained by the legalistic boundaries championed by modern civil societies. Part of Levinas’s appeal to a broader philosophical community had a lot to do with his commitment to translating his theological sensibilities into “Greek” terms that spoke to more general phenomenological interests in otherness as an alternative to Western metaphysics. This “transplantation of theology into phenomenology,” 73 Sam Moyn points out, additionally served the purpose of reaffirming the importance of “Jerusalem’s” commitment to ethics within “Greek” philosophical terms that could speak to modern audiences increasingly alienated from pre-modern discourses of obedience and reverence. Although Levinas’ emphasis on the importance of heteronomy and fear/awe of God (Yirat Ha’shem) was redolent of a reactionary antimodernism among religious thinkers, part of Levinas’s appeal was his ability to translate “Hebrew” theological concerns into secular terms without simultaneously insisting on a return to pre-modern foundationalism or anti-intellectual authoritarianism. Like other progressive religious intellectuals of his time (most notably Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel), Levinas embraced the paradoxical view that individuals achieve ethical self-actualization through embracing the “difficult freedom” of an “infinite responsibility” for other people. 74 According to Levinas, what gives Judaism it’s universal appeal

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(and hence counts as a form of “humanism”) is precisely its model of spiritual obligation and commitment to otherness—first in the form of God, and then to other people as created in God’s image. Unlike the freedom afforded by liberal institutions and courts of justice which emphasize rights based on freedom-from encumbrances and obligations, real freedom entails the struggle to overcome the imperialism of the ego. Liberalism’s focus on individual rights is deficient because true redemption does not come from the unleashing of desire, but rather when we go beyond our egos and embrace the Zaddik or saint’s ideal of radical obligations that demands a commitment from our whole being toward the other. 75 Just as a parent’s love for a child is “gratuitous” in that it goes beyond any kind of economic calculation or expectation for reciprocal exchange, so too, according to Levinas, we best affirm our ethical selves when we embrace a saintly willingness to take the “bread from one’s mouth” in service to the other. 76 Levinas’ great ethical sensibility—but also perhaps the greatest source of controversy—was expressed in his demand that the “surplus” of obligations that one might expect from intimate family members should in fact become a standard for all social interactions. In this sense, Levinas followed a standard religious hope that the justice and love that has primarily been directed toward one’s intimate family members or lovers can be extended to what he referred to as “the third,” namely all other members of society. As belief in revolutionary political change toward a more egalitarian society diminished, Levinas’ idea that otherness could somehow become part of our broader discussions of social ethics became increasingly appealing to those who did not see their distinct identities recognized by humanism’s emphasis on “sameness.” In the post-World War II era, in which traditionally marginalized groups began to find new opportunities for acceptance within the shifting currents of Western liberalism’s confrontation with totalitarianism, Levinas’s phenomenology of otherness as the path toward redemption became the intellectual backbone for many post-modern theorists similarly interested in critiquing the legacy of Western metaphysics. RORTY’S SOCIAL HOPE: BETWEEN POST-MODERN METAPHYSICS AND LIBERAL POLITICS Levinas’ emphasis on our responsibility and relationship with otherness was historically appealing in part because it fit into a grander emergent narrative among western intellectuals eager to problematize the Enlightenment’s ideal of individualism, and other discourses rooted in the “violence” of subject/ object dualism within the philosophical tradition. For many theorists brought under the broad umbrella of post-modernism, one of the main problems with modern constructions of subjectivity was the failure to recognize that indi-

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viduals are always contextualized and preconditioned by the contingency of their social and geographic location. Although scholars have additionally noted that there are many elements within Levinas’ thought that placed him outside, perhaps even at odds with, post-modern critiques of subjectivity, Levinas’ emphasis on a self that is already pre-conditioned and contextualized by alterity contributed to a larger post-modern intellectual trend toward problematizing the liberal ideal of the autonomous and isolated self freed from social and metaphysical obligations. 77 Levinas’ phenomenological veneration of otherness also provided a crucial philosophical foundation for the shift in the post-war period toward the veneration of multiculturalism and other forms of what Foucault later famously identified as “subjugated knowledge.” Levinas’ account of Western humanism as following a “totalitarian” logic of assimilating all otherness to make way for a more unified (often white Christian male) ideal of humanity was particularly appealing for those who later identified with the rise of multiculturalism, feminism, and other movements dedicated to undermining the epistemological pretense that the end goal of Enlightenment rationality should be the subsumption of all otherness into a single totality. 78 On both a phenomenological and political level, a dialectical overcoming of otherness in order to achieve the abstract imperial “sameness” of humanism was viewed as increasingly impossible, and ethically undesirable. What started out mostly as an internal intellectual debate for Levinas over the meaning of phenomenology in the wake of Heidegger’s turn to Nazism ended up part of a much broader theoretical and political shift in how otherness is linked to the broader challenge of recognizing different cultural identities. Rather than representing fossilized pre-modern modes of social relations, the performance of Jewish culture could now be viewed as part of a continuum of avant-garde radicalism in the libratory service of subverting hegemonic discourses. Rather than promote new forms of solidarity, however, post-modern critique often played into a politics of negation in which the goal was to undermine the West’s cultural imperialism of subsuming the infinite varieties of otherness—that is, culture, race, gender, and class—into a static vision of “the human.” Rather than focus on concrete changes to economic conditions of the broader society, for many intellectuals in this period a recognition of otherness became an alternative basis for furthering humanity’s redemptive and libratory impulses without having to directly engage in praxis. Respect for otherness and difference emerged as a new rallying call for how intellectuals could both support the liberal expansion of universal civil rights, while also fostering a new kaleidoscopic ideal of interacting layers of identity politics. Given the unraveling of the West’s narratives around the necessity of metaphysics for inspiring ethical conduct—coupled with the residual traumas

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of the Holocaust and other twentieth-century genocides—we should still appreciate how the emphasis on various forms of otherness and particularism during this post-World War II period played an essential role in making liberal democratic audiences more sensitive to forms of suffering, humiliation, and identity commitments than ever before in history. Also, given the “totalitarian” qualities that Levinas and other intellectuals during this period correctly identified as part of the Western metaphysical tradition, Levinas’ insistence on a veneration of otherness should be appreciated for building a whole new discourse centered on concerns for both justice and social liberation. These insights and historical contributions to cultures of resistance are not only essential for understanding the later developments of cultural studies, women studies, multiculturalism, etc.—but also continue to be an essential educational resource for the task of inculcating critical consciousness in educational institutions across the world. 79 Nevertheless, in the later part of the twentieth century, Richard Rorty raised a significant challenge to the veneration of otherness as a method for fulfilling the libratory legacy of the Enlightenment. Rorty questioned whether a politics of negation is sufficient for the more important task of building democratic solidarity and furthering social hope. Rorty took the controversial position that progressive goals of liberation and the expansion of liberal democratic ideals of inclusiveness are not necessarily served by discourses that venerate otherness or identity politics. Rorty was critical of conceptions of “otherness” (as promoted by Levinas and other post-modern theorists) for lacking the practical dimension of social solidarity, as well as continuing onto-theological thinking. According to Rorty, concerns with otherness and particularism do not represent a triumph over Western metaphysical imperialism. Rather, the quest to venerate otherness is a continuation, according to Rorty, of a fundamental metaphysical desire to create a correspondence between ourselves and eternal principles of truth. Psychologically, correspondence theory is appealing because the more we can claim a privileged access to an external standard of truth, the more we can justify our finite existence as meaningful. Phenomenological accounts of otherness, according to Rorty, are an extension of our religious and romantic yearnings to get in touch with something sublime, primordial and deep within the human self that can never be accessed by the type of “instrumental rationality” promoted by the Enlightenment. These types of spiritual hopes for connecting to the sublime may be inspirational, but they are still problematic for deliberative debate among a diverse citizenry within liberal democratic societies. The concern for the recovery of otherness/difference by Levinas, Derrida, and other post-modern theorists, according to Rorty, provided a compelling elitist poetry for those who yearn for the intellectual weightiness of phenomenological explanations. The problem is that these very same phenomeno-

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logical abstractions can distract from more concrete problems of trying to use rational terms shared in common in order to debate when and how to extend the boundaries of a liberal democratic “we-ness” to those with whom we might regard as outside our concentric circles of care. Rorty sums up his indictment of appeals to metaphysical categories like Otherness and Being in the following terms: I don’t find Levinas’s “Other” any more useful than Heidegger’s “Being”— both strike me as gawky, awkward, and unenlightening. I see ethics as what we have to start creating when we face a choice between two irreconcilable actions, each of which would, in other circumstances, have been equally natural and proper. Neither my child nor my country is very much like a Levinasian Other, but when I face a choice between incriminating my child or breaking my country’s laws by committing perjury, I start looking around for some ethical principles. 80

Appealing to terms like Being and Otherness rarely assist, according to Rorty, in broad democratic discussions over concrete political choices. When it comes to trying to figure out how to get citizens to make collective sacrifices in order to make hard decisions over how and to whom we extend the boundaries for care, appealing to the otherness of the alien or enemy rarely clarifies what concrete actions should be taken. Additionally, metaphysical terms like Otherness, Being, or the Soul participate in a quality of ineffability that makes it impossible to argue over within the public arena. 81 For Rorty, both Being and Otherness are terms that function as yet another set of metaphysical placeholders for something essential about being human that, paradoxically, often remains beyond the grasp of our finite understanding. 82 Just as ideas about the nature of God necessarily elude our grasp (since the infinite can never be completely contained within terms resulting from finitude), so too otherness often refers to qualities of individual persons or people that elude terms allowing for mutual understanding within the realm of appearances. 83 Otherness, like Being, suggests a transcendental referent beyond all linguistic conventions, making it almost impossible to establish inter-subjective agreement needed for proscribing action within the public arena. Consequently, for the purposes of continuing democratic discussions, appeals to otherness—similar to the demand for public references to God—run the danger of acting like a conversation stopper. 84 As long as we no longer insist that our fellow citizens adapt our personal understanding of terms like Otherness, Being, and God in the public arena, however, Rorty concedes that we should not have to rationally justify whatever terms we privately use to bring meaning and beauty into our lives. 85 If we follow Mill in tolerating and respecting the boundaries of individual freedoms, “people have the same right to idiosyncratic forms of religious devotion as they do to write poems or paint pictures that nobody else can

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make any sense out of.” 86 Within the public arena, however, appeals to otherness/difference/thou-ness are only relevant if we can construct concrete rational proposals for proscribing behavior and resources. We may not need inter-subjective agreement when it comes to private matters of personal poetry, but when it comes to democratic solidarity, however, it is hard to understand, according to Rorty, how demands to appreciate ones “infinite responsibility” for the “Other” could ever be adequately implemented beyond extending democratic rights and greater economic resources to those who lack wealth and power. It is impossible to separate Rorty’s appeal to social hope as an alternative to metaphysics from the historical triumphalism of post-World War II American power and culture. The shattering of Europe’s heavy and deep intellectual culture of existential angst was in part a vindication of America’s pragmatist tradition. The pragmatists could argue that an intellectual culture that had produced thinkers more concerned with issues of primordial Being (Heidegger), or with the aesthetics and authenticity of self-fashioning (Nietzsche)—rather than with democratic concerns of strengthening the ties of social solidarity—may have justifiably found its way to the dustbin of history. As Rorty points out, despite the centuries of yearning for a form of Platonist transcendence “beyond history and institutions,” the West’s ontotheological tradition had little effect in preventing the atrocities committed in the heart of Western civilization’s most scientific, most Christian, and most philosophical of all cultures. 87 The call that goes out from Auschwitz does not entail continuing the quest for better accesses to “the unconditional” as a guarantee for ethics, but rather strengthening social hope by expanding the boundaries of social solidarity. 88 This is why we can jettison the metaphysical legacy of the Enlightenment and instead just focus on continuing it’s libratory ethos. 89 The demand to recognize a universal otherness about people can easily be addressed by simply elaborating on Kant’s categorical imperative and Judith Shklar’s liberalism that, in Rorty’s terms, a “recognition of a common susceptibility to humiliation is the only social bond that is needed.” 90 In the end, expanding the social benefits of liberal democratic society may be a more effective defense against the fascist and fundamentalist than insisting on an appreciation for the mystifications of otherness. The social hope born out of Rorty’s bourgeois liberalism is that, through the merging of contingency with solidarity, we will increase our “willingness to live with plurality and to stop asking for universal validity.” 91 The less we are concerned with the ontological nature of otherness, the better chance we have of actually extending rights and benefits to people once viewed as alien. The less we consider certain social distinctions as having an ontological or holy aura about them, the more likely we are to allow a greater diversity of desires to be tolerated. 92 A neo-pragmatic utopia is a future in which “everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something

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not merely human, that really matters.” 93 Instead of looking to escape our humanness, the social hope of expanding on Western Democratic utopianism means we now can look to the contingency and freedom of “our conversation with our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance.” 94 Additionally, the less we insist that everyone share the same final vocabulary for describing what really matters to them, the greater chance we have for encouraging freedom, tolerance, and multiple identity commitments. 95 To the age old ethical dilemma over “Why should I care about a stranger?,” Rorty offers that it is more effective to provide a “long, sad, sentimental story” in order to draw individuals into a sympathetic connection to those whom may appear alien or threatening. For Rorty what determines ethical norms is our “sentimental” ability to see others as “one of us.” 96 Rorty states, “I think of imagination and sentiment rather than reason as the faculties which do the most to make moral progress possible.” 97 Moral progress advances, according to Rorty, based on “a people’s imaginative ability to identify with people whom their ancestors had not been able to identify with.” 98 “Progress,” should be viewed as “a history of increasing useful metaphors rather than of increasing our understanding of how things really are.” 99 Rather than focus on otherness as a signifier for some mystical quality that is beyond the grasp of our understanding, we should instead focus on translating individual and cultural expressions of otherness into opportunities for generating greater ethical narratives that focus on making those who seem different and alien appear more familiar, sympathetic, and deserving of care and protection. The more we appreciate the contingency of our final vocabularies the less willing we become to hold onto social distinctions as ontologically fixed. Historically, cultural politics has done best when it has helped us take less seriously certain social and cultural distinctions—such as blood, caste, and race—that once mystified our ancestors. Cultural and political reforms, in the name of pursuing a greater sense of solidarity, will do better, according to Rorty, by making concrete claims about how to rectify actual harm being done. Otherness from a neo-pragmatic perspective only becomes a “useful metaphor” if it contributes to the creation of a common, recognizable discourse over how we may be excluding and humiliating those whom we might want to include as part of our larger sense of “we.” Within Rorty’s neopragmatic utopia we may lose a depth of meaning that has entranced European intellectuals for centuries, but what we gain is the potential of increasing the number of people once considered alien now included as part of the liberal democratic sense of “we.” In his essay “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” Rorty proposed that we drop the metaphysical ideal of justice as standing outside the contingencies of history and circumstance, and instead re-interpret justice simply as “the name for loyalty to a certain very large group.” 100 Drawing on Michael Waltzer’s

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work “Thick and Thin,” Rorty points out that the relevant “thickness” or “thinness” of our loyalties boils down to the “detailed and concrete stories you can tell about yourself as a member of a small group,” in contrast to those “relatively abstract and sketchy stories you tell about yourself as a citizen of the world.” 101 Consequently, the tension between our local loyalties versus vague and general loyalties to an ideal of global justice largely revolves around the very difficult task of determining how much we are willing to view the stranger—or other—as deserving of the same bonds of care we expect from our local, familial, and tribal/national associations. Because both the virtues of justice and loyalty represent social goods that often exist in perpetual tension, we are constantly faced with the dilemma of whether or not we should, in Rorty’s terms, “contract the circle for the sake of loyalty, or expand it for the sake of Justice.” 102 We may not feel obligated to recognize and respect the otherness of the stranger, but we may feel comfortable giving a greater number of non-citizens basic civil rights. Conversely, it is rude to those for whom we do have intimate relations to insist that they stand in the same relation to us as someone outside our circles of loyalty. This point is particularly relevant with regard to the “gratuitous” and “saintly” qualities within Levinas’ demand that the overflow of our “infinite responsibility” to the other necessitates a martyr like willingness to “jump into water to save someone” without even knowing how to swim. 103 Levinas’ gratuitous ethics certainly provides an ideal that perhaps could be applied to family relations, but are these reasonable expectations for how to relate to those outside our local loyalties? 104 Can I really be expected to treat my children as I would other people? If one were to take Levinas’ slightly masochistic demand seriously, what are the implications here for the self and the competing social good of autonomy? 105 If the other is a stand-in for the infinite, how exactly do we evaluate our efforts at venerating otherness? Levinas fails, for example, to make the necessary stipulations between my economic obligations to my neighbor in contrast to my family, community, state or nation. Without such gradations, a phenomenological demand to prioritize the other at a height above all else becomes a vacuous platitude that may stimulate an abstract sense of guilt and debt to otherness (which was certainly appropriate for the European context immediately after the Holocaust), but is difficult to imagine how exactly we are supposed to implement this ideal in broad multi-cultural democratic societies. One of Rorty’s strongest retorts to the privileging of otherness and cultural identity was presented in his essay “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz.” 106 Rorty engages Geertz’s thesis that liberal institutions do not adequately address the “thickness,” nuance, or “otherness” of personal identities. Rorty counters that the type of critical theory and cultural politics developed to investigate such “thick” descriptions are good for generating

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greater love and concern for those who may be marginalized, but they also tend to overlook the crucial benefit of having liberal institutions based on a quality of “thinness” that, theoretically, allows a larger group of individuals to have their basic needs addressed. The advantage of the bureaucrat’s disinterested focus on procedures of statecraft—to the exclusion of prophetic concerns for soulcraft—is that, arguably, a greater diversity of personal pursuits can flourish without the sanction or interference from state institutions. Additionally, Rorty adds that a great benefit of “thin” liberal institutions is the historically unprecedented ability for rights and justice to be extended to social groups and individuals previously viewed as foreign, if not as enemies. While Rorty lauds the “banality” of our administered public institutions, he qualifies his position by stating that there is still an essential role to be played by social theorists. 107 According to Rorty, “the moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between agents of love and the agents of justice.” Agents of love generate creative, penetrating, and thick cultural venues for enriching our social relations. Conversely, agents of justice are more concerned with satisfying the bare minimum of cultural identity so that a maximal amount of people can receive basic justice while infringing upon the least amount of freedoms. Rorty applauds social scientists like Geertz and Foucault for serving as “agents of love” who strengthen democratic societies by making us aware of how our institutions and norms may in fact humiliate marginalized groups. 108 A concern with the transcendental qualities of otherness may increase love; nevertheless, for justice to advance, appeals to otherness have to be translated into concrete proposals for civil society. Rorty is right that pragmatically appealing to the mystery of otherness does little to help us with concrete concerns like how to adjudicate between competing social goods like justice, peace, security, freedom, and prosperity within liberal democratic society. At tough moments we may need to tilt toward one ideal at the expense of other equally important social goods. For example, there is very little about encountering otherness that can help us determine when a society should be willing to sacrifice freedoms in order to achieve greater levels of security, or sacrifice social harmony in the name of justice. At the same time, however, Rorty’s vision of social hope, by making his neo-pragmatism dependent on whatever strengthens the bonds of solidarity, leaves open room for re-reading Thou-ness/otherness as “a useful metaphor” for those inexplicable phenomenological components of encounter with other people that are essential for finding communion and hope. It is this type of re-reading Jewish cultural performances and modern Jewish reflections on otherness that I turn to in my conclusion.

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CONCLUSION Buber, Kaplan and Levinas all suggested different routes that can be taken for reinterpreting the performance of Jewish culture as both a challenge and potential compliment to liberal democratic culture. For Kaplan, the otherness generated through Jewish cultural performances affirm divine ideals of inner freedom and redemptive hopes for salvation. These ideals, although originating within the specific history of Jewish civilization, are also actualized through the American democratic project. Jewish otherness and American democratic ideals share in the same redemptive vision for all humanity. For Buber and Levinas, however, Judaism’s cultural otherness represents more of a challenge for the West’s Enlightenment and liberal traditions. For Buber, liberal institutions—especially those dedicated to education—only provide the shells and husks within which the sparks of genuine encounter can be ignited. Similarly for Levinas, Jewish culture is the only genuine counter to the metaphysical “violence” against otherness in the name of “sameness.” 109 The strength of Jewish culture is that it provides texts and traditions that help reinforce a sense of being spiritually commanded to sacrifice for the other, even if that means violating the boundaries of rights and economies of reciprocal exchange. 110 Alternatively, Rorty gives us reason to pause and critically reflect on the limits of identity politics and cultural performance. According to Rorty, what cultural theorists and agents of love miss in their fervor for recovering and venerating alterity is an appreciation for the fact that “most of the time, justice has to be enough.” 111 By not insisting on a social policy based on the love for mysterious otherness, we may lose out on collective sentiments of spiritual interconnectedness, but what we gain is greater freedom, tolerance, and potentially more diversity. The delegation to courts and other state institutions may have to suffice, especially if we expect to strengthen large democratic societies comprised of diverse groups of citizens who may resist the demands for group love with their “whole beings,” but nevertheless might be reconciled to lesser goals of allowing individuals to pursue their freedoms and happiness on their own terms so long as stability and the rule of law are maintained. Rorty is right that terms like “Being” and “Otherness” may not be conducive to most civil debates, but thinking about otherness can pragmatically serve as a “useful metaphor” if it assists to delineate discursive commitments that, in Rorty’s terms, help citizens to “adjust the balance between their responsibilities to themselves and their responsibilities to their fellow-citizens.” 112 Drawing on Rorty’s proposal to separate the Enlightenment’s libratory politics from its metaphysics, modern Jewish intellectual discourses on Thou-ness/otherness should be re-read through the lenses of neo-pragmatism as expressions of social hope, best realized through concrete acts of solidar-

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ity. How to do this without engaging in what Levinas warned is a reduction of otherness to a vague humanism remains a challenge—yet a challenge worthy of our intellectual efforts. Pragmatically, teaching, reading, and thinking about otherness can additionally provide a spiritual exercise that encourages us to reflect on what Kaplan referred to as the “the rhythm of alternation” between those parts of our “hyphenated” identities or relationships that can serve as a source of social solidarity and citizenship, versus those parts of identity that are more reflective of local loyalties to particular peoples, tribes, or families. The function of any culture is to engage in what Peter Berger referred to as “world-construction” through cultural acts of generating boundaries that reinforce a sacred cosmos as distinct from forces of chaos. 113 World-construction always involves binding the self to the other, while maintaining their distinctiveness. Cultural performances also provide, in Philip Reiff’s terms, “motives directing the self outward” as a way to overcome the anomy of personal despair and isolation. 114 In more subjective terms, to think Jewish culture is to always engage the dialectics between those parts of the self that are other verses those parts of one’s personal identity that can establish common cause and solidarity with other people. The dialectic of both celebrating the distance from the other, as well as seeking the redemptive moment of overcoming that distance, defines the redemptive hope that Buber, Kaplan, and Levinas all saw at the heart of Jewish culture. What unites Buber, Kaplan, and Levinas in their approach to Jewish culture is their conviction that Jewish otherness is only truly meaningful if it can help further the goal of turning an other into a subject that we are obligated to care for. The point is not to get an “objective” grasp on what defines otherness but rather, as Buber and Levinas suggest, to imagine yourself encountering something profound that changes how you relate to those around you from a position of care and compassion. Jewish cultural practices that assist in strengthening these ethical commitments, as Kaplan suggested, not only serve democracy, but also strengthen redemptive hope. Once that is accomplished, all the rest is commentary. Cultural performances of otherness additionally help to disrupt majority cultures from becoming too self-assured by introducing a sense of the uncanny—or what Rorty lauds as the power of contingency and irony—that allows for a reevaluation, sometimes even as trans-valuation of normativity and “collectivism.” Holding onto Jewish cultural practices becomes a reminder of what Ernst Bloch referred to as the “not-yet” of redemption. In a sense, to perform Jewish culture is to reintroduce a counter history that does not yet accept what Hegel claimed was the final reconciliation between spirit and desire through the resolution of the dialectical process within the modern world. To paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon, it is not up to us to resolve or overcome

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this dialectic, nor can we flee from our responsibility for the other even as we seek to affirm our own autonomy. Given my interest in harnessing Jewish intellectual reflections on otherness for the purposes of strengthening liberal democratic solidarity, I propose that Buber’s, Kaplan’s, and Levinas’ emphasis on the encounter with the Thou/Other can be re-interpreted as a metaphor for the importance of going beyond the boundaries of individual autonomy and egoism. The civil structures established within a procedural republic may be important but are no substitute for the sense of responsibility that comes from genuine encounters of mutual presence and inter-subjective affirmation that break individuals out from their shells of alienation. Modern Jewish reflections on encounters with otherness provide a more holistic account of what Geoffrey Hartman refers to as the complexity of “ghostly feelings” and libidinal emotions involved in the hopes that bind and separate the self from society. 115 In his concern to protect the communicative rationality of the public sphere, Rorty’s neo-pragmatic version of social hope failed to account for the sense of intimacy and care that both challenge the boundaries of liberal democratic institutions but are also essential for a real sense of solidarity. Buber and Levinas’s dense phenomenological writings on otherness continues to give us a thick description for imagining the psychological and erotic complexities of inter-subjective dynamics that make solidarity possible. The great Enlightenment hope that egalitarian institutions based on the ethos of distributive justice will ensure stability and prosperity will always need to be balanced out by our more romantic and inter-subjective hopes to address and interact with other people from the intimacy of recognition that comes from relating to someone as a Thou. These challenges have important implications for thinking about the meaning of Jewish culture. The pragmatic challenge for Jewish cultural performances in the twenty-first century is how to translate the inherited traditions and terms from the Jewish tradition into meaningful narratives for the next generation. As Chancellor Arnold Eisen writes, “any meaning proposed to contemporary American Jews for their acceptance will have to demonstrate its relevance and its adequacy to their experience in the variety of settings where life is lived: family and politics, faith and ritual, professional and personal roles.” 116 Re-reading Buber’s, Kaplan’s, and Levinas’ approach to Jewish otherness through the lens of Rorty’s social hope can assist in this pragmatic challenge to turn one’s obligations to the other into a source of personal meaning that contributes to social solidarity. Otherness plays an essential phenomenological role in the ethical formation of the self. Accordingly, the redemptive hope from Buber’s and Levinas’s phenomenological accounts of social encounter provides a necessary compliment to Rorty’s emphasis on the “thinness” of social relations defined by agents-of-justice. 117 Where Rorty imagines social hope remaining mostly

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within the confines of sharing “rational” projects together, Buber and Levinas provide a poetic narrative for how to imagine shattering the shells of social isolation. The shattering of alienation by creating a relation to otherness is perhaps the best of what cultural performances offer, and genuine encounters with otherness provide the foundation for a phenomenology of hope that can help bring us closer to redemption. NOTES 1. See Buber’s essays on “Nationalism” and “Hebrew Humanism,” located in Martin Buber, Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997). 2. See Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, New French Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Jeffrey R. Stout, Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); and Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 3. See J. W. Burrow and J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 18481914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Robert Audi, Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Audi, Moral Value and Human Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate, Point/ Counterpoint (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997); Daniel Gordon, Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York: Routledge, 2000); Miroslav Volf and William H. Katerberg, The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition amid Modernity and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004); Susan A. Handelman, Slayers of Moses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007); John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 4. See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, with “the Resumption of History in the New Century” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 5. Exploring the history of Jews and Judaism as an expression of various categories of cultural and phenomenological otherness continues to be a generous spring of scholarly inquiry. See Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn, The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Sander Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 2006); Gilman, Inscribing the Other Texts & Contexts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); David Biale, Michæl Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Steven Kepnes, Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Kepnes, Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998); Deborah Dash Moore, American Jewish Identity Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and Arnold Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

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6. Most notably, in his work Jerusalem (1783) Moses Mendelssohn argued that providence has sanctioned diversity as part of natural law. 7. See Kenneth Seeskin’s chapter “Universality and Particularity” in Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); and Daniel Frank, ed., Autonomy and Judaism: The Individual and the Community in Jewish Philosophical Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 8. Moses Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 49. Also see Ken Koltun-Fromm, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 9. Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1967), 270. 10. Ibid., 273. 11. For further discussion of Kaplan’s distinction between otherness and religion, see Ken Koltun-Fromm, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Mel Scult, and Robert M. Seltzer, The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (New York: New York University Press, 1992). 12. “The higher life of man should be lived to the rhythm of alternation. It should alternate between self-consciousness and oblivion of self. Far more potent than in the articulated and self-conscious ideals of a civilization is religion’s subtle and invasive power in the unselfconscious habits and the secret and mysterious strata of being that are beyond verbalization.” Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994), 179. 13. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 180. 14. Kaplan defines otherness in the following terms: “We have to analyze the very notion of difference. To be different may mean to be both other and unlike, or to be other only. Otherness is different in entity, unlikeness is difference in quality. Unlikeness presupposes otherness, but otherness is compatible with either likeness or unlikeness. Otherness may therefore be considered primary, and unlikeness only secondary. Hence, when Jewish life is engaged and we try to conserve it, we necessarily try to conserve that which differentiates it from non-Jewish life. But here a fallacy insinuates itself. We make the mistake of believing that what we chiefly try to conserve is that wherein Jewish life is unlike non-Jewish life, or what may be termed its differential. We concentrate on the religious aspect of Jewish life, because it is that aspect which is conspicuously most unlike, and because we assume it to be the least troublesome to justify. But the truth of the matter is that what is at stake in our day is the very maintenance of Jewish life as a distinct societal entity. Its very otherness is in jeopardy.” Kaplan goes on to state that “Judaism as otherness is something far more comprehensive than Jewish religion. It includes that nexus of a history, literature, language, social organization, folk sanctions, standards of conduct, social and spiritual ideals, esthetic values, which in their totality form a civilization.” See Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 177-78. 15. Ibid., 217-18. 16. Ibid., 315. 17. Ibid., 219. For more of Kaplan’s discussion on the relationship between the “self” and “other,” see page 403. 18. For more of Kaplan’s discussion of the distinction between “otherness” and “separation,” see Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 515. 19. Ibid., 403. 20. For Kaplan’s discussion of “cultural hyphenism” see Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 218. 21. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 273. 22. Ibid., 267. 23. Ibid., 272. 24. For more on Kaplan’s reflections on Judaism and Democracy, see Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 283. 25. Ibid., 284.

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26. It is worth noting that Kaplan’s argument here echoes Heinrich Graetz’s argument in The Structure of Jewish History (1846) that Judaism’s struggle with paganism is part of a historical struggle of spirit verses nature. 27. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 285. 28. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1991), 169. 29. Ibid., 183. 30. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 31. See George Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1993); Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass.; Oxford University Press, 1993); and Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 32. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 33. See Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979); Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Emil Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy; a Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 34. See Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism; Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War; Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity; Ariel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Paul Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 35. See Emil Fackenheim’s essay “The Commandment to Hope” in The Future of Hope, ed. Walter H. Capps (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970). 36. See Arnold Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion. 37. See Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions; Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 38. Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 73. 39. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays (Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1988), 50. 40. Ibid., 61. 41. Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 62. 42. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Maurice S. Friedman, and Martin Buber, The Philosophy of Martin Buber (La Salle: Open Court, 1967), 141. 43. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 20. 44. Buber, I and Thou, 63.

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45. Buber, Between Man and Man, 168. For further discussion of Buber and Heidegger, see Zygmunt Bauman’s discussion of Heidegger’s Mitsein in comparison with Buber’s I and Thou in which he argues that both carry an assumption of symmetry and solidarity. See Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 49; Haim Gordon, The HeideggerBuber Controversy: The Status of the I-Thou (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); and Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). 46. Buber, Between Man and Man, 170. 47. Buber, I and Thou, 132. 48. Ibid., 121. 49. Ibid., 126. 50. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002). 51. It would be a mistake to view Levinas as simply elaborating on Buber’s philosophical anthropology. As Sam Moyin’s book amply demonstrates, Levinas’s influences and project drew on a variety of sources and intellectual arguments coming from within several trajectories of thought, both in Germany and in France, that makes his engagement with otherness more complex than the confines of this article would allow. 52. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (London: Athlone, 1999), 177. According to Levinas, Judaism constitutes a “particularism that conditions universality” so that, despite Jewish otherness, in its essence “Israel equals humanity.” See Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 22. In Levinas’ words, Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 223. For more on Levinas’ universalization of Jewish particularism, see Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 53. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 93. 54. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 112. 55. Ibid., 73. 56. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 26. 57. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 44. 58. Ibid., 25. 59. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 294. 60. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 146. 61. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 52. 62. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 92. 63. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215. 64. Levinas, Time and the Other, 58. 65. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. 66. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 71. 67. For Levinas’s critique of Buber see Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Maurice S. Friedman. Levinas & Buber: Dialogue & Difference. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004). 68. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 100. 69. Ibid., 164. 70. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 126. 71. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 188. 72. For more on Levinas’ critique of liberalism and Western Humanism, see Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2002); Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Leora Batnizky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Robert Gibbs,

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Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Fred Alford, Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Adam Newton, The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel Among the Nations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); James Olthuis, Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997); and Ze’ev Levy, From Spinoza to Levinas (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009). 73. Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 13. 74. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 37 and 193. 75. For more on Levinas’ gratuitous ethics see Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Wyschogrod and Gerald McKenny, The Ethical (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2003); and Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Benjamin, Scholem, & Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 76. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 74. 77. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 101. 78. Levinas charges, “Western humanism has never managed to doubt triumph or understand failure or conceive of a history in which the vanquished and the persecuted might have some value.” See Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 282. 79. See Claire E. Katz, Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); and Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). 80. Simon Critchley, Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 41. 81. See Richard Rorty’s essay, “Religion as a conversation stopper,” located in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 82. Rorty states, “We might stop trying to find a successor to ‘the working class’—for example, ‘Difference,’ or ‘Otherness’—as a name for the latest incarnation of the Logos.” See Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 242. 83. In his exchange of letters over the topic of otherness with Anindita Niyogi Balslev, Rorty sums up his concerns with otherness in the following terms: “Otherness: I find this topic a bit baffling. This is because, as a good pragmatist, I am uncomfortable with notions of uncommunicability, with the idea that some special sorts of things (God, the inside of another human being, the experience of the oppressed) are impossible, or at least very difficult, to put into language. When I am told that the oppressed are very different from me, a white male inhabitant of the richest part of the globe, I am inclined to say ‘Of course they are. They have a lot less money and power, they are always on the edge of starvation and always threatened by brutality, and I’m not.’ That makes them very different all right, but it doesn’t raise any deep philosophical question about our relations, or our knowledge of each other. It just raises practical questions of how to redistribute money and power—how to get a global socioeconomic system that will level things off’ . . . all that ‘otherness’ comes down to is the fact that practices (including linguistic practices) suitable for dealing with one (human and social) environment are often ill-adapted for other environments.” See Anindita Niyogi Balslev, Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 98-99. 84. See Rorty, “Religion as a conversation stopper,” in Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope. 85. Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala, The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 41. 86. Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25. 87. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 189. 88. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13.

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89. See Rorty’s essay “The Continuity Between the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism,’” in Keith Baker and Peter Reill, What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 90. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 92. 91. Ibid., 65. 92. “Thanks to the secularizing influences of the recent West, it has become increasingly difficult to use religion to sanctify oppression. (This seems to me one almost entirely good thing which Westernization has done for the East, though I admit that the Western colonialists tried to use Christianity to legitimize their own oppression when they first arrived.) It has become increasingly easier for the weak and the poor to see themselves as victims of the greed of their fellow-humans rather than of Destiny, or the gods, or of the sins of their ancestors.” See Balslev, Cultural Otherness, 100. 93. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 20. 94. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 166. 95. Balslev, Cultural Otherness, 114. 96. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 189. 97. Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Leszek Kolakowski, et al., Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski (Westport.: Praeger, 1996), 49. 98. Ibid., 48. 99. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 16. 100. Matthew Festenstein, Richard Rorty, and Simon Thompson, Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 225. 101. Ibid., 227. 102. Ibid., 224. 103. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 164. 104. Levinas acknowledges that justice, and therefore the liberal regime of rights, is necessary for addressing the fact that a “third person” (See Totality and Infinity, 106), in addition to the other before me, has an ethical claim. Nevertheless, the question that Levinas himself poses, namely, “who in this plurality, comes first?” is never sufficiently answered. 105. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 149. 106. See Rorty Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. 107. Rorty states, “I hope that we can banalize the entire vocabulary of leftist political deliberation. I suggest we start talking about greed and selfishness rather than about bourgeois ideology.” See Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 229. 108. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 203. 109. Levinas states, “The institutions that justice requires must be subject to the oversight of the charity form which justice issued. Justice, inseparable from institutions, and hence from politics, risks preventing the face of the other man from being recognized. The pure rationality of justice in Eric Weil, as in Hegel, succeeds in making us conceive of the particularity of the human being as negligible and as if it were not that of a uniqueness, but of an anonymous individuality. The determinism of the rational totality runs the risk of totalitarianism. . . .” See Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 176. 110. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 101. 111. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 206. 112. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 26. 113. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 25. 114. Philip Reiff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 4. 115. Geoffrey Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 38. 116. See Arnold Eisen, “Rethinking American Judaism” in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 135.

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117. Hilary Putnam provides a model for the type of pragmatic balancing I’m proposing when he states that there is a “moral perfectionism” in both Buber and Levinas that makes their emphasis on the other hard to reconcile to liberal democratic politics, but remains necessary for expanding social hope. See Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 59.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alford, Fred. Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Atterton, Peter, Matthew Calarco, and Maurice S. Friedman. Levinas & Buber: Dialogue & Difference. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. Audi, Robert. Moral Value and Human Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Religious Commitment and Secular Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate, Point/Counterpoint. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. Autonomy and Judaism: The Individual and the Community in Jewish Philosophical Thought. Edited by Daniel Frank. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Baker, Keith, and Peter Reill. What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Balslev, Anindita Niyogi. Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Batnitzky, Leora. How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. ———. Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. ———. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. ———. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. ———. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, with “the Resumption of History in the New Century.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. New York: Macmillan, 1967. ———. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner, 1970. ———. Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. ———. Paths in Utopia. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. ———. The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays. Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1988. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002. Burrow, J. W. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Caygill, Howard. Levinas and the Political. New York: Routledge, 2002. Critchley, Simon. Deconstruction and Pragmatism. New York: Routledge, 1996. de Vries, Hent. Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Deutscher, Isaac. The Non-Jewish Jew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Eisen, Arnold. “Rethinking American Judaism.” In American Jewish Identity Politics, edited by Deborah Dash Moore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. ———. Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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———. The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Fackenheim, Emil. Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy; a Preface to Future Jewish Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1973. ———. The Future of Hope. Edited by Walter H. Capps. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970. Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Tina Chanter. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Festenstein, Matthew, Richard Rorty, and Simon Thompson. Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Gibbs, Robert. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gilman, Sander. Inscribing the Other Texts & Contexts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ———. Multiculturalism and the Jews. New York: Routledge, 2006. Goldsmith, Emanuel S., Mel Scult, and Robert M. Seltzer. The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Gordon, Daniel. Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History. New York: Routledge, 2000. Gordon, Haim. The Heidegger-Buber Controversy: The Status of the I-Thou. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Habermas, Jürgen, Richard Rorty, Leszek Kolakowski, et al. Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski. Westport.: Praeger, 1996. Handelman, Susan. Fragments of Redemption: Benjamin, Scholem, & Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. ———. Slayers of Moses. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Fateful Question of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Hess, Jonathan M. Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Hess, Moses. The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1991. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Edited by David Biale, Michæl Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. ———. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Kaplan, Mordecai. Judaism as a Civilization. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994. ———. The Future of the American Jew. New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1967. Katz, Claire E. Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Kavka, Martin. Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kepnes, Steven. Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age. New York: New York University Press, 1995. ———. Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.

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Koltun-Fromm, Ken. Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. ———. Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. London: Athlone, 1999. ———. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. ———. Existence and Existents. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. ———. Nine Talmudic Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ———. Otherwise Than Being. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. ———. Outside the Subject. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Levy, Ze’ev. From Spinoza to Levinas. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009). Librett, Jeffrey S. The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Lilla, Mark. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. New York: Knopf, 2007. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. ———. From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. ———. German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Meyer, Michael A. The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979. Moore, Deborah Dash. American Jewish Identity Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Mosse, George. Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1993. ———. German Jews Beyond Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Newton, Adam. The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel Among the Nations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Olthuis, James. Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Putnam, Hilary. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Reiff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Renaut, Alain. The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, New French Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999. ———. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala. The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ———. Truth and Progress. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Rose, Gillian. Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, Mass.; Oxford University Press, 1993. Rose, Paul. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Roshwald, Ariel. The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Schilpp, Paul Arthur, Maurice S. Friedman, and Martin Buber. The Philosophy of Martin Buber. La Salle: Open Court, 1967. Seeskin, Kenneth. Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Silberstein, Laurence J., and Robert L. Cohn. The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Stern, Fritz R. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Stout, Jeffrey R. Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. Theunissen, Michael. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984. Volf, Miroslav, and William H. Katerberg. The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition amid Modernity and Postmodernity. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004. Wyschogrod, Edith. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———, and Gerald McKenny. The Ethical. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2003. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Chapter Three

Philip Rieff’s “Jew of Culture” and the Ends of Higher Education in America Gregory Kaplan

An erstwhile departmental colleague once chidingly remarked to me that as professors, we are in the business of selling books. On hearing that frank assertion I could only have imagined the grimace that might have crept across Philip Rieff’s face. After all, the late, controversial sociologist Rieff wrote prodigiously during his long career, publishing in rapid succession two groundbreaking monographs and one extremely long essay (subsequently printed in book form), only to retire deliberately from the “knowledge industry” so that he might concentrate his energies on reading, teaching, and (heaven forbid!) thinking for another thirty years 1 —until the emergence of three profoundly original deathbed or posthumous publications plus an additional collection of previously released writings. As Rieff stated, in terms that may strike the present-day scholar as somewhat unseemly given the implications of its inversion, “The more original the book, the less justified we are in publishing it.” 2 In effect, the remark above suggested to me the following admonition: Publish more shit! This logic neatly expresses the fate or, at least, the state of higher education in America. Rieff uses illness as a metaphor 3 to declaim an American academia which due to its “knowledge factories . . . has become a plague on culture.” 4 For Rieff’s antihero, the Jew of culture, whose dialectical torsions I describe in this essay, the plague or sickliness of hypertrophied educational institutions must come under question and yet cannot be simply resisted by their denizens. In an America saturated by public relations and publicity firms, wherein even university professors retain literary agents to represent their economic interests and career prospects, the Jew of culture altogether hesitates to publicize. The academic is no longer faced with the alternative 71

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between publish and perish; she suffers now the fate of publish and perish, 5 for genuine teaching remains the glorious pastime of scholars immersed in discovery and invention. Conversely, measurable output or productivity— assessed in the main numerically—does not hold a candle to the quality of genuine thinking. In Jewish terms, we may say that learning happens for its own sake and the reward of thinking is thoughtfulness, to paraphrase the rabbinic dictum: the reward of fulfilling a commandment is receiving a commandment. In a short comment on Franz Rosenzweig’s moving little book Understanding the Sick and Healthy, Rieff characterizes it as “an attack on the sickliness of modern thought,” since modern thought behaves as if theory idealistically encompasses reality. 6 And yet conversely Rieff admonishes the turn to bald empiricism, which purports to take facts as they come, because this uncritical acceptance of reality refuses to take higher spiritual aspirations into account. In this essay I contend that, for the most part, Jewish thought in American culture does not escape the unsatisfying dilemma of grasping after theory or retreating into facts. In what follows I ask: Where does the Jewish thinker figure into an institution of higher education in America that is oriented toward the quantitative output of scholarship more than its qualitative significance? Is Jewish scholarship not a party to this system where the number of Talmud pages read—or at least cited—is more important than the fecundity of their reading? Could the Jewish thinker’s immune system really fend off the disease of American academic culture? Or is he just as much a patient or a carrier as anyone? Following Paul Mendes-Flohr’s study of the Jewish intellectual, we may be tempted to notice here a familiar figure that is both inside and outside a surrounding social environment. Rieff’s Jew of culture seems to represent this figure of the inside-outsider. However, this representation suggests a limit, a stage through which one side morphs into the other. Whereas Mendes-Flohr situates the Jewish intellectual “in but not of” her cultural surroundings (specifically, a “cognitive insider” and a “social outsider”), Rieff works in much the opposite direction. 7 He places the Jew of but not in culture. The Jew is shaped, even produced by her cultural surroundings; hence the lasting relevance—albeit unconvincing conclusion—of Sartre’s argument that the Jew is at least partly a byproduct of the anti-Semite’s hatred of an illusory image. But the Jew of culture does not actively present productions except by subterfuge, fomenting against all kinds of perceived fashions and fascisms. Above all, the Jew of culture rarely speaks culturally as a Jew. Perhaps the American Jew of culture is one part Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld, another part Gloria Steinem and Michael Medved, and a final part Larry Summers and Sheldon Adelson: court jester, prophetic scold, and avaricious aristocrat all at once. In consonance with Rieff’s idiosyncratic and iconoclastic character, it is not clear to me whether he would approve the lines of inquiry taken in the present volume. True culture is not a source or

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structure for identity; it is rife with conflict and discord. (“Let there be fight,” Rieff quotes Joyce, “and there was.”) 8 Ideally, on Rieff’s view, Jewish worship is not directly subject to external social influence but observes the eternal word of God, and takes issue with rivals on God’s behalf. Rieff effectively concurs with the dictum of Moses (Chatam) Sofer, “new is forbidden by the Torah [chadash assur min haTorah ] ,” that is, innovation and change are precluded from biblical law. 9 (Nevertheless, in practice Jewish rituals, performed in a cultural space between sacred and social orders, do adjust to historical and geographical conditions; but even these changes are eternally sanctioned, as Moses Maimonides would have supposed, which I explain below.) 10 Rieff therefore explicitly suspects that both Jewish thought and cultural studies are intrinsically misdirected: Jewish life engenders less theoretical articulation than it obligates routine performance; cultural studies stimulates less critical reflection than it motivates political maneuvering. Neither Jewish thought nor cultural studies explains the Jew of culture, who is neither a theoretical nor political animal but, rather, a practical and reflective creature. The Jew of culture is not a cultural Jew or Jewish intellectual inasmuch as the latter figures have changed from commentator (such as Franz Kafka or Sigmund Kracauer) to tenured professor. For reasons I will propose below, the value of the professor of Jewish studies in the United States is either inflated or irrelevant or both; put otherwise, he is both paradigmatic of and dispensable to American academia. The Jew of culture by contrast is an anomaly, which American academia cannot abide. On the one hand, the Jew of culture does not follow the procedures of rational criticism; she is antiintellectual where “intellectual” means detached critical judgment. On the other hand, the Jew of culture does not simply advance political goals; she is not merely one actor or agent among others in the battle over history. Let us then consider for starters the Jew of culture’s anomalous character. Above all, Rieff’s writings display tension between the secular and the sacred. However Rieff less directly opposes one to the other than he discerns three types of cultural struggle, on the grounds that culture encompasses contested terrain, a battleground of wits and weapons. In particular he delineates a cultural struggle among the gods (paganism), a cultural struggle between sacred commands and social proclivities (biblical monotheism), and a struggle among various animal, including human, factions (unmitigated secularism). Regardless of the historical ambiguities involved in his account, I simply note how Rieff delineates three incompatible epistemic regimes of cultural contestation. 11 He calls these first, second, and third worlds—but theorists have outlined their features under different labels as well. In first worlds there is the equivalence or interchangeability of gods. This phase has been adumbrated extensively in the writings of Jan Assmann. Assmann calls this phase paganism, by which he means a world in which all

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pantheons are equivalent to one another; wherein no one national culture presumes that any one god excludes the counterparts existing in other nations’ gods. In first world, moreover, gods inhabit the temples; but outside the temples, in profane life, humans strictly rule. In second worlds, there is the rule of one God over creation. Second worlds accord with what Assmann calls the first counter-religion of monotheism. 12 Assmann argues that, in its radical separation of God from the created world and its elevation of God above so-called other gods, not only separating sacred and profane but also true and false, proper and improper, the Jews and Judaism suffuse every part of secular life with an all-encompassing religious validity. 13 Michael Fishbane similarly suggests that Judaism assumes “our everyday consciousness is experienced as shot through with traces of transcendence.” 14 Temporally, the emergence of second world accords with a historical period that Karl Jaspers dubs the Axial Age. It deserves noting that where Assmann disapproves of the Mosaic religion, Rieff wholeheartedly approves. Monotheism designates the “vertical in authority”—the “immutable” authority of divine interdiction, whose first word is Do Not—which Rieff commends to his readers. 15 In third worlds there arises an overwhelming leveling of differences through what we might call unmitigated secularism, or hard as opposed to soft secularism. 16 Rieff’s conception of third worlds closely parallels Charles Taylor’s extensive dissection of the “immanent frame” in its closed (as opposed to open) variety of “self-sufficing humanism.” 17 Although even humanism may be too generous a label, for what Rieff alludes to is nearer to post-humanism, a thoroughgoing naturalism or materialism. Secularism— not as a process or a historical event but as the substantive claim that there is nothing outside of the natural world—renders all cultural values equal, though now without any reference to transcendence whatsoever. In it, everything is immanent to the world. 18 Rieff is not alone in making these generalizations about modernity. Peter Berger arguably delineates a parallel tripartite division in his class work of sociology of religion, The Sacred Canopy. 19 Berger’s greatest teacher, and to some extent Rieff’s as well, Max Weber delineates this (third culture) worldview in his essay “Science as Vocation” which envisages the neutralization of any self-proclaimed superiority of values, or what he calls the “polytheism” of values, whose validity is judged not according to any absolute standard but simply by virtue of its accounting for “inconvenient facts.” 20 The monotheism of second worlds rejects an initial polytheism worshipping a multitude of gods. Yet that polytheism returns, transformed, on a pantheistic view according to which “God is limitless; so is the world; [therefore,] god is the world.” 21 It is this pantheistic view—wherein nothing separates the divine from the natural—that broadly characterizes axiomatically secular philosophy beginning at least with Spinoza.

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To telescope my argument—with and against him—it is that while Rieff considers sickly postmodern culture (third worlds) to antagonize the Jew and monotheism (second worlds), the dialectical practices commended by the Jew of culture nevertheless risk colluding in (third world) “anti-intellectual” views of academic life as a persistent skepticism of ideologies. It is into conservatism that many of Rieff’s readers might drift, although I believe Rieff’s Jew of culture would not commend this outcome. While these readers believe there obtains a clear escape from the sickly condition Rieff diagnoses, I am not as sanguine. It is my contention here that Rieff’s estimation of the problem facing academia is apposite as well as disturbing. The question remains whether Rieff offers a promising way to negotiate the struggle he tracks between the secular economy of signs and the sacred dominion of God; although I am not persuaded that he does, I deem his effort valiant and instructive. On my reading, Rieff’s writings belie an irresolvable tension between the rule of God and the economy of signs beneath the question of truth. This chapter cannot plumb Rieff’s fertile epistemological inquiries. But I should say I view truthfulness or sincerity as having the highest value for Rieff. For our limited purposes, truthfulness signals the greatest achievement of thought and behavior. While the content of truth is inevitably contested, having a will to truth is undeniable (to quote Joyce once again, “Let there be fight. And there was”). The biblical critique of American culture stands in not always fruitful relation to the cultural criticism of Jewish thought, by which I mean to say that the former entails the most absolute assertions about contingency, whereas the latter involves mostly contingent (historically and geographically) claims about ultimate values. Rieff has much to contribute to illuminating these contradictory approaches to truthfulness. Since however it is not possible to examine the breadth of Rieff’s writings here, instead I focus my attention only on the self-reflexive writings by Rieff about academia, its regnant American condition, and the place of the Jew of culture within—or, rather, without—it. To reckon the power of the Jew of culture’s criticism of American academia, I compare it to the counter-narrative of the late literary historian Bill Readings’s eviscerating account of our University in Ruins. I examine these two controversial writers because, although emerging from very different political sensibilities, they agree on the catastrophe besetting an American academia that is increasingly less distinguishable from a corporatist knowledge-production-and-consumption factory. Universities trading in the currency of knowledge now mostly function to raise consumers and develop productions for consumption. As Frank Donoghue summarizes his chilling account of the corporate university, “market categories of productivity, efficiency, and competitive achievement, not intelligence or erudition, already drive professional advancement in the academic world.” 22 Critical analysis,

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historical mindfulness, and other past (and prospective) academic endeavors serve only commercial functions now. I construe the present calamity of American higher education narrowly within the confines of this chapter to make a provisional statement about its grave victim and antagonist, the Jew of culture, in Rieff’s definition. In order to appreciate the force—and limit— of this figure, I set Rieff’s bracing reverence for the vertical in authority against Readings’ provocative call for a “heteronomous horizon of dissensus,” for these authors suggestively converge on the acute failure of American academia and propose solutions at wide variance with each other. The Jew of culture accordingly faces a conundrum, which I assay in conclusion. BUILDING CULTURE Let us consider some of the many problems that have arisen with higher education in the United States. A century-long debate over higher education in America revolves around whether it results in scientific and technological advancement, public education of citizens, or private education of elites. It boils down to the following questions: What is the purpose of higher education? Might it ever cease to apply? When would we know? Jacques Derrida’s 1968 essay “The Ends of Man” brings the dilemma facing higher education into focus. As an end in itself, knowledge has always been, in Hegel’s critique of Kant’s idealized moral ego, a “beautiful soul.” Pure reason stands at once removed from reality and retains its integrity; but it remains fragile and easily broken by unfavorable conditions. Once tarnished by its action in one way instead of another, such beauty turns ugly or, at least, uninformative and uninteresting. It is no longer a real problem. The quotations heading Derrida’s essay include Kant’s claim that “man . . . must always be regarded at the same time as an end” and Michel Foucault’s that “man as an invention of man is of a recent date . . . and one perhaps nearing its end.” 23 In what sense has one end precluded another? In the struggle over the definition of the university noted above, maybe a winner is already prevailing. As Leon Wieseltier said in his 2013 Brandeis University commencement address: “The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning—to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work.” 24 Hence, Wieseltier concludes, “there is no greater bulwark against the twittering acceleration of American consciousness than the encounter with a work of art, and the experience of a text or an image. You are the representatives, the saving remnants, of that encounter and that experience, and of the serious study of that encounter and that experience—which is to say, you are the counterculture. Perhaps culture is

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now the counterculture.” Only the counterculture of studying outdated cultures resists the domination of measurable success by calculative problem solving instead of speculative question crafting. This sentiment echoes Rieff in important respects that I consider in the next section. Let us begin with the anti-culture that has turned culture into a counterculture. Like “man” in Derrida’s account of the end(s), higher education has considered itself an end in itself; and from its recent invention it has perhaps come ever (more rapidly) nearer to its end or completion. I cannot rehash the precise narrative wrought by Readings. Suffice it to say that the posthistorical university departs from its historical inheritance as being an end in itself. In sum, higher education as an end in itself is—or always has been—coming to an end. Readings’ book traces the transition of the university from an institution of the nation-state to a multinational corporation. From Kant’s idea of a university within the limits of reason had arisen the idea of a literate national culture, which entails, in Humboldt’s seminal model, the unity of knowledge (Wissenschaft) and the inculcation of character (Bildung). 25 Spinning a circle intended to mediate between the chaotic indeterminacy of nature and the formal predeterminations of reason, “culture claims to be both object and process,” end and means. 26 As the nation-state withers, so too does culture lose its referent in and of a literary canon. In place of the University of Culture, therefore, has come the University of Excellence justified not by its cultivation of canonical literacy but, rather, “in terms of optimal performance or return on capital [investment].” 27 The post-historical university replaces Humboldt’s conjunction of science (Wissenschaft) and development (Bildung) with the nexus of knowledge-production and knowledge-consumption. Consequently, present-day administrators, mission statements, and budget proposals evaluate the university by its excellence. Bill Readings writes: “As an integrating principle, excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless.” 28 Excellence lacks any reference such that the distinctiveness of excellence covers over any qualitative difference: “Its very lack of reference allows excellence to function as a principle between radically different idioms: parking services and research grants can each be excellent, and their excellence is not dependent on any specific qualities or effects that they share.” 29 The nonreferentiality of excellence abounds in corporate speak: productivity, efficiency, and competitive achievement. By such criteria, only measurable outcomes count. The accountability of excellence is strictly a matter of accounting: How many students enroll in a course? How many essays or examinations are required? How are grades distributed? 30 How many pages or hours of work does it require to complete an assignment? 31 To be sure, these criteria satisfy the demands of administrative “responsibilities,” but they do not respond to the demands of responsible pedagogy—and that is a serious problem.

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As a consequence, the empty cipher of excellence measures culture but does not serve as a standard for judging its truth, for culture no longer references something outside of itself or obtains any content within itself. It does not carry ideological baggage or press an ideological agenda. It is manufactured and circulated in its own terms, globally. There is nothing besides culture and nothing distinguishing it. “If culture is everything, then it has no center, no referent outside itself.” 32 Anything cultural is potentially excellent, or not, depending on the point of view: low culture is as excellent as high; literate, as oral; foreign, as native. Yet since “everything, given a chance, can be or become culture . . . culture ceases to mean anything as such.” 33 In this case, the flourishing of cultural studies is not an alternative to, but rather a symptom of, “dereferentialization.” Those professors who advocate cultural studies risk invoking an alibi, which putatively justifies an unjustifiable condition. Readings puts it this way: “Cultural Studies, committed to the generalized notion of signifying practice to the argument that everything is culture, can only oppose exclusions from culture—which is to say, specifications of culture. . . . [But] there is no longer any culture to be excluded from. . . . Critics miss the fact that culture no longer matters to the powers that be.” 34 Or, even more precisely, culture feeds—with excellence—the corporate machine of growth in profit and acquisition of fungible assets. “Validating closeness to the real . . . has become a prized academic commodity.” 35 Precisely because I am different am I the same as everyone else. If my “I” were a consumer of identity, then authenticity sells. The effect of cultural studies is contained within the production-consumption model by providing “sites for further investment by a system” that is entirely capitalist. 36 Education serves neither cultural acquisition nor cultural resistance, for with nothing left besides culture, it is not possible to stand astride and criticize it. 37 Ethnic studies, gender studies, LGBT studies, and Jewish studies each compete over the same resources: additional faculty lines, richer graduate fellowships, more free research time, more generous travel budgets. The criticisms launched within cultural studies do not threaten anyone but, to the contrary, “risk providing new marketing opportunities for the system.” 38 As a result, Readings admonishes, “the invocation of culture cannot have redemptive force, cannot lend meaning (unity and direction) to symbolic life.” 39 Readings prescribes that university professors should relinquish their claim to be intellectuals in pursuit of a mission. Rather than operatives for the nation-state or cultivated society, professors ought to inhabit the role of question askers, as challengers. They should take nothing for granted, not even their own relevance. Therefore, when Readings speaks of the twilight of the University of Culture, 40 he awakens us not to the bright day of genuine critique but to the dark nightmare in which the corporation incorporates, or co-opts—to use the fashionable parlance—critique and criticism per se.

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Bill Readings approaches this nightmarish scenario from a postmodern or, in his preferred idiom, posthistorical viewpoint. Rieff takes a different tack yet arrives at pretty much the same conclusion; both thinkers seem in agreement that no human belongs to or flourishes within corporate culture. Rather, corporations treat labor—no less its senior executives than its middle managers and manual workers—as a quantifiable resource or, in its privileged terminology, human capital. In order to quantify labor, therefore, corporatized messengers, artists, scientists, and professors take it as their new task “to promise people that it is all right to live their lives in a condition of dispossession.” 41 After the failure/success of the canon wars from the 1990s, the university curriculum offers “a smattering of everything/nothing.” 42 Perhaps a culture of civility can operate cut loose from its sacred mooring, its investiture of quality in human beings, but Rieff is dubious. Indeed, “a radically skeptical knowledge industry has been built upon the ruins of sacred truth,” writes Rieff, citing Harold Bloom’s lamentation, Ruin the Sacred Truths. 43 I will put it crudely: the university is a place where ideas go to die—or, to paraphrase the scientific scholar of rabbinic Judaism Moritz Steinschneider, a place providing ideas with a decent burial. As I suggest below, I believe neither Rieff nor Readings would demur. Genuine creativity emerges today from the campus of Google more than Stanford; more important, creative activity at Stanford derives from and returns to the economic fortunes of Silicon Valley. 44 Bill Readings is hopeful that this reality, the ruin of sacred truths, has advantages or silver linings: from these ashes, a (University of) Phoenix can arise (apologies for the crass pun). Readings suggests that we are witnessing the “twilight” of the University of Culture, implying that the sun will rise on a new day. Rieff is plaintive, even mournful. 45 Has the university finally breathed its last gasp? Yet precisely because the university is neither therapeutic nor revolutionary, neither remissive nor transgressive, it, and “not the state or any church, is the last bastion in defense of culture.” 46 To maintain this defensive posture, however, the university must resist the constant breakthrough into evernew “values” and the daring of “criticism” for its own sake. One problem is that “our inherited culture is more attacked, and less defended, by its official defenders.” 47 Indeed, in a gesture perfectly suitable to the American mood, “Freud proclaims the superior wisdom of choosing the second best,” 48 expressing modesty rather than aspiring to greatness. On the university scene in particular, Donoghue draws the conclusion that “professors tend to naturalize the role of management, accepting the erosion of their working conditions as a fact of life,” rather than a deliberate and destructive ploy to wring a profit from thinking. 49 What, though, is the alternative? Rieff, like Readings, espies the collapse of higher education, for “the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief . . . may have run its course . . . with several systems of belief competing for primacy.” 50 Howev-

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er, these systems of belief compete within a unified, or unipolar, global marketplace. Corporate–consumer culture is hegemonic; a third world, it embraces all difference by equating everything under the rule of exchangevalue. Arguably, even the critique of corporatism serves to benefit the corporate profit motive. Like everything else in a consumer culture, the critique of corporatism charges money—through college tuition fees, books sales, journal subscriptions, and authors’ salaries. Does any alternative remain? Readings and Rieff do not appear sanguine about the prospects of higher education in America, although they do offer a counternarrative and an antihero for the consideration of their intrepid readers. Readings takes his argument to its understandable, though undoubtedly objectionable to the beneficiaries, conclusion with his claim that “radicalism sells well in the University marketplace.” 51 The constant demand for more radical professors and more radical courses is not only ineffective, he argues, it is perverse because it falls right into the corporate trap, for the corporate form is growth whatever the contents: “Produce what knowledge you like, only produce more of it, so that the system can speculate on the knowledge differentials, can profit from the accumulation of intellectual capital.” 52 Yet Readings does envisage an alternative. In the concluding, prescriptive chapters of Readings’s book, he draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community to invoke—in a now familiar refrain—the Other to the knowledge factory of academia. In Readings’s words, “the social bond is in fact an obligation to others that we cannot fully understand. . . . If we knew what our obligations were, then we could settle them, compensate them, and be freed from them in return for a payment.” 53 As a result, Readings calls us to attend Thought in a “dialogic web of obligations . . . [that is] dissymmetrical and endless . . . [and that] no third term, such as ‘culture,’ can resolve dialectically.” 54 Thought, in Reading’s postmodern account, does not function in Platonic fashion, representing the idea of an image, or Form, so much as it marks, like in Neoplatonism, the ideal activity of formulating. To practice thinking, a thinker must be comfortable residing within a “heteronomous horizon of dissensus.” 55 Readings does not call upon his readers to lament but, instead, to transvalue “the process through which culture loses any specific referent.” 56 Rieff has traced this transvaluation through the charismatic personality limned by Weber, who defined the charismatic as a force breaking through the status quo. Rieff calls this view of charisma Nietzschean because it purports to supplant predetermined values. What Readings prescribes may well fit this description. Yet Rieff appropriately admonishes that while Weber’s supplanting claims to be value neutral, it opens the floodgates to an infinite number of value assertions, including deadly and inhumane ones. In Rieff’s words, “I, too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate violence to

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which the modern intellectual is committed. Since things have become as they are, I, too, share the modern desire not to be deceived.” 57 This irresolvable dilemma establishes Rieff’s complex dialectical position; as Arnold M. Eisen notes, “Rieff seems caught, and he wants us to know it.” 58 For Rieff explicitly condemns what he considers anti-culture, but he also stands this side of anti-culture, not on the side in which culture was never held up to question. Since, therefore, Rieff advocates the negation of the negation of culture, or de-negation of culture, he risks adopting a familiar postmodern viewpoint. To evaluate this risk, we must take into account Rieff’s nuanced axiology of culture. By culture, Rieff means world creation/rule. 59 Specifically, culture names “a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” 60 Culture thereby orders in both senses of the word: it both commands and organizes. Culture occupies a symbolic space located between the sacred order, divine commandment, and a social order, usually case or constitutional laws; it modulates the sacred into the social register, albeit imperfectly. Through culture as an achievement, that is, not as a neutral background to action, the sacred persistently introduces a tension into the social. The tension begins in the opposition not to nature per se but to that which comes naturally to human beings: self-aggrandizement and self-expression. Put otherwise, culture enacts “resistance to the disordering that men themselves, in their vitality, work.” 61 Because it strives toward the vertical in authority, culture inevitably displaces or distorts the society in which it finds a place to dwell. The sacred order in Rieff’s view has intrinsic value, granting derivative meaning and purpose to the individual by loading her with a guiltiness that instills order on a social scale, in legal institutions, for unlike profit, purpose is not unlimited; on the contrary, purpose in principle limits. Yet those limits are constantly tested, again, by human vitality, for the self that has a divine origin must nonetheless gear into (or, in the case of a sociopath, will fail to accept) a shared, communal meaning and purpose. 62 And that result is hard won. It is always the case, even in the well-adjusted person, that a self who travels within the sacred order nevertheless shuffles and sidles across the social order. 63 Hence that need for culture, which does not stand still. As a result, culture has undergone significant transformation—or it has evinced itself in variegated manifestations—through historical time. Rieff defines pagan first worlds by the subservience of their denizens to pure power. The gods rule nature, as kings rule society. In this case, “fate registers the unchangeable directive force of some unsurpassable authority.” 64 No human choice goes undetermined by the alignment of sun, moon, and stars. This fate is divined, but it cannot be understood. In second worlds characterized by monotheism, what Rieff calls “the vertical in authority” is

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not absolute or mysterious. To be sure it remains outside, above, and beyond human interaction that takes place along the horizontal dimension of social order. But it nonetheless intervenes in the social world. Or, put another way, the social second world receives divine revelation and so imitates the structure of divinity, sometimes rendered Imitatio Dei in shorthand. This sacred order is paradigmatically represented by the People Israel, a “distancing people” at their very inception: so God confers to the Israelites, “you will be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (goy kadosh)” (Exodus 19:6); and “you are a holy nation unto the Lord, and the Lord has chosen you to be His own treasure among the peoples (‘amim) of the earth” (Deuteronomy 14:2). The members of Israel in good standing accordingly segregate themselves from the nations, in addition to separating ritually holy from profane, light from dark, life from death, good from evil, Sabbath Day from workday, and so on. 65 In Rieff’s estimation, the rabbis (appropriately) ceded to Roman law the conduct of political affairs and retained for their community the ritual observance of divine commands; they cultivated “their own saving sense of limit—or partiality and particularity.” 66 Third worlds, lastly, are characterized by a disregard for any and all constraints. The denizens of this culture perform a “final assault on the objects of its admiration.” 67 Their participants see no value that extends beyond their own mastery. “Third cultures read nothing but themselves.” There are many contemporary advocates of this view, but perhaps none as accomplished and unrestrained as Stanley Fish. This incisive literary critic went from desiccating any claim to a text’s significance besides its readers’ (arbitrary) responses in Self-Consuming Artifacts, through eliminating principles of interpretation in Is There a Text in this Class, to denying seriousness of purpose in academic circles apart from the unjustifiable expression of preference or taste. 68 In this perspective (occasionally mislabeled postmodern), fate and faith are replaced by the predominance of unrestrained fiction: whatever can be imagined must be true—at some level, for someone. Rieff bemoans this “fictive culture of the primacy of possibilities,” the freedom from limits. 69 I tend to agree with Rieff’s description of secularism without external authority, but not entirely with his disapproving evaluation; complaining about the reality surrounding us is somewhat akin to judging lions for slaughtering lambs. 70 By dint of this opposition to anti-culture, presumably, John Murray Cuddihy mistakenly places the mantle of Matthew Arnold upon Rieff. Indeed, Cuddihy burdens Rieff with the Hebraism, or intellectual elitism, that is supposed to counter Hellenism, or churchly populism. Thus, Cuddihy imports the familiar dichotomy: the subversiveness of the ruling elite versus the wholesomeness of the populist masses. Contrary to Cuddihy, however, Rieff does not think highly of high culture per se, that is, a culture that decries the unlearned masses at the gate. 71 To Rieff, the masses revolt not against second

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world authority, but against the pretenders who proclaim to be elites but in fact rule a roost of mediocrities managed by corporate interests. 72 Nevertheless, Rieff does defend what he calls a minimalist reading of culture that recognizes changing social arrangements and thereby averts “any kind of Arnoldian defense of culture, as if it were frozen in its canonical form.” 73 In this respect, perhaps Wieseltier’s championing the counterculture of culture does not go far enough, since counterculture deviates from the norm. Nonetheless, there is a clamoring for a reading elite that imposes interdictory demands on its readers. To make this point, Rieff calls upon the negative capability imagined by the poet John Keats. Negative capability is the willingness to dwell actively in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” 74 This negative capability is “obedience to renunciatory command.” 75 The restraining force of biblical prophecy, of Jewish revelation, is that it opposes a “‘natural’ inclination of the human to take advantage of every opportunity.” 76 Neither rationality nor empiricism, nor their opposite numbers, irony and mockery, could approach the subtleties of thinking required by second-culture readings. Charles Taylor argues very much the same point in A Secular Age when he writes, “for the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from disengaging from everything outside the mind,” and, I would add, body. 77 This buffered self is manifestly isolated and alone in the world. As Rieff puts it, in accord with unmitigated secularism, “the self as a performance of presence” 78 replaces the self as a response to a commanding truth of the sacred order, shuttling between interdiction and remission, between forbiddance and forgiveness. 79 In the secular age, Rieff presumes, nothing is forbidden, and no one is forgiven. For, in truth, on Rieff’s biblically informed account, interdictory rules command obedience. Interdictions limit possibilities; they say NO, “God forbid.” 80 Transgression by definition violates the determinate interdictory limits. But not all transgression is irremediable. For the prospect of remission lies in pardoning those transgressions that are “admissible” or excusable as long as they are tolerable and excusable. 81 With some exceptions (for example, in Leviticus 10:1-11), transgressions are not fatal. Nevertheless, “before permission, there must be prohibition.” 82 The (presumably third world) rallying cry that anything goes is not permissive, but empty, vacuous. In short, interdiction is binding; transgression is the overstepping of boundaries; remission is the correcting of mistakes. “Interdicts were made to be compromised (remissively) and inverted (transgressively).” 83 Thus any self who participates in a social order and aspires to a sacred order lives a remedial life: rather than fated or predestined by some original condition, it operates freely within constraints. Forgiveness may follow atonement or repentance (teshuvah). Moreover, life endowed by the sacred depends upon it. According to biblical monotheism, human (or, at least, Jewish) life originates in and

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is sustained by obedience to interdictory rules. 84 Life on this account comes from nothing (ex nihilo)—which is to say, not from any existing being—but embodies a response to a command. 85 Life originates through revelation and repentance: “In the beginning, there is only the caller and his call toward which life is the turning.” (Repentance or teshuvah in Hebrew means literally “returning.”) Life is a gift given to a creature that remains forever indebted to its Creator. 86 Life is therefore neither self-sufficient nor self-enclosed—a living self is not buffered—because the giver eternally “lives” above and beyond the given gift. 87 Because the Creator remains distinct from creation, created worlds or rules are never complete or final. That is to say that sacred order is not tantamount to interdicts, although the former issue in the latter. Sacred order is eternal, but the cultural interdicts it sanctions can and must change to accommodate the circumstances. Thus, rules are newly exposed and permissible options ceaselessly uncovered within the cultural work of revelation. Revealed texts (which is to say, interdictory ones, which are not restricted to the Bible or any other permanently delimited canon) demand close and deep readings. For from the perspective of the living, “there can be no positive knowledge of sacred order. It can only be given through revelation, living traditions following upon commanding truths.” 88 In contrast, “distancing and deliberate distortion is the fictive achievement, repression taken at face value.” 89 In hard secularism, the buffered self frees itself from external constraints; the only limits are the ones it sets for itself, whether from a position of strength or weakness. (Nietzsche and Freud were arguably connoisseurs of such self-sufficiency.) In fiction, it is duplicity that charms a viewer. Sincerity plays no significant role. Fiction thus claims full autonomy from sacred order in its bid for self-legitimacy. Within this distorting and distancing (from the sacred) effect, “the buyer becomes a part of the object [the commodity] bought.” 90 Consumers are what they consume. In the closed immanent frame of a secular age (to adopt Taylor’s language), there is no claim to sincere truthfulness, only simulation and simulacra (to adopt Jean Baudrillard’s language). 91 Everything competes for attention on a level surface of value. It would seem therefore that the only thing that stands out is refutation or denial; not proof but disproof, not affirmation but negation. One indiscriminate value prevails: “the mode of making it clear that nothing is true.” 92 In third worlds there is no right or wrong way to live, only living one way or another. So-called liberationist movements purport to overcome the narrowness of second-world culture. However, Rieff avers that “our endlessly critical culture religion is ending, I reckon, in massive movements of inversion,” 93 which diminish the interdictory and elevate the transgressive. In its manifest (rather than latent) repressions, the sacred order denies the self its limitless possibilities; cultures formulate responses to that commanding order. Transgressions, in contrast, violate those interdicts. Be-

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fore modernity, transgressions would haunt the sleep that “served a waking life.” 94 In a therapeutic, postmodern, third-world culture, however, repressions replace revelation: rather than instill reverence, or the fear of God in another vocabulary, these latent repressions instigate transformation and revolution. Helpfully rephrasing Rieff’s question, Eisen suggests that he asks not “can civilized men believe?” but instead “can unbelieving men be civilized?” 95 The problem for third-world, mass, cosmopolitan “civilization” is that therapeutic techniques have “nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being” and “the systematic hunting down of all settled convictions.” 96 Techniques seek liberation, unencumbered freedom. But it leaves them with no goals, no purpose—only means to a variable end. That end is wellbeing that closely resembles excellence in Readings’s critique of it as a thin and hollow distinction, really a kind of nondistinction playing the role of distinguishing. In the end, though, a purely remissive culture, replete with positive freedom unbound from the restrictions of sacred order, relieves the self of any burden carried from guiltiness due to its inevitable failing to obey interdicts set forth by the Creator in order to create life. Therapeutics wish to hold their options open, to forefend the foreclosure of every opportunity available to them. The self would then seek its salvation simply “in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions.” 97 Rieff frequently invokes Nietzsche against jejune but commonplace postmodern readings. As Eisen notes, Rieff—like Nietzsche—”demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences [or arts] but about life and the value of life.” 98 The Jew of culture administers this judgment. THE JEW OF CULTURE As I note above, the mythical ideal of the People Israel since its biblical origin is as a distancing people. 99 As a corollary claim of Rieff’s, therapy purveys the universal values of goyim (nations), whereas Israel upholds definitive and, by definition, exclusive virtues: “A universal culture is a contradiction in terms. We Jews of culture are obliged to resist the very idea.” 100 Nothing the Jew of culture says is universally admissible; she exerts no compelling power over others. Her authority is neither severe nor harsh. Rather, the Jew of culture is a powerless authority, authorizing malleable commandments, not issuing strict laws. She cajoles and harangues. Her authority influences; it does not compel. Authority means not doling out but rather taking responsibility, receiving, accepting it. 101 In the social role of election that it acquires, the Jew of culture must not attack her opponents, but can only powerlessly defend her principles. 102

