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 . 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 final and had his work published in Israel by the youth movement of Mizrahi, representing modern Ortho- doxy. Volume 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 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 (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 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 hukkim 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 hukkim, 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 hukkim, 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; (“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. Thus all these categories of reason will have some validity in explaining the value of the religious observance for different kinds of people. But at this point, Heinemann’s analysis, which was started on the assumption that the mitzvot are to be taken as divinely revealed, becomes relevant as well to people who are not wholly comfortable with that assumption. Divine reason and human reason have after all a common aspect; what is rational to God is rational to human beings as well. Thus, divine reasons may be able to work equally well when reclassified as human reasons, even when the divine origin of the mitzvot is doubted. On a theory of human authorship, the speculative answers that the medievals offered as to the reasons God commanded the mitzvot can serve us at least in part as a suggestion of the reasons human beings devised the mitzvot, or why the mitzvot work in the context of a religious community. At this point we may take Heinemann’s methodology a step further. He allowed a pluralism of approaches among the intellectualists, emo- tivists, and pragmatists in the theorization of the reasons of the mitzvot, but stopped short of granting parity as between supernaturalists and humanists. However, the reality in today’s Jewish community (and by extension, in the Western community comprising religious believers and secularists) is that from this point forward, we are never going to get a total consensus around one religious outlook. Traditionalists, believing that God commanded the mitzvot of the Torah, and religious humanists, ascribing the Torah to human authorship, are going to have to live together in community and come to accommodation with each other. How, then, will they be able to achieve this? The dual divine-human aspect of the “reasons of the mitzvot” may help bridge this gap between supernaturalists and naturalists in today’s Jewish community. A community is, after all, united by practice more than by

xviii Translator’s Preface belief. Different members can attach different meanings to common obser- vances, and (following the Talmudic paradigm) intellectual disagreements can be framed within a common rubric so long as the differing parties accord each other legitimacy and are united by common commitments and concerns. There is certainly plenty of diversity and disagreement among the thinkers Heinemann presents in this study; he may forgive us if we extend his tolerance for diversity one step beyond the point where he was willing to apply it. Still, one may demur: Can there be a mitzvah for a naturalist? If the Torah is conceived by some as humanly authored, what is their notion of “commanded”? Here, too, we can learn from Heinemann. He shows us how in the Bible itself, some mitzvot are heteronomous whereas others are autonomous. Cain is condemned for murdering Abel, although there was no utterance from God “You shall not kill” until after the Flood. “The blood of your brother’s blood cries up from the ground.” Some imperatives are so obvious that they do not need to be spelled out or ascribed to a specific author. When Moses realizes he stands on holy ground, he takes off his shoes. When the sailors of Jonah’s ship perceive the storm, they cry out to God. And when a Jew sees a tradition—laden with the wisdom of the ages and testifying to the glory of God—in need of maintenance and perpetuation, he steps in and commits himself to it. The Jew, face to face with the tradition and feeling responsible to the situation, feels responsible to God in that situation—this is one meaning of “being commanded,” which Rosenzweig (who was no fundamentalist) especially taught us to appreciate. The Torah confronts us as a black box. It has a label on it: “Ingredients: xx% of divine authorship, yy% of human authorship”—only the numbers are rubbed out and illegible. Some of us maximize the divine factor, others the human factor. This is a disagreement over the unknown and unknowable. We are responsible in any case to do what we conceive as our duty to God, based on the best knowledge available, which is incomplete. The study of the “reasons of the mitzvot” gives us clarity to guide us in this murky enterprise. Our God-given reason is the best instrument we have for understanding the Torah and for arriving at knowledge of right and wrong—and these two must correlate positively, for it is as a guide to right and wrong that we turn to the Torah in the first place. Fortunately, we are not unaided in our search; many have gone before us in a similar quest. It is to aid us in that search that Heinemann has provided this guide to the thinkers of Judaism on the “reasons of the commandments.”

Leonard Levin New York, November, 2007

xix Leonard Levin

Acknowledgments

This translation is a revision of a draft prepared jointly by the members of my class in “Reasons for the Mitzvot,” Cecelia Beyer, Loren Chachkes, Daniel Dorsch, Philip Ohriner, Ita Paskind, and Jeremy Ruberg, in the theological seminar of the Rabbinical School of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York) in Fall, 2006. The six students all par- ticipated with great enthusiasm and each contributed his or her weekly installment on the chapter or thinker of the week, which I then revised to improve accuracy while leaving the style of each author intact in the original draft. For the penultimate draft I took on with mixed feelings the role of the Redactor, overriding the stylistic diversity of the original in favor of greater uniformity, but the original character peeks through in places. Thus the ordinary reader will probably view this as a unified work, while those more skilled in “Higher Criticism” may be able to parse out the J,E,P,D composite character of the text. Some of the collaborators may feel slighted at my considerable (but not complete) overlaying of their individual voices, but I am grateful to all of them for providing the groundwork of the first draft that made my task in preparing this version so much easier. I am also grateful to Judy Cohen for performing the final copy-editing on the English text of this work, and to Laura Shelley for preparing the indexes.

A Note on Notes

There are three kinds of notes to this book. Notes have been placed at the bottom of the page when they add materially to the argument made in the adjacent text and may be of interest to the general reader; these are subdivided into Heinemann’s original notes (generally marked “IH”) and my own amplifications to (and occasionally dissent from) his arguments (marked “LL”). Any unmarked notes at the bottom of the text are Heinemann’s. Additionally, there are notes primarily of interest to the scholar, making reference to the primary and secondary sources documenting Heinemann’s claims; these have been relegated to the end of the volume.

L. L. The Reasons for the Commandments in Jewish Thought

From the Bible to the Renaissance