Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy

Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy

Edited by

Elliot R. Wolfson (New York University) Christian Wiese (University of Frankfurt) Hartwig Wiedebach (University of Zurich)

VOLUME 23

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sjjt Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century

Personal Reflections

Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jewish philosophy for the twenty-first century : personal reflections / by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes. pages cm. — (Supplements to the Journal of Jewish thought and philosophy ; volume 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-27961-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-27962-9 (e-book) 1. Jewish philosophy—21st century. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor.

B5800.J49 2014 181’.06—dc23 2014020416

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Acknowledgements ix Contributors x

Introduction: Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century 1 Aaron W. Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

1 The Historian as Thinker: Reflections on (Jewish) Intellectual History 11 Asher D. Biemann

2 After Germany: An American Jewish Philosophical Manifesto 42 Zachary J. Braiterman

3 Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being toward Death 61 James A. Diamond

4 Jewish Philosophy: Living Language at Its Limits 81 Cass Fisher

5 Toward a Synthetic Philosophy 101 Lenn Evan Goodman

6 Jewish Philosophy Tomorrow: Post-Messianic and Post-Lachrymose 119 Warren Zev Harvey

7 Transgressing Boundaries: Jewish Philosophy and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict 133 Aaron W. Hughes

8 Philosophy, the Academy, and the Future of Jewish Learning 152 Claire E. Katz

9 Revisioning the Jewish Philosophical Encounter with Christianity 172 Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover vi contents

10 Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Jewish Piety 205 Shaul Magid

11 Otherness and a Vital Jewish Religious Identity 229 Ephraim Meir

12 The Need for Jewish Philosophy 248 Alan Mittleman

13 Historicity, Dialogical Philosophy, and Moral Normativity: Discovering the Second Person 266 Michael L. Morgan

14 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Jewish Philosophers of Encounter 296 Michael D. Oppenheim

15 A Shadowed Light: Continuity and New Directions in Jewish Philosophy 319 Sarah Pessin

16 Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences 343 Heidi M. Ravven

17 God Accused: Jewish Philosophy as Antitheodicy 358 Bruce Rosenstock

18 Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 372 Tamar Ross

19 Toward a New Jewish Philosophy: From Metaphysics to Praxis 391 Avi Sagi

20 A Plea for Transcendence 410 Kenneth Seeskin

21 The Preciousness of Being Human: Jewish Philosophy and the Challenge of Technology 428 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson contents vii

22 In Search of Eternal Israel: Back to an Intellectual Journey 458 Shmuel Trigano

23 Skepticism and the Philosopher’s Keeping Faith 481 Elliot R. Wolfson

Index 517

Acknowledgements

Although the idea behind this volume originated in 2008, it took some time to materialize into a solid book proposal and find an appropriate home. We wish to thank the editors of Brill Academic Publishers, especially Jennifer Pavelko, for their continual support of our work on Jewish philosophy in the contemporary world. Their interest in the project could not have been possible without the commitment of Elliot R. Wolfson, the editor of the series Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, in which this volume appears. We are very grateful to Professor Wolfson for accepting our book for publication in his distinguished series. Editing volumes, especially one of this size, takes a lot of work. We could not have done it without the expert copyediting of Mary Lou Bertucci, whose attention to minute details has been superb and with whom it has been a pleasure to work. Thanks are also due to Ina Gravitz, the 2013–2014 President of the American Society for Indexing, for the compilation of the Index. Finally, we wish to thank the contributors to the volume, all of whom accepted our challenge to participate in a rather unconventional project that asked them both to share and theorize the personal dimension of their professional and academic journeys. Their subsequent reflections on their individual paths to Jewish philosophy and their articulations of both the challenges to and tasks of Jewish philosophy today are, we firmly believe, of universal interest. We hope that the volume will invigorate the field of Jewish philosophy by inspiring readers to respond to the reflections presented herein. Contributors

Asher D. Biemann is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches modern Jewish thought and intellectual history. He is the author of a critical edition of Martin Buber’s Sprachphilosophische Schriften (2003), as well as of Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (2009) and Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme (2012), both of which appeared with Stanford University Press.

Zachary J. Braiterman is a professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (2007) and (God) after Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post Holocaust Jewish Thought (1998). He is also the coeditor of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era (2012).