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The phrase “Question Authority” has an elegant ring to it; it makes for a good bumper sticker. However, is there truth in it? Does question in this context mean challenge or interpret? Yet what does authority challenged authorize? Rieff insists that the Jew of culture does not only voice critical questions about society. He or she measures society against the vertical in authority, against which it never measures up because society is a horizontal network of person-to-person relations. We see that there is no final world/ rule creation; world demands explication, whereas rule expects application. The Jew of culture—like its precedent in the Talmudic rabbi—explicates and applies the truth out of reverence for authority, not dissent from it. Just for that reason, Rieff’s Jew of culture is decidedly not the non-Jewish Jew parsed and praised by Isaac Deutscher. 103 In Deutscher’s widely cited account, Spinoza, Marx, and Freud were ostracized by respectable society because they dared to hold it against the measure of reason. In contrast, Rieff’s Jew of culture is precisely not a “cultural” Jew; hence, the odd locution he insists on using. The Jew of culture is just not an assimilated, lox-andbagel, or “Woody Allen” type Jew. Rather, “the satyr of reason” who revels in cleverness and comedy (in the Greek sense) stands precisely opposite the Jew of culture. 104 Pace the Jew of culture, American universities increasingly cater to selfassertiveness, to those recipients and practitioners of therapeutic cures whom Rieff calls role changers and identity seekers. (The character Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen’s film Zelig is Rieff’s image for the non-Jewish Jew par excellence). 105 Caprice, rather than the inversion of a will to power—the will to restraint, as it were—rules the day in our universities. That is not to say that authority must control outcomes. However, “evasion is one thing. Escape is another.” 106 Within this decision point we come to experience “the psychomachia in which very late second culture Jewry finds itself . . . seek[ing] a possibility of a kind of people emerging out of the defeat of the Law.” 107 The non-Jewish Jew’s gnostic tradition, we see, gains in popularity within third-world culture, 108 for the gnostic vision declares the highest authority, God, transgressive not against the law but against life itself. 109 The Jew becomes symptomatically, if not causally, unadulterated malevolence. Even (especially?) those “post-Jews” Marx and Freud abide, if not advance, this inversion of authority. 110 Such is the gnostic vision of the third culture: “a teaching of universal contempt.” 111 I believe that Rieff is correct to question the role of college and university professors in our age, for they seem to play a very minor one in the drama currently unfolding. Are professors meant to train responsible citizens of a state? Are they meant to stimulate independent judges? Are they meant to impart a definitive body of knowledge? Are they meant to get students jobs? Are they meant to assess students’ excellence? If not, what qualities are they meant to evaluate? Whatever the case, we know that administrators and public relations shape admissions policies

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and mission statements, not teachers. 112 Are then teachers expected to play any role besides managing and counseling their charges? (The foregoing questions simply reflect my interpretation of Readings and Donoghue above.) Knowledge, as Weber has long ago observed, buckles under the intellectually unsupported weight of savvy political actors and self-proclaimed prophets or gurus. 113 In Rieff’s estimation, bouncing around indiscriminately between different lifestyles as many contemporary therapeutic methods encourage, 114 diminishes or levels individuality no less than its orthodox counterparts. 115 In therapeutic practice, “there are no superiorities; all ‘values’ are equally entertainable.” 116 Rieff praises character, as in the “graven, deeply etched” characteristics marked by inward conviction. 117 As Rieff puts it, the educational disciplines “need both long preparation and regular exercise in a protected institution uniquely unchanging in its object.” 118 Here, though, Rieff and Readings may come to some agreement: to Rieff, that object is the sacred; to Readings, it is thought. Moving within the vertical in authority or the heteronomous horizon of dissensus, “authority can only be taught to us; it cannot be thought up by us.” 119 Yet, in another respect, Rieff pushes back against Readings’s apparent veering toward postmodern indeterminacy. As Rieff eloquently champions his fellows, “the great teacher is he who, because he carries in himself what is already known, can transfer it to his student: that inwardness is his absolute and irreducible authority.” 120 This inward disposition of character, which can withstand authority as much as dispense it, is the Jew of culture’s most important quality. Rieff writes: Opposing this experimental life, in which all god-terms can be taken lightly, rather as heuristic devices, there can be only a culture of militant, opposing truths—god-terms that are interdictory before they are remissive and have to be taken seriously because humans will oppose the interdicts with all their wits. . . . Of one condition that could make him less capable of brutality, the therapeutic, conqueror of his feeling intellect, is likely to be incapable: inwardness, the quality of self-concealment. . . . What is referred to as “inner” and “autonomous” expresses responses of obedience to interdictory-remissive predicates that are as complex before as after they are taken in as character. Cultures are constituted by interdictory contents, and their remissions, in multiform cults. Few of those cults are recognized in their multiformity, now that all have been overwhelmed by the cult of personality. Within those cults we are free to choose among authority relations; authority generates, as culture, its indispensable interior flexibility. 121

Throughout his writings, Rieff arguably adheres to Isaiah Berlin’s distinction of two types of liberty: negative and positive, or “freedom from” and “freedom to.” 122 Like Berlin, Rieff worries about the “freedom to” perform actions without restriction but does not entirely disapprove “freedom from”

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external powers. Indeed, he praises—and laments the loss of—genuine interiority, or privacy and the personal, in more charged political words. 123 Culture truly preserves the boundary between public and private and, moreover, provides the mechanisms for translating one into the other, the social into and out of the self. Rather, Rieff condemns what he calls the therapeutic or thirdworld celebration of “impulse release, projecting controls unsteadily based upon an infinite variety of wants raised to the status of needs.” 124 What the second world offers instead is “renunciatory control, enjoining releases” from the pressure of impulse. Cultic behavior, such as religious ritual, provides the training ground for the expression of determinate needs that do not thereby promise “commensurate gratifications.” 125 By bringing personal impulses into line with communal relations, they also preserve the individuals’ integrity. 126 The remissive functions of culture do not condemn persons to lack of freedom. Rather, they inhibit the unlimited expression of infinitely insatiable desires: lust, avarice, and so on. By instilling inhibitions in the content of one’s character, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., culture makes the communal purpose and meaning of social selves possible. Culture does its work most faithfully, then, “by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” 127 Such work requires a “compelling symbolic of self-integrating communal purpose . . . channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority.” 128 The pressure of this symbolic does not exact a commitment, but rather, faith. Faith is not the same as a commitment that minimizes content in place of form. For both Readings and Rieff, the true work of culture entails having regard for specific contents or appropriate behaviors that explode any superficial reign of form or formalism. Rieff offers this unusual but stimulating notion of the Jew of culture: “A sociological definition of a Jew: he who resists—that is, resists the very problem [the very question] of his identity.” 129 Due to this resistance, the Jew of culture explodes the stale form of a given social order and, rather, seeks to reorient society toward the sacred order. I believe Readings would concur with Rieff that power politics and therapeutic remedies have no rightful place in higher education, for “authority is given or it is fraudulent; it cannot be taken by force or ambition.” 130 Jews of Culture can work their way into a reordering of democratic society, Rieff avers, only by starting from outside, in reverence of the vertical in authority, imposing constraints upon the impulse to free the social self from its absolute limits. Self-expression knows no limits and thrusts “its transgressive energy against the Jew of culture.” 131 In agreement with Hans Blumenberg’s well-known analysis, modernity is distinguished by the act of “selfassertion.” 132 (As I note above Taylor negatively defines modern humanism

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by self-sufficing.) Needless to say, that version of modernity which celebrates the subject and her representative identity is highly suspect on both Rieff’s and Readings’s accounts. Rieff, who—contrary to some outspoken conservative critics of higher education (such as Allan Bloom and William Bennett, for instance)—condemns positive assertions about “values,” 133 recognizes, like Readings, that value raises a question but does not offer any obvious solution. Yet Rieff also lodges a disagreement with Readings’s prospectus for dissensus, for “no presence can preside when all are subject to abandonments quick as their adoptions.” 134 The knowledge, Rieff insists, is in repetition or recalling what has previously gone forth. Authority comes to one who repeats. Indeed, gesturing toward the Jew of culture, Rieff explicitly praises the rabbinic grounding of pedagogy in the Mishna, the repetition of the ancient sages. In contrast, so-called critical praxis or therapeutic effectiveness means enhancing wellbeing, fulfillment, comfort, and “the emancipation of desire.” 135 Rieff does not, however, impose any orthodoxy. He condemns straightforward solutions (that is, ideologies) to complex problems, 136 demurs from sectarian divisions, and rejects the supposed gloriousness of any past value system. 137 The Jew of culture puts God before all else yet essays to bring godliness into the social world of family, clan, church, and nation. In terms of a radical or absolute monotheism, God created a finite world; differentiated as its Creator, God remains eternal. There is of course debate about the nature of sacred into which Rieff wades categorically siding with the so-called essentialist school of religious thinkers such as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade against the so-called reductionists (Marx, Freud, et al.). 138 Others have portrayed it as a debate between substantive and functional definitions of the sacred. According to an essentialist or substantive view, God’s will or wisdom never changes, although its human meaning or application adjusts to the circumstances. As Maimonides for instance deliberately cites Talmud, “The Torah speaks according to the language of men.” 139 Maimonides, himself a finely attuned historical thinker, 140 adamantly asserts—if not altogether convincingly proves—the eternal nature of divinity (or, precisely, principle that God is not not-eternal). 141 The sacred does not change, for these and other thinkers, though its appearance in the world does. On this reading, religious culture (texts, symbols, images, rituals, and so on) that aspires to the place of the sacred in the social order countervails, even contradicts, the presumed value of novelty endowed by popular, secular, or universal culture. More specifically, in Rieff’s view, the Jew of culture demands the supersession of any given social order, not to replace it as such with the sacred order but to judge it constantly against the ever-surpassing vertical in authority. (Maimonides himself advances a very similar argument for the role of sacrifice in transforming ritual practice by transcending accepted norms of behavior in

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his allegory of the Sabians.) 142 Unlike first- and third-world selves, politicians and gurus, the Jew of culture neither comfortably resides in the social order as though it were home nor explicitly rejects the social order as though it were alien. The Jew of culture is, himself or herself, no cultural absolutist; indeed, as Rieff writes, “no Jew can live in an entirely Jewish reality.” 143 But nor, as we have noted, is a Jew of culture a human in general. The Jew of culture does not—perhaps to the dismay of many ultra-Orthodox and New Age Jews alike—make a disjointed life whole again. Nor, however, does the Jew of culture reject the perfection of the sacred as an object of faith. 144 It is rather the dialectic between the separateness and wholeness of the sacred order and the partiality and integrity of the social order that Rieff takes the Jew of culture to exhibit most demonstrably. For reason of his faith in authority, though he does not side with orthodoxy or Arnoldian high culture, Rieff nevertheless risks engaging in wars over purity. Indeed, he frankly asserts that “where there is culture, there is struggle” and that “culture is the form of fighting before the firing begins.” 145 Yet, by counseling exclusivism in matters of behavior, in respect of the traditional vertical in authority, Rieff may well rush too quickly to judgment. Rieff has not acutely distinguished between the change within tradition and the deviancy barred by it. Presumably, it is the genuine charismatic who draws us into new formulations of the vertical in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. did so for race relations. Could that not happen as well for lesbian/ gay/bisexual/transsexual advocates, an occasion that Rieff consistently rejects? If so, how? What standard would eventually garner Rieff’s support? Is it time that will tell? Rieff insists that seeking the truth is not an intellectual or cognitive problem but is an attitudinal one. What Rieff calls our aristocracies of the feeling intellect comprise those who have “an elaborately cultivated strength of inhibition preventing or punishing transgressive activity.” 146 It is not a matter of taste, as perhaps Arnold would counsel, but rather of reverence and, finally, justice. The true, the beautiful, and the good are intimately, inseparably connected. Altogether, these call for interdiction; they result from restrictions, not excesses: “No good can be achieved except as the supersession of desire and the limit of power.” 147 An outstanding question therefore remains as to whether Rieff sanctions some particular sacred order or simply supersedes every generic social order. Is there transcendence without supersession? Is supersession not a prerequisite or an inevitable byproduct of transcendence? Putting the question in another way, is the figure of a Jew of culture assumed through a conscious effort or ascribed by divinity or fiat? I am not sure how to answer these questions, and so it leaves me uncertain about how to evaluate the Jew of culture. For the most part, I concur with Rieff’s diagnosis of unmitigated secularism or third worlds. I remain ambivalent about his advocacy of the Jew of culture. On the one hand, the Jew of culture has exposed a

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cultural and intellectual sickliness. On the other hand, I am not convinced it is curable. For that matter, I am not persuaded that Readings’s turn to a heteronomous horizon of dissensus resolves the quandaries plaguing academia. Despite their different prescriptions, Rieff and Readings seem to agree on the diagnosis. What American academia houses today is a disproportionate share of “operators—operating out of the University base since its relatively recent catastrophic capitalization.” 148 Almost entirely political and therapeutic figures now occupy powerful posts in academia. Not that all are guilty, to paraphrase that Jew of culture Abraham Joshua Heschel, but each is responsible. But the multiple efforts at recompense or justification to which we are privy hardly suffice to bolster a fading endeavor. Practitioners of humanistic inquiries have made commendable efforts of late to justify their priorities. The late biblical critic Tikva Frymer-Kensky once quipped that exegetical scholarship must be “learned at the elbow.” 149 You will hear no disagreement from me. And yet why should anyone who is not pursuing, or proffering, a humanities PhD care about this putatively admirable quality? In Jewish circles of learning the best quality to have was sitzfleisch, which perhaps could translate into “a cushy butt.” In an effort to validate the virtue of having a cushy butt, intellectual historian Anthony Grafton describes the work of humanities scholarship—while pretty much sidestepping the responsibilities of teaching altogether 150—by the descriptor hard, with no less than nine references in a two-thousand-word review of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, which puts me in mind of George W. Bush’s repeated complaint during a 2004 presidential debate that being the president is “hard work.” Of course, it is also hard work to operate heavy machinery (which may explain the History Channel’s delight in ice-road trucking and logging) or to run a mob syndicate. 151 Hard is an empty qualifier that sounds an awful lot like excellent—albeit taken from an insecure rather than a vainglorious position. Evidently, the humanities deserve preservation, despite all economic evidence to the contrary, because their pursuit is hard, just as universities deserve funding and support because they are excellent. However, neither judgment either raises the question of value or looks up to the vertical in authority; they merely inoculate themselves against serious criticism. Yet they persist in falling short of an authoritative response. 152 I do not begrudge the stalwarts named above. At some universities, to be sure, fellow teachers, inward authorities, stand a fighting chance. More worrying is the ethos of an industry than the individuals who populate it. Rieff’s dialectical approach is needed, for no one contests Grafton’s assertion that research is hard. What I for one question is whether that hardship any longer defines higher education and elite research programs or whether it remains embedded within it as the exception. However, the alternative risks eliding

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Spinoza’s closing words of the Ethics that “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” 153 Put otherwise “we have lost our Jewish patience,” Rieff states, “our modesty before problems.” 154 I dare not tarnish authors with whose insistences on the value of academia I disagree with a dismissive accusation of fashionableness. 155 Here my contention lies at the structural or institutional level. What transpires in teaching and research when American academia is no longer differentiated from the corporate climate from which it putatively remains independent? How can academia justify unique protections of free speech, such as tenure, when it becomes, as Rieff repeatedly notes, 156 the research and development arm of Monsanto, Shell, Dow Chemical, and Google—to name just a few multinational corporations with vested interests (and correspondingly large investments) in controlling the flow of information through society? The undeniable pain suffered by practitioners in research and teaching does not address these questions. Perhaps a danger of Rieff’s critique of academia is that it can be used for communitarian tendencies. While Rieff does not impose orthodoxy, his progenitors might do so because they do not follow the dialectical nature of valuing authority. An authority is valued, but a person or people is/are doing the valuing; that means authority is not objective, although it does reflect impersonal standards: it is, at least in part, constructed personally. It is an unavoidable tragedy that subjects do not always live up to the values they authorize, and authorities often do not serve the values of their followers. 157 It may be suggested further that the historical dialectic that Maimonides traces reflects a dilemma in which Reform Judaism and ultra-Orthodox Judaism display the extreme alternatives that Modern Orthodox and Conservative Judaism essay to negotiate. If Judaism obtains principled sacred values, then a Jew of culture on Rieff’s view would not—or should not—forsake them merely out of convenience. Yet nor could an American easily, that is, without risking the danger of isolation or even illegality, 158 betray his or her commitment to the political diversity and moral incongruities (as in the case of abortion, for instance) which are taken by many (legal and other) authorities to characterize American culture and are virtually guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, the tension between state and federal governments, and the balance of three branches of government. 159 Authority commands attention, but the author does not have the power to grant it; only the reader or receiver chooses to pay attention or not. Regardless of the reasons determining this choice, its variability demonstrates that authority upholds one side of the equation and desire, the other.

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AMERICAN CULTURE AND JEWISH THOUGHT: IS THERE A FUTURE? Given the dialectic of authority and acceptance, what place does the Jew of culture occupy in American academia? Whereas the Jew of culture is devoted to worship God, according to Rieff, it could be argued that in United States culture diverse devotions participate equally and fair competition among them is not only tolerable but also desirable. Over the course of recent centuries, some historical powers of Jewish institutions have absorbed the blows of civil rights granted to individual Jews in exchange for their abandoning certain particularistic characteristics. (One example is the outlawing of the legal power of the herem or ban on supposedly heretical community members.) 160 And yet as Eisen observes at the start of his book Rethinking Modern Judaism, which thoroughly documents the foregoing statement, Jews and Judaism still persevere while the status of modern culture of pluralism may well be seen to have reached its limits of respectability. American academia, like America itself, arguably fails to broadcast authority, although it successfully deploys power and it exploits opportunity. 161 Although sometimes used interchangeably, the meanings of authority and power are quite different. Authority from the Greek auctoritas means advice, opinion, or influence; and it denotes legitimacy or justification in the exercise of power. Authority is bestowed or granted; it is not possessed or owned. Power, from the Greek potestas means the capacity to produce an effect or affect an outcome. It denotes an endowment or acquisition. The difference allows us to say that an unruly mob has power but neither moral nor legal authority to kill someone, whereas a duly appointed or elected judge has authority but not power to issue a sentence. America does not obtain as high a degree of authority as perhaps it once (if ever) had. 162 And yet its therapeutic procedures—not to mention its military might—manifestly bring about a materially abundant (if not always politically free) life: more disposable goods, better dispensable services. Higher education degrees are shown to raise salaries. University research steadily improves manufacturing processes and distribution systems through Lean Six Sigma, spoke-hub distribution, machine code, and so on. In short, America supplies fashionable commodities cheaply to consumers, and the privileges associated with elite universities equally accords with this model. A university’s prestige markets a product for consumption, and its campus cultivates consumers for its production. 163 Is American academia at risk though of training line engineers and technicians for the human enterprise? As a publisher, I facilitate globalizing Asian humanities and social science research through publication of books and journals. A refrain heard repeatedly is that Asian higher education does not foster sufficient creativity. No doubt, many factors contribute to this situa-

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tion; notable among them perhaps is the weak status of liberal arts education, attributable to lacking freedom of speech and an emphasis on learning by rote memorization. 164 And yet, by the same token, liberal arts education is fading fast in America, where the last time 50% of students majored in traditional liberal arts was 1969–1970, 165 and by one statistical analysis, the number of devoted liberal arts institutions has plummeted from 212 in 1990 to 130 in 2012. 166 The rapid ascendance of online education prefers a modality of learning—the transfer of “codified knowledge and algorithmic skills”—that dispenses with both Rieff’s authority and Readings’ thinking. 167 Perhaps most disconcertingly, more self-anointed gadflies are lining up to condemn a model of inquiry, criticism, and reverence for authority that does not intend to guarantee a good job, as one sophistical columnist puts it, 168 but rather to provide resources to fulfill the Socratic dictum “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Rieff wonders—and he is not alone, as Jean Baudrillard, Mark C. Taylor, and others would attest (with admittedly varying degrees of approval or disapproval) 169 —whether we are entering a “world where everything will be spectacle in the service of endless distraction.” 170 I should be clear that I do not consider this a bad thing, and in no way intend to rant against it; and though I remain open to persuasion, hence my serious consideration of Rieff in this chapter, I do not yet foresee the grounds to protest it. A good many Jewish thinkers advance studies of Jews and Judaism on the grounds that they embody universal structures of performance or express judicious principles of reason. 171 A commendable line of inquiry stems at least from Moses Mendelssohn, who in his book Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism, claims that while “symbols and hieroglyphs can easily lead one into error” about the nature of divinity, nevertheless, responsible students of supposedly idolatrous religions “must acquaint themselves very intimately with the thoughts and opinions of a nation before they can say with certainty whether its images still have the character of script,” that is, in his terms, reveal eternal truths, “or whether they have already degenerated into idolatry.” 172 In short, any religious culture might seem idolatrous but in reality match the universal principles of reason adduced (most beautifully, perhaps) in the Jewish religion. The most elaborate statement remains the magisterial Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism by Hermann Cohen, who clearly implies that many religions (potentially) have a share in rational ethical life and that a line can be traced to it directly from the Biblical prophets. 173 There is much to say in defense of this approach. It often satisfactorily manages to situate Jewish religion as a—perfectly or imperfectly—cultural and intellectual endeavor. 174 However its consequences and objectives do not seem to me an improvement on the technical and bureaucratic functions described above. Indeed, we might ask, what would improvement constitute in this instance. Are they claiming to be more effective or efficient at achieving scholarly excellence? If so, they have not

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evaded Readings’ criticism; if not, they would require considerable, and undoubtedly contested and contestable, justification. At the same time, on the other side of the equation, many academic Jewish thinkers excise the most severe criticisms in the act of defending or promoting traditional and communal norms. Here it merits noting one sophisticated version of an uncritical Jewish counterculture. Leora Batnitzky has recently published an elegant book arguing that “religion” on a Protestant model defines a sphere of behavior supposedly isolated from the rest of culture, from nationality, ethnicity, media, education, and the rest. The result, Batnitzky claims, is that Jewish thinkers influenced by modern philosophy woefully misconstrue Judaism. Elsewhere, the book’s author specifically condemns the liberal university for its potentially dangerous tolerance of fanaticism since it presumes that professional philosophy might benefit humanity rather than—as the author implies it does—harm it, 175 for critical thinkers pretend to “know better” than their untrained counterparts. Batnitzky thus proffers in place of critical thinking the legitimacy of a provocatively theocratic village in upstate New York by observing respectfully, even admiringly, “a wholeness granted by God” which those ultra-Orthodox Jews consider themselves (exclusively or not is left unstated) to enjoy. 176 While I find Batnitzky’s prescription rather unexpected for a university professor to reach, 177 I do agree with her diagnosis. Jewish thinkers usually make a choice between two alternatives: either advancing technological-bureaucratic efficiency and effectiveness or returning to a traditional theological community. (More often, they forge an uneasy amalgam of the alternatives.) 178 It should come as no surprise to readers of Batnitzky’s work on Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas in which she professes strong affinity for the University of Chicago philosopher who wrote a 1956 essay, “Progress or Return?” which starkly presents us with the alternatives I name. 179 CONCLUSION Perhaps a few fellow teachers are happily, or unhappily as the case may be, waking up to the dilemma faced by American academia. The erstwhile professor turned professional writer William Deresiewicz excavates both sides of the equation. On the one hand, he convincingly shows that “the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap.” On the other hand, he retains an optimism about professors’ value, as “academics play a special role in society: they tell us things we don’t want to hear—about global warming, or the historical Jesus, or the way we raise our children.” 180 Yet Deresiewicz cannot

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offer any incentive for the employers of academics to exploit that putative “value,” as, in fact, it has none for the said employers. I conclude as I began, with a personal anecdote. On an especially limp draft of a dissertation chapter, my doctoral supervisor, Arnie Eisen, commented that we are paid to give our opinion, to render judgment—not to indemnify ourselves from having a contestable point of view. It is a fair point. I lack here the space to explain this comment’s agreement with Rieff’s overall critique of Weber’s value-neutral methodology, 181 although it suits the Jew of culture more fittingly than my opening quotation would. 182 And yet it still begs the question of what judgment entails. What value does an opinion have, after all, in a world filled with hyper-opinionated blogging? If it means judging quality, and thereby excluding certain anti-cultural forms from consideration, then Rieff would concur. However, professors today are more likely to opine on the basis of political and therapeutic grounds, for instance, by seeking to exclude only language that offends (that is, which is not inclusive). That expresses a common plaint about “political correctness” from conservative critics of higher education; however, so-called conservatives fall into the same trap of opposing exclusivity when they assert the need to give conservatives their own voice on liberally slanting university campuses. 183 Once conservatives enter the game of inclusivity they have, on Rieff’s view, already lost. Better remain voices crying in the wilderness than join the game of a supposedly level playing field, as if culture were anything but a struggle for power and over authority. Rieff joins with Readings—however discrepant their political priorities— to shed light on a failure of American academia that impinges on a subsidiary deflation in Jewish thought. We must then begin to pose some troubling questions for Jewish studies in American academia. Will raising the question of value address the issue of judgment, which involves the use and abuse of power as well as the exploitation of capital? Why do professors’ opinions count any more (or less) than self-appointed experts who abundantly populate the internet? How should we expect to question authority when authority itself dissipates into fractured and trivial claims? Can we think our way around judging or judge our way through thinking? 184 Or may we conclude of American Jewish studies with Yeats—and, more, with Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novelistic and (those quintessential Jews of culture: comics, scolds, and high artisans) Joel and Ethan Coens’ cinematic elaborations—”that is no country for old men”? 185 American Jewish studies is no longer patient, or modest. These irritants—which the Jew of culture injects under the skin of Jewish thought and American culture, if not always entirely within their bodies—have few easy answers and perhaps, more sadly, fewer still responsible askers.

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NOTES 1. Arnold M. Eisen recalls a graduate seminar he took (as an undergraduate student at Penn) with Rieff about Max Weber’s seminal essay “Science as a Vocation” in which an entire semester was absorbed parsing, in Midrashic style, “just a few short pages” of the essay; see Philip Rieff, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), xxxiii. Now, that required thinking! The quotation is from Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 97. 2. Rieff added, “Do not blame the publishers for your thrustings; justifications are not their business” (Fellow Teachers, 162n106; and see Fellow Teachers, 95n60). In the damning words of sociologist Martin Anderson, “the research ethos that now dominates the academic world has been tragic for many professors. They delude themselves when they claim their research is important. . . . And when they act as if it were, when they allow others to assume it is . . . they are engaging in a subtle form of academic corruption”; see Imposters in the Temple: A Blueprint for Improving Higher Education in America (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1996), 118. 3. Rieff was briefly married to a young Susan Sontag who later wrote the book Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1978). 4. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 124. 5. “The problem is basing tenure [and promotion] on the quantity of publications, publications few read,” writes Harvard University Press executive editor for the humanities Lindsay Waters in his powerful booklet Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004), 19. Moreover, “books have to have fewer ideas, so that they do not alarm the recipients by taxing their minds, if by chance they are read” (Ibid., 35). 6. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 25. 7. See Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Study of the Jewish Intellectual: A Methodological Prolegomenon,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 23–53 (see page 37); Mendes-Flohr cites the inspiration of Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 8. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (New York: Faber and Faber, 1975), 90, quoted in Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 1. 9. See Mishnayot Masechet Orlah (3:9), homiletically based on Leviticus 23:14. 10. On this stance and its modern inversions, see See Talya Fishman, Shaking the Pillars of Exile: ‘Voice of a Fool,’ an Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 11. Rieff’s delineation of epistemic regimes accord in significant respect with the differential episteme, or a priori discursive spaces which provide the condition for the possibility of meaningful statements, that Michel Foucault traces and theorizes in work including The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xxii and passim. 12. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chapter 2. 13. Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2008), 85, 93, 119-25, 139. Cf. Kenneth Seeskin, No Other Gods: The Modern Struggle Against Idolatry (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1995), 29, 90-107. 14. Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), x - xi. 15. Rieff, My Life, 12. 16. Wilfred M. McClay, “Two Concepts of Secularism,” Journal of Policy History 13/1 (2001), 47-72. 17. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 19 and 544. 18. Rieff, My Life, 174. See Gregory Kaplan, “Secularism,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, edited by Judith R. Baskin (New York: Cambridge University

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Press, 2011), 539, and “An Intellectual History of Secularism,” http://jbooks.com/secularculture/G_Kaplan.htm. 19. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967), especially 105-125 (chapter 6). 20. . Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 148, and Schriften zur Wissenschaftslehre (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), 197. Rieff writes in Fellow Teachers, 116: “Prophetic orders and their compelling god-terms have ceased to recall us. . . . We exist only inside orders from which we can depart; that is the sociological sense in which the ‘gods’ may be said to exist. . . . Critical praxis has no descent from prophetic recalling.” In this respect we might add that Readings’s proposed way out of moribund intellectualism is not the same as Rieff’s. 21. Thus does Jan Assmann characterize an Egyptian response to the foregoing monotheistic revolution; see Assmann, Of God and Gods, 68. 22. Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), xvi. Donoghue rightly points us back to Thorstein Veblen’s masterful 1918 criticism of Stanford University, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/higher. In addition, early and prescient insight comes by way of George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 113–33. A bracing prognosis, albeit an implausible prescription, appears in Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). For a synopsis, see Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Post-Welfare State University,” American Literary History 18/1 (Spring 2006), 190–216. 23. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 125. 24. Leon Wieseltier, New Republic, March 28, 2013. 25. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997), 64. 26. Ibid., 183. 27. Ibid., 10. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Ibid., 22–24 (citing page 24). 30. It is not uncommon for administrators to frown upon teachers who grant an excessive number of As and, at the same time, to reprimand teachers with poor teaching evaluations, which are likely correlated to the grade a student expects to earn in the course. 31. An engineering professor at my former workplace complained that humanities courses were not hard enough because they did not require as many assignments as engineering courses; the higher number of pages completed, it would seem, the more excellent the learning. In Readings’s words: “As a non-referential unity of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-reflection. All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information. . . . The University is a point of capital’s self-knowledge, of capital’s ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from that management” (University in Ruins, 39). 32. Readings, University in Ruins, 118. 33. Ibid., 17 and 91, see also 20–24. 34. Ibid., 102–5. See Readings on center and periphery, University in Ruins, 111–15. 35. Ibid., 113. 36. Ibid., 121. 37. Ibid., 119. 38. Ibid., 121. 39. Ibid., 99. 40. Ibid., 7–9. 41. Rieff, My Life, 184.

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42. Ibid. 43. Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 204. See Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Rieff, My Life, 56. 44. Tony Wagner’s Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (New York: Scribner, 2012) extensively reports this phenomenon. Ken Auletta’s “Get Rich U” in the New Yorker, April 30, 2012, makes the point directly. My current research investigates the enablement and disablement of creativity in global higher education, with a focus on comparing the United States with China. For soft approaches to this research, see Yong Zhao’s Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2009) and World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012); Benjamin Wildavsky’s The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Tony Wagner’s books. Unsurprisingly, each of these books resembles headline-grabbing journalism or feckless policy papers more nearly than they do critical analyses of a calamitous situation. 45. Rieff’s rejoinder to Readings would be “that [skeptical knowledge] industry creates high pleasure out of the low life in those ruins. In pursuit of that pleasure, the self that was found in relation to highest authority, as faith, has now been lost in roles played as if life were a succession of amateur theatricals, with an experimental laboratory as the world’s stage.” Rieff, My Life, 56. 46. Rieff, Charisma, 165, 180–81 (citing 180). 47. Ibid., 201. 48. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 89. 49. Donoghue, Last Professors, 65. William Deresiewicz describes the situation pungently: “What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its prerogatives—its comfortable compensation packages, its workplace autonomy and its job security—in return for acquiescing to the exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly, the betrayal of the future of the entire enterprise” (“Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education,” The Nation, May 4, 2011). 50. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 81. 51. Readings, University in Ruins, 163. 52. Ibid., 163. 53. Ibid., 188. 54. Ibid., 145. 55. Ibid., 187–88. 56. Ibid., 50. “The system as a whole will probably remain inimical to Thought, but on the other hand, the process of dereferentialization is one that opens up new spaces and breaks down existing structures of defense against Thought, even as it seeks to submit Thought to the exclusive rule of exchange-value” (Ibid., 178). 57. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 91. 58. Eisen, “Introduction,” Jew of Culture, xxx. Rieff writes: “The old faiths could be judged valid even by those who consider them now no longer viable” (The Jew of Culture, 103). 59. Rieff, My Life, 1. 60. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 82–83. 61. Rieff, Charisma, 50, see also 49, 175–77. 62. “The self in all its irreducible identity belongs to its Creator. . . . Each individual is inviolately itself from the moment of its conception after an image that has no biological form or social substance” (Rieff, My Life, 145). 63. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 195. 64. Rieff, My Life, 49. 65. See Arnold Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 14.

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66. Rieff, Charisma, 79. 67. Rieff, My Life, 7, see also 5–6, 12. 68. See Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 69. Rieff, My Life, 173. 70. It behooves mention that there are potential alternatives within third world cultures that admit the sacred within it, but cannot find space here for exposition. One alternative appears in the writings of the late Edith Wyschogrod, specifically her presidential address for the American Academy of Religion, “Facts, Fictions, Ficciones,” reprinted in Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 345-59; and her Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). It may be of interest to note that Michael Wyschogrod takes more or less the position of Rieff in his The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1996). 71. Rieff, Charisma, 38. 72. Rieff, My Life, 16. 73. Rieff refuses to indulge in “withdrawals from the kulturkampf,” which obsess over the “sectarian world of the orthodox.” Ibid., 195. 74. Ibid., 196–97, quoting John Keats, Letters of John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 72. 75. Rieff, Charisma, 223, and see page 15. 76. Ibid., 16. 77. Taylor, A Secular Age, 38, see also pages 135-37, and 542-45. 78. A classic value-neutral, non-moral account is provided in Erving Goffman, The Presentation Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). 79. Rieff, My Life, 204. 80. “Those arbitrary meanings warranted not by any man, but by the one God, are necessary if we are to find some safety in any world” (Rieff, My Life, 13). 81. James Davison Hunter, “Introduction,” in Rieff, My Life, xix. 82. Rieff, My Life, 190. 83. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 122–23. See also on Rieff’s point, Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2003), 94-95. 84. Deuteronomy 30:16 reads “In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances; then thou shalt live and multiply, and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.” 85. By contrast, in first worlds, “the All, death as being given, forms the world elsewhere to which every life, in the individuality of the disturbance, must return.” Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 169–70. 86. Rieff, Charisma, 82. 87. Rieff remarks that God is a personal being, but not a human being. For a Jewish debate about transcendence and its lack see Gregory Kaplan, “God: Divine Immanence,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era, ed. Zachary Braiterman, Martin Kavka, and David Novak (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 337–70. 88. fRieff, My Life, 22. 89. Ibid., 23. 90. Ibid., 25. 91. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 92. Rieff, My Life, 26–27. 93. Ibid., 149. 94. Ibid., 150. 95. Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism, 67. 96. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 91–92.

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97. “Men will have ceased to seek any salvation other than amplitude in living itself.” Ibid., 97–98. 98. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 205. 99. To be sure, there are contradictions between the mythical ideal and the historical realities. For more on some of these contradictions, see Arnold Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 1-22, and David Biale, Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). 100. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 46. 101. Ibid., 197. 102. Ibid., 112–13. 103. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 104. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 206. Thus, “we Pharisees of culture know the world is justified neither morally nor aesthetically” (Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 164). 105. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 179. 106. Rieff, My Life, 156. 107. Ibid. 108. “Once God was dead or permanently absent, the question remained: who is in his place? That place could be filled most rationally by the inventors of the God of the second culture, the Jews themselves. After all, they were and remain highly visible, high achievers and yet without power.” Rieff, My Life, 157. 109. The Manichean view “implied the denial not only of injustice and oppression, but of the human race itself” (Rieff, Charisma, 190). We see this denial, or “race suicide,” now evinced in so-called transhuman and posthuman ideologies. See the unconvincing but nonetheless indicative book from Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 110. Rieff, My Life, 155–60; and see 166. Rieff draws this contrast to the Jew of culture: “Jews of protest always end fighting their own means of protest toward some end against themselves” (Rieff, My Life, 211). 111. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 150. “Note the ancient connection between simony and gnostic movements,” which ply their wares (secrets) for the appropriate fee (Fellow Teachers, 147). 112. Donoghue, The Last Professors, 119-120, offers a scathing review of my own alma mater Oberlin College’s rebranding. 113. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 97. 114. An example of how modern therapy facilitates individuals’ testing out different lifestyles is the proliferation of personality profiles. Their inconclusiveness and occasional contradictoriness suggests that even though there is no one suitable way to live, people might do their best to try on a career or a relationship to see what fits. 115. With regard to therapeutics’ orthodox counterparts, Rieff offers the most compelling readings of Søren Kierkegaard in Fellow Teachers. In reference to that book’s subtitle, he later writes, the death of soul or “second death is that lowering in the vertical in authority to the very bottom of its range so as to separate the individual from its identity, self from sacred order” (Rieff, My Life, 100). 116. Rieff, Charisma, 215. 117. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 114 n72. “The therapeutic can treat all meanings as equally authoritative” (Ibid., 87). 118. Ibid., 125. 119. Ibid., 137. 120. Ibid., 117. 121. Ibid., 49, 53–54. 122. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 123. “Reticence, secrecy, concealment of self, have been transformed into social problems”; Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 100, and see page 154.

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124. Ibid., 96. 125. Ibid., 94. 126. “Authority long established, woven into manners that cultivate men, has the virtue of attracting those who need a shelter from the crudities of power not yet refined” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 199). Rieff dubs that “last” gentleman of letters in America, Lionel Trilling, a “leading American Jew of culture”; Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 137. 127. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 81. To be clear, Rieff does not seem to insist that the created worlds/rules stay the same forever. He is not antiquarian. However, even as creation changes, the indebtedness of the self to the Creator, the giver of life, demands recognition in the reality of guilt. “The moral demands we must teach, if we are teachers, are those eternal truths by which all social orders endure” (Rieff, My Life, 15). Third-world teaching puts roles in the places that identity once stood; see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 356–57, 302–310. 128. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 82–94 (citing page 84). 129. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 78. 130. Ibid., 161–62, and 36. 131. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 115. 132. Ibid., 151. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 137-38. 133. “‘Value’ is a word which should only be used for purposes of marketing spoilt goods” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 7 n4). “Look for ‘values’ where they belong, in bargain-basement sellouts of character” (Ibid., 98). 134. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 49. Likewise, “art fails when it becomes a form of intellectualized tourism” (Rieff, My Life, 17). Indeed, “prophetic orders and their god-terms have ceased to recall us. . . . We exist only inside orders from which we can depart. . . . Critical praxis has no descent from prophetic recalling” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 116). “Doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life . . . could drive the value problem clean out of the social system” (Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 104). 135. Stephen L. Gardner, “Philip Rieff and the Self-Destruction of Democracy,” Society 46/2 (2009), 184. 136. Rieff, Charisma, 30. 137. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 217. 138. For a definitive but demanding account of well-known debates between essentialism and reductionism, see Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 139. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 35. 140. See Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 133-54. 141. Note the fourth of Maimonides’s so-called Thirteen Principles of Faith in his commentary on the Mishnah (tractate Sanhedrin chapter 10), in A Maimonides Reader, edited by Isadore Twersky (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 418; and Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 149. See Joshua Parens, Maimonides and Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 108. 142. See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 94-95. 143. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 196. 144. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 35, 54, and passim. The Jew of culture shares many features with the moral perfectionism advocated by Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letter on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 2. 145. Rieff, The Jew of Culture, 169. 146. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 156. 147. Ibid., 207. 148. Ibid., 190. See, especially, Rieff’s “well known special law, with reference to academic institutions,” which only his readers can partially, if not fully, appreciate (Ibid., 96).

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149. Quoted by Margaret Mitchell in an essay that defends the worth (her word) of scholarship for its expert use of footnotes; see “Workshop or Assembly Line?” Criterion 49/1 (Spring 2012), 17. 150. Note that Rieff’s book is not entitled “Fellow Scholars.” See Anthony Grafton, “Humanities and Inhumanities,” The Nation, February 17, 2010. For a consideration of the question of value in higher education, see Stephan Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin Books, 2012), though I read it too late to incorporate here. 151. “All creativity may be touched with criminality . . . but criminality is not creative” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 100). 152. As I finish revising this chapter, a report issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences titled “The Heart of the Matter” is garnering much commentary. Among many worthy responses, I find most convincing that of Stanley Fish, which effectively condones third worlds that Rieff decries; see “A Case of the Humanities Not Made,” New York Times online (June 24, 2013), http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/a-case-for-the-humanities-not-made/. A less convincing response, in my opinion, is offered by Martin Jay, “Why the Humanites,” The Daily Californian (July 11, 2013), http://www.dailycal.org/2013/07/08/why-the-humanities/ 153. Spinoza: Complete Works, translated by Samuel Shirley, edited by Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Book Publishing Co., 2002), 632. Readings’ diatribe against the empty qualifier “excellent” boils down of course to the presumption that in higher education at large it is no longer difficult or rare; rather, “everyone is doing it,” or so Grafton implies. 154. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 178. Touching on the theme broached in this essay’s introduction, Waters states convincingly (Enemies of Promise, 78–84, citing pages 82 and 84), “many who have the most to say are the most reluctant to say it”; legendary among those “best who are often in no rush to write” are Rogers Albritton and Sidney Morgenbesser (who coincidentally pursued rabbinical studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America). 155. See Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 156. Indeed, Rieff claims, “the managerial revolution in American society is even further advanced in the university” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 193). 157. I might feebly suggest here, without explanation, that Kiekegaard dissects the problem of individual persons’ inveterate failure to respect authority properly whereas Karl Marx exposes the endemic inclination for authority to abuse its claim on individual persons. 158. For a kind of rejoinder to Batnitzky’s contention in her book cited above, see David N. Myers and Nomi M. Stolzenberg, “Kiryas Joel: A Theocracy in America,” in The Huffington Post (December 4, 2011), www.huffingtonpost.com/david-n-myers/kiryas-yoel-theocracy-inamerica_b_1124505.html?view=screen. 159. It was, coincidentally, the Jew Israel Zangwill who in 1905 imagined America as a melting pot, and the Jew Emma Lazarus who penned The New Colossus (1883) which graces the Statue of Liberty. See Horace M. Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956); and Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a challenge to the realities—if not ideologies and legalities of this characterization—see Noam Pianko, “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 94/4 (December 2008), 299-329. 160. To the extent that religious institutions continue to exercise this (possibly illegitimate) power, for instance in the widely publicized practice of “disconnection” by the Church of Scientology, it is at least controversial if not outright condemned; see “Judge brands Scientology ‘sinister’ as mother is given custody of children,” The Times (July 24, 1984), 3, and Jonny Jacobsen, “Niece of Scientology’s leader backs Cruise biography,” Agence France-Presse (January 28, 2008). 161. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 200. 162. It is probably fair to say that the USA enjoyed a high degree of moral authority after World War II, but since the Vietnam War, the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and the 2008 Banking Crisis, I think it is also fair to say that many factors have contributed to the global erosion of this authority.

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163. See Donoghue, Last Professors, chapter 5. 164. See, for example, Christian Caryl, “The Big Bang Theory of Education,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2012, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/11/the_big_bang_theory_of_ education?page=full. 165. Donoghue, Last Professors, 72. 166. Vicki L. Baker, Roger G. Baldwin, and Sumedha Makker, “Where Are They Now? Revisiting Breneman’s Study of Liberal Arts Colleges,” Liberal Education 98/3 (Summer 2012), 48-53. 167. See William F. Massy and Robert Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/html/nli0004.html. 168. Scott Gerber, “How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America,” The Atlantic, September 24, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/how-liberal-arts-colleges-arefailing-america/262711. Needless to say, commentators and investors such as Gerber and Peter Thiel can no doubt blissfully ignore the rejoinder that they failed at receiving a liberal arts education. 169. Of many works to consider, I recommend Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation; and Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 133-34 and passim. 170. Simon Castle, “Universities’ Assault on Humanities Signals a Society Going Backwards,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 20, 2012, http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/societyand-culture/universities-assault-on-humanities-signals-a-society-going-backwards-2012101727rfp.html#ixzz29oGsVIbM 171. There are too many examples to list here, but I dare mention two new finely crafted and well-argued books that in my opinion nonetheless fail to remedy the condition that Readings and Rieff lambaste: Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Willi Goetschl, The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 172. Moses Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity and the Bible, edited by Micah J. Gottlieb (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 102-103. 173. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, translated by Simon Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Robert Erlewine, Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), especially 131-75. 174. We can read spirited justifications of humanistic disciplines from a range of thinkers including, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond the ‘Crisis in the Humanities,’” New Literary History 36/1 (Winter 2005), 21-36 [see also the several critical responses in this special issue of New Literary History]. On the other side which views academic disciplines as unprincipled by nature, see Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and now especially Toby Miller, Blow Up the Humanities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). 175. Leora Batnitzky, “Levinas between German Metaphysics and Christian Theology,” in The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas between Jews and Christians, ed. Kevin Hart and Michael Signer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 17–31. 176. Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 185. 177. This is not to say that Batnitzky supports religious fundamentalism, however; her position more closely resembles the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and others, which Charles Taylor also affirms in the conclusion of A Secular Age, 774. 178. To take a recent admirable study by Shaul Magid, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), it leaves me with questions of definition. Is it describing (advocating) a spirituality that is distinctively Jewish, or simply informed by Jewish sources, as by Christian (on Thomas Merton, see 278),

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Buddhism (see 148), and other New Age spiritualities—suggesting there is something vaguely instrumental at work here? Or is it carving out an expressly (even exclusively) Jewish theological terrain—which the concept of identity evokes but the notion of post-Judaism belies? I highlight this book due to its strength of argument rather than its weakness; there are more weak arguments in academic Jewish thought that merit discussion. 179. Leora Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 87-136. For elaboration on the foregoing paragraphs, see Gregory Kaplan and Dustin Atlas, “The Ends of Modern Jewish Thought and Philosophy,” Religious Studies Review 38/1 (March 2012), 1-7. 180. “Academia exists in part to support research the private sector won’t pay for, knowledge that can’t be converted into a quick buck or even a slow one, but that adds value to society in other ways” (Deresiewicz, “Faulty Towers”). How telling society what it does not want to hear adds up to a value for society remains a mystery worth exploring; of course, Socrates and Sophocles started this conversation long ago. 181. See Rieff, Charisma, 124–25. 182. One problem I cannot address here are the psychological issues implicating the erstwhile colleague cited at the start of my essay. As Waters states, “boldness, even bullying, is accompanied by a certain unctuous timidity when academics are the perpetrators” (Waters, Enemies of Promise, 62). Unfortunately, bullying in academia, including Jewish studies, is a rarely discussed topic; for an exception, see Darla J. Twale and Barbara M. De Luca, Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do about It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). 183. Note the recent case where donors committed one million dollars to endow a position in “Conservative Thought and Policy” at the University of Colorado, Boulder; see the university’s website at www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2013/03/13/cu-boulder-appoints-steven-haywardinaugural-visiting-scholar-conservative. 184. Rieff’s rebuke to humanities professors: “You cannot politic your way to an idea” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 191). 185. W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 193.

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———. The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Seeskin, Kenneth. Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. No Other Gods: The Modern Struggle Against Idolatry. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1995. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1978. Spinoza: Complete Works. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Book Publishing Co., 2002. Strauss, Leo. “Progress or Return?” In Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by Kenneth Hart Green, 87-136. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Twale, Darla J., and Barbara M. De Luca. Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do about It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. Wagner, Tony. Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. New York: Scribner, 2012. Waters, Lindsay. Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Wieseltier, Leon. New Republic. March 28, 2013. Wildavsky, Benjamin. The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 190–216. Wyschogrod, Edith. Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. ———. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Wyschogrod, Michael. The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel. Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1996. Yeats, W. B. “Sailing to Byzantium.” In Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Zhao, Yong. Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2009. ———. World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012.

Chapter Four

Reading a Book like an Object: The Case of The Jewish Catalog Ari Y Kelman

Within eighteen months of its publication in 1973, The Jewish Catalog became the second best-selling title in the history of the Jewish Publication Society behind its perennial best-seller: the Bible. Aggressively marketed as “a book that will turn you on to Judaism,” The Jewish Catalog sold more than 125,000 copies during its first two years in print and quickly led to two subsequent catalogs in addition to a Jewish Kids Catalog, becoming something between a cottage industry and a cultural phenomenon. The success of the book was not only unprecedented, but came as a surprise to almost everyone who had a hand in its production. The book grew out of a constellation of influences and forces: a Master’s program at Brandeis University, a Jewish commune, the counterculture of the late 1960s, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the commercial and cultural interests of the most venerable Jewish publishing house in the United States. This particular confluence of forces created the conditions by which the countercultural motivations behind the creation of the Catalog could enter into the Jewish cultural mainstream. Its sales figures, however, represent only one dimension of its cultural significance. In addition to becoming a Jewish best seller, it crystallized and publicized aspects of the countercultural ethos that emerged during the late 1960s within an explicitly Jewish context. Alongside and in conversation with other publications like Response Magazine or the collective efforts of the Jewish Student Press Service, the emergence of Jewish collectives known as havurot (singular: havurah), the Jewish feminist movement, the Jewish Student Network, and Jewish student activists who turned their campus activism toward changing the Jewish community, The Jewish Catalog has be109

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come one of the most important documents of the late 1960s and early 1970s. From its anthologized introduction to its oft-reproduced instructions for tying tzitzit or braiding challah, The Jewish Catalog captured the multifarious sensibilities of that moment as well as the cultural and communal changes it, in many ways, both predicted and initiated. 1 Yet, the Catalog’s successful marketing campaign and subsequent sales numbers indicate an appeal that extended well beyond the members of the baby boom generation who participated in the majority of countercultural activities and embodied its ethos. Jews of all ages bought the book, turning the book itself into something of a symbol that stood for more than the sum of its collected essays and the ideals that stood behind them. The coalescence of these ideals into a book that could be designed, marketed, bought and sold helped bring those ideals from the margin to the mainstream by rendering them into the familiar material and symbolic form of the book. This essay explores the materiality of The Jewish Catalog as a book in both orientation and representation, focusing on its material qualities and the concerns that shaped its creation, publication, and distribution. Emphasizing the material dimensions of the book means accounting for its physical properties with greater delicacy than the words it contains in order to uncover how the materiality of the book itself both promoted and compromised the book’s motivating ethos. In this way, this essay reads the book against its countercultural roots, situating the Catalog in conversation with broader Jewish cultural and commercial trends than other authors who have focused mainly on its contents. In other words: the materiality of the Catalog matters, and the matter of its materiality inflects the meaning of the book beyond the words on its pages. HOW TO “READ” A BOOK The Jewish Catalog began as a Masters’ Thesis by George Savran and Richard Siegel at Brandeis University. Eventually, Savran left the project and Michael and Sharon Strassfeld collaborated with Siegel in editing the book, which eventually included thirty-one essays by forty-two contributors, organized into four thematic areas: Space, Time, Man/Woman, and Word. The essays within each section are loosely tied together; the section entitled “Word” includes contributions about music, film, and gematria (the semimystical mathematics of the Hebrew alphabet). The “Space” section includes entries on travel alongside essays about ritual objects: candles, shofar, ćhallah, and the four species (which are connected to the holiday of Sukkot). What makes the book so powerful, however, is neither its manifest content, nor even its driving impulse to make Jewish knowledge usable by a new generation. Even more, it is a relatively late entry in a very long literary

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tradition of edited Jewish “how-to” books, a genre that reaches back at least as far as Joseph Caro’s Shulchan Aruch, one of the earliest and most important compendia of practical Jewish law and conduct. Instead, what makes it so powerful is its appeal not as a book to be read, necessarily, or as a book to be used, but as a symbol of new currents in American Jewish life in the early 1970s. Sales figures notwithstanding, there is little historical evidence that the majority of those who bought the book ever read it, let alone admitted feeling an affinity for its “do it yourself” ethos or the other sensibilities conveyed by the articles it contained. Though it is fairly easy to record the sales of books, tracking who reads them is something else entirely. Correlating sales numbers with the book’s cultural meaning rests on the problematic assumption that everyone who bought the book actually read it. Add to this the impossibility of calculating the number of people who made their own shofar or established a havurah based on the instructional essays in the Catalog, and the significance of book sales grows increasingly tenuous as an index of how the book was read or used by those that purchased it. 2 At best, sales figures provide a deeply unreliable measure for the popularity or representative nature of the book’s ideas and sensibilities. However, its popularity certainly meant something, whether or not that meaning is derived from its contents. Its publication and reception reflected the surfacing of something significant, but what exactly and for whom remains uncertain. Reading the book as an artifact of material culture rather than as a strictly literary text, however, can reframe its popularity as a significant index of its meaning by focusing on how the book circulated, not how or if it was read. In an influential essay from 1964, American Studies scholar John Kouwenhoven criticized his field for being “too ready to accept verbal evidence as if it were the equivalent of the evidence of our senses. . . . We have been so preoccupied with words . . . that we have neglected things.” 3 Koewenhoven’s essay challenged his literary-minded colleagues to pay less attention to stories as such, and to attend with greater sensitivity to the stories that objects and artifacts have to tell. With this essay, Koewenhoven attempted to shift the burden of cultural analyses from the strictly literal to the material and the symbolic, urging other scholars to attend to how clothing, furniture, and decorative arts could convey complex meanings in addition to ideas embedded in texts. For Koewenhoven, words only reveal meaning if exchanged within a more-or-less bounded “community of experienced particulars,” or, alternatively, within a community that already shared much in the way of common meaning. 4 Reading books for their words, for Koewenhoven, lent far too much credence to words as ready-made vehicles for the transmission of meaning. Instead, he urged his colleagues (and himself) to “perceive and savor with our five senses the things nonscribbling Americans have made in somewhat the same way that the archaeologist or anthropologist approaches

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the artifacts and folk arts of other times and places.” 5 My intention in this essay is to approach The Jewish Catalog in much this same way: as an artifact of a particular cultural context, in which inheres all manner of meaning that exceeds the sum total of that captured by text of the book. To be sure, the contents of the book matter too, and I don’t mean to argue that the book’s meaning can be understood without reading the words on its pages. The book is a sharp rebuke to what its editors called “the prefabricated, spoon-fed, nearsighted Judaism” of their parents’ generation and of the established organizations of the Jewish community. 6 The book, they hoped, would awaken people to the “possibilities for personal responsibility and physical participation . . . [through] a returning of the control of the Jewish environment to the hands of the individual.” 7 However, to read the editors’ prescription for how the book’s content should be used by its readers as a description of the ways in which people actually used the book is to misread the book, its contents, and its broader cultural meaning. The content is not unimportant, but neither does it tell the whole story. Leaving the text aside and focusing on the book’s material properties opens up an avenue of investigation that can account for its popularity, not as evidence of the resonance of its content, but as the result of a more complex set of material, cultural, and financial concerns. In other words, approaching the Catalog as a material artifact destabilizes the assumption that its popularity meant that people bought it solely or even primarily because of its content. Meaning inheres in objects in complicated ways, and books—as both objects and texts—double the complications. 8 Approaching The Jewish Catalog as an object rather than a literary text means leaving the content for another essay in order to look closely at the book’s presentation, organization, structure, design, marketing and circulation as an object that could be bought, sold, and given as a gift. It means reading the book for its largely symbolic meaning, more so than its literal one. It means attending to the volume’s presentation, packaging and presence on a shelf rather than the volume of its contents as they might be read by a scholar, a student, or someone looking for guidance about “do it yourself” Judaism. It means approaching the book as an object, as an artifact, as a material manifestation that can speak volumes about itself, so long as we avoid only paying attention to the words. Approaching the book in this way allows for a broader understanding of both how people “read” and what constitutes a “book.” DESIGNING THE BOOK Designed by Adreinne Onderdonk Dudden and published in paperback with a bright red-orange cover, The Jewish Catalog did not bear much resemblance to any of the other twenty-nine titles that the Jewish Publication

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Society (JPS) released in 1973. Alongside important titles like volume fifteen of Salo Baron’s Social and Religious History of the Jews, Bernard Weinryb’s The Jews of Poland, and two editions of translations of the book of Isaiah (one with illustrations, one without), The Jewish Catalog looked colorfully out-of-place in the JPS catalog. The JPS published Baron’s volume in a mute black binding, and Weynreb’s contribution featured a smart cover rendered neatly in black and blue. Even the most graphically oriented JPS product of that year, a translation of Isaiah with Chayim Gross’ illustrations, looked positively plain next to the Catalog, which announced the emergence of a new vision of American Jewishness even before its reader cast her eyes on its pages. Occupying the top half of the cover, a clean, modern font announces “The Jewish catalog: a do-it-yourself kit,” in all lower-case letters. Beneath the title and the names of the volume’s editors, dividing the cover in two and running right-to-left across the front of the book in bold green, blue, yellow, and red text, appear a selection of lines from the text of a ketubah, calligraphed by David Moss. Beneath the text sit five black-and-white photos: a man in a prayer shawl reading a page of Talmud; a couple—he in a white furry hat, she in long, straight brown tresses—standing behind a bank of candles as he feeds her something; a photo of an audience of women circa 1970; a classroom photo of what look like young, female immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century flanked by American flags; and a photo of a black-hatted, black coat-wearing orthodox male hopping on the back of a motorcycle driven by another young man wearing a helmet with what look like the hills of Jerusalem in the background. The eclectic visual representation of Jewishness continues on the spine and back cover with additional photos from Jewish life—an orthodox bride and groom sitting behind a huge challah, a group of young people sitting in the grass with a prayer shawl clearly visible—and a photo of the editors themselves. The book’s spine includes a small cartoon drawing of the Hebrew word shalom, interpolating a face in profile into its design (which looks something like a fish and a sun combined into a simple line-drawn figure). The collection of images, the text, the font and the colors leap out from the book’s exterior announcing a significant graphical departure from the typically staid approach to publishing preferred by the book’s relatively conservative Jewish publisher. It also represents the diversity and complexity of Jewish life, culture and practice in technicolor. Rather than presenting a unified vision of an authoritative text (like Weynreb’s volume for example), the cover of the Catalog conveys something quite different, divergent, and diverse.

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THE JEWISH WHOLE EARTH CATALOG The Jewish Catalog, however, did not begin with a vision for a book, but with a Master’s thesis that paid explicit tribute to the volume that inspired its authors and to its visions both of what a book could be and what a book could do. Richard Siegel and George Savran, both students at Brandeis, entitled their 53-page thesis, “The Jewish Whole Earth Catalogue: Theory and Development.” Although the name changed between Savran and Siegel’s thesis and the publication of The Jewish Catalog, the influence of Stuart Brand’s landmark Whole Earth Catalog remained. In the Catalog’s introduction, the editors pair Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture with Bill Novak’s essay-length Jewish response, The Making of a Jewish CounterCulture, in order to explain their vision for the book: 9 “What the Whole Earth Catalog was to the former, i.e., an access to tools and resources, this catalog was envisioned to be for the latter.” 10 In an interview from 1973, Siegel explained in a phrase that could have come from Brand himself: “it’s not just a summary of resources but [it] is a resource in itself.” 11 For Siegel, the book represented more than its text—he hoped that the book itself would be a resource, of sorts. A resource for what, exactly, remained somewhat vague, but The Jewish Catalog took from its predecessor a desire to provide information and tools for people to use in the construction of their own worlds and communities. Edited and published by Stewart Brand and his wife, Lois, the Whole Earth Catalog sold one thousand copies at five dollars apiece when it made its debut in 1968. Ironically, the cover of its first edition, which featured a photo of the earth taken from space, only hinted at the diversity of items included on the pages within. The thin sixty-one page volume included approximately 133 items across a range of categories including books, seed packets, kits of all kinds, games, learning tools, periodicals, other catalogs, and assorted items intended to serve the needs, interests, and ideals of the “new communalists” with whom Brand identified. Though thematically organized—“Understanding Whole Systems,” “Communications,” and “Nomadics,” to name three sections—the pages themselves revealed less internal coherence, juxtaposing the United Farm Agency Catalog (a listing of land for sale around the United States), the Merck Manual and Consumer Reports on one page, and Norbert Wiener’s book on cybernetics alongside a HewlettPackard calculator for $4,900 on another. 12 Brand selected the items and references for the Whole Earth Catalog based on his assessment of their ability to empower individuals in their quest for meaningful lives. 13 Internal coherence mattered less than overall coverage. Published in paperback on cheaply available newsprint and inexpensively reproduced, the Whole Earth Catalog bore more resemblance to the newspapers of the counterculture than to a glossy magazine or full-color mail-

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order catalog. The page layout, too, featured collages of images, multiple typefaces, texts, and illustrations that reinforced the juxtapositions that defined and animated its hands-on ethos. Yet, if Brand understood the symbiotic relationship between material tools and information, then he also understood that his project not only informed people about tools, but that it also became a tool itself. The materiality of the Whole Earth Catalog was not merely functional, but ideological, as well. It not only gave people something to buy, sell, and peruse, but it also became something of a symbol of the ideals and values of the counterculture both for those who identified with it and those curious about it. By 1971, the Whole Earth Catalog had become something of a phenomenon, expanding to some 448 pages, selling over one million copies, and winning the National Book Award. That year, Brand recalled his motivation in launching the Catalog as a response to a particular problem—a problem of information. “The problem,” he recalled, “was How to Generate a Low Maintenance, High Yield, Self Sustaining, Critical Information Service.” 14 Brand saw the Whole Earth Catalog as a response to the fact that those who wanted to get “back to basics” did not necessarily know what or “where those basics were.” 15 Brand imagined his project could solve that problem by making them widely available, collected under a single countercultural cover. Yet, at the same time, Brand understood that the Whole Earth Catalog not only promoted tools and information, but that it also modeled the do-ityourself ethos that it espoused. It was, to paraphrase Richard Siegel, both a collection of resources and a symbol of what those resources could create. As Fred Turner explained, “it . . . offered up those tools—and itself—as prototypes of a new relationship between the individual, information, and technology.” 16 It became both a channel for and an embodiment of those ideas, until Brand, believing the Catalog to have run its course, published its final edition in 1972, turning whatever funds that had accumulated over to a not-forprofit for disbursement. Despite the popularity of his project, Brand did not set out to create a symbol, but a “service” that could deliver information. The information already existed; Brand only tried to harness, organize and distribute it. His problem was not really a problem of “information,” but a problem of access and distribution. The information was out there, but it was difficult to obtain. By creating a catalog that curated and presented resources for those interested, Brand not only provided a mechanism through which people could access information, but he did so through a material artifact that required far less do-it-yourself effort: a book. The familiarity of the book as a format made it possible for people to access the information it contained. The Jewish Catalog began with a similar concern for information and access. In an oft-told story, Richard Siegel, a member of Sommerville’s Jewish commune, Havurat Shalom, found himself and some housemates in

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the backyard, trying to erect a sukkah, a temporary dwelling, for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, or the Feast of the Tabernacles. Siegel recalled being confused about how to begin such a project and not knowing either how to construct such a thing or what Jewish law said such a structure required. Standing in the backyard, Siegel and his housemates had two very material and immediate concerns. First, they did not possess either the skills or the tools necessary to construct a sukkah; Siegel has described himself as “hardware challenged.” 17 Second, and presciently, they felt a lack of information about what defined such a structure. How big would it have to be? What shape? What materials could it be made of? The convergence of questions about tools both physical and informational set the stage for the ways in which its editors envisioned The Jewish Catalog. Brand sought to provide access to information and, in turn, empower his readers. In this formulation, access proved as important as the information it enabled, and a catalog seemed like the best cultural venue for doing so. Savran and Siegel, in their Masters’ thesis, also focused on the relationship between information and access, proposing the creation of “a compendium of tools and resources for use in Jewish education and Jewish living in the fullest sense,” a gloss of the book that found almost identical formulation in the introduction to the published version of The Jewish Catalog. 18 The difference here is slight but significant. While Brand envisioned his catalog as a solution to a problem of information and access, Savran and Siegel saw their intervention primarily in terms of an activation of hands-on, material production that they believed to have been lost amidst mass production and commercialization, and which could be best disseminated through the mechanisms of Jewish education. All of us who see Jewish Education as active and physical, as part of total Jewish living, also feel the need to transcend supermarket challah and factorymade talleism [prayer shawls]. In order to combat these depersonal, commercializing trends in Jewish life, we must personally involve ourselves and our students in the physical aspects of tradition. We propose, then, an experiment in communal self-help: the compilation and publication of what, for want of a better term, we now might call: A Jewish Whole Earth Catalogue [sic]. 19

For Brand, information meant empowerment. For Savran and Siegel, education could lead to a deeper engagement with tradition. Savran and Siegel framed their desire to empower Jews as a problem of education, and its general inability to engage in the “physical aspects of tradition.” Thus, The Jewish Catalog, even in its nascent form, concerned itself both with the presentation of information and with the physical dimension of participation in Jewish knowledge and tradition, demonstrating an attention to material concerns that resonates through its pages and its overall presentation.

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As an educational text that drew so strongly upon the Whole Earth Catalog’s vision of the empowered individual, The Jewish Catalog seemed close in spirit to some of the broader changes that were just emerging on the landscape of American religion. Sociologists of American religion like Robert Wuthnow, and Wade Clark Roof have documented these changes, framing the “restructuring of American religion” in terms of a “generation of seekers,” no longer satisfied with the houses of worship and available religious practices of preceding generations. 20 Robert Bellah, too, helped document a turn toward individual autonomy and away from religious tradition as the definitive impulse of American religion that emerged in the late 1960s. 21 Yet, while Wuthnow, Roof, and Bellah emphasized the emergence of individual desire as a hallmark of American religion at this historical moment, none attended seriously enough to the material dimensions of that emergence, and the ways in which the “generation of seekers” sought not only personal meaning but also tools for the production of that meaning. In other words, Bellah, Wuthnow, and Roof focused on the ideological dimension of religious change often at the expense of its material dimension—a dimension that Savran and Siegel, following Brand, explicitly emphasized. This educational impulse of Savran and Siegel’s thesis appeared in The Jewish Catalog in its stated intention to return “the control of the Jewish environment to the hands of the individual—through accessible knowledge of the what, where, who, and how of contemporary Judaism.” 22 Its emphasis on equipping individuals with “enough information to be immediately useful” reinforced the editors’ central concern that both Judaism and the process of learning about Judaism be largely grounded in the material concerns and efforts of individuals. Like Brand, they believed information was important, but they understood learning to be less an intellectual exercise than the beginning of a larger, more holistic engagement. If information was only as valuable as its use, then Jewish education would be worthless if it did not prepare people to use the knowledge they acquire. Information without action had no value, but like Brand, Savran and Siegel’s intervention was not one of information per se but one of dissemination. By making information material, they created a product that could serve as both a resource and a reference. The Whole Earth Catalog set the template for The Jewish Catalog by framing the ways in which information and access could be reconfigured around the active user and his or her impulse to make both meaning and things. In the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand demonstrated the ways in which information had become a tool, and the ways in which the Catalog itself had, too. Extending the vision of the Whole Earth Catalog, Savran and Siegel imagined that The Jewish Catalog could fill an educational void by providing usable information and encouraging their readers to leave the commercialized dimensions of Jewish life behind in favor of one that drew on the power and creativity of individuals. Drawing on

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both the material dimensions of the counterculture as evidenced in the Whole Earth Catalog and on the increasingly individualized quest for religious meaning that surfaced during the late 1960s and 1970s, The Jewish Catalog emerged as an attempt to make material the elusive elements of Jewish life, to draw down the abstractions and render them in flesh, in dough and fabric and wood, and on paper. MATERIALIZING WHOLE EARTH JUDAISM For the editors and the publisher of The Jewish Catalog, the book’s material aspect was crucial. As a result, its relationship to the Whole Earth Catalog went beyond similarities in content and ethos and extended to the book’s presentation. In a letter from Sharon Strassfeld to David C. Gross of the Jewish Publication Society, Strassfeld explained her desire that the book be published initially in paperback, like its predecessor. With a mistaken reference to her own project, she wrote: “We were under the impression that the Whole Earth Catalogue [sic] would be published principally as a paperback and that only a very limited hardcover edition would be published. . . . We would like you to confirm our initial impression since we do not want to see a hardcover edition [of The Jewish Catalog] in bookstores before a paperback comes out.” 23 On behalf of her co-editors, Strassfeld explained that a hardback copy for libraries and archives would be acceptable, but the JPS never published such an edition. Like its predecessor, the paperbackness of the book played a central role in the book’s marketing and reception, intending to attract people who might not have the resources or the desire to spend full price on a hardback book. Moreover, the Catalog’s paperback presentation lent it an air of casual approachability, also intended to highlight its attraction to its intended audiences. Even though the JPS normally published in hardback, they agreed with the book’s editors that the book ought to be as cheap as possible, and that such a position in the marketplace would aid in their pursuit of a younger audience. Whether or not this strategy succeeded remains unverifiable. What is clear, however, is that the marketing and design of the book made it seem like either younger people should buy for themselves, or that an older friend, family member, or relative might purchase it as a gift. Jerome J. Shestack, the chairman of the board of the Jewish Publication Society at the time of the Catalog’s publication, wrote a note to the board of trustees crowing about its popularity and urging other members of the board to purchase the book as a gift for younger people: “Many of our trustees are sending the books as gifts to teenagers and friends (you get the trustee’s discount, of course.) I bought 20 to send to teenagers and friends, and they were most enthusiastically received.” 24 One reader wrote to the JPS announcing her intention to buy it

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for “all of my acquaintances and relatives of college age.” 25 Whether or not college-age readers ever bought their own copies remains unclear, but in the minds of those who did buy copies of the book, such readers remained the target audience. After some negotiation, the book listed for $5.50, but the price (further reduced by the trustee’s discount) perhaps mattered less than the symbolic nature of that price, which complemented the book’s paperback publication and suggested easy access for young people without significant means. In fact, according to one reviewer, the price contributed to the book’s appearance on shelves beyond typical Jewish bookstores. According to the Jewish Publication Society’s annual report, The Jewish Catalog was “eagerly sought” by college bookstores, a demand that drove its initial run of 20,000 copies, four times the run of JPS’s second largest title of that year. 26 Specific references in JPS communications to college bookstores and “teenagers” further demonstrated the publisher’s desire to market the book to younger consumers. This marketing push, supported by print advertisements in the New York Times and elsewhere that used a youthful idiom to sell the Catalog (“the book that will turn you on to being Jewish”), helped to frame its youthful sensibility even before readers opened its cover. The force behind the Catalog’s cover, as well as its signature interplay between text, image, font, and illustration, could be credited almost entirely to Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden—a freelance graphic designer who found herself working for the Jewish Publication Society and tasked with the job of designing the Catalog. Ms. Dudden, who passed away in 2005, designed hundreds of titles for JPS and other publishers. The JPS gave Ms. Dudden nearly free reign with the book’s design, provided it spoke to the youthful audience that the press intended to attract. This same sensibility carries through to the book’s overall design, which plays a central role in the book’s material presence. Inside the front and back covers, Dudden manipulated a photograph of young people engaged in a circle dance on a lawn so that it reads “Shalom”—in English inside the front cover, and in Hebrew inside the back. She turned the table of contents and acknowledgements on their side, so that in order to read them one has to turn the book ninety degrees, encouraging readers to physically change their standard orientation of how to approach a book. She engineered the Catalog’s final essay, “A First Step: a Devotional Guide,” which covers twenty-two pages over the course of which the amount of each page dedicated to printed text grows smaller and smaller, until the essay’s final page contains just a single line, surrounded by blank space, a marginal note about meditation, and a small cartoon. Dudden, whose design makes generous use of the margins elsewhere in the book, elected to leave these margins empty even of page numbers (which resume in the bibliography that closes the book), as if to mimic the “fade out”

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of a record album or a slow “fade to black” of a film. This experimental layout provides a graphic counterpart to the text, which emphasizes prayer and meditation, itself concluding with the quasi-mystical intention, “May His blessed name be with you until you get to Him.” Yet, in a book as cacophonous as this one, Dudden could not let the quiet of the margins rest, allowing a note and an illustration into the silence. Whether or not she suggested a book with large margins, or whether that idea began with the book’s editors does not matter in this context as much as their implicit reference to the spacious margins that frame some printed editions of the Talmud, which play such an important role in the polyvocal nature of that earlier compendium’s approach to “do it yourself” Judaism. The Jewish Catalog employed generous margins for a similar effect, providing space for readers to offer their own notes, or for the editors to provide their own commentaries on the main essays. The margins provide one of the Catalog’s most consistent graphical elements, suggesting a departure from books of both poetry and prose, and inviting readers into the book as an interactive space rather than a generally didactic one. Alongside Dudden’s design, Stuart Copans’ illustrations provide the book’s most identifiable quality, adorning many pages with curious commentary and humorous counterpoint. When the New York Times published its review of the Catalog, it reproduced two of Copans’ images alongside a photo of the editors and the cover of the book. 27 Many of his illustrations play on the word “shalom,” rendering it in flowers (page 12), as cars on a train (page 190), or as elements in a stone wall (page 78). Elsewhere, Copans used his illustrations to demonstrate the text, as he did with his drawing of a bride and groom being lifted on chairs in the “Weddings” section, or in the handful of illustrations containing the Hebrew word “shabbat” in the section addressing the Sabbath. Copans, who had never met the book’s editors, was introduced to the project by William Novak, whom he had met through a conference on spirituality. Unlike the majority of other contributors to the volume, whose social networks intersected through Boston’s Jewish commune (Havurat Shalom), or Camp Ramah (the residential summer camp of the Conservative movement), Copans did not have connections to either. 28 Raised Jewish in Yonkers, he “did not think much about Judaism growing up,” and was in medical school in Vermont when Novak approached him about the Catalog. 29 When Novak put him in touch with the Strassfelds and Siegel, Copans had been, by his own description, an amateur doodler, inspired largely by illustrators like William Steig and Saul Steinberg, two Jewish illustrators who found popular success in venues like The New Yorker and elsewhere. As a result, Copans situated himself in a rich artistic tradition that brought together wry observational humor and a simple approach to illustration as key elements of a larger aesthetic. Copans combined Steig’s countercultural so-

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cial commentary and liberal perspective with Steinberg’s contradictory relationship to his own art to create a style that both meshed with and humorously commented on the Catalog’s editorial voice. Perhaps more importantly, with artistic references like these, Copans held no “high cultural” aspirations for his art and wore his “amateur” badge proudly, an attitude and posture he shared with the book’s editorial vision and imagined community of readers. 30 As a result, his illustrations echo the book’s “do it yourself” ethos, offering creative and often free-form interpretations that drew on cartooning for style and inspiration. This, too, departed dramatically from other books in the JPS catalog and from the aesthetics of more conventional Jewish art of the time. To highlight just how different this book looked within the context of the JPS aesthetic of the early 1970s, compare Copans’ contributions to those of the other illustrated volume published by JPS that same year: a translation of the Book of Isaiah, illustrated by Chayim Gross. Gross, a well-known and well-established artist contributed thirty-six illustrations to his book, the majority of which complemented the book’s central narrative in simple but dramatic fashion. For example, Gross’ pen-and-ink line-drawings that accompany chapter 39 include some of its main motifs, including a king being served and a large eye, along with the letters lamed and tet, which signify the number 39. Gross explained that he tried to render his drawings from Isaiah’s perspective: Isaiah saw the future so clearly. He had to teach people around him, warning against sin, stressing the horror of war. During his time there was constant warfare. We are going through the same stress. When I was working on the book, I kept thinking—everything is contemporary. . . . I wanted to do the drawings from Isaiah’s point of view—they try to catch the spirit of his words, in his frame of time. 31

Though informed by contemporary events, Gross’ approach to illustration often illuminates the text in the most figurative way possible while Copans worked from a much more liberated palate. 32 If Gross’ representational illustrations intended to amplify the dramatic content of Isaiah’s narrative in order to reach into the present moment, Copans’ whimsical drawings mirrored the non-linear, non-hierarchical approach to Judaism that the Catalog intended to promote, and he used contemporary imagery to delve more deeply into the Jewish tradition. This sensibility is embedded in the book’s material and graphical presentation—in the margins and illustrations, in the page layout and on the book’s cover. Copans and Dudden shaped this aspect of the book most directly: more comics than Chagall. From its bright red-orange cover to the broad margins surrounding the text, the designers distinguished the book from other Jewish books of its moment and, as a result, practically everything about

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this book announced its departure from JPS’s typical fare and thus from the mainstream of American Jewish culture, as well. PUBLISHING MATERIAL The distance between the countercultural margin and the publishing mainstream, however, was smaller than it might have appeared. Unlike the Whole Earth Catalog and despite its ideological similarities, the production of The Jewish Catalog was largely a professional effort. Copans’ illustrations and contributors’ essays notwithstanding, The Jewish Publication Society handled every aspect of the book’s production, from providing Dudden’s design services to the book’s publication, marketing, and distribution. This does not necessarily compromise the book’s countercultural ethos, but rather it opens up a tension between the information the book contains and its symbolic significance, between the book-as-artifact and the book-as-vehicle for ideas. Unlike the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steward Brand compiled by hand and published himself, The Jewish Catalog was published by the oldest active Jewish publisher in the country, a publisher that saw in it an opportunity to reinvigorate its own brand. Chaim Potok, who served as the Editor-inChief of the Jewish Publication Society from 1966-1974, played a critical role in publishing the Catalog, and his influence seems more pronounced in the production of the volume as a whole than on the level of its contents. Potok’s interest in the book derived from his concerns about the future of Jewish publishing in the United States and his desire to reinvigorate JPS. He wanted a book that he could market and sell to the largest demographic in the nation, whose purchasing power had been proven through popular music and popular culture during the 1960s. 33 His interest in The Jewish Catalog began with that concern, not with any particular ideological affinity with Siegel, the Strassfelds, the havurah movement or Jewish youth culture more generally. Rather, concerns about Jewish book publishing had already come to permeate the offices of the Jewish Publication Society and, consequently, led to Potok’s appointment some years earlier. As Jonathan Sarna has written in his history of the JPS, by the mid-1960s a “mood of depression . . . increasingly gripped the Society.” 34 Though it had found solid financial footing, the political and cultural changes underway in the mid-1960s made the Society seem “old, stodgy, uncertain of its goals and purposes, and out of touch with the youthful spirit of the day.” 35 Potok’s appointment as Editor-in-Chief signaled that “the moment had come for the older generation to step aside.” 36 The relatively young Potok—who was around 37 years old when he took up the editorship, and had only recently published his first book—embodied the spirit of the younger American Jewish generation, at least from the perspective of the JPS. Potok took the reins, aggressively challenging the Society to

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cooperate more with Israeli publishers, to focus on “current and topical books—particularly for college students,” and cultivate new authors. All of these fell within a broader vision of the kinds of books the Society sought to publish: We are interested in books that speak to our time. We are interested in books that address themselves to the problem of our day, to our own harsh realities. We are, in brief, interested in what, for lack of a better term, might be called Jewish encounter literature . . . . The criterion of encounter will henceforth operate as a basic yardstick for the works we publish under our imprint. 37

The contemporary emphasis of Potok’s vision for the Society cannot be understated, though his desire for books that “speak to our time” is only partially driven by his sense of the Jewish generation gap. Indeed, baby boomers, despite their critiques of the consumerism of modern life, proved their influence with purchasing power before they proved it with their politics. Without the interest and support of baby boomers, JPS simply might not have survived. This is not to suggest that Potok or the JPS board of directors were quite so calculating, focusing solely on the bottom line. But neither can Potok’s vision be taken simply at face value. His concern with relevance also reflected a concern for revenue. 38 His shift in editorial tone also reflected an awareness that books had to sell, that books were objects to be sold, and that their materiality mattered. Although he made his comments some years before Savran and Siegel wrote their thesis and well before Siegel and the Strassfelds approached him with their proposal, The Jewish Catalog soon became Potok’s dream project. The composition of the Catalog even played a role in Siegel and Savran’s Masters’ thesis, in which they imagined their “Jewish Whole Earth Catalogue [sic]” would be published as a loose-leaf notebook so that its readers could share in the co-creation of the book as a product and a process, to be supplemented with regular updates, along with whatever else its readers and users saw fit. 39 Siegel and Savran’s initial vision for the book incorporated its own materiality into its mission, conflating the book, as a usable tool, and the book as a product with information for its readers. Materiality was part of the Catalog from the very beginning. If the catalog they proposed would succeed “by giving people a sense of responsibility for their Jewish lives,” and “recapture the personal power of a given symbol or action within the Tradition,” then the very properties of the book itself ought to make these values material. 40 Potok, entranced as he was with the idea of the Catalog, did not think a loose-leaf binder a good idea. Savran, for his part, backed out of the project and Michael and Sharon Strassfeld, a young couple attached to Havurat Shalom, assumed the editorship alongside Siegel, outlining and organizing

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the book, corresponding with contributors, and so on. Yet Potok played a powerful editorial role, “particularly in terms of organization, form, style, and appearance.” 41 William Novak observed, “It was Potok who supervised its publication, turning the unformed dream into a well-designed and handsome volume.” 42 Though Siegel and the Strassfelds, among others, labored to bring the book to light, it was Potok who turned the Catalog into a book that could be sold, marketed, and bought. He helped the young editors find their collective voice and worked with Dudden on the book’s design, so that the book’s physical properties could both reach the college market that he so ardently sought, and adhere to his vision for “Jewish encounter literature.” These decisions and choices derived in part from Potok’s editorial sensibilities, but also from his impression of the publishing market, the changing Jewish generational landscape, and his vision for what the JPS would be in the future. In this way, his material concerns about selling books shaped the production of The Jewish Catalog almost as much as Siegel and Savran’s question about how to build a sukkah, the Whole Earth Catalog or even the counterculture itself. The countercultural text and the material conditions of its publication frame the book within competing forces and conflicting narratives about its meaning. CONCLUSION Only by attending to its material dimensions, however, do these divergent interpretations come into focus. With the imprimatur of the JPS, The Jewish Catalog represented both a collection of countercultural voices and a popular symbol of changing American Jewish attitudes during the early 1970s. The articles, art, and essays it contains articulate a trenchant critique of mainstream American Jewish culture and offer alternatives for a more personally engaged vision of practice. Yet at the same time, the materiality of the book, together with its publication and promotion by the Jewish Publication Society, enabled the book to find a wider audience and to participate in the consumer culture that the book itself tried to critique. Read together for both its content and its materiality, as both text and artifact, the Catalog becomes a slightly more complex bearer of meaning and venue for creative collaboration in ways that are not limited to its contents. The Jewish Catalog emerged out of a set of intersecting forces: the counterculture, the influence of the Whole Earth Catalog, the sensibilities of its editors and authors, and the desire of the Jewish Publication Society to be “relevant” and access a new market. This essay attempted to magnify the book’s material properties in an effort to better understand how the book circulated and what it might mean. Attending to the values and concerns that influenced the book’s production has illuminated some of the ways that its

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ideological qualities chafed against the material concerns that underwrote it. This is not to suggest that selling The Jewish Catalog as a book undermines the efforts of its editors or contributors. However, it does argue that paying attention to its material qualities invites a more subtle reading of what the Catalog means and how its meaning circulates within American Jewish culture. Reading the book as a text and as a book, with both literary and material dimensions, asks that we not let the text speak for itself, and reminds us that there are always material conditions that shape ideas when thinking Jewish culture. The Jewish Catalog certainly articulated a particular countercultural ethos and as such it became a powerful and popular symbol of its historical moment. Yet it also served the desires of an esteemed publishing house that sought both cultural cachet and survival by appealing to precisely the prominent values of that same moment. Both of these concerns collaborated in the production of The Jewish Catalog as a book, as something that could be bought, sold, read, and placed on a shelf next to other symbolic texts of that moment: Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, the Moosewood Cookbook, and the Whole Earth Catalog. 43 As a book and as a symbol, the Jewish Catalog critiqued and capitalized on the ethos of the late 1960s and early 1970s, materializing the complexities of that moment and embodying the ways in which material concerns often lay at the heart of cultural negotiations. NOTES 1. Michael E. Staub, The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook (Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2004). See also Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Marshall Sklare’s review and critique of The Jewish Catalog “The Greening of American Judaism” in Commentary (December, 1974). For other analyses of the Jewish countercultural moment, see David Glanz, “An Interpretation of the Jewish Counterculture,” Jewish Social Studies 39 (January, 1977), 117–28. 2. For instructions on making your own shofar, see Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld, The Jewish Catalog (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), 64; for creating one’s own havurah, see pages 278-88. 3. John Kouwenhoven, “American Studies: Words or Things?,” in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Thomas Schlereth (Lanham: Rowman Altamira, 1982), 81. 4. Ibid., 85. 5. Ibid., 88. 6. Siegel, Strassfeld and Strassfeld, “Introduction,” The Jewish Catalog, 9. 7. Ibid., 9. 8. Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2011). See also Joshua Glenn, Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). For a more theoretical approach, see Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also

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William Novak, “The Making of a Jewish Counterculture,” Response 7 (Spring-Summer, 1970), 5-10. 10. Siegel, Strassfeld, and Strassfeld, The Jewish Catalog, 8. 11. Gary Rosenblatt, “Rabbinic Student Has Guide to Jewish Counterculture,” American Examiner (May 17, 1973), 8. 12. Siegel, Strassfeld, and Strassfeld, The Jewish Catalog, 43 and 34. 13. Brand’s oft-quoted statement of purpose does not use the term “empowerment,” but in the short paragraph, Brand emphasizes the emergence of a “realm of intimate, personal power,” which he hoped to encourage and enable with the Catalog. 14. Quoted in Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006), 78. 15. Quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 79. 16. Ibid., 79. 17. Jennifer Bleyer, “Do It Yourself,” September 18, 2007 www.tabletmag.com/jewish-artsand-culture/books/939/do-it-yourself [accessed March 15, 2012]. 18. Quoted in Jonathan Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 282. See also Siegel, Strassfeld, and Strassfeld, The Jewish Catalog, 8. 19. Quoted in Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 282-83. 20. Wade Clark Roof, Bruce Greer, and Mary Johnson, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper, 1994); Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 21. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, with a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 22. Siegel, Strassfeld, and Strassfeld, The Jewish Catalog, 9. 23. Letter from Sharon Strassfeld to David C. Gross, dated February 22, 1973 (Jewish Publication Society Archives, Temple University: MSS 50, Box 49, Folder 4). 24. Memo from Jerome Shestak to Board of Trustees of the Jewish Publication Society, dated January 16, 1974 (Jewish Publication Society Archives. Temple University: MSS 50, Box 49, Folder 4). 25. Letter from Joyce Rudnik to Chaim Potok dated March 5, 1974 (Jewish Publication Society Archives. Temple University: MSS 50, Box 49, Folder 4). 26. “The Jewish Publication Society of America: Report of the Eighty-Sixth Year,” in American Jewish Yearbook 75, edited by Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1974-75), 680. 27. Edward B. Fiske, “Jewish Guide offers Food for Thought and Palate,” New York Times (December 1, 1973), 35. 28. For a critique of these relationships and of the Catalog generally, see Sklare, “The Greening of Judaism.” 29. Author interview with Stuart Copans, April 17, 2012. 30. Ibid. 31. “Chaim Gross,” JPS Bookmark (May, 1972), 1-2. 32. See David Morgan, The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (New York: Routledge, 2007). 33. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). For a historical study of teenagers, see Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 34. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 261. 35. Ibid., 261. 36. Ibid., 261-62. 37. Chaim Potok, Jewish Publication Society Board Minutes 13 (December, 1966), 6. Quoted in Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 267.

