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Translator's Preface Translator’s Preface It is over sixty years since Isaac Heinemann wrote his monumental work Ta’amei Ha-Mitzvot, based on his lectures at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau in the 1930s. Yet barriers of language and cultural frame-of- reference have denied this work the influence it rightly should have had in Jewish thought. There are echoes of his approach in the method and writings of Abraham J. Heschel and Seymour Siegel, but the contemporary discussion of halakhic authority still has much to learn from his analytical approach and his scholarship on this topic. Isaac Heinemann (1876–1957) was a leading humanistic and Judaic scholar who enriched his generation’s understanding of Hellenistic and rabbinic Jewish thought in his important studies on Philo and the Aggadah of the rabbis, and his many years of teaching in Europe and in Israel. His Darkhei Ha-Aggadah (“The Ways of the Aggadah”) still stands as a leading appreciation of the relation of form and message in rabbinic non-legal litera- ture. The current volume turns to the legal thought of the rabbis as understood by many generations of pre-modern Jewish thinkers. It addresses a central topic that is vital to the substance of Jewish religious life in all its forms, under whatever denominational label (or lack thereof) it may be practiced. Heinemann represented a traditionalism that did not align itself strictly with the modern party lines of Jewry. He taught at one of the institutions of European Conservative Judaism final and had his work published in Israel by the youth movement of Mizrahi, representing modern Ortho- doxy. Volu me II of his work treats with equal respect the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Zechariah Frankel, and Franz Rosenzweig. The line that he drew was between those who did and did not accept the binding character of the body of traditional halakha as a whole, putting him at odds with Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Reform Judaism generally, but this was an opposition born of principle, not simply party affiliation. The relationship of his position to that of Mordecai Kaplan (to take the leading theorist of a positive approach to Jewish observance on the basis of its being non-revealed sancta of the Jewish people rather than the reveal- ed explicit will of God) is more complex. Both Heinemann and Kaplan xv Leonard Levin appreciated the insights of Max Kadushin into the practical-ethical orientation of rabbinic thought. Heinemann nowhere mentions Kaplan but condemns by implication all who disbelieve the revealed status of the mitzvot. At the same time, Heinemann is very appreciative of the Hellenistic thinkers Philo and Josephus, who (he remarks with wonderment) called Moses the legislator of the Torah, by analogy with Solon and other famous legislators of different nations in the Hellenistic world. Heinemann correct- ly appreciates that the difference between the Hellenistic thinkers and the rabbis on this point can be traced to their different placement in the Hellenistic multicultural milieu. The same difference led Philo and Josephus to stress the autonomous-based reasons for observing the mitzvot, in contrast to the heteronomous emphasis of the rabbis. It may be a stretch to call Philo and Josephus Kaplanians before their time. But it is not at all far- fetched to find in the range of positions sketched by Heinemann ample precedents to illuminate and inform the diversity of positions in contem- porary Jewish thought on the rationale of Jewish observance. But to appreciate Heinemann, we must understand him starting from his own presuppositions. Heinemann was a supernaturalist. God gave com- mands to the people of Israel, some more “rational” (the mishpatim), others apparently less amenable to reason (the hukkim ). If by “autonomy” we mean the self-legislation by human beings based on human reason, then human beings can agree with the binding character of the mishpatim from a standpoint of autonomy, whereas they can only accept the validity of the hukkim from a heteronomous acceptance of the “yoke” of divine authority. But this is only the start of the game, for the real challenge of the intellectual enterprise called ta’amei ha-mitzvot (“the reasons for the commandments”) is to reveal how the hukkim also can be explained rationally, in whole or in part. The divine origin of the hukkim is an assumption that is basic to the thought-system of the rabbis and the medieval philosophers whose views are the principal subject matter of this volume. If reasons can be offered for the hukkim, these are reasons that obtain from the divine point of view: they are God’s reasons. But the fact that we are able to intuit and analyze them is based on the fact that reason is a common feature of God and humanity, a part (maybe the central part, along