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38. Jonathan Sarna explains that Potok led the JPS to publish increasing numbers of books about international affairs, Jewish art, women’s issues, and a growing interest in many American Jews’ East European heritage. See Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 280-81. 39. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 284. 40. George Savran and Richard Siegel, “The Jewish Whole Earth Catalogue: Theory and Development” (unpublished Master’s thesis: Brandeis University, 1972), 10 and 36. 41. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 284. 42. William Novak, “The Last Word on the Jewish Catalog,” Moment 1 (May-June, 1975), 81. Quoted in Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 351 fn. 42. 43. Bleyer, “Do It Yourself.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Bleyer, Jennifer. “Do It Yourself.” September 18, 2007. Accessed March 15, 2012. www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/939/do-it-yourself. “Chaim Gross.” JPS Bookmark (May, 1972): 1-2. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Fiske, Edward B. “Jewish Guide offers Food for Thought and Palate.” New York Times (December 1, 1973). Glanz, David. “An Interpretation of the Jewish Counterculture.” Jewish Social Studies 39 (1977): 117–28. Glenn, Joshua. Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. Hine, Thomas. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Kouwenhoven, John. “American Studies: Words or Things?” In Material Culture Studies in America, edited by Thomas Schlereth. Lanham: Rowman Altamira, 1982. Morgan, David. The Lure of Images: a History of Religion and Visual Media in America. New York: Routledge, 2007. Novak, William. “The Last Word on the Jewish Catalog.” Moment 1 (1975). ———. “The Making of a Jewish Counterculture.” Response 7 (1970): 5-10. Roof, Wade Clark. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———, Bruce Greer, and Mary Johnson. A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. San Francisco: Harper, 1994. Rosenblatt, Gary. “Rabbinic Student Has Guide to Jewish Counterculture.” American Examiner (1973). Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Rudnik, Joyce. “Letter from Joyce Rudnik to Chaim Potok.” March 5, 1974. Jewish Publication Society Archives. Temple University: MSS 50, Box 49, Folder 4. Sarna, Jonathan. JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Savran, George, and Richard Siegel. “The Jewish Whole Earth Catalogue: Theory and Development.” Master’s thesis, Brandeis University, 1972. Shestak, Jerome. “Memo from Jerome Shestak to Board of Trustees of the Jewish Publication Society.” January 16, 1974. Jewish Publication Society Archives. Temple University: MSS 50, Box 49, Folder 4. Siegel, Richard, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld. The Jewish Catalog. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973.

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Sklare, Marshall. “The Greening of American Judaism.” Commentary (1974). Staub, Michael E. The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook. Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2004. ———. Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Strassfeld, Sharon. “Letter from Sharon Strassfeld to David C. Gross.” February 22, 1973. Jewish Publication Society Archives, Temple University: MSS 50, Box 49, Folder 4. “The Jewish Publication Society of America: Report of the Eighty-Sixth Year.” In American Jewish Yearbook 75, edited by Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1974-75. Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2011. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism . Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006. Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ———. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Part II

Art, Literature, Culture

Chapter Five

Beyond the Chasm Religion and Literature after the Holocaust Claire E. Sufrin

In the opening article of the 1991 American Jewish Year Book, Arnold Eisen comments that “if there is one point of agreement among students and practitioners of Jewish theology in North America, it is that not much creative work has been forthcoming over the last two decades.” 1 Surveying American Jewish theological writing from the previous twenty years, Eisen suggests it is unlikely that contemporary America will produce a Jewish theologian or thinker whose work will go “beyond [Martin] Buber and [Franz] Rosenzweig,” the great German Jewish thinkers of the first half of the century. He argues that American Jews have become too individualized and disconnected from tradition; 2 they are wary of claims of chosenness; and though they tire of Holocaust-centered theologies, they cannot return to classical Jewish imagery of a providential God. It is striking to note that the first of Eisen’s assessments of American Jews—the weak relationship between the Jewish individual and her community—is an important part of Buber’s writing on Judaism, and Eisen’s second assessment—the rethinking and questioning of chosenness—is central to Rosenzweig’s work. Despite these shared concerns, Eisen’s final assessment—frustration with existing perspectives on God’s involvement in human affairs—reminds us that the Holocaust stands between American Jews in the late twentieth century and the German Jews Buber and Rosenzweig addressed. The religious, spiritual, and intellectual needs of late twentieth-century Jews were irrevocably shaped by the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish people even as they grew frustrated with theologians who make this their primary concern.

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In the very next essay in the 1991 volume of the AJYB, Sylvia Barack Fishman offers an assessment of American Jewish literature. She begins with this observation: Over the past 25 years a remarkable literary trend has occurred within the fiction of a significant group of contemporary American Jewish writers. These writers have produced a new, inward-turning genre of contemporary American Jewish fiction which explores the individual Jew’s connection to the Jewish people, to Jewish religion, culture, and tradition, and to the chain of Jewish history. 3

Unlike earlier authors, she argues, the leading writers of this generation of American Jewish fiction assume that Judaism, Jewish values, and Jews are “inherently compelling” and worthy of serious consideration and exploration. The contrast between her upbeat analysis of American Jewish fiction and Eisen’s sober evaluation of American Jewish theology is sharp. The pattern highlighted by this contrast between Eisen and Fishman has continued until our own day as emerging novelists such as Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn, and Nicole Krauss have all made Jewishness a central concern of both their writing and their public personas, while one remains hard-pressed to name a contemporary American Jewish theologian whose work has garnered the sort of deep respect given to Buber and Rosenzweig a century ago. But this is not necessarily a problem for those of us who are theologically inclined. In this article, I argue that contemporary novelists are specifically engaging themes we would expect to find in the work of theologians, and interrogating categories and concepts of Jewish thought. I push this argument further by exploring what it would mean to read literary works as religious thought within a Jewish context. To be clear: this essay rests on the contention that theology is defined by the questions we ask more so than it is by the shape that our writing takes—whether we write treatises or narratives. 4 That said, conventions of genre are exactly what allow literary writings to address religious themes in ways that theological treatises cannot. It may even be, as Martha Nussbaum has argued in regard to philosophy in Love’s Knowledge, that certain theological questions are best explored through literary techniques. 5 I am suggesting that we can read novels as theology by analyzing how they wrestle with themes that are characteristic of Jewish religious thought. In this essay, I focus specifically on theological questions and issues raised by the Holocaust. I begin below with further discussion of why we can and should bring theological questions to literary texts, followed by an overview of central themes found in American Jewish Holocaust theology from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the second half of this essay, I offer a reading of the novel Great House by Nicole Krauss as a test case. Bringing a theological

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lens to literature also allows us to see how religious issues are woven into American Jewish culture. RELIGION AND LITERATURE In her 1970 essay “Existentialists and Mystics,” the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch posits that literature will come to replace theology in the postmodern world of science, secularism, and technology. While both literature and theology at one time served the same function—“to clothe our metaphysical nakedness and in general to cheer us up” 6 —she argues that in recent years the novelist has become the chief source of philosophical comforting. The metaphysician’s certainty has been shaken and “God, Reason, Society, Improvement and the Soul are being quietly wheeled off. The individual is more frightened and alone. . . . Twentieth-century man [sic] . . . finds his religious and metaphysical background so impoverished that he is in some danger of being left with nothing of inherent value except will-power itself.” 7 Murdoch argues that the need to tell stories continues as a mode of meaning making, and it offers a beacon of hope at a difficult time to the point that “it may be that in the end the novelist will prove to be the saviour of the human race.” 8 Murdoch’s description of the situation of twentieth-century humanity echoes the questioning of Enlightenment values that characterizes post-modern thought. In Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concise formulation, postmodernity is defined as a lack of trust in the metanarratives that sustained and underwrote the Enlightenment project that launched and shaped modernity, “such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.” 9 The postmodern is defined by “incredulity toward metanarratives. . . . To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.” 10 Instead of narratives, post-moderns have “narrative language elements” that organize themselves into different language games in overlapping but also incommensurable ways. The “post” of the term “postmodern” signifies an attention to the failures of modernity and consciously marks a rupture from modern values and ideals. Though the Holocaust is perhaps the most extreme example of the failure of Enlightenment ideals that is central to a postmodern perspective, in American Jewish theology of the late twentieth century, we see a sense of crisis that is distinctly after-the-Holocaust rather than more generally postmodern or even post-Holocaust. First and foremost, after-the-Holocaust theo-

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logians attempt to restore or reconstruct the foundational narratives of Judaism, not to further deconstruct them. Their harshest criticism is generally reserved for the promises of Emancipation and Enlightenment that shaped Jewish experience in modern Europe, but even these critiques do not employ postmodern assumptions or analytical techniques. Rather, the theologians I discuss below are very much theologians of the Holocaust: they write after the catastrophe, but without asserting the critical distance signified by the word “post.” If we imagine the Holocaust as a chasm between two mountains—one representing the pre-Holocaust Jewish past and the other a postHolocaust Jewish future—American Jewish Holocaust theology of the 1960s through 1980s was written from within the chasm rather than as a bridge across it. From within this chasm, theologians of the Holocaust assert that Hitler’s near destruction of the Jewish people shakes the foundations of God’s covenant with the ancient Israelites and God’s promise to protect them and their descendants. Zachary Braiterman describes this as a “textual crisis” because he argues the basic claims of the Hebrew Bible are made nonsensical by the murder of six million Jews: A textual tradition may depict a culture’s putative origins, clarify values, envision a future, establish observances and ritual patterns, define individual and collective identities, and delineate institutions, lines of authority, and due process. Almost by definition, constitutional texts become objects of special care, devotion, attention and love. Conversely, these very same texts (along with their faithful interpreters) invite conflict, scorn, ridicule, hurt, hate, contempt, disgust, or apathy in the face of suffering and injustice. 11

In their work, theologians such as Richard Rubenstein (After Auschwitz, 1966), Emil Fackenheim (God’s Presence in History, 1970), Eliezer Berkovits (Faith after the Holocaust, 1973), and Arthur Cohen (The Tremendum, 1981) confront the biblical promises of divine providence and protection, which are essential elements of the covenant between the Israelites and God. 12 If God is indeed a God of History, these theologians ask, how is it that he permitted or even enabled the Nazis to pursue the destruction of the Jewish people? 13 The concept of the God of History retreats before awareness of the Holocaust, in particular the suffering and murder of innocent individuals, whom the theologians often present synecdochically as children. The work of these Holocaust theologians is further shaped by an anxiety that their readers lack the trust in God of earlier generations, and they write for those who see the Holocaust as a reason not to believe in God’s existence as much as they do for those believers who wish to understand God better in light of the Holocaust. Berkovits, for example, frames his theology with reference to concentration camp inmates who continued to pray, echoing medieval martyrologies by describing their murders as kiddush hashem,

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sanctifications of God’s name. In his language, if we consider the Holocaust victim a latter day Job, the Holocaust theologian is “Job’s brother”: The outsider, the brother of the martyrs, enters on a confusing heritage. He inherits both the rebellion and the witness of the martyrs, a rebellion not silenced by the witness; a witness not made void by the rebellion. In our generation, Job’s brother, if he wishes to be true to his God-given heritage, ‘reasons’ with God in believing rebellion and rebellious belief. . . . He desires to affirm, but not by behaving as if the holocaust [sic] had never happened. 14

What I have called the chasm of Holocaust theology Berkovits describes as a rupture between a pre-Holocaust confidence in covenant, and a questioning of God’s power to shape human history in response to the Holocaust. His sense of rupture is common to much, if not all of Holocaust theology, and we see it already in the work of Richard Rubenstein, whose After Auschwitz was the first Jewish Holocaust theology published in the United States. 15 Deeply influenced by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, Rubenstein describes the after-the-Holocaust era as the time of the death of God. 16 This description is not intended as an ontological statement: God is not so much dead as absent, and by declaring him dead, Rubenstein is instructing Jews to stop hoping that God might return. In effect this is like declaring a missing person to be legally dead, so that those whom he left behind can settle his estate and conclude his affairs rather than remaining in the limbo of notknowing for an indefinite period of time. 17 Furthermore, while the Holocaust serves as “proof” of the death of God, Rubenstein is not arguing that the Holocaust killed God. God may well have been dead all along. Or, given that Rubenstein is not claiming that God was once alive and now dead, we might say that the Holocaust has shattered the illusion of a God of History, but this God had always been illusory. The rupture between past and present is thus minimized. Similarly, Rubenstein argues that Jewish life in the time of the death of God can continue with little interruption: ritual and symbols will continue to serve the latent human need that first gave rise to belief in the God of History. It is not clear in his writings whether or to what extent he thinks references to the God of History should be removed from the liturgy; his confidence that Jews will continue to find meaning in the traditional rites of Jewish practice overwhelms his writings, especially in the first edition of After Auschwitz. 18 Furthermore, a careful reading of the book reveals that God survives the death of God. Particularly in “The Rebirth of Israel in Contemporary Jewish Theology,” Rubenstein re-presents the God of the Jews as the immanent God of Nature rather than the transcendent God of History. 19 Berkovits, Fackenheim, and Cohen, in contrast to Rubenstein, all seek to redefine the covenant in terms that will maintain the God of History. Each in

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his own way argues that the Holocaust does not represent a rupture of the Biblical covenant, but that it does force us to reconsider the meta-historical claims of the covenant. In the name of covenant, each theologian presents an understanding of how God acts in history that complicates earlier understandings, while also introducing enough flexibility into the conceptual structure of covenant to absorb the Holocaust without breaking. The Holocaust is thus transformed into a new lens for understanding the past. 20 Berkovits, for example, argues that Jewish experience must be understood as happening within two historical narratives running in parallel. While God shapes faith history, he is powerless within what Berkovits calls power history—that is, what we generally think of as history. Fackenheim’s account of root experiences and epoch-making events take seriously the claim credited to Elie Wiesel that Auschwitz shapes Jewish life as forcefully as Mount Sinai. 21 For Fackenheim, this means that the Holocaust is a revelatory event; the commandment revealed at Auschwitz is that Jews must ensure the continuity of Jewish life and not allow Hitler a posthumous victory. 22 Cohen calls the Holocaust a “tremendum” and describes its effect on Jewish history as a caesura and an abyss. He argues that the only way this abyss can be crossed is with a theological response: “Jewish reality must account for the tremendum in its view of God, world, and man [sic]; it must constellate Jewish facts of practice and belief in such a way as to enable them to endure meaningfully in a universe that endures the tremendum and withstands it and a God who creates the universe in which such destructiveness occurs.” 23 The Holocaust becomes a lens for the reinterpretation of tradition. 24 As exciting and compelling as they may initially have been, these theologies have not had long-lasting resonance among American Jews. In 1991, Eisen ascribed this failure to a community tired of theologies centered on loss yet also unable to return to pre-Holocaust teachings on God’s role in history. I would add that today the place accorded to the rise of the State of Israel and, in particular, the hope many of these thinkers find in the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, falls flat and as a result calls their theologies into question. 25 Berkovits, for example, writes that, Defeat and suffering need not mean being abandoned by God and worldly success in the affairs of man is no proof of divine support. Nevertheless, the Jew the world over, and especially in the state of Israel, experienced the speedily developing crisis, followed by the lightening transformation of the Six-Day War as history on a metaphysical level. . . . As a conscious reaction, the sensing of metaphysical meaning might be questioned. But the realization that through the events of those few days all Israel was addressed from beyond the boundaries of time was not in the realm of conscious reaction. It was a spontaneous experience, born in upon the Jew with the power of inescapable revelational quality. 26

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From this ecstatic account of the Israeli victory as a moment of revelation, Berkovits turns to an analysis of whether or not it should be understood in messianic terms. We cannot hold Berkovits, who died in 1992, responsible for events he could not foresee. But today, as the Holocaust slips further into history, we read his assertion that “as a Jew, I can believe in the future of man [sic] only because I believe in the future of Israel” 27 far more aware of the political repercussions that post-1967 messianic fervor has had for the State of Israel. Maintaining a presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has cost the state tremendously; it has cost many lives both Israeli and Palestinian; it has dramatically redefined the perception of the State of Israel on the world’s stage and turned Israel into a political fault line within Jewish communities in the diaspora. 28 This complicates Berkovits’ view of Israel’s 1967 victory as an act of God and thus an assurance that God had resumed acting in history on behalf of the Jewish people, and it calls the larger theology of which this view is a part into question. 29 Yehuda Kurtzer’s recent work Shuva (2012) offers another way of understanding why Holocaust theologies no longer resonate, in large part by looking at the practices of Holocaust commemoration among American Jews. Kurtzer’s writings on the Holocaust are part of his larger argument that the contemporary American Jewish community must change its attitude toward history, in particular by letting go of the empiricist’s desire to know every detail of a long ago past, and by turning instead to a “selective reclamation of the past and a translation of that past into purposefulness.” 30 In his discussion of the Holocaust, Kurtzer echoes earlier works of Holocaust theology when he uses language of rupture and caesura to describe a disconnect between past and present. His description of this rupture, however, marks a distinct shift from the work of earlier theologians. Kurtzer is a historian by training, but he nevertheless argues for the value of memory over history as a mode of communal relationship to the Jewish past. Borrowing from and also critiquing Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, Kurtzer uses the term memory to suggest the rabbinic model of ritualizing and reliving the past through an annual cycle of holidays, and he deploys the term history to reflect the values of modern academic historians. 31 Where Rubenstein and other Holocaust theologians use the Holocaust as a lens for the reconsideration of tradition, Kurtzer argues that we must use the traditional tools of the rabbis as a lens for reconsidering the Holocaust. The tool that most interests him is the creation and performance of ritual. He is sensitive to the ways in which ritual shapes human communities and gives meaning to human experience. With the exception of Rubenstein, this emphasis sets Kurtzer apart from Holocaust theologians in a way that is immediately apparent. With a closer look, one realizes that by presenting ritual as a rabbinic tool, Kurtzer also brings rabbinic trust in God back into play while avoiding theological apologetics. Kurtzer’s imagined reader is not an atheist who must

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be convinced of God’s existence, but a seeker wishing to know how to live a life of meaning. The question of God’s role in Jewish history that was central to earlier Holocaust theology fades into an acceptance of the Holocaust as an important event of the past that should not be allowed to define contemporary Jewish experience. In Kurtzer’s account, memory is linked to rituals such as the reenactment of the exodus from Egypt in the Passover Seder. Memory also allows for creative interpretations that far exceed the limits of the historian’s insistence on empirical data and rational argument. Kurtzer drives this point home through a comparison of the Passover Seder with common practices used to mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day: On Passover, we insert ourselves into a narrative, we become the oppressed and the liberated; on Yom HaShoah, the custom has emerged that we become passive listeners to a survivor, to an eyewitness. On Passover, we toy with a template and make it relevant; on Yom HaShoah, our memory is dictated by listening to the precise recitation of specific events. . . .We remember the Exodus by . . . privileging the centrality of its message of liberation in our own time. But the commanding memory of the Holocaust in our present climate, in and out of Yom HaShoah, is precisely the opposite. 32

It is right and necessary that we mourn the victims of the Holocaust and feel anguish at the acts of the Nazis; Kurtzer’s question is how to do this such that the Holocaust becomes a memory shared by all Jews through active ritual and reinterpretation rather than the sole possession of survivors or historians to be presented before passive listeners or readers. Kurtzer seeks a model for responding to the Holocaust in rabbinic responses to the destruction of the Second Temple, particularly in ritual responses and how they are presented and understood within rabbinic text. He focuses on T. Sotah 15:11-15, which describes a group of Jews who eliminate meat and wine from their diet in mourning the destruction of the Second Temple. Rabbi Joshua gently rebukes these ascetics, explaining that “not to mourn at all is impossible, for the decree has been declared. But to mourn excessively is also impossible.” 33 He names two customs—leaving a small part of one’s home unpainted and removing one piece of jewelry from a complete outfit—that serve as what Kurtzer describes as “small-scale, symbolic rituals to mark loss, thereby preventing loss from becoming all-defining and all-encompassing.” 34 To allow one’s grief to define one’s existence is paralysis, not life. The practices Rabbi Joshua offers incorporate grief within ordinary life, including the joy and hope implicit in building a new home or in adorning one’s body. Insisting upon small imperfections within these joyful practices domesticates the destruction of the Temple; it gives each person access to the experience of destruction while also allowing for a post-destruction present and future.

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What are the small-scale, symbolic rituals that will continually memorialize the Holocaust and replace the existing emphasis on painstaking historiography and distance from the past? Kurtzer would like to climb out of the Holocaust chasm by using the same tools that the rabbis used to climb out of the chasm created by the destruction of the Second Temple. He pursues conscious change and open discussion of a new communal relationship to the memory of the Holocaust. Yet, though he sees himself as heir to a set of tools that might allow him to build rituals that will domesticate Holocaust memory, he is not sure how to use the old tools in new ways, and his book is short on practical suggestions. But I do not consider this a major shortcoming. Creating new rituals is difficult and uncertain work, and I think it is arguably only in the actual experimenting with ritual practice that one can know for certain what will resonate meaningfully with participants. 35 Kurtzer freely admits he has not engaged in such experimentation. What I want to suggest is that this desire to exit and move beyond the liminal space of the Holocaust chasm directs us toward literature, and it is here that we will find both Jewish thought and a constructive model for approaching the Holocaust from a perspective of memory. What interests me here are not Holocaust narratives or poems per se, or even novels and short stories whose main characters are Holocaust survivors. 36 These we might best term after-the-Holocaust, parallel to the work of Berkovits and the other theologians I discussed above. I would like to focus instead on Jewish literature that thematizes after-ness, rupture, and separation with an eye toward how these places of liminality might become sites of reflection and rebuilding. 37 This is the literature that I think we can and should call post-Holocaust. We should also distinguish post-Holocaust literature from postmodern literature. Postmodern literature is informed in style and content by the same sense of rupture that characterizes postmodern thought, as authors seek to represent in words the very limitations of linguistic representation. Linda Hutcheon defines the postmodern as “a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges.” 38 We might on this basis be inclined to argue that post-Holocaust literature is also postmodern, and indeed, there are writers whose work fits both categories. 39 However, though post-Holocaust literature may reveal the limits of testimony, it does not necessarily seek to subvert them, and writers may even continue to try to produce testimony. That is, though “questions of how textuality functions as testimony and in interpretation are raised with respect both to post-Holocaust and postmodern discourse,” 40 post-Holocaust literature can be distinguished from postmodern literature because of its insistence on both the limits of testimony and a continuing need to testify. Susan Shapiro thus observes how “writing about the Holocaust becomes at once both impossible and necessary. One strategy of writing in recognition of, as well as despite this antinomy, is through its negative ‘constitution’ of

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textuality. . . . [T]estimony is ironically made possible through their inscription of this very failure in discourse.” 41 This anxiety about testimony has led to a tendency to privilege the autobiographies of survivors over fictional accounts of the camps. Using Berkovits’ language, we might say that the assumption behind this privileging is that if the concentration camp compels Job to testify, it prohibits Job’s brother from using his suffering for art or for personal gain. 42 As Ruth Franklin writes, There is something ethically dubious, so the usual argument goes, about using—literally or figuratively profiting from—atrocity as an inspiration for literature, or indeed any form of art. Aesthetically, the literary representation of horror has an inherent falsity, in that it requires the writer to impose a coherent pattern or form where in reality there was only chaos. And speaking practically, many have argued that as long as at least a few survivors are still alive, it’s more important to focus on getting their stories down, to preserve their memories while that is still possible. 43

Franklin’s work on Holocaust narratives offers a strong and comprehensive indictment of this “usual argument” as she demonstrates that the work of memoirist is plagued by the same “inherent falsity” that critics and readers more easily observe and identify in Holocaust fiction. She makes this argument not by comparing memoirs to an uncorrupted “true story” but by recognizing that memoirists rely on “writerly” techniques to compose compelling narratives of their own lives. 44 Even a firsthand account must create narrative order out of the chaos of the camps. Franklin uses evidence of the constructed nature of memoir to argue for a deeper appreciation and critical evaluation of Holocaust narratives that are openly fictional or fictionalized. As fewer and fewer survivors remain to testify and as novelists are fast becoming the only source for new Holocaust narrative, Franklin embraces contemporary writers who are liberated from the pressure of direct Holocaust experience and can thus “return art to the realm of aesthetics” by playing openly with narrative form and technique. 45 She cites Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated as one example. Foer’s characters are masterfully developed; many of them leave the reader laughing out loud, perhaps none more so than a tour guide named Alex who speaks English as though he learned it from American movies filtered through a thesaurus. Alex narrates the story of a character named Jonathan Safran Foer whose grandfather was a Holocaust survivor from a shtetl named Trachimbrod. Jonathan has hired Alex and his grandfather (and, unwittingly, their dog) to drive him through the Ukraine in search of Trachimbrod and the woman who sheltered (and saved) his grandfather during the Holocaust. Sections of this narrative alternate with sections describing

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life in the pre-Holocaust Trachimbrod. Each of these Trachimbrod sections ends with a letter from Alex to Jonathan reacting to the tale. After the modern travelers in Alex’s narrative acquire The Book of Past Occurrences, a history book referenced many times in the narrative of preHolocaust Trachimbrod, the reader realizes that the latter should be read as work composed by the character Jonathan after his return to America. Furthermore, it gradually becomes clear that Alex and Jonathan are each writing their pieces so that they will complement and support one another. As Alex comments parenthetically after The Book of Past Occurrences appears in the travelogue, “You may understand this as a gift from me to you, Jonathan. And just as I am saving you, so could you save Grandfather. We are merely two paragraphs away. Please, try to find some other option.” 46 But Alex’s hope—that their shared narratives might conspire to hide his grandfather’s confession of having betrayed his best friend—is not realized. (Or, if it is realized, the grandfather’s confession of betrayal is a fiction covering up a more heinous crime.) In its structure and in its content, Everything is Illuminated continually reminds the reader that both its most realistic and its least realistic elements are constructions, and our access to the past is always imperfect. To read a novel as Jewish religious thought means to focus on the ways in which it speaks to the central themes of the Jewish intellectual tradition. Sometimes we will be able to identify distinct arguments; other times, novels will present meditations on theological questions rather than resolutions. In the remainder of this essay, I do not intend to provide a hermeneutic theory or method ready to be used as a tool for finding religious meaning within the pages of any novel. Rather, I present a reading of Great House in light of American Jewish Holocaust theology of the late twentieth century, and in light of Kurtzer’s approach to memory. In particular, I examine how Krauss addresses history and the relationship between the present and the past. In doing so, I am joining Kurtzer in his move away from direct discussion of God’s role in history to a discussion of the relationship between the Jewish past and the Jewish present, and how our attitude toward historical events shapes us. CASE STUDY: GREAT HOUSE BY NICOLE KRAUSS Published in 2010, Great House is Nicole Krauss’ third novel. The novel is narrated primarily by four different characters: Nadia, a writer living in New York City; Aaron, an Israeli father of two sons; Isabel, an American who was once a student at Oxford; and Arthur, a retired Oxford don. A short final chapter is narrated by George Weisz, a Hungarian antiques dealer and Holocaust survivor. 47 These narrators and the stories they tell are linked by the

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presence of a particular desk. 48 Within the book’s pages, the reader watches this desk—an overbearing, heavy piece of furniture that has a strange power over those who sit at it—travel from Arthur’s wife Lotte in London to the Chilean poet Daniel Varsky in New York. Varsky lends it to Nadia before returning to his home country, where he disappears. Many years later, Nadia reluctantly relinquishes it to Weisz’s daughter Leah, after Leah falsely presents herself as Varsky’s grown daughter. The reader also learns that before the Holocaust, the desk belonged to Weisz’s father. After losing his parents and home in the war, Weisz settles in Israel, marries, and becomes an antiques dealer with a specialty of helping Holocaust survivors recover possessions stolen by the Nazis during the war. He is a successful businessman, but his true passion is to redeem his parents’ possessions from before the war and recreate his father’s study in one room of his own home in Israel. After the death of his wife, he takes his children Leah and Yoav to Europe, where they are constantly on the move, residing at fourteen different addresses. At the time that we meet them, Leah and Yoav are university students, living in London in a spacious Victorian home their father has provided them and commuting to Oxford. Weisz uses their home as one of his warehouses; his children pay little mind to the furniture that arrives and disappears with no particular explanation. Their indifference contrasts starkly with the desires of their father’s clients, who will pay any sum to be reunited with long-lost objects, and with their father’s own desire to restore his father’s study down to the tiniest detail. At this point, Weisz needs only one last object to complete his project: his father’s desk, the very same one that so inspired Lotte, Varsky, and Nadia when they each possessed it. As the novel progresses, the reader realizes that it is tracing both the desk’s path and Weisz’s path as he pursues it. This story is told only through the eyes of others: Isabel, who falls in love with Yoav and joins the siblings in their London home; Arthur, who considers the desk a symbol of his wife’s secrets; and Nadia, who questions her choice to value her art over her relationships with others. From Isabel, we learn that Weisz’s pursuit of his father’s study has crippled his children. Isabel describes them as “prisoners of their father’s, locked within the walls of their own family, and in the end it wasn’t possible for them to belong to anyone else.” 49 When Leah takes the desk from Nadia, she places it in storage in New York and refuses to tell her father where it is even though he is the one who sent her to fetch it. A short while after Leah claims and then hides the desk, Weisz commits suicide in the study he has so painstakingly recreated. Leah and Yoav blame themselves for his act of violence. They leave London and retreat into their childhood home, destroying the lives they had built for themselves away from their father. Isabel quotes from a letter Leah writes six years after the death of her father:

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I thought I’d killed him with what I’d done. But it was just the opposite. When I read his [suicide] letter . . . I understood that my father had won. That at last he’d found a way to make it impossible for us to escape him. After he died, we went home to the house in Jerusalem. And we stopped living. . . . It can’t go on like this or we really will stop living. One of us will do something terrible. It’s as if my father is luring us closer to him every day. 50

Leah ends the letter by pleading with Isabel to come to Israel and rescue Yoav from their self-imposed imprisonment. Isabel does so; from the beginning of the chapter she narrates, we already know that she and Yoav have married and have a child, David. The book’s closing chapter leads us to question Leah’s interpretation of Weisz’s suicide. Here, the reader learns from Weisz that before his death he went to New York, and he found the desk where Leah had hidden it. He describes bribing a guard to let him into the storage space so he can sit at the desk. In the moments before he finally sees it again for the first time since the Gestapo arrested his parents in 1944, Weisz realizes that he will not take it back to Israel, and he will not complete his rebuilding of his father’s study. Instead, he writes, he knows that Yoav will have a child, and that child is the one who will inherit the desk and rightfully so: There is something unanswered in Yoav, and I know there will be a woman for him, perhaps many women, in whom he will spill himself in order to seek the answer. One day a child will be born. A child whose provenance is the union of a woman and a riddle. One night as the infant sleeps in the bedroom, his mother will sense a presence outside the window. At first she will think it is just her own reflection, haggard in her milk-stained robe. But a moment later she will sense it again, and suddenly afraid, she will switch off the lights and hurry to the baby’s room. The glass door of the bedroom will be open. On top of the pile of the child’s tiny white clothes his mother will find an envelope with his name, written in small, neat handwriting. Inside the envelope will be a key and the address of a storage room in New York City. And outside, in the dark garden, the wet grass will slowly straighten up again, erasing my daughter’s footsteps. 51

Though Leah thinks she has killed her father by hiding the desk and preventing him from completing his life’s work, her act has led Weisz to realize that the project was mistaken. His attempt to recreate the past in physical terms was a trap; he and his children have all been caught in it. By finally letting go of the desk and everything it symbolizes for him, Weisz frees himself enough that he can envision a future in the form of a grandchild. Weisz’s suicide further reveals that his original plan of restoring his father’s study was a dead end: perfect recreation of the past is a path to selfdestruction. In a sense, killing himself is the only way Weisz can ensure that his grandchild will inherit the desk without also inheriting the burden of

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understanding it in Weisz’s terms as the past itself. Within the confines of the book, it is possible even to say that this is a hopeful act. That Isabel and Yoav name their son David invokes the rabbinic hope of a messianic redeemer descended from the biblical king and suggests the redemptive power of this fourth generation. 52 Weisz unwittingly shares another important clue about both the desk and the grandchild when his pursuit of the desk brings him to Arthur. Though Arthur’s wife Lotte gave the desk away long before Weisz arrives and is now no longer living, the two men sit and talk. In the course of their conversation, Arthur reports to the reader, Weisz tells him a story that his father used to tell about Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai, who established a rabbinic study house in Yavneh after the destruction of the Temple. In Weisz’s retelling, when scholars gathered to argue about the law, They became so absorbed in their work that sometimes they forgot the question their teacher had asked: What is a Jew without Jerusalem? Only later, after ben Zakkai died, did his answer slowly reveal itself, the way an enormous mural only begins to make sense as you walk backwards away: Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost.

With the birth and development of rabbinic culture, the Talmud—the most important work of classical rabbinic culture is titled with a Hebrew word meaning to study—becomes the new Great House, the new Temple. Weisz remembers his father teaching him that “now every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned in that fire, so vast that we can, each one of us, only recall the tiniest fragment: a pattern on the wall, a knot in the wood of a door, a memory of how light fell across the floor.” 53 Each Jew must nurture his or her own fragment of memory in the hope that someday all the memories might be joined. As Weisz comments, “Perhaps that is what they mean when they speak of the Messiah: a perfect assemblage of the infinite parts of the Jewish memory. In the next world, we will all dwell together in the memory of our memories.” 54 Redemption will come not in a reconstructed Temple, but in a communal memory of the Temple composed and protected by an infinite number of Jews wherever and whenever they live. In later generations, Temple memories will arise not from seeing the Temple intact or even from knowing people who once did. Rather, these memories will arise from direct engagement with the tradition, as first modeled by Yohanan ben Zakai. Weisz’s recollection of ben Zakai is just such a fragment of Temple memory, but he does not understand it and make it his own until the very end of his life. His search for the desk is not an act of memory but rather the act of a historian who hopes that reconstructing the past in all of its precise details will redeem the present and future. But the message Weisz’s own

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father gave him was that reconstruction and return come only in the form of shared memory, itself an act of interpretation, as each person sees and remembers something different. In the biblical account, God stopped King David from building a Temple in Jerusalem and denied having any desire for a physical home on earth; this message too is woven into Weisz’s grandson’s name. The desk itself cannot speak to tell its own story. Like Yohanan ben Zakai’s students in Weisz’s story, the reader is the only one who can step back and see how the chapters fit together into one story. To do so is a taste of redemption as Weisz foretells it. It is tempting to understand the role of the desk within the novel as a symbol of the past, particularly in light of its immense physicality, and then to think that the characters who have it in their homes possess the past itself. But this is a misreading of the text, for no one who possesses the desk knows very much at all about where it came from. What they do know is the role it plays in their own lives, primarily as a site of creativity and hope. Because of this, Great House is best read as an argument against Weisz’s project to possess the pre-Holocaust past, and for storytelling as a better and more hopeful mode of interaction with that past. When Weisz is within reach of the desk, he is able to imagine a future for his family, but it is a future that has no room for him or for his relationship with the past. His vision is one of hope not only for his son Yoav, whose wife will bear the child Weisz foresees, but for all the novel’s characters. Every other child who appears in this text marks a dead end: either imagined but unborn or born but then undone. Only Isabel and Yoav’s David offers the promise of a future. When read as a work of Jewish thought, Great House breaks the pattern of meta-historical inquiry that characterized earlier Holocaust theology. Like Kurtzer, Krauss emphasizes the relationship of the present generation to the past over any claim that God shapes human history in general or Jewish history in particular. In the constructed world of any novel, the writer plays the role of God: creating and then shaping people and guiding their actions. As readers, we seek to share that perspective (though an author does not always leave it open to us). With Great House, when the reader steps back to take in the desk’s history as a whole, there remains a distinct piece missing. Though we can know more about the desk’s journey than any of the characters it meets along the way do, we do not know what happened to the desk during the years of the Holocaust, and there is little reason to think that Weisz knows. Does Krauss, the novelist, even know what happened to the desk? This lack of knowledge keeps us from remaining in the chasm of the Holocaust. By letting go of his desire to restore a piece of the pre-Holocaust past with precise verisimilitude, Weisz releases his family into the present and the future.

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Krauss’ novel succeeds at demonstrating the power of memory in a way that Kurtzer’s treatise does not. Its form gives it an emotional power similar to that of the rituals Kurtzer wants but does not describe. I would argue that in its portrayal of the desk from many different perspectives, Great House models the sort of memory that Kurtzer describes: a collection of incomplete remembrances that nevertheless evoke powerful feelings and reactions. Nadia’s narrative in particular illustrates both the challenges and the power of storytelling as an act of memory. Her narrative is composed in the form of a testimony delivered before a judge. By the end of the novel, we know that she is testifying because, while driving in Jerusalem, she hit and seriously injured a pedestrian who now lies comatose in a hospital. She does not know his name, but the reader realizes that this man is the estranged son of Aaron, the Israeli narrator. At issue in Nadia’s court case is the car accident and whether she reasonably could have prevented it. But in trying to explain what happened that night, Nadia must explain that she is in Jerusalem because she had hoped to find the woman who took Daniel Varsky’s desk from her. In trying to explain why she has come to Jerusalem to find a desk, she must explain its significance. And so her testimony about a car accident becomes a retelling of her writing successes, and the price she has paid for them as her love of her work and of the desk suffocated her relationships with human beings. Nadia’s testimony leads the reader to ask: where does a story begin? How many years of one’s life must one recount in order to explain a single event? What are the events that are meaningful? And, in light of the desk’s role in Nadia’s testimony, the reader comes to recognize that despite Nadia’s attempt to tell the whole truth, her story is part of a longer narrative, one that she cannot recount because she does not know it. It is not possible to write a complete history of the desk; it is not possible to write a complete history of Nadia’s life, of the life of the man she hits or of any other character in the novel. Nadia’s discussion of her writing career offers further support for this argument; one of her most successful short stories—the tale of a mother who kills her children—is based on an event recounted to her at a dinner party. She writes the story because the narrative compels her, but she fears seeing the man who first told it to her, fearing he must think she stole something from him. But he too had appropriated the story from someone else: it was not his own mother or his own murder (and if it had been, he would have been unable to share it himself). To take events and make them one’s own: this is the writer’s task. As Kurtzer argues and Krauss demonstrates, this is also the task of the Jew in the post-Holocaust era. Hutcheon’s account of postmodern poetics offers a framework for further understanding this aspect of Krauss’ novel. As she notes, a central project of postmodernity has been the blurring of boundaries between historical and literary writing. 55 As she writes,

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The entire notion of reference in art has been problematized by the postmodern mingling of the historical and the self-reflexive. . . . What is the referent of the language . . . of any fiction, or, for that matter, of historiography? How can we come to know the past real? Postmodernism does not deny that it existed; it merely questions how we can know real past events today, except through their traces, their texts, the facts we construct and to which we grant meaning. 56

In other words, a postmodern perspective recognizes that an event of the past is accessible to the present not in its actuality but only in whatever traces we see in its wake and can organize into an archive, broadly defined. These traces are not the “reality” of the event—that reality was once and now is no more—but they allow us to imagine what might have been. In Hutcheon’s formulation, as the historian gathers traces and determines which will be the building blocks of a historical narrative, she assigns meaning and transforms events into facts. In calling a particular trace of a particular event a “fact,” the historian says: this is what is meaningful. Krauss’ novel gently illustrates this claim and, I would argue, it is no accident that the point is made through the novel’s characters, structure, and plot—and not delivered as a treatise. The reality of Holocaust deniers— whose arguments are based in falsified data or highly selective readings of evidence, not in postmodern theory—makes one hesitate before denying the reality of past events and describing facts as created, as Hutcheon does. 57 However, the least gentle moment of Krauss’ novel—Weisz’s suicide— makes this point most clearly. As I noted earlier, his death suggests that his attempt to reconstruct the past is a dead end. But his project is not just an attempt to reconstruct the past: it is an attempt to recreate the past exactly. By refusing to distinguish among his father’s possessions—to pursue some and not others—Weisz fails to perform the most crucial task of the historian: to create meaning. He realizes this only when the possibility of completing his picture of the past by bringing the desk home becomes real. If Weisz’s project of reclamation is the epitome of a meaningless historical account, his own father’s understanding of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple offers an alternative. Earlier, I raised questions about the discussion of the State of Israel in Holocaust theology, arguing that we can no longer share in the exuberant optimism of Holocaust theologians who view Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War as assurance of God’s returned presence and guidance in history. The war’s legacy has been mixed, and the politics surrounding the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been divisive for both Israelis and American Jews. Krauss’ novel explores aspects of this situation in a gentle way that allows her to escape the harsh vitriol, finger pointing and name calling of the editorial page (or blogosphere). We find her discussion of the

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morality of power and statehood in the chapters belonging to the fourth narrator of Great House, Aaron. Aaron is the father of Dov, the man Nadia hits with her car, but he tells his story before he has been notified about the accident, and before his comatose son has even been identified. What Aaron describes is Dov’s childhood and adolescence, and his struggle to understand his son. As a child Dov wanted to be a writer, but he changed course after abandoning a dying comrade during his military service in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As Aaron describes it, How many times I tried to imagine it as if it had been me. Nothing but the endless dunes and the wires on the ground left from Egyptian missiles. The sound of explosions. Trying to carry the wounded man on your back, but it being impossible to make any headway in the sand. The commander, in shock, begging you not to leave him. If you stayed there, you both would die. If you left to find help, he might. You were taught never to leave another soldier wounded in the field. It was a cardinal rule the army had driven into you. How you must have struggled with yourself. Only there was no self left to struggle with. The dumbstruck look on his face when he understood you were going. How with difficulty he removed his watch and held it out: This is my father’s. . . . There was no one left in you, and so like the walking dead you abandoned the commander. 58

The commander’s body is never found, and he is presumed dead. Aaron’s retelling of the episode invokes many of the same themes that appear elsewhere in Great House; in trying to put himself into Dov’s shoes as he imagines the event, he identifies the facts of the event and thus weaves a framework of meaning around it. And what is that meaning? Aaron describes his son as the “walking dead,” arguing that making the sort of choice that Dov had to make destroys one’s self. The choice he faced was either to honor his commitment to his unit (and, by extension, his state) by dying with his comrade in the desert or to survive by leaving his comrade to die alone. By choosing the latter, Dov himself died a sort of spiritual or moral death. This story is defined by its context: war is a reality of Jewish life in an age of statehood and military power, and it is a time of moral complexity. Aaron relives Dov’s dilemma in his mind, and he does not condemn his son for choosing to leave. After the war, Dov brings the commander’s watch to his father. The commander’s father later writes Dov a letter, which Aaron retrieves from the mailbox and gives to Dov and then later reads himself. This interplay of sons and fathers suggests an additional framework for understanding the themes of the book. As Aaron remembers, It was not an eloquent letter, but the crudeness made it worse. He blamed you for the death of his son. You took his watch, he wrote in his spindly handwrit-

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ing, and let my son die. How do you live with yourself? He had survived Birkenau, and brought this into it. He summoned the courage of the Jewish inmates at the hands of the SS, and called you a coward. In the last line of the letter, scratched so hard that the pen had broken through paper, he wrote: It should have been you. 59

The watch, passing from father to son and then back to father, can be understood as a symbol for the passing of generations, not unlike the desk in Weisz’s family. But a watch is more than a possession: it measures the passage of time itself. In giving Dov his watch, the dying commander communicates a message to his father: time is now moving in reverse. The commander’s father tells Dov “it should have been you,” but that is an impossible alternative to reality. The commander was too wounded to walk; he could not have left Dov to die. The father castigates Dov for not acting as Jews did in resisting the SS while imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. But the situation of concentration camp inmates is precisely not the same as that of Israeli soldiers, even when they are wounded by an Egyptian military attack on their tank, as Dov and the commander were. Israel was ultimately victorious in the 1973 war; because he abandoned his commander, Dov survives. In war, some live and some die, and some live because others die. The moral choices we make are always made within particular contexts and sometimes there are no good choices. Dov’s choice destroys him, and after the war he leaves Israel, moving to England where he studies law and becomes a judge. At the point when Aaron is narrating his story, Dov has resigned this position and returned to the State after his mother’s death. Living with his father in silence, every night he wanders the streets of Jerusalem. He is the prototypical wandering Jew, only he wanders in the land of Israel, not in diaspora. Exile and homeland are confused, and neither place offers moral clarity. Krauss does not link war to divine presence or messianic redemption but instead portrays a nuanced glimpse of the moral human messiness of statehood. As a novelist, she uses a small event to illustrate a larger complexity of Jewish life after the Holocaust, raising questions without offering clear answers. For some, this will be unsatisfying. But her lack of answers is itself an argument that we cannot assume that the answers are simple or straightforward. CONCLUSION In closing, I want to offer several suggestions for further research in religion and literature in Jewish Studies. These suggestions—which I will offer in the form of three questions—emerged as I wrote this essay and, in particular, as I shared drafts of it with colleagues in Jewish Studies trained in a variety of disciplines.

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First, what are the forces—cultural or otherwise—behind the contemporary surge in Jewish literary creativity? As I noted above, I do think that the vitriol of public conversations about Israel has made some reluctant to write theologically or systematically. But this is surely not a complete explanation. We might point to trends of secularization and the weakening of tradition among American Jews or Americans in general, and we should consider trends in theological writing among other American religious groups, as well as among Jews living in Israel and elsewhere. It may be, though, that what I am calling a shift from theology to literature is better characterized as a growing literary production coinciding with a notable decrease in theological writing. David Roskies’ study of pre-Holocaust Jewish literary responses to tragedy underscores this point. 60 This raises a related issue. An important part of Roskies’ thesis is that the writers he examines play with themes of theodicy borrowed from traditional sources, which they studied in their youth. At least in Eastern Europe, this was generally true even for Jews who did not practice Judaism as adults. Today, such knowledge is no longer typical and we cannot assume that the average Jew knows very much at all about Jewish sources or Jewish tradition. In interviews, Krauss does not claim to know much about Judaism. Commenting on the story of Yohanan ben Zakai in Great House, Krauss says “it’s a Jewish story, but it’s a very universal idea.” 61 How do comments like these—or the presence or absence of Jewish education in a novelist’s background—affect our ability (or our inclination) to read a novel as a work addressing theological issues? Should we discount Krauss’ comment as an attempt to support the marketing of her book as appealing to all audiences? Or should it lead us to question whether the book has any meaning that is specifically Jewish? The question of which novels and other works can and should be read as works of Jewish thought is a second and related issue. In “Existentialists and Mystics,” cited above, Murdoch comments that “the novel, that great sensitive mirror, or screen, or field of forces, is still one of the most articulate expressions of the dilemmas of the age.” 62 For her as a philosopher, the study of literature centers on observing thematic patterns in literary works and using these to understand the situation of the contemporary person. This approach emphasizes the contents of a novel, and it is the approach I took in choosing to analyze Great House as my case study. A literary studies perspective on the study of the novel would also demand that we pay attention to the form of the novel, not only its contents. How can we more fully integrate consideration of form into a theological reading of a literary work? My third and final question is one of scope. Putting aside the question of which novels are interesting, which novels are Jewish? How many novels must one read as Jewish thought in order to develop a compelling thesis about the interplay of religion and literature? What are the boundaries of the

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inquiry? In this essay, I focused on a specific issue in Jewish thought and on a single novel, with brief reference to a second; I located both the issue and the novel firmly in America. A more complete study will have to address multiple issues and multiple novels; it will likely work in several languages with authors from a variety of contexts. How does one choose? I suspect that answers to this question will vary, and each one may reflect little more than each scholar’s own interests in the study of Jewish thought or literature. But I do not think this is problematic. One’s interests arise in the context in which one lives, and the scholar’s choice of novels will always be in part an expression of her time and place. Though Murdoch did not note this in her essay, by choosing which novels to study as works of theology, the scholar of religion further sharpens our sense of the issues of the day. NOTES 1. Arnold Eisen, “Jewish Theology in North America: Notes on Two Decades,” American Jewish Year Book 91 (1991), 3. I gratefully acknowledge the feedback I received on this essay from Mara Benjamin, Edan Dekel, Sam Fleischacker, Rachel Gordan, Todd Hasak-Lowy, and Ken Koltun-Fromm. 2. Eisen examines these issues through a more sociological lens in Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 3. Sylvia Barack Fishman, “American Jewish Fiction Turns Inward, 1960-1990,” American Jewish Year Book 91 (1991), 35. 4. I am also informed by the study of religion and literature that has played an important role in the discipline of religious studies generally but not in the study of Judaism specifically. The journal Religion & Literature, which first appeared in 1984, describes itself as “a scholarly journal providing a forum for discussion of the relations between two crucial human concerns, the religious impulse and the literary forms of any era, place, or language” (http://religionandlit.nd.edu/, accessed August 2, 2012). See John J. McDonald, “Religion and Literature,” Religion & Literature 16/1 (1984), 61–71. With some exceptions, literary scholars are responsible for earlier articles on religion and literature in Jewish Studies, and scholars of Judaism trained in Religious Studies have not turned to literature in the way that I propose. 5. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 6. Iris Murdoch, “Existentialists and Mystics,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1999), 221. 7. Ibid., 224. 8. Ibid., 232. 9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xxiii. 10. Ibid., xxiv. 11. Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 28. 12. This list cites the earliest book-length Holocaust-themed publication of each theologian and is not comprehensive: Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970); Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: KTAV, 1973); and Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981).

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13. In using the pronoun “he” for God here and elsewhere in this essay, I do not intend to imply that God is masculine or can only be described using masculine language. In general, the theologians I address in the essay use masculine pronouns for God, making it the appropriate choice for my discussion of their work. Furthermore, I want to recognize that to use feminine pronouns (e.g., referring to God as “she”) would be problematic for similar reasons. 14. Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, 69-70. 15. Though he does not name Rubenstein specifically, Berkovits’ claim that Job’s brother cannot reject God because Job maintained his faith seems to me to be a direct reference to Rubenstein’s Death of God theology. As I discuss, I share Braiterman’s view that Rubenstein was not the atheist or even the anti-traditionalist that Berkovits takes him to be. 16. In using the phrase “death of God,” Rubenstein points to Christian theologians such as Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, and like them, he references Nietzsche’s myth of the madman who announces the death of God. Rubenstein distinguishes his thinking, however, by speaking of the time of the death of God rather than the death of God. See Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181–82. 17. It is worthy of note that within Jewish law (halakhah), a person cannot be declared dead without witnesses to his death: even a long-term absence is not sufficient evidence. This has had significant ramifications for Holocaust survivors wishing to remarry after the presumed murder of a spouse in the Nazi concentration camps. 18. The second edition of After Auschwitz, published in 1992 and still in print, represents a dramatic revision of the work. The subtitle of the second edition, “History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism,” is toned down from the first edition’s “Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism,” and the most provocative of the first edition’s essays have been replaced by more measured pieces. 19. See Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 105-111. Rubenstein does himself a disservice by using the term “pagan” to describe this theological move; I would suggest we term it panentheist. Calling Rubenstein’s work panentheism does not necessarily make it any more “authentically” Jewish, but it points toward significant conversation partners who have engaged with this sort of theology in a Jewish context. I am thinking in particular of Arthur Green, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 20. Cf. Michael Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 21. Elie Wiesel is widely credited with saying that “Auschwitz is as important as Sinai.” I have been unable to find an original printed source. 22. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 84–92. 23. Cohen, The Tremendum, 82. The italicization of “tremendum” is Cohen’s. 24. We can also add the work of Irving Greenberg to this list. For him, the Holocaust marks the opening of the voluntary covenant, in which the terms of Sinaitic covenant are reversed as the Jewish people invites God to join them in shaping their destiny. See Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1977), 79–95. More recently, David Weiss Halivni uses the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum—the contraction or withdrawal of the Godhead before creation—as a model for arguing that throughout history God has continued to withdraw from the world, leaving the course of human history to unfold more and more according to human will and with less and less divine guidance. He posits that the Holocaust happened at the moment when God was most withdrawn and human beings were most free to act as they would; nevertheless, this moment of divine withdrawal is simply the latest chapter in a single, continuous narrative of divine existence and human struggle. See David Weiss Halivni, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology after the Shoah, ed. Peter Ochs (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007). 25. The Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz provides a striking contrast on this point. Leibowitz insists that God does not act in human history, and so neither the Holocaust nor the State of Israel holds any theological significance. Following the war of 1967, Leibowitz called for the State to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. See Yeshayahu Leibowitz,

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Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 26. Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, 145. 27. Ibid., 167. 28. See Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failureamerican-jewish-establishment/?pagination=false, accessed July 11, 2013. 29. See Steven T. Rosenthal, Irreconcilable Differences?: The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair With Israel (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2003). 30. Yehuda Kurtzer, Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 3. 31. Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). Many scholars have criticized Yerushalmi for overemphasizing differences between modern and pre-modern Jewish worldviews and for his portrayal of the modern Jewish historian as “fallen.” I think such critiques are valid and that they further Kurtzer’s argument. In a sense, Kurtzer is arguing that in their embrace of history, American Jews are in danger of creating the total bifurcation between history and memory that Yerushalmi’s critics find problematic in his description of modern Jewry at an earlier point. See Moshe Idel, “Yosef H. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor—Some Observations,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97/4 (2007), 491-501. 32. Kurtzer, Shuva, 6–7. 33. I am using Kurtzer’s translation. See Kurtzer, Shuva, 83. 34. Ibid., 85. 35. We see this most clearly in some of the ritual experiments undertaken by Jewish feminists. For example, why have Rosh Chodesh groups taken off while the introduction of feminine God(dess) language into the liturgy has not? On the latter, see Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), chapter 3. For an upbeat take on new Jewish ritual more generally, see Vanessa L. Ochs, Inventing Jewish Ritual (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007). 36. For an example of literary analysis of Holocaust literature, see Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, “Representing Auschwitz,” History and Memory 7/2 (1995), 121-54. 37. In this essay, I focus on novels. But I intend my larger claim to apply to poetry and short stories as well. 38. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 3. 39. Susan Shapiro explores this overlap with reference to Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Edmond Jabès. See Susan E. Shapiro, “Failing Speech: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Semeia 40 (1987), 65-91. 40. Ibid., 67. 41. Ibid., 66. 42. For another perspective on the aesthetics of Holocaust writing, see Zachary Braiterman, “Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory,” History and Memory 12/2 (2000), 7–28. 43. Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 44. Franklin’s argument about the careful construction of memoirs echoes James Young’s arguments about the rhetorical construction of survivor testimony. See James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). For further discussion of the implications this holds for the writing of Holocaust history, see Omer Bartov, “Intellectuals on Auschwitz: Memory, History, and Truth,” History and Memory 5/1 (1993), 87-129; Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998). 45. Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses, 237.

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46. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 224. 47. George Weisz is called “Weisz” by all of the other characters in the book, and here I do so as well. 48. Ken Koltun-Fromm’s account of material culture and American Judaism suggests another approach to examining the desk and its physicality. See Ken Koltun-Fromm, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 49. Nicole Krauss, Great House (New York: Norton, 2010), 113. 50. Ibid., 116. 51. Ibid., 289. 52. The name Yoav is also biblical; in 2 Samuel, Yoav was King David’s nephew. His participation in a complicated battle of succession underscores our sense that Great House is about the relationship between generations. 53. Krauss, Great House, 279. 54. Ibid. 55. See, in particular, the work of Haydn White. 56. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 225. 57. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993). 58. Krauss, Great House, 187. 59. Ibid., 188. 60. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 61. Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “Nicole Krauss on Fame, Loss, and Writing About Holocaust Survivors,” The Atlantic (October 21, 2010). www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ 2010/10/nicole-krauss-on-fame-loss-and-writing-about-holocaust-survivors/64869/?single_ page=true. Accessed August 7, 2012. 62. Murdoch, “Existentialists and Mystics,” 221.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, Rachel. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Altizer, Thomas J. J., and William Hamilton. Radical Theology and the Death of God. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Bartov, Omer. “Intellectuals on Auschwitz: Memory, History, and Truth.” History and Memory 5, no. 1 (1993): 87-129. Beinart, Peter. “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” New York Review of Books (June 10, 2010). Berkovits, Eliezer. Faith after the Holocaust. New York: KTAV, 1973. Braiterman, Zachary. “Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory.” History and Memory 12, no. 2 (2000): 7–28. ———. (God) After Auschwitz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Cohen, Arthur A. The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Cohen, Steven, and Arnold Eisen. The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Eisen, Arnold. “Jewish Theology in North America: Notes on Two Decades.” American Jewish Year Book 91 (1991). Ezrahi, Sidra Dekoven. “Representing Auschwitz.” History and Memory 7, no. 2 (1995): 12154. Fackenheim, Emil L. God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. “American Jewish Fiction Turns Inward, 1960-1990.” American Jewish Year Book 91 (1991).

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Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Greenberg, Irving. “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust.” In Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, edited by Eva Fleischner, 79-95. New York: Ktav, 1977. Gritz, Jennie Rothenberg. “Nicole Krauss on Fame, Loss, and Writing About Holocaust Survivors.” The Atlantic (October 21, 2010). Halivni, David Weiss. Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology after the Shoah. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Idel, Moshe. “Yosef H. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor—Some Observations.” Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 491-501. Krauss, Nicole. Great House. New York: Norton, 2010. Kurtzer, Yehuda. Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2012. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Leibowitz, Yeshayahu. Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Free Press, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. McDonald, John J. “Religion and Literature.” Religion & Literature 16, no. 1 (1984): 61–71. Morgan, Michael L. Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Murdoch, Iris. “Existentialists and Mystics.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Ochs, Vanessa L. Inventing Jewish Ritual. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007. Rosenthal, Steven T. Irreconcilable Differences?: The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair With Israel. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2003. Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Rubenstein, Richard. After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Shapiro, Susan E. “Failing Speech: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Discourse of Postmodernism.” Semeia 40 (1987): 65-91. Wyschogrod, Edith. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Yerushalmi, Yosef. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. Young, James. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Chapter Six

Celan’s Holocaust The Scene of Instruction for America Leonard V. Kaplan

This essay is part of a larger project in the Weimar Moment 1 concerning what we can learn from that past, and what are the limits of law and culture in the United States and beyond for resisting future Holocausts. The turn here is to commentary and poetry. But the turn to poetry is particular. It is the poetry of the most recent Holocaust in Jewish American history, the Nazi attempt at Jewish eradication. The contention here is that the vantage point of poetry may provide a significant vantage point for tracing Nazi atrocities to contemporary American (Jewish) understanding of that recent history. The turn to poetry is a turn to a form of Western understanding that once rivaled philosophy—compelling Plato to respond to its power. My claim is that poetry can still inform the public square as much as political philosophy—a degraded form for Plato. 2 The turn to poetry is the return to revelation and prophecy, to Jerusalem and not Athens. The poet I turn to: a secular Jew—a traumatized secular Jew whose genius illuminated the twentieth-century trauma for the Jewish and other peoples by the Nazi assault on humanity. 3 Examining Paul Celan allows poetry to speak truth to power, and the prophetic to (re)call the ancient roots still alive if we attend. I write from the perspective of a law professor and not a poet or expert in poetics. The history of twentieth century American jurisprudence is one of integrating any and all disciplines into the dominant project of dealing with conflict resolution and, for many of us in law, toward using legal thinking for a progressive jurisprudence. So turning to poetry is very much within the project. Celan’s poetry forces recognition. Here I turn to this poet and his reception, from his mind to ours: his hopes critically circumscribed, his resources ours, his demands beyond self to revelation. He invokes the scenes of 157

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evil and their continued cancer in the human corpus. Likely the sirens of our times will distract us, but the scene of instruction is present in Celan. In a longer elaboration of this essay I have contrasted the Jewish Paul Celan to the Christian Auden: each a great poet of real influence and each versed in the received wisdom of the west. Auden remains the poet of anxiety and the immigrant to America where he found a home; Celan came and stayed in Paris and arguably remained homeless. Both Celan and Auden were versed in the poetics, literature and politics of Weimar and the Nazi experience. They wrote from this experience enhanced by theological and philosophic western inheritance. This essay approaches the Jewish and Nazi experience from the lens of historical trauma. I look to the poet Paul Celan whose life and art encompass the various meanings of trauma in Jewish history, his own mid-twentiethcentury experience and his reception into American Jewish poetic consciousness. Celan is also a poet who has influenced American Jewish poets, though he entered the world undone by both the Nazis and the Soviets. His hometown in Romania was pushed back and forth and his parents perished under Nazi control. He was a Jew in a Christian world, a world that not only erupted in terror but one equally contested by theologians and philosophers seeking to intellectually deal with the spirit in the Enlightenment frame. THE VOICES OF CELAN This succinct section points toward the thinkers who animated Celan and for that matter still inform contemporary understanding. The Frankfurt school, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Buber, Arendt, Heidegger, and Freud provided analytic grist for his poetics. Celan turned to the resources that inform us: Athens and Jerusalem and all the permutations so engendered. What for Auden constituted the anxiety of our times, exploded on Celan and determined his poetic project. But I want to invoke a later and real dialogue between a Christian and Jew that affected Auden and was in the geist that Celan internalized. 4 The dialogue is between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and his close friend Franz Rosenzweig. Both were born in the Germany that became Weimar and beyond. Both were born Jewish but the former converted to Christianity and the latter re-engaged Judaism. I also want to mark Buber, the Frankfurt thinkers, Heidegger and his Jewish progeny all as backdrop for Celan’s excavations. Celan had disappointing contacts with both Heidegger and Buber. From one he wanted apology, from the other wisdom. Many of the Weimar thinkers and those just somewhat before turned to different aspects of theology. Franz Rosenzweig attempted to reclaim Judaism for himself and a secularized German intellectual set of fellow Jews. But

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his friend Rosenstock-Huessy prompted Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, 5 and he produced an analogue with the emblematic Cross. Their dialogue preserved in letters is sharp with little diplomatic commentary: hard times, hard choices. If anything Rosenstock-Huessy was more aware of the immanence of Hitler and the Holocaust. Rosenstock-Huessy wrote about the necessity of the thou-I relationship where he argued that the Thou must precede the I. Levinas would pick up on this distinction between the other as subject or object. But no one solved the move from personal encounter with the other’s face to the institutional or state framework. Each of these combatants invokes Abraham, the sacrifices of Isaac and Jesus, and the difference between the Jewish and Christian versions: immediacy for the Jew, mediation by Jesus for the Christian. If Jews mark and hold the law internally, then Christians proselytize the world. But have American (secular) Jews become Pauline without the son as Messiah, indeed without Messiahs at all? 6 This is a question that animates Celan’s gift and demand. Celan I present here as Jew, a brilliant traumatized and secular Jew. Trauma personal and political is at stake with Celan as the scene of instruction. This is one aspect of resistance to the denigration of liberal politics. The figure of Paul is important because of the changed reception he has had in the twentieth century. Paul has been retrieved by certain Jewish scholarship for Jews. 7 But he is now taken as in no way desiring to convert all Jews to his new ministry. Badiou has interpreted Paul as a universal philosopher relevant beyond theological concerns. 8 Jennings has compared him to Derrida and found him important for Derrida’s own strain of Jewishness. 9 For both the Jew Rosenzweig and the Christian Rosenstock-Hussey, Paul was a marker for historical time that figured into Auden’s Age of Anxiety. 10 The issue between them was whether humanity was moving into the Johannine age or was still in its Pauline phase. Rosenzweig adapted from Schelling the marking of ages, claiming that western history had surpassed its Greek phase to the Pauline phase. The new turn presented a new historical task: “The task was not so much to elaborate what the church wanted to know for itself, that is, the dogma, but to address itself to the Gentiles.” 11 The claim is that Christianity had already internalized Greek philosophy. Rosenstock-Huessy was less optimistic about the historical conjuncture though he agreed with the historical trajectory and the obligation on each historical moment to engage that time’s task. So history for each has meaning in an agreed upon set of phases. But where Judaism posited Abraham and Moses as that grounding historical moment, Heidegger proposed an original moment, a pre-Socratic time when poetry illuminates and purifies inherited metaphysical contaminants. And the beauty and irony is that Celan met and confronted Heidegger on his own terms. This meeting, then, is also a clash of historical interpretation: they both mark historical time, but in radically dif-

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ferent ways. Can the suicidal Celan defeat the “pariah” Heidegger, whose work is alive and available for totalitarian appropriation? Celan’s initial reception in Germany was distorted and belated in the United States, but Celan’s interpreters now include significant philosophers and literary commentators. Derrida, Levinas, Gadamer, and later LacoueLabarthe, Agamben, and Alain Badiou have all spent intellectual effort on Celan and all of these have had and continue to have resonance in the United States. 12 Their respective commentaries provide critical, political, and literary theories based on Celan and are sympathetic to his project. Stanford University Press has created an important series of books that have elaborated the cutting edge themes birthed in Europe; the series is called Meridian after Celan’s famous speech on receiving the Buchner Prize. So it can be argued that his influence is very far beyond his name recognition in the United States. Much of the response to Celan involves his encounter with Heidegger and has commanded analyses on remembrance, responsibility and more technically the question of the “uncanny.” His poetry captures his metaphysics and challenges that of Heidegger’s. But the very difficulty of his poetry has prompted competing translations and interpretations. What Paul Ricoeur called the conflict of interpretations becomes instructive in Celan’s reception. Interestingly the conflict is not among poets, Jewish or otherwise, but between Heidegger and Gadamer and those who resist their ontology and apology for Celan’s concrete truth in place and time. The dialectic runs between Celan the poet and his admirers, and Heidegger and to a lesser extent Gadamer. Indeed Gadamer himself became a significant interlocutor in conversations with Habermas, Derrida and his generation of Europeans whose work continues to affect American consciousness. Derrida disagrees most respectfully with Gadamer, as does Pierre Joris (a significant translator of Celan and himself a first rate poet). Joris now teaches in the United States and has become an important conveyor of international sacred writings in his work with Jerome Rothenberg. These are some of the voices we must address if we think, as I do, that poetry is beyond the private and still capable of providing revelatory meaning. Celan demanded that his poems be treated as encounter and practice; the work puts into play the problem of practice and responsibility beyond bearing witness to evil. Celan also places the significance of poetry and politics on the map within the Republic, claiming that the poem constitutes truth and not representation. His work gives the lie to Heidegger and those who would downplay the Holocaust or deny its singularity. With Celan we are in a time that is both past and there in front of us—happening. Jewish hermeneutics have sanctioned interlocutors speaking across time; Celan does this with his poetry.

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The boundary between psychoanalytic psychology and philosophy is played out by Celan in dealing with anxiety, the uncanny, and trauma: states of consciousness significant for marking modernity and post-modernity. But psychoanalysis itself could not offer a way out of the anxiety of the modern and the trauma of contemporary reality. Anxiety still motivates individuals and the collective life. Trauma has recently attracted significant attention in law, politics and psychology. Where Auden named the age of anxiety, Celan is the poet of trauma. Trauma is nothing new to humanity but the concept has gained traction through modernity in the last part of the twentieth century. Part of this is the move from economic to psychological being as object for analyses, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The concepts of anxiety and of trauma are the objects of analysis and commentary in law, the humanities and in medicine, including endocrinology and neurophysiology. The concepts of anxiety and trauma figure into Freud’s original work, as he conjectured that law itself was predicated on the trauma of killing the father. Existential and neurotic anxiety still occupy everyday psychotherapy and psychopharmacy. Trauma is the condition beyond anxiety for psychology. It is marked in its extreme form by post-traumatic stress disorder, brain change, terror, psychic paralysis, unreality, disassociation, disavowal, rage, irritation, flash back, and failed capacity for trust. Trauma is also the figure behind repetition compulsion. Celan is of interest for both his personal reaction to anxiety and trauma, and his capacity to channel experience beyond trauma into truth beyond the personal. Psychology and psychiatry function by placing nosologies—that attempt to tie conceptual chaos within bundles (syndrome)—into checklists for rational and rationalized prognosis and treatment. Those nosologies allow psychiatry and psychology to police the public space defining normality and pathology, differentiating between mad and bad. Whatever their therapeutic good (and there is much), they also deflect from social madness. But figures like Celan confound such categories. His biography is useful in this regard. We know that Celan committed suicide and that he was mentally unhealthy, perhaps even mad. I think him mad but not in Foucault’s sense: rather mad with rage, grief, with unresolved direction. We know Celan abused his wife physically and she had him move from their home. We know he had close friends and lovers, including at least one prominent female poet, Ingeborg Bachman (we have a book of correspondence between the two). We know he was close to Nelly Sachs who also succumbed to grief. We have a testament to her psychiatric history, including her electro-shock treatment, in her letters to Celan. 13 We know that he had younger friends like Peter Szondi, another who perished too quickly. Love, violence, brilliance, and intense suffering marked his life. We know he was easily irritated for example by his friend Jabes who found redemption, though hardly an excuse, for

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the Holocaust, forcing a renewed Jewish solidarity. Could his very poetic genius have permitted him, before his suicide, a way to break through trauma that would have disabled others? Despite his trauma and his mental illness, Celan nevertheless was not so paralyzed that he could not create a space for poetic truth for himself and for humanity. POETRY, LITERATURE, AND TRAUMA Paul Celan was the homeless (another wandering) Jew, considered by some to be the poet of the Holocaust, himself a linguistic genius—both as translator for great French, German, American, and Russian poets, and a translator of the Holocaust into the German language which he contended was defaced and had to be redeemed from the Nazi experience. In contemporary poetic terms he has become a leading language poet or master reference for them. He was a lyric poet whose whole project of writing lyric poetry was considered to be if not impossible, then at least problematic after the experience of the Holocaust. Theodore Adorno pronounced in effect that there could be no poetry after the Holocaust, and even “all culture after Auschwitz, including its much needed critique, is garbage.” 14 Celan’s poetry altered his perception, for Celan’s lyric is not an exultation of love. And so finally for Adorno: “Celan’s poems articulate unspeakable horror by being silent, thus turning their truth content into a negative quality. . . . They emulate a language below the helpless prattle of human beings—even below the level of organic life as such. It is the language of dead matter, of stone and stars. . . . Celan writes poetry without an aura.” 15 Paul Celan’s poetry is the significant object of analysis to test the limits of poetry to point to truth, and to identify what it means to be the secular Jew with spirit in the United States. For American Jews the reception of Celan presents an opportunity for reflection. What kind of Jew was Celan and what difference does the answer make for a time which is already past—when Celan would hold it still, silent, under the lens of his compressed, layered linguistic archeology? The Holocaust is from a past century, and a past history for Jews and other peoples. And why Celan and not Zukofsky who is an American Jew, genius, poet, modernist, whose “epic” A traverses all western theo-philosophy and poetic form, and who had to follow and deal with Pound and Eliot? Resnikoff and his take on the Holocaust and his Testimonies, and later Rothenberg would provide important access for American Jewish experience, poetics, law and culture. In fact, Rothenberg first translated Celan into English and describes his one meeting with Celan in the form of “a letter to Paul Celan” written in 1975. 16 Celan is the poet most there at the physical, psychological and anthropological sites of Nazi practice. He presents both

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the raw fact of the Shoah and its continuing trauma for those whose belatedness can still absorb the past truth and truths. Celan is the poet of the Shoah and he is acknowledged as such in criticism, music, architecture, and (American) Jewish poetic homage. The very obscurity of Celan’s works calls forth the questions of hermeneutics and reception, not only of Celan but also of the Shoah. Celan’s exemplary Shoah poem, Death Fugue (Todesfuge), despite his reasonable disavowal, has stirred homage from at least two significant (American Jewish) poets: Edward Hirsch and C. K. Williams. The poem has retained its brilliance despite Celan’s unhappiness about its reception in Germany. He composed perhaps his greatest poem Stretto in some way to replace Death Fugue. Brilliantly analyzed by his younger friend Peter Szondi, Stretto (Engfurung) has attracted critical analysis in the United States by (among others) Pierre Joris and Esther Cameron and of course John Felstiner. 17 The homage(s) and the interpretations of Celan’s work in their differences may speak to subtle and not so subtle understandings of what constitutes an authentic Jew, and what is left of the Holocaust for Jews and for American Jews concerning Israel. This is part of what it means to be a secular Jew with spirit in the United States. Celan was more than a great poet: he was a superb translator with a thousand pages of translation of Mandelstam, Emily Dickenson and many others, in many languages. The level of close reading of all his work, including his prose commenting on his poetic practice, commends itself to the law as well. Kafka, himself a lawyer, famously captured “the law before the law.” Celan was a reader of Kafka, and like him drew on Jewish Kabbalah, and evoked the uncanny of the displaced person. The uncanny one would think is anathema to law and state. Yet the truth of Kafka and Celan captures something about politics and law. There is something uncanny about thinking law after the Holocaust as if it did not happen, as if constitutions can constrain future Holocausts. Pierre Joris, who has spent a lifetime with Celan’s poetry (and attributes his own commitments as a poet upon hearing Death Fugue while a student in Luxembourg), conjectures that the accusation of plagiarism (the Goll affair) triggered a trauma that Celan never surmounted, and to at least some degree led to the darkness of Celan’s later poems. 18 Joris also acknowledges (as have all the major commentators) that the reception of Death Fugue (Todesfugue) also significantly led to the later darker, more difficult style. This poem was well received and indeed became anthologized in Germany at a great psychological cost to the poet. The reception honored the lyricism but ignored its too obscure meaning. The poem was taken as a brilliant surreal creation, negating its prime thrust. So the poem was co-opted, Celan felt, as an acknowledgment of but not a resolution for German guilt. The poem

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further was anesthetized in its reception in Germany, a denigration of its object. Death Fugue (Todesfuge) was originally entitled Berlin, December 22/3, 1967, a late poem published during Celan’s life. Peter Szondi, a friend of the poet and one of his significant commentators, unlocked a difficult poem that, without his aid, would have defied clarity. I will not present Szondi’s gloss except in part, but will provide the poem for a taste of its difficulty. Celan moreover is an intentionally difficult poet to comprehend and, to many, incomprehensible. I want to familiarize the reader with Celan’s work, and do not intend significant textual exegesis. You lie amid a great listening, enhedged, enflaked. Go to the Spree, to the Havel, to the butchers’ hooks, the red apple stakes from Sweden— Now comes the gift-laden table, It turns around an Eden— The man becomes a sieve, the woman, The sow, had to swim, For herself, for no one, for everyone— The Landwehr Canal will not murmur. Nothing stops. 19

Szondi, who was with Celan in Berlin, fortuitously gave him a book concerned with the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. While driving through Berlin he pointed out the Eden apartments—the place the two army captives spent their incarcerated lives. Szondi’s gloss provides texture to the poem and light on Celan’s practice. But Celan knew that future readers would not be privy to such information and would situate Eden differently from the singularity of passing the apartments. Celan demands the same kind of study that Joyce, Eliot, Pound and others demand. But in our time few poets receive such attention. So we are left with a scene of violation, denigration and stagnation: “the Landwehr Canal will not murmur.” It will also not give up its secrets. Some of Celan’s poems capture the reader and the hearer even if the gloss is unclear and the language not our own. Such for me at least was his famous early representation of concentration camp living. But this fixing on the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg is transparent when examined against

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much of his later work. This work seeks to both use German and to fashion German into something free of Nazi experience. He both sought to restore and to fix the moments under his poetic lens. Celan’s Death Fugue (Todesfuge) brought so much early attention after the war in West Germany that he later refused permission to reprint it and at public readings refused to recite it. I place the Stretto (Engfurung) below, the poem that “replaced” Death Fugue when Celan wished to stop its cooptation. One can readily hear the shift in musicality and accessibility between the two stellar poems, and one can follow Celan’s poetry and poetics striving against the aesthetic towards creating a German language free of Nazi usurpation. I read a thematic progression that fits both Celan’s avowed intention and the poetry he produced. Taken off into the terrain with the unmistakable trace:

Grass, written asunder. The stones, white With the grassblades’ shadows: Read no more—look! Look no more—go!

Go, your hour has no sisters, you are— are at home. Slowly a wheel rolls out of itself, the spokes clamber, clamber on the blackened field, night needs no stars, nowhere are you asked after

Nowhere are you asked after— The place where they lay, it has A name—it has None. They did not lie there. Something Lay between them. They Did not see through it. [The poem continues in part] At owl’s flight, near the Petrified lepra, near our fugitive hands, at the latest rejection, above the bullet trap on the ruined wall:

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166 [I skip to near the end] Therefore Temples still stand. A star may still give light. Nothing. nothing is lost. [And at the end he finishes] Taken off Into the terrain with the unmistakable trace: Grass. Grass, written asunder) 20

Contrast this part of Stretto with Todesfuge—the poem that the Germans took as reconciliation. Each poem has been recorded so that one can hear Celan’s voice. Certainly Death Fugue should be heard even for those of us who lack German (and Celan’s reading is available on the web). The contrast with the ground, grass asunder, not so pleasant a landscape, and star still allow a merging of a whole world but it is where—despite the deaths (the place where they lay) and the reality of the bullet trapped on the ruined wall—still sisters (the feminine, Mother, Shekinah), still Temple, still traces present a modicum of hope. But the unmistakable trace is still the extermination, if “only” a parenthetical moment. There is no name for these victims, no care for them—so much for knowledge even after the fact (Hegel’s Minerva’s owl). What has humanity learned from history: the Nazi extermination is “the latest rejection.” Consider as well the relationship between trace and ruin: Levinas and later Derrida talk of trace as the string that may reach back to the Bible (for Levinas to the Talmud) and perhaps provide a glimmer of the original meanings. Ruins become not only markers but postcards: Death Fugue Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink we drink we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to stay close

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he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground he commands us play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there others sing up and play he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue stick your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening we drink and we drink a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers

He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise then as smoke to the sky you’ll then have a grave then in the clouds there you won’t lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith 21

According to Felstiner, Stretto is Celan’s “most demanding poem.” He cites Celan as saying to an interviewer on receiving the Buchner prize in Bremen: “In my first book I was still transfiguring things—I’ll never do that again!” Engführung reconceived the manner of Todesfugue going beyond the pathos

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of black milk, exploring memory itself as a dimension of the original trauma. 22 Felstiner provides an insight into the problems of translating the poem into English, as well as its continued reception in Germany to this day. The phrase “black milk” was part of the Goll libel charge, and has its own genealogy, one that Felstiner finds in Lamentations. Primo Levi acknowledged using the phrase without attribution as homage to Celan. Was the phrase an inspired metaphor along with “a grave in the air”? Felstiner makes the case that the phrase can be construed literately as the “tango” beat that played in the camps. Celan certainly was acutely aware of his linguistic formulation and its polysemic possibilities. The mourning of the fugue and the hypnotic lamentation constrain a horror and anxiety. As his poetry develops, the move is toward confronting the trauma of the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Primo Levi, always the hardnosed scientist who rejected obscurantism, was nonetheless drawn to Celan’s poetry as language before language—coping with death and attempting to stay alive. Still, Levi protested against Celan’s obscurity and the fact of his suicide. Ulrich Bauer argues that Celan’s poetry is in line with others, including Baudelaire, and advances the poetry of trauma. 23 Bauer traces the themes of the urban lyric from the first poet of trauma, Baudelaire, as he undercuts the ground from poetic transcendence to the internal. The poem is its own ground: its language doubles back on itself and refuses the mimetic. Baudelaire already undercuts key lyric themes in altering landscape and blindness toward opening the trauma of everyday, inarticulate urban experience. Baudelaire uncannily or perhaps only fortuitously captured the essential in urban poverty and human dignity. In a prose poem, he describes being panhandled by a poor man. The poet proceeds to physically assault the fellow who at first remains abject. But then he fights back: they pound each other to a draw. The poet then goes into his purse, divides his limited resources into two, and hands them to the poor fellow. So there are definite antecedents for Celan’s difficult practice. Baudelaire’s lyric takes us toward Celan and away from the lyric form. The image of “black milk” even resonates for contemporary Jewish poets. Witness Harvey Shapiro’s For Paul Celan and Primo Levi: A coming to terms with man’s savagery? God’s savagery? 24

Shapiro’s smoke is the black of Celan known to him and American (Jewish) poets and still drifting, not settling, not only man’s savagery but God’s as well?

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Celan’s influence on modern poetry is clear, but so too Heidegger’s influence on his own lyric style. Lyon makes clear how deeply Celan read into Heidegger, to what extent he absorbed the philosopher’s language. Celan was moved by Heidegger because he realized that independently they shared a view of poetry and poetics. Celan was an intellectual who studied different branches of science (and almost any other discipline) in the service of his struggle—to represent the unrepresentable Holocaust. Celan demanded of himself no less than to re-appropriate the German language from its Nazi contagion. So the call to Heidegger becomes clear. But they did not agree on everything about the task of poetry. Heidegger thought that poetry (and here he is thinking of Hölderlin) aspires to universal Being. Celan aspired not to some universal truth but the truth of the historical in all its particularity, unencumbered by artifice. He did figure beyond the concrete into the question of Judaism and the problematics of the beyond, but not at the loss of concrete biology, geology and other hard objects to ground understanding and human encounter. Here are the key words in Celan’s testimony on visiting Heidegger: Arnica, Eyebright, the drink from the well with the star-die on top, in the hut, into the book —whose name did it take in before mine?— the line written into this book about a hope, today for a thinker’s (undelayed coming) word into the heart, 25

The poem goes on. The hope of explanation, of contrition, or understanding was denied. No word was offered to the heart or head. And the poem ends: “the floating sword/is at dusk.” Celan allows for openness into being and the future if not a response from Heidegger. Lyon agrees that the poem expresses disappointment that Heidegger refused to apologize publicly for his complicity with the Nazi regime, but he makes a case that Heidegger privately admitted fault. Celan never understood that.

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For Joris, the poem does respond to Heidegger but has a larger reach beyond that encounter. He reads the poem not only as a response to his disappointment with Heidegger, but also as something more telling: 26 Celan does not simply reduce the questions that haunt him to bad or good communications between humans, to misunderstandings that a better “understanding,” philosophical or other could sublate. For Celan, that ominous darkness pervades, is inherent in, the world. Beyond the contention with Heidegger’s specific ideological aberration, the poem points to a radical pessimism that includes, but does not originate in Heidegger or in fascist ideology. 27

In his book Turbulence, Joris instructs what Celan was all about and how to view each of his poems: re Sorbin’s work : two ways of working, essentially: first the veritical/ spine poem that turns /twists on Grammatik, cf: ‘compose. (no ideas but in . . .)’ grammatik 28

Joris explains the necessity of following each line, title, and word “always downward, vertical straights, sharpest clinamen, always downward, screws itself into, earth.” In his critique of Gadamer and even of Lacoue-Labarthe, Joris follows his own advice and digs deeply, following Celan who always dug as deeply as possible despite the pain of the digging. Celan’s wrestling continued in his address on accepting the Buchner Prize. The talk provides instruction on Celan’s poetics and provokes a contrast with all later serious political poetry. The uncanny, the problematics of art, the body of the poet and of the witness are aspects of the short Meridian speech. The uncanny is an aspect of the theories of anxiety and trauma that enlist and separate Heidegger from Freud. Alan Bass teases out the differences between the two. 29 Bass’s argument is that uncanniness for Heidegger is marked by the anxiety of the individual’s incapacity to ever feel at home. But most retreat from the threat of the unfamiliar. The resultant conformity leads to a split in consciousness that results in a feeling of dislocation and oddness. For Freud as well the individual comes into the world and starts life with a primary sense of the uncanny in that the internalization of the other, even with a nurturing mother, is discordant to the unstructured self. The splitting of the ego marks the uncanny and is the subject for objectrelations psychoanalysis to this day. Kligerman likewise argues that homelessness marks the uncanny. Antigone is one place where Heidegger deals with the uncanny. Kligerman points here to Heidegger’s marking two moments of the uncanny or not being

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home. 30 Antigone is not at home in this world and not in the world of the Gods—a separation from both the human and metaphysical realm. If, as Kligerman suggests, Heidegger’s move to translating and entering the Greek world constitutes entry into the uncanny, how much more so for Celan writing in the German of the enemies of his and all peoples—the uncanny indeed. But theory cannot do justice to the uncanny. Aristotle defines the good by pointing to good in the world. We can do no better than pointing to Kafka and Celan who create that space where we feel dislocated, confused and suffused with a sense of unreality that marks the uncanny. The Meridian is a rich, short address as unsurprising complex and difficult as is Celan’s poetry. In Celan’s reference to Buchner, who as a playwright introduced the uncanny into his own work, the sense of weirdness and homelessness becomes alive. The Meridian speech has been subject to rigorous analyses by Celan interpreters, for it deals with the metaphysical truth of humanity, history, the organic and stone. As such it continues a dialogue with Heidegger’s lebenswelt. For Lacoue-Labarthe, at stake for Celan and for poetry is the following question: “But can we, today, think a Poem without any Mytheme, one that has not renounced neither thinking itself . . . nor foretelling for human beings what is necessary. Here too it is a question of an imperative.” The quote claims that “Celan, for one, never ceased his attempts to respond to such a question, and that these attempts involved hand-to-hand combat with Heidegger’s overinterpretation of poetry.” 31 So now, to his Meridian. Celan spent considerable time on this short work, writing draft after draft. We are fortunate to have copies of those drafts, recently edited by Bernhard Boschenstein and Heino Schmull (and translated by Pierre Joris). 32 Joris spent seven years on the translation for Stanford University Press, adducing each of the numerous drafts of the short speech into a long and complex book. The speech is obscure and dark, fitting Celan’s context. The occasion was an award from a nation that had murdered his people, together with so many others, and had disparaged his work as plagiarized or, equally disheartening, as surreal. He invokes the uncanny but it must have seemed uncanny to be present at such an occasion. He did justice to the moment: a Kafkaesque judgment. He also replicated in the speech the key to his poetics. Let’s spot some of the issues that Celan wanted his audience to contemplate. He starts with art and turns to Buchner’s works: Woyzeck, Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and a fragment on the playwrite Lenz. Celan considers art as puppetry, art as carnival, as “mutable, tough, and long lived . . . an eternal problem.” 33 Buchner, according to Celan, characterizes art as constituted by lots of talk, but many do not listen or hear. Buchner even catches a degree of humor in the folly and disaster of the French Revolution. His hero,

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Danton, actually a moderate in comparison to the other revolutionaries, dies but without bowing down. Celan is in accord with Buchner: “Homage . . . to the majesty of the absurd.” 34 “This is poetry,” so Celan teaches—a simple statement after acknowledging the carnivalesque nature of Buchner’s setups. From Buchner to Mallarme marks Celan’s tracing through the uncanny. But Buchner’s Lenz forgets himself. Art creates what Celan calls “I distance.” Poetry moves to the “strange,” to the uncanny, but Celan asks where does it end when through this movement it gains a peculiar kind of freedom. The Lenz manuscript is a fragment. The historical Lenz was a noted playwright with a very abbreviated career. Buchner in the Lenz fragment deals with questions of madness, genius, friendship, and ultimate loss. Celan, following Buchner, notes that Lenz’s existence was a necessary burden. Buchner has Lenz walking through nature, talking with a few confidants, but ultimately succumbing to depression, leaving no trace of his burial place. Buchner’s Lenz wanted to walk on his head, flirted with the abyss, and approached liminality. The world inverted, sky where ground should be: the precariousness of wanting to walk on his head and not upright. The Lenz fragment is obscure, Celan notes, but marks the need for poetry to work through strangeness and the uncanny. The poem is an encounter—it needs the other in specificity. Celan quotes Walter Benjamin on Kafka, the uncanny underlined: “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul?” Celan’s work marks encounter, two Jews talking, but not the vibrant, athletic, hero and heroine of Hitler’s banal cinematic romances. 35 Celan’s encounter is in a long history of philosophic dialogues beginning with Plato, but here by a poet who demands a careful, attentive readership. Socrates talked only to the few and did so unpersuasively in his Apology. Celan is still talking with poets and commentators. And then this strange, estranged moment, for all its poetic obscurity, is “poetry that can mean a breathturn:” Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route—also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa’s head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down—for this single short moment? Perhaps here with the I— with the estranged I set free here and in this manner—perhaps here further Other is set free. 36

Shortly after the Meridian speech Celan published Psalm, a poem where Felstiner believes Celan’s “breath-turn” marks poetry as a “turning, a revolution of the spirit in him and in us.” 37 The poem takes in the Christian moment, where Celan affirms his Jewish commitment: Psalm

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No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one. Blessed art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite. A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be , blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One’s- rose. With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corolla red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn. 38

The poem has attracted both commentary and also poetic homage. Eliot Wolfson, one of the significant Kabbalah scholars of this time, has invoked the poem in an essay as well as using it as muse for his own poetics. Wolfson identifies the poem with the naming of the forty-sixth name of God from an anonymous Kabbalist text. 39 The gravamen of the commentary both enlighten and warn about the invocation of God’s name(s) that, properly constructed, represent a ladder to connect to God’s soul. But the namings are hidden and so left unclarified except to the cognoscenti. Celan’s encounter demanded a burden as well. One can readily see this in Levinas and his demand for a radical responsibility to the other: defying and challenging Heideggerian ontology with the Jewish demand for the a priori of the ethical: defying the ethical, defying the human. How can one think, just think after the Holocaust, and not become deranged or livid and vengeful? Celan turned to his Jewishness with frustration toward the unopened door: To one who stood before the Door, one evening: to him I opened my word -: . . . Rabbi , I gnashed , Rabbi Low:

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Leonard V. Kaplan for this one write the living Nothing in the heart, for this one spread the two cripple-fingers in hallowing sentence. For this one. Slam shut the eveningdoor, Rabbi. Fling the morning door open, Ra- 40

Are we to read the door as the door to the Talmudic and paradisal rooms of the early Talmud heaven, of the four sages who attempt to reach God, the door of “before the law”? Celan was after a new language: not a golem, untainted by history, but one alive to history. In this he was not original. Morse Peckham in the 1960s pointed out that the quest for identity and a new politics beyond tragedy was already a significant theme for composers, artists, playwrights, novelists and poets in the nineteenth century. 41 Celan in his poetry survived his suicide, and like the paradigmatic Jew left us with texts as objects and as scenes of instruction. He defied Aristotle in that he presented scenes that admitted to no either/or but to the quandary itself about how to live, what to do, and how to cope with the dangers of life and politics. He presented poetry that offered concrete fact and reached beyond. Celan demanded a sensitive reader. He was about bearing witness with his own blood, Jacob and the Angel, the bloody knuckles of the Talmudic exegete. In a culture that does not read poetry, Celan could only attract readers who must believe their labor counts, and for this there is the Jewish Talmudic tradition where every commentator counts and all voices are to be heard. Therein is Celan’s demand: a pluralism and a singularity. CELAN RECEIVED American poets and indeed Efraim Sicher in his book, The Holocaust Novel, pay homage to Celan, and this from American novelists and short story writers as well. Cynthia Ozick and Thane Rosenbaum are among those in the United States who have appropriated Celan for their fiction. 42 But I will highlight the American poets here, for they have incorporated his lament, his instruction, and his poetics into their work. Edward Hirsch said about Celan in his Paul Celan: A Grave and Mysterious Sentence, that he thinks that Todesfugue “may be the greatest Holocaust poem ever written.” He finishes his homage in his own words: The slate clarity of another day Forever breaking behind the smokestacks. 43

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Hirsch captures the fragility of personal security that comes with such memory. In a later poem, he prays in memory of Celan: like burning tongs, a tongue of flame. A scouring eagle wheels and shrieks. 44

Without invoking Job, Hirsch still does so, but demands a response from God. Hirsch prays not for himself but for a worthy, anguished Celan who responds beyond himself for the other/Other. Jacqueline Osherow captures a sadness and enigma in her portrait of her cousin Abe and thoughts of the loss of past promise in her My Cousin Abe, Paul Antschel and Paul Celan. In the poem, Abe knew Antschel in childhood, but with his own Holocaust experience and survival cannot understand Celan’s act of suicide. Her second stanza reads as profound bewilderment: Do you remember him? For twelve your classmate? A Yiddish speaker, religious, quick at math? I was telling him about his great lantzman –poet And he identified you by your death: He killed himself? In Paris? In the Siene? His name is Paul Antschel, not Celan.

After traversing a life, and the lives of the ordinary at this extraordinary time, the poem ends with Abe’s voice: “What could have happened? He is bruised, distraught, What could have made him do a thing like that? 45 Esther Cameron presents another face in the encounter with Celan and Judaism, and has struggled mightily on this issue. She wrote her dissertation on Celan, and as did Joris was enthralled with his poetry. Herself a serious poet, Cameron details in a set of analyses her explication of his work, his relationship to Jewish mysticism, and to rabbinic Judaism. She also had a rare opportunity to meet him in Paris shortly before his suicide, but they failed to meet, and she painfully withdrew. Cameron remains true to his work and has integrated his poetics into her own. 46 After converting to Judaism, Cameron moved to Israel as she began work on Celan (she has since returned), joined Chabad, and presented an aggressive defense of contemporary Israel. Though she was unaware of his last poems at the time, she published a hymn to the Sabbath as homage to Celan. The poem was entitled, Invitation: We gather here to see faces from which we need not hide our face,

The poet wishes relief from competition and seeks a place of sanctuary, a place to transcend discord and distrust: a place of communal problem solv-

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ing. She is not looking for some ideal home, some utopian place, but a place for hope. The poem concludes in this way: For, looking back from here upon the world, perhaps ways will appear to us, which when we only struggled in it, did not take counsel of kindred minds, lay undiscovered; perhaps, reflecting on the Babeled speech of various disciplines that make careers, we shall find out some speech by which to address each sector of the world’s fragmented truth and bring news of the whole to every part. We say the mind, once whole, can mend the world. To mend the mind, that is the task we set. How many years? How many lives? We do not know; but each shall bring a thread. 47

Celan wrote of “threadsuns,” much like the mending of the world captured in this prayer. The term “threadsuns” is an allusion to the mystical sefirot and the threads from nature: a withdrawn God that must be and perhaps can be reconstituted. From a very different Judaism, Celan also worried for the concrete Israel, and in fact expressed unhappiness with some of its policies. C. K. Williams captures much of my literary experience in his recent book Wait. 48 He also expresses well Celan’s ethos in one short poem. In Either/Or, he writes of angel-bees. 49 Williams does not offer us new language but transparent meaning and political depth. He describes a landscape that is not benign—no daffodils here—and sees biological life as struggle. He exposes the angel-bees as bereft of the stars moored to dust, and matter as hard but sloping. This he shares with Celan: Williams works the personal and the political when so many poets constrain their work to the personal: Raskolnokov hasn’t slept. For days. In his brain, something like white. A wave stopped in mid-leap. Thick, slow, white. Or maybe it’s brain. Brain in his brain. Old woman’s brain. Old woman’s brain on the filthy floor of his brain. 50

The poem invokes Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The would-be superman is trapped in poverty and in himself, a lost and wandering murderer. But then he sees JEW (capitalized, universalized) on a bridge. Celan, of course, jumped from a bridge: “My deathfugue. My black milk of daybreak.” Yet here is a poem that Celan no longer wanted to revisit nor recite. Who is the “Jew on Bridge,” so suspended, so locked-in, so caught in the Medusa’s gaze? Did Celan jump because of guilt that he did not convince his parents to leave in time, a survivor’s guilt? What kind of Jew, Williams asks:

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Do I need forgiveness for my depression? My being depressed like a Jew? All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew? I don’t want some vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew. I want certainty, science: everything you are, do think; think, do, are, is precisely twenty-two percent Jewish. Or six-and-a half. Some nice prime. Your suffering is Jewish. Your resistant, resilient pleasure in living, too, Can be tracked to some Jew on some bridge on some page or other In some city, some village, shtetl, some festering shvitz of a slum, With Jews with black hats or not, on their undershirts fringes or not. Celan on his bridge. Raskolnikov muttering Dostoevsky under his breath. Jew on Bridge. Raskolnikov-Dostoevsky still in my breath. Under my breath. Black milk of daybreak. Aschenes Harr. Antschel-Celan. Ash. Breath. 51

CONCLUSION Celan has become the secular Jew as Hebrew prophet demanding witness and action. He despairs but his poetry does not give in. His scenes of instruction are ancient and post-modern. His spirit and its suffering demand actions that we still do not understand how to effect. But like him we, those American secular Jews with spirit, are without excuse: Just Think: The bog soldier of Masada Conjures a home for himself, most inextinguishably, against every barb in the wire. Just Think: the eyeless ones without gestalt lead you freely through the throngs, you grow stronger and stronger. Just Think: your own hand has held this bit of habitable earth, suffered up again into life. Just Think: this came towards me,

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178 name-awake, hand-awake, for ever, from the unburiable. 52

Think the specific and the universal, the physical hand that writes the poetry and that takes up the history of the heroic and futile Masada, the repetition of existence through time, and think what name and the burden with the life that comes as a burden, awake. Celan’s just think conveys both the reception of the necessary to thinking and the difficulty of passing through that reception. He takes on both the thing and the think, two of Heidegger’s categories. Heidegger—forever smug in his hut and Celan—in the Seine. Truth. NOTES 1. Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar eds., The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012). I want to dedicate this essay to three “Philadelphia” friends: Arnie Eisen (theologian), Bill Sherman (poet), and Vince Rinella (psychologist-lawyer). I also want to acknowledge the help from several people: Bonnie Sucha and the staff of the Wisconsin Law School library; Theresa Evans and Sue Sawatske who each helped me take the dibbuk from my word processor; Esther Cameron, poet and Celan expert for her input on several drafts; Ken Koltun-Fromm for his close editing though I did not follow some of his sage suggestions; Pierre Joris, poet and Celan translator and commentator; and Bill Sherman, poet who put me on to David Meltzer and to Jack Hirschman. I want also to acknowledge and thank both John Felstiner and C. K. Williams who each reviewed the text and saved me from embarrassing errors. 2. Recently Oren Izenberg has attempted to reconceptualize today’s poetry into a taxonomy for poetry which achieves both particularity and transcendence from non-poetry. He follows Bloom, who once rated T. S. Eliot a non-poet. Izenberg recognizes the problem of any notion of transcendence being relevant to contemporary consciousness save for the few cognoscenti who read or write or professionally analyze poetics or individual poems. Izenberg’s project is one of the many who still value the power of poetry to reach a truth that is distinguished from other attempts to represent truth. See his Being Numerous, Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 3. The secular Jew as a reality beyond a figure has become a clearer type over many years and does not depreciate the Jewishness of the designation. Perhaps the origin of secularity for the Jew dates to Spinoza at least so Yirmiyahu Yovel argues. See his two volume work, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4. Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 6. The question of the Messiah for modernity is fascinating. Frankfurt theorists imposed the messianic to counter Heidegger’s nihilism. Elliot R. Wolfson has given us a subtle account of messianic thought in recent mystical thought. He argues that Schneerson’s account of Messianism presents a paradox and certainly does not turn the dead Rebbe into the coming but rather into a liberation from the trap of looking for essence and liberation itself. We are in the territory of Heidegger’s freedom of openness to the future buttressed by Jewish mystical hermeneutics with Buddhist enrichment. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic

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Messianism and the Mystical Revisionism of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 7. See for example Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 8. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 9. Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); also see Wolfson, Open Secret. My guess is that for many in Schneerson’s surviving community his message has been lost in a reification of his figure, another graven image. 10. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 343. 11. Ibid., note 4, page 35. 12. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 370; HansGeorge Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who am I and Who are You” and Other Essays, trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State University of New York, 1993); Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 40; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). 13. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Correspondence, edited by Barbara Wiedemann (Riverdaleon-the Hudson: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). I comment on Derrida’s significant essay Sovereignties in Question, The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) in a longer version of this essay, including the fraught question of circumcision and language as well as Derrida’s take-down (deconstruction) of Gadamer’s reduction of Celan to a hollow literality. See also Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 14. Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 359. Recent commentators have reviewed the state of the lyric after the Holocaust. See Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 216, where she remarks that Lucy Dawidowitz, as early as 1937 and a literature student determined that she should change focus from romantic poets to Jewish history, asking herself, “what did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time.” Dawidowitz became a significant historian of the Holocaust. Guyer in close readings of Celan affirms that such poetry matters and that it did and will go on in any event. See too Adorno’s take on Celan in Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 295. 15. See Dennis J. Schmidt, “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1994), 120. 16. Jerome Rothenberg, “Paul Celan: A Memoir and a Poem,” in Homage to Paul Celan, eds. Ilya Kaminsky and G. C. Waldrep (Grosse Pointe Farms: Marick Press, 2011), 215. Rothenberg wrote his letter to Celan: Of how your poems arise in me alive my eye fixed on your line “light was salvation” He continues later in the letter: you said “jew” @ I said” jew”

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180 though neither spoke the jew words jew tongue neither the mother language loshen the vestiges of holy speech but you said “pain”

The poem goes on. The poem—written in 1975 along with a memoir of the 1958 meeting in Paris—captures the two poets, the shared space, the attempt to communicate the commitment to Judaism though both secular, though Rothenberg “wasn’t yet aware of the turn toward brilliant Judaisms his work had taken. . . .” But another observation true for many American Jews, “the Jewish thing was what we largely spoke about—with more ambivalence on both sides. . . .” (213-4). 17. Peter Szondi, Celan Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Pierre Joris, Justifying the Margins (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2009), 82; and John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 18. Pierre Joris, Justifying the Margins, 81. Clair Goll, the widow of a poet that Celan translated, accused Celan of plagiarism. The accusation was false but it never stopped haunting Celan. The various letters between Celan and Nelly Sacks, Ingeborg Bachman and Ilana Schmueli provide insight into this incident and into Celan’s personal love, struggles and anguish. Though he committed suicide, though he was involuntarily placed in an institution in Paris, though he was given electroshock and was on medication, Celan continued to write significant poetry. I would argue that despite the guilt and trauma from the fate of his parents and the attempt to co-op his work by some commentators in Germany, though he was libeled in the Goll affair, Celan resisted what in too many would have destroyed creativity. It is a testament to his fortitude that he sustained until he could no longer do so. 19. Szondi, Celan Studies, 83-4. 20. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 119-31. 21. Ibid., 31-33. 22. Ibid., 125. 23. Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. 24. . Harvey Shapiro, “For Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” in Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish Poetry, ed. Steven J. Rubin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 169. 25. Felstiner, Selected Poems, 315. 26. Joris, Justifying the Margins, 94-100. 27. Ibid., 98-9. 28. Pierre Joris, Turbulence (Rhinebeck, New York: St. Lazaire Press, 1991), 32. For a longer and powerful tribute to Celan from Joris, see “The Book of Luap Nalec” in Homage, 224-27. Two sections read: Celan dares go further, Faden sun through threadbare web, his breath turned to water The poem continues:

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Time broke us in, saddled us with a sadness (post-modern, no, post-mortem) its vigor the rigor of water now frozen, the white silenced sheet, Pleitocene 29. Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Stanford: Stanford University, 2006). 30. Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 93. 31. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 35. 32. Paul Celan, The Meridian, eds. Bernhard Boschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986), 17. Waldrop argues that this very short dialogue captures the alienation of the Jew from others and from self. 36. Celan, The Meridian, 29 a/b. 37. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, 167. 38. Felstiner, Selected Poems, 157. Two other influential American Jewish poets pick up on Celan’s Psalms. David Meltzer, in his poem Monkey, picks up on the carnival and the monkey in the Meridian near the end of his three-page poem: Gelobt seist du, Niemand. Dir zuleib wollen Wir bluhn. Dir entgegen. This is word for word the second paragraph of Celan’s Psalm. Melzer ends his poem— which alludes to the contemporary horrors of the fraudulence of culture, negation of reality with Hollywood, narcotics, and the self-absorption of masturbation—with this verse: “It’s a real tree my words mistake for light.” Reality should not be confused with evasion and hallucination. Further, Jack Hirschman in his, “The Sheer Arcane, For Paul Celan and David Melzer,” works through the kabbalistic voyage that is only an aspect of Celan’s work, invoking Abulafia (who initiated “the deconstruction of God by poetry”) and Luria: leaving a light under the tongue of the centuries which were murdered outright and dumped into Auschwitz pits, the abandonment of God began beginning as not –being every instant. Hirshman addresses Celan and his experience. He talks about how, if together they saw the bikini panties slipping into view of a woman at a café, they would both “embarrassedly” move

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to the Shekinah and then to Heidegger and Derrida. Hirschman too laments Celan’s end: and in a time when suicide is a form, of brutal sacrifice under religious garb, I think of you own, tomorrow 35 years ago, when you entered into the Seine because pain had gotten to the bottom of everything you could feel or think of with its own mystery of mysteries. See David Meltzer, The Selected Poems of David Meltzer, introduction by Jerome Rothenberg (London: Penguin Poets, 2005), 161-63; also, www.bigbridgeorg/issue/dmpoethirschman. htm. Rothenberg specifically names Hirshman and Meltzer as sharing a secular and Jewish poetical project and mentions his one meeting with Paul Celan as well. See Jerome Rothenberg, “The House of Jews, Experimental Modernism and Traditional Jewish Practice,” in Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, eds. Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 32-39. Rothenberg in the same essay states that homelessness is an aspect of his and the poetry of others. This is his interpretation of the claim that all poets are Jews. If that is the case, the notion of the uncanny is even more than homelessness; it is the psychological state of the self not fitting in with its own reality or the reality that the world brings to it. 39. Barbara Ellen Galli, On Wings of Moonlight: Elliot R. Wolfson’s Poetry in the Path of Rosenzweig and Celan (Montreal: University of Montreal Press, 2007). 40. Quoted in Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 222. 41. Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1962). 42. Efraim Sicher, The Holocaust Novel (New York: Routledge, 2005). 43. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, ed. Charles Fishman (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1991), 132-33, 390. 44. Edward Hirsch, “In Memoriam Paul Celan,” in Homage to Paul Celan, 119. 45. Telling and Remembering, 468-70. 46. www.pointandcircumference.com/Celan/main.htm. 47. Ibid. In response to the author, Cameron replied: “I wrote ‘Invitation’ in 1975, before Celan’s last poem, with its tribute to the Sabbath, was published. I converted in 1979 and went to Israel in 1980; in 1990 I returned to the US but have remained in touch with the country— my 2009 poetry collection Fortitude (Bitzaron Books) is an aggressive defense of Israel, and am presently preparing to move back there.” 48. C. K. Williams, Wait (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010), 121. 49. Ibid., 102-3. 50. Ibid., 121-25. 51. Ibid., 123-24. 52. Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, 259-60.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodore. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Seabury Press, 1973. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. The Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

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Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bass, Alan. Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care. Stanford: Stanford University, 2006. Bennington, Geoffrey. Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. Edited by Charles Fishman. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1991. Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Translated by Rosemarie Waldrop. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986. ———. The Meridian. Edited by Bernhard Boschenstein and Heino Schmull. Translated by Pierre Joris. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Translated by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Gadamer, Hans-George. Gadamer on Celan: “Who am I and Who are You?” and Other Essays. Translated by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: State University of New York, 1993. Galli, Barbara Ellen. On Wings of Moonlight: Elliot R. Wolfson’s Poetry in the Path of Rosenzweig and Celan. Montreal: University of Montreal Press, 2007. Guyer, Sara. Romanticism After Auschwitz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Hammerschlag, Sarah. The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Jennings, Theodore W. Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Joris, Pierre. Justifying the Margins. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2009. ———. Turbulence. Rhinebeck, New York: St. Lazaire Press, 1991. Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen RosenstockHuessy and Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kaplan, Leonard V., and Rudy Koshar, editors. The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. Kligerman, Eric. Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper Names. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Meltzer, David. The Selected Poems of David Meltzer. London: Penguin Poets, 2005. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Correspondence. Edited by Barbara Wiedemann. Riverdale-on-the Hudson: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995. Peckham, Morse. Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1962. Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Rothenberg, Jerome. “Paul Celan: A Memoir and a Poem.” In Homage to Paul Celan, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and G. C. Waldrep. Grosse Pointe Farms: Marick Press, 2011. ———. “The House of Jews, Experimental Modernism and Traditional Jewish Practice.” In Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris, 32-39. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010. Schmidt, Dennis J. “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language.” In Word Traces, Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1994.

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Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Shapiro, Harvey. “For Paul Celan and Primo Levi.” In Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish Poetry, edited by Steven J. Rubin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. New York: Routledge, 2005. Szondi, Peter. Celan Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972. Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollender. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Williams, C. K. Wait. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2010. Wolfson, Elliot R. Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revisionism of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. ———. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Chapter Seven

Aura and the “Spiritual in Art” in the Age of Digital Reproduction Zachary Braiterman

Of course it is a cliché that by the end of the twentieth century and at the start of the twenty-first century contemporary culture has been constituted by technology and by photographic images in museums and galleries, at home, at work, and in the places in between on the street. But what about Judaism, and what does it look like inside the society of spectacle? If it is even possible to ask this question, it is because artificially enhanced nexi between culture, art, religious thought and practice emerge out of sensate materialities—visible, sonic, and also tactile, olfactory, and gustatory. Relative always to some historical time and geographical situ, these emergent nexi make it possible to say that any form of secular and/or religious culture looks, sounds, feels, tastes, or smells like “something.” All of this has gone under-theorized in contemporary Jewish thought and philosophy, including the importance of culture and place, and how the nexus between ideas and physical sensation conditions the dynamic possibilities at the intersection between religion and culture. In these pages to follow, I want to consider what contemporary Jewish religion or “spirituality” might look like through the photographic medium. I do so based on the presumption that, in our own image-saturated culture, photographic images are central to how one might realize commitments to religious and to secular thought, to religious enthusiasm and critical realism. My contention will be that art and technology are key to understanding (Jewish) religion and secularism in modern and contemporary culture; and today, that interface has to include photography in its purview. 1 To illustrate the impact of the visual arts on modern religion, consider the case of early twentieth-century German Jewish philosophy. Paying attention 185

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to its ideational-cultural matrix (the way ideas emerge out of flesh and the way ideas loop back to shape it) allows one to say that German Jewish thought “looked” like something. And if a critic wants to say, no, modern German Jewish philosophy does not look like anything, it may be because he or she does not know where or how to look. To read the German Jewish corpus is to bump constantly into literature, and also art, into Michelangelo, Monet, E. M. Lilien, Leser Ury, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse, Rilke, Stefan George, Kafka, Agnon, William Morris, and Mahler. Steeped in the imagination and in the dramatic arts and saturated by eros and color, the conceptual work of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, or Gershom Scholem assumed a highly “visual” character, formed around plastic figures such as God and man, fellow-man and world, the prophet, the Shulamith, the Hasid, the Jew, the messianic, Palestine. Modernist Jewish thought and culture were part of a larger cultural reception history of antique sculpture, baroque form, classical music, lyric poetry in the arts of impressionism, arts and crafts and Jugendstil design, cubism, expressionism, and neue sachlichkeit. 2 In comparison, modern and contemporary Jewish thought in the United States stands out as visually poor, with no countenance to meet the eye, no plastic frames of reference, and pale erotic force. Where even to begin? An American Jewish thought worthy of the name emerges out of works by Kaplan, Heschel, and Soloveitchik in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In his own important study of “material culture and Jewish thought in American,” Ken Koltun-Fromm locates the place of their thought in the cities and suburbs. 3 But what do American Jewish thought and philosophy look like? Jewish thought and philosophy never developed a distinctive look apart from a retardataire decorative expressionism that drew on woodcuts and on late works by Chagall with a little Rembrandt thrown into the mix. With no visage, mid-century modern and contemporary American Jewish thought and philosophy do not look like anything. Formless, there has been no conversation between Jewish philosophy and postwar and postmodern styles, not with Abstract Expressionism, and not with Pop Art, Conceptualism, Minimalism, photography, or performance art; and for that, modern and contemporary American Jewish thought lack liveliness. Largely concept driven, it has none of the perspicuity that only plastic intuition can lend to thought. In and after the age described by Walter Benjamin as “the age of mechanical reproduction,” anyone who is going to explore the relationship between religion-art-culture would have to consider possible lines of convergence between photography, technology, and theology. But Benjamin’s essay mostly underscores that this is not a simple venture. The problem immediately confronting any attempt to think through the relation between religion and the particular art form of photography is the problem of “aura,” which photography, according to Benjamin, has systematically stripped away. As

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the exemplary art of mechanical reproduction, photography as understood by Benjamin would have dead-ended religion and religious thought; but only if it is true that the former has destroyed forever the sense of aura so integral to the latter. Even without Benjamin’s famous analysis, one would be hardpressed to see how photography contributes to any discussion about religion, religiosity, or religious experience; at first glance, photography would seem to have its purview limited to the empirical things of the material world and to their “iconic” representation or resemblance. Of course, photography can document the visage of religious actors or ritual objects, place, and practices. But what about spiritual “things” or states; what about those phenomenal states of consciousness that do not lend themselves to mimetic realization? Can one photograph God? And what special effects would this require? My argument in this chapter proceeds as follows. As we will see below, Adorno rejected Benjamin’s claim that so-called mechanical art simply destroys aura once and for all, arguing that Benjamin had failed to negotiate the dialectical tension between photography and aura. Following Adorno’s lead, I will look to the dialectics between religion and technology in the thought of Joseph Soloveitchik, and then explore the sense of aura technologically caught in the “straight photography” and epistolary musings of Alfred Stieglitz. A pioneer in America of art photography in the first half of the twentieth century, Stieglitz provides the first bearings for these thoughts about technology and aura, photography and the spiritual in art. I will then turn to the intensified sense of aura, its visual rhetoric, in the digital photography of Neil Folberg. A student of the great naturalist Anselm Adams, Folberg brings Judaism and Jewish “religiosity” directly into a digitally produced photographic milieu. His photographs allow one to consider how, under the right affective and cognitive conditions, technologically enhanced digital images turn out to be familiar and disorienting, worldly and other worldly. Indeed, “spiritual” values seem always to seep into claims made by theorists writing about photography, seeping into the interplay between realism, anti-realism in relation to the indexical character and cult-value of art-photography. The upshot is this: the most mimetic of art forms turns out to be non-mimetic, lending itself to a kind of thinking about religion that is invested in the worldly structures which the image simultaneously outstrips. That modern Jewish thought has been unable to say anything about photography—the art form that has come more and more to dominate postwar aesthetics—is to have left modern Judaism out in a kind of cold that the more visually informed doyens of German Jewish thought and philosophy never once allowed Judaism to suffer.

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AURA To even begin to think about photography in relation to contemporary Jewish thought and culture, one must do some necessary preparatory spadework around the heavy blockage set up by Walter Benjamin’s argument about photography and aura in the 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” First appearing in English translation in 1968, this essay, by now a cultural studies classic, quickly became one of the most cited texts in photo-theory. It is in this essay that Benjamin famously identified and called for the “liquidation” of “aura” in the interest of revolutionary criticism. About this thesis and its claims, so much has been written, but almost none of it has come from the perspective of modern religious studies and certainly not from Jewish philosophy. In light of the nimbus of hagiography and genius hanging around his image, it most often seems to be that writers writing about Benjamin’s thesis tend to accept it at his word. Any interest in pursuing the intersection between art, religion, and technology is thus instantaneously brought up short by the essay. The dogmatism expressed by him about the liquidation of aura is ironic, seeing that one of the abiding points of interest about Benjamin for modern religious studies and contemporary religious thought might have more to do with how images and their idea frame his project overall than with the particular patois of messianism, redemption and revolution for which his work is also known. According to Gerhard Richter, the “thought-image” in Benjamin’s work is one built up as an assemblage of “philosophical miniatures,” “as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engagements with the conceptual.” 4 No matter what the object of analysis, or the metaphysical or anti-metaphysical temper at this or that stage in his life, the methodology was remarkably consistent. Benjamin develops and critically deploys the image mediated via the photograph, cinema, the historical past, the metaphysical, language, art, hashish. He does so in order to shock, break, and become free from individuated bourgeois consciousness, society and habit, the cultural petrifaction of things, the rigormortis of modern culture, commodity markets, the complete absorption of things into names, the sign character of language, instrumental reason, and so on. As critic, Benjamin unlocks the redemptive force in the image of whatever stripe, following, as per Susan Buck-Morss, the movement of thought from the dream image into political awakening. 5 The theo-political edge to the work of the thought-image relates to what Benjamin understood to be the necessarily mediated character of the absolute. All the attention paid by Benjamin to the image, to profane illuminations, and the redemptive potential of shock aesthetics would have seemed ready-made for the kind of crypto theology haunting Benjamin’s profile as a heterodox Marxist. In his early theological musings, the absolute or truth

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appears as the extra-mundane force of pure expressivity inscribed into language and images. In his more mature work, he turned to historical materialism, and also to surrealism, without quite abandoning religious frames of reference. From either side of the scholarly divide, many have simply concluded that the attempt to fuse theology and historical materialism was an unhappy one. Rather than enter into the scrum between mysticism and Marxism, one might prefer instead to follow the lead set by Buck-Morss and “remember that theology animates historical materialism, but to keep this knowledge invisible because to call it by name would cause its truth to vanish.” 6 Central to the argument about religion and politics in his work, “aura” and technology constitute the two key terms undergirding the ambivalence in Benjamin’s thought regarding religion and the place of religion in the modern world. And if aura is key to understanding this ambivalence, then the fate of religion in Benjamin’s writing would be bound up with photography. Aura, not messianism or redemption, is the thought-image that brings Benjamin deepest into “religious” discourse, even as the thought of its liquidation keeps him distant from religion. Crystallizing his call for the “liquidation” of aura, photography took him far from the dream world of religion and into the political awakening promised by historical materialism, the gross form of which remained forever foreign to his own thought and worldview. Belief that photography has destroyed aura put the brake on that very religious impulse identified by Buck-Morss and others animating the image work in his thought-world. Appearing throughout his literary career, Benjamin’s understanding of aura was surprisingly consistent. Like a nimbus, aura would refer to something distinct but intangible, to a radiance or color surrounding objects, persons, or gods. The properties evoked by aura for Benjamin include these associations but prove more idiosyncratic. Already in the book on the German Baroque, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), aura is steeped in religion and images, defined by the sense of distance, authority, and transcendence in a work of art and associated with ritual. Like the idea of “the holy” in the Hebrew Bible, an auratic thing is spatially set apart from the regular world of ordinary material objects. The same base meaning is developed across the Benjamin oeuvre. Released from the “baroque,” aura haunts “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), an essay in which Benjamin toyed with the fancy that aura invests the image or object with the power to look back at us. 7 One notes as well the apparition of aura in the essay “Kafka” (1934) when aura is said to appear in the beauty of hopelessness, in allusions to doctrine and to hope, but never present, not for us, as per Kafka’s famous quip. 8 While aura haunts the reading of these two modernist writers, Benjamin’s claim is that aura has burnt out in modern times. The discussion at the end of

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“The Storyteller” (1936) locates this thesis as a case of secularization theory—the notion once popular among social scientists that religion served to integrate simple, so-called “primitive” societies but now begins to dissolve in the more complex social formations of modern secular life. “The Storyteller” would then present a melancholic tale about the disenchantment of modern life as the collapse of experience, the causes of which are as varied as the trauma of World War I, the distractions of urban life that keep boredom away, the decline of handcrafts, the sanitization of death, and the disappearance of chroniclers in whose tales there is no clear distinction between religious and worldly elements. The fate of storytelling and aura is also attributed to the novel, which displaces epic memory and isolates the reader. Enmeshed in the romance of fairy tales, Benjamin regrets the inability today to link higher and lower things and to invest them with “mystical depth.” 9 While the mood in “The Storyteller” is melancholic, more revolutionary elán was demonstrated in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here again, aura is associated with tradition and authority, with “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” 10 But how does this square with the more well-known argument that mechanical reproduction detaches the image from tradition and originality: “the quality of its presence is always depreciated. . . . By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” 11 Mechanical reproduction is said to work against aura by bringing the image, or rather a copy of the image, up close “spatially and humanly,” enabling us “to get a hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.” 12 The original cult value of the object or image is first magical and then religious, before giving way to the modernity of exhibition value and art for the sake of art. No longer esoteric, no longer invisible to the optical eye of the ordinary person or limited to the gaze of the connoisseur, the image is now exoteric and visible, transferred to the general public. What excites “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the revolutionary enthusiasm with which Benjamin brings to the unhappy secularization story. It is in the liquidation of aura, of authority and distance, introduced by photography and consummated in cinema that Benjamin identified with the more politically groping, haptic, hands-on forms of critical looking than the kind of absorptive contemplation characterized as bourgeois art and society. 13 About the attempt to craft a hard-edged Marxist analysis of culture, I’ll pass over in silence except to note that “liquidation” is a violent word with unpleasant historical connotations. Adorno accused Benjamin of an “anarchistic romanticism,” a blind confidence in the spontaneous power of the proletariat,” while Richard Wolin tells us the communism was actually toned down in the published version of the essay. 14 What Benjamin was unable to see was that the line between the fascist “aestheticization of politics” and the communist “politicization of aesthetics” is but a fine one, and he was no

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doubt naïve in believing one could sequester the one from the other. Less damning but just as confusing is how the secularization-modernization theory implicit in these thoughts about mechanical reproduction reflect the very idea of progress that Benjamin rejected in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an essay in which the bourgeois notion of historical progress is swept away by radical, apocalyptic images of historical rupture. With no place for aura and religion, the rupture heralded by Benjamin was specific to the radicalization of the cultural and aesthetic milieu in 1920s Germany, marking the shift from Expressionism, suffused in the language of spirit and “the spiritual in art,” for the more hard bitten materialism of the new sobriety (neue Sachlichkeit). In 1914-1915, when Kafka first wrote The Trial, “the Cathedral” could still be the place of negative revelation. At the Bauhaus in 1919 in its “early” period, the black and white woodcut “The Cathedral of Socialism” was one the most important visual emblems for the new school of architecture before the transformation at the school to the machine aesthetic for which it is better known. By the mid 1920s there was no place among critical thinkers committed to intellectual rigor for this kind of stuff. Siegfried Kracauer, a scholar-theorist also associated with the Frankfurt School at the Institute for Social Research, understood that this was the age of the anonymous Hotel Lobby, not the “House of God.” Photography itself was an important element in the turn from the rhetoric of invisibility to the rhetoric of the visible in the aesthetic theory and culture of post-Expressionism. But perhaps mechanical reproduction was never a serious threat to the cult value of an image, assuming against this kind of apocalyptic secularization theory that religion and technology, even modern mechanical ones, always carry over into each other. As Jeremy Stolow insists, religion and technology have never been external to each other, technological media serving religion as a condition of possibility. 15 And clearly, Benjamin’s entire argument, based as it is on mechanical reproduction, has been outmoded by the new arts of digital production and reproduction. Benjamin’s exemplary reflections on photography belong to the period of its gestation in interwar Germany, and it makes sense that Benjamin could not have been able to see how religion, ritual, and the cult value of an image might actually survive the age of mechanical reproduction, or even how the photograph might not be simply a work of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was unable or unwilling to consider how photography, at least after its early period, might carry within its practice and its discourse that impulse identified by Kandinsky in 1912 as “the spiritual in art.” The notion that photography was simply mechanical, both in its reproduction and production, was a widespread one against which modern art-photographers struggled. Today, almost eighty years later, Benjamin’s thesis has gotten a little tired around the edges. I would offer three points around which to reconsider its

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eulogy to auratic art. The first point is in part dogmatic, in part quirky form of historical materialism that inspires this essay may have made intuitive sense to Benjamin in the 1930s. Less clear is how it pans out today in a postideological age. The attempt to harness art to revolution enjoyed a renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s, but the politically radical gesture constitutes a wobbly leg in that it overstates the significance of historical transitions by framing them as ruptures. Secondly, against the secularization cum modernization theory, there is a general recognition that religion, with or without aura, has adapted itself to the age of mechanical and now digital reproduction. 16 Finally, the aesthetic theory undergirding Benjamin’s critique of aura belongs to a distant time and place, the “shock” registered by new urban spaces and media technologies having long since waned. Their aesthetic, psychological, social and political effects are more easily integrated, and no longer carry the radical force of surprise, disorientation, rupture, rapture, and revolutionary promise they once did. In other words, it is quite clear that technology was never going to “liquidate,” in any final sort of way, the place of religion in modern life or of aura in modern art. Against Benjamin’s radical negation of aura, Adorno suggested that “the simple antithesis between the auratic and the mass-reproduced work, which for the sake of simplicity neglected the dialectic of the two types, became the booty of a view of art that takes photography as its model and is no less barbaric than the view of the artist as creator.” 17 About all of this, we will see more below in my discussion of aura and index. For now I want to note that, for all the dialectic in Benjamin’s thought relating to the past and the future, the refusal to introduce dialectic into the relation between technology and aura falls flat. There should be a better, more complex way to think through the relation between religion and photography, understood either dialectically or synthetically, as opposed to antagonistic or one-sided. On what basis, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, would it even be possible to find aura in photography? TECHNOLOGY (ON SOLOVEITCHIK) If we turn from Benjamin to the Jewish philosophy of Joseph Soloveitchik, it is because of the premium placed by the latter on the possible interface between technology and religion, which Benjamin was unable to imagine. More so than Benjamin, Soloveitchik would seem to have captured the nuance carried in the lived relationship between technological and religious values; and more than any twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Soloveitchik is the one who most deeply adapts religion, and with it aura, to the question of technology and technological culture. This has a lot to do with neoKantianism and something to do with his work’s peculiar aesthetic, also

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Kantian. About aesthetics, Soloveitchik expressed great ambivalence. On the one hand, he reacted sharply against unbridled aesthetic pleasure; on the other hand, his own thought relating to halakhah (Jewish law) is enmeshed in a form of aesthesis based on abstract patterns and the play between sense perception and a conceptual apparatus. It is the technical apparatus that is of interest here in our discussion of photography, assuming that any relation between photography and religion would depend upon the relationship between religion and technology. About technology, we will now see, Soloveitchik was also ambivalent. On the one hand, he expressed great openness toward technology as a general system; yet on the other hand and in the end, he sought to close off Jewish religion from the particular instantiation of modern technological society. Soloveitchik’s conception of technology and modern science was antiempirical. As he understood them, modern science and technology provide for a “functional duplication of reality,” “reproducing the dynamics of the cosmos by employing quantified-mathematized media which man [sic] evolves through postulation and creative thinking.” 18 Mathematical science “whisks us away from the array of tangible things, from color and sound, from heat, touch, and smell . . . into a formal relational world of thought constructs.” This is a world that is “woven out of human thought processes, functions with amazing precision and runs parallel to the workings of the real multifarious world of our senses. The modern scientist does not try to explain nature. He only duplicates it. . . .” Through science, the modern person “constructs his own world and in mysterious fashion succeeds in controlling his environment through manipulating his own mathematical constructs and creations.” 19 For Soloveitchik, technology as a system does not pose a threat to religion because he saw the two as both separate and isomorphic. Soloveithcik was heir to the rationalist tradition in Jewish and western philosophy, coupling the rationalism of Maimonides and the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen. More under the influence of Cohen than is often presumed, we see it in Soloveitchik’s tendency toward system, science, and anti-empiricism. As such, he shared none of the animus against technology and other mediated forms of consciousness and culture characteristic of the neo-romanticism, anti-romanticism, and post-romanticism of thinkers like Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, or Benjamin and Heidegger. In Soloveitchik, there is neither a predilection for ecstatic experience of the Eastern European Hasidim or their modern, German-trained imitators, nor the melancholic musings about the destruction of aura and the future of technology in works by Benjamin and Heidegger. Soloveitchik’s is the more sober style that characterized the opponents of Hasidism, or mitnagdim, whose brand of orthodox religion stressed the centrality of Torah study, in particular the study of halakhah, as the epitome of Jewish piety. For Soloveitchik, halakhah is dedicated to the

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manipulation of the natural order to purposeful ends, and it was this openness to reason that opened Soloveitchik to technology, although only up to a very sharply delimited point. In Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik set out to couch Jewish law in terms of human dignity and power, and it is this which already brings Judaism close to technology. Indeed, halakhah, as seen by Soloveitchik, resembles nothing less than a technological apparatus. In the ideal types sketched by him, two basic types of human consciousness are identified. The halakhic person combines the cognitive-scientific-technological type of human consciousness with homo-religiosus. Like the former, the halakhic person is not interested in transcendence or metaphysics. The attitude is a worldly one focused on simple things such as torts, contracts, leases, and technical details regarding ritual observance, forbidden foods, forbidden sexual relations, marriage, divorce, and so on. Halakhah provides the working tool, a parallel mechanism of apriori concepts with which to apprehend reality and to negotiate one’s way in this world. It is a technical filter with which to constitute a world and its experience. The appearance of a “natural” spring of water, sunrise, sunset, mountains, trees, plants, animals, colors, and other spatial arrangements have all been processed by means of a technical grid, transformed into halakhic objects. The natural object world is transformed by the halakhic system into the super-cool clarity of a modern photographic image. To cite Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, for Soloveitchik the halakhic medium is the message, a message that is not predicated upon slavish and dry rule following rote behavior. The halakhic person is also a type of homoreligiosus, and also a bit homo aestheticus. Halakhah is a system that combines heteronomous and autonomous drivers. On the one hand, the system is revealed by God. Halakhic persons seek redemption and desire eternity. They too thirst for transcendence. But rather than seek to enter into supernal realms, they endeavor to purify this world, and this desire is at the heart of halakhic worldliness. As I have described it elsewhere, “beauty” and halakhic concepts mingle freely at highpoints in Soloveitchik’s text. But even more to the point, the technical apparatus is that which secures freedom and dignity of the person who knows how the system works and how to code it. It is this freedom, the freedom enjoyed as technicity, and the power and confidence vis-à-vis that which outstrips all of the cognitive capacities of the understanding, that make the halakhic apparatus a sublime one. 20 The idealist-phenomenological reflections about halakhah and technology were written over against the searing realities of the Second World War and the massacre of European Jewry. They came close to crashing down to earth in The Lonely Man of Faith, an essay that first appeared in Tradition magazine in 1965, some twenty years after the original Hebrew publication of Halakhic Man in 1944. The reflections are now suspended, precariously, midway between heaven and earth. Nothing had perturbed “halakhic man,”

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whose system construction in bold primary colors is as implacable as a grid by Mondrian. In contrast, the “lonely man of faith” has been shaken, deeply, by Kierkegaardian existentialism, by modern secularism, and, presumably, by the Holocaust. The “lonely man of faith” moves between abnegation and affirmation, despair and ecstasy, letting each side of the polarity persist as ideal compliments, one to the other. We see in these reflections a modern orthodox version of the critique of contemporary society circa 1950-1960 in the image of existential loneliness confronting technological, victorious, utilitarian culture. Conservative religious community and religious values figure into the critique of liberal, secular society. As in Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik attempts valiantly in The Lonely Man of Faith to integrate the two polar aspects of human existence. There is the aspect of human existence figured in the image of Adam-1, drawn from the first creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. This is “technological man” as sovereign, creative, functional, practical, dignified: a world-creating creature who lives in a natural community, in a work community motivated by distribution and consumption of goods. In stark contrast, Adam-2, drawn from the second creation story in the second chapter of Genesis, does not create his own world, but is rather confronted by a world not of his own making. Alienated from the world, the ontological awareness is that “to be” is to be lonely, incomplete. Unlike his counterpart from the first book of Genesis, Adam-2 seeks redemption from loneliness in a new type of companionship, but never completely finds it. There is in this essay a third type of person who is not identified as such, not by Soloveitchik and not in the scholarly literature. Adam-2 gives way to an Adam-3, as it were. This third type is a mediating type of “covenant man.” The “lonely man of faith” is only complete, only promised redemption in and only in covenant community. The community is the place where metaphysical questions are ultimately answered not in cosmic confrontation or propositional contents, but in the form of covenant itself, where “accidental” human existence dovetails with “the necessary infinite existence of the Great True Real Self.” 21 (It was never the case that Soloveitchik actually eschewed metaphysics as much as he bracketed them.) In genuine covenant communities such as prophetic and prayer communities, two partners confront each other on supposedly equal terms. The conception is surprisingly non-hierarchical and non-hieratic. As a formal institution, covenant is marked by mutual recognition and mutual consent, even between God and human persons, whose meeting in covenant is between virtually co-equal comrades and fellow members—at least for those who are recognized from within the institution as bona fide members of the halakhic covenant community. Halakhah is the hinge mechanism that binds as one into a single machineassemblage what would otherwise be two different aspects of human existence. The “man of faith” is allowed no complete immersion into covenantal

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community. Over and over, he is thrown back into, indeed obligated to return to the world of majestic, technological culture in which colloquy with God has no place. It is the “halakhic gesture” that makes this work: “When man gives himself to the covenantal community the halakhah reminds him that he is also wanted and needed in another community, the cosmic-majestic, and when it comes across man while he is involved in the creative enterprise of the majestic community, it does not let him forget that his is a covenantal being. . . .” 22 Conceived felicitously, this mechanism makes for “a steady oscillation.” Ideally, it should not be sharp edged, meaning that technological-secular culture and the life of religious devotion are not supposed to be at odds with each other as a contradiction. 23 Soloveitchik rejects “the philosophy of contemptus saeculi.” But the upshot is tragic. Because of the “movement from center to center, man does not feel at home in any community. He is commanded to move on [even out of religion] before he manages to strike roots in either of these communities, and so the ontological loneliness of the man of faith persists.” 24 Had it been left at that, this would have been a remarkable place for an orthodox religious thinker to end his ruminations on modern religious life and technological society. The combination of aura and techné, the virtual embrace of halakhah qua mechanic aura, would have stood out as far superior to Benjamin’s more dogmatic assertions about mechanical reproduction and the “liquidation” of aura, providing a launch point from which to consider photography in relation to religion. But Soloveitchik did not leave it at that. The symmetry carefully maintained between the techno-scientific and the religious forms of existence is only ideal. In practice, the complementarity gets lost at the very moment when Soloveitchik turns to consider his ideal typology in the real-time of postwar society circa 1965. As soon as he does so the mood immediately sours and the oscillation abruptly stops: “the dialogue between the man of faith and the man of culture comes to an end.” This because modern man is said to no longer recognize the true faith of the community with its “absolute moorings” dedicated to God. 25 Modern man is perceived by the conservative critic to be not just out of balance; modernity projects a “demonic image” of the human condition. 26 Like the biblical prophet Elisha in the book of Second Kings, the man of faith must therefore withdraw from the secular world. This demands a brand new modality, a “solitary hiding” and “abode of loneliness,” from which there might be no return back into the world of general, secular culture. To be sure, Soloveitchik did not want to end the story at this unhappy culde-sac. Elisha’s withdraw from society was not final, nor is the one intended for the contemporary “man of faith” who still, “in spite of everything, continues tenaciously to bring the message of faith to majestic man.” 27 However, it is in no way clear how a contemporary “man of faith” can continue to do so if, in fact, the dialogue has ended. Soloveitchik may have continued to hun-

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ger for action and movement in history, but he did so from an enclavist position. 28 It remains unclear how “the lonely man of faith” can participate in technological society if, as contended, the worldviews are so incompatible and “incommensurable.” 29 After such a sharp withdrawal, how can “the man of faith” return, and on what basis and by what right can he expect a hearing? There are too many inconsistencies. While mutuality between God and human persons is basic in covenantal community, from (liberal) modern religionists Soloveitchik would like to demand nothing less than absolute obedience. 30 The world as imaged by Soloveitchik is indeed a technical marvel, a parallel, virtual world in which rabbinic authorities can demand absolute obedience from others. Soloveitchik insists that the withdrawal from secular society is not final, but I do not see how that can be. There is no modality upon which return might be constituted if faith cannot be transposed into secular categories except by dint of sheer imposition. 31 The common feature at play in the work of Benjamin, the heterodox Marxist and Soloveitchik, the Kantian-Kiekegaardian orthodox thinker is the same marked ambivalence as to the conditions of modern life. Benjamin was not sure if he wanted to advance or mourn the liquidation of aura. Soloveitchik wanted to embrace technological life, but fled, rhetorically, from its modern instantiation. No doubt, the unease affecting both thinkers had everything to do with the world-political situation preceding and immediately following in the wake of the Second World War. Our own cultural moment is very different. With the ubiquitous proliferation of photographic images and new media technologies, there is much less discomfort with either technology or photography that once marked theoretical discourse at midcentury. Much of the discomfort that one continues to find in the critical literature seems faked. Writing in response to Heidegger’s rumination on technology, Michael Fried comments upon the “at-homeness” in contemporary art-photography, with “the way in which technology . . . provides the framing structure for a mode of being-in-the-world, of everydayness, toward which, at least seen from ‘outside,’ the artist feels positively drawn.” 32 This at-homeness is fundamentally distinct from the dialectical antipathies with modern life expressed by Soloveitchik and Adorno, and the mix of nostalgia and utopianism expressed by Benjamin. It’s the starting point for any discussion regarding the relation between photography, aesthetics, and contemporary religious thought and culture. AURA AND INDEX The possibility for which neither Soloveitchik nor Benjamin seemed able to account was the intimate, seamless imbrication of aura and technology. The place to look for aura, as conceptualized by Benjamin, might be inside the

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structures of technological culture and the photographic image, not outside, as presupposed by Soloveitchik. Against Benjamin, Adorno argued that the anti-mimetic values of so-called autonomous art, the refusal in modern art to abide by the canons of copy realism, preserve the distance between art and reality that is essential to both aura and cultural-political criticism. 33 But what does anti-mimetic modern art have to do with photography, and what does photography have to do with aura? Photography, after all, would appear to be the mimetic art par excellence, an art whose reference is worldly, not religious. The first point to clarify is that the mimetic relation of photography to the natural order of things does not obviate the distance of the photographic image from that reality. It is this complex relation between realism and anti-realism that contributes to understanding the relation between religious and aesthetic values, and the way aura, which depends upon that very distance, might mingle in photographic art. The relation between it and its referent is not “iconic,” for it is not a relation of likeness and resemblance. A photograph or photographic image has no material or structural property in “common” with its object. A parallel thing with its own autonomy, the photograph is an “index.” What is an index? In her oft cited, two part “Notes on the Index,” critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss applies this key term in the semiotic theory of Charles Peirce to the photographic image. By “index,” she means “that type of sign which arises as the physical manifestation of a cause, of which traces, imprints, and clues are examples.” Qua index, the photographic image does not resemble its referent as would an “icon.” The example of an index typically given is the way a weather vane manifests the presence of wind, 34 or perhaps the impress of a chalky hand on a blackboard. Krauss explains that, “every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface.” The trace of a departed object is not “symbolic.” It is an impression made by the thing or object itself. Pre-symbolic, it “[cedes] the language of art back to the imposition of things.” 35 While these “things” impose themselves upon the photographic image, it is important to keep in mind that image and thing bear no resemblance to each other. This distance or gap between image and thing is, I suspect, the place of aura in photographic art, one that Krauss herself does not recognize, but one which nonetheless seems to seep into her own writing. Krauss traces the manipulation of photographic index back to Duchamp’s Large Glass and to Man Ray’s development of the “rayograph” in the 1920s. The rayograph is particularly instructive. By placing objects (everyday objects like feathers or combs, needles, buttons. and other industrially produced things) on lightsensitive paper and then exposing them to light, Man Ray produced photograms whose ghost-like appearance highlights for Krauss “photography’s existence as an index.” Its index character gives to the photographic image an un-real or un-natural character that brings it close to the distant aura of supra-

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natural religion. The index, while invested in the order of things, does so always from at least one remove from reality—and that is what might make it “religious.” While Krauss writes in the cool detached style of an iconoclast, the enthusiasms, which border uncomfortably on the spiritual in her own writing, are indicated the more she lets thought about photography and art slip into the register of anti-realism. Citing Roland Barthes, she wants to make sense of the photograph’s “real unreality.” Krauss continues citing Barthes in order to explain that the photograph’s “unreality is that of the here . . . it is nothing but a presence (one must continually keep in mind the magical character of the photographic image).” The reality of the photograph “is that of a havingbeen-there, because in all photographs there is the constantly amazing evidence: this took place in this way.” 36 The keywords to mark here are “magical” and “amazing.” In assimilating her own thought to Barthes, who only a little apologetically referred to his own reflections on photography as “stupid metaphysics,” Krauss comes just up to the point of viewing the impact of the physical index as “spiritual,” understood as the experience and ontology of objects free from time and space. About Duchamp, she writes in a similar vein: “This language of rapid exposure which produces a state of rest, an isolated sign is, of course, the language of photography. It describes the isolation of something from within the succession of temporality.” Here the image is “suspended” as a physical substance. 37 Despite their close indexical relation to things, photographic images begin to lose their status as physical substance in the language of photography. They begin to re-secure the distance and aura that Benjamin denied the photograph. Against the surface of her own intentions as a writer, Krauss’ writing begins to approach the kind of enthusiasms signaled by the dematerialization of physical objects in twentieth-century abstract art. About this she is deeply ambivalent. Why, for instance, did so many artists with a spiritual bent choose to paint grids—that most scientific of things? Krauss notes that, like the photograph as described in “Notes on the Index,” the grid in works by Mondrian or by the postwar American artist Agnes Martin is meant to conjure supercharged stasis, an imperviousness to time that is anti-narrative, anti-mimetic, and anti-real. 38 As to her own skepticism about all this, Krauss writes quite bluntly that even to mention “the spiritual in art” is to open a Pandora’s Box. 39 Supposing instead an absolute rift between spirit and matter, Krauss thinks we have to choose between the sacred and the secular. Krauss observes “our” late twentieth-century embarrassment with linking art and religion, before going on to discuss the art of Martin and Ad Reinhardt who themselves were not embarrassed at all by the topic. Indeed, Krauss herself writes so convincingly of the grid as “myth,” a mode of presentation that combines incompatible elements, that one could just as reasonably conclude that the grid is both spiritual and techno-scientific at the same time. 40