with moral consciousness) of our being created in the divine image. So they are human reasons as well. Are they “necessary and sufficient” reasons? Perhaps not. Perhaps only in the case of the mishpatim is the connection between reason and the law so necessary and direct. Even if rational, there is an aspect of contingency that clings to the hukkim, even when rationally understood. Part of this contingency is historical. A good many of the mitzvot are rooted in ancient history, whether the pre-history of the creation of the world or the proto- history of the creation of the nation of Israel out of the crucible of the Exodus xvi Translator’s Preface and conquest. The Exodus need not have happened in the first place (in fact, some claim it did not happen, or did not happen as reported—but we need not enter that controversy here). But having happened (or the memory having been implanted in the Jewish people of its occurrence—whether wholly historical or not, that memory still remains formative of Jewish identity), it becomes a necessary ingredient in the definition of Israel as a nation and Judaism as a historical religion. In that sense it is “necessary” in the sense that what is done cannot be undone, and the future must be built upon the foundation of the memory of the past. And the action of Jews as Jews must be a response to the remembered historical reality that has brought them to this point. Another part of the contingency is historical on a different level. The prohibition of pork and meat-milk mixtures has no explicit reference to events in Jewish history (and the prohibition of the sciatic nerve has reference only to a mythical event). Nevertheless, the very fact of the prohibition itself is a part of Jewish history—that, and the fact that Jews have suffered ostracism, persecution, and death for their obedience to this prohibition, so that it has become a proverbial marker of Jewish identity. Still, the complex of dietary laws has also been one of the richest lodes of speculation over the inherent rationality of the mitzvot. Are they for medical reasons? To inculcate moderation of the appetites? Astrological? Ethical-symbolic (milk symbolizing the maternal love of the mother animal for its young)? Pedagogic? Every thinker and every generation comes up with different reasons, and has its own preferred taste for liking certain explanations and rejecting others. Maimonides was of two minds about the perfect rationality of behavioral norms, whether ethical or ritual. On the one hand, he did not regard ethical inquiry (or the related enterprise of finding reasons for commanded beha- viors in general) as on the same intellectual level as physics and metaphysics. Physics and metaphysics achieved objective truth; ethics (“the knowledge of good and evil”) was more on the level of opinion, and Adam made a bad bargain in rejecting the former in order to gain the latter. Such is Maimonides’ reading of the Eden narrative, as narrated in Chapter 2 of Book I of the Guide of the Perplexed. There may have been an element of tongue-in-cheek to this interpretation; nevertheless, it accords with his rejecting Saadia’s doctrine that there are “rational commandments.” Moses may have been the wisest legislator of all (according to the more radical esoteric interpretation of Maimonides’ theory of prophecy in the Guide), yet even the wisest legislation has an element of improvisation and concession to historical circumstance (as in Maimonides’ famous explanation that the Torah’s commandment of sacrifices was a concession to the ritual custom of the ancient world). On the other hand, in Part III of the Guide Maimonides made the most thoroughgoing effort in all of history (at least up to that time) to find a basis xvii Leonard Levin in reason for all of the mitzvot of the Torah. God does nothing purposeless, nothing in vain. Hence, all the mitzvot must have a rational purpose; it is only a shortcoming of our own reason and ingenuity if we fail to find it. And find it they did—for centuries, in many different ways. Heinemann is at his best in giving as full an inventory as he can of the various reasons given by the medievals for the traditional mitzvot. He categorizes them in different ways in different parts of his book. At the outset, he finds four kinds of reasons: scientific, apologetic, theoretical-religious, and practical-religious. In hindsight, he discovers an additional threefold classification: intellectual, practical, and emotional. Either way, there are different kinds of reasons be- cause there are different kinds of human beings in a religious community. Some are driven by the desire to understand, some by emotional involvement, some by the joy of practical participation. It is the nature of religious obser- vances to be complex and multi-faceted, to satisfy different people in different ways.
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