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Krauss wants to resolve the tension by deciding against the spiritual, but it is by no means clear how helpful her use of the term “schizophrenic” is to describe attempts to square or hold on to both sets of value—namely (1) the spiritual-dematerialized-centrifugal-transcendent direction in which the meaning of a grid is pushed beyond the material frame of the canvas and, (2) the techno-scientific-materialist-centripetal-immanent reading of the same grid-form in which the force of the motion is compressed inside the immanent frame of the canvas. Krauss understands myth as “repression,” in this case repressing what is seen as an irreducible tension between the spiritual and the scientific. There is something strangely hardheaded and regressive in appealing to this structuralist account of myth by Levi-Strauss, as if there is a “true tension” masked in the mythic persistence of two ostensibly contradictory elements to a system (one spiritual, one scientific). Clearly, the artists about whom Krauss writes with such obvious power do not force these kinds of choices. The tension in her own writing about photography comes from wanting to deny or disavow the persuasive readings that she herself marks out as strange, almost mystical moves made in modern art and photography. STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY (ON ALFRED STIEGLITZ) In the mid-1930s, when Benjamin wrote his essay, up through the 1960s when the essay became famous in the English speaking world, photography had not yet been fully established or recognized as an “art” by the broader institutional public. The essay reflects how, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the first attempts at setting up photography as an independent art depended upon maintaining a firm distinction between it and painting. This was a long standing assumption about photography advanced by its earliest champions, to emancipate the photographic image from painting. Indeed, this commitment drove modern masters of the new art such as Alfred Stieglitz to reject anything in photography that might have resembled “pictorialism”—the attempt to make photographs look like painting, exemplified by the staged Victorian tableaus in photographic works of Henry Peach Robertson in the middle of the nineteenth century and including the misty impressionism in Stieglitz’s own early New York cityscapes around the turn of the century. The point, as it emerged by the 1920s, was not to reproduce the effects of painting, but to promote “straight photography,” whose values were the crisp, clarity of a new visual presentation. Krauss’ own writing on the unique indexicality of photography reflects the values of straight photography, in the putatively direct investment in the world of things that should have set the photograph free from the painting. The spiritual in art was always based in a type of enthusiasm, and Americans were particularly enthusiastic about the new technology from the

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very start. It may have had something to do with democracy, an impulse rejected most famously by the poet Charles Baudelaire from his continental perch. His view was that photography placed truth over beauty and imagination, only confirming to him the general public’s lack of faith in painting. As a mimetic based art enslaving modern man to nature, photography represented a “form of lunacy,” “strange abominations, sacrilege, obscenity, and idolatry, as if the peepholes of the stereoscope were “skylights of the infinite.” 41 Indeed, for practitioners of this new thing, which Baudelaire would not even recognize as an art, photography was able to elicit the very enthusiasm condemned by the poet. Oliver Wendell Holmes realized how the photograph was able to fix fleeting, unstable, and unreal images. He saw in it “the miraculous quotidian thing, the way in which ‘the lesser details’ of an object such as a building might be of greater import to us than the picture’s main motif.” 42 Edgar Allen Poe saw in the photograph, the independent action of light, “miraculous” beauty, and the absolute truth of identity of aspect and thing, perhaps just as Baudelaire feared. This democratic enthusiasm about quotidian, trivial things, the almost religious faith in straight photography championed by American photographers such as Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans was part of a program promoting the cause of progressive politics. In particular, Alan Trachtenberg writes about the intimate links between early twentieth century American photography and the Progressive Era, making special note of Strand’s work at the Ethical Culture Society of New York. 43 Strand himself celebrated the birth of the machine and, indeed, worshipped it as a new god. Unlike Baudelaire, however, Strand recognized the extremely plastic nature of the new medium, the possibility of creative control as a source of vision and intuitive knowledge. Strand’s faith was in the ability to humanize the machine, the challenge of photography being to integrate “a new religious impulse,” the combining together of science and art against the materialism of the one and the anemic fantasy of the other. 44 Part of the early enthusiasm surrounding photography was theoretically sophisticated and avowedly “spiritual.” Indeed, the realism in so many of “the classic essays on photography” edited by Trachtenberg is awash in the language of mystery and wonder. In this context, the painting-like effects of pictorialism that Strand and Stieglitz rejected in photography is worth revisiting, if only for a moment. What matters is not the faked tableaus, mawkish conflation of death and beauty, or other maudlin images staged by Robinson. What draws our attention is the theoretical insight brought to bear in his practice. It is well known that in our own era in the aftermath of the digital revolution, the photographic image has been almost completely un-tethered from the direct kinds of optical reference and objectivity championed by straight photography. The point that Robinson understood better than Baudelaire was that photographic values were not limited to realism. Rejecting the

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prejudice that photography was a mere form of mechanical realism, he saw it as an idealist medium, “add[ing] truth to bare facts.” 45 Tired of the “sameness” of the photograph, Robinson wanted something “more,” namely mystery, from a photograph. 46 No one takes Robinson seriously today, but they should, just a little. In his photography, he espoused the very antirealism espoused by Baudelaire without the actual artistic flair. As for Stieglitz, he might have rejected the tradition of pictorialist idealism, insisting that a photograph must never resemble a painting, but his own pictures strained no less than Robinson’s against mimetic realism. Precisely as he was working out the idea and praxis of straight photography, Stieglitz was also speculating about the spiritual in art vis-à-vis his own work under the direct influence of Wassily Kandinsky. For Stieglitz, photography had nothing to do with mechanically representing the mimetic surface of things, because for Stieglitz, the technological mechanism was flexible, plastic, and, most importantly, open to the elaboration of ideas. 47 The point for him was to get at the essence, to get closer and closer to a thing and to abstract it out from its surrounding contexts, to look so hard at a thing as to draw every last ounce out of an object, to get at “a reality—so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” 48 What interested Stieglitz in a photograph were not documentary or other mimetic contents, but rather the undergirding forms, tensions, conflicts, changes, and forces shown in opposition. 49 About the cloud photographs that he was to take up at Lake George in the Adirondacks, the important thing to note is the spiritual freedom of the photographic medium from subject matter such as trees, people, streetscapes, and buildings. Stieglitz claims to have wanted to make photos that might seem to say, “Music! music! Man, what this is music!” And when Ernest Bloch did see these pictures, Stieglitz reports that’s precisely what the composer said verbatim. 50 Or in a letter to Hart Crane, Stieglitz writes that several who saw the photographs remarked that it was as if he had painted God. “Maybe,” Stieglitz adds in the letter, very tongue-in-cheek. 51 Apart from the rhetoric, in part overheated and in part playful, where in the actual photographs should one look for what one might call the spiritual in art? In the “chiaroscuro” effect found in western forms of religious art going back to the Baroque, divine presence is signaled by an intense inner light encased in an enveloping black background. In the case of Stieglitz, the chiaroscuro effect is reversed. The place of aura is found in undoubtedly erogenous, dark patches surrounded by light. One sees the dark, spiritual presence in early works like The Hand of Man (1902) or The City of Ambition (1910), or Steerage (1911). Dark spaces dominate these pictures, lending to the photographic image a mystery, an index to which the technology can signal but never illuminate. Viewed more critically, these early photographs belong to a style which Stieglitz was to abandon in favor of a more straight photography. The early style in his work is neo-romantic, deliberately in-

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tended to alienate the viewer from lived reality of ordinary life. Programmatically, these lovely pictures are incoherent. They are so suffused with mood that they ultimately resemble in more consummate form both the art of painting as well as the painting-based photographic pictorialism from which Stieglitz and other modernist photographers and photo-theorists sought to distance the new art of photography. 52 Pressing further into Stieglitz’s photographic universe, one notes how the dark spiritual spots continue to mark the more fully realized modernism of his work in the 1920s and 1930s. Consider for instance the unlit recess of the castrated horse in Spiritual America (1923), a photograph read widely as a critique of American materialism. Or consider the more simple black shutters in relation to the white clapboard house in House and Grape Leaves (1934). For a more realized synthesis of aura and technological wonder, consider also the shadows falling across the New York cityscape in pictures shot by Stieglitz from his home with Georgia O’Keeffe at the Shelton Hotel from around this same period—including Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York (1932), From my Window at the Shelton West (1931), and From the Shelton (1931). The buildings are best described by Wanda Corn as “dark and sober, but at the same time sublimely majestic, mountains of steel, unsullied by the noisy riffraff in the streets below.” 53 What we see in even these mature photographs is the lingering influence in photography of symbolism and “the spiritual in art” that open up in a free, non-dogmatic way the relation between art, technology, and religion. Corn points out how Stieglitz in his work combined beauty, the material, and the technological without submitting these to what we might call ideological materialism. 54 In their sublime majesty and distance above the street, the buildings suggest the idea or semblance of “aura” participating in works of majesty created by Soloveitchik’s technological Adam and superimposed over or alongside the natural world. In Stieglitz’s vision, it is darkness, not light that conveys those spiritual values. In photos From the Shelton, the effect of technology and shadow works simply, without the intrusion of a church or landscape effect. Dark, geometrically peculiar shadows fall like a big black blanket over and between the buildings. Their uncanny and deathlike presence overlay the technological wonder of the modern cityscape. These black blankets participate in that very urban, architectural order which they simultaneously obscure. By obscuring visual objects like an intrusive foreign element, they complicate modern and modernist values of clarity and light. The almost immateriality of the shadow belongs to a different order in the world. As Weston Naef suggests, these photographs are not technically virtuosic pictures as much as they are “deeply emotional.” 55

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DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY (ON NEIL FOLBERG) The relation between religion and photography has always depended upon the theoretical twists and turns relating to the indexical relation of the photographic image vis-à-vis the physical world known to the senses. As we have seen in our discussion of Krauss and the straight, analog photography of Stieglitz, the twist and turn feeding into the idea of aura in photography is made possible by the tension between the real and unreal aspects of an image. As much, however, as the index might twist, turn and stretch out the distance between image and thing, the analog image will always remain tethered to a physical spatial-temporal presence or object. With the digital image, the image finally attains the freedom to twist free and snaps off from its base in the physical world. The digital image does not necessarily represent the world as it is to the senses. It can now present a parallel world of its own making. In this, there is no structural difference between the digital image, a painting, or a cultic symbolic system. As icon, the digital image resembles first and foremost only itself. As index, the digital image can mean anything to anyone. In the hands of viewers and users inclined to look for religious significance, the digital image will be used to capture or provoke a supernatural presence not “really” committed to a place in the physical world. With the development of new technologies, the photographic image recoups its cult value as it comes more and more to resemble painting. Modernist theorists writing about photography and film such as Bazin, Cavell, and Savedoff had sought hard to sustain the difference between photography and painting, but the distinction is harder to maintain of late. This is the thesis argued by Michael Fried, who points to the introduction starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s of the large-format tableau style of exhibition, a technical innovation with which Fried effectively reintroduces the distance that Benjamin thought had been overcome between the photographic subject and the person who comes to look at the image. For Fried, what matters most in photography is the importance of the object, always the object, and not the viewing subject. Too large to hold in one’s hand, the sheer size of the large print format allows the image to take on its own objective life independent of the viewer, who stands before the photograph as she or he would before a painting. 56 Fried also comments as to how the introduction of digital technologies complicates the relation between the digital image and physical reality. Pixilated, the resulting images are more abstract, and more distant from physical reality than would have been the case with analog photographs. Writing about the massive scale in works by Andreas Gursky, Fried notes how the photographic image begins to lose much of its indexical weight. 57 With no clear perceptual ballast, the image assumes what one might imagine

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as otherworldly values insofar as the relation to the physical world becomes more and more attenuated. 58 Another factor contributing to the relation between spirituality and technology is what James Elkins calls “the strange place of religion in contemporary society.” One can trace back to the 1980s, contemporaneous to the technological shift from straight photography to digital imaging, the shift to more spiritual-supernatural “effects” in the culture at large. From the movies Exorcist and Ghost to the music of Arvo Pärt, the philosophical explorations of Jacques Derrida, and films such as the Coen brothers’ Serious Man and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, examples are too numerous to list. Sometimes serious, often coy and tongue-in-cheek, they fall under the lowbrow to highbrow rubrics of New Age religion, the rise of the religious right in American politics, the inundation of religion or “spirituality” in popular film and television, as well as art-film, art and contemporary classical music, and the so-called religious turn in continental philosophy. Part of this more general trend is the relationship between “Jews and Photography,” the title of an essay by photographer William Myers. It will be noted that, historically, most of these first works centered on “the Jews” rather than “Judaism” per se. Noting that twentieth-century American photography before and at mid-century was dominated by Jews, Myers observes how, for the children of immigrants, ambitious newcomers on the social-cultural scene, the proclivity towards new technologies and their industries (movies, records, radio, television) combined with the intense interests in progressive politics. Like Trachtenberg, cited above, Myers has his eye here on the Photo League, active in the 1930s and 1940s, and the New York School of Photography. The aesthetic was an urban anti-aesthetic, gritty and beautiful, never pretty. The preferred subjects were almost always “negroes,” gangsters, working class people—the photographers identifying themselves as leftists, not as Jews. Starting in the 1980s, Jewish content begins to center the photographic work of artists such as Bill Aron, Lori Grinker, Joan Roth, Penny Diane Wolin, and Yves Mozesio. 59 A case in point would be French photographer Frédéric Brenner’s Diaspora Project, a photographic record of more than 80,000 photographs shot all over the world. Brenner pictures are pictures of Jews and ritual objects, Jews doing Jewish “things.” With its eye on social history and documentary, photography was largely the medium with which to explore Jewish cultural diversity, not claims about God in relation to the worlds of time and space, creation, revelation, redemption or to any other aspects relating to the mystical aura of Jewish religion. Viewed from the particular angle of aura and photography, the digital images of American Israeli photographer Neil Folberg is of particular note. A student of naturalist landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Folberg provides a photographic lens with which to understand “the spiritual in art” from the

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perspective of Judaism. “Place” is central to Folberg’s conception of photographic aura, most specifically in two projects—in the nightscapes, starscapes, and landscapes of Celestial Nights (2005), and in the historical synagogues shot in And I Shall Dwell among Them (1995). Almost to a photograph, there is not a single Jew in them. We are given to see instead an image of the trace and place of God in the physical world, digitally enhanced by a complex technological apparatus; the illusion and vision of aura are made possible only by the undergirding technical mechanism. 60 Folberg’s pictures take us from the clear light of the American west in works by Ansel Adams to darker places deep in the platonic cave of the Jewish imaginary. The visions in Celestial Nights swoon darkly over desert and semi-arid landscapes, scrub forests, orchards, groves, archaeological ruins, all of which, identified by name-place names, are meant to carry ancient biblical, oriental, and mystical charges. The al-Aqsa Mosque, ancient synagogue ruins at Gush Halav or on the Golan, an olive press, groves, paths, and vistas are rendered thick with presence by starlight and moonlight, by the immense starry skies that frame these places. Their illumination is dark. In each black and white image, individual objects, down to the slightest pebble, stand out discretely in full clarity, like liquid things gelled, then frozen magically and rendered unnaturally brittle. In the tradition of landscape painting and landscape photography, the trace presence of God, if that is what it is, is made possible by the absence of “man,” who has been scrubbed from the picture. One reason that Benjamin announced the liquidation of aura was that photography at the time was, as a medium, entirely dependent upon light. Sounding very much like Novalis (“Hymns to the Night”), Benjamin complained in “The Short History of Photography” as to how new and advanced optical technologies destroy the aura of darkness that he could still find in old nineteenth-century photograuves. Benjamin saw the aura in early photography residing in the “absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow.” It was Benjamin’s judgment that improved optical technologies had “completely conquered darkness and distinguished appearances as sharply as a mirror.” 61 But photography never expelled darkness, not in the work of Peach Robinson, not in the inky, dark patches in Alfred Stieglitz’s pictures, and certainly not in Folberg’s digital works, in which the idea of aura will fall between the dark tonal values that dominate them. Benjamin was clearly unable to anticipate the possibility of photographing darkness and images in the dark. Well after Benjamin’s own time in the historical emergence of photographic technologies and art photography, Folberg’s work shows how one might capture the continuum between nighttime darkness and the clarity of objects in stellar light. As we saw in the photographic images shot by Stieglitz From the Shelton, aura is maintained by the negative chiaroscuro effect; instead of dark enfolding over inner light, dark-

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ness is encased in the light that is its “place.” The technique is an interesting trick. In contrast to the bright, daytime naturalism of straight photography of Stieglitz, Folberg pursues the aura of light into the darkest night, which only enhanced photographic technologies make possible. As to the obvious relation between religion and photography intended in these pictures, Folberg himself reveals his hand at the beginning of the volume containing these fantastical images with an epigraph from tractate Bava Batra of the Babylonian Talmud. The larger Talmudic text from which the epigraph is taken details the fanciful travel tales told by Rabbah b. Bar Hana, how once when travelling in a desert he was joined by an Arab who showed him and his companions sites related to the biblical story of the Israelites in the desert. What the guide tells them serves as the epigraph to Folberg’s project, “Come look and I will show you where heaven and earth kiss” (b.Bava Batra 74a). Clearly the viewer is intended by the photographer to search out in these pictures that obscure line between heaven and earth. In the book’s epilogue, Folberg explains that the “metaphor of these photographs” speaks to “the horizon between knowledge and imagination, between the present and eternity, between substance and spirit, certainty and doubt.” Photography is meant to mark the point, to occupy the point, or to provide for a point where heaven and earth meet, the vision intending to “encompass the universe—and sometimes more” at “the human edge of the cosmos.” 62 It would be easy for an unfriendly critic to lampoon this artist’s statement were it not for the remarkable self-scrutiny to which Folberg submits his own practice, revealing the mechanism that opens out the digital illusion. What, after all, are we supposed to think about the character of that line between heaven and earth, or about those darkly illuminated objects on that line? Do these pictures belong solely to the order of nature which they simultaneously bend? Or do they, perhaps, establish a more supernatural frame of reference, and if so, then on what basis does one pretend to introduce natural-supernaturalism into a digital contrivance? Folberg’s pictures would seem to subvert the entire order of the pictorial universe established by his teacher Ansel Adams. In the dark stellar light, there remains nothing natural about these frozen, liquid land-nightscapes, and about the distinction between reality and artifice, the viewer is asked to suspend his or her own critical incredulity. Perhaps these images are too easy to interpret in the religious register intended them by the artist. Yes, we are meant to see spiritual places, God’s trace presence in the order of creation, the semblance of an absent trace in the world; or is this the way creation looks through the eyes of God? 63 What complicates the sense of aura in Folberg’s celestial photographs is the epistemological caution reflected in the artist’s own remarks about the technical construction of his pictures. These allow the reader-viewer to intrude critically into an illusionistic scene that would otherwise present itself as simply untouched, natural, spiritual, and primordial. What we learn,

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though, is that the aura of the image might lie not in the image itself, but in the technique that makes the image possible. About the “tenuous” relation to natural or spiritual orders of reality in these pictures, Folberg states it quite clearly: Every one of these photographs is either something I saw or something I thought I saw but couldn’t photograph due to the technical limitations of photography, or something I wished to have seen but didn’t. If I saw it and photographed it, it was because a photo could be made with the photographic materials available—or because I was able to make it in two exposures, reconstruct it using digital imaging techniques, and then print it on standard photographic materials. . . . And sometimes it is pure imagination—but imagination based in the very concrete reality [of these ancient places]. 64

In other words, it is not entirely clear what it is that we are looking at. The relation between this world and the physical world is tenuous at best. What matters most is not the truth of the image itself, but rather the distance created by the digital effect between these two worlds. Writing at the height of the 1960s drug culture about the general relation between hallucinogens and mystical experience, LSD researcher Walter Pahnke listed five types of experience associated with both. I mention them here for the almost perfect sense they make of these pictures by Folberg, who grew up in this era. The types of experience listed are: (1) psychotic, (2) psychodynamic (“in which material that had previously been unconscious or preconscious becomes vividly conscious”), (3) cognitive (“characterized by astonishingly lucid thought), (4) aesthetic (“[marked by an] increase in all sensory modalities, changes in sensation and perception”), and (5) psychedelic peak or mystical. 65 The relation between technology and aura brought out in the relation between religion and psychedelics has to do with the animation of materials, the clarity of information, artificial interfaces and interventions, the introversion and extroversion of sensation and consciousness, the intensification and other transformations of optical impression, synaesthetic color-sound inversions, and repetition of visual patterns. And indeed, Folberg’s landscapes exercise a hallucinogenic, perhaps even “psychotic” quality that brings the values of “religious” or “spiritual” aura squarely into techno-psychedelically enhanced art-photography. In contrast to the visionary quality of the nightscapes in Celestial Nights, the pictures of synagogues in And I Shall Dwell among Them would seem to demand less critical credulity on the part of the viewer. The subject matter in these photographs is simply synagogues. Physical places, there is nothing metaphysical about them. The pictures do not necessarily seek to convey or conjure the order of creation or the trace of God, and at first glance there is nothing to recommend them beyond the very beauty of their site, structure, and the composition of the shot. And yet, the tension between the real and the

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ideal is very much alive in these pictures, perhaps even more so than in in Celestial Nights. With the nightscapes, the viewer knows immediately that, no, these places are not real, that they are unreal, that the images have been technologically enhanced. The synagogues, on the other hand, only look real. That is part of the trick. Yes, this is a synagogue; but no, this is not a synagogue. It is a picture, and as a picture, it too is composed, it too is structured, it too is artifice, it too is visionary. These too are composited digital images. No longer outside under starry skies, the synagogue portraits present large format pictures of interiors from around the world, spanning the globe from Italy, North Africa, Uzbekistan, India, northern and eastern Europe, the United States, and Israel. In contrast to the mix of organic and archaeological materials in Celestial Nights, in these pictures the stone, wood, plaster, stucco, brass, and silver are completely architectural, the colors drawn from a deep palette of blues, reds, browns, yellows, creams, and whites. For Folberg, the synagogue stands as an antipode to the Christian cathedral. Inside and outside, the cathedral magnifies God’s greatness and beauty by making the person small and insignificant, unlike the synagogue space, which is small and humble. 66 Instead of that vertical thrust, the strong horizontals of the wide frontal view define Folberg’s synagogue portraits. With this, Folberg means to say that the general horizontal standard at work in his pictures reflects the diminutive liturgical architecture of a small people in exile, a people the sole trace of which in these photographs can be found only inside the empty synagogue space. As with Celestial Nights, there is an obvious and less obvious interpretation of these pictures. The obvious ethnographic interpretation is to read these images as an invitation into the spiritual glories of Jewish architectural space, and this despite the artist’s comment regarding the humble character of the synagogue. However, a closer look will suggest that something else is at foot other than an ethnographic recording of real, physical sites. There are phenomenological and indexical intentions at play undergirding all the geographical details and historical diversity of the synagogues. Again Michael Fried guides my discussion. About the baroque interior shots in the work of German photographer Candida Höfer, Fried spots the tension between the historical and geographical specificity in the diverse details in the photograph, and the timelessness and placelessness conveyed by the still pictorial image. The same thing holds here in this body of Folberg’s work. This is not just a synagogue. This is the synagogue, an interior kind of celestial space, in time and timeless, in place and placeless, where ordinary materials are transformed into sacral objects. But invitation to enter is not quite the right word either. As Fried also notes about Höfer’s work, the values in the installation shot are purely visual, not tactile. They do not invite the viewer inside, but rather exclude, powerful-

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ly, the gross physical presence of any human subject, including the viewer who comes to look at the image from outside the pictorial frame. In both Höfer and Folberg’s interior shots, the eye of the viewer confronts an unnatural clarity that she or he is forbidden to touch. Folberg’s picture of the entrance to Bikur Holim Synagogue, Izmir Turkey should remind one of almost any painting by Vermeer. Its calm is set by the whitewashed walls, a table with simple patterned tablecloth, and the bright hand towels over a stand with a brass “oriental” pitcher and basin. The scene is simple, clean, just a little shabby. The point about such a space is the one made, also by Fried citing Brian O’Doherty, about another kind of cool interior, the “white cube” of the modern art-gallery space with its simple, almost Platonic, quiet box-like structure and white-washed walls. In the installation photo-shots from inside the gallery, no spectators are ever shown. Just like in Folberg’s synagogues, “You are there without being there.” 67 In his seminal meditation, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1986), O’Doherty argues against the values presupposed by this kind of space. Inside the white cube of the modern art-gallery, viewers are said to have lost their sense of being human. With his eye on mystical states of transport, O’Doherty knows that with no dust, no eating, no talking, no dirt there, one must die to enter this space—which, of course, cannot be literally true, at least of the commercial gallery space. 68 I would argue, nonetheless, that neither the white cube nor the Folberg synagogues are so antilife. These spaces, the pictures of these spaces, and the hush of the objects enjoy a different kind of life. And the spectator is not as befuddled, dominated, and lost as O’Doherty suggests. Left outside of and excluded from the frame, the viewer learns to negotiate these kinds of places. In the white cube of modern society, organizing frames get tighter and tighter. The synagogues are empty. The Jews in Europe have been murdered, or have moved out of Uzbekistan or India and onto Israel. Folberg’s synagogues are not white boxes. They are richly textured, full of ornamental objects. But the ideology of the photographs is just as abstract, imbued with a sense of timelessness, and just as invested in modern art values, practice, and histories. The illusionism in these portraits allows the viewer to think he or she is looking at a synagogue. But as with the celestial nightscapes, no one should be too sure about the reality of this place. The first doubts begin to filter in with “light,” with the unnatural lighting of these pictures. The pictures are vision much more than place, and about this, Folberg is, again, completely candid as an explicator of his own work and best practice. Defining “light” as the leading topos in the synagogues project, Folberg explains how artificial lighting technologies were employed to create mood and clarify objects. So it is no longer natural light or the imitation or image of natural light that provide an index to natural-supernatural illumination. None of the lighting effects in the pictures are natural. Folberg illuminates the synagogues with

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his own equipment in order to override every bit of existing natural light and to fill in every dark shadow. Each photo-shoot involved about one hundred kilograms of gear, two cases of electronic flash equipment, and all kinds of stands, tripods, extension cords, and country-specific plug adapters. The physical place of each synagogue was literally wired up. Prepping the site demanded mopping and polishing floors, dusting furniture, and hanging of the lamps so they might look just right. The polishing makes the place “gleam,” with not a speck of dust or dirt out of place. Finally, each image is composed out of multiple exposures, sometimes as many as fifty exposures for a single image, layered on top of each other on a single sheet of film, and blended into a single image. This is the only way to convey “absolutely” stable objects. Every object in any of these pictures is fixed and immobile or, in the case of chandeliers, has been tied down in order to be rendered as such. 69 Every image and the aura in every one of these digital images are complex composites made possible by modern imaging and computational technologies. To understand the technical apparatus undergirding the work is therefore to understand that none of these images are real or even realistic. To be sure, a passing glance of these pictures reveals a real, ordinary synagogue, images of which one has seen before in big picture coffee table books about the history of the synagogue. But the more lingering look these pictures deserve underscores just how peculiar these image-places actually are. One begins to see how frozen, fixed, and luminous these images are intended to be at their best. What one begins to see the longer one looks is the visionary quality of each individual picture. These are not realistic representations, even though they look that way. As for the actual physical site, what does it look like? Folberg explains it in this way: “It looks a little bit like the photograph, depending on what time of day or night you visit it, how much you know of its people, customs, prayers, and history—and what you had for breakfast. In short, it looks the way you see it. These photographs, then, show the way I saw it.” As he says, the “synagogues” exist only in his mind. 70 Confusing the line between ontology and vision, Folberg’s synagogues form that part of twentieth-century art highlighted by René Magritte’s famous surrealist painting This is not a Pipe (1926). Widely recognized as a signature slogan for the anti-mimetic impulse in modern painting, Magritte’s picture-pun is a rather drab realistic depiction of a pipe. It looks like a pipe, but is not itself a pipe. The joke works as effectively as it does, in part, by introducing the language of the legend directly inside the pictorial space. With Magritte as our guide, we can now say “this is not a synagogue.” But the pictures are not even that simple. While this may not “be” “a synagogue” or while that is not “a pipe,” it may very well be that this is precisely how we perceive a pipe or a synagogue as a web of composite associations, memories, and anticipations built up over and into time as an object of intentional

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consciousness. If the composite character of images and imagining is already true in early stereoscopic images and in surrealist painting, it becomes even more the case or more apparent in the age of digital production and reproduction. Subverting the platonic hierarchy that descends vertically from ideal form, to material thing, to poetic representation, in Folberg’s synagogues, “representation” as horizontal vision is prior to and supersedes the dull, mundane reality of a historical site and gives to that reality its ideal-phenomenological cast, as simulacrum. In his classic discussion “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), André Bazin makes this point about photography and realist ontology: “The photographic image is the object itself.” This is the major statement on photographic realism for which Bazin is most often panned by contemporary theorists, who mostly neglect that his essay on realist photo ontology actually builds upon the ideality of the photographic image. Bazin’s complete statement is: “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” 71 The same coupling of realism and idealism-spiritualism (the creation of “an ideal world in the likeness of the real”) that Bazin sees in painting is recapitulated in the photographic image. 72 For all the object-like character he attributes to photographic realism and to surrealist photography, Bazin understood how, the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, a hallucination that is also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting [and here Bazin could also have added surrealist as well as digital photography] combines tricks of visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this. 73 CONCLUSION Concluding these reflections on the relation between art, technology, and religion, we have argued that Adorno and Benjamin’s analyses regarding aura and modern technologies were insufficiently “dialectical.” Soloveitchik struggled valiantly to maintain a creative equilibrium between technological society and culture, on the one hand, and religious consciousness and halakhic-covenantal community, on the other hand. What we begin to suspect, however, is that “dialectic” or equilibrium may not be the right terms to understand “the look” that technological culture and cultural objects give to religious thought and culture. What we learn from photo-theory of Krauss and Fried, and what we learn from looking at pictures by Stieglitz and Folberg is that what one might have thought were two ostensibly separate things—art and technology, religion and technology—are in fact always al-

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ready intermediated into each other. Religion begins to “look like something,” both real and unreal, both in and out of this world, and it takes on this appearance in the shifts between dark and light revealed by the photographic lens and enhanced by digital technologies. What this means for American Jewish thought is a self-knowing form of religion that takes shape between illusion and criticism. At the turn of the twentieth century, photography was commonly said to have freed painting from mimesis. There was now no need for painters to render realistically what a photograph could do with much greater precision. Certainly many of the most prominent contributors to twentieth-century photography theory insistently maintained the difference between the two arts in order to uphold either the purity of painting or the autonomy of this strange new art. But the strict division between photography and painting was and remains too simple. In the staged tableaus photographed by Henry Peach Robinson, photography was always idealist, and in this respect, always already close to painting. Stieglitz and his colleagues sought a more straight form of photographic practice, even as he insisted that there was nothing mechanical or automatic about the art of photography, and even as he also insisted upon the importance of ideas in his own photographic practice. All the questions about ontology, vision, representation, and ideas that were once asked about painting by symbolists and expressionists, all the questions that would have given painting a metaphysical cum religious-spiritual coloring, all these come flooding back into photography. Most pointedly in digital imagining, the line between what is real and what is unreal has become so blurry that the ontological difference between the two arts is almost rarely maintained, along with values such as autonomy and purity. It is no longer the image now that gets called into question, especially in view of what seems to be the fact that reality imitates art and other design formats. The ontological question has been turned around. It is the being of the referent itself that is no longer obvious. Is the object presented in the image a real thing or is it unreal? And if the relationship between the image and the thing imaged are no longer direct and natural, to what degree then can one say that the photograph is supernatural—without being credulous and dumb? Are we supposed to see in Folberg’s digital photographs a less cold and distant starscape, or perhaps one that is even colder still and now very distant? Herein lies the aura of art in the photographic age of digital reproduction, what Benjamin called the “strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close at hand.” 74 This is only to say that works by Stiegliz and Folberg make claims about the spiritual in art, from which it is but a short leap into the aura denied to the photograph by Benjamin. What is the status of such claims? I have sought here only to consider how a photograph, and with it technology,

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might open itself up to religious interpretations, and to identify some of the pitfalls therein. One problem with modern religious interpretations of art or of language is that those who pronounce upon the topic tend to overreach hermeneutically. Consider the art religious criticism of Paul Tillich or Jean-Luc Marion, or even the same preening about the ontology of poetic language from Heidegger. Perhaps guilty of it myself, I have nevertheless offered elsewhere similar reservations about Buber and Rosenzweig when they write about language, scripture, and revelation. 75 For these religious thinkers, every signifier, every image gets forced into an interpretive frame portending to some doctrinal or some carefully packaged post-doctrinal theological or phenomenological concept—“the unconditional,” “ultimate reality,” “Being,” “the call of being,” “the ground of being,” “revelation,” “gift,” or “the infinite.” About these things, a little critical distance is always in order. In contrast, artists will sometimes prove to be more skeptical than philosophers. A case in point are Folberg’s own self-critical remarks about the constructed nature of digital images; or Stieglitz, who also understood, tongue-in-cheek, the difference between a spiritual “equivalent” and the actuality of having photographed God. Practically this may not be so, but why should it be theoretically “impossible” to photograph God or perhaps the presence of God? Of course I too say this tongue-in-cheek, but it would have to depend upon the theory. In fact, the best photograph of God ever taken is the one by Magritte himself, which he called God, the Eighth Day (1937). In the photograph, God is shot sitting on a chair. His torso and face are obscured by a piece of cardboard decorated with a crude, child-like drawing of a door and two clouds. We see the hat perched on God’s head, his legs, and his hands. He sits behind a picture of a house, a white jug lying on the ground. Here is the image of God. It is certainly a joke, but a very serious theological joke, one that alternatively respects and pokes fun at profound canons and taboos that plumb the stuff of religious life and thought. How does one do this? Not with overtly pious images. What Magritte’s image offers is either an intentional form of blasphemy undermining old, orthodox forms of religion and art, or new critical forms for both religion and art; or perhaps both at the same time. As for the future of contemporary American Jewish thought and culture, at issue, perhaps, is not the need for new “language.” Its theological language has been talked to death in modern Jewish thought for some two hundred years. There is already plenty of language to go around—rational, mystical, aesthetic, ethical, sociological, political. Perhaps today’s cultural environment requires something in addition to and other than language. My guiding assumption in this essay has been that new media have the potential to transform Judaism and its religious thought in new and even revolutionary ways. Or maybe not. This remains to be seen, not vis-à-vis more language,

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but rather new datasets of images, new ways to composite and frame visually what contemporary Judaism and contemporary religion might look like under new cultural conditions. In part, the confusion in Jewish philosophy lies in not knowing where to look, whereas the trick is in knowing how to assess new forms of expression. Increasingly, the kinds of theological expression that shaped modern Jewish religious thought and philosophy from the late nineteenth and twentieth century belong to a distinct historical moment upon distant European shores. If, in general, old forms of thought continue to circulate in a more contemporary culture, it will have done so in carefully mediated packages. That is what happened to the Bible in early twentiethcentury Jewish thought, or to French bourgeois culture in Benjamin’s arcades project. These formats have always been technological, involving old media, then, and new media, today. Religion, including Jewish religion, almost always insinuates itself into technological expression, meaning that new technologies might actually enable the turn to new forms of aura and the spiritual in art in the age of new media. NOTES 1. See Zachary Braiterman, “Photographic Index, the ‘Spiritual in Art,’ and the Ethics of ‘Downcast Eyes,’” Philosophy Today 55/4 (2011), 348-60. 2. Zachary Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). For general overviews, see especially the introduction and epilogue. See also Asher D. Biemann, Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 3. Ken Koltun-Fromm, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), especially chapters 1, 3, and 4. 4. Gerhard Richter, Thought Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2. On Benjamin’s imagistic-photographic conception of history, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), xxi and chapter 1. 5. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 260-1, 337. 6. Ibid., 152. 7. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 188. 8. Ibid., 116. 9. Ibid., 107-8. 10. Ibid., 222. 11. Ibid., 221. 12. Ibid., 223. 13. Published in the same year as “The Storyteller,” it is impossible to attribute this to some shift from melancholy to enthusiasm regarding the liquidation of aura. 14. Theodor Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, March 18, 1936 in Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism (London: Verso, 1977); Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 183. On the larger dispute between Adorno and Benjamin, see Wolin, Walter Benjamin, chapter 6. 15. Jeremy Stolow (ed.), Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and The Things In Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1-2, 4.

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16. For an important corrective to this neglect, see Stolow (ed.), Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and The Things In Between. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 55. 18. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2006), 12-13. 19. Ibid., 17-18. 20. Zachary Braiterman, “Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant’s Mitzvah-Aesthetic,” AJS Review 25/1, (2000/01), 1-24. 21. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, 75. 22. Ibid., 78. 23. Ibid., 79. 24. Ibid., 81. 25. Ibid., 100. 26. Ibid., 97. 27. Ibid., 101, 105. 28. Ibid., 102, 106. 29. Ibid., 96, 105. 30. Ibid., 42-3, 46, 98. 31. Ibid., 93-6, 91, 99. 32. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 62. 33. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 45, 79. 34. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernists Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), 211. 35. Ibid., 203. 36. Ibid, 217 (emphasis in the original by Barthes). 37. Ibid., 205. 38. Ibid., 158. 39. Ibid., 10. 40. For a similar instance in which Krauss writes with tremendous verve and insight about the spiritual in art which she herself rejects, see Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998), 6-8. In this case, the reference is to Michael Fried’s commentary on baseball and “the metaphysics of grace.” 41. Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 86-7. 42. Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 72-3, 78-9. 43. Ibid., 109, 141. 44. Ibid., 151. 45. Ibid., 92. 46. Ibid., 96. 47. Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983), 15, 186-9; also see Weston Naef, In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. P. Getty Museum, 1995), 26; Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 262; and Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (Lebanon, NH: University of New England Press, 1989), 108. 48. Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz, 21, 205, 208. 49. Ibid., 26. 50. Ibid., 207 51. Ibid., 208. 52. Mary Woods, Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 20-1. 53. Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 28. For a pessimistic reading of the city in the 1920s, see Woods, Beyond the Architect’s Eye, 53. Woods talks about the dislocations in New

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York architecture prior to the Second World War, and the complete usurpation of the past by the present against which Stieglitz reacted (12). In a similar vein, see Celeste Connor, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924-1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Connor reads the Shelton photographs as representing dark, retributive judgment against the city (164; cf. 52, 56). She also highlights the distance of life in the Shelton with O’Keeffe over and above the maddening city (158-9). In contrast, Sarah Greenough writes about Stieglitz and the city in a more effusive vein. See Sarah Greenough (ed.), My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915-1933, Volume 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 360. 54. Corn, The Great American Thing, 32. 55. Naef, In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz, 134. Note the informative and insightful dialogue between the curators in this text is titled “An Affirmation of Light,” which obscures the operation of darkness in the pictures discussed here. 56. Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, 288. 57. Ibid., 165-6. 58. Ibid., 158, 161-3. 59. William Myers, “Jews and Photography,” Commentary January (2003), 45-48. www. williammeyersphotography.com/words/jewsandphotography.pdf. 60. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), 208-9. 61. Found in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 207. 62. Neil Folberg, Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land (New York: Aperture, 2005), 58-9. 63. See the introduction by Ferris in Folberg, Celestial Nights. As if to cut off the critics of religion at the pass, Ferris claims to see “in the artifice [of Folberg’s] creation and the naturalness of its results” an interface between human mind and nature, between art and science (15). I too see the artifice described by Ferris, but I’m not sure about the naturalness. 64. Folberg, Celestial Nights, 13. 65. Walter Pahnnke, “LSD and Religious Experience,” in LSD, Man, and Society, eds. Richard C. DeBold and Russel Leaf (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1967), 61-3. Pahnke distinguishes the last feature as religious, while noting the overlap between all five types. I would also think “the religious” extends across all five types, spanning the psychotic to the mystical. 66. Neil Folberg, And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World (New York: Aperture, 1995), 13, 105. 67. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 15. 68. Ibid., 9-10. 69. Folberg, And I Shall Dwell Among Them, 10, 19. 70. Ibid., 10-13. 71. Found in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 241. 72. Ibid., 238. 73. Ibid., 243. 74. Found in Trachtenberg, Classic Essay on Photography, 209. 75. Braiterman, Shape of Revelation, conclusion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism. Edited by Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, 1977. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Modern Public and Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1969.

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Biemann, Asher D. Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Braiterman, Zachary. “Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant’s Mitzvah-Aesthetic.” AJS Review 25, no. 1 (2000/01): 1-24. ———. “Photographic Index, the ‘Spiritual in Art,’ and the Ethics of ‘Downcast Eyes.’” Philosophy Today 55, no. 4 (2011): 348-60. ———. The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993. Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Connor, Celeste. Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924-1934. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Corn, Wanda. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and The Things In Between. Edited by Jeremy Stolow. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Folberg, Neil. And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World. New York: Aperture, 1995. ———. Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land. New York: Aperture, 2005. Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Greenough, Sarah. Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983. Hoffman, Katherine. Stieglitz: A Beginning Light. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Koltun-Fromm, Ken. Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998. ———. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernists Myths. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915-1933. Edited by Sarah Greenough. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Myers, William. “Jews and Photography.” Commentary January (2003): 45-48. Naef, Weston. In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: J. P. Getty Museum, 1995. O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Pahnnke, Walter. “LSD and Religious Experience.” In LSD, Man, and Society, edited by Richard C. DeBold and Russel Leaf. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1967. Richter, Gerhard. Thought Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Lebanon, NH: University of New England Press, 1989. Soloveitchik, Joseph. The Lonely Man of Faith. New York: Three Leaves Press, 2006. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Woods, Mary. Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Part III

Theology and Culture

Chapter Eight

A Personal Partnership With God Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Pragmatic Theodicy Einat Ramon

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s stubborn refusal to assign the primary responsibility for evil in the world in general, and for the Holocaust in particular, to God—or, alternatively, to redefine the relationship between God and humanity or between God and Israel in light of the mass slaughter of human beings in modern times—has troubled and continues to trouble many theologians and students of modern Jewish thought; all the more so, in light of Heschel’s centrality in non-Orthodox Jewish philosophy. 1 Heschel (Warsaw 1907-New York 1972) stresses that the feeling of the presence of the Shekhinah in human suffering became indelibly engraved in the consciousness of Jews inspired by the Kabbalah. 2 He adamantly refused to abandon this line of thought, notwithstanding the precedents for doing so in classic Rabbinic literature and despite radical innovations in contemporary theology. In the present study I shall attempt to add another voice to the scholarly discourse on this issue and offer an alternative explanation for Heschel’s theological position on theodicy, as consistently expressed throughout most of his writings. I demonstrate that: a) Heschel’s refusal to adopt “naturalist” or “pagan” theodicies reflects his moral critique of humanity’s projection of its own immorality on God; b) the theological perception that justifies alienation from God as a result of the reality of evil is, according to Heschel, an essentially idolatrous theology; and c) the philosophical influence of William James came to Heschel’s support in formulating his theological response to radical evil. As we shall see below, when Heschel encountered “aggadic–theological pluralism”—that is to say, when he confronted two legitimate theological positions within the Rabbinic tradition—he made use of the pragmatic method that supported the “philosophical validity” of 221

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faith as creating an ethical reality to decide which of the two traditional approaches ought to be adopted in our own day as a way of life. The relevance of once again delving into Heschel’s theodicy reemerges in our day and age within the context of North American liberal Jewry, where many American rabbis face theological challenges from their congregants when a loved one dies or when experiencing illness, unemployment, or other trials. They then search for new approaches to help congregants face radical evil in their lives and sometimes encourage their congregants to express their anger at God or even curse God when facing personal or universal suffering as an expression of an authentic dialogue with the Divine. Yet Heschel emphasizes over and over again that alienation from God, including blaming Him for human or natural evil, reflects an escape from human responsibility to God’s creation and from moral and spiritual obligations. According to him, Biblical theology continually directs human beings to perceive suffering as a religious challenge and a personal trial, one that leads to a more intimate encounter with God. Heschel refused to succumb to contemporary intellectual and spiritual pressure to abandon a personal relationship with God as portrayed in the Bible, as he believed that it is this personal relationship that maintains the world while the alienation between humans and the living Biblical God is an idolatrous reaction to evil that endangers the future of the human species. Heschel’s struggle with the tension between some Rabbinic statements that express anger at God and his commitment to partnership with Him can clearly be traced in the first volume of his monumental work, Torah from Heaven as Reflected Through the Generations (hereafter: Torah from Heaven). In Torah from Heaven, Heschel lays down the midrashic foundation for his theodicy, rejecting those options within Talmudic and midrashic aggadic literature that contradict it. As in most of Heschel’s thought during the second half of his life, this book too was written in the wake of the Holocaust horrors, as evidenced by the book’s dedication: “To the memory of my righteous mother, Rivka Raizel, and that of my sisters, Devora Miriam, Esther Sima, and Gittel, who perished in the Holocaust.” 3 In contrast to the approach of other researchers, I intend to show, at the outset of this chapter, that Heschel in fact raised the theological possibility of God’s direct responsibility for evil and for the Holocaust, and of humanity’s crying out to Heaven in protest. He did so both in Torah from Heaven and in earlier writings. Nonetheless, he narrowed this theological direction by ignoring its depths or only partially addressing its fundamental sources, thereby supporting the position of Rabbi Akiva, who understood suffering as a further expression of humanity’s total identification with God and God’s with humanity. I shall then attempt to ponder the logic underlying Heschel’s identification with this position and his rejection of others within the context of Rab-

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binic thought. In my opinion, Heschel was motivated to concur with Rabbi Akiva’s position by pragmatic educational, theological, and philosophical considerations. As an eclectic and independent thinker, Heschel chose what to adopt and what to reject, on the basis of moral positions that he considered to be eternal and as manifested in the lives of the outstanding heroes of the Jewish people. Heschel could not accept William James’ pragmatism insofar as “there are no absolute evils,” or even that “the highest ethical life . . . consists in the breaking of rules.” Such expressions seemed to invite an unwanted relativism at a time that human freedom was exploited for the creation of unimagined atrocities. 4 Heschel often employed William James’ pragmatic philosophy to decide between the worldviews of central pillars among the sages of Israel. This decision was made after clarifying the social consequences of each one of these worldviews. In a world that had lost its innocence, Heschel sought to preserve the innocence of faith expressed in the ability to carry out a covenant of mutual relationship between God and human beings. Heschel’s decision in favor of the position that “both of us”— that is, both God and ourselves—“are in need of deliverance” was not based upon epistemological or metaphysical considerations, but was rather an educational–pragmatic decision. This decision may also be taken as indicative of Heschel’s position regarding the function of theology in general. Its aim is not to clarify epistemological issues concerning the nature of God, of which humans have no empirical knowledge, but rather to encourage man to listen to the living divine–ethical voice revealed to humanity at Sinai, the voice of human responsibility and integrity. GOD’S RELATION TO EVIL IN HESCHEL’S THOUGHT: SCHOLARLY STANCES Heschel’s theological explanations of the place of evil in God’s world, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust, have concerned a number of scholars over the last decade, including Robert Eisen, Alexander Even Chen, and Zachary Braiterman, all of whom have attempted to understand the structure of the theological models adopted by Heschel. 5 Did he amend his position on this issue over the years? 6 In what way is Heschel’s insistence on a personal and traditional view of God to be interpreted, particularly in light of the theologies developed in the United States since the 1950s that completely broke with this tradition? 7 Indeed, we may not ignore these theological approaches, whose main spokesmen were Mordecai M. Kaplan, Richard Rubenstein, and, on the contemporary scene, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Green. 8 While the last three also wrote after Heschel’s time, it should be remembered that

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Heschel was Rubenstein’s teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York when the latter began to develop his own radical theology. Rubenstein’s theology preached a “pagan Judaism”—that is, one that recognized God’s presence in nature alone, not in history. As a starting point for our discussion, we shall note the similarity between the points of departure of Heschel, the teacher, and Rubenstein, the student, regarding the moral and religious difficulty posed by the Holocaust. In a chapter of his most widely read book, God in Search of Man (1955), devoted to the problem of evil, Heschel describes the moral-theological problem of his generation, which had experienced the Holocaust in the most concrete and palpable way: This essential predicament of man has assumed a peculiar urgency in our time, living as we do in its civilization where factories were established in order to exterminate millions of men, women, and children; where soap was made of human flesh. What have we done to make such crimes possible? What are we doing to make such crimes impossible? Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror. 9

And yet, Heschel goes on to stress, God’s standing and nature remain firm even after the Holocaust. In referring his readers to the creation story, Heschel notes that the God of Israel is not impressed by the glorious, the great or the mysterious, but rather by the good and the holy, “a higher level of existence, where man is not alone when confronted with evil.” 10 About a decade later, 11 Rubenstein described the Jewish-human crisis following the Holocaust in a vein similar to Heschel, as follows: There can be a question for Job only when there is a Job. Hideously afflicted, Job sat on his dung heap. No matter how terrible his condition became, he was at all times recognized as a person by both God and man. At Auschwitz, the Jew did not sit upon the dung heap. He became a dung heap. We became less than a dung heap. At least the dung heap has the ability to expand earth’s lifegiving capacity. No “Thou” was addressed to the Auschwitz Jew by either God or man. The Jew became a nonperson, in the deepest sense. Neither his life nor his death mattered. There was no question because there was no Job. Job went up in smoke. His question went with him. 12

Despite the similarities between Heschel and his disciple Rubenstein, the difference between them is also apparent. True, both saw the Holocaust as the most catastrophic event, marking an unprecedented nadir for humanity, characteristic of modernity. But whereas the older Heschel continued to write, believe, and to act within the framework of traditional religious-theo-

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logical categories, the younger Rubenstein refused to do so. He stood his ground: in his view, after Auschwitz, the covenant between the People of Israel and God had been revoked. Thus, Rubenstein asserts that traditional stories of Jewish heroes—of those who withstood various tortures and suffered great torment—are no longer of significance for our generation. 13 He argues that Auschwitz turned all of Judaism and all of human morality on its head, for “the evil rooted in human nature would never entirely disappear. Like the plague in Albert Camus’ novel, radical evil might lie dormant for long periods but it remained forever capable of disrupting the pathetically weak fragments of reason and decency with which men have constructed their fragile civilization.” Rubenstein further argued that “each generation had to confront the choice between good and evil unaided by those who went before.” 14 Although published in 1965, one may assume that these words were earlier articulated within the walls of the Jewish Theological Seminary. But Heschel adamantly continued in his own way: he taught a return to the mitzvot, to the theology implicit within Rabbinic lore, and to seeing the exemplary personalities of the Jewish people as positive models. All these, he thought, are of double significance for our own and future generations, for they possess the requisite force and depth to show the way for future generations. Zachary Braiterman claims that there was a certain wavering in Heschel’s adherence to this position. In his book (God) After Auschwitz (1998), Braiterman suggests that Rubenstein may have influenced his teacher in his later years, as evidenced mainly in Heschel’s last book, published in 1973, shortly before Heschel’s death—that on the Kotzker Rebbe and Søren Kierkegaard, entitled A Passion for Truth. Braiterman argues that one may see in this work a certain departure of Heschel from his persistent defense of God in light of the Holocaust. In chapter 9 of A Passion for Truth, devoted to a comparison between Job and the Kotzker Rebbe, Heschel places in the mouth of R. Menahem Mendel the words: “For who was responsible that we hurried about in a world of phantoms? Was only man to blame? . . . did not castigation itself cast reproach upon their Maker? What about the Heavens above permitted, or even ordained, that the predicament arise and persist? . . . Something had gone awry in Heaven.” 15 Braiterman claims, however, that this stance, which raises the radical question of God’s part in human cruelty, is overcome by Heschel’s recurring argument that stresses the loneliness of a God who loves good against a world overcome by unimaginable evil. 16 A Passion for Truth concludes with the story of a Holocaust survivor who, upon returning from an official visit to Poland, met with S. Z. Shragai, Heschel’s Israeli Orthodox friend and a noted Religious Zionist. The survivor trembled upon hearing Shragai’s heartfelt prayer and, despite having turned his back upon religion after Auschwitz, joined with him in prayer so as not to abandon God in His loneliness. 17 Braiterman thought that, even if

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Heschel recorded his heretical thoughts linking God to the worst imaginable human evil, the theological stance of his final years ultimately remained as it had been throughout his life. 18 Yet Braiterman was unaware that Heschel raised and rejected this same stance—the possibility of God’s connection to the perpetrators of the Holocaust—on a number of occasions over several decades. In an article published in Liberal Judaism in 1944, at the height of the horrors of the Holocaust, he wrote the following: The Day of the Lord is a day without the Lord. Where is God? Why dost Thou not halt the trains loaded with Jews being led to slaughter? It is hard to rear a child, to nourish and to educate. Why dost Thou make it so easy to kill? Like Moses, we hide our faces for we are afraid to look upon Elohim, upon His power of judgment. Indeed, where were we when men learned to hate in the days of starvation? When raving madmen were sowing wrath in the hearts of the unemployed? Let Fascism not serve as an alibi for our conscience. We have failed to fight for right, for justice, for goodness as a result we must fight against wrong, against injustice, against evil. We have failed to offer sacrifices on the altar of peace. Now we must offer sacrifices on the altar of war. 19

Although on more than one occasion he expressed his anger at Heaven, in every one of these cases Heschel dismissed the possibilities that either: (a) God is apathetic to human suffering; (b) God intentionally causes evil; or that (c) God is impersonal and therefore cannot engage in a relationship with humans. He treated these as merely theoretical options, temporary “stations” in the flow of his theological thought. But in the final analysis, time after time he rejected each one of these positions as his theological stance. A systematic examination of all these sources will indicate that he consciously raised and rejected this idea. He repeatedly refused to become captive to a worldview that would cast responsibility for the Holocaust upon God, as that implied exempting human beings from their own responsibility for the abominations of the Holocaust. This may explain the source of the frustration felt by Heschel’s disciple, Rubenstein, 20 as well as Braiterman’s conclusion that Heschel ignored the fact that, for many people, including many survivors, the Holocaust was a kind of final station on the path of religious faith. 21 In light of the characterization of members of that generation, one must also examine that section of Heschel’s book, Torah From Heaven, in which he discusses at length the doctrine of suffering. Even if the chapter in his book dealing with “The Doctrine of the Shekhinah” was written in concert with certain theological ideas that had accompanied Heschel from the beginning of his path, we must always keep in mind his subtle polemic with Kaplan’s Reconstructionism and with the advocacy of “Jewish paganism” by Rubenstein. The common denominator for these “naturalist” theologies is that they advocate a view regarding belief in a personal God as archaic and

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irrelevant to modern scientific society (Kaplan), and to the post-Holocaust human condition. CONFRONTING “AGGADIC PLURALISM”: RABBINIC ATTITUDES TOWARD EVIL IN TORAH FROM HEAVEN It seems significant that the issue of suffering arose in its full force and complexity specifically in Heschel’s Torah From Heaven. Heschel saw R. Akiva and R. Ishmael (two of the ten martyrs whose lives were cut short, according to the legends of the aggadah, in the course of cruel humiliation and abuse) as theological “experts” from whom one may learn about the existential confrontation with evil run amok in the world. Heschel appears to have been morally frightened by the paganism of the various radical theological views within Rubenstein and his generation. His ethical critique of paganism may already be seen in his early article, “Saving the Soul,” written shortly after the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel (1949): The soul of every human being possesses within it the tendency to value those things that it likes, and to bow down to that which appears to be valuable. This is a test that everyone passes. How easy it is to be attracted to outward beauty, and how hard it is to remove the mask and penetrate to that which is inside. 22

In Heschel’s view, this is the essential ethical characteristic of paganism, as expressed in our own generation in the closed rationalistic guise of pantheism: “The Greek deification of nature developed into the concept of the essence in Greek philosophy.” 23 It follows from this that American Jewish religious worldviews that lead to alienation from God, exaggerated rationalism, and a substitute faith in humanity, are seen by Heschel as a reflection of ancient idolatrous theological stands. Heschel thought that the sweep of modern paganism must be pushed aside by understanding the outstanding figures of the Jewish people and the uncertainty and decisions which characterized their lives. “The unity of the generations and the unity of all members of the generation depend upon one another. We need to turn to the prophet Isaiah, to R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, to Maimonides and to the Baal Shem Tov,” he wrote. 24 Hence, he devoted his time to portraying the spiritual images of many of the sages of earlier generations—such as Solomon ibn Gabirol, R. Saadya Gaon, Maimonides, the prophets, and various Hasidic teachers—using the philosophical and psychological language of the modern generation so as to enable Jews to emulate these same outstanding figures. In his hope to restore American Jewish living and personal faith in God, Heschel chose the life stories of R. Akiva and R. Ishmael in order to deal

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with the problem of modern evil produced and engineered by technocrats. In certain respects, it might have been preferable for him to have chosen the story of Job: a story with a seemingly “happy end” that constructs a theology which is in a certain sense acceptable to moderns, in that it does not demand moral logic in the conduct of nature. 25 But Heschel found R. Akiva and R. Ishmael more appropriate examples than Job for a generation that seeks meaning and faith in the wake of the contempt shown for the lives of the sons and the daughters of the Jewish people who were slaughtered in the crematoria of Auschwitz and Treblinka. We shall therefore examine two “theological crossroads” and see how, at these interstices, Heschel inclined his theological direction toward the faith which he wishes to share with his readers. We shall see how Heschel leads his readers through various different theological options, but in the end directs them toward God’s participation in the sufferings of Israel. This is, according to Heschel’s approach, and as has been noted by the researcher Alexander Even Chen, the path of R. Akiva. 26 First Theological Crossroad: Biblical Theology versus Pantheist Idolatry To Heschel, the idea that God participates in human suffering, and humans in the suffering of God, is a revolutionary idea: But along came Rabbi Akiva, who taught that the participation of the Holy and Blessed One in the Life of Israel is not merely mental nod, a measure of compassion born of relationship to God’s people. The pain of compassion amounts to pain only at a distance; it is the pain of the onlooker. But the participation of the Holy and Blessed One is total identification, something that touches God’s very essence, God’s majestic being. As it were, afflictions of the nation inflict wounds on God. 27

In this context, Heschel quoted Exodus Rabbah (Parashat Ki Tisa), where there is a series of midrashim dealing with the nature of the apostasy that lay at the root of the sin of the Golden Calf. 28 R. Akiva thought that the Sin of the Calf consisted in focusing redemption upon God and rejecting the idea that the people were redeemed from Egypt—a position opposed to the literal sense of the Torah: “And what falsehood did they speak about the Holy One blessed be He? R. Akiva expounded it, saying: And was He engaged with us? He was engaged with Himself; He redeemed for Himself and He did not redeem us.” 29 Heschel explains this complicated midrash, in which God redeemed only Himself and not the Israelites from Egypt, is an idolatrous idea. It is very tempting to make religious faith totally independent of any sort of historical material: to claim that faith is focused upon God—and upon God alone. The “speakers of falsehood” understood the Exodus from a theo-

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logical viewpoint, in a far-reaching and logical way. They asserted that the only religious benefit attained from the Exodus in the long term was the acknowledgement of God by humankind. Based on this midrash, we might argue that the Israelites were really never redeemed from Egypt. In other words: the only “outcome” of the Exodus, according to those mentioned in the midrash who make false arguments, was a purely theological one: the recognition of God’s existence by humans, not of God’s care for the Jewish People through His deliverance of the People of Israel from Egypt. Yet, we might ask how was this “false” position different from the radical, theocentric theology which Heschel sought to emphasize through the religious personality of Rabbi Akiva and his students: In the wake of this reversal there was effected a veritable revolution in religious thought, one that exerted a profound influence through the course of the generations. From time immemorial the people had perceived the salvation of Israel as a human need, a national need, through which, to be sure, God’s name would be magnified in the world. But now Rabbi Akiva taught that Israel’s salvation is a divine need, and God’s needs take precedence over human needs. There is yet more: according to the classical theology, salvation was conditional on Israel’s merit, but folded into Rabbi Akiva’s doctrine is the idea that salvation is the concern and need of the Holy and Blessed One, in all the divine glory, and thus would have to come even in the absence of merit. 30

This being the case, why do R. Akiva, and Heschel in his wake, reject this approach of those who argue that the only spiritual achievement of the Exodus is human recognition of God? 31 Heschel, it is true, does not delve deeply into this question, but the question becomes even sharper when R. Akiva’s disciple, R. Meir, delivers a sermon that might appear as not too far removed from those “falsehoods.” Rabbi Meir expressed the same thought: “redemption is mine and yours, and I, as it were, was redeemed with you, as it is said: ‘whom you have redeemed for yourself from Egypt, a people and its God.’” 32 This being the case, what is the difference between “the speakers of falsehood” and Rabbi Meir? In both cases God is redeemed; in both cases the redemption was the outcome of a transcendent need that served the Almighty; in both cases it is emphasized that God redeemed Himself from Egypt by establishing the good and by the longing for it; in both cases we see a sense of a historical turning point in which humankind recognized the possibility of freedom and religious responsibility. Why then does one midrash emphasize the false, idolatrous faith, liable to “upset the applecart and invite denial of God’s omnipotence and compassion,” 33 while the latter, according to Heschel, constitutes “a profound revolution in religious thought”? If we examine the subtle distinctions between the two, we will find that Rabbi Meir’s revolution in religious thought consisted not in attachment to

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the factual knowledge that, in the wake of the Exodus, humankind recognized God, but rather in the demand to see the Exodus as an act of cooperation between God and the Jewish People, an act of intimacy and closeness. Unlike those who sinned in making the Golden Calf, who limited the meaning of the Exodus to an event of rational theological significance, signifying detachment and alienation between God and humanity, R. Akiva’s school of thought understood the Exodus as an emotional, intimate event. The outcome of intimacy expressed by the Exodus demands responsibility, sensitivity and the transcendence of material historic appearances! The revolutionary idea couched in this traditional Jewish religious language seeks to see the meeting between humanity and God from the point of vulnerability on both sides. The difficulty in the rational-material viewpoint—one so amenable to American liberal Jewry—lies precisely in its inability to discern the relationship and connection between human beings and God, and it is precisely towards this point that Jewish monotheism directs and educates people, according to Heschel. An alternative to this view leaves human beings alone, without hope in a meaningless world, in a world where destructive drives have no limit. As Heschel explains in God in Search of Man: “There is a passion and drive for cruel deeds which only the awe and fear of God can soothe; there is a suffocating selfishness in humans which only holiness can ventilate.” 34 Hence, Heschel cites in Torah from Heaven the example of R. Judah b. Ilai who said, while marching around the altar every day of the Festival of Sukkot, “Ani va-ho, deliver us.” 35 Heschel, quoting here Rabbi Nathan of Rome, the author of the first (eleventh century) Talmudic dictionary The Arukh, writes: “va-ho refers to the Holy and Blessed One; he too as it were is in need of deliverance.” 36 This relationship was also inherent in the legendary personality of R. Akiva, the mystic. Heschel summarizes as follows: Now if the Holy and Blessed One shares in the pains of mortals, how much more so is it incumbent on us to take our share in the pains of the Holy and Blessed One. Moreover, whenever there is misery in the world, one should know that there is misery on high just as there is misery below. 37

Heschel’s answer to the problem of lack of faith after the Holocaust was the essence of R. Akiva’s teaching: we can break our loneliness in the face of suffering by cultivating the feeling that God participates in human suffering and humans in God’s. The feelings of loneliness and alienation, and the loss of intimacy between God and humans, lead, according to Heschel, to the devastating moral crises that we confront in modernity.

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Second Theological Crossroad: Rejection of Midrashic Religious Protest While Heschel devoted an entire chapter to R. Akiva’s doctrine of suffering, he greatly limited his discussion of this doctrine, while gently rejecting various other midrashim and Rabbinic sayings that contradicted it. For example, regarding R. Ishmael’s defiant statement of protest towards Heaven he wrote: “Rabbi Ishmael saw the travails of Israel and did not accept his people’s afflictions with love. From his academy rose the painful cry: ‘Who is like You, God, among the mighty [ba’elim]—Who is like You among the mute [be’ ilmim]! Who is like You in how you see the humiliation of Your children and remain silent!’” (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, Beshalah, Ch. 8). 38 Heschel asks the following: “Does a human being have the right to answer thus the words of the Master of the Universe?” 39 Heschel left this last question with a question mark and did not propose any answer. In the school of R. Ishmael, he concluded, “they rejected the idea that the Holy One blessed be He needs the light of human beings.” 40 In similar cavalier fashion, Heschel relates the story in b. Berakhot 5a about R. Yohanan and his ailing colleagues/students, where there appears repeatedly a saying that protests against R. Akiva’s stance that “beloved are sufferings,” implying that from Rabbi Akiva’s perspective there is an aspect of intimacy with God when one confronts suffering. This story is central to everything relating to the human confrontation with suffering within the Rabbinic tradition: R. Hiyya bar Abba was ill. R. Yohanan went to see him. R. Yohanan said to R. Hiyya bar Abba: “Do you love suffering?” He answered him: Neither them nor their reward. He said to him: Give me your hand and I will lift you up [i.e., he healed him]. R. Yohanan was sick. R. Hanina came to see him. He asked him: “Do you love suffering?” He answered: Neither them nor their reward! He said to him: Give me your hand. He gave him his hand and he lifted him up. Why? Should not R. Yohanan raise himself?! They say: a prisoner does not take himself out of prison. R. Eleazar was ill, and R. Yohanan came to visit him. He saw that he was lying in a dark house. R. Yohanan uncovered [his forearm] and there was light [i.e., R. Yohanan saw that R. Eleazar was crying]. He said to him: “Why are you crying? Is it because you have not learned much Torah? We have learned: [It makes no difference whether] one does much or does little, provided only that he direct his heart towards Heaven! And is it because of livelihood [i.e., your poor economic situation]? Not every person enjoys two tables [i.e., both wealth and Torah]. And if because of children [i.e. who died]? [Look,] this is the bone of my tenth son. R. Eleazar said to him: Because of this beauty [of R. Yohanan] which shall waste away in the grave I weep. He [R. Yohanan] said to him: For that one certainly ought to weep. And the two of them wept. In the course of matters he said to him [R. Yohanan to R. Eleazar]: Are sufferings beloved to you? He replied to him: Neither them

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Time after time, the conversations between R. Yohanan and his disciples, against the background of their illnesses, reveal a question to which there is also the same, clear answer: “Do you love suffering?” “Neither them nor their reward.” The protest here against R. Akiva’s position is clear and explicit: sufferings are not desirable, neither on the national level nor on the personal level of sufferings of body and soul. Moreover, these things are brought in the name of R. Yohanan who, as a disciple of R. Judah the Prince and of his disciples, is considered one of the heirs of the school of R. Akiva. 41 It would seem, therefore, that generations later within that same school of thought there were certain scholars who questioned the position of their teacher’s teacher. Heschel, however, in Torah From Heaven, refrains from entering into the thick of this opposed position and summarizes it briefly as follows: Not all the Sages shared Rabbi Akiva’s views concerning the love of afflictions. We have on record the words of Sages who were stricken and, like King Hezekiah, begged for mercy. Rabbi Hiyya Bar Aba, Rabbi Johanan, and Rabbi Eleazar were each asked: “Are your afflictions beloved of you?” and each answered: “Neither them nor their rewards!” 42

It would have been fitting to discuss extensively the question as to why the second generation of R. Akiva’s disciples—R. Yohanan and his students— objected to R. Akiva’s position and the meaning of this objection, 43 but Heschel did not do so. He quoted the phrase repeated in the story in tractate Berakhot and no more than that. He did the same when he brought one of the hair-raising midrashim from the prologues (petihtot) to the midrashic collection, Lamentations Rabbah, likewise attributed to R. Yohanan and his disciple, brother-in-law and friend, Resh Lakhish: R. Yohanan said: [A parable. This may be compared to] a king who had two sons. He was angered with the first one, took a staff, beat him and sent him into exile. He said, “Woe to this one! From what tranquility was he exiled!” He was angered with the second, took a stick, beat him and sent him into exile. He said, “I am the one who caused them to behave wrongly.” Thus the ten tribes were exiled, and the Holy One blessed be He began to say this verse: “Woe to them, for they have strayed from Me!” [Hosea 7:13]. When Judah and Benjamin were sent into exile, the Holy One blessed be He as it were said, “Woe to Me, for I am broken” [Jer 10:19]. R. Shimon ben Lakish [Resh Lakhish] said: [A parable; this may be compared to] a king who had two sons. He was angry with the first and took a stick

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and beat him and he trembled and died, and he began to bewail him. He was angry with the second, took a stick, beat him, and he trembled and died. He said: From here on in I have no strength to lament him; rather, call to the wailing women and let them bewail and lament them. So, when the ten tribes were exiled, He began to bewail them, “A lamentation for the House of Israel” [Amos 5:1]. Once Judah and Benjamin were exiled, the Holy One blessed be He said, as it were: From now on I do not have the strength to lament them. Rather, “Thus says the Lord of Hosts: Consider and call to the mourning women and let them come, and to the skillful women and they shall come. Let them make haste and raise a wailing and a lament over us, that our eyes may be filled with tears, and our eyelids gush with water” (Jer. 9:16-17). 44

Here, too, Heschel refrained from discussing the harsh implications of this midrash: he did not examine whether there was indeed a school of sages who openly opposed R. Akiva’s doctrine of suffering and were willing, for purposes of crying out, to compare God to a cruel and abusive father. This midrash has recently been discussed at some length in a study by Galit Hasan-Rokem, who, unlike Heschel, draws our attention to the fact that the midrash is from Lamentations Rabbah: A sharp confrontation emerges here from the perspective of the father-son relationship when, at the mourning stage, the borders between father and sons are encroached, and the conflict unfolds within the father himself. The meaning of the encroachment is twofold: first, the father physically destroys his sons by thrashing them, and then he denies their separate existence by turning his mourning into mourning for himself. 45

Heschel, on the other hand, had minimized the power of the harsh protest toward heaven. In the parable, God, by means of this power, is depicted as an arbitrary and cruel father who cold-heartedly kills his children. The great irony embodied in depicting the dirge of this murderous father after the act of murder is particularly troubling. While Heschel did not delve deeply into the contents of the midrash, he gave an unbalanced degree of weight to the end of the midrash or to the addition to the midrash brought by the unknown editor of Lamentations Rabbah, stating that: “It is not written here ‘upon them’ but ‘upon us.’” In practice, Heschel did not devote a single word to clarify this midrash or to understand it. He concludes the entire chapter with the words: “For this is yet another mundane matter that has lofty parallel above. They dared to look, and in so doing, they found that the pains of the nation were indeed paralleled by the pains of the Creator. Thus, instead of bearing their own afflictions, they began instead to share in the afflictions of Heaven.” 46 This approach, placing the emphasis on the addition to the midrash rather than on the midrash itself, which raises penetrating theological

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questions, entails a deliberate avoidance of confronting its significance in depth. This phenomenon of partial quotations in Heschel’s work is better known and understood today thanks to Michael Marmur’s study of Heschel’s rhetoric of quotation. 47 We learn from Marmur’s study of the free use Heschel made of the classical sources of Judaism. One may argue that the use of creative and free quotations in Torah From Heaven weakens the connection between the textual–historical truth and theology, a connection whose importance Heschel did not dismiss. Heschel cited that religious position which rails against heaven, but did so in a cursory way, without discussing it, and only confronted it in a marginal way. He took a perfunctory approach toward those matters that were opposed to his opinion. While this did not detract from the literary and aesthetic dimension of the book, it certainly, in the final analysis, weakened the force of his own theological position. 48 Heschel’s reaffirmation of R. Akiva’s position and its ethical value were well-formulated by him, time after time: In the school of Rabbi Akiva, God’s bond to Israel is one of intimate empathy. God, as it were, is linked to Israel with bonds of love, participating in its suffering and redeemed by its salvation. Such a bond belongs to the inner realm of the heart. But other Sages saw the bond as a moral imperative. God is, as it were, compelled by the very words of His oath to the patriarchs to be faithful to the covenant concluded with them. Such a bond belongs to the outward realm of the will. The first point of view stresses the divine pathos; it speaks of the bond in dynamic terms of feeling. The second stresses the covenant; it speaks of the bond in terms of obligation. The first sees the bond as a connection to the ever-present Israel, and the second sees the bond to Israel as the deserts of the patriarchs. 49

R. Akiva’s position compromises neither the personal, intimate connection between God and Israel, nor the closeness and identification between God and the people. In Heschel’s eyes, as implied in these passages, this position was the very essence of Judaism. He saw a direct line between the prophetic pathos which he discussed in his other books, and the “sufferings of love” which are, in practice, the emotional participation of Jews and their God in the same human–ethical crisis in the world. The other positions—R. Ishmael’s cries of pain, or an interpretation of R. Yohanan and his disciples’ comments as polemic with Rabbi Akiva, a commentary adopted within liberal American Judaism in our day and age—are all, in the final analysis according to Heschel, dangerous compromises with pagan and ultimately idolatrous positions. They limit themselves to that which is visible and provide it with a simplistic interpretation or, alternatively, with alienation between humanity and God, and thus also between humans. Both of them—as it would seem to follow from the Heschelian discussion—are dangerous to Jews, Judaism, and

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humanity. The fusion of God, humans, and nature, the transformation of God into a rational entity cut off from humanity, or the transformation of man to a being that rejects a supernatural God, are all opposed to the prophetic pathos. It therefore follows that, when Heschel uncovered, if only by allusion, the broad scope of aggadic–theological pluralism of the midrashic literature, he ultimately decided unequivocally in favor of one position, that of R. Akiva. Why did he do this? He explained his decision in terms of the theological significance of suffering and of human cruelty as follows: “It is better to limit belief in God’s power than to dampen faith in God’s mercy.” 50 Engaging in anger against God and self–pity was, according to Heschel, a spiritual prison and a sure path toward self, national and human destruction. In the following remarks we shall see how Heschel’s unambivalent theological decision concerning such a complex dilemma may be explained through his reading of William James. PRAGMATISM AND THE ATTITUDE TOWARD EVIL Pragmatism, understood as a philosophical movement, was widespread in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In the second chapter of his book, Pragmatism (1907), William James defines the movement’s perception of reality, and its philosophical method: The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. . . . The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. To develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. . . . To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. 51

Since the 1950s pragmatism has enjoyed a renewal of life, thanks to the influence of such outstanding American philosophers as Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Cornel West, Richard Posner and others. 52 Stephen Frank has recently characterized Heschel as a religious philosopher who ought to be seen as within the pragmatist movement. In his article, Frank correctly argues that, when Heschel expressed his reservations from continental European philosophy, he may have felt more comfortable in the world of American philosophy that developed from the thought of William

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James. 53 Frank nevertheless emphasized that Heschel does not belong to that branch of pragmatism from John Dewey, to which Mordecai M. Kaplan and his Reconstructionist disciples belonged. 54 Both Heschel himself and his biographer, Edward Kaplan, testify to James’ influence upon Heschel’s philosophical approach. As part of a theological–philosophical discussion group led by his teacher and mentor David Kogan in Berlin during the spring of 1930, Heschel read James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) together with the other members of the group and led, in a critical manner, the reactions of the group to this book. 55 It is also possible that James’ book exerted influence on Heschel’s doctoral dissertation, which characterizes the varied religious consciousness of the prophets, as well as his writing the spiritual biographies of such medieval sages as Ibn Gabirol, Saadya Gaon, and Maimonides. 56 In addition, in a television interview which he gave to NBC reporter Carl Stern two weeks prior to his untimely death, on December 10, 1972 (it was first broadcasted on Sunday, February 4, 1973), Heschel mentions James’ earlier philosophical book, The Will to Believe (1896). In this interview he stated the following: 57 Isn’t there a God who is above the ground? Maybe God is the source of qualms and of disturbing my conscience. Maybe God is a God of demands. Yes. This is God, not the ground of being. The result is, we have religious institutions without religious belief. We have a wave of non- belief. I have suddenly discovered that William James was not right when he spoke about—he was right, by the way, I am saying it rhetorically—that there is a will to believe, but there is today a will to disbelieve. And that will is very powerful. To this very day our young are craving some deeper meaning. Our young people are craving a religious outlook. And what they get is stone and not bread. 58

If Heschel, who tended not to quote modern thinkers frequently, mentioned James’ book The Will to Believe as a source of inspiration, we must relate to this influence with due seriousness and ask ourselves in what sense James influenced Heschel. In continuing the interview, Stern asked Heschel: “You’re telling me of the nature of man, not the nature of God, aren’t you?” And Heschel answered: “Yes, the nature of God is that man should have ends, not only needs. The difference between an animal and man is not in needs. An animal has needs. Man has needs, too. But man, in addition to needs, has to have ends, goals to strive for. The great task of religion is to teach man how to convert ends into needs.” 59 This answer to a large extent echoes the formulae of William James in a lecture he delivered before Unitarian ministers in 1881. In his essay, “Reflex Action and Theism,” James writes: “A God who

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gives so little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.” 60 It is not our purpose here to deal in depth with James, only with his influence upon Heschel. Indeed, we have no textual evidence in which Heschel himself discusses James’ teachings in detail and/or indicates the precise nature of his influence upon him. Nevertheless, James’ philosophical statement that “there are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming,” 61 is one of the key sentences for understanding James’ impact upon Heschel. Concerning this we might note that every Jew who knows that the faith statement, “Next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem,” became a fact by virtue of the faith therein, can see in this a concretization of James’ philosophical statement. This thought, regarding the importance of faith in determining reality, is clearly reflected in Heschel’s statement: Our entire civilization today—we’ve all gone under one idea: interest or need. And we are taught the greatest thing alive is to satisfy one’s needs and interests. Actually, our way of living revolved around one principle: self-interest. There is nothing else but self-interest. This is a fallacy according to religion. And religion is right, valid. Because if everything is self interest, then there is no love. Can you imagine humanity without love? If love is only self-interest, then love is a fake, a pretense. 62

At the conclusion of the interview, in order to arouse the young generation to faith, Heschel says: Let them remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can, everyone, do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as it were a work of art. You’re not a machine. And you are young. Start working on this great work of art called your own existence. . . . Entertainment is destroying much of our initiative and weakens our imagination. What’s really important is life as a celebration. . . . One of the most important things is to teach man how to celebrate. 63

According to James, and in his wake Heschel, a non-personal divinity—like the one proposed by Kaplan and Rubenstein, who both regarded the language of human intimacy with God a paradoxical concept—in essence is not divinity. According to Heschel, and he could turn to James for a modern philosophical perspective that supported his position, the essence of religious life is a consciousness of life as a blessing, a blessing rooted in the relationship between God and humans. Thus Heschel, like James, criticizes the concept of the impersonal God understood as “the Ground of Being” in the following

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words: “Ground of being causes me no harm. . . . It’s meaningless. . . . The result is we have religious institutions without religious belief.” 64 James’ approach enabled Heschel to take exception to the exaggerated tendency to create a harmonization between modern scientific atheistic claims and theology by distinguishing between the two disciplines, science and religion. James and Heschel saw the surrender of religion to the materialistic and utilitarian doctrine of modern science as unnecessary and dangerous: a surrender likely to have far-reaching ethical consequences. James thought that this tendency was in itself irrational, while Heschel summarized the matter quite simply by saying that, “A great many religious leaders have given up faith altogether. They are deluding themselves.” 65 It is important to take note as well of those aspects of James’ thought that did not affect Heschel. Heschel could not adopt James’ pluralistic ethos, as formulated by him in 1891. Heschel believed in eternal truths. His critique of the lack of concrete, eternal values in the American education system was harsh. 66 In this sense he took exception to James’ outlook and to any outlook that saw the modern age as an expression of progress. Living according to Jewish law, he thought, carried the potential of spreading eternal prophetic values. James, by contrast, wrote in 1891 (though it seems that he subsequently changed his mind) that, “As our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order.” 67 We do not see an echo of such statements in Heschel’s thought. Heschel was present at the rejection of traditional religious orders by modern thought, which eventually turned totalitarian in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Many aspects of a new, anti-religious, world order were monstrous in his eyes. Heschel, who lived more than one generation after James, was suspicious of any systems of moral conventions as “evolving.” And yet, one must note that James, too, criticizes those absolutist scientists who do not treasure faith and traditional values in the occurrence of events. James went on to argue in The Will to Believe that, “Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things. First she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. . . . The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.” 68 While James did not articulate a coherent theological doctrine regarding the confrontation with suffering and evil in the world, 69 it is nevertheless recognizable that his pragmatism constituted a convenient framework for Heschel by which to explain Rabbi Akiva’s approach. If, according to James’ approach, faith creates reality and every small act may be an expression of a great faith that turns the world into a hymn of praise, it is possible for us to understand why R. Akiva’s approach to confrontation with evil is preferable

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to that of R. Yohanan and others. When Heschel explained his deliberation between the two views, he wrote in Torah From Heaven as follows: “It is better to limit belief in God’s power than to dampen faith in God’s mercy.” 70 This sentence is not a quotation from the aggadah, but Heschel’s own language: a language that guides in practice, by means of a pragmatic philosophical argument. Heschel explained his preference for the one Rabbinic position, that of R. Akiva, to the other, by using the phrase “it is preferable.” The phrase, “it is preferable,” expresses a statement that one position is preferable on the basis of its results, both to the individual, for human society, and for the Jewish people. Or, as James would have formulated it, “It will be better for us” if we believe in it. 71 Heschel systematically refrained from leaving his readers to flounder about in a theological position in which they were alienated from God or which attempted to limit the emotional quality. A theological perception which is either cut off from God emotionally, or which relies upon Him excessively, is in the final analysis a passive position, according to Heschel. Naturalist or pagan theological positions leave human beings either in a situation of complete isolation or in a posture of expectation that God will act according to limited criteria. Heschel felt that Rubenstein’s post Holocaust neo-pagan theology and those who followed in his wake were likely to paralyze the Jewish people emotionally, spiritually, and practically. R. Akiva’s position, by contrast, contains the potential to free the Jewish people from the trauma it had undergone in the Holocaust, and to bring to it an attitude of brave responsibility for its own destiny and for that of humanity. In the sentence, “It is better to limit belief in God’s power than to dampen faith in God’s mercy,” 72 Heschel half admitted that turning the focus of attention from that of human suffering to the suffering of God, Who participates in human suffering, involves a certain suppression of human self-pity. This suppression is necessary, according to Heschel, for ethical, psychological and educational–pragmatic reasons. Only in this way can one prevent humanity from sinking into narcissism, and so enable humanity to help create the proper social responsibility which has been so profoundly upset. To this pragmatic philosophical line, as adopted by Heschel in Torah from Heaven, one must add his words in God In Search of Man. There Heschel concludes that, according to his approach, “At the end of days, evil will be conquered by the One; in historic times, evils must be conquered one by one.” 73 Until then evil is not only a threat, but also a challenge: “It is both the grandeur and the misery of living that makes man sensitive to the ultimate question.” 74 The moment that man is conscious of the problem of evil and of its significance in the world, it is possible for him to confront it through the commandments. The mitzvah, the commandment, is a way of teaching man “to love life in this world because of the possibilities of charity and sanctity.” 75 There is no need, nor is it possible, to understand the evil in

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the world. Religious devotion that emphasizes the mutual dependence of man and God provides an opening for man’s action to reduce suffering within both the upper and the lower worlds. CONCLUSION Examination of the issue of evil in the world and of the question of theodicy, particularly as discussed extensively by Heschel in his book, Torah From Heaven, has revealed Heschel’s consistent rejection of those theological voices within Rabbinic literature and modern theology that blame God for evil or apathy in the world. His consistent preference for the position of R. Akiva seeks to see in human suffering a reflection of divine suffering and a call for human partnership with God. By understanding the relationship between the thought of Heschel and that of James, we recognize more clearly that James’ framework for the discussion of religion—with its emphasis upon the centrality of faith in a transcendent reality, in the implementation of hope in the Eternal, in love and in emotion as creating a moral reality—provides a rational and ethical philosophical backing for the prophetic pathos to which Heschel adhered from the beginning of his writing. James’ religious pragmatism provided philosophical support for Heschel who sought to combine in his writing reason and feeling, science and faith, philosophy and poetry. 76 But most of all we must ask what is the relevance of Heschel’s theodicy for American Jews today, beyond the call for social–political liberal activism, which seems to be Heschel’s most obvious current legacy? 77 When many contemporary Jewish American theologians, some of whom are considered Heschel’s disciples, are returning to naturalist/pagan theologies, 78 they overlook the fact that Heschel’s passionate care for AfricanAmericans, 79 the religious freedom of Russian Jews, 80 and his stand against U.S. imperialistic wars were all rooted in his perception that dissent is the essence of Judaism. We learn about this form of dissent from an unpublished manuscript that has recently appeared in print that according to Heschel: Judaism in its very essence came into being as an act of dissent from paganism, as an act of nonconformity with the surrounding culture. And unless we continue to dissent, unless we continue to say NO to idol worship in the name of a higher Yes, we will revert to paganism. . . . So much of what is given out as Jewish thinking is obsolete liberalism or parochialism. The education offered in most Jewish schools is insipid, flat and trivial. 81

Can our generation find the golden path between obsolete liberalism and parochialism both within our political affairs as well as in our personal relationships with God? 82 Can we offer a vision of “deep caring, concern, un-

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trammeled radical thinking informed by rich learning, a degree of audacity and courage, and the power of the word” (as Heschel summarized the alternative to paganism)? In a world which is so polarized between right and left, between Orthodox and non-Orthodox, due to cynical economic and political interests, can we stand in front of God with the people of Israel (of the present and past generations) and the Torah with us? 83 These questions must be asked (and answered in the affirmative). Can we learn from our Jewish ancestors to struggle with radical evil and suffering, while not neglecting our humble walk with God? Can we not neglect our right to be loved by God and cherish the miracle of our being alive at the most difficult times of our biographies when we actually most need Him? Heschel’s call for American Jews to allow a personal intimacy with the Biblical God when facing personal challenges came out of his belief that American Jews need this view, on pragmatic grounds. Heschel hints that the scientific, pagan, and even idolatrous culture is really an American culture that lures these Jews away from what is meaningful, powerful, and spiritually supportive in Hassidism and in traditional Judaism. 84 NOTES 1. I would like to thank Rabbi Yehonatan Chipman and especially Professor Ruth Anna Putnam for helping me think through many of the philosophical perplexities explored in this paper. 2. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Shamayim al Haaretz: Al HaHayim HaPnimiyim shel Hayehudi beMizrach Eyropa [The Heavens on Earth: On the Inner Life of the Jew in Eastern Europe; Hebrew] ed. Pinhas Peli (Jerusalem: no date), 61-62. This is the Hebrew version of Heschel’s The Earth is the Lord’s, a book based on a speech at YIVO eulogizing Eastern European Jewry, versions of which were published in Yiddish, Hebrew and English. See Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1940-1972 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 71-77. On the greater accuracy of the Hebrew version of the book see Einat Ramon, “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Critique of Modern Society,” Gvanim: The Journal of the Academy of Jewish Religion 6:1 (May 2010), 34-35. 3. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah min ha-Shamayim be-aspaqlarya shel hadorot [Torah from Heaven as Reflected Through the Generations; Hebrew] (London–New York, 1962), first page. Whenever accurate, I relied on the recent translation of this book by Gordon Tucker. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah; as Refracted Through the Generations, edited and translated from the Hebrew with commentary by Gordon Tucker with Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005). 4. William James, “The Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life” (1891) in The Will to Believe (New York: Dover Publication Inc., 1956), 209. 5. Robert Eisen, “A. J. Heschel’s Rabbinic Theology as a Response to the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism 23:3 (2003), 211–25. 6. Alexander Even Chen, “God’s Omnipotence and Presence in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Philosophy,” Shofar 26:1 (2007), 41-71. 7. Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 67–77. 8. See Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Paradigm Shift: From the Jewish Renewal Teachings of Zalman Shachter Shalomi, ed. Ellen Singer (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1993); and Arthur Green, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

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9. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 369. 10. Ibid., 376. 11. In 1966, Rubenstein published his book After Auschwitz, and in 1968 his book, The Religious Imagination. 12. Richard Rubenstein, The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology (Boston: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), xvi–xvii. 13. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Boston: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 216. 14. Ibid. 15. Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1973), 264. 16. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 68. 17. Heschel, A Passion for Truth, 323. 18. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 68. 19. In an essay included in a collection edited by his daughter. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Meaning of This War (World War II),” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 210. 20. On Rubenstein’s influence by Kaplan’s Reconstructionism, see Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 84. 21. Braiterman (God) After Auschwitz, 71. 22. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Pikuach Neshama: To Save a Soul,” in Moral Grandeur, 58. 23. See Dror Bondi, Where Art Thou? God’s Question and the Translation of Tradition in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel, (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2008), 8-11. 24. Heschel, “To Save a Soul,” 64. 25. For this reason, in my humble opinion, and as noted also by Michael Marmur, in his book God in Search of Man, Heschel quotes extensively from the Book of Job. However, Job’s situation is not similar to the existential situation of those slaughtered in the Holocaust or to those of its survivors. 26. Even Chen, “God’s Omnipotence and Presence in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Philosophy,” 67. 27. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 106. 28. Ibid. 29. Exodus Rabbah 42.3 (Ki Tisa). 30. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 107. 31. Ibid. 32. Exodus Rabbah 42.3 (Ki Tisa). Mirkin brings this midrash in the name of R. Akiva, but cf. the parallel in Exod. Rab 15.12. 33. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 106. 34. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 169. 35. Ibid. 36. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 110. 37. Ibid., 119. 38. Ibid., 137. 39. Heschel, Torah min ha-Shamayim, I, 101. 40. Ibid., 79. 41. For a brief biography of R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, see Jewish Encyclopedia.com. www. jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=362&letter=J. 42. Heschel, Torah From Heaven, I, 98. 43. Compare the approach of Rabi Abraham Yitzhak ha-Cohen Kook, ‘Ein Ra’yah leMasekhet Berakhot, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Rav Kook Institute, 5750), 35. Heschel’s reservations as to the literal meaning of the Talmud here is similar to that of R. Kook, who is also hesitant about the simple meaning of the passage in Berakhot 5b. R. Kook also found difficulties with the literal sense, but unlike Heschel does not pass over it cursorily but suggests a new interpretation: “Neither them nor their reward” is read by R. Kook, “Not, Heaven forbid, to reject [lit. kick at] sufferings. . . . ‘Not them’ because they did not want its reward, [that is] to receive

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merit without their own knowledge, not by way of Divine service.” Heschel is thus not alone in his feeling of unease with regard to this message of b. Berakhot 5b. 44. Lamentations Rabba, proem, 2b. 45. Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature, translated by Batya Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 134. 46. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 121. 47. On Heschel’s manners of quotation, see the study by Michael Marmur, “Heschel’s Rhetoric of Citation: the Use of Sources in God in Search of Man,” (Doctoral Dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005), 62-65, 144-46. 48. On Heschel’s neglect of the theodicy of Rabbi Yishmael, see Geoffrey Claussen, “God and Suffering in Heschel’s Torah Min Ha-Shamyim,” Conservative Judaism 64:1 (Summer 2010), 17- 37. 49. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 116. 50. Ibid., 119. 51. William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 94-96. 52. Ibid., 303-469. 53. Ibid., 20-21. 54. Stephen Frank, “Abraham Joshua Heschel and William James,” Conservative Judaism 59 (Winter 2007), 12–25. 55. Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 132-34. 56. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Maimonides, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982); and “Don Isaac Abravanel” (1937), translated by William Wolf, Intermountain Jewish News 5 (19 Dec. 1986), 8–12. For references to other works written during those years containing spiritual biography of the sages of Israel, see Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 365-66. 57. On the interview with Carl Stern, see Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972, 371. 58. “Carl Stern Interview with Dr. Heschel” (originally broadcast in February 1973) in Moral Grandeur, 408. It should be emphasized that Heschel concludes his words here specifically with a reference to the New Testament, which emphasizes that educational failures are the result of the lack of connection and response to the next generation, using the parable “What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” (Matt 7:9). 59. “Carl Stern Interview with Dr. Heschel,” 409. 60. William James, “Reflex, Action and Theism” (1881), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 126. 61. James, “The Will to Believe” (1896), in Will to Believe, 25. 62. “Carl Stern Interview with Dr. Heschel,” 409. 63. Ibid., 412. On the centrality of meaning in Heschel’s thought, see James Hyman, “Meaningfulness, the Ineffable and the Commandments,” Conservative Judaism 50:2-3 (Winter/ Spring 1998), 84-99. 64. “Carl Stern Interview with Dr. Heschel,” 408. One might conjecture that Heschel alluded here to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) who taught at the Union Theological Seminary, with whom Heschel had various academic connections in the framework of inter-religious dialogue. See Paul Tillich, The New Being, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 65. Ibid., 407. 66. See Ramon, “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Critique of Modern Society.” 67. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life” (1891), in Will to Believe, 206. 68. Ibid. It would therefore seem that James, who wrote The Will to Believe in 1896, in which he champions the idea of eternal truths, found himself in a certain philosophical tension with the earlier James of 1891, who emphasized the fluidity of ethical systems and the fact that they can be exchanged. In the approach of the later James, moments of ethical truth and true ethical action are ones “in which we listen to the stirrings of Divine being” (141).

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69. On James’ understanding of defeating evil see: Ruth Anna Putnam, “William James,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, eds. Chad Meieste and Paul Copan (New York: Routledge, 2007), 181-90. 70. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 119. 71. James, “The Will to Believe,” 26. 72. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 119. 73. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 377. 74. Ibid., 367. 75. Ibid., 377. 76. Abraham Joshua Heschel to Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Warsaw, 22 Sivan 5693 (1933), Archive of Beit Bialik. 77. See “Religion and Ethics: Abraham Joshua Heschel,” (January 18, 2008), PBS Episodes. www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-18-2008/abraham-joshua-heschel/1789/ 78. See E. J. Cosgrove, Jewish Theology in Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010); and A. Kirsch, “Unorthodox Theology,” Tablet Magazine (June 29, 2010), http:// www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/37749/unorthodox-theology. 79. See: “Telegram to President John F. Kennedy,” in: A.J. Heschel, Essential Writings (New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 64-65. 80. “Prayer for Soviet Jews,” in Heschel, Essential Writings, 80-81. 81. “Dissent” (Unpublished Manuscript), in Heschel, Essential Writings, 106-107. 82. See also Ramon, “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Critique of Modern Society,” 28- 42. 83. “The Jew never stands alone before God; the Torah and Israel are always with him. . . . Jewish existence is not only the adherence to particular doctrines and observances but primarily the living in the spiritual order of the past and with the Jews of the present.” See Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God, Torah, and Israel,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 191. 84. Heschel’s perception of American culture as essentially pagan and idolatrous is most clearly emphasized in Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965). See also my article, Einat Ramon, “Idolatry and the Dazzle of the Enlightenment in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Thought,” Daat 71 (Summer, 2011), 105-31.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “Abraham Joshua Heschel to Hayyim Nahman Bialik.” Warsaw, 22 Sivan 5693 (1933), Archive of Beit Bialik. Bondi, Dror. Where Art Thou? God’s Question and the Translation of Tradition in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2008. Braiterman, Zachary. (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Chen, Alexander Even. “God’s Omnipotence and Presence in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Philosophy.” Shofar 26, no. 1 (2007): 41-71. Claussen, Geoffrey. “God and Suffering in Heschel’s Torah Min Ha-Shamyim.” Conservative Judaism 64, no. 1 (2010): 17-37. Cosgrove, E. J. Jewish Theology in Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010. Eisen, Robert. “A. J. Heschel’s Rabbinic Theology as a Response to the Holocaust.” Modern Judaism 23, no. 3 (2003): 211–25. Frank, Stephen. “Abraham Joshua Heschel and William James.” Conservative Judaism 59 (2007): 12–25. Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature. Translated by Batya Stein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. A Passion for Truth. New York: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1973.

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———. “Don Isaac Abravanel.” Translated by William Wolf. Intermountain Jewish News 5 (1986): 8–12. ———. Essential Writings. New York: Orbis Books, 2011. ———. God in Search of Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955. ———. Heavenly Torah; as Refracted Through the Generations. Edited and translated by Gordon Tucker. New York: Continuum, 2005. ———. Maimonides. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. ———. Shamayim al Haaretz: Al HaHayim HaPnimiyim shel Hayehudi beMizrach Eyropa (The Heavens on Earth: On the Inner Life of the Jew in Eastern Europe). Edited by Pinhas Peli. Jerusalem. ———. “The Meaning of This War (World War II).” In Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, edited by Susannah Heschel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. ———. Torah min ha-Shamayim be-aspaqlarya shel hadorot (Torah from Heaven as Reflected Through the Generations). London–New York, 1962. ———. Who is Man?. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965. Hyman, James. “Meaningfulness, the Ineffable and the Commandments.” Conservative Judaism 50, no. 2-3 (1998): 84-99. James, William. “Reflex, Action and Theism.” In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. New York: Dover Publications, 1956. ———. The Will to Believe. New York: Dover Publication Inc., 1956. ———. “What Pragmatism Means.” In Pragmatism: A Reader, edited by Louis Menand, 9496. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Kaplan, Edward K. Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1940-1972. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Kaplan, Edward K., and Samuel H. Dresner. Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Kirsch, A. “Unorthodox Theology.” Tablet Magazine (June 29, 2010). Kook, Abraham Yitzhak ha-Cohen. ‘Ein Ra’yah le-Masekhet Berakhot. Jerusalem: Rav Kook Institute, 5750. Marmur, Michael. “Heschel’s Rhetoric of Citation: the Use of Sources in God in Search of Man.” PhD Thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005. Putnam, Ruth Anna. “William James.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Chad Meieste and Paul Copan, 181-90. New York: Routledge, 2007. Ramon, Einat. “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Critique of Modern Society.” Gvanim: The Journal of the Academy of Jewish Religion 6, no. 1 (2010). ———. “Idolatry and the Dazzle of the Enlightenment in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Thought.” Daat 71 ( 2011): 105-31. “Religion and Ethics: Abraham Joshua Heschel.” January 18, 2008. PBS Episodes. www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-18-2008/abraham-joshua-heschel/ 1789/. Rubenstein, Richard. After Auschwitz. Boston: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. ———. The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology. Boston: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Shachter-Shalomi, Zalman. Paradigm Shift: From the Jewish Renewal Teachings of Zalman Shachter Shalomi. Edited by Ellen Singer. Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1993. Tillich, Paul. The New Being. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Chapter Nine

“An Ethic of Suffering” J. B. Soloveitchik as Pragmatist Jessica Rosenberg

The problem of evil is the most intractable of conundrums to the Western religious mind. If we contemplate the universe as the province of an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God, it is nearly impossible to reconcile the existence of immense and seemingly pointless human suffering. The composers of the Jewish prayer book had this in mind when they changed the biblical quotation to its devotional form, from God “who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates evil,” to “who makes peace and creates all things.” 1 For contemporary Jews the problem is no less vexing. Although some have turned to halakhic fundamentalism to deal with such questions, most do not consider halakhic observance an answer. However, an essay by Modern Orthodox theologian Joseph Soloveitchik attempts to make the case that it could be. When Joseph Soloveitchik describes humankind as being “cast” into its predicament, he is deemed an existentialist, a thinker fixated on the essential loneliness and unintelligibility of the human condition. 2 A reading of Soloveitchik’s “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering,” 3 in comparison with aspects of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, 4 reveals another facet of Soloveitchik’s philosophical views, one that bears an interesting relationship with Pragmatism. 5 While there is no concrete evidence that Soloveitchik relied on James in his essay, there are a number of striking similarities between these works. I analyze “A Halakhic Approach” specifically because it provides the most explicit topical and methodological connections to Pragmatism, while at the same time also providing an important link to Soloveitchik’s later philosophical work. Soloveitchik is an extremely typological thinker, and James’ approach may have appealed to his impulse to 247

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separate objects of inquiry into dialectical pairs. Both essays were initially presented in lecture form—James speaking as part of the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh in 1898, and Soloveitchik presenting his lecture in 1961 as an address to a symposium on religion and mental health. James and Soloveitchik universalize a particular experience of suffering, defining it as a core component of the human condition. 6 Each chooses a method of meliorating suffering—James through what he deems the intra-religious concept of being “twice born,” and Soloveitchik by retheorizing the halakhic tradition as a mental health technique. Both thinkers present a typology that separates those who accept and those who would deny the reality of evil on the level of ordinary human experience. Both propose a solution that presumes that evil, whatever its ontological status, must be dealt with by religion acting as a concrete problem-solving method, a typically pragmatic way of approaching questions of ultimate truth. In his conclusions, however, Soloveitchik veers away from this approach and its implications, and instead turns to the philosophy of halakhic self-abnegation that he would further develop in The Lonely Man of Faith. Soloveitchik explicitly named a certain number of influences on his work, but not all. Exploration of any of these tacit or implicit influences increases our knowledge of Soloveitchik and the different elements of his thought. I believe the relationship between Soloveitchik and Pragmatism is significant not solely because of Soloveitchik’s intellectual legacy, but also because of the nature of American Jewish commitment to halakhah. Soloveitchik, like many Jewish philosophers, tends to hypostatize halakhah and the halakhic process. He presents halakhah in the service of his own philosophical system as a unimodal, basically unchanging aspect of Judaism, which he often refers to as the halakhah. When a relationship with Pragmatism emerges, that ‘the’ may be changed into an ‘a.’ Since Pragmatism is a uniquely American philosophical system, this helps halakhah take on a uniquely American tone. This has direct cultural implications, for American Jews are already much more likely to embrace forms of Judaism that take a relativized view of halakhah’s origin and significance. Mordecai Kaplan’s dictum that “tradition has a vote, not a veto” continues to be the rallying point of most American Judaisms. The popularity of Reform and Conservative Judaism in the United States greatly outstrips the membership of these movements elsewhere in the Jewish world. 7 A pragmatic reading of Soloveitchik shows the ways in which an Americanized view of halakhah might complicate, in a specific, cultural situation such as that of improving mental health, a hypostatized philosophical view of halakhah. Here, halakhah could become a situationally useful set of truths, a divinely-inspired technology, rather than a single fixed truth. Thus my analysis of the two thinkers will identify a practical flexibility in applying religion to the concrete, cultural problem of suffering.

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JAMES AND HEALTHY VERSUS SICK SOULS Based on James’ own understanding of the term, I define as pragmatic those philosophies that define truth in relation to its impact or problem-solving ability, the difference a given philosophical stance makes in the world. This is in contrast to the idea of truth as correspondence to reality. The central core of James’ Pragmatism is that “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact.” 8 The theory is grounded in what James terms a radical empiricism but what we might also understand as a radical phenomenology. He rejects abstraction and searches for examples of authentic human experience as the starting point for philosophy. “Our acts, our turning-places,” he writes, “where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is most intimate and complete. . . . Why may they not be the actual turningplaces and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world.” 9 This slightly awkward formulation links personally life-changing moments to what is real or what is true. A philosophical problem is one that is amenable to this type of approach. The problem of suffering is clearly philosophical since it springs directly from the human experience of life, and a true philosophy must act therapeutically to make a difference to the sufferers. James, acting in what he considers the best empiricist tradition, selects case studies of these “turning-places,” and creates his inquiry by dividing religious humankind into “healthy-minded” and “sick-souled” individuals. The healthy-minded temperament renounces control over life and its outcomes. It is “passive” and emphasizes “letting go” of the world’s evil, because it believes wholly in the “suggestive efficacy” of positive thought. It is essentially a psychological placebo effect created by the power of positive thinking. When this thinking confronts the problem of evil, it convinces itself that evil has no concrete reality and must only be ignored to cease having an effect on the individual. There are certain aspects of this philosophy that are congenial to James, since it gives primacy to the idea that metaphysical status is less important than one’s place in the strata of human experience. But he believes there is also an attitude of pervasive, willful denial about the healthy soul that he finds difficult to reconcile with the way most people confront and are confronted by the problems of life. James identifies the philosophy of Spinoza as the prototypical example of healthy-mindedness. In Spinoza’s pure rationalism, “[h]e whom reason leads . . . is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is ‘inadequate’ knowledge.” 10 For this reason, James says, Spinoza even rejects the idea of repentance. James argues that in the Christian tradition, repentance is central enough that it cannot be eschewed, but a healthy-

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minded Christian believes it is possible to escape sin quickly without “wallowing” in it. 11 By contrast, the “sick-minded” soul believes that “the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence.” 12 In terms of views about the basic constitution of the universe, James claims that the healthy-minded individual is pluralist whereas the sick-souled is monist. 13 For the healthy-minded, reality is an expression of God as omni-benevolent. Evil must either stem from a force other than God, or it is something that may eventually be overcome or removed from the ideal. Evil makes “no rational whole” with the rest of the universe. 14 The terms “evil” and “suffering” are used interchangeably in both James’ and Soloveitchik’s essays, and no distinction is made between human-created evil such as crime or war, and basic realities of human finitude such as disease and death. For some religious thinkers, the word evil may also be applied to suffering from natural causes, since the classical problem of evil questions how a just God could weave such realities into the fabric of the universe. However, when these types of evil are viewed as equivalent in the pragmatic context, it sometimes becomes unclear whether the potential remedies are the same for both human-caused and natural evils. James also elides the concepts of externally-caused evil, human sinfulness, and human psychological tendencies toward unhappiness or depression. The sick soul at various points seems to suffer from being more acutely aware of the evils in the universe, or she is personally beset by a sense of personal sin, or naturally depressive in other ways. Obviously all of these factors may interact in a given individual, but they are not clearly differentiated in James’ writing as distinct causes of human suffering, and therefore it is unclear how they are each potential factors in the solution. This hinders the ability of his Pragmatism to effect a specific remedy. Intellectual slippage also occurs in James’ view of evil’s ontological status. In summing up his chapter on the healthy soul, he writes that “it may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. . . .” The healthy mind contends that there is no rational place for certain types of evil in a religious worldview. In the second half of the same paragraph, however, James opines that “provisionally . . . since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.” 15 He is making two statements that fit together uneasily within his philosophical system. One is that evil is real, not in an

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experiential but in an ontological sense (the use of the term “genuine” is particularly confusing). The other is that the only form of healthy-minded treatment of evil is to ignore it totally. Placing evil into a rational system in which it makes sense or is “ministerial to a higher good” is a tendency of the sick-souled. Yet one could just as easily understand it as a function of the healthy-souled denial of evil. Evil can be defined as “matter out of place” only if one presumes a universe in which evil has no useful role to play, no way to be eventually understood as a good unknown to us. It seems anomalous in a system which ultimately represents the best of all possible worlds. As we will see, Soloveitchik makes this point in his own typology. This allows his system to be less rigid and perhaps more congenial to the lived experiences of the religious mind, since it identifies a broader range of healthy-minded tendencies. The healthy-minded person does not just have to ignore evil. She may present her healthy-minded tendencies through viewing evil as always and in every case part of a larger meaningful scheme of good that is not visible to humanity. James ascribes such an extreme position—that healthy-souled people pretend evil does not exist at all—as a straw man in order to make it easier to contrast with the sick-souled. But it also allows him to argue that the power of the will can be shaped by the way our temperaments color the world. Human beings cannot escape, he argues, viewing matters of fact through subjective experience. As someone who hews to a pragmatist’s definition of truth, James is concerned specifically with which philosophical schools are effective and “the method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work.” Indeed, this method “will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution.” 16 The healthy-minded approach shows the power of James’ “will to believe” for a broad swath of society. However, James wants to argue both that the sicksouled approach corresponds better to reality and is more pragmatically useful: [the healthy-souled approach] breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. 17

Here again is the word “genuine,” a call to a religious vision that can get at the real truth of life. It is James wanting to have his pragmatist cake and eat his correspondence theory cake too. This is a tension that Soloveitchik tries to avoid by working from a specifically halakhic frame, in which real truth

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can be defined as the God’s eye view of the universe, while pragmatic truth is human experience, and both are addressed by halakhah in different modes. Just as Soloveitchik will explain suffering through splitting the halakhic system into two distinct parts, so James now argues that in fact, the healthy and sick-souled temperaments may be aspects of the single human soul. In neurotic psyches, the soul is divided into these two aspects which war with one another, and the soul may only be unified through becoming “twiceborn.” Becoming “twice-born” for James does not just mean being born again in the Christian sense, but encompasses any type of life change that occurs when the individual feels that she has dramatically moved from one reality or type of meaningful existence to another, and has made a radical break with the past. Through this moment of epiphany, conversion, or enlightenment, each [individual] realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact they could and did find something welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be overcome. 18

James’ social-scientific, phenomenological approach leads him to assert that there are many different paths that are equally efficacious in creating a successful second birth that alleviates suffering, even the path from belief to atheism. Yet he cannot resist occasionally making grander truth claims, and this includes hierarchizing religious traditions as he understands them: “The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.” 19 There are a number of problematic assertions here. One is the repetition of the idea that healthy-mindedness consists solely in the complete denial of any evil. The others are unwarranted assumptions about Buddhism and Christianity (and by extension the unworthiness of other religious systems). They are the only religions that ostensibly address evil’s reality because they fit in with James’ model of twice-born religious identity. James also fails to acknowledge that a religion that portrays the unredeemed believer’s world as unreal could easily be healthy-minded, because it might avoid directly addressing the experience of evil. SOLOVEITCHIK AND HALAKHAH AS TECHNIQUE Perhaps because he is a professing believer, Soloveitchik also intimates that some religions approach the problem of evil more effectively than others. He

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speaks specifically from his own experience as a halakhic Jew. For him, the answer is ultimately not to overcome but to consecrate negative emotion by considering it as a way of ceding one’s ultimate being to God. On the way to this conclusion, which presages his later philosophical positions, however, he passes through what I argue is a pragmatic reading of halakhah. If halakhah is amenable to such readings, it can be viewed as a problem-solving toolkit rather than a fixed ontological entity, which may be an attractive cultural option for a broader number of Jews in America. Soloveitchik frames “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering” as a personal meditation, a “soliloquy” or “monologue,” 20 which accomplishes two goals: it creates the illusion of eschewing authoritative pronouncements, and it provides a certain connection with the case history genre and personal mode of address in James’ work. While Soloveitchik’s standing as a figure in the halakhic community makes even his personal reflections highly important to his followers, as of course he knew, speaking in this personal way makes it possible for him to avoid appearing opine ex cathedra. Soloveitchik opens the essay by defining the telos of the halakhic system, which will form the framework for his approach. According to Soloveitchik, “the Halakhah is concerned with one problem—that of the relationship of man to the existential orders confronting him,” and it addresses that problem through “will translated into action.” 21 This already sounds very much like the “will to believe,” since for Soloveitchik halakhah is a philosophy which is also an active form, a “gesture,” which expresses itself through “living structural value themes.” 22 But typical of Soloveitchik’s concern for valuing that which is effaced and self-effacing in humanity, one aspect of this gesture is addressed to “clandestine man, homo absconditus,” and thus the halakhic figure “does not engage in understanding something or . . . acting out something, but is always concerned with relating to and sharing in something.” 23 This is the relationship that, through halakhah, humanity shares with God and with the Jewish community. Halakhah has a “precise” and “normative” component that comprises correct action, but it also includes “an all-out involvement with a singular, unreasoned order of experiential themes” that are “felt intuitively and beheld.” 24 This discussion presents ‘rational’ healthy-mindedness in contrast to ‘experiential’ sick-souledness, although both of these aspects as halakhic stances are described in positive terms at the outset of the essay. When Soloveitchik turns to theodicy and mental health, he argues that the active, experiential aspect comes to the fore: “to explore the therapeutic and redemptive qualities of the religious act . . . is exactly what modern religion, cooperating with mental institutions, is trying to do.” 25 Religion is not a noun to be parsed but a verb that acts upon concrete problems. Yet not even a page later Soloveitchik backs away from the implications of this position, writing that “religion is basically not a technology.” 26 The ‘basically’ means from the

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base, serving to identify the fundamentals: religion does indeed act in the world apart from metaphysics, but it is built on metaphysical premises. About to launch into a Jamesian analysis, Soloveitchik distances himself from the most extreme position of some pragmatic ontologies, in which an idea’s “cash value” or practical use constitutes the totality of its meaning. Soloveitchik will attempt to avoid this extremism by anchoring his analysis within the halakhah that is both the starting point and telos of his entire philosophical system. In that sense Soloveitchik’s philosophy does not even make the pretense of intellectual freedom that characterizes most Western philosophy. He is starting from the premise that traditional halakhic Judaism is true, both necessary and sufficient for human flourishing. However, his dialectic temporarily frees him from working solely from that understanding, and the possibility of another view of halakhah arises. This alternative view of halakhah—with its focus on accepting human experience rather than theological reflection as the starting point, and acting as a concrete solution to human problems—contains some advantages for the way contemporary American Jewish culture might wish to use Jewish law. But Soloveitchik surely does not wish to abandon the core idea of halakhah as divinelymandated religious legal system. He counters the problem of viewing halakhic Judaism as solely practical by having recourse to an even more sophisticated dialectical understanding of halakhah: “thematic” halakhah provides the philosophical, “God’s-eye view” of evil, while “topical” halakhah concerns the human experience of evil. In the world of the thematic halakhah, whose “frame of reference . . . extends into infinity and eternity,” human experience of evil does not signify that evil is an ontological reality. 27 However, the clearest element of Pragmatism in Soloveitchik’s paper is his insistence that the approach to evil must be based in problem-solving rather than definition, and the topical halakhah allows Judaism to do just that. Understanding the difference between the reality of suffering and the experience of suffering is the key to understanding how to fight against it. Evil is experienced by human beings as real, and the necessary data to confront it is therefore the human experience of evil, granting it a type of provisional reality. Soloveitchik’s language when talking about the topical halakhah mirrors James’ words almost perfectly: The topical Halakhah could not accept the thematic metaphysic which tends to gloss over the absurdity of evil, and it did not engage in the building of a magnificent philosophical façade to shut out the ugly sights of an inadequate existence. Realism and individualism . . . prevented it from casting off the burden of the awareness of evil. 28

Soloveitchik, although attempting to avoid this problem, eventually makes the same elision as James between ontological realism and experiential real-

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ism. On the one hand, since one presumes God’s perspective is ultimately the correct view, it is true that there is no such thing as evil. On the other, the healthy-minded individual/topical halakhah is castigated for glossing over the reality of evil, despite the fact that it is solely partaking in the human view. The experiential truth gains precedence over the capital-t Truth. This weakens the power of the thematic halakhah to act as the sole arbiter of reality, and allows the pragmatic, topical version of halakhah freer rein and even a certain moral superiority. Hence, the topical Halakhah, which is particularly interested in real man . . . in his day-to-day activities, in his transient, carnal perceptions and experiences . . . could not be content with a fine metaphysical distinction between evil and the pathos of being, between Satan and suffering. The topical Halakhah lacked neither the candor nor the courage to admit publicly that evil does exist, and it pleaded ignorance as to its justification and necessity. The topical Halakhah is an open-eyed, tough observer of things and events and . . . acknowledged boldly both the reality of evil and its irrationality, its absurdity. 29

Soloveitchik makes a clearer distinction than James in his typologies, and creates a broader and potentially more experientially realistic picture of the variety of ways healthy-mindedness might operate in the religious mind. Evil is absurd, and any act of trying to rationalize it into a higher good, rather than accept it as such, is part of healthy-mindedness. Healthy-mindedness causes human beings to overstep the bounds of their knowledge, and places them inappropriately into the God’s-eye-view of the system. Yet even with this sharper delineation, echoes of James remain, and result in a certain amount of confusion in Soloveitchik’s system. It is impossible not to view Soloveitchik’s use of the word ‘tough’ as a direct reference to James’ theory of the tender-minded and tough-minded thinker from his essays on Pragmatism. 30 Characteristics of this tough-minded type include empiricism, grounding philosophy in the physical world and its immediate sensations. For James in that set of essays, tough-mindedness characterized the “irreligious” personality, but he also wished to find a way to bring toughmindedness into harmony with a new type of religious philosophy wedded to Pragmatism, to break away from the “shallowness of rationalist philosophizing.” 31 Pragmatism “can remain religious like the rationalisms [sic], but at the same time, like the empiricists, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts.” The pragmatist must do so by confronting “the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere . . . with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience is Reality.” 32 Once again the tension between the correspondence theory and the pragmatist theory of truth appears strongly in James’ formulation, and Soloveitchik tries to avoid it with a halakhic dialectic that maintains the unity and ultimate truth of the whole while appealing to its particular human formulation.

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Soloveitchik chooses death as his exemplar of the difference between the types of halakhah. Death rests, more than any other theme in both authors’ work, on the blurry line between evil and natural suffering endemic to the human condition. Perhaps this is what makes the difference between humanity’s view and God’s view particularly acute and useful for Soloveitchik. He claims that death was “idealized” by the thematic halakhah. 33 When topical halakhah, concrete law, confronts death through the laws of mourning, it does not press the idea that there is a higher purpose to the end of life. Death is “a dreadful fiend” the experience of which “knocks out the bottom of human existence.” The very act of intense mourning, and the ongoing fear of death, contradict the idea that death is part of a greater pattern, that it is “a victory over nihility.” According to Soloveitchik, the essence of the topical halakhah is that evil must not be smoothed over but fought against, confronted in its essential absurdity, and “man must face it in perplexity and embarrassment.” 34 The pragmatic heart of Soloveitchik’s project is that evil must be treated as a problem to be solved and not a concept to be understood. This topical halakhah created “an ethic of suffering instead of a metaphysic of suffering.” 35 The truth of suffering, its existential reality or its deeper meaning is not important. The task is confrontation, an “actus which one engages, the succumbing to an overwhelming force [changed] into an experience impregnated with direction and sense.” 36 This is a significant approach for any Jew who seeks a halakhah that is responsive to her experience and provides her a means to act on it, rather than simply supplying her with pre-determined theological answers. CONCLUSION That action in response to suffering constitutes the significance of suffering stands as the most important doctrine that Soloveitchik and James share. Once evil is recognized as a phenomenological fact it may also be actively opposed. 37 As Soloveitchik says, the result may be “a long war,” but the combat is certain to end in victory, at least according to the Jewish tradition. 38 In another moment in which he echoes James’ language, Soloveitchik takes this opportunity to inveigh against “passivity,” a word James specifically identifies with the healthy-souled. Soloveitchik argues that passive resistance in the Gandhian mode is anathema to Judaism. He apparently misunderstands the philosophy of passive resistance, taking it to mean acquiescing to a system of evil rather than fighting against that system through nonviolent means. Once again the ideas of ignoring evil, accepting evil, and rationalizing evil are run together. All are presented as the ultimate betrayal of halakhah.

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However, in the final summation Soloveitchik turns back from this aggressive posture. He emphasizes that he is speaking specifically about halakhah as mental health technique because there is a difference between the way secular moderns cope with suffering (“equanimity”), and the way in which halakhic Judaism teaches the Jew to cope with suffering (“dignity”), else any form of combat against evil might be substituted for the Jewish model. In this Jewish vision, human beings are separated from nature by being created in God’s image, and human beings have dignity (kavod) because this is an attribute of God. 39 This use of the term dignity, and its role as the central aspect of human personality and our connection with God, allows Soloveitchik to make the transition to the philosophy that will characterize his most famous argument in The Lonely Man of Faith. 40 As in that work, ultimate human meaning must not come through triumphalism. This type of hubris characterizes modern secular humanity’s attitude, and jeopardizes Judaism’s particularly important contribution to philosophy, which is to stand in contrast to modernity’s flawed view of the human condition. Instead, human dignity must be gained through the religious ideals of “recoil” and “defeat”: the recognition that human beings cede their autonomy to God’s will. Thus the active struggle against evil that Soloveitchik has been lauding throughout “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering” ends in a voluntary humility, a step back that allows God to take on God’s rightful role. In the final analysis, human action is not and cannot be the telos of halakhah, since this would allow any system of human action to supplant Judaism if it were more effective in achieving human goals. Although active striving against evil is required, it must eventually be carried out through the effort to understand and instantiate God’s will, which guarantees the process will be Jewish. This effectively forestalls any more pluralist understanding of either halakhah or Judaism, limiting the ultimate effectiveness of this philosophy to those who share Soloveitchik’s particular orientation. What remains pragmatic about Soloveitchik’s piece is his belief that the question of the ontological status of evil is secondary to its reality as a human experience in the topical halakhah, and his cautious use of that halakhic stance as a concrete method (but not an end in itself) for treating a specific problem. This is the point at which his argument is most open to a pluralistic halakhic reading. Yet paradoxically he rejects the stance, embraced by James, in which success comes in the very act of overcoming suffering. For James as a psychologist, the treatment is successful if the person ceases to suffer. For Soloveitchik this is not enough; rather the individual must accept the value system of Judaism. One might ask if this retreat to the core of his own philosophy conflicts with Soloveitchik’s ostensible quest for a halakhic methodology treating the issue of mental health. Although Soloveitchik is careful to frame his piece as a personal meditation, it also presents a therapeutic view of the halakhic life. If this therapy is ultimately tautological, it

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may not be meliorative in a productive way, and thus ultimately fails to create a more flexible view of halakhah. This, of course, would fit with Soloveitchik’s basic view of halakhah as ontologically fixed. Soloveitchik’s eventual re-casting of halakhic meaning in Lonely Man of Faith may serve his own core philosophy better than the fascinating melding of Pragmatism and devotional thought in this particular essay. That combination creates the aspects that are of potential interest to, and useful for cultural Judaism, but in the end it proves impossible for Soloveitchik himself to sustain. NOTES 1. Originally Isaiah 45:5; the altered version is found in the morning service. See Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1917). 2. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Westminster, MD: Doubleday, 2006), 21. 3. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Out of The Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering, and The Human Condition, ed. David Shatz, Joel B Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2003). 4. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 5. I capitalize the term Pragmatism to indicate that I am speaking of a specific American philosophical school and not the everyday usage of the term, which usually means some version of realpolitik, set in opposition to hopeful or idealistic views of the way the world works. This common use is not an accurate characterization of the philosophy. 6. As far as I can discover, there has only been one scholarly article on the relationship between James and Soloveitchik: Jon A. Levisohn, “Religious Experience as a Jewish Educational Ideal,” Journal of Jewish Education 70/1–2 (2004), 4–21. Levisohn demonstrates internal connections between the concepts of religious experience, using James and Rudolph Otto to illustrate what certain motifs in Soloveitchik’s thought might look like in practice. Like my own essay, it does not assert that Soloveitchik acknowledged James as an influence, but simply that there appears to be a close connection between the philosophy and language of the two thinkers. 7. The Union for Reform Judaism claims 1.5 million members in North America, and the commonly cited number of Conservative Jews is around one million. This dwarfs liberal membership elsewhere. 8. William James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” in Writings, 1902-1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 508. Emphasis in original. 9. Ibid., 613. 10. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 128. 11. James marks this tradition as different from Spinoza’s own, without indicating what Spinoza’s tradition might be. It is fairly difficult to argue that repentance is the key concept of Christianity without mentioning that it is also a major feature of Christianity’s antecedent, Judaism. Yet Judaism is not discussed at all in James’ lectures. This is a topic worth exploring further. 12. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 131. 13. This makes it even more unusual that James chooses Spinoza as the exemplar of the healthy-minded type. 14. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 133. 15. Ibid., 164–65. 16. Ibid., 163. 17. Ibid.

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18. Ibid., 187. 19. Ibid., 163. 20. Ibid. 21. Soloveitchik, Out of The Whirlwind, 87. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 88. 24. Ibid., 89. 25. Ibid., 91. 26. Ibid., 91–92. 27. Ibid., 95 28. Ibid., 100. 29. Ibid. 30. James could have been the original inspiration for the joke that there are two kinds of people, those who say that there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. 31. James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 498. 32. Ibid., 499. Emphasis and capitalization in the original. 33. Soloveitchik, Out of The Whirlwind, 100. 34. Ibid., 101. 35. Ibid., 102. 36. Ibid. 37. James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 612–13. 38. Soloveitchik, Out of The Whirlwind, 103–104. 39. Ibid., 105. 40. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man Of Faith, 24. Soloveitchik somewhat confusingly changed his terminology in the intervening years, since dignity becomes, in The Lonely Man of Faith, an almost pragmatic “ technique for living” associated with Adam the first rather than with ultimate meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY James, William. “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.” In Writings, 1902-1910, edited by Bruce Kuklick. New York: Viking Press, 1987. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Levisohn, Jon A. “Religious Experience as a Jewish Educational Ideal.” Journal of Jewish Education 70, no. 1–2 (2004): 4–21. Soloveitchik, Joseph B. Out of The Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering, and the Human Condition. Edited by David Shatz, Joel B Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler. Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2003. ———. The Lonely Man of Faith. Westminster, MD: Doubleday, 2006.

Chapter Ten

Intersubjectivity Meets Maternity Buber, Levinas, and the Eclipsed Relation Mara H. Benjamin

Parental caregiving is rich with existential meaning. 1 But critical reflection on childrearing—in particular, on the daily activities of adults engaged in raising children, most of whom have been women—has been quite absent in the dominant forms of Western philosophy and religious thought. 2 This has begun to change recently as a small but significant number of Christian theologians have examined some of the implications of the scholarly literature on maternal experience for religious thought. 3 Modern Jewish thought and ethics, by contrast, have thus far remained quite oblivious to the theological potential latent in critical reflection on childrearing. Yet critical reflection on the activities associated with childrearing in the modern West offers great potential to help explore uncharted terrain in contemporary Jewish theology and ethics. Critical reflection on the daily labor of caring for young children can shed light on some of the liveliest questions in modern Jewish thought: questions of affectivity and performance; the burdens of obligation and freedom; and the significance of intersubjectivity. Furthermore, taking up these questions can draw Jewish thought more directly into the realm of culture, for childrearing forms a crucial site for a contemporary discourse of relationality. In this essay, I initiate precisely such a conversation, demonstrating what is to be gained when we allow the cultural practice of childrearing in contemporary American life to interrogate theology. My project begins by noting the paradoxical occlusion of parental caregiving in precisely the quarters one would most expect to find it: the critical work on intersubjectivity that became the hallmark of twentieth-century Central European Jewish philosophy. Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Ro261

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senzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas all aimed to chart the theological and ethical significance of human relationality. They were particularly concerned with dyadic, affective relationships, and with questions of reciprocity and asymmetry within this dyadic structure. Yet where we might expect to find the most available model of such relationships—the one between parent and child—we find a conspicuous absence. In other words, twentieth-century Jewish philosophers were most interested in precisely those kinds of interpersonal relationships that characterize many post-industrial, bourgeois Western relationships that mothers have (and are enjoined to have) with their children—yet we find few traces of mothers or children, and certainly no satisfying traces of them in this body of literature. 4 Scour I and Thou or The Star of Redemption as we might, we will not find any sophisticated consideration of such relationships, or of the inherently “relational” processes by which selves—selves capable of mature relationships—are formed. 5 My interest is not to take these twentieth-century Jewish thinkers to task for eliding or misrepresenting this critical type of relationship (although I will point out some of these elisions and problematic representations below). Rather, this essay begins by rereading twentieth-century Jewish thinkers with the following question in mind: what would happen if we made maternal caregiving, and parent/child relationships generally, central, rather than marginal, to an account of intersubjectivity and relationship? 6 In embarking on this constructive inquiry, I borrow and expand on the approach set forth in Arnold Eisen’s Rethinking Modern Judaism. Eisen’s synthetic treatment of key issues and themes in modern Jewish thought contests the long-established practice of focusing on “great men” and “great ideas,” asserting instead that practice “has almost always remained way ‘out in front’ of theological beliefs.” 7 In more recent decades, cultural historians and anthropologists have developed and applied this core insight by highlighting the question of power in the analysis of Jewish normativity and contesting the scholarly myopia that privileges texts over “the material, embodied, and visual manifestations of Jewish tradition.” 8 In the context of this essay, which attends closely to a specific modern Jewish textual tradition of European philosophy, this observation suggests the necessity of allowing cultural practices—in this case, a ubiquitous cultural practice that is marginalized in the canonical works of modern Jewish thought—to interrogate the texts at hand. In what follows, I ask Jewish theology to confront childrearing, and to consider it a site of religious meaning. This endeavor entails not so much a critical analysis of childrearing as a set of cultural practices but rather the forging of a conversation between two realms of discourse that have been estranged in the production and the content of Jewish thought. In this essay I focus on an aspect of intersubjective relationships that is particularly salient for parent/child interactions: the role of power differentials or lack thereof in dyadic relationships. First, I consider two modern

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Jewish thinkers’ treatment of power asymmetries in the intersubjective encounter: I begin with Buber’s conception of I-Thou dialogue as a dialogue between equals in I and Thou, and then turn to Levinas’ critique of Buber’s “egalitarianism” in Totality and Infinity. Levinas’ corrective pivots on the fundamental asymmetry in the relationship to the Other. I focus on this issue in order to identify and retrieve what will be useful and instructive from this dialogue for my consideration of parenting. I then identify core concerns regarding power differentials and asymmetry in mother/child relationships, when viewed from the standpoint of feminist philosophers. I will argue that reading these tensions in Jewish thought alongside the tensions that emerge from critical reflection on mothering can open up new and useful questions for how we think about relationality in general. In the conclusion, I will suggest ways in which Buber and Levinas can help plumb the theological and existential dimensions of feminist literature on mother/child relationships. My aim is to demonstrate that drawing Jewish theology into the cultural practice of childrearing will re-energize both culture and theology. BUBER AND LEVINAS: RECIPROCITY AND ASYMMETRY IN INTERSUBJECTIVE ENCOUNTER In his most famous work, I and Thou, Martin Buber (1878-1965) begins by asserting the fundamental duality of human experience in the world: “The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.” 9 The “basic word-pairs” that describe these two possibilities for how the world is known or encountered are the I-Thou and I-It. 10 The I-Thou relation, as Buber conceives it, is the locus of reciprocity; indeed, it defines reciprocity and constitutes the locus of intersubjectivity proper. Hence I will discuss the I-Thou relation in some detail. A famous passage in I and Thou establishes Buber’s contention that “IThou relation” is the privileged, originary model of relationship: In the beginning is the relation—as the category of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul; the a priori of relation, the innate Thou. In the relationships through which we live, the innate Thou is realized in the Thou we encounter. 11

This inborn drive to relation leads individuals to relate not only to other humans, but also to animals, to objects in nature or works of art, as a Thou. The I-It relation occurs as a falling-away from this original relationality; the detachment of the ‘I’ from its involvement with a Thou creates the I-It relation, which Buber describes as one of “experience” and “knowledge” rather than “relation.” 12

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I want to dwell on several elements of the I-Thou relation that will be especially important for my later discussion. The first of these concerns the issue of particularity. For Buber, the I-Thou model of “relation” consists in an immediate grasp of the whole of the Thou. In Buber’s words, “What, then, does one experience of the Thou?—Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.—What, then, does one know of the Thou?—Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.” 13 Buber argues that the I-Thou relation is unmediated: we relate directly to the Thou, unencumbered by “prior knowledge,” “imagination,” and even “memory.” 14 It is the relation in which “particularity” disappears, so that we come in contact with the “wholeness” of the other and of ourselves. In the I-It relation, by contrast, the person to whom I might potentially relate becomes the person I merely experience. The Thou becomes “a He or She, an aggregate of qualities, a quantum with a shape,” in whom I experience merely an aggregate of particular qualities, such as “the color of his hair . . . his speech . . . his graciousness.” 15 For Buber, the I-Thou relationship, the privileged relationship that reveals the core attribute of relationality, dissolves not only visible externalities but also those qualities of being that make us particular individuals. Consequently, in I-Thou encounters, “measure and comparison have fled” and the ‘I’ detaches from the attributes it associates with itself. 16 Later in the text, Buber elaborates by introducing the terms “person” and “ego” to refer, respectively, to the ‘I’ of the ‘I-Thou’ dyad and the ‘I’ of the ‘I-It’ dyad. The key difference here concerns the mutability or steadfastness of the individual-in-relation: “The ego . . . wallows in his being-that-way,” while the “person” is led to “self-destruction—or rebirth” in the encounter with the other. 17 The self, Buber suggests, is malleable, open to being fundamentally altered as a consequence of its encounter with another, and it is key to his claim that “[r]elation is reciprocity.” 18 The central point here is that “reciprocity” for Buber not only indicates the power of the Thou to affect and even constitute the I, but it also suggests how a type of encounter in which particularity, “comparison” or asymmetry will evaporate. 19 For one of Buber’s key readers, the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), attributing “reciprocity” to the encounter with the Other was deeply problematic. 20 Levinas’ critique of reciprocity is found in his important 1961 work Totality and Infinity, widely considered a watershed in his phenomenological corpus. For our purposes, its central contribution is the reformulation and radicalization of a claim he had implied in Time and the Other (1947) that the recognition of ethical “bondage” or obligation to the other constitutes the achievement of an already preexistent self. By contrast, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes the face-to-face encounter with the other as a kind of ethical bondage that is constitutive of the self. 21 Ethical relation precedes all being, and thus the relationship that demands something from or imposes something on me is the one that thereby calls me into being.

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This encounter does not reveal the wholeness of the other to me; indeed, the other remains “opaque” and radically other. 22 In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues forcefully that a fundamental asymmetry characterizes this privileged intersubjective moment, which he calls the encounter with the face of the Other. In this encounter, one member of the dyad is overwhelmed and impinged upon by the other; the former challenges, perhaps even shatters, the latter’s illusion of self-contained, autonomous agency. The intersubjective encounter, then, must contain a degree of the individual’s ceding of his or her will, desires, even selfhood so that the other’s self may occupy that space. This capacity of the other to interrupt and make demands on the individual becomes the sine qua non for an authentic intersubjective encounter. Thus Levinas argues that the moment of ethical encounter is defined by the defenseless need of the other. The face of the other “imposes itself . . . precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity—its hunger—without my being able to be deaf to that appeal.” The other solicits me. 23 Significantly, the “other” for Levinas is situated simultaneously at two diametrically opposed positions. The Other is ethically “high” in comparison to the Same: the face of the other commands, and the Same receives the command. Yet the other is socially (or perhaps existentially) low, needy, even destitute (Levinas borrows the biblical phrase ‘stranger, widow, and orphan’ in this context). 24 In both scenarios, height and lowliness, the relationship to the Other is radically asymmetrical. Only thus, Levinas implies, can the Other command, solicit, or interrupt me. Buber’s “reciprocity,” by contrast, suggested to Levinas the “reversibility” of the I-Thou, “so that it is indifferent whether it is read from left to right or right to left.” 25 Buber’s model moves on a horizontal axis whereas Levinas’ encounter with the face of the Other moves on a vertical axis. 26 This difference between Buber and Levinas is a crucial one, but it should not obscure a point that both thinkers assume: the primary, perhaps even normative encounter between two humans is the encounter between two adult male subjects. Neither Buber nor Levinas discuss parent-child relationships in the texts under consideration. Yet each thinker briefly discusses gestation and the infant/parent relationship as a counterpoint to his understanding of intersubjectivity proper. These apparently marginal passages in fact throw into relief the assumption of adult male normativity that guides the body of the text. Deeper appreciation of these passages reveal how serious engagement with the dyadic pair mother/child would alter, challenge, and potentially enrich Buber’s and Levinas’ dialogue on asymmetry. Buber, for instance, illustrates his claim that the capacity for I-Thou relationships is inborn by looking to gestation. His lyrical, neo-Romantic discussion of the origin of the human capacity for the I-Thou relation builds on a fantasy of the original state of human beings. Buber locates this original

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human condition in the mind of the “primitive” and in the fetus in utero, writing of the latter, The prenatal life of the child is a pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the developing being appears uniquely inscribed, and yet also not inscribed, in that of the being that carries it; for the womb in which it dwells is not solely that of the human mother. . . . Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. . . . What is to surround the finished human being as an object, has to be acquired and wooed strenuously by him while he is still developing. 27

A feminist critique of this passage practically writes itself: the woman who carries the fetus is only named negatively (“the womb in which [the fetus] dwells is not solely that of the human mother”), and the pregnant woman is relevant only insofar as she possesses a uterus in which a fetus grows. This woman lacks subjectivity; even the particularity of her body quickly collapses into a mythical archetype: “Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother.” 28 This single description of pregnancy in Buber’s philosophy of dialogue underscores the complete absence of actual mothers (or, for that matter, fathers) and children engaged in ongoing, worldly relationships. 29 Moreover, for Buber, the relata in the normative I-Thou relation are imagined as potentially returning to or re-experiencing the originary state in which the fetus and the “primitive mind” perpetually dwell. This suggests that the normative account excludes the maternal and the juvenile ‘I’, the ‘I’ that is in some sense unformed as a separate being. Buber’s I-Thou, then, obtains chiefly, or normatively, for fully realized adult selves. Judith Plaskow’s brief consideration of this remarkably problematic passage in I and Thou goes to the heart of the issue that concerns us here. She observes, The child [i.e., fetus] is not characteristically an object to the mother—as in the I-It mode—but neither does she [the mother] necessarily experience a perpetual reciprocity of relation. Her experience of care and connection even when mutually absent may constitute a third sort of relation insufficiently accounted for in Buber’s theology. 30

The perspective of the gestating woman vis-à-vis the fetus, Plaskow suggests, can be accommodated neither by a model of pure relation (the I-Thou) nor by a model of detached objectivity (the I-It). Women’s experiences of pregnancy embrace every imaginable configuration within and beyond the two opposing possibilities of “relation” to a Thou and “experience” of an

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It. 31 Reciprocity, however, is hardly an adjective that captures the subtleties of what occurs between the developing embryo or fetus and the pregnant woman, at least as the latter experiences it. And thus, Plaskow suggests, Buber’s categories cannot allow for a relationship in which authentic regard is present but mutuality, or reciprocity, is absent. 32 Buber’s 1957 afterword to I and Thou highlights the limitations in his work for comprehending maternal/child relations. In this afterword, he addresses questions concerning mutuality and reciprocity that had arisen for his interlocutors in response to the first edition of the book. Here Buber specifically addresses the issue of asymmetry by raising the question, “People ask: what about the I-Thou relationship between men? Is this always entirely reciprocal?” Here, then, we might hope to find some tools for conceiving of parent/child relations. Instead, Buber’s choice of asymmetrical pairs in his answer dramatically underscores my point: There are many I-Thou relationships that by their very nature may never unfold into complete mutuality if they are to remain faithful to their nature. Elsewhere I have characterized the relationship of a genuine educator to his pupil as being of this type. . . . Another, no less instructive example of the normative limits of mutuality may be found in the relationship between a genuine psychotherapist and his patient. . . . The most striking example of the normative limits of mutuality could probably be found in the work of those charged with the spiritual well-being of their congregation. 33

Teacher/student, therapist/patient, clergyperson/congregant: these—not parent/child—constitute the socially asymmetrical pairs Buber imagines in which the I-Thou can flourish despite the inequality of the two individuals. Likewise, Levinas’ insistence on the asymmetry and irreversibility of the encounter with the Other reveals an assumption that both self (or what Levinas calls the ‘same’) and Other are two adult male subjects. 34 I offer here a brief reading of the key passages on this point in Totality and Infinity and then suggest what I see as the limitations of Levinas’ account for my constructive effort. In Totality and Infinity, the figure of the gestating body appears in the last part of the text. The pregnant body represents the generativity and “fecundity” of the encounter with the face of the Other. Yet pregnancy here is entirely metaphorical; Levinas excludes or marginalizes actual parent and child, even as he insists on the capacity of the vulnerable Other to command: “The poor one, the stranger, presents himself as an equal . . . the Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated.” 35 Levinas’ introduction of erotic, and then familial, language later on points (as it did in Buber) to the fact that the “poor one,” the “stranger” and even the metaphorical “widow” and “orphan”—not the mother and child—describe the normative Other.

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The section of Totality and Infinity called “Fecundity” further attests to the marginality of actual mothers and children in favor of their utility as symbols for the encounter between two adult male subjects. In this section, the appearance of the figure of the child grows out of Levinas’ treatment of erotic love. Levinas, in other words, builds on the inevitably heteronormative plot in which the erotic physical relationship between (masculine) subject and (feminine) Other produces a child. 36 In Levinas’ extended metaphor, the figure of the “son” and the concept of “paternity” serve to represent the radical unpredictability and otherness of what arises from the relation between the same and the Other. Fecundity “does not denote all that I can grasp—my possibilities; it denotes my future, which is not a future of the same. . . . The relation with the child—that is, the relation with the other that is not a power, but fecundity—establishes relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time.” 37 The child, in other words, represents an idea—the idea of the spilling over of the same/Other relationship into the as-yet unimaginable possibilities to which this encounter with radical alterity will lead. Non-metaphorical children are neither seen nor heard here. What would happen to Buber’s and Levinas’ accounts of intersubjectivity if we contended with children and the real individuals who care for them? To begin to answer this question, I turn now to a few key treatments of both volition and asymmetry in the context of maternal practice. MATERNAL CARE AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY In her groundbreaking, now classic study, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich pithily observed, “Those who speak of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions.” 38 Her book is nothing if not an attempt to correct this divide. To investigate maternal experience, she demonstrates, is to inquire into the human condition: To have borne and reared a child is to have done that thing which patriarchy joins with physiology to render into the definition of femaleness. But also, it can mean the experiencing of one’s own body and emotions in a powerful way. We experience not only physical, fleshly changes but the feeling of a change in character. We learn, often through painful self-discipline and selfcauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be ‘innate’ in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being. We are also, often to our amazement, flooded with feelings both of love and violence intenser and fiercer than any we had ever known. 39

Following Rich, I ask: what might it mean to launch an inquiry into intersubjectivity with the daily activities, encounters, and relationships between par-

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ents and children? How would our assessment of intersubjectivity change if we apprehended the cultural practices of childrearing with a nuanced and dynamic understanding of these relationships as sites in which the political, existential, social, spiritual, affective, embodied and ethical intersect? This is not to say that childrearing comprises a single phenomenon or set of practices; to the contrary, it constitutes a highly variable site for difference along many axes. Thus any constructive enterprise will require careful consideration of social and cultural variability. Nonetheless, in investigating some characteristic elements of parental/child intersubjectivity and relationships, we can begin to develop a lexicon for comprehending the diversity of parent/ child interactions. In what follows, I suggest a framework for a parent-centered model of intersubjectivity by considering, first, the role of maternal volition, and second, reciprocity and asymmetry. The daily caregiving of young children constitutes a radically diverse set of practices, and any account of it must of necessity be limited in scope. Here, I build most explicitly on the framework Sara Ruddick provides in her Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989), a volume that examines the philosophical meaning of the ubiquitous (but heretofore philosophically invisible) activities of mothering. Ruddick’s central claim is that the work of mothering encourages or even necessitates the development of a specific, positive cognitive and moral consciousness. As a result, she argues, maternal care does not belong in the realm of pure affectivity or biological determinism implied in crude or essentialist notions of “mother love” or “maternal instinct,” but within a realm fit for philosophical and moral reflection. Her text opens up to view a realm of experience that has been invisible or marginal to philosophy. Over two decades after its publication, the volume remains among the definitive critical treatments of mothering. Ruddick focused on three activities that form the core of “mothering work”: protecting the child, nurturing and fostering the child’s growth, and training the child to be socially acceptable within his or her culture. Here, I will focus on the first of these activities. In my view, attention to this most basic task of childcaring, especially but not only in Ruddick’s treatment, raises with special acuity the issues of volition and choice in the maternal actor and the significance of the power differential between mother and child. The work of protecting one’s child from harm inarguably constitutes one of the primary activities of childrearing. Yet this apparently obvious assertion, when focused on mothers, typically leads thinkers unreflectively into the complex and politically charged terrain of “maternal instinct.” In the contemporary popular imagination, this notion conjures a primal, animal instinct that releases a surge of fierce power in a mother when her child is in danger. Like the gendered dualism that informs so much of Western thought,

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women’s activity here is animalistic, guided by instinct rather than by moral reasoning. Clearly, any feminist account of this component of childcaring must address maternal activity with much greater nuance, and indeed, Ruddick demonstrates a persuasive method of doing so by highlighting the ever-present possibility of refusing to meet the needs of the other—what might be called, in Levinasian terms, a turning away from the face of the other. Ruddick begins her description of protecting the child, which she also calls the activities of “preservative love,” with an anecdote in which a mother’s need to protect her child involves the conscious and willed exercise of restraint. In this story, an exhausted, frustrated mother fantasizes about hurtling her colicky baby out of the second-floor window. 40 The mother, fearful she might act on her violent fantasy, barricades the baby inside the nursery room. Later in the night, the mother tries a different strategy: she takes the baby from her crib, boards the city bus with her, and rides it all night long. The mother, sensing that eyes of the other riders are on them, is reassured: the presence of strangers will protect the two of them from her own violent impulses. Preservative maternal love, in this account, is comprehended through a scene of potential violence resourcefully averted. For Ruddick, preservative love can involve a deliberate, reasoned decision to act against one’s impulse or “instinct.” The capacity for choice and reflection—the fact that the mother relied on her cognitive and reflective powers so as not to fulfill her fantasy or her (at least momentary) desire—establishes this love as one not defined by raw, unmediated instinct, but rather by mediated reflection on feelings. Protective love, in this view, must be measured by its practical results rather than by a purported inward state. The activity of protecting a child always involves a complex and dense set of feelings including not only love but also ambivalence, resentment, despair, frustration, and rage. It is the complexity and intensity of the feelings that inextricably accompany maternal caregiving that necessitate a concept of maternal activity as reflection on feeling; as Ruddick argues, “Rather than separating reason from feeling, mothering makes reflective feeling one of the most difficult attainments of reason. In protective work, feeling, thinking, and action are conceptually linked.” 41 Immediacy is ruled out. Ruddick’s account, which emphasizes the constant demand to commit to protect one’s child, suggests that the mother must also constantly face the possibility of withholding care: In any culture, maternal commitment is far more voluntary than people like to believe . . . both maternal work and the thinking that is provoked by it are decisively shaped by the possibility that any mother may refuse to see creatures as children or to respond to them as complicated, fragile, and needy. 42

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This emphasis on maternal choice, as an explicit rejection of simplistic notions of “maternal instinct,” is echoed in other feminist philosophical considerations of mothering as well. 43 For Ruddick, all “mothers” are “adoptive” in that they choose to care for particular children (often, but not always, their biological children) rather than to flee from or abuse them: “Even the most passionately loving birthgiver engages in a social, adoptive act when she commits herself to sustain an infant in the world.” 44 The choice to respond to children indifferently or in a way that does not address their needs is the key factor, for Ruddick and others, in establishing maternal activity as moral and reflective activity. 45 The power differential between mother and child underscores the stakes of this power to respond or to withhold response; the care of at least one “mother,” in the most expansive sense of the term, is critical to the basic survival of an infant and necessary to its flourishing. Because children are “complicated, fragile, and needy”—because they have no viable option but to rely on an adult for their most basic needs—the ethical stakes of this activity are high. 46 And yet the radical asymmetry in which the parent/infant relationship begins is, indeed, only the beginning. What comes next, of course, varies enormously by culture. In the post-industrial West, parents generally strive to raise children who are socially, economically, and in other respects independent; “mutuality” and “reciprocity” (let alone “reversibility”) are not usually thought of as ideals for the eventual relationship between parent and child, at least not in any simple sense. 47 Rather, parents often strive for their children to be able to show their own partners, children, and others the sense of care and responsibility that they themselves were shown as children. A critical piece of the parent’s task is that of welcoming and encouraging the development of a child’s capacity for mutuality in relationship, knowing that the relationship with one’s child will never be directly “reversible” or “reciprocal.” 48 A nuanced understanding of the subtle interplay between reciprocity and asymmetry will acknowledge this complexity. Such an understanding must also grapple with the potentially transformative effect that living with children and providing for their daily needs has on the caregiver, for this too is an important but complex element of reciprocity. This is the labor of which Rich wrote so incisively: “We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be ‘innate’ in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being.” 49 Surely, we do not all learn the same qualities; neither is the process of learning one that can be described as “disciplining” or “cauterizing” the self. But here, the critical factor is the extent to which this relationship works with particular potency and relentlessness on the adult self:

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Mara H. Benjamin Most of the literature of infant care and psychology has assumed that the process toward individuation is essentially the child’s drama, played out against and with a parent or parents who are, for better or worse, givens. Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother, one of those givens, when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself. 50

An adequate conceptualization of intersubjectivity in parent/child relationships must grapple with the fact of parental subjectivity. Alongside children’s immersion in dynamic growth and receptivity, a more subtle but no less potent kind of transformation can work on parents when they respond— and when they fail to respond—to their children. In considering the question of maternal choice and volition in relationships with children, I have asserted that parents immersed in the daily work of childcaring must constantly grapple with the possibility that they may refuse to respond to their children’s needs, or may relegate these needs to a position of limited urgency. At times, a child can act as the Other who calls one forth into responsibility, following Levinas. 51 At times, I may encounter my child as a Thou and relate to her with the wholeness of her being and mine, as Buber suggests. But neither of these portraits is adequate for any fully imagined experience of parental caregiving. An account of intersubjectivity that honors the dynamism and the contingency of the parent/child relationship and its many forms of encounter will force us to contest what Buber and Levinas present as “authentic” I-Thou or same/Other encounters. Moments of feeding, caring for, cleaning, and soothing children are philosophically and existentially significant moments, no less than are the moments of deep reciprocity or extreme obligation. To dismiss (with Buber) the manifold ordinary, quotidian encounters that occur in the course of caring for a child as partaking only in the I-It relation, or to suggest (with Levinas) that the only ethical relation with the Other is one in which I cede my autonomy to the other, is to exclude the lion’s share of childcaring from the conversation. It consigns the bulk of these relationships to theological and ethical irrelevance and hinders theological conversation from attending to a significant cultural practice. Likewise, reciprocity and asymmetry must be accounted for in all their complexity. To map the mother/child relationship onto any single portrait of power within intersubjective encounters is to distort or fail to account for major parts of it. Mother/child relationships cannot be wholly comprehended by treating them as only spiritually asymmetrical, reciprocal, reversible, or as equal. Any account of the encounter or relationship between mother and child that privileges one of these elements while failing to recognize the others will fall short. To put it positively: an account of intersubjectivity that arises from reflection on maternal caregiving must include significant attention to the complex-

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ities, contingencies, and the dynamism of the asymmetries between parent and child. Children participate actively (although with less power and a different kind of power than their caregivers) in making known their needs and soliciting help or attention. Nonetheless, parents have the ability to ignore or refuse these demands (and in many cases, they cannot meet their children’s demands). Each day brings countless opportunities for parents and children to confront their differing desires, wills, and abilities (and the varying social circumstances in which these needs and abilities can be articulated). Consequently, parents and children will necessarily negotiate, interpret, and routinize moments of meeting and failure to meet; they will negotiate, as well, moments of radical difference and moments of harmony. Moreover, the asymmetry of the relationship between parents and children changes in momentous ways over the course of months and years—not necessarily moving progressively in the direction of “equality” or simple reciprocity but rather undergoing periodic tectonic shifts and realignments. An account of intersubjectivity in which mothers and children are central must necessarily grapple with social and existential dimensions of asymmetry in all their diversities and continual oscillations. Neither Buber’s nor Levinas’ model can account for the dynamic quality of ethical encounters as they develop over the course of the months and years, as is routinely the case with childrearing. CONCLUSION In this last section, I return to Buber and Levinas to explore the possibilities that emerge from their work for reflecting on the ethical and theological meaning of a fully imagined parent/child relationship. The caveats I raised in the first section above primarily concern the marginal or merely metaphorical role of parents and children in the two principal works I have considered. Now, however, I move into a mode of retrieval. I believe Buber’s and Levinas’ contributions to the discourse of intersubjectivity hold great potential for reengaging Jewish theology with culture. Before doing so, however, it bears noting that the kind of retrieval I have in mind goes against the grain of the feminist writers I have considered. Many feminist ethicists and philosophers of mothering and, more broadly, care ethics, display an allergic reaction to religion and theology. 52 They tend to avoid or even forestall conversation between their own projects and traditions of religious ethics. Virginia Held argues that it is unwise for proponents of the ethics of care to use religious terminology or to look to religious analogues of their work. 53 Nel Noddings is thoroughly skeptical, even pessimistic, in her assessment of religion and its utility for women, largely forestalling conversation between care and religious ethics. 54 Ruddick, while not

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as antagonistic to religious thought as some of the later feminists who built on her work, nonetheless finds very few points of contact between her approach and that of a “religious” attitude, and her remarks on religion are quite limited. 55 There are, indeed, good reasons to be cautious when seeking out points of correlation or contact between feminist and various kinds of religious discourses. Yet in spite of, and alongside, the problems endemic to twentiethcentury Jewish religious thought, thinkers like Buber and Levinas make for compelling interlocutors for feminists interested not only in the existential, cultural, philosophical, and ethical implications of maternal activity, but in the theological implications as well. 56 The most reflective philosophical and ethical engagements with mothering can and should become the raw data from which Jewish thinkers develop new and fuller accounts of intersubjectivity. Doing so will enliven Jewish thought by drawing it into public discourse about widespread cultural practices. Let me suggest, by way of conclusion, several paths that could be explored in this pursuit. One route for exploring the possibilities in Levinas and Buber for theorizing childcaring has already begun. For instance, Roger Burggraeve builds on the concept, in Totality and Infinity, of the command issued by the face of the Other. Burggraeve regards the crying infant as the best illustration of this ethical phenomenon: the infant overwhelms the carer’s illusions of self-sufficiency; she interrupts the self-containedness of the parent. 57 Indeed, many parents involved in caring for young children might go further and agree with Levinas’ later formulation that this particular Other holds me hostage! 58 Yet as recent developments in the field of childhood studies have made clear, the moral agency of children, and their active participation in the relationships through which they are constituted, require a model in which they are not primarily viewed as the opaque Other who calls the adult out of his or her self-containment. 59 Furthermore, feminist thinking demands a greater interest in the agency and subjectivity of the mother and in her capacity to refuse to admit the claim of this particular other, which as we said above, is critical for a nuanced portrait of mothering. A more promising route lies in pushing feminist engagement with maternal care beyond its generally secular comfort zone. I find Buber and Levinas instructive in showing how we might move from adamantly secular accounts of maternal activity, such as Ruddick’s, toward the development of a theological account of maternal activity, and one which might foreground Jewish theological frameworks in particular. 60 Both Buber and Levinas offer accounts of intersubjectivity that hover in the liminal space between the secular and the theological, or that paradoxically include both of these possibilities at once. For instance, Levinas argues explicitly that the “ethical relation . . . cuts across every relation one could call mystical. . . . [T]he face . . . remains commensurate with him who welcomes; it remains terrestrial.” 61 And yet, at

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the same time, for Levinas the intersubjective plane and the daily encounters that take place upon it open up “infinity” and “transcendence.” These terms, certainly, cannot be simply identified with “God.” But arguably, the infinite—“a genuine relation with what is other than ourselves”—holds the place of the divine in Levinas. 62 Levinas’ inquiry into the “infinity” that lies within intersubjective relationships provides a framework for thinking about the theological meaning of mothering. The same could be said of Buber’s account of the Eternal Thou in whom all lines of relationship “intersect.” 63 Such conceptions of the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent suggest, at the very least, a nuanced and potent framework for dialogue between religious thought and feminist analysis of maternal care. Imagining the transcendent as located within and through the terrestrial is precisely at the heart of some critical avenues for feminist theology since the 1970s and 1980s. 64 Likewise, investigations into Jewish women’s own reported experience of childbirth and childrearing have grappled with birthgivers’ own attempts to put into language the connection they see between the remote God of their tradition and the intimate experience of caring for particular others, including their children. 65 A critical but constructive reading of Buber and Levinas can help develop a language for an ethic and theology of caring for children in which the terrestrial, mundane, and quotidian is understood to have transcendent implications. Although Buber, Levinas, and the other great Central European Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century had little (and little of use) to say regarding women and gender, we would do well to return to the discourse of intersubjectivity they developed. The project I have undertaken, of foregrounding the theological and philosophical meaning of maternal practice and the daily care of young children, is one these men could have scarcely imagined. Yet questions of agency, power, volition, and reciprocity are absolutely central to the work of parental caregiving. My inquiry demonstrates that the most important twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, in spite of their own limitations, can provide a lexicon with which those engaged in the daily work of childrearing can forge a new language; with it, we may articulate the unique forms of intersubjectivity that occur between parents and their children. NOTES 1. This essay is dedicated to my teacher Arnie Eisen. I thank Ken Koltun-Fromm, Claire Sufrin, and Diane Tracht for their insightful comments on drafts of this essay, and Bonnie Miller-McLemore for her response to a version of this paper delivered at Vanderbilt University in April, 2013. Special thanks also to Riv-Ellen Prell for her encouragement during the early stages of formulating this paper. 2. Two general observations can be made about how childrearing appears in the Western philosophical tradition. First, to the extent that childrearing is the subject of reflection, thinkers in the Western tradition regard it primarily as a means of reproducing culture, not a daily

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practice or activity. Second, literature about childrearing consistently exhibits an unquestioned identification with the child. On this point, Susan Suleiman’s comments regarding psychoanalytic writing could just as easily apply to philosophy and religious thought: “Mothers don’t write, they are written. . . . This is the underlying assumption of most psychoanalytic theorist about writing and artistic creation in general.” See Susan R. Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, ed. Moyra Davey (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1985), 113-37, especially page 117. 3. See Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics,” in Feminist Theological Ethics: A Reader, ed. Lois K. Daly and Margaret A. Farley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 146-59; Marcia Bunge, Children, Adults, and Shared Responsibilities: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Christine E. Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice,” in Women’s Consciousness and Women’s Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, ed. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Christine E. Gudorf, and Mary D. Pellauer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 175-91; Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999); Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); Cristina L. H. Traina, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and John Wall, “Animals and Innocents: Theological Reflections on the Meaning and Purpose of Child-Rearing,” Theology Today 59/4 (2003), 559-82. 4. The premise of mothering as an essentially dyadic enterprise has sustained intense criticism in broader feminist circles. The criticism comes from diverse quarters: from social historians, who point to the notion of the mother/child dyad as a recent construct of latecapitalist bourgeois societies; from women of color, who have pointed out the ways in which this construction renders invisible both the network of caregivers who play a prominent role in African-American lives and the conditions of racism and oppression under which AfricanAmerican communities continue to struggle; and from those who argue that the dyadic structure is politically ineffectual. For examples of each of these criticisms, see Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood,” in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 56-74; and Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993). 5. A very few scholarly endeavors have investigated possible crossovers between modern Jewish philosophers and childrearing. The bulk of those projects have been concerned with educational philosophy; one exception, which focuses specifically on feminist philosophical corollaries to Jewish existentialism, is Leora Batnitzky, “Dependence and Vulnerability: Jewish and Existentialist Constructions of the Human,” in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 127-52. 6. I believe the gender-specific terms mother and mothering, as opposed to the genderneutral terms parent and parenting, serve an important function: in the words of Sara Ruddick, upon whose work I build, the choice to use the feminine term “recognize[s] and honor[s] the fact that even now, and certainly through most of history, women have been the mothers.” In her influential work, Ruddick defined a “mother” simply as “a person who takes on responsibility for her children’s lives and for whom providing child care is a significant part of her or his working life.” Such an approach would use the term “mother” for a male or female person. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 40. For other arguments against the gender-neutral term, see Virginia Held, “The Obligations of Mothers and Fathers,” in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 7-20; Onora O’Neill and William Ruddick, Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Susan Rae Peterson, “Against ‘Parenting,’” in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984), 62-69. However, using the gendered term “mother” exclusively has its disadvantages. Changes in familial divisions of labor in recent decades, limited though they are, have resulted in a small but significant

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increase in the numbers of men who take responsibility for the daily, physical care of their children. Language that reflects this fact is particularly important in this essay, which focuses on the activities of childrearing (which is performed by individuals of any gender who are nonbiologically as well as biologically related to their children) rather than childbearing. Thus I will speak below of “mothering” (which I will do especially when a specifically gendered context demands it) as well as of “childrearing” and occasionally of “parenting.” In addition, I will occasionally use the gender-neutral neologism “childcaring” to refer specifically to the daily, often mundane, activities of tending to children’s needs. 7. Arnold M. Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4. 8. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow, “Anthropology, History, and the Remaking of Jewish Studies,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 18. 9. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 53. On the development of I and Thou, see Rivka Horwitz, Buber’s Way to “I and Thou”: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought and His “Religion as Presence” Lectures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). Recent contributions to the already sizeable literature on Buber’s volume include Martin Kavka, “Verification (Bewährung) in Martin Buber,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20/1 (2012), 71-98; Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002). 10. For clarity, I will break from Kaufmann’s translation of Du as ‘You,’ using ‘Thou’ instead. I have otherwise refrained from altering his translation. 11. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 78. 12. Ibid., 73. 13. Ibid., 61. 14. Ibid., 62. 15. Ibid., 69. 16. Ibid., 83. 17. Ibid., 113-16. 18. Ibid., 67. 19. That having been said, Buber insists that the dissolution of asymmetry does not result in the dissolution of identity. See Martin Buber, I and Thou, 135. 20. Levinas implies that his critique is (in some part) directed at Buber, a point Derrida noted in “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). On the substance of this critique, see Robert Bernasconi, “‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (New York: Routledge, 1988), 100-35. On the relationship between the two thinkers, see the articles in Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Maurice S. Friedman, Levinas & Buber: Dialogue & Difference (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004). On the tension between Buber and Levinas on this point, see also Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chapter 8. 21. I am indebted here to the formulation in Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 240. 22. One of Moyn’s most important claims in his book is that Levinas borrowed but then transposed the concept of the “totally other” from Rosenzweig, Karl Barth, and other Weimar theologians. ‘Alterity’ went from describing God to describing the human other (Moyn, Origins of the Other, chapter 4). In what follows, I draw only on Totality and Infinity, leaving aside the complex turn to somatic metaphors, including and especially the metaphor of pregnancy, in Otherwise than Being. For discussions of the pregnancy metaphor in Otherwise Than Being, see many of the discussions in Tina Chanter, Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) and Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

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23. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 200. 24. I am grateful to Michael Gottsegen for sharing his insight on this point with me; Gottsegen builds on this observation in his forthcoming book, Emmanuel Levinas: From Ethical Piety to Prophetic Politics. See also Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 68. On Levinas’ inexact use of the biblical “orphan,” see also Claire Elise Katz, “Reinhabiting the House of Ruth: Exceeding the Limits of the Feminine in Levinas,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Tina Chanter (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 145-70, especially page 149. 25. Levinas here is quoted in Bernasconi, “‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus,” 110. Note that Buber seems to exclude asymmetry in the I-Thou relation in his statement that “wishing to understand the pure relationship as dependence means wishing to deactualize one partner of the relationship and thus the relationship itself.” See Buber, I and Thou, 131. 26. I am grateful to Claire Sufrin for her felicitous formulation. 27. Buber, I and Thou, 76-77. 28. Judith Plaskow, citing the work of Lauren Granite, has observed this as well: “Here Buber focuses on the experience of the child without ever naming the mother as the one with whom the child is in relation or looking at the mother-child relationship from the mother’s side.” See Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62-84, especially page 68. 29. This claim must be qualified by a small but telling exception. Buber makes brief mention of the effect of the child on the adult: “Relation is reciprocity. My Thou acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us. The ‘wicked’ become a revelation when they are touched by the sacred basic word. How we are educated by children, by animals! Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity” (Buber, I and Thou, 67). Buber gestures to a motley set of figures to illustrate how the person or object that acts as my Thou can affect my I: students, objects we produce, ‘wicked’ people, children, and animals. The very brevity with which Buber catalogues these suggests that my normative Thou is essentially like my I and thus operates within “the economy of the same.” 30. Plaskow, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” 68. 31. Biologically speaking, the fetus both is and is not part of the gestating woman’s body, and the fetus’ capacity for physical individuation and separation from the woman’s womb is part of the ongoing work of gestation. 32. Buber’s model is just as inadequate when attempting to comprehend childrearing as it is when it attempts to conceive of gestation. 33. Buber, I and Thou, 178. Note the description of the ‘pupil’ in the text is neither explicitly nor necessarily imagined as a juvenile; indeed, the pupil is referred to as the “partner” of the educator in the I-Thou relation that the latter “awakens” in the student. 34. The insight that, for Levinas, the Same is male and “alterity” is “accomplished in the feminine” was first pointed out by Simone de Beauvoir, and has been amply demonstrated in the voluminous feminist criticism of Levinas in the intervening years. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953), xix. 35. “Equality” should not, however, be confused with the idea of assimilating the “absolute foreignness” of the Other. Levinas uses the counterintuitive metaphor of “paternity” to capture this idea: “Paternity is not a causality, but the establishment of a unicity with which the unicity of the father does and does not coincide.” See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 214. 36. Many of the articles collected in Chanter’s volume comment on the feminine and/as Other; see Chanter, Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. See also Catherine Chalier, “Ethics and the Feminine,” in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 119-29; Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-Writing of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. 37. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 268. On the metaphorical status of these comments, see Sandra Sandford, “Masculine Mothers? Maternity in Levinas and Plato,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, 180-202, especially page 189.

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38. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Norton, 1986), 33. 39. Ibid., 37. 40. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, 65-67. 41. Ibid., 70. 42. Ibid., 22. The work of a number of recent evolutionary biologists has affirmed this insight with data drawn from a broad swath of physical and neurological sources; see especially the feminist primatologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on the contingency of maternal investment in offspring (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 378). In general, the diversity of ways in which birthgivers act toward the children they bear has not been fully incorporated into some, perhaps most, feminist formulations. Ruddick’s formulation is the exception here; her decoupling of birthing labor and mothering labor is consistent with the enormously diverse historical and cultural variety in mothering practices. Infanticide, abandonment, and child abuse may be culturally non-normative practices in the modern West, but they are hardly aberrant. Rather, these practices must be considered part of the spectrum of maternal response to children in their care. Regarding infanticide and child abandonment in historical and crosscultural perspective, see Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 169-83; John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); ChaeRan Y. Freeze, “Lilith’s Midwives: Jewish Newborn Child Murder in Nineteenth-Century Vilna,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 16/ 2 (2010), 1-27; Glenn Hausfater and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives (New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2008), Section IV; Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, 18 and 22; Julia E. Hanigsberg and Sara Ruddick, Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Nancy ScheperHughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On ethics and maternal violence, see Laurie Zoloth, “Into the Woods: Killer Mothers, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Evil,” in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, 204-33. 43. See the article by Virginia Held, “Birth and Death,” Ethics 99 (January 1989), 362-88, especially page 364. 44. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, 50. 45. My own view is that the language of “choice” (vs. “instinct”) is not subtle enough to adequately capture the often opaque processes by which individuals come to their decisions. Here is where recent literature on agency in cultural and religious life can be particularly useful. See, for instance, Elizabeth Bucar, “Dianomy: Understanding Religious Women’s Moral Agency as Creative Conformity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78/3 (2010), 662-86; Judith Butler, “Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 21/2 (2011), 405-29; and Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 46. This is not to say that the child has no agency; as psychologists and biologists have noted, human infants are actively involved in soliciting care from their caregivers. On children’s participation and agency in soliciting their adults, see Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection and Cristina L. H. Traina, “Children and Moral Agency,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29/2 (2009), 19-37. 47. See Christine Gudorf’s critique of Reinhold Niebuhr’s treatment of agape: “With our own children we realized very clearly that though much of the early giving seemed to be solely ours, this was not disinterested, because the children were considered extensions of us, such that our efforts for them rebounded to our credit. Failure to provide for them would have discredited us. And we had expectations that the giving would become mutual. This led to the most revealing lesson the children taught us: that complete agape as either intention or result is

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impossible. . . . All love both involves sacrifice and aims at mutuality” (Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice,” 181-82). 48. This is, of course, a value not only in the post-industrial West; recall Glikl of Hameln’s invocation of the fable of the birds at the beginning of her autobiography, told to illustrate the point that wise parents do not strive to recoup any direct return on the investment of childrearing. See Glikl, The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646-1724, edited by Beth-Zion Abrahams (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), 8-9. That having been said, the expectation of children to provide—directly or indirectly—for elderly parents is a topic important both in classical religious texts and in contemporary considerations of filial responsibility. For an example of each in a Jewish context, see BT Qiddushin 30b-32a and Gerald J. Blidstein, Honor Thy Father and Mother: Filial Responsibility in Jewish Law and Ethics (New York: Ktav, 1975), 60-74. 49. Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 34. 50. Ibid., 17. 51. Roger Burggraeve, “The Ethical Voice of the Child: Plea for a Chiastic Responsibility in the Footsteps of Levinas,” in Children’s Voices: Children’s Perspectives in Ethics, Theology and Religious Education, eds. Annemie Dillen and Didier Pollefeyt (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 267-91. I comment briefly on Burggraeve’s essay below. 52. Both Noddings and Held were instrumental in expanding on Ruddick’s ideas and to the development of the emergent, free-standing field of care ethics. The ethics of care, the subfield of moral theory that largely grew out of specifically feminist origins, has been one important locus for the development of sustained philosophical reflections on the relational self. Important early contributions to this literature include Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). More recent important scholarship in the field includes Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Nel Noddings, The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Michael A. Slote, The Ethics of Care and Empathy (New York: Routledge, 2007). 53. Held maintains that the ethics of care needs to be developed independently of religious vocabularies; “when a morality depends on a given religion, it has little persuasiveness for those who do not share that faith. Moralities based on reason”—which Held believes the ethics of care is and should remain—“can succeed in gaining support around the world and across cultures” (Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, 21). 54. See especially Noddings, The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality, 141-42. 55. For instance, Ruddick writes that a variety of “religious, mystical, and secular attitudes are compatible with mothering. However, there is nothing in maternal practice itself that demands a religious of mystical response to nature and, whatever the solace and inspiration of faith, most mothers cannot will themselves to believe.” See Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, 78. 56. Interestingly, Nel Noddings does draw on Buber at some important junctures in her work. On this topic, see Richard L. Johannesen, “Nel Noddings’s Uses of Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue,” The Southern Communication Journal 65/2-3 (2000), 151-60. A more general exploration of Buber in connection with feminist thought is James W. Walters, Martin Buber & Feminist Ethics: The Priority of the Personal (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 57. Burggraeve, “The Ethical Voice of the Child.” 58. Derrida explores the meaning of the language of “hostage” (in Levinas, Otherwise than Being) in Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 56-63. 59. See, for example, Traina, “Children and Moral Agency”; and John Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010). 60. Christian feminist theologians have done much more work on this topic than have Jewish thinkers. See, for example, the work of Bonnie Miller-McLemore, especially Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); In the

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Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006); and “Feminism, Children, and Mothering: Three Books and Three Children Later,” Journal of Childhood and Religion 2/1 (2011), 1-32. 61. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 202-03. This passage ostensibly aims to distinguish Levinas’ own “non-mystical” concept of ethics from Hegelian thought (in which the other exists only in relationship and indeed as a kind of negation of the self). But this argument simultaneously accomplishes something else as well: a secularization of ethical and religious thought. Sam Moyn has persuasively argued that the secularizing project was central to Levinas’ endeavor in his early writings: Levinas, deeply influenced by the Weimar theologians, radically secularizes them, transforming the “totally other” from divine into human. See Moyn, Origins of the Other, 227-8. 62. As Edith Wyschogrod writes, for Levinas, “the relation with the other which is preceded by neither representation nor comprehension can be termed ‘invocation’ or ‘prayer.’ The essence of such invocation is religio, but religio of a very special order, for it arises, as in the case of Kant, within the framework of ethical relations” (italics mine). See Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 92. 63. Buber, I and Thou, 123. On the concept of the Eternal Thou, see Steven Katz, “Martin Buber’s Epistemology: A Critical Appraisal,” in Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: NYU Press, 1983), 1-51; and Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “Martin Buber’s Conception of God,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 237-82. A recent consideration of the question has been put forth in Kavka, “Verification (Bewährung) in Martin Buber.” 64. See, for example, Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). For an important development of this theme, see Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992). Many feminist Jewish theologians have themselves identified Buber and Levinas as particularly rich dialogue partners for moving beyond patriarchal monotheism, in spite of these thinkers’ omission or problematic representations of women or “the feminine.” See Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998); and Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). 65. Susan Starr Sered, “Childbirth as a Religious Experience? Voices from an Israeli Hospital,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7/2 (1991), 7-18.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, Rachel. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998. Allen, Ann Taylor. Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. “Agape in Feminist Ethics.” In Feminist Theological Ethics: A Reader, edited by Lois K. Daly and Margaret A. Farley, 146-59. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994. Atterton, Peter, Matthew Calarco, and Maurice S. Friedman. Levinas & Buber: Dialogue & Difference. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. Batnitzky, Leora. “Dependence and Vulnerability: Jewish and Existentialist Constructions of the Human.” In Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 127-52. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Baumgarten, Elisheva. Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953. Bernasconi, Robert. “‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas.” In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 100-35. New York: Routledge, 1988.

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Blidstein, Gerald J. Honor Thy Father and Mother: Filial Responsibility in Jewish Law and Ethics. New York: Ktav, 1975. Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Boustan, Ra’anan S., Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow. “Anthropology, History, and the Remaking of Jewish Studies.” In Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, edited by Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky and Marina Rustow, 1-28. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Bucar, Elizabeth. “Dianomy: Understanding Religious Women’s Moral Agency as Creative Conformity.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 3 (2010): 662-86. Bunge, Marcia. Children, Adults, and Shared Responsibilities: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Burggraeve, Roger. “The Ethical Voice of the Child: Plea for a Chiastic Responsibility in the Footsteps of Levinas.” In Children’s Voices: Children’s Perspectives in Ethics, Theology and Religious Education, edited by Annemie Dillen and Didier Pollefeyt, 267-91. Leuven: Peeters, 2010. Butler, Judith. “Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law.” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 21, no. 2 (2011): 405-29. Chalier, Catherine. “Ethics and the Feminine.” In Re-Reading Levinas, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, 119-29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-Writing of the Philosophers. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood.” In Representations of Motherhood, edited by Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, 56-74. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Eisen, Arnold M. Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Freeze, ChaeRan Y. “Lilith’s Midwives: Jewish Newborn Child Murder in Nineteenth-Century Vilna.” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (2010): 1-27. Gibbs, Robert. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Glikl. The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646-1724. Edited by Beth-Zion Abrahams. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962. Gudorf, Christine E. “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice.” In Women’s Consciousness and Women’s Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, edited by Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Christine E. Gudorf and Mary D. Pellauer, 175-91. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Guenther, Lisa. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Hausfater, Glenn, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives. New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2008. Held, Virginia. “Birth and Death.” Ethics 99 (1989): 362-88. ———. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “The Obligations of Mothers and Fathers.” In Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, edited by Joyce Trebilcot, 7-20. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984. Horwitz, Rivka. Buber’s Way to ‘I and Thou’: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought and His ‘Religion as Presence’ Lectures. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988.

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Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. Johannesen, Richard L. “Nel Noddings’s Uses of Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue.” The Southern Communication Journal 65, no. 2/3 (2000): 151-60. Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Katz, Claire Elise. “Reinhabiting the House of Ruth: Exceeding the Limits of the Feminine in Levinas.” In Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Tina Chanter, 145-70. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Katz, Steven. “Martin Buber’s Epistemology: A Critical Appraisal.” In Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought, 1-51. New York: NYU Press, 1983. Kavka, Martin. “Verification (Bewährung) in Martin Buber.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20, no. 1 (2012): 71-98. Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999. Konner, Melvin. The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2010. Laughlin, Lynda. “Who’s Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 2005/Summer 2006.” Edited by U.S. Census Bureau, 70-121. Washington, D.C., 2010. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Magid, Shaul. “Brother Where Art Thou? Reflections on Jesus in Martin Buber and the Hasidic Master R. Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev.” In German-Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics, edited by Christian Wiese and Martina Urban, 209-40. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2012. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. McFague, Sallie. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987. Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. ———. Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994. ———. “Feminism, Children, and Mothering: Three Books and Three Children Later.” Journal of Childhood and Religion 2, no. 1 (2011): 1-32. ———. In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. O’Neill, Onora, and William Ruddick. Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Peperzak, Adriaan Theodoor. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. Perpich, Diane. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Peterson, Susan Rae. “Against ‘Parenting.’” In Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, edited by Joyce Trebilcot, 62-69. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984. Plaskow, Judith. “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective.” In Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, edited by Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum, 62-84. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

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———. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991. Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1986. Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Sandford, Sandra. “Masculine Mothers? Maternity in Levinas and Plato.” In Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Tina Chanter, 180-202. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Sered, Susan Starr. “Childbirth as a Religious Experience? Voices from an Israeli Hospital.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7, no. 2 (1991): 7-18. Slote, Michael A. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. New York: Routledge, 2007. Suleiman, Susan R. “Writing and Motherhood.” In Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, edited by Moyra Davey, 113-37. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1985. Traina, Cristina L. H. “Children and Moral Agency.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29, no. 2 (2009): 19-37. Traina, Cristina L. H. Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993. Wall, John. “Animals and Innocents: Theological Reflections on the Meaning and Purpose of Child-Rearing.” Theology Today 59, no. 4 (2003): 559-82. ———. Ethics in Light of Childhood. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010. Walters, James W. Martin Buber & Feminist Ethics: The Priority of the Personal. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Wyschogrod, Edith. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Zoloth, Laurie. “Into the Woods: Killer Mothers, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Evil.” In Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 204-33. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Chapter Eleven

Authenticity, Vision, Culture Michael Wyschogrod’s The Body of Faith Ken Koltun-Fromm

In the preface to the second edition of his The Body of Faith, Michael Wyschogrod notes the change in subtitles from the first to this more recent edition. Where he had once appended Judaism as Corporeal Election to the title (first edition, 1983), the reissued second edition now defined The Body of Faith as God in the People of Israel (1989). 1 The implications of this change for American Jewish culture is profound. Where the first edition subtitle focused on Judaism and chosenness (Judaism as Corporeal Election), the second edition emphasized God’s presence in a particular nation (God in the People of Israel). With Judaism as corporeal election (the first edition), the word “body” in the title (The Body of Faith) defers to a theological statement about belief. “Body” reads more as metaphor, such that corporeal election becomes the “body” of faith. The point here seems to be that chosenness is Judaism’s central theological principle, and this implies that Jewish culture protects a people apart, one chosen and committed to divine instruction. If Judaism is the body of faith, then American Jewish culture ought to enrich and preserve that faith But with the second edition phrasing—God in the People Israel—the word “body” is less referent to a theological claim and far more a descriptive statement about the physical indwelling of God’s presence. And that presence resides in the people Israel—really, truly, in that body. Judaism is neither some kind of chosen religion, nor a theological construct. Indeed, God displaces Judaism altogether in the subtitle and chooses to dwell “in” a particular national group. The body of faith is a real, material, and visual body in which we can see God’s presence. This is a claim about visual and cultural authenticity in a 285

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corporeal body. Wyschogrod tethers ocular metaphors to physical bodies, and thereby directs visual discourse into carnal Israel. Faith has a body, so Wyschogrod argues, and we can see it in the Jewish people. American Jewish culture is thereby transformed into the physical location of God’s presence; we can see God there, in Abraham’s Jewish descendants. In The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, Michael Wyschogrod envisions God’s presence in an embodied people as an authentic and corporeal display of divine chosenness. This account of God’s presence in the people Israel raises the problem of Jewish converts, and whether they too count as Abraham’s descendants. If culture is less the maintenance of practices or beliefs (as “the body of faith”), and instead the visible exposure of God’s presence, then Jewish culture is primarily a visual medium of divine revelation. When Jews do Jewish things as Jews, God is embodied therein. Wyschogrod recognizes, and accepts, “the incarnational direction of my thinking,” 2 and has been an energetic participant in Jewish-Christian dialogue. 3 Indeed, he acknowledges his debt to such Christian thinkers as Karl Barth, and has been read as “a Jewish Barthian.” 4 He unashamedly discusses God’s love for the Jewish people, even calling it a “falling in love,” asserting that God loves some children more than others. 5 Wyschogrod tells his readers what God desires, how God feels, and why Jews cannot escape their chosen heritage. But just how welcoming is Wyschogrod’s conception of the Jewish people? He sharply criticizes the insular security of his own Orthodox community, even as he resolutely believes it to be the most authentic Jewish practice and the “core” of Jewish identity. 6 Yet only some Jews make up this “core”; others are left on the periphery. This is the central tension in Wyschogrod’s The Body of Faith: although Judaism is the authentic exposure of God’s presence, God appears to dwell more fully in some Jews rather than others, and so some Jews become more authentic, more enlightened, more Jewish. This is the cultural politics lurking within Wyschogrod’s theological debate. Such a visible presence of God in the people Israel draws together notions of cultural authenticity, vision, and chosenness in ways unique to Wyschogrod’s theological text. I want to explore how Wyschogrod employs visual discourse to see an embodied Israel as God’s chosen people, and draw out the implications of his thought for American Jewish culture. Israel is the proper, authentic body within which God dwells, and this indwelling is a visual event. Wyschogrod’s theology attempts to capture this visual certainty by exposing a distinctively Jewish way of seeing that recognizes God’s indwelling in the people Israel. These claims to authentic certainty are, to be sure, powerful and controversial. Even David Novak, perhaps the contemporary Jewish theologian who shares most with him, resists Wyschogrod’s emphasis on God’s indwelling in the Jewish people. 7 But Wyschogrod’s peculiar argument for Jewish election deserves our attention because he interweaves

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claims to authenticity with a visual discourse that is both embodied and carnal, and this physical attraction potentially limits who counts as authentic Jews in America. Jews can see their election in the embodied people of Israel as a form of visual knowledge that binds sight to authenticity. But what about those who come to Judaism from without as converts, or those who fail to make up the “core”? Are they equal members of this covenant, and so radiate God’s presence? Since Wyschogrod’s account is so visual in temperament and scope, what of those Jews who “look” different? Does God dwell in those people too? I want to explore these questions through Wyschogrod’s rhetorical use of vision to reaffirm God’s falling in love with the people Israel. To establish this divine link to a national group, Wyschogrod discusses the nature of human finitude by employing ocular metaphors that, so he claims, function less as symbolic speech and more as an embodied dialectic between light and darkness. Human beings are the kind of beings who oscillate between clear enlightened visions and darker, more obscure musings. Judaism adequately renders this condition as worthy of divine love, for God creates a person both carnal and spiritual. Wyschogrod describes Judaism as the most authentic visual expression of the embodied and enlightened human condition. This sense of Judaism’s authenticity—that it adequately portrays the human existential situation—confirms Jewish chosenness. Wyschogrod’s fleshly Judaism reveals God’s choice as appropriate and good; Israel turns out to be precisely the kind of people with whom God should fall in love. But this love story must end with the death of particular bodies, for it is both a human and divine narrative. If God establishes a visual presence in the people Israel, what happens to this God when one of Israel dies, and the corpse lies inert before a gazing spectator? This is the limit case for Wyschogrod’s sensual and visual account of Jewish election, and one that ties him to Christian incarnational theology. If persons can still recognize God’s presence in a dead, chosen body, then even God feels the pain and terror of a dark mortality. God’s visual presence in the chosen people is permanent heritage and authentic indwelling where death loses its mortal sting. But death fails to lose its sting for those who seek entrance from outside. Wyschogrod exposes a profound mistrust of converts to Judaism, and he seeks to limit their numbers. I take this to be a visual problem of cultural authenticity: Jews must look like God to be like God. Visual knowledge translates into cultural power, for Wyschogrod limits the convert’s access to Jewish goods. The body of faith as divine presence is recognized by some, but not by all the people Israel.

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SITUATING VISION IN THE SELF Structurally, Wyschogrod’s The Body of Faith mimics Abraham Joshua Heschel’s well-known rhetorical strategy: reveal the nature of human finitude and existence, and then show how Judaism adequately responds to the human situation. Like Heschel, Wyschogrod talks about God’s pathos and suffering, divine sympathy and jealousy, and seeks a God who yearns for human companionship. Wyschogrod’s God is not an unmoved mover, but an empathetic personality—sometimes mature, but other times vicious—who falls in love with the people Israel. This Jewish God is known as Hashem, as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who abandons the more abstract concept God to take on distinctly human characteristics. Hashem is “the one who is related to the people of Israel”; to Hashem Israel speaks freely and openly. Here is a God who remains familiar, close at hand, and trustworthy. 8 This intimacy between a people and their God sustains both a spiritual and material presence. Hashem offers neither metaphysical grounds nor ethical foundations, but reveals a physical, visual presence among Israel. This is but one meaning of Wyschogrod’s title: God as Hashem is the body of Israel’s faith. This God acts, feels, and reflects in ways that human beings recognize as their own. Hashem’s jealousy is a human emotion; his loneliness—and Wyschogrod always genders Hashem as male—provokes human empathy. God hurts like we do; he scolds his children like human parents do theirs. To be sure, Wyschogrod still upholds God’s invincibility and supremacy: though vulnerable, this God still commands, creates, reveals, and controls darker forces. Even so, Hashem reveals himself in material bodies, and like those bodies he travels within the spiritual moods and physical boundaries, both hopeful and tragic, of the people Israel. Wyschogrod’s account of Hashem as the body of Israel’s faith underscores how God’s personality authenticates human existence. This is a God who condones rather than judges human desires and fears. If God loves some more than others, this only confirms how a human father “will find himself more compatible with some of his children than others and, to speak very plainly, that he love some more than others.” 9 Certainly fathers love all their children, as does God. But Hashem’s love arrives not to confront and challenge human love as partial. Israel’s God accepts fragmentary and particular love as fundamentally human and good. After all, this God created beings in this way, in his image, and so their sensibilities are in part his as well. Clearly Wyschogrod’s Hashem does not force submission to categorical ethical demands. If ethics channel an is to an ought, such that persons aspire to what they ought to be and do, then Wyschogrod’s Hashem vindicates a more limited, flawed, and scarred human existence. This God meets human beings where they are, acknowledges their faults, and comforts them in the hope for a brighter future. Though Hashem may expect more, he still receives less.

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Wyschogrod’s God acts as a compassionate father who accepts his children as they are, even if he wishes they could be much more. So Wyschogrod begins his text with an account of human finitude to better situate Judaism as a fitting response to it. And from the beginning Wyschogrod establishes the visual as a critical feature of human activity and identity: “Man is a being who prefers light over darkness. The day is the normal time for human activity, the night for sleeping, for the suspension of consciousness. . . . But human being is being in the light because vision, the primary human sense, functions only in the presence of light.” 10 This dichotomy between light and darkness extends throughout Wyschogrod’s text and becomes its central motif. Though persons gravitate toward the light, they cannot escape darker corners. Perception and philosophical scrutiny work in the light, but human beings must sleep too. This ever-present fluctuation between illumination and concealment defines the human condition. Yet persons yearn for brighter enlightenment, argues Wyschogrod, and this because vision is the preeminent human sense. Light enables persons to actively engage a world rather than to passively receive it. Vision opens up a horizon of possibility in ways that other senses conceal out of sight: To some degree, the world reveals itself in smell and touch, hearing and tasting. But a dark world in which odors are smelled, surfaces touched, sounds heard, and flavors tasted but nothing is seen, remains a world that crowds man, that does not open itself but impinges upon him and turns man into a recipient of what the world wishes to deliver to him. Only the seen world, the illuminated world stretches off into the horizon. 11

A person visually impaired cannot lead a flourishing human life, so Wyschogrod implies here. Such a visual deficit impedes human productivity, for an unseen world “crowds” and “impinges” human expression. Note how Wyschogrod appropriates the long-standing reverence for sight as the master sense, 12 and does so by turning against the efficacy of other modes of engagement. Touch, smell, and taste are passive responses to a world that seeks more active feedback. Through these less vigorous senses, persons become mere recipients of experience and not purveyors of and actors in a world. To be human is to stretch beyond a “dark world” and to engage the illuminated space of a distant horizon. This visual perspective drives human beings toward an enlightened future. A prospective gaze, as a fundamental human directionality, positions Judaism as a religion of the future. For Jewish thought to adequately respond to the human condition, it must seek out an intended future without always looking back. This yields important consequences for Wyschogrod’s critique of Christianity and some forms of Orthodox Judaism. Religions that look backwards to a glorious past (some Orthodox Judaisms) or to a fulfilled prophecy (Christianity) reverse the natural human gaze toward the future.

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These perspectives, so Wyschogrod argues, are ill-suited to fully account for the inevitable darkness, insecurity, and ignorance of a future not-yet born into the light. Here we get a glimpse at those outsiders who fail to see well, who misdirect their gaze in one way or another. They do not envision a more earthy, bounded humanity that still looks ahead. As Wyschogrod’s anthropology would have it, human beings oscillate between reflective light and obscure darkness, and so live in the present with the inheritance of a past and a yearning for a brighter future. Here too, we can see why vision is so crucial to Wyschogrod’s account of human being-in-the-world, for the light of day “releases man from its [the world’s] tight embrace and reveals to him vistas in all directions, toward which he can move and which he perceives long before he sets out toward them.” Vision propels human beings forward, opening up a world of possibility and freedom. On one reading of the Biblical text Israel promises to perform the commandments before actually hearing about them (Exodus 24:7); in Wyschogrod’s visual depiction, human beings see before doing. Physical sight liberates the human to expand toward objects of desire. Indeed, Wyschogrod tightly binds vision with desire in ways that activate directional and purposeful activity. Light then becomes “the great liberator that bestows power because it transfers the inititative [sic] to man.” 13 Human beings lean toward a future brightness illumined by the master sense of sight. With this visual perspective, the world no longer “crowds” but instead draws closer to human control. Vision allows persons to master the world. Animals too have eyes to see, and compared to inanimate things, they also illumine a world before them. But to these other creatures resides a “darkness of consciousness” 14 that forever remains obscure to human perception. Persons ascend toward the light, and this determined movement toward the beyond contrasts with the instinctual pursuits that mark other animals. Wyschogrod associates critical thinking, consciousness, philosophy, and knowledge with the light; embodiment, emotions, and partial knowledge belong to darkness. Persons instinctively gravitate toward philosophical knowledge and the brilliant illumination it promises, but they are embodied beings who come up against dark limits. A reason true to the human condition would be a dark one that acknowledges obscurity, ambivalence, and finitude as inescapable features of human existence. Persons exist somewhere between the light as high and beyond, and a darkness as low and behind. And this positionality between light and darkness is a physical reality. When Wyschogrod claims that persons meet God in “the realm of light,” he recognizes this as metaphorical speech. It is a peculiar human mode of talking about the sacred. But he also believes such appeals to visual images are more, or perhaps less, than metaphorical leaps:

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Viewed mundanely, the language of light when applied to the sacred is metaphorical language, applying an aspect of the material world to the divine domain. But after a while, we find ourselves less certain about our ability to distinguish the literal from the metaphorical. Does “seeing” literally refer to what we perceive with our eyes and only metaphorically to understanding or is it the other way around? 15

What would “the other way around” look like in Wyschogrod’s visual anthropology? He asks us to consider a mode of understanding that is a literal and physical seeing. Appealing to “the other way around,” Wyschogrod suggests neither an analogical nor a metaphorical account of knowledge, but rather a physical mode of understanding. Can we see knowledge in this way? Is epistemology a visual practice? Wyschogrod raises but does not fully come to terms with these questions (in this too he shares much with Heschel). But it does seem clear that Wyschogrod wants his readers to think and see materially, and to consider light and darkness as physical attributes that make human knowledge possible. It is as if Wyschogrod fears that his readers will too easily escape darkness through metaphorical flights to the light. Reason may observe and enlighten a future, but it is still an embodied reason that bumps up against darker forces. The human experiential wavering between light and darkness shapes Wyschogrod’s account of knowledge. To see an object requires both a radiance to illumine and an opaqueness to delimit it among other things. Something must reflect back the light of vision for the object to come into view. Wyschogrod offers something close to a phenomenological account of vision in which, “seeing requires the opaque because without it there is nothing to reflect back the light, thus making something visible since light travels until it reaches that which it cannot penetrate and only then does it return to the observer, carrying the image of that which refused it passage.” 16 My concern here is not with the scientific accuracy of Wyschogrod’s claims, but rather the work such claims do to structure his account of reason. Wyschogrod believes that in the visual act of seeing, a ray of light projects toward an object. That object reflects the light back to the observer, and the light now carries with it an image of the material thing. This visual structure reveals how talk of rational light and embodied darkness is not merely metaphorical language. Knowledge of things is a physical seeing that requires both obscure things and brilliant rays of light. Understanding in this empirical, “other way around” sense is a seeing that requires both light and darkness. As Wyschogrod would have it, “without meeting such opacity, reason would lose its contact with being and its light would become invisible.” 17 Wyschogrod stands firmly in the dark soil of being and the visible, illumined objects stretched out before the human gaze.

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God created Adam and Eve as physical, embodied beings. Turning to the Biblical terms in Genesis for image and likeness (tselem and demut), Wyschogrod offers this provocative reading: These are basically visual terms, and were it not for the long-standing resistance to anthropomorphism, we would interpret them in physical terms to refer to the kind of resemblance children have to their parents. It may therefore be the case that the Bible would find it difficult to focus on reason as the defining essence of man because reason is a mental capacity that does not take into account the physical uniqueness of man. 18

There are more than a few significant claims lurking in this reading of the creation story in Genesis, and not least among them is Wyschogrod’s personification of the Bible—a rhetorical gesture that positions his own voice as a more authentic revelation of Biblical intentions. For if the “Bible would find it difficult to focus on reason,” should not we as intelligent readers do so as well? This is less a motivated reading than a discovery of an authentic, revealed voice. Biblical interpretation recovers the voice of God’s intentions: “The meaning of the Torah is the intention of the divine lawgiver, who is its author. It therefore follows that the only fully satisfactory way of determining what the law is in any specific case is to ask God.” 19 Of course this we can no longer do, so instead persons “must ask Hashem to guide them to the discovery of his will.” In this “prayerful dialogue,” the interpreter “transmits the will of Hashem to those who inquire.” 20 In his own attempt at Biblical transmission, Wyschogrod shows how the text could not have envisioned a meaning for “image” beyond a biological analogy. To be created in the image of God means to be physically akin to an embodied God, as a child appears similar to his/her biological parents. As visual knowledge, persons come to know and recognize God in physical bodies. But Wyschogrod distinguishes between God’s image and God’s dwelling in a people. All persons reflect the image of God, but only Israel reveals God’s presence. This too is part of what Wyschogrod means by the subtitle to his work: God in the People Israel. Though all persons reflect the divine image, God chooses to dwell only among the body Israel after his initial creation. Persons physically see God in those bodies. This is no metaphor: it is a visual recognition of God’s chosen people. Physical presence confers knowledge. To know God is to see him in the people Israel. Yet even for Wyschogrod, to be in the image of God conveys more than physical resemblance. He emphasizes Adam’s “creatureliness” and the psychological dimensions of the parent/child relationship. 21 Much of his book seeks to dissolve “a resistance to anthropomorphism,” and often Wyschogrod leans heavy on the body in order to realign a perceived imbalance toward abstract reason. Here again Wyschogrod reasserts another long-standing dichotomy: the distinction between Greek philosophy and Jewish Bibli-

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cal religion. The Greeks could easily define “man without reference to his body,” but not so the Bible. Wyschogrod’s appeal to “the physical uniqueness of man” is meant to curtail this Greek bias. Yet a dark “creatureliness,” one without reflective capacities, would fail as an authentic human life, for it could not stretch forward toward an enlightened future. Embodiment without intelligence would be a tragic darkness resembling non-human animals. Yet Greek notions of reason, so argues Wyschogrod, are too abstract for embodied persons, for they seek only “philosophical theory” and “the rationality of the universe.” Wyschogrod desires a more balanced account of enlightened reason and embodied image, and he discovers it in a Biblical reason as radiating intelligence: a form of “working endowment rather than a theory” that remains “a quality of brightness.” 22 This Biblical intelligence, in contrast to Greek reason, adequately responds “to the inherent ambiguity of the human situation,” and “is so deeply rooted in human existence and its limitations.” 23 Similar to Buber’s appeal to Biblical knowledge that Akiba Lerner discusses in this volume, Wyschogrod desires a more intimate form of knowledge. But where Buber distances this knowing from “the visual sense,” Wyschogrod highlights it. In this more graphic picture of the human image, Wyschogrod portrays authentic selves as those carnal beings who perceive human frontiers through a radiant vision. The radiant light of Biblical intelligence is infinite enough to perceive and move toward future possibilities, but finite still as an embodied reasoning that struggles with indecision and partial knowledge. Yet the limits to this directive capacity of human intellect lie not only within the self, but also outside it “before the power of God.” All human reasoning confronts an opaqueness that reflects its projected light. In this way human beings perceive physical objects. But it is also the mode by which human intelligence becomes aware of God’s presence. Like those inanimate objects that project back the light directed to it, so too God functions as the opaque limit to an enlightened human intelligence: “In its direct encounter with the holy, intelligence is calmed, brought up against its limits, and at least temporarily silenced. It is not destroyed, as man is not destroyed. But it is endangered, as man is endangered.” 24 The picture conjured here is one of intelligence striving to move beyond its legitimate borders, only to confront the holy who polices and delimits them. But only temporarily: weakened but not destroyed, endangered but not subdued, intelligence will soon rise again to challenge those imposed limits. This phenomenological account captures the dialectic movement of light (intelligence racing forward) and darkness (intelligence calmed and in retreat), one that mirrors Joseph Soloveitchik’s portrayal of the lonely man of faith. 25 Wyschogrod, like his teacher and mentor Soloveitchik, directs religious experience away from both self-annihilation and complete unification with God. When finite intelligence confronts God’s holiness, in this myste-

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rium tremendum of fear and wonder, it addresses that unintelligible but very real limit to its own pursuits. Intelligible light cannot project higher or farther, but like those objects that reflect back its rays, the human gaze directly confronts the divine body as visual limit. This is what Wyschogrod labels a dark reason: “a reason that remains entangled in the dark soil in which the roots of reason must remain implanted if it is not to drift off into the atmosphere.” The basic dyad of light and darkness, one that delimits the nature of perceptual knowledge and the human condition, also works in Wyschogrod’s text to locate God’s relationship to humanity. An authentic encounter with God’s holiness adequately restricts human aspirations to be less in spirit than what they are in body. Wyschogrod maintains that some religious traditions encourage a spiritual drifting to higher pursuits in ways that remain distinctly ill-suited to the human condition, and Christianity is his primary target for such ethereal flights. Even a cursory reading of The Body of Faith reveals how the Christian tradition functions as Wyschogrod’s conversational other. At times he deflects typical criticisms against Judaism onto Jesus or Christianity; but more often he opposes Christian spirituality to Jewish material humanism. Christianity appears in Wyschogrod’s text as closely aligned to Greek philosophy and its fondness for clarity, philosophical truth, and total exposure. Judaism accords with the human condition, but Christianity, with its unencumbered brilliance, rejects that finite, embodied condition: Jesus’ relative lack of interest in the political order, his absolutist and uncompromising ethical demands, the absence of law (which embeds the moral vision into the soil of the created order) in the New Testament are among the symptoms of Christianity’s liberation from the darker side of reality. Christianity therefore shuns the darkness, from which it attempts to escape into the light of redemption and sinlessness. 26

Note, to begin, how Wyschogrod typically personifies Christian practice (“Christianity therefore shuns”), and this effectively silences the multiple and complex voices within that tradition. Readers do not know who shuns, but only that Christianity does so. And one can sense too how Wyschogrod closely aligns “Christianity” with more liberal forms of Judaism that stress ethics over law. His essentialist rhetoric positions Christianity (or a more liberal Judaism) as the distorted foil to Wyschogrod’s Judaism: where Judaism is rooted in physical beings, Christianity seeks to escape them; if Judaism is an embodied politics, Christianity has little interest in those mundane proceedings; when Judaism creates law to inhibit darker forces, Christianity liberates persons from that darkness to a grander light. Judaism, in the end, “will not be unfaithful to the darkness of human existence.” 27 Christianity misrepresents the human condition before God; Judaism, in contrast, delivers an authentic humanism. There are clear insiders and outsiders to a visual

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authenticity that adheres “to the darkness of human existence.” Christians remain on the fringes, but so do more liberal Jews who, like Wyschogrod’s Jesus, are absolute in their ethical demands. Light and darkness are more than visual metaphors; they are for Wyschogrod constitutive features of human embodiment. Judaism can justifiably claim allegiance from finite beings because it recognizes both intelligent striving and embodied vulnerability: “Human existence is possible only in the shade of the divine light as that light comes up against its limit and the solidity of matter. . . . We see it in terms of a darkness that is required by human existence which Judaism preserves in its very fabric.” While Christianity arises out of Greek reason, Judaism is rooted in human existence. A finite existence is one in which knowledge is an embodied vision—a physical seeing that distinguishes human beings from other animals. Wyschogrod ties vision to personal identity in order to ground intelligence in embodied beings. Though persons still prefer light over darkness, as Wyschogrod claims they do in the opening sentence of his text, that preference resides within the limits of a darkened order. The nighttime remains and even makes possible the presence of daylight. Knowledge as a form of physical seeing and as “the other way around” to metaphor suggests a more concentrated gaze at the embodied life of a people. Seeing “requires the opaque,” as Wyschogrod claims, and both the human and God’s body function to limit a radiant intelligence. Only a Judaism faithful to this human condition can be a body of faith. JUDAISM, AUTHENTICITY, AND CHOSENNESS Wyschogrod maps Judaism onto his visual anthropology of light and darkness. He articulates a vision of the human condition, and then suggests how certain forms of Judaism fittingly address human experience. God too, as Hashem, confronts human beings as they are: embodied, enlightened, and so hovering between light and darkness. Wyschogrod’s Judaism, and the Jews who practice it, expose a visionary and carnal humanism that stretches beyond toward a vague future, but they do so forever tethered to the soil of a created and constraining world. Human beings are not gods, Wyschogrod warns throughout his text, but neither are they physical beasts. Authentic Judaism captures these expressive features of the human condition, and reveals them to be features of God’s intended creation. Wyschogrod employs ocular models to expose Judaism as authentic vision, and I want to look at three moments in which he does so. In his discussion of the sacrificial ritual, Karl Marx as alienated Jew, and Jewish art, Wyschogrod articulates a mode of being Jewish-in-the-world that appears as right, fitting, and just. A Juda-

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ism that resonates with a darkened but illuminated experience teaches Jews how to see well, but it also marks others as visually inauthentic. The cultic life of the Temple sacrifices is above all “concrete and incarnated.” In these physical, bloodied acts, “the holy appears with predictability.” 28 This is both a physical and visual security: God is present before Israel (“the holy appears”) and dwells with Israel in the Temple. Wyschogrod is all too aware that Jewish prayer eventually supplants this sacrificial system. Still, the destruction of the Temple that brought an end to the daily ritual slaughters was a human tragedy. That sense of predictability, security, and holy presence in the ritual act would no longer be available. Unlike the Jewish commandments, in which Jews can only obey in part, “the obligatory sacrifices of the day either have or have not been brought.” There is no middle ground here: either the ritual has been performed or it has not. The “mixture” that Wyschogrod finds in the commandments yields to a stark either/or of ritual obedience or disobedience. Prayer is a “contemplative” gesture, 29 Wyschogrod tells his readers, but sacrifices are performative acts that persons see, feel, touch, and smell. Perhaps God can be thought; but Hashem resides in the physical acts of sacrificial worship. Without the Temple as physical site for God’s dwelling, Jews are deprived of that physical closeness offered by the sacrificial system. God’s residence among Israel partially compensates for this loss of the Temple as physical abode. That loss should neither be forgotten nor ignored, for it exposes a darkness at the heart of human experience. In sacrifice, human beings see themselves as they really are. Wyschogrod highlights this visual experience, and attends to the corporeal movements of this deathly ritual. Indeed, he vibrantly portrays the bloody scene: The priestly slaughterer approaches the animal with the lethally sharp knife in his hand, yet the animal does not emit a sound of terror because it does not understand the significance of the instrument. It is then swiftly cut, the blood gushes forth, the bruiting begins as the struggle with death begins, as the animal’s eyes lose their living sheen. The blood is sprinkled on the alter, the animal dismembered, portions of it burned, and portions eaten by the priests who minister before God in the holiness of the Temple. This horror is brought into the house of God. 30

Holiness resides here—in the dismembering of animal limbs, in the dullness of the physical eyes, in the flow of blood. The priest functions as God’s minister, but he is a slaughterer before a dumb animal. The killing yields neither conceptual ideal nor symbolic import, but simply witnesses to a struggle with impending death. The terror lies not in the loss of meaning, but in a failure to recognize the function of a physical instrument. Wyschogrod portrays the scene as the base act that it is: “a dumb animal is to be slaughtered.” When the knife approaches, the animal remains calm: it simply “does

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not understand the significance of the instrument.” Yet that significance lies solely in its use value; it is there to slaughter by means of the priestly slaughterer. The horror, then, is ours alone. Wyschogrod’s use of the passive voice (“this horror is brought”) underscores this sense of observed terror. It is not the brute who emits a sound of terror; we do. The focal point of the sacrificial service resides in the visual observance of it. God sees the killing because “the bruiting, bleeding, dying animal is brought and shown to God.” But so too every person who witnesses this event stands before “the truth of human existence”: This is what our fate is. It is not so much, as it is usually said, that we deserved the fate of the dying animal and that we have been permitted to escape this fate by transferring it to the animal. It is rather that our fate and the animal’s are the same because its end awaits us since our eyes, too, will soon gaze as blindly as his and be fixated in deathly attention on what only the dead seem to see and never the living. 31

In the Temple sacrifice, we see the darkness that is ours alone. We do not escape death, nor mitigate its horror, but actually see it executed. Yet Wyschogrod channels a passive observance into an active performance as “our eyes” take the place of the animal’s stare. But this gaze cannot enlighten: it “blindly” attends to an anticipated death. Wyschogrod stresses the sensual and visual features of this fate, and denies conceptual or symbolic meaning. A sacrificial act yields only a visionless death. There is no light in this kind of darkness. Wyschogrod imagines the sacrificial scene as a kind of bodily transference effected by a visual apparition: we come to see ourselves as that dying animal, and position our gaze from within the physical eyes of the brute. In this way, the animal sacrifice becomes a vision of human experience: “In the Temple, therefore, it is man who stands before God, not man as he would like to be or as he hopes he will be, but as he truly is now, in the realization that he is the object that is his body and that his blood will soon enough flow from his body as well. The subject thus sees himself as dying object.” 32 The animal “brought and shown to God” is really the human individual as embodied victim. Wyschogrod uses the term “man” to designate the positioned gaze, but he appeals to an “I” that confronts a personal death. The sacrificial system in Judaism shows that “I” precisely what it is: embodied existence as a dying object. The subject cannot escape to some incorporeal essence, but must see personhood as “the object that is his body.” Sacrificial Judaism, as Wyschogrod calls this event, enables persons to see as God sees. It is a divine vision in which human beings are “brought and shown to God” as dying objects. It is to see the “I” as truly embodied object before God. This is the authentic vision at the core of the Jewish sacrificial system.

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Wyschogrod’s rhetoric turns decidedly apologetic in his account of the prayer service, for he recognizes that much has been lost within it. Although the rabbis structure sacrificial worship within prayer, they too “share some of the prophets’ ambivalence to sacrifice.” This wistful tone from Wyschogrod appears to acknowledge that some features within Judaism are less authentic than others. Prayer comes to supplant the sacrificial system, but it has not done away with it altogether, and even seems inferior to it. The visual horror of sacrificial worship has dimmed, both in prayer and in other sacrificial acts. Wyschogrod notes how circumcision is “the vestigial remains of human sacrifice in Judaism. The knife that cuts into the flesh of the animal in sacrifice cuts into the flesh of man in circumcision.” Despite the prophetic ambivalence toward Temple sacrifices, circumcision remains “holy to the Jewish people.” That people is decidedly gendered, such that holiness travels from the bloody knife to male bodies to expose “the sacrifice of man before God.” Women appear on the outside of this sacrificial cult. The knife that sacrifices animals, and that turns male bodies into holy ones, also appears in Abraham’s hand to slaughter his son Isaac. In the Jewish Akedah (the binding of Isaac narrative of Genesis 22), Jews learn “that to be loved by God requires the willingness to accept death at the hand of God.” Wyschogrod reads the binding of Isaac story as a parent/child narrative in which “continuation of the Jewish people” is the most precious good. But he has structured this continuity as a gendered one in which only males bear the marks of their forbears. The test before Abraham, then, appears as a conflict of values: his trust in God struggles against the yearning for his male descendants through Isaac to accept his inheritance. Sacrificing Isaac becomes a self-sacrifice, and Abraham’s test becomes Israel’s own: “Israel’s acceptance of the law is such a sacrifice of the uncurbed biological appetites that are at the service of the species’ life-force.” 33 The law arrives, sometimes through a cut of the knife, to restrict passions such as the biological desire for children. But note how different that bloody knife is from the one set to slaughter the dumb brute. Sacrifice has changed from a stark physicality to a vague “life-force” that delivers a weakened security and predictability. Within the sacrificial system, Jews recognized their condition in the objectified eyes of the dying animal; but the Genesis account shows how they must curb their love for a son, the one they love, for an Isaac, and replace him with a hope for “the continuation of the Jewish people.” Though he does not intend to lessen the drama of the Akedah, I think it crucial to read Wyschogrod against Wyschogrod on this point: the kind of visual physicality that he traces in the Jewish sacrificial system has exposed a form of sacrifice far less authentic. Wyschogrod mitigates against this loss by tethering it to male heirs, but a Judaism forgetful of its sacrificial roots will too quickly abandon terror for hope, despite what Akiba Lerner argues in this volume. Certainly hope, as Lerner argues, is a critical Jewish yearning toward the future, but Wyscho-

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grod seeks to recover a past darkness before too much light seeps in. For Wyschogrod, authentic Judaism shows us that “there is darkness in which there are occasional clearings but much of which the sun never penetrates.” 34 A Judaism that mediates this kind of light in a darkened world speaks to the human experience revealed in the sacrificial system. A fully illumined human condition, one in which the sunlight really does penetrate every finite experience, is an alienated life. It may comprise the messianic future; but here and now human beings undergo partially bright and dark lives. That yearning for total exposure and enlightenment, however, overwhelmed many European Jews who dreamed of “a neutral society” that would renounce religious affiliation in favor of individual citizenry. With a promised social emancipation in which Jews could enter once closed professional trades and occupations, European society appeared to value rational beings and productive citizens. That liberation, of course, proved all too elusive, but Wyschogrod understands the motivations that might compel what he calls “Marrano philosophers” to hide their Jewish convictions and translate them into universal claims of science. Marrano experience included “Jews who were not steadfast enough to resist conversion . . . but who nevertheless were loyal Jews,” 35 and included those Jewish types who criticized society in the name of science or nature, but still appealed to Jewish visual knowledge of light and darkness to level that critique. Philosophers hid their Judaism and Jewish sensibilities, only to expose them as universal, “neutral” claims. Wyschogrod considers this kind of mutation a form of Jewish alienation, for it marginalizes the authentic source (Jewish knowledge) from the public perception (scientific critique). Both Sigmund Freud and Baruch Spinoza count as Marrano philosophers in Wyschogrod’s analysis, but I want to focus on his depiction of Karl Marx as that alienated Jew who nonetheless draws upon Jewish sensibilities to attack modern capitalism. To Wyschogrod, Marx is not a Jewish “philosopher who struggles with basic Jewish ideas,” but is instead “one who was born Jewish and then proceeds to philosophize without any apparent reference to his origins.” 36 Yet Marx cannot escape his Jewish heritage, for even without the struggle with Jewish concepts, he still levels a Jewish critique upon economic value. That one discovers no “apparent reference” to his Jewish analysis only confirms his Marrano status as one who conceals what is essentially his all along. Marx represses his Jewish identity by attacking Jews as the modern symbol of capitalist excess. Associated with finance and portable wealth, the Jew embodies the values of translatability, fluidity, and uprootedness that capitalism requires for ever expanding markets. Marx assails this unholy business in which “everything has a price” unrelated to productive labor. With a monetary value assigned to each object, exchange among incommensurable goods

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now becomes possible. Wyschogrod argues that speed and fluidity of exchange come to dominate trade with this new sense of translatability: “The money system brings into play a permanent system of translation that monitors relations continuously and, what is more important, makes it unnecessary to confront individual essences but enables the monetary system to perform the translation without an encounter between individual objects being necessary.” Financial capital undermines individual differences and essences, and produces universal translations among what use to be distinct objects. Now that “the value of everything else can be translated,” 37 notions of Jewish difference, chosenness, or authentic rootedness lose their distinctive qualities and become part of a monetary algorithm of quantitative value. From a “total absence of comparability,” in which claims to authentic culture and a chosen people made sense, European Jews now symbolize the tyranny of money as the universal arbiter of value. Wyschogrod embarks on his own translation of value, associating Marx’s critique of capitalism with the method of modern science. Both Marx’s critique and science tend “to minimize the ultimacy of qualities in favor of quantitative relations.” Science, so Wyschogrod argues, “seeks the quantifiable regularities behind the confusing qualitative world.” It searches for pure enlightenment, and conceals all that cannot fall under its purview. Marx associates the capitalist order with these scientific values: quantifiable regularity, translatability, and clear and repeatable use. Yet Marx revolts against this process, in Wyschogrod’s reading of him, because he recognizes the fundamental dehumanization of assigning market value to everything. In his disgust, Marx reveals his Jewish sensibility and preference for qualitative uniqueness over and against quantitative uniformity: He [Marx] is appalled by a system that is able to assign a monetary value to anything, no matter how unique, noble, or precious. His experience resembles that of the homeowner who attends an auction at which the objects with which he has been living all his life are on the block. He is pained as each object is auctioned off and a number is called out for which it is sold. He learns that the objects that are an extension of him have a market value . . . which tears away his precious belongings and hurls them into a public world in which he, along with his belongings, becomes an object alienated from himself because perceived through the eyes of others. 38

Like the homeowner, Marx stands aghast at the loss of personal value, a forfeiture of individual love for neutral exchange. But Marx does not attend the auction; he criticizes it with his weighty tools of economic theory that draw upon scientific method. He fights back, as it were, in the name of the “unique, noble, or precious.” In other words, Marx plays the scientific game in order to undermine it. He utilizes techniques of science to expose the empty value of quantifiable things. Persons are not objects but subjects with

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unique qualities. Yet all this gets lost in market translatability where personal value transforms into the worth “perceived through the eyes of others.” Marx is a humanist disguised as a European enlightened scientist. 39 But he is also a Marrano philosopher whose humanism belies a Jewish consciousness. As an alienated Jew, Marx fails to recognize his humanist critique as a Jewish one. But Wyschogrod does see this, and his supple reading suggests how Marx could both yearn for the neutral values of the market economy and be repulsed by them. Marx too dreams of the “neutral society” in which he casts off his Jewish heritage for an “equal identity as rational beings.” 40 He could value and be valued like all other intelligent persons. This is a false mythology, one that captures his passions but ultimately destroys Marx’s unique personhood. Wyschogrod sympathizes with Marx’s devotion to a neutral society, however illusory, for this had been a coveted goal of “modern Jewish consciousness.” In some sense this is an estranged Jewish consciousness, but Wyschogrod suggests that Marx’s Jewish alienation runs deeper: We have shown that the seeds of a critique of modern science can be discovered in Marx and that his theory of money implies a critique of the consciousness of quantification. But all this is presented under the rubric of science. The moral passion, the messianic imagination so active in Marx, is repressed, thereby turning him into a paradigmatic example of Jewish alienation. He must objectify his concerned advocacy, which is moral in nature, and pass it off as a force of nature, a law that operates in society as the laws of nature do in the realm of the natural. . . . We interpret this as an expression of Jewish alienation. The prophetic role is externalized by converting it into science, perceived by the assimilated Jew as the vehicle of Jewish liberation. 41

Marx’s alienation is two-fold: on the one hand, he passes off a Jewish prophetic critique as modern science, but then as alienated Jew, he perceives this science as his liberation from Judaism. But even more, a Jewish critique rooted in the “unique, noble, or precious” becomes, in its alienated form, a science of quantifiable objects. Marx’s humanism is a Jewish prophetic call to qualitative uniqueness, but he represses that heritage, and in doing so translates it into a quantifiable science of exchange. It is not the Jew who symbolizes the abstract form of money, as Marx would have it; instead it is Marx himself who appears as the alienated object now at auction, displaced from its Jewish home. Appeals to authenticity as prophetic Jewish heritage run throughout Wyschogrod’s reading of Marx. He defends Marx’s prophetic critique against a misguided scientific method that sheds a universal light on the darkest corners of human experience, and so alienates persons from it. For Wyschogrod, there are features of a human life that defy quantification, and so must remain opaque to rational analysis. He fears a universal translatability of essentially

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distinct and unique objects. But with such ubiquitous exchange arises the idea of a universal subject, one neither embodied nor chosen. Judaism is a bad fit to this modern sensibility of quantity, exchange, and use value. It is more at home where the “unique, noble, or precious” reign as valued ideals. Yet as the discussion of sacrificial worship suggests, there are more and less authentic forms of Jewish practice. A modern Judaism content with enlightened order and rational exchange is less humane because it misses essential features of the human condition. It is therefore less authentic as well, for only the Jewish prophetic voice perceives the noble as a unique encounter with embodied radiance. Wyschogrod carries over this language of authenticity, rooted in the dichotomy between the unique and the commodity, to his analysis of Jewish art. He echoes the distorted consensus that “Judaism has not made a great contribution to art and music,” and appeals to the distinction made famous by Clement Greenberg between kitsch and the avant-garde. 42 Yet Wyschogrod’s concern for “the level of taste” among contemporary Jewish communities has less to do with aesthetic preferences, and more to do with authentic Jewish culture. For Clement’s kitsch Wyschogrod inserts “bourgeois mentality,” and the “bohemian” takes the place of the avant-garde. Judaism has succumbed to a bourgeois sensibility, and this because “the rabbinic mind is, to a large extent, a bourgeois mind.” Their Judaism, so Wyschogrod contends, is structured, orderly, static, “in short, bourgeois and not bohemian.” To counter this stultifying logic, Wyschogrod’s modern Jews should cultivate “the free play of the imagination” and “its antibourgeois clientele.” And to integrate the bohemian sense of creative play, Judaism must return to its authentic sources: The great souls of Judaism, as of any religion, are not cautious members of the middle class. They do not calculate their actions from the point of view of prudence. They do not hesitate to stick out, to be different, to risk everything on their mission. A bourgeois Judaism is dead because it is out of contact with the explosive ferment of the religious spirit. 43

Authentic Judaism is more prophetic than rabbinic, less rational than imaginative. Jewish art can help cultivate this volatility only if contemporary Judaism opens itself to this instability. This is sharp critique from Wyschogrod, especially for his own Orthodox community that produces more scientists than artists. He suspects that Orthodoxy is compatible with scientific careers because it easily distinguishes light from darkness, and sees only quantifiable objects rather than qualitative disruption. While Orthodox Jews can live “parallel lives” in which their Jewish and scientific selves rarely conflict, Wyschogrod believes “this is far less possible for a poet.” He desires more

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Jewish poets because with “bad taste goes an inauthenticity of its spiritual life.” 44 Good art reveals authentic religious culture. The bohemian artist, like the prophets of old, force us to see “the unpredictable and the noninstitutional” as constitutive features of a religious life. This “explosive ferment” can neither be measured nor translated into exchange value. It resonates instead with the qualitative distinctions that generate objects of the “unique, noble, or precious.” But appeals to uniqueness also belie a fear of the outsider and the stain of mixtures. The kind of compromises made by the bourgeois Jewish middle class sullies the purity of bohemian visions. Sacrificial worship was pure vision in which Jews were marked as dying objects before God. Prayer is no substitute, for it lacks the finality, the clear demarcation of the ritual act. And Marx was that alienated Jew who reveals how assimilation is a form of Jewish alienation. To mix with others is to lose what is truly one’s own. But there is one mixture that Wyschogrod believes categorically defines the human condition. Authentic human experience, Wyschogrod argues throughout The Body of Faith, is one of hopeful brilliance and embodied darkness. In a universe of pure light (the world of Christianity, in Wyschogrod’s theology), the qualitative dimensions of human existence would be concealed under the majestic allure of transparent enlightenment. But finite beings do not live in that world of illumination, and neither should Judaism. Authentic Judaism is faithful to beings as they are: not as the bourgeois middle-class, but as avantgarde bohemians who recognize there is more to see than order, logic, and quantity. That seeing is a muddied one, obscured by a darkness that Wyschogrod associates with the body. And God does not abolish the night, nor denigrate the body, but determines their fitting place within a created world. In that world God takes hold of the Jewish people as the chosen body of divine dwelling: Were God to have entered this world in the fullness of his being, he would have destroyed it because the thinning out or the darkening we have spoken of would disappear and with it the possibility of human existence. He therefore entered that world through a people whom he chose as his habitation. There thus came about a visible presence of God in the universe, first in the person of Abraham and later his descendants, as the people of Israel. 45

God encounters human beings as they are in a world of light and darkness. But to discover God as he is in the world we must see Hashem in the people Israel. Chosenness confers visual authenticity of God’s presence in these biological descendants of Abraham. So even as Wyschogrod allows for the visual hybrid of light and darkness, he still confines it within a biological inheritance of purity.

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VISION AND CHOSENNESS David Novak worries that Wyschogrod subordinates the Torah to the Jewish people, such that God’s choice is both biological and unconditional. 46 Wyschogrod does indeed bind vision to chosenness such that one can see God in and through the body of Israel. Seeing God is a form of bodily recognition; God chooses to dwell among Israel, and so Israel’s body reveals God’s presence. Wyschogrod makes this a visual knowledge for both God and human beings. God continues to love the people Israel, as Wyschogrod tells it, “because he sees the face of his beloved Abraham in each and every one of his children.” 47 This is a physical, biological awareness. God creates physical beings in his likeness, such that the body “cannot be excluded from this resemblance”: “Man is created by God as a physical being and if there is a human resemblance to God then his body also resembles God.” 48 The Biblical term tselem (image) is a visual one, according to Wyschogrod, “related to the concept of shadow, a naturally occurring drawing of physical likeness.” 49 This physical correspondence with Adam only intensifies in the people Israel. God recognizes Abraham in his Jewish descendants, and human beings see God in and through Israel’s body. Wyschogrod continually asserts this natural or biological relationship between Israel and God. With the diversity of Jewish faces, one might remain puzzled by what Abraham’s countenance actually looks like to God. But Wyschogrod contends that this obscurity of vision is a finite one: in some mysterious way God recognizes his beloved Abraham in Israel’s bodily appearance. And by dwelling among that people, God reveals himself in and through these material bodies. But does God’s presence disappear with the inevitable disintegration of the body? Or does the divine countenance remain even in death? These questions haunt Wyschogrod, as they would any theologian who so profoundly ties God’s visual presence to embodiment. That God’s presence may surrender or succumb to human mortality also raises constructive links between Wyschogrod’s work and Christian incarnational theology, as I briefly explore below. Even so, bodily death raises distinctive problems for Wyschogrod, in part because he continually reasserts the physical and biological features of visual knowledge. We have already confronted this carnal recognition in his discussion of Jewish sacrificial worship. There it was a vision of the self as dying object in place of the sacrificial animal. Here it is the possibility of divine death, in which God can neither be seen nor discovered in the people Israel. Wyschogrod understands well the horror of bodily decay, and how death impairs a more hopeful vision of meaning. Yet in the midst of this despair he also reasserts God’s presence in death because God’s dwelling has always been a physical embodiment. In death, the divine image “is no longer mediated by the invisibility of thought and speech,” but is revealed instead within the stark visibility of the motionless body:

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The dignity that is bestowed on man by the divine image does not cease with death, which would be the case if only the spirit of man had the divine stamp. Instead, a corpse remains holy or perhaps becomes more holy than ever. . . . In death, the illusion of spiritual eternity is shattered, and yet the image of Hashem does not flee but remains sharply impressed in the human body.

With death, a morbid darkness overwhelms the lightness of being. If Hashem were to flee the body at that moment, “human encounter would be driven to despair and murder.” 50 Here Wyschogrod reclaims God as the great protector against meaningless existence; God is the one who will preserve hope amid death. Yet the dead body terrifies the self in much the same way as the sacrificial animal: that death could be my death. To restrain this terror, Judaism inhibits a public gaze on a dead corpse, and in particular a look at the “eyes of the dead,” for they “are the organs by means of which man thrusts himself ahead.” Recall that Wyschogrod had recovered vision as “the great liberator” that “transfers the inititiative [sic] to man” by extending the human gaze “into the far distance.” 51 But a dead man’s gaze is “fearfully empty, an impotent thrust into the beyond that returns into itself and only emphasizes the deadness of the corpse.” 52 This vacuity moves us to close the eyes of the dead in order to limit their darkness from absorbing our own light. Fearful that we might succumb to complete darkness and despair before death, Jewish tradition councils a withdrawal of the human gaze from dead bodies; by closing their eyes, we prevent a mutual gaze of incoherence. Yet death mysteriously intensifies God’s presence such that the body “becomes more holy than ever.” This reveals, as Wyschogrod powerfully asserts, the human attraction and repulsion to death: God more assertively dwells in the dead body, yet the inert eyes and blank stare reveal only an “impotent thrust into the beyond.” Even in death, the delicate balance between light and darkness remains a deeply human visual experience where enlightened hope mingles uneasily with a darkened morbidity. We see this in death, Wyschogrod asserts, even if we cannot really see it at all. The darkening insecurity of death raises the specter that nonbeing will overwhelm the more luminous quality of being. Wyschogrod devotes a lengthy and somewhat tortuous chapter to an exploration of nonbeing in the Western philosophical tradition. 53 While much of his analysis extends his earlier work on Kierkegaard and Heidegger, 54 I find that R. Kendall Soulen summarizes quite well Wyschogrod’s critical interest in nonbeing: So long as non-being is embraced only in thought, the final result falls short of the actual embrace of nonbeing. Real nonbeing can be embraced only outside of discourse, by the act. But the act that affirms being and is at the same time the pure embrace of non-being is the act of destruction, the act of reducing another living being to death. 55

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For Wyschogrod, nonbeing cannot be thought but only enacted. Yet nonbeing as physical act is embodied violence, as it was for Heidegger in his support for the Nazi regime. 56 Wyschogrod’s God is “the Lord of being,” and as such exists “beyond being and nonbeing.” 57 God guarantees that nonbeing will not win out, that violence will not prevail, and that death can be outflanked: As the Lord of being, he [God] circumscribes being, not in the mode of nonbeing that must translate itself into violence but in the mode of the trustworthy promise, which is the power of nonbeing transformed into the principle of hope. . . . In spite of these similarities between nonbeing and Hashem, the difference between the two is the difference between death and hope. 58

The delicate balance between light and darkness plays out here too between nonbeing and being. Nonbeing (darkness) limits being (light), but Hashem is the God who contains both without destroying either, and in doing so radiates hope in a meaningful life of embodied existence. The being of light still radiates in death, for God dwells among even the dead bodies of his chosen people. Hope really does spring eternal. This sense of hope in the midst of death conveys Wyschogrod’s incarnational reasoning and the influence of Christian theology. Wyschogrod has readily acknowledged Karl Barth’s impact on his own Jewish theology, but he has also confessed to a form of incarnational thought akin to Christian doctrine. Jewish thinkers of the past have often evaded discussions of God’s corporality, Wyschogrod surmises, because they feared such topics would draw them too close to Christian theology. Not so for Wyschogrod: “The incarnational direction of my thinking became possible for me only after I succeeded in freeing myself from the need to be as different from Christianity as possible.” 59 Yet Wyschogrod wishes to avoid the term “incarnation” to describe God’s embodiment in the people Israel. Instead, he develops the notion of indwelling to account for God’s presence. This evades, so Wyschogrod hopes, any misunderstanding that God actually becomes one with a particular group. The Christian incarnation, in Wyschogrod’s view, yields pure presence and light that destroy the darkness of human existence. A God who dwells among his people, however, chooses to intensify their uncleanness and their darker moods, and so accepts them as they are. As “the dwelling place of Hashem,” Israel appears not as sinless but as more authentic, for this people exposes the true nature of human experience steeped in light and darkness. 60 Christianity, with its appeal to a “sinless Christ,” denies that experience and so becomes, in Wyschogrod’s critique, a dehumanizing religious tradition. Walter Lowe has written eloquently about an abiding darkness that permeates Christian thought as well, suggesting that Wyschogrod has misread the Christian tradition or has accounted only for one strain within

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it. 61 Wyschogrod certainly limits a more diverse Christianity to one monolithic culture, but he does so to play the foil to an equally homogeneous reading of Jewish theology. In Wyschogrod’s taxonomy, Judaism and Christianity offer two competing accounts of God’s relation with finite existence. Where Hashem associates with a people, the Christian God becomes human in one man; if Hashem accepts human beings as they are, Jesus too often condemns them as sinners; and where Judaism imparts an embodied visual knowledge of light and darkness, Christianity only sees the light, and so must deny the body and its darkened physicality. Wyschogrod’s incarnational theology, however tied to reductive versions of competing religions, seeks to reassert God’s presence in a people without thereby undermining its corporeality. So Judaism is incarnational, but in a form distinctive from and critical of Christian traditions that assert God’s unity with a singular person. At times, Wyschogrod stresses this distinction, noting how Judaism is “a less concentrated incarnation, an incarnation into a people spread out in time and place.” In this sense, “the presence of the Jewish people in the world is a kind of continuing incarnation.” In these texts, Judaism differs from Christianity only in God’s adoption of an entire people. One may witness God’s presence in Christ, but “he who touches this [Jewish] people, touches God and perhaps not altogether symbolically.” 62 In this case, Israel functions much like a Christ figure who embodies God’s presence. Yet in other texts Wyschogrod asserts the deeply humanizing force of Jewish incarnational theology, in which Israel reveals God’s acceptance of human weakness and corporeality. To be sure, both Wyschogrod and his imagined Christian theologians confront the horror of a divine death, either in Jesus Christ or in the people Israel. Christian thinkers have developed robust theologies to mitigate against and even rejoice in this fear and trembling. But if Wyschogrod appropriates features of Christian incarnational thought, he does not appeal to a resurrection, to the trinity, to Marian theology, or to the many other ways of situating a divine death in a larger narrative of salvation. Instead, he appeals to the people Israel, “a less concentrated incarnation,” one “spread out in time and place,” such that any one death among Israel will not engender a divine death. Indeed, the very opposite is true: God appears more fully present in corporeal death, and strengthens that bond between Hashem and his chosen people. By spreading out God’s presence among the people Israel, Wyschogrod expands God’s body through time and place, and this not altogether symbolically. The authentically chosen people of Israel are a permanent visual presence of God’s love. Their visual and material body is their faith.

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CONCLUSION In the preface to the second edition of The Body of Faith, Wyschogrod admits that he barely touched on notions of conversion in the original publication, and poses this query: “if the primary identity of the Jewish people is based on its descent from the patriarchs, then how is conversion to Judaism possible?” Indeed it should not be possible, for this chosen people constitutes “a priestly class into which one either is or is not born.” The kind of honest confrontation that Wyschogrod takes on throughout his book is on display here as well, for he forthrightly acknowledges the theological dilemma: his focus on the visual and carnal body precludes conversion, and yet clearly persons convert to Judaism. Such a rebirth can only occur “by means of a miracle,” and this because the convert “miraculously becomes part of the body of Israel.” The convert “must become seed,” and she does so “quasiphysically, miraculously.” This is a genuine rebirth, according to Wyschogrod, for a male son who converts does not violate the Biblical law against incest were he to marry his mother (although the rabbis banned such marriages). Through some miraculous occurrence the gentile body transforms into a Jewish one. But we cannot see it: Conversion is thus not just a spiritual event. It has biological or quasi-biological consequences. This does not, of course, imply that the biological miracle that accompanies a conversion can be observed under the microscope as changes in the DNA of the convert. It is a theological-biological miracle. It severs the mother-son and brother-sister relationship in some way that we cannot physically observe but that must be very real. 63

The miracle consists in a real event taking place beyond visual assurance. This is why Wyschogrod must qualify his embodied language with phrases like “quasi-biological” and “theological-biological” miracle. Since marvels such as these should not occur, and yet they do, Wyschogrod insists that “converts are therefore accepted but not encouraged.” 64 The problem here lies in a physical change beyond discernment. We can see God in the chosen people Israel, and yet we cannot perceive this same God in the body of the convert. God can miraculously envision the face of his beloved Abraham in the gentile become Jew, but Israel cannot do so. Wyschogrod is clearly uncomfortable with conversion to Judaism, and even more uneasy with Jewish proselytizing activities. He avoids saying too much about DNA, and yet he appeals to some kind of biological change for the convert. This anxiety is a visual one, for Wyschogrod defends a “theological-biological miracle” that “we cannot physically observe.” God’s visual presence in the dead body delivers hope over a final death. But what of this visual absence in the quasi-physical conversion of the gentile? The convert elicits anxiety because she neither displays visual authenticity of this hope,

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nor reveals God’s chosen indwelling with the people Israel. We can only infer a miraculous presence of light, but the convert remains uncannily obscure to human vision. Hers is not a body of faith but a quasi-biological miracle. And this mystery shadows Wyschogrod’s embodied triumphalism. Conversion narratives undermine the visual authenticity of Israel’s status as God’s chosen people. Chosenness is not a miracle but a result of God’s loving choice. Wyschogrod avoids discussions of conversion in his text because gentile bodies, even converted ones, do not fully expose God’s presence to human vision. I read Wyschogrod’s account of conversion as anxious apologetic, and this because vision plays such a decisive role in his account of chosenness and authenticity. Conversions ought not be possible because only Israel portrays the human condition in its existential light and darkness; only Israel displays God’s presence as embodied in its people; and only Israel sees as God sees the I as sacrificial, dying object. This is authentic vision, and it is Israel’s alone. By means of miraculous conversion, the non-Jew takes on these responsibilities and powers, but is forever regulated by a “quasi” status of embodiment and, because conversion should not be encouraged, inauthenticity. This mark of inauthenticity always shadows claims to authenticity. They are both present and articulated, even when (especially when) the other cannot be seen. When Wyschogrod defends bohemian creativity, he also denounces bourgeois conformism; the authentic marks its unstated (inauthentic) opposite. And this has profound consequences for the cultural politics underlying and implied by Wyschogrod’s Jewish theology. If Jews, or only some Jews, are authentic carriers of the divine countenance, if God dwells with them and not others, then culture also reflects this hierarchy of value, as it did among the bohemian and bourgeois. In other words, not all of Jewish culture reveals God’s presence; God dwells in some places but not in others. So God dwells in more than a people; God also dwells somewhere within a cultural landscape. Part of Wyschogrod’s unease with converts, I want to suggest, is a cultural one of absorption. It is one thing to commit to God’s commandments, but it is quite another to be accepted within a culture. Their “quasi” status is both metaphysical and geographical. They do not reside in the right place. When Wyschogrod claims that “the majority of Jews must remain the descendants of the patriarchs and the matriarchs,” 65 then the minority of converts—who, it seems, really do not become full descendants—are a bit less chosen, somewhat less insightful, and far more obscure and opaque. This is so because Wyschogrod ties chosenness to visual authenticity, and he employs a visual rhetoric to expose God’s love for the people Israel. But vision has its limits, and not only in the agitated body of the convert. It is, as Wyschogrod repeatedly reminds us, an obscure and partial perspective. Total

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exposure lies beyond the human realm, and certainly beyond the Jewish gaze. So perhaps conversion is no miracle at all, but rather a partial revelation that Jewish cultural identity is far more mysterious, and darker, than any one people could hope to perceive. NOTES 1. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1996), xiii. 2. Ibid., xxxv. 3. See the collected essays in Michael Wyschogrod and R. Kendall Soulen, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004); and note as well the essays on Wyschogrod in the special issue of Modern Theology 22/4 (2006). 4. See Wyschogrod, “Why Was and Is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” in Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, 211-24; Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 75-79; and Shai Held, “The Promise and Peril of Jewish Barthianism: The Theology of Michael Wyschogrod,” Modern Judaism 25/3 (2005), 316-26. 5. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 64. 6. Ibid., 185-90, 241. 7. David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 92. 9. Ibid., 65. 10. Ibid., 1. 11. Ibid. 12. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 13. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 1. 14. Ibid., 2. 15. Ibid., 3. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Ibid., 203. 20. Ibid., 205. 21. Ibid., 104-08. 22. Ibid., 4-5. 23. Ibid., 7. 24. Ibid. 25. See Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 26. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 9. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 17. 29. Ibid., 18. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 18-19. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 20-23. 34. Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid., 43-45. 36. Ibid., 42. 37. Ibid., 46-47. 38. Ibid., 47-48.

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39. Wyschogrod draws heavily from the interpretive tradition that reads Marx as a modern humanist. See the influential work from Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 40. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 45. 41. Ibid., 49. 42. Ibid., 248 and 249. See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3-21. 43. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 249. 44. Ibid., 249. 45. Ibid., 10. 46. Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People, 246. 47. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 64. 48. Wyschogrod and Soulen, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, 171. 49. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 115. 50. Ibid., 115-16. 51. Ibid., 1. 52. Ibid., 96. 53. Even Wyschogrod admits to the arduous nature of this section: “This chapter is somewhat more difficult than the others, though it should not be beyond the attentive, nontechnically trained reader” (The Body of Faith, xxxv). 54. Michael Wyschogrod, Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence (London: Routledge & Paul, 1954). 55. R. Kendall Soulen, “The Achievement of Michael Wyschogrod,” Modern Theology 22/ 4 (2006), 677-85, especially page 681. 56. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 159. 57. Ibid., 163 and 171. 58. Ibid., 171-72. 59. Ibid., xxxiii-xxxv. 60. Ibid., 10 and 212-13. 61. Walter James Lowe, “The Intensification of Time: Michael Wyschogrod and the Task of Christian Theology,” Modern Theology 22/4 (2006), 693-99. 62. Michael Wyschogrod, “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation,” Modern Theology 12/2 (1996), 195-209, especially page 208. 63. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, xvi-xix. 64. Ibid., xxi. 65. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Held, Shai. “The Promise and Peril of Jewish Barthianism: The Theology of Michael Wyschogrod.” Modern Judaism 25, no. 3 (2005): 316-26. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lowe, Walter James. “The Intensification of Time: Michael Wyschogrod and the Task of Christian Theology.” Modern Theology 22, no. 4 (2006): 693-99. Novak, David. The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Soloveitchik, Joseph. The Lonely Man of Faith. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Soulen, R. Kendall. “The Achievement of Michael Wyschogrod.” Modern Theology 22, no. 4 (2006): 677-85.

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Wyschogrod, Michael. “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation.” Modern Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 195-209. ———. Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence. London: Routledge & Paul, 1954. ———. The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel. Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1996. ———, and R. Kendall Soulen. Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004.

Postscript Thinking Jewish Culture in America Arnold Eisen

It’s a special pleasure to respond to essays by friends and former students on a subject that has occupied me all of my adult life and that poses new challenges almost daily as I seek to steer The Jewish Theological Seminary through territory that increasingly seems uncharted. The pleasure and the challenge both stem in large part from the nature of American Jewish culture, which Ken Koltun-Fromm correctly characterizes in the Introduction to this volume with words such as “abundance,” “diversity,” “complexity,” “multiple,” “pluralities,” and “contested.” I don’t know of any other way to speak accurately about the variety of “practices, gestures, performances, and rituals”—and, I would add, of beliefs, commitments, institutions, organizations, aspirations, avoidances, and ambivalences—that constitute American Jewry and American Judaism today. How to “think [this] culture in all its diversity”—and to bring the Jews and others who participate in it together in shared pursuit of common goods—is for me a question of great, even ultimate, importance. I want to reflect on the matter with the help of Solomon Schechter, who from the very moment he arrived at JTS as its president in the opening years of the past century shared that conviction and that quest. Schechter insisted paradoxically that his institution would be distinguished precisely by the pluralities within its walls. His inaugural address in 1902 contained the following significant statement, uttered only half in jest: I once heard a friend of mine exclaim angrily to a pupil: “Sir, how dare you always agree with me?” I do not even profess to agree with myself always, and I would consider my work . . . a complete failure if this institution would not in 313

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Arnold Eisen the future produce such extremes as on the one side a raving mystic who would denounce me as a sober Philistine; on the other side, an advanced critic, who would rail at me as a narrow-minded fanatic, while a third devotee of strict orthodoxy would raise protest against any critical views I may entertain. 1

The passage is framed by two assertions, two master-concepts, that are utterly fundamental to Schechter’s view of Judaism and—when one examines them for clarity and consistency—turn out to be utterly problematic. The first is “Catholic Israel” and the second “historical Judaism.” Unpacking them, we learn a lot about American Judaism then and now, and a great deal about what is at stake in having (I quote Koltun-Fromm again) “Jewish thought becom[e] a transformative cultural practice.” Schechter’s introduction of the “Catholic Israel” concept followed seemingly straightforward declarations meant to mark out differences between his new institution, and the sort of Judaism it would serve, and the competition. JTS would aim “at the perpetuation of the tenets of the Jewish religion.” Torah was “bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh,” and JTS would part from those who engaged in “constant amputations” that were causing the body of Israel to “bleed to death before our very eyes.” 2 The address is highly polemical. But Schechter also insisted that his students, future teachers of Judaism, should “know everything Jewish,” from Bible and Talmud to history and folklore. 3 He made it clear that his notion of Torah included rigorous scholarship about all those subjects. The statement that his Seminary would have a “general religious tendency” 4 should be read with emphasis on “general” (rather than specific) and “tendency” (rather than creed). It comes as no surprise, then, to hear Schechter assert, as if with utter clarity, “There is no other Jewish religion but that taught by the Torah and confirmed by history and tradition, and sunk into the conscience of Catholic Israel.” 5 The term has occasioned much research and consternation over the years, 6 and I think we do well to examine the passage in Schechter’s Introduction to the initial volume of Studies in Judaism (1896) where the term is first explicated. Schechter is ruminating on the fact that modern Biblical scholarship had taken something away from the authority of Scripture but (as if in compensation) had endowed the development of Jewish tradition over the centuries—which he called the “Secondary Meaning”—with added weight. The major figures of the “Historical School” (Zunz, Rapoport and Krochmal) had never offered a “theological programme.” They rather exhibited an “enlightened Scepticism” in matters of belief and “staunch conservatism” in matters of practice. The statement is extremely telling, I think—and it brings Schechter to the words on which I want to focus. . . . It follows that the centre of authority is actually removed from the Bible and placed in some living body, which by virtue of its being in touch with the

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ideal aspirations and the religious needs of the age, is best able to determine the nature of the Secondary Meaning. This living body, however, is not represented by any section of the nation, or any corporate priesthood, or Rabbihood, but by the collective conscience of Catholic Israel as embodied in the Universal Synagogue. 7

That institution had been at work for twenty-three centuries and included (among others) psalmists and scribes, rabbis and patriarchs, martyrs and philosophers, scholars and mystics. “This Synagogue, the only true witness to the past, and forming in all ages the sublimest expression of Israel’s religious life, must also retain its authority as the sole true guide for the present and the future.” 8 Let’s stipulate that Schechter is drawing on a variety of concepts and thinkers in this passage, both ancient and modern. He clearly has the opening of Pirkei Avot in mind, with its chain of transmission and reference to the “Men of the Great Assembly.” He has adopted and expanded the notion of “Knesset Yisrael.” He has assimilated Zacharias Frankel and Ernest Renan. I will not attempt to build on the scholars who have investigated the meaning and origins of the term “Catholic Israel.” My concern is rather Schechter’s deployment of the concept in order to further define and differentiate Historical Judaism and JTS from competing movements and schools and to ground hope that American Judaism could remain one “culture in all its diversity.” That is of course a central problematic of this volume. The adjective “Catholic” itself performs some of the work for Schechter, connoting both universality and acceptance of variety. But the major rhetorical force of the passage lies in the length and comprehensiveness of the list of figures and movements from throughout the ages. It is as if Schechter warns: if you cut yourself off from this ever-developing tradition, you read yourself out of the continuing story of Catholic Israel; if you deny the immense diversity and change that are part and parcel of that story, you damage your claim to carry the chain forward. Embrace the many past stages and forms in Catholic Israel’s long and remarkable history; assume the responsibility for assuring that this history will not end—and you have established the rightness of your cause. The pathos of the argument is revealed in Schechter’s confession that part of him longs to go back to the “old Adam” inside him, re-inhabit the “old Low Synagogue,” and make a forthright statement of faith in traditional verities. He frets that “history,” in the absence of such a theology, might no longer be enough to sustain Jewish commitment. But he derives comfort from the conviction that “general custom” rather than Scripture forms the “real rule of practice.” What Jews do counts for a lot more, in perpetuating Judaism, than what Jews believe. He calls this “consecration of general use”—Catholic Israel. 9

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One can easily see why Mordecai Kaplan felt himself Schechter’s true disciple in his advocacy for seeing Judaism as civilization rather than religion—a student confronting and voicing truths that his teacher pointed to but never voiced in so many words. It is apparent too that theological doubts and quandaries brought on by modernity pose some of the same problems for belief that were provoked for later generations by the Holocaust. Twentiethcentury debates about what would come to be called “culture” and “peoplehood” (cf. the pieces in the present volume by Noam Pianko and Claire Sufrin) are clearly adumbrated. Those issues are clearer still in an address delivered in the final paragraphs of a second address, “The Seminary as Witness,” delivered five months after “The Charter of the Seminary.” It too stresses the unity-invariety exhibited by Judaism over the centuries, Schechter’s vehicle this time being a long (and occasionally tongue-in-cheek) comparison between Maimonides and Rashi. The point is to identify the boundary marking out authentic Judaism through the ages, i.e., Catholic Israel, the Judaism that JTS is resolved to strengthen. After listing differences between the two figures one after another, Schechter describes the following elements (and requirements) of unity: But as they both observed the same fasts and feasts; as they both revered the same sacred symbols, though they put different interpretations on them; as they both prayed in the same language—Hebrew; as they both were devoted students of the same Torah, though they often differed in its explanations; as they both looked back to Israel’s past with admiration and reverence, though Maimonides’ conception of the Revelation, for instance, largely varied from that of Rashi; as their ultimate hopes centered in the same redemption—in one word, as they studied the Torah and lived in accordance with its laws, and both made the hopes of the Jewish nation their own, the bonds of unity were strong enough to survive the misunderstandings between their respective followers. 10

Note what matters and does not matter for the preservation of Jews and Judaism, according to this account. Observance matters a great deal: “fasts and feasts,” life in accordance with the law—but not unanimity of meaning concerning these observances. Prayer in the same language as the ancestors matters, as does study of the same Torah—but not particular conceptions of revelation or interpretations of Torah. Identification with the hopes of the Jewish nation is mentioned twice. (Schechter’s purposes in the passage do not require him to go into the balance of universal and particular elements of that hope, a focus of concern for Akiba Lerner.) Schechter’s enumeration of Jewish unity-in-diversity or diversity-in-unity once more aims at the requirements for authentic continuity with the past, and at the distinction for his school of thought (and his school for rabbis!) from others. One cannot credibly claim an authoritative role in guiding the

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future of Catholic Israel, Schechter seems to say, if one cuts oneself off from the set of commonalties that have long constituted Jewish unity despite differences in belief. One retains membership in Catholic Israel even while denying the differences that have characterized—and enriched—it for many centuries. But one’s claim to guide the future of Judaism is weakened in that failure to recognize the true nature of the past. True to the conception of Judaism set forth in the passage just quoted, Schechter went on three years later to pen a ringing and controversial endorsement of Zionism. His logic would soon be echoed by Kaplan (and Pianko after him): “To me personally, after long hesitation and careful watching, Zionism recommended itself as the great bulwark against assimilation.” 11 Nowhere in his voluminous writings, to the best of my knowledge, did Schechter offer anything that could be construed as a theological statement, much less a creed. The closest he came to a credo is perhaps the claim—or, better, the hope—expressed at the very end of “The Seminary as Witness.” JTS students would strengthen Jewish unity “by appreciating everything Jewish and falling in love with it.” This, to Schechter, was a form of witnessing “between us that the Lord is God!” 12 The institution he inaugurated in 1902 would contain thinkers as diverse in their theologies as Louis Ginzberg and Israel Friedlander or Mordecai M. Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Conformity of halakhic practice would have to make up for broad aggadic pluralism. “Enlightened Scepticism” would be balanced by “staunch conservatism.” The latter, as Schechter predicted, would not be “wholly devoid of a certain mystical touch.” 13 I am haunted by that phrase. Several pieces in the current volume (especially those by Zachary Braiterman, Einat Ramon, and Leonard Kaplan) raise to awareness the “certain mystical touch” present even in sectors of American Jewry far removed from the traditional institutions and practices (“staunch conservatism”) that Schechter believed necessary for the perpetuation of Catholic Israel. My question—implicit through the present volume, I think—is whether even a more robust set of beliefs than most contemporary American Jews possess would suffice to achieve that goal in the absence of strong communities that bind Jews together in and despite their immense diversity. I doubt it; lacking such communities, and the kind of shared observance that Schechter believed necessary to sustain them, scholars a generation or two from now will likely not be able to speak in any meaningful sense of a single Jewish group or Jewish culture in America, however multi-form or contested. NOTES 1. Solomon Schechter, “The Charter of the Seminary,” in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers (New York: Burning Bush, 1959), 24.

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2. Ibid., 23. 3. Ibid., 19. 4. Ibid., 21. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. See David J. Fine, “The Meaning of Catholic Israel,” Conservative Judaism 50/4 (1998), 29-47; David Starr, “Catholic Israel: Solomon Schechter, a Study of Unity and Fragmentation in Modern Jewish History” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003); Howard N. Lupovitch, “Searching for ‘Catholic Israel’ in Focsani: Solomon Schechter’s Childhood in Romania,” Studies in Jewish Civilization 16 (2006), 313-28; and the most recent volume of Conservative Judaism, especially Michael Panitz, “Judaism in the Queen’s English: the Anglican Context of Schechter’s ‘Catholic Israel’ and Associated Terminology,” Conservative Judaism 64/3 (2013), 62-84. 7. Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism: First Series (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), xviii. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., xxff. 10. Schechter, “The Seminary as Witness,” in Seminary Addresses, 51-52. 11. Schechter, “Zionism: a Statement,” in Seminary Addresses, 93. 12. Book of Joshua 22:34. See Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 52. 13. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, xvii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fine, David J. “The Meaning of Catholic Israel.” Conservative Judaism 50, no. 4 (1998): 2947. Lupovitch, Howard N. “Searching for ‘Catholic Israel’ in Focsani: Solomon Schechter’s Childhood in Romania.” Studies in Jewish Civilization 16 (2006): 313-28. Panitz, Michael. “Judaism in the Queen’s English: the Anglican Context of Schechter’s ‘Catholic Israel’ and Associated Terminology.” Conservative Judaism 64, no. 3 (2013): 62-84. Schechter, Solomon. Studies in Judaism: First Series. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945. ———. “The Charter of the Seminary.” In Seminary Addresses and Other Papers. New York: Burning Bush, 1959. Starr, David. “Catholic Israel: Solomon Schechter, a Study of Unity and Fragmentation in Modern Jewish History.” PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2003.

Index

A (Zukofsky), 162 Abraham, 159, 298; descendants of, 303, 304, 308 Abulafia, Abraham, 181n38–182n39 Achad Ha-am, 20–21, 25–26 Adam, 259n40, 292, 304; Eve and, 292; of Soloveitchik, 195, 203 Adams, Ansel, 205–206, 207 Adorno, Theodor, 40, 162, 197; on Jewish photography and aura, 187, 190, 192, 212 African Americans, 276n4 After Auschwitz (Rubenstein), 135, 152n18 after-the-Holocaust literature, 139 agape, 279n47–280n48 agency, children and, 274, 279n46 Age of Anxiety (Auden), 159 aggadah, 239; aggadic-theological pluralism, 221–222, 227–228, 235 “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering” (Soloveitchik), 247. See also halakhah; suffering AJYB, 132 Akedah, 298 Akiva, Rabbi, 222; in Heschel’s God and evil, 223, 227, 227–228, 228–229, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233–235, 238–239, 240, 242n32; on midrashic foundation, 231–232, 232, 233, 234–235 Albritton, Rogers, 103n154 aliyah, 23, 25

Allen, Woody, 86 alterity, 57; Levinas and, 46, 50, 63n52, 268, 277n22, 278n34 America, 7, 17; for Jewish peoplehood, 19–22; moral authority of, 93, 103n162 American Jewish literature, 132, 153n37 American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Magid), 104n178 Am Yisrael (the People of Israel), 16, 28n11 “An Affirmation of Light”, 217n55 anarchy, 3 Anderson, Martin, 97n2 anthropology, 3, 5 anti-culture, 81 anxiety, 161 Apology (Socrates), 172 Aristotle, 174 Arnold, Matthew, 3–4, 5–6, 82, 90 art, 185, 302–303 Assmann, Jan, 73–74, 98n21 asymmetry, 272–273; of Buber, 262, 262–263, 264, 265–266, 267, 277n19, 278n25; of Levinas, 265, 267–268 Auden, W. H., 158, 159, 161 Auletta, Ken, 99n44 aura, 190; for Folberg, 206, 207, 211; index and, 197–199; technology and, 208. See also Jewish photography and aura 319

320

Index

authenticity, 286; bodies related to, 285–286; conversion and, 309; degree of, 286; God’s love in, 286, 287; God’s presence as, 286–287, 303; of Jewish art, 302–303; poetry and, 302–303. See also light authority, 85, 89, 93; character and, 87, 101n117; God and, 86, 101n108–101n110; power and, 85, 88, 102n126; reverence for, 86; values and, 92, 103n157; vertical, 87, 89–90, 101n115 Bachman, Ingeborg, 159 Badiou, Alain, 159, 160 Bar Han, Rabbah b., 207 Baron, Salo, 113 Barth, Karl, 286, 306 Barthes, Roland, 199 Bass, Alan, 170 Batnitzky, Leora, 95, 104n177, 276n5 Baudelaire, Charles, 168, 189, 200–202 Baudrillard, Jean, 84 Bauer, Ulrich, 168 Bava Batra, 207 Bazin, André, 212 beauty, 52–53 Beauvoir, Simone de, 278n34 Begegnung (non-instrumental encounter), 45 Beilin, Yossi, 25 Bellah, Robert, 117 Ben Gurion, David, 20, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 172, 188, 189, 191, 200, 206; Soloveitchik compared to, 196, 197. See also Jewish photography and aura; photography and Jewish thought Bennett, William, 89 Berakhot 5a, 231 Berakhot 5b, 242n43–243n44 Berger, Peter, 58, 74 Berkovits, Eliezer, 134–135, 135–137, 140, 152n15 Berlin, Isaiah, 87–88 Bhabha, Homi, 4–6 Bible. See Torah Bildung (character), 77 biology, evolutionary, 279n42 Birthright Israel, 24–26

Blanchot, Maurice, 80 Block, Ernst, 58, 202 Bloom, 178n2 Bloom, Allan, 89 Bloom, Harold, 79 Blumenberg, Hans, 88 The Body of Faith (Wyschogrod, M.), 9, 285, 286, 288, 294, 303, 308 Book of Isaiah, 121 Boyarin, Daniel, 5–6 Boyarin, Jonathan, 5–6 Braiterman, Zachary, 134, 152n15; Heschel’s God and evil related to, 225–226 Brand, Lois, 114 Brand, Steward, 114–115, 116, 116–117, 122, 126n13 Brandeis, Louis, 17 Brenner, Frédéric, 205 Brown, Erica, 16, 22–23, 24 Buber, Martin, 9, 41–42, 131, 280n56, 293; asymmetry of, 262, 262–263, 264, 265–266, 267, 277n19, 278n25; childrearing and, 278n28–278n29, 278n29, 278n32; feminism and, 274; gestation and, 265–266, 278n32; Heidegger and, 63n45, 158; on intersubjectivity, 263–264, 265–266, 266–267, 268, 273; Kaplan, M., compared to, 42, 45; Levinas and, 263, 264–265, 277n20; Plaskow compared to, 266–267; reciprocity of, 263–264, 265–266, 278n29; subjectivity alternatives from, 42–45; warnings of, 32–33. See also I and Thou Buber’s self, 42, 57; democracy in, 44–45; hope in, 43–45; Levinas on, 43, 45; Levinas’s hope compared to, 45–46, 47; middle path for, 42–43; mystery in, 43–44; presence in, 43–44 Buchner, 171, 171–172 Buchner Prize, 160, 167, 170 Buck-Morss, Susan, 188, 189 Burggraeve, Roger, 274 Bush, George W., 91 Cameron, Esther, 175–176, 182n47 Camp Ramah, 120 Camus, Albert, 225

Index Caro, Joseph, 110–111 The Case for Jewish Peoplehood: Can We Be One? (Galperin and Brown), 16, 22–23, 24 Catholicism, 36, 37 Catholic Israel: meaning of, 315; of Schechter, 314–315, 315, 316, 317; tradition and, 314, 315; unity-indiversity of, 316–317; as Universal Synagogue, 314–315 Celan, Paul, 8, 168, 180n28–181n29; anxiety of, 161, 161–162, 180n18; Auden compared to, 158, 159, 161; background of, 158, 161–162, 180n18; insanity of, 161–162, 180n18; Kafka and, 163; linguistic skills of, 162, 163; loves of, 161; “The Meridian”, 160, 170, 171, 171–172, 181n38; Osherow on, 175; plagiarism related to, 163, 168, 180n18; resources for, 158–160; trauma of, 158, 161, 168, 180n18 Celan’s poetry, 162, 173–174, 177; analyses of, 160, 163; Buchner Prize for, 160, 167, 170; commentators on, 160, 174–177; “Death Fugue”, 163, 163–165, 166, 166–168; Heidegger and, 158, 159–160, 169–170, 170–171, 173; hope in, 169; interpretation conflict of, 160; Joris on, 160, 163, 170, 180n28–164; “Psalm”, 172–173; silence in, 162; “Stretto”, 163, 165–166; as truth, 160, 162, 169 Chagall, Marc, 186 charisma, 2, 80 Chen, Alexander Even, 228 childbearing, 265, 279n42; childrearing compared to, 276n6–277n7; feminism and, 266–267, 268 childrearing, 261, 275, 276n6–277n7, 280n48; Buber and, 278n28–278n29, 278n32; feminism and, 269–271, 273–274, 274–275, 276n4–276n5; Western philosophy on, 275n2–276n3. See also parent-child relationship children, 109, 274, 279n46–280n48, 280n48; Birthright Israel and, 24–26; love of, 269, 270, 298; as same/Other, 272. See also parent-child relationship choice vs. instinct, 279n45

321

Christianity, 40, 65n92, 258n11, 280n60, 289; Catholicism, 36, 37; Greek philosophy and, 159; healthy versus sick souls and, 249–250, 252; incarnational theology and, 306–307; Jesus, 159, 294, 307; Messiah, 144, 159, 178n6; Wyschogrod, M., on, 294–295, 303, 304, 306–307 circumcision, 298 Coens, Ethan, 96 Coens, Joel, 96 Cohen, Arthur, 134, 135–136 Cohen, Hermann, 94 Cohen, Steven, 2–3 Connor, Celeste, 216n53 Conservative Judaism, 248, 258n7 Constitution, 92 conversion: authenticity and, 309; descent compared to, 308–310; limitations in, 287; of Marranos, 299; miracle of, 308–309, 309–310; as rebirth, 308 Copans, Stuart, 120–121, 122 Corn, Wanda, 203 covenant, 152n24; God related to Holocaust despite, 134, 135, 135–136; in The Lonely Man of Faith, 195–196, 197 creativity, 131; criminality related to, 91, 103n151; higher education and, 93–94; literary, 150 Creator. See God Cuddihy, John Murray, 82 culture, 89–90; anti-culture, 81; as conflict, 72–73, 73, 90, 97n11; corporate, 78–79, 79–80, 92, 99n44; counterculture of, 76–77, 114; definitions of, 2–4; end of, 77; high culture, 82–83; invisibility of, 4; location of, 4; as meaning-making, 5; minimalist reading of, 83, 100n73; privacy and, 88, 101n123; as process, 3–4, 5; Readings on, 78–79, 79–80, 80, 88, 99n56; as social control, 5; thought and, 2, 10; understanding of, 2–6; world creation/rule as, 81. See also Jewish culture; Jew of culture; photography and Jewish thought Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 3 culture contestation, 73, 97n11; first world, 73–74, 81, 100n85; second world,

322

Index

74–75, 81–82, 84, 88; third world, 74, 80, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 88, 100n70, 103n152 darkness, 289; in straight photography, 202–204; of Temple sacrifices, 297, 298–299 Dawidowitz, Lucy, 179n14 death: of Celan, 161; declaration of, 152n17; of God, 135, 152n15–152n16; God in, 304–305, 306; in Great House, 142–143, 143–144, 148–149; in halakhah of Soloveitchik, 256; hope and, 305, 306, 308–309; as nonbeing, 305–306; Temple sacrifices as, 296–298; in vision and chosenness, 304–306. See also Holocaust “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”) (Celan), 163, 166, 167; gloss on, 164, 164–165; reception of, 163–164, 165, 168; selections from, 164, 166–167 democracy, 50; in Buber’s self, 44–45; love and justice in, 56; in otherness and hope, 36, 38–39, 57, 61n14; in Rorty’s social hope, 51, 52, 53; straight photography and, 200–201 Deresiewicz, William, 95–96, 99n49 Derrida, Jacques, 76, 77, 159, 160, 166, 205, 280n58 Descartes, 43 Deuteronomy, 82, 100n84 Deutscher, Isaac, 86 Dewey, John, 236 diaspora, 5; Jewish nationalist paradigm and, 18, 24, 25 “Diaspora Project” (Brenner), 205 digital photography, 213; analog photography compared to, 204; aura in, 205, 206–207, 207–208; Fried on, 204–205; technology of, 204–205, 208. See also Folberg, Neil dignity, 257, 259n40 Donoghue, Frank, 75, 79, 87, 98n22 Duchamp, 198 Dudden, Adreinne Onderdonk, 112–113, 119–120

The Earth is the Lord’s (Heschel). See The Heavens on Earth: On the Inner Life of the Jew in Eastern Europe egoism, 32 Ehrenkrantz, Daniel, 28n18 Eisen, Arnold, 59, 93, 97n1, 262; on American Jewish theology, 131, 132, 136; on judgment, 96; on Rieff, 81, 85 “Either/Or” (Williams, C. K.), 176–177 Eliade, Mircea, 89 Eliot, T.S., 178n2 Elisha, 196 Elkins, James, 205 “The Ends of Man” (Derrida), 76 “Engführung” (“Stretto”) (Celan), 163, 165–166 Enlightenment, 133–134, 300, 303; in Rorty’s social hope, 51, 53 ethics, 256, 280n52; over law, 294–295 Ethics (Spinoza), 91–92 Europe, 19, 40; Germany, 185–186, 191; nationalism in, 17, 26, 41 Everything is Illuminated (Foer), 140–141 evil, 247; causes of, 250; in halakhah of Soloveitchik, 254–255, 256, 256–257; in healthy versus sick souls, 249–251, 252, 255; reality of, 251. See also Heschel’s God and evil; Holocaust; suffering excellence, 77–78, 85, 91–92, 98n31, 103n153 Exodus, 82, 138, 228–229, 229 Exodus Rabbah (Parashat Ki Tisa), 228–229, 242n32 Fackenheim, Emil, 134, 136 faith, 237; in Heschel’s pragmatism, 237. See also The Body of Faith; The Lonely Man of Faith fascism, 40, 53 Fellow Teachers (Rieff), 98n20, 101n115 Felstiner, John, 167–168 feminism, 153n35, 280n60, 281n64; Buber and, 274; childbearing and, 266–267, 268; childrearing and, 269–271, 273–274, 274–275, 276n4–276n5; Levinas and, 274, 274–275; parentchild relationship and, 273–275 Ferris, 217n63

Index First Amendment, 92 first world culture contestation, 73–74, 81, 100n85 Fish, Stanley, 82, 103n152 Fishbane, Michael, 74 Fishman, Sylvia Barack, 132 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 140–141 Folberg, Neil, 8, 187, 208, 213, 217n63; “And I Shall Dwell among Them”, 205, 208–209; aura for, 206, 207, 211; “Celestial Nights”, 205–206, 208–209; imagination of, 206, 207; light for, 206–207; place for, 205–206, 208–209; reality of, 207–208; synagogues of, 208–212 forgiveness, 83–84 “For Paul Celan and Primo Levi” (Shapiro, H.), 168 Foucault, Michel, 50, 76 Frank, Stephen, 235–236 Frankfurt School, 40–41 Franklin, Ruth, 140, 153n44 freedom, 38–39, 49, 85; to and from, 87–88; of halakhah, 194 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 86, 161 Fried, Michael, 197, 204–205, 213 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, 91 The Future of the American Jew (Kaplan, M.), 20, 38 Gadamer, Hans-George, 160 Galperin, Misha, 16, 22–23, 24 Geertz, Clifford, 2–3, 4, 55–56 Gemilut Hasadim (righteous actions), 33 gender, 298; of God, 152n13. See also feminism Genesis, 292, 298 Gerber, Scott, 104n168 German language, 166 Germany: Jewish culture and, 185–186, 191. See also Holocaust “Get Rich U” (Auletta), 99n44 Glikl of Hameln, 280n48 God, 152n13; authority and, 86, 101n108–101n110; being of, 84, 100n87; compassion of, 288–289; creation apart from, 84; in death, 304–305, 306; death of, 135, 152n15–152n16; embodiment of, 292;

323

evil and, 247; fear of, 85; as Hashem, 288–289, 292, 295–296; humanism of, 288–289; inner freedom and, 39; intelligence and, 293, 295; inventors of, 86, 101n108; for Jew of culture, 89; in Levinas’s hope, 48–49; in light, 290–291, 295; limits from, 83–84, 100n80; love and, 100n84, 234, 237, 286, 287, 288, 304; names of, 173; national history or, 19; pantheistic view of, 74; photography and, 202, 207, 214; questions to, 292; self and, 81, 99n62; Six-Day War and, 136, 147; vision of, 297; withdrawal of, 152n24. See also rituals “God, the Eighth Day” (Magritte), 214 (God) After Auschwitz (Braiterman), 225 God in Search of Man (Heschel), 224, 242n25 God related to Holocaust, 134, 152n25; despite covenant, 134, 135, 135–136; God of History and, 134, 135–136; Job and, 135, 224; rituals or, 135. See also Heschel’s God and evil God’s presence, 9; as authenticity, 286–287, 303 Golden Calf, 228, 229 Goll, Clair, 163, 168, 180n18 goy kadosh (holy nation), 82 Graetz, Heinrich, 62n26 Grafton, Anthony, 91, 103n153 Granite, Lauren, 278n28 Great House (Krauss, N.), 8; death in, 142–143, 143, 143–144, 148–149; exile in, 149; future in, 143, 143–144, 145; hope in, 143–144, 145; memory in, 144–145, 146; Messiah in, 144; morality in, 147–149; narrators in, 141–142, 154n48; realization in, 143; reclamation in, 147; reconstruction in, 141–142, 143–144, 144–146, 147, 149, 154n48; redemption in, 144–145, 154n52; statehood in, 147–149; time in, 148, 148–149; title meaning of, 144–145; unknown in, 145–146; Yom Kippur War in, 147–149 Greek philosophy, 34–35, 159, 292–293 Greenberg, Clement, 302 Greenberg, Irving, 152n24

324

Index

Greenough, Sarah, 216n53 Gross, Chaim, 113, 121 Gross, David C., 118 Gudorf, Christine, 279n47–273 Gursky, Andreas, 205 Guyer, Sara, 179n14 halakhah (Jewish law), 152n17; aesthetics and, 193; centrality of, 193–195; freedom of, 194; metaphysics and, 194; technology of, 194 halakhah of Soloveitchik: active form of, 253–254; death in, 256; evil in, 254–255, 256, 256–257; without extremism, 254; humility in, 251; mental health and, 248, 257; monologue of, 253; against passivity, 256; perspective of, 252–254; pluralism in, 257; pragmatism of, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257–258; relationship in, 253; suffering in, 254, 255, 256–257; thematic, 254, 256; topical, 254–255; “tough” in, 255 Halakhic Man (Soloveitchik), 194; The Lonely Man of Faith compared to, 194–195 Halivni, David Weiss, 152n24 Hartman, Geoffrey, 59 Hasan-Rokem, Galit, 233 Hashem, 288–289, 292, 295–296 Hasidism, 193 Haverford College, 1 Havurat Shalom, 115–116, 120 healthy versus sick souls, 72; Buddhism and, 252; Christianity and, 249–250, 252; denial in, 249; distinctions between, 249–250; evil in, 249–251, 252, 255; evil’s reality in, 251; positive thinking in, 249; pragmatism in, 249, 250, 251–252; soul division in, 252; Spinoza as, 249, 258n11, 258n13. See also suffering The Heavens on Earth: On the Inner Life of the Jew in Eastern Europe (Shamyim al Haaretz: Al HaHayim HaPnimiyim shel Hayehudi beMizrach Eyropa (Heschel), 241n2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 33, 42, 76

Heidegger, Martin, 50, 197, 305, 306; Buber and, 63n45, 158; Celan’s poetry and, 158, 159–160, 169–170, 170–171, 173 Held, Virginia, 273, 280n52–280n53, 280n53 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 8, 91, 223, 224, 241n2; Kaplan, M., and, 226–227; Kook and, 232, 242n43; Rubenstein compared to, 224–225, 226, 227, 237, 239; Torah from Heaven, 222, 226–227, 230, 234, 240, 241n3; Wyschogrod, M., compared to, 288–289 Heschel’s God and evil, 221; aggadictheological pluralism in, 221–222, 227–228, 235; Akiva in, 223, 227, 227–228, 228–229, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233–235, 238–239, 240, 242n32; Braiterman related to, 225–226; cooperation in, 229–230; exiled tribes in, 232–233; Exodus in, 228–229, 229; God’s nature in, 224; God’s redemption in, 228–230; God’s responsibility in, 222, 225–226; human responsibility in, 222, 228–230; idolatrous theology in, 221; Ishmael in, 227, 227–228, 231, 234; James in, 221, 223, 235, 235–237, 237–239, 240, 243n68; Job in, 228, 242n25; midrashic foundation for, 222, 231–235; pagan theodicies in, 221, 226–227, 227, 234–235, 239, 240; scholars on, 223–224; suffering in, 231–234, 234–235; Yohanan in, 231–232 Heschel’s pragmatism: commandments and, 239–240; faith in, 237; Frank on, 235–236; human self-pity in, 239; James on, 237–239; paganism and, 239 Heschel’s theodicy: dissent and, 240; James in, 240; paganism and, 240; relevance of, 240; suffering in, 240; Torah and, 240, 244n83 Hess, Moses, 35, 37 high culture, 82–83 higher education, 7, 73, 102n148; authority and, 93; consumption and, 75–76, 93; corporate culture and, 78–79, 79–80, 92, 99n44; creativity and, 93–94;

Index cultural studies in, 78; defensiveness of, 79, 99n49; end of, 76, 77; excellence and, 77–78, 91–92, 98n31, 103n153; grades and, 77, 98n30; human capital in, 79; illness of, 71–72, 75, 91, 97n5; Jewish studies in, 94–95, 96; lifestyles and, 87, 101n114–101n115, 102n134; management and, 103n156; purpose of, 76; radicalism in, 80; resources in, 78; role of, 86–87; self-assertiveness in, 86; teachers of, 91–92, 95–96, 102n127, 103n150; thought in, 99n56; truth and, 79, 99n45; values and, 89, 95–96, 102n133–102n134, 105n180; work load in, 77, 91, 98n31, 103n149. See also Jew of culture Hirsch, Edward, 174–175 Hirschman, Jack, 181n38–182n39 Historical Judaism, 314, 315 history, 19, 21, 32, 110–111, 315; God of, 134, 135–136; for Jewish peoplehood, 22–23; poetry compared to, 159–160, 179n14; in postmodern literature, 146–147 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 200 Holocaust, 8, 131, 152n17, 152n24, 162–163; after-the-Holocaust theology, 133–134, 135; chasm of, 134, 135, 139; deniers of, 147; Jewish heroes and, 225; law and, 163; memory of, 137–138, 139; without poetry, 162; revelation and, 136; rituals, 135, 138–139; Yom HaShoah, 138. See also God related to Holocaust; post-Holocaust literature The Holocaust Novel (Sicher), 174 holy nation (goy kadosh), 82 hope, 7, 43–45, 133, 169; death and, 305, 306, 308–309; in Great House, 143–144, 145. See also Levinas’s hope; otherness and hope; Rorty’s social hope Horkheimer, Max, 40 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, 279n42 human capital, 79 humanism, 74, 88–89, 290, 295; of God, 288–289; in Levinas’s hope, 47–49, 50, 57, 65n109 humanities, 91, 93–94, 105n184 Humboldt, 77 Hutcheon, Linda, 139, 146–147

325

I and Thou (Buber), 42–43, 262, 277n10; duality of human experience in, 263; pupil in, 278n33; relation in, 263–264, 278n25, 278n29 identity, 32–33, 49, 54, 104n178; Birthright Israel for, 24–26; in Catholicism, 36, 37; hyphenism of, 36, 37, 37–38, 58; in Jewish nationalist paradigm, 26, 27; Jewish otherness in, 37; Jewish peoplehood in, 6, 15; of Marranos, 299; in otherness and hope, 36, 37, 39; otherness related to, 33–34, 34; thought and, 1, 2, 6 Ilai, R. Judah b., 230 Illness as Metaphor (Sontag), 97n3 imagination, 54, 58, 206, 207 index, 197–199 Ingold, Tim, 5 The Inoperative Community (Nancy), 80 Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (O’Doherty), 210 intersubjectivity, 261; Buber on, 263–264, 265–266, 266–267, 268, 273; Levinas on, 264–265, 267–268, 273; maternal care and, 268–273. See also parentchild relationship; reciprocity Isaac, 159, 298 Isaiah, 121, 258n1 Ishmael, R., 227, 227–228, 231, 234 Is There a Text in this Class (Fish), 82 Izenberg, Oren, 178n2 James, William, 8–9, 247–248, 258n6, 259n30; in Heschel’s God and evil, 221, 223, 235, 235–237, 237–239, 240, 243n68; on Heschel’s pragmatism, 237–239; in Heschel’s theodicy, 240; pragmatism of, 249. See also healthy versus sick souls Jaspers, Karl, 74 Jennings, Theodore W., Jr., 159 Jerusalem (Mendelssohn), 61n6 Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism (Mendelssohn), 94 Jewish Agency of Israel, 23–25 The Jewish Catalog, 7; accessibility from, 117–118; as artifact, 111–112; circulation of, 111; content of, 112; cover of, 113, 119, 121–122; design of,

326

Index

112–113, 119–120; history related to, 110–111; illustrations of, 119, 120–121, 122; Jewish Education and, 116; margins of, 119–120; marketing of, 118–119, 122–123; notebook presentation of, 123; origins of, 110; paperback presentation of, 118–119; professionalism of, 122–124; readers of, 111–112; sense experience and, 111–112; structure of, 110, 114; success of, 109–110; sukkah building and, 115–116; symbols of, 110, 111, 112, 119–120, 124–125; tradition and, 116; use of, 111, 112, 117–118; Whole Earth Catalog compared to, 114–118 Jewish culture, 34, 114, 214–215; authenticity in, 309; Eisen on, 59; formlessness of, 186; Germany and, 185–186, 191; without homogeneity, 36; otherness and hope in, 32–33; radicalism of, 50; texts compared to, 262 Jewish Kids Catalog, 109 Jewish law. See halakhah Jewish nationalist paradigm, 6, 16, 28n10, 28n18; Achad Ha-am and, 20–21, 25–26; Birthright Israel and, 24–26; diaspora and, 18, 24, 25; identity in, 26, 27; Jewish peoplehood compared to, 19–22, 26, 27; justice in, 24; Kaplan, M., on, 20–22, 22, 24; religious functionalism in, 22; statism compared to, 20; Zionism and, 17–18 Jewish novels, 8; for hope, 133; for Jewish studies, 150–151; Murdoch on, 150; theology in, 132–133, 141, 151n4. See also specific novels Jewish otherness, 41, 57; against cultural homogeneity, 39–40; fascism and, 40; in identity, 37; individualism and, 37 Jewish peoplehood, 6, 17; America for, 19–22; case for, 22–26; definitions of, 15, 16; history for, 22–23; identity and, 6, 15; Israel and, 19, 23; Jewish Agency for, 23–25; Jewish nationalist paradigm compared to, 19–22, 26, 27; Kaplan, M., on, 15, 20, 22, 23, 28n18; mission in, 22–23; term, 16

Jewish photography and aura, 186; absolute in, 188–189; Adorno on, 187, 190, 192, 212; aura and index in, 197–199; aura liquidation in, 188, 189, 189–190, 196, 197, 206, 215n13; chiaroscuro in, 202–203, 207; light and, 206–207; materialism related to, 189, 191, 192; mechanical reproduction in, 190–191; politicization in, 190–191, 192; secularism and, 189–190, 192; time and, 191, 192 Jewish Publication Society (JPS), 7, 109, 118–119, 121, 122–123, 124 Jewish studies, 94–95, 96, 149; authors’ education in, 150; Jewish novels for, 150–151; literary creativity in, 150; scope of, 150–151 Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 1, 313–314, 315, 316, 317 Jewish thought, 186. See also photography and Jewish thought Jew of culture, 7, 73, 92, 102n126, 102n144; definition of, 88, 89; God for, 89; illness of, 90–91; as insideroutsider, 72; orthodoxy and, 89–90; as powerless authority, 85; publication by, 71–72, 97n5; reverence from, 86 “Jews and Photography” (Myers), 205 Job, 135, 224, 228, 242n25 Joris, Pierre, 171; on Celan’s poetry, 160, 163, 170, 180n28–164; Turbulence by, 170 Joseph, 23 Joyce, James, 73, 75 JPS. See Jewish Publication Society JTS. See Jewish Theological Seminary Judaism, 19, 35–36; bourgeois, 302; Christianity compared to, 294–295; particularism of, 34–35, 45–46, 48, 63n52 Judaism as a Civilization (Kaplan, M.), 20, 21, 38 judgment, 85, 96 justice, 24, 59, 65n109, 90; in Rorty’s social hope, 54, 56, 57 “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” (Rorty), 54 Kabbalah, 163, 173, 181n38; Shekhinah and, 221, 241n2

Index Kafka, Franz, 163, 172, 189, 191 “Kafka” (Benjamin), 189 Kandinsky, Wassily, 191, 202 Kant, Immanuel, 48, 76 Kaplan, Edward, 236 Kaplan, Mordecai, 38, 61n12, 61n14, 62n26; Buber compared to, 42, 45; European influences compared to, 19; Heschel and, 226–227; on Jewish nationalist paradigm, 20–22, 22, 24; on Jewish peoplehood, 15, 20, 22, 23, 28n18; Schechter and, 316; on tradition, 248; Zionism and, 20, 21. See also otherness and hope Kaufmann, Walter, 277n10 Keats, John, 83 Kellner, Shaul, 25 Kiekegaard, S., 103n157, 225 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 88, 90 Kligerman, Eric, 170–171 knowledge, 76, 77, 292; from light, 290, 291 Kook, Abraham Yitzhak ha-Cohen, 232, 242n43 Kouwenhoven, John, 111–112 Kracauer, Siegfried, 191 Krauss, Nicole, 8, 132, 141, 216n40. See also Great House Krauss, Rosalind, 198–200, 213 Kurtzer, Yehuda, 137–139, 141, 145–146, 153n31 Lamentations (Felstiner), 168 Lamentations Rabbah, 232–234 language, 166, 214, 277n7, 279n45 Large Glass (Duchamp), 198 Lazarus, Emma, 103n159 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 152n25 Lenz (Buchner), 171–172 Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas (Batnitzky), 95 Levi, Primo, 168 Levinas, Emmanuel, 9, 63n51, 159, 166, 173, 278n25; alterity and, 46, 50, 63n52, 268, 277n22, 278n34; asymmetry of, 265, 267–268; Buber and, 263, 264–265, 277n20; on Buber’s self, 43, 45; feminism and, 274, 274–275; on intersubjectivity, 264–265,

327

267–268, 273; on Judaism’s particularism, 45–46, 48, 63n52; Moyn and, 277n22, 281n61; paternity and, 268, 278n35; reciprocity of, 264–265; religio of, 281n62 Levinas’s hope: alterity in, 46, 50; appeal of, 49–50; autonomy in, 47–48; Buber’s self compared to, 45–46, 47; deference to other in, 46–49; God in, 48–49; Greek perspective in, 46, 48; humanism in, 47–49, 50, 57, 65n109; imperialism in, 47; multiculturalism of, 50; multiplicity of reality in, 47; otherness as family in, 49, 55; self emergence in, 46; thick and thin in, 55; universalism in, 48 Levisohn, Jon A., 258n6 Liberal Judaism, 226 Liebman, Charles, 2–3 light, 217n55, 295–296; Benjamin on, 206; for Folberg, 206–207; for future, 289–290; God in, 290–291, 295; Jewish photography and aura and, 206–207; knowledge from, 290, 291; secularism and, 299; of synagogues, 210–211; vision and, 289 literature: religion and, 133–134, 151n4. See also specific literature types The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 4 The Lonely Man of Faith (Soloveitchik), 248, 257, 258; covenant in, 195–196, 197; Halakhic Man compared to, 194–195; pragmatism in, 259n40; technology in, 195, 197; withdrawal in, 196–197 love, 49, 161, 237; agents of, 56, 57; of children, 269, 270, 298; God and, 100n84, 234, 237, 286, 287, 288, 304; in Rorty’s social hope, 56, 57 Love’s Knowledge (Nussbaum), 132 Lowe, Walter, 306–307 loyalty, 54 Luria, 181n38–182n39 Lyon, 169 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 133 Magid, Shaul, 104n178 Magritte, René, 211–212, 214 Maimonides, 89–90, 91, 316

328

Index

The Making of a Counter Culture (Roszak), 114 “The Making of a Jewish Counter-Culture” (Novak, W.), 114 Malick, Terrence, 205 Manganaro, Marc, 5 Marion, Jean-Luc, 214 The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Menand), 91 Marmur, Michael, 234, 242n25 Marranos, 299, 301 Martin, Agnes, 199–200 Marx, Karl, 33, 86, 103n157; Jewish alienation of, 301, 303; as Marrano, 299, 301; quantitative relations of, 300; science of, 300–301; translation of values from, 299–301; Wyschogrod, M., and, 299–302, 311n39 materialism, 189, 191, 192 maternal case. See parent-child relationship Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Ruddick), 269 May Ray, 198–199 McCarthy, Cormac, 96 McLuhan, Marshall, 194 Meir, Rabbi, 229 Meltzer, David, 181n38–182n39 memory: in Great House, 144–145, 146; of Holocaust, 137–138, 139; rituals and, 137–138; of Temple, 144–145; Yom HaShoah, 138 Menand, Louis, 91 Mendelssohn, Moses, 37, 61n6, 94 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 72 “The Meridian” (Celan), 160, 170, 171, 171–172, 181n38 metaphysics, 133, 194; religion compared to, 253–254; in Rorty’s social hope, 51–53, 64n82–64n83 midrashic foundation, 233–234; Akiva in, 231–232, 232, 233, 234–235; HasanRokem on, 233; for Heschel’s God and evil, 222, 231–235; Yohanan in, 231–232, 232–233 midrashim, 222, 228 Milbank, John, 104n177 Mill, 53 Mishna, 89

Mitchell, Margaret, 91, 103n149 modernity: Messiah related to, 159, 178n6; science and, 193. See also postmodernity money, 300, 301 “Monkey” (Meltzer), 181n38 monotheism, 98n21; of second world culture contestation, 74–75, 81–82 Morgan, David, 6 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 103n154 Moss, David, 113 mothering, 268, 276n4, 276n6–277n7, 280n55. See also childbearing Moyn, Sam, 48, 63n51, 277n22, 281n61 Murdoch, Iris, 133, 150–151 “My Cousin Abe, Paul Antschel and Paul Celan” (Osherow), 175 Myers, William, 205 mysticism, 208, 280n55, 281n61; Schechter and, 317 myth, 23, 27, 85, 200, 266 Naef, Weston, 204 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 80 Nathan, Rabbi, 230 nation, 16, 18, 19, 26, 27, 82 nationalism, 17–18; boundaries and, 18–19, 28n10; in Europe, 17, 26, 41; history for, 21, 22; Jewish peoplehood and, 17; statism and, 17, 18, 20. See also Jewish nationalist paradigm negative capability, 83 neo-pragmatism, 31; Rorty’s social hope and, 53–54, 56, 57–58, 59 New Age religion, 90, 104n178, 205 “The New Colossus” (Lazarus), 103n159 Nietzsche, F., 85, 152n16 Noddings, Nel, 273, 280n52, 280n56 non-instrumental encounter (Begegnung), 45 nosologies, 161 “Notes on the Index” (Krauss, R.), 198, 199 Novak, David, 286, 304 Novak, William, 114, 120, 124 novels, 190. See also Jewish novels Nussbaum, Martha, 132 O’Doherty, Brian, 209–210

Index Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich), 268 O’Keefe, Georgia, 203, 216n53 “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz” (Rorty), 55–56 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin), 189 “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (Bazin), 212 order, 90 The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin), 189 orthodoxy, 289, 302; Jew of culture and, 89–90; Radical, 95, 104n177 Osherow, Jacqueline, 175 otherness, 44, 61n14, 277n22; cultural performances of, 58; as family, 49, 55; identity related to, 33–34; imagination in, 54, 58; misunderstanding about, 52, 52–53, 64n82; post-modern theory on, 33, 50; praxis and, 50; Rorty on, 59, 64n82–64n83; veneration of, 51–52, 54. See also Buber’s self; Jewish otherness; Levinas’s hope otherness and hope, 31, 32, 35, 66n117; cultural identity and, 32–33; democracy in, 36, 38–39, 57, 61n14; identity in, 36, 37, 39; inner freedom in, 38–39; Jewish otherness in, 37, 39–40, 57; Judaism in, 35–36; Judaism’s challenges related to, 41–42; neo-pragmatism and, 31; rhythm of alternation for, 36, 58, 61n12; self-consciousness in, 36; will to live in, 38 Otherwise than Being (Levinas), 277n22 Otto, Rudolf, 89, 258n6 paganism, 62n26, 152n19, 223–224; of first world culture contestation, 73–74, 81; Heschel’s theodicy and, 240; theodicies of, 221, 226–227, 227, 234–235, 239, 240 Pahnke, Walter, 208, 217n65 panentheism, 152n19 parent-child relationship, 262, 272, 276n4, 279n42, 298; centrality of, 262, 276n6–277n7; complexity of, 272–273; feminism and, 273–275; maternal instinct and, 269–270, 271; mutuality

329

in, 271; power and, 262–263; power in, 269–270; protection in, 269–271; Rich on, 268, 271–272; Ruddick on, 269–271. See also asymmetry; reciprocity particularism, 50; of Judaism, 34–35, 45–46, 48, 63n52 A Passion for Truth (Heschel), 225–226 Paul, 159 Paul Celan: A Grave and Mysterious Sentence (Hirsch), 174–175 Peckham, Morse, 174 Peirce, Charles, 198 People Israel, 285–287, 288, 292, 307; as “distancing people”, 82, 85, 101n99 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 42 photography, 213; God and, 202, 207, 214; reality of, 213–214. See also digital photography; Jewish photography and aura; straight photography photography and Jewish thought, 185, 197, 205; grids in, 199–200; isolation in, 199; presence of, 199; reality in, 197–199 Pirkei Avot, 315 Plaskow, Judith, 266–267, 278n28 Plato, 157, 172 Poe, Edgar Allen, 200 poetry, 162, 178n2, 179n16–180n17; authenticity and, 302–303; conflict and, 157; history compared to, 159–160, 179n14. See also Celan’s poetry; specific poems post-Holocaust literature, 139; fictional testimony in, 140–141, 153n44; personal gain in, 140; postmodern literature compared to, 139–140; testimony in, 139–140. See also Celan’s poetry; Great House postmodernity, 133–134 postmodern literature, 139–140, 146–147 post-modern theory, 33, 50 Potok, Chaim, 122–123, 123–124, 124, 127n38 power, 85, 88, 93, 94, 102n126; Brand, S., on, 114, 126n13; of religious institutions, 93, 103n160 pragmatism, 235, 258n5, 259n40; of halakhah of Soloveitchik, 253, 254,

330 255, 256, 257–258; in healthy versus sick souls, 249, 250, 251–252; reality of, 235; suffering and, 247–248. See also Heschel’s pragmatism; neopragmatism Pragmatism (James), 235 praxis, 50, 98n20, 102n134 prayer, 296, 298, 303 presence, 83, 199; in Buber’s self, 43–44; God’s presence, 9, 286–287, 303 “The Primacy of Peoplehood” (Ehrenkrantz), 28n18 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 3 privacy, 88, 101n123 Promey, Sally, 6 “Psalm” (Celan), 172–173 psychology, 161 Putnam, Hilary, 66n117 Rabbinism, 32–33 Radical Orthodoxy, 95, 104n177 Rashi, 316 rationalism, 53, 193 rationality, 65n109; Jewish otherness related to, 41; negative capability and, 83 Rawls, John, 47–48 rayograph, 198–199 Readings, Bill, 75, 79, 91, 94–95, 96; on culture, 78–79, 79–80, 88, 99n56; on excellence, 77–78, 85, 98n31; thought and, 87; value and, 89 realism, 201–202, 212 reality: of evil, 251; of Folberg, 207–208; multiplicity of, 47; negation of, 181n38–182n39; of photography, 213–214; in photography and Jewish thought, 197–199; in postmodern literature, 147; of pragmatism, 235; about synagogues, 211–212 reciprocity, 262; of Buber, 263–264, 265–266, 278n29; complexity of, 272–273; ego and, 264; of Levinas, 264–265; particularity in, 264 redemption, 158–159, 228–230; in Great House, 144–145, 154n52; “not-yet”, 58–59 “Reflex Action and Theism” (James), 237 Reform Judaism, 248, 258n7

Index Reiff, Philip, 58 Reinhardt, Ad, 199–200 religion: care and, 273; from Folberg, 207, 213; literature and, 133–134, 151n4; metaphysics compared to, 253–254; New Age, 90, 104n178, 205. See also specific religions religion and technology, 191, 205; interface between, 192–193; Myers on, 205; oscillation between, 196; rationalism in, 193; Soloveitchik on, 192–194, 195–197. See also halakhah “Religion & Literature”, 151n4 Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (Cohen, H.), 94 religious culture, 89–90 Renan, Ernst, 16–17, 18, 21, 26 repentance, 83–84 Resnikoff, 162 Rethinking Modern Judaism (Eisen), 93, 262 revelation, 84, 136 Rich, Adrienne, 268, 271–272 Richter, Gerhard, 188 Ricoeur, Paul, 160 Rieff, Philip, 7, 81, 85, 98n20, 101n115; publications and, 71, 97n1–97n2; truth and, 75. See also culture contestation; higher education; Jew of culture; specific publications Ritual and Its Consequences (Seligman), 5 rituals, 5, 73, 88; experimentation with, 139, 153n35; Holocaust, 135, 138–139; memory and, 137–138. See also Temple sacrifices Robinson, Henry Peach, 200, 201–202, 206, 213 Roof, Wade Clark, 117 Rorty, Richard, 7, 31–32, 50; on Geertz, 55–56; on otherness, 59, 64n82–64n83 Rorty’s social hope, 59; against banality, 56, 65n107; correspondence theory and, 51; democracy in, 51, 52, 53; diversity in, 54; Enlightenment in, 51, 53; fascism and, 53; identity in, 54; imagination in, 54; imperialism and, 51; justice in, 54, 56, 57; love in, 56, 57; loyalty in, 54; martyrs and, 55; metaphysics in, 51–53, 64n82–64n83;

Index neo-pragmatism and, 53–54, 56, 57–58, 59; progress in, 54; rationalism in, 53; reforms in, 54; religious oppression and, 54, 65n92; statecraft compared to soulcraft in, 55; terminology in, 51–53, 57–58, 64n82–64n83; utopia in, 54; veneration of otherness in, 51–52, 54 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 158–159 Rosensweig, Franz, 40, 72, 131, 158–159 Rosh Chodesh, 153n35 Roskies, David, 150 Roszak, Theodore, 114 Rothenberg, Jerome, 160, 162, 179n16–180n17, 182n39 Rubenstein, Richard, 134, 135, 152n15–152n16; After Auschwitz, 135, 152n18; Heschel compared to, 224–225, 226, 227, 237, 239; Job and, 224; paganism and, 152n19, 223–224 Ruddick, Sara, 269, 273–274, 276n6, 279n42, 280n52, 280n55; maternal choice from, 269, 270–271 Ruin the Sacred Truths (Bloom), 79 Sachs, Nelly, 161 The Sacred Canopy (Berger), 74 Sarna, Jonathan, 122, 127n38 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 72 “Saving the Soul” (Heschel), 227 Savran, George, 110, 114, 116, 116–117, 123–124. See also The Jewish Catalog Schechter, Solomon: Catholic Israel of, 314–315, 315, 316, 317; Kaplan, M., and, 316; mysticism and, 317; pluralities of, 313–314; Zionism for, 317 Schneerson, Menahem Mendel, 178n6, 179n9 science, 193; evolutionary biology, 279n42; of Marx, 300–301; orthodoxy and, 302; psychology, 161 “Science as Vocation” (Weber), 74 Second Temple destruction, 138–139 second world culture contestation, 74–75, 81–83, 84, 88 A Secular Age (Taylor), 83, 104n177 secularism, 178n3, 179n16–180n17, 299; Jewish photography and aura and, 189–190, 192; in third world culture

331

contestation, 74, 84, 86, 100n70, 101n108; transgressions and, 83–84; truth and, 84 self, 46, 83; alternation for, 36, 58, 61n12; God and, 81, 99n62; otherness and, 33. See also Buber’s self self-assertiveness, 86 self-consciousness, 36 Self-Consuming Artifacts (Fish), 82 self emergence, 46 self-pity, 239 Seligman, Adam, 5 “A Seminary as Witness” (Schechter), 316, 317 sense perception, 289. See also vision Shamyim al Haaretz: Al HaHayim HaPnimiyim shel Hayehudi beMizrach Eyropa. See The Heavens on Earth: On the Inner Life of the Jew in Eastern Europe Shapiro, Harvey, 168 Shapiro, Susan, 139–140, 153n39 Sharansky, Natan, 23 Shestack, Jerome J., 118 Shoah. See Holocaust “A Short History of Photography” (Benjamin), 206 Shulchan Aruch (Caro), 110–111 Shuva (Kurtzer), 137 Sicher, Efraim, 174 Siegel, Richard, 115, 115–116, 116–117, 120; editorship of, 123–124; thesis by, 110, 114, 116, 117, 123. See also The Jewish Catalog Six-Day War, 136, 147 Socrates, 172 Sofer, Moses (Chatam), 73 Soloveitchik, Joseph, 8, 9, 187, 212, 247; Adam of, 195, 203; Benjamin compared to, 196, 197; Halakhic Man, 194–195; influences on, 248; The Lonely Man of Faith, 194–197, 248, 257, 258, 259n40; on religion and technology, 192–194, 195–197. See also halakhah of Soloveitchik; suffering Sontag, Susan, 97n3 Soulen, R. Kendall, 305

332

Index

Spinoza, 74, 91–92, 178n3; as healthy versus sick soul, 249, 258n11, 258n13 spirit (Geist, Volkgeist), 33, 41, 158 Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig), 158–159 statism, 17, 18, 20, 28n7 Steig, William, 120–121 Steinberg, Saul, 120–121 Steinschneider, Moritz, 79 Stern, Carl, 236 Stieglitz, Alfred, 8, 187; for straight photography, 200, 201–203 Stolow, Jeremy, 191 “The Storyteller”, 189–190, 215n13 straight photography, 213; Corn on, 203; darkness in, 202–204; democracy and, 200–201; without pictorialism, 200, 202; realism of, 201–202, 212; Robinson on, 201–202; spiritualism of, 201–204; Stieglitz for, 200, 201–203; Strand and, 201; truth in, 200, 201–202. See also Jewish photography and aura; photography and Jewish thought Strand, Paul, 201 Strassfeld, Michael, 110, 124 Strassfeld, Sharon, 110, 118, 124 “Stretto” (“Engführung”) (Celan), 163, 165–166 Studies in Judaism (Schechter), 314–315 suffering, 240, 250, 256; dignity in, 257, 259n40; in Heschel’s God and evil, 231–234, 234–235; James’ religious experience compared to, 247–248; pragmatism and, 247–248; success over, 257–258. See also halakhah of Soloveitchik Sukkot, 230; sukkah building, 115–116 Suleiman, Susan, 276n3 synagogues: of Folberg, 208–212; interiors of, 209–210, 211; light of, 210–211; reality about, 211–212; space and, 210; technology for, 211–212; tension about, 209; Universal Synagogue, 314–315 Szondi, Peter, 163, 164 Talmud, 89, 174; Bava Batra, 207; literal meaning of, 242n43–243n44 Tarfon, Rabbi, 59

Taylor, Charles, 74, 83, 84, 88–89, 104n177 technology, 194, 205; anti-empiricism of, 193; aura and, 208; of digital photography, 204–205, 208; in The Lonely Man of Faith, 195, 197; for synagogues, 211–212. See also religion and technology Temple, 144–145 Temple sacrifices: circumcision compared to, 298; darkness of, 297, 298–299; prayer compared to, 296, 298, 303; transference in, 297–299; vision of, 296–299 theodicies: pagan, 221, 226–227, 227, 234–235, 239, 240. See also Heschel’s theodicy theology, 131, 132, 136, 306–307; afterthe-Holocaust, 133–134, 135; aggadictheological pluralism in, 221–222, 227–228, 235; in Jewish novels, 132–133, 141, 151n4 therapy, 87, 88, 101n114–101n115 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 191 Thick and Thin, 54, 55 Thiel, Peter, 104n168 third world culture contestation, 80, 82, 83, 85, 88, 103n152; secularism in, 74, 84, 86, 100n70, 101n108 “This is not a Pipe” (Magritte), 211–212 thought, 1, 6, 87, 99n56, 186; culture and, 2, 10. See also photography and Jewish thought Thou-ness. See otherness and hope Tillich, Paul, 135, 214 time, 160; in Great House, 148, 148–149; Jewish photography and aura and, 191, 192 Time and the Other (Levinas), 264 “Todesfuge.”. See “Death Fugue” topical halakhah of Soloveitchik, 254–255 Torah, 314; Deuteronomy, 82, 100n84; Exodus, 82, 138, 228–229, 229; Genesis, 292, 298; Greek philosophy compared to, 292–293; Heschel’s theodicy and, 240, 244n83; Wyschogrod, M., compared to, 292–293

Index Torah from Heaven as Reflected Through the Generations (Torah min haShamayim be-aspaqlarya shel hadorot) (Heschel), 222, 226–227, 230, 234, 240, 241n3 totalitarianism, 49, 50, 65n109 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 263, 264–265, 267–268 Trachtenberg, Alan, 201 tradition, 131, 248; Catholic Israel and, 314, 315; history compared to, 315; The Jewish Catalog and, 116; in text, 134 transgressions, 83–84, 84–85 trauma: anxiety and, 161; of Celan, 158, 161, 168, 180n18 The Trial (Kafka), 191 Trilling, Lionel, 4–6 truth, 75, 102n127, 225–226, 255; Celan’s poetry as, 160, 162, 169; higher education and, 79, 99n45; justice related to, 90; secularism and, 84; in straight photography, 200, 201–202 T. Sotah 15:11-15, 138 Turbulence (Joris), 170 Tylor, E. B., 3–4, 5, 5–6 The Unavowable Community (Blanchot), 80 Understanding the Sick and Healthy (Rosenzweig), 72 University in Ruins (Readings), 75 values: authority and, 92, 103n157; higher education and, 89, 95–96, 102n133–102n134, 105n180; translation of, 299–301 The Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 236, 247 vertical authority, 87, 89–90, 101n115 vision: body and, 292–293; desire related to, 289; of God, 297; knowledge and, 290, 292; light and, 289; metaphor of, 290–291; opacity with, 291, 293; reason related to, 292–293, 294; of Temple sacrifices, 296–299 vision and chosenness, 308–309, 309–310; Abraham’s descendants in, 304; death in, 304–306; incarnational theology in, 306–307

333

visual culture, 6 Volkgeist. See spirit Waldrop, Rosemarie, 181n35 Walzer, Michael, 4, 54 war: Six-Day War, 136, 147; Yom Kippur War, 147–149 Waters, Lindsay, 103n154, 105n182 Weber, Max, 2, 74, 80, 87, 96, 97n1 Weimar Moment, 157 Weinryb, Bernard, 113 Whole Earth Catalog, 109, 114, 115, 116–118; appearance of, 114–115; purpose of, 115; structure of, 114; symbol of, 115, 116 Wiesel, Elie, 136 Wieseltier, Leon, 76–77 Williams, C. K., 176–177 Williams, Raymond, 3 The Will to Believe (James), 236, 243n68 Wissenschaft (knowledge), 77; Wissenschaft des Judentums, 34–35, 41 Wolfson, Eliot, 173 Woods, Mary, 216n53 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), 188 Wuthnow, Robert, 117 Wyschogrod, Edith, 100n70, 281n62 Wyschogrod, Michael, 9, 100n70, 286, 308; Buber compared to, 293; on Christianity, 294–295, 303, 304, 306–307; Heschel compared to, 288–289; Marx and, 299–302, 311n39; subtitles for, 285; Torah compared to, 292–293. See also authenticity; vision and chosenness Yerushalmi, Yosef, 137, 153n31 Yohanan, R., 231–232, 232–233 Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), 138 Young, James, 153n44 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 178n3 Zakhor (Yerushalmi), 137 Zangwill, Israel, 103n159 Zelig (film), 86

334

Index

Zionism, 6, 24, 28n7; American, 17; European nationalism compared to, 17; Jewish nationalist paradigm and,

17–18; Kaplan, M., and, 20, 21; for Schechter, 317 Zukofsky, 162

About the Contributors

Mara Benjamin is assistant professor of religion at St. Olaf College. Her first book, Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (2009), examines the high stakes, both theological and political, of Franz Rosenzweig’s attempt to craft a modern textual identity for Jews using the Hebrew Bible. Her current project is a constructive investigation of the theological and ethical significance of childrearing and how it can inform contemporary Jewish thought. Zachary Braiterman is professor of religion in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (2007), (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (1998), and is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era (2012). Arnold M. Eisen, one of the world’s foremost authorities on American Judaism, is the seventh chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary. Since taking office in 2007, he has transformed the education of religious, pedagogical, professional, and lay leaders for Conservative Judaism and the vital religious center of North American Jewry, and enhanced JTS’s notable reputation and global reach. Gregory Kaplan is the founding CEO of Bridge21 Publications and honorary research associate at University of Hong Kong. He has written numerous articles and chapters on modern Jewish thought. Lately he has turned his attention to Chinese philosophy and Creative Industries. His book, Hallowing Days: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on Living Between the Secular and the Sacred is forthcoming. 335

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About the Contributors

Leonard V. Kaplan was the Mortimer Jackson Professor of Law and is now emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry and a past president of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health. He is series editor of Graven Images, a book series with Lexington Press (Roman & Littlefield) which he previously co-edited with Prof. Andrew Weiner. He co-edited two books in that series: Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State with Professor Charles L. Cohen, and The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology and Law with Professor Rudy Koshar. Ari Y Kelman is the inaugural Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies in the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. He is the author of Station Identification: a Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (2009) and the editor of a volume of the work of cartoonist Milt Gross (2009). He is also the co-author of Sacred Strategies (2010), a study of synagogue transformation efforts in the United States and winner of the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Jewish Education and Identity. In collaboration with Steven M. Cohen, Ari has authored a number of studies of contemporary American Jewish culture addressing issues from Israel to the internet. His research focuses on the ways in which people encounter, assimilate, and make sense of Jewish culture in extra-scholastic settings. Ken Koltun-Fromm is professor of religion at Haverford College where he teaches courses in modern Jewish thought and material religion. His publications include Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (2001), Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (2006), and Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (2010), all with Indiana University Press. He is currently preparing a manuscript (Visual Authenticity in American Jewish Thought) exploring how American Jewish thinkers deploy visual discourse to make claims about religious authenticity. Akiba Lerner is assistant professor of religion and Theology at Santa Clara University where he teaches courses on Jewish thought, prophetic politics, and film. He has published on Jewish thought and is currently completing a manuscript on redemptive hope. Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies and International Studies at the University of Washington. His research interests include American Jewish thought, the history of Zionism, and contemporary Jewish life. Pianko’s first book, Zionism and the Roads not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (2010) explored the diversity of early twentieth century

About the Contributors

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expressions of Zionism. He is currently working on a manuscript titled, The Jewish People, which traces the emergence and evolution of this key term in American Jewish life. A Wexner Graduate Fellow, Pianko received his PhD from Yale University. Einat Ramon is a senior lecturer in Jewish thought, Jewish women studies, and Jewish family and community studies at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem. She is the founder and primary supervisor of the Marpheh Program, the first and currently only academic training program of spiritual care practitioners in Israel. She is also the chairperson of the standardization committee at the Israeli Network of Spiritual Care. Her book, A New Life: Religion, Motherhood and Supreme Love in the Thought of A. D. Gordon (in Hebrew) appeared in 2007. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and two children. Jessica Rosenberg is a graduate of Oberlin College and Stanford University. Her dissertation, entitled “Blessed Is He Who Says and Does,” explores contemporary response literature and how its rhetoric frames the ideal Jewish subject as male. Her ongoing research focuses on Modern Orthodox identity, Jewish thought and halakhah. Claire E. Sufrin is lecturer in religious studies and Jewish studies at Northwestern University, where she teaches courses in modern Jewish thought, American Judaism, post-Holocaust theology, and religion and literature. She has published articles on the philosopher Martin Buber’s writings on the Hebrew Bible and on feminist theology.