James A. Diamond is the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy and exegesis and has published widely on all aspects of Jewish thought. His previous publications include Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in the Guide of the Perplexed (2002), Converts, Heretics and Lepers: Maimonides and the Insider (2007), and Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (2014).

Cass Fisher is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on philosophical questions regarding Jewish theological language. His first book, Contemplative Nation: A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language (2012), draws on resources from philosophical hermeneutics and analytic religious epistemology to construct a new model for understanding Jewish theology. His essays on rabbinic theology and modern Jewish thought have appeared in the Journal of Religion, Modern Judaism, and several edited collections. contributors xi

Lenn Evan Goodman is a professor of philosophy and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, who works in metaphysics and ethics. He is a specialist in Jewish and Islamic philosophies and has written widely on theology, law, and philosophy of nature. His most recent books include Creation and Evolution (2011); his Gifford Lectures, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself (2012); and the forthcoming Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body, coauthored with D. Gregory Caramenico.

Warren Zev Harvey is professor emeritus in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has taught since 1977. He studied philosophy at Columbia University (PhD 1973) and taught at McGill University before moving to Jerusalem. He is the author of more than 150 studies in medieval and modern Jewish philosophy. Among his publications is Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas (1998). He is the recipient of the EMET Prize given in Israel in 2009.

Aaron W. Hughes is the Philip S. Bernstein Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester. He specializes in Jewish philosophy and theory and method in the academic study of religion. Recent books include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (2012), The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (2013), and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (2014).

Claire E. Katz is a professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at Texas A & M University, where she also directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She teaches and conducts research at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and gender; and focuses on modern Jewish philosophy, philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, contemporary French philosophy, and feminist theory. She is the author of An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2014), Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (2013), and Levinas, Judaism and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (2003). She is also the editor of Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments (2005).

Martin Kavka is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of xii contributors

Philosophy (2007), which was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought in 2008. He has also coedited four books, including Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology (2014), and coedits the Journal of Religious Ethics.

Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies and a professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he teaches Jewish mysticism, Jewish thought, contemporary American and comparative religion. He is the author of From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbalah (2008), American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (2013), and Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity and the Interpretation of Scripture (2014).

Ephraim Meir is a professor of modern Jewish philosophy and chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is also Levinas Guest Professor for Dialogical Philosophy and Interreligious Theology at Hamburg University, Germany. Among his recent books are Differenz und Dialog (2011), Between Heschel and Buber (2012, with Alexander Even-Chen), and Dialogical Thought and Identity (2013).

Alan Mittleman is a professor of modern Jewish thought at the Jewish Seminary in New York. He works in the fields of ethics, political theory, and German-Jewish intellectual history and is the author, most recently, of Human Nature and Jewish Thought (forthcoming), A Short History of Jewish Ethics (2011), and Hope in a Democratic Age (2009).

Michael L. Morgan is the Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies (emeritus) at Indiana University-Bloomington and an honorary professor of the Australian Catholic University. His work ranges over ancient Greek philosophy, Jewish philosophy, the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, and political thought. He is the author and editor of many books, including Beyond Auschwitz (2001), Discovering Levinas (2007), the Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas (2011), and Fackenheim’s Jewish Philosophy (2013). contributors xiii

Michael D. Oppenheim is a professor in the Department of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal. His teaching and research are concerned with modern Jewish philosophy, comparative philosophy, philosophy of religion, and psychology of religion. His books include Speaking/Writing of God: Jewish Philosophical Reflections on the Life with Others (1997), Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Narrating the Interhuman (2006), and Encounters of Consequence: Jewish Philosophy in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2009).

Sarah Pessin is an associate professor of philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. She works on Greek, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Neoplatonic philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern Jewish philosophy, post-Holocaust thought, and the philosophy of religion. In addition to being the author of articles and book chapters, she is the author of Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (2013).

Randi Rashkover is an associate professor of religious studies and director of Judaic Studies at George Mason University. Her areas of expertise include Jewish philosophy and theology, Jewish-Christian theological engagement, and the philosophy of religion. She is the author of Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Praise (2005) and Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics (2011), and the coeditor (with Martin Kavka) of Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology (2013).

Heidi M. Ravven is a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College, where she has taught Jewish Studies since 1983. She is a neurophilosopher and specialist on the philosophy of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, in addition to publishing on Moses Maimonides, on G. W. F. Hegel and feminism, and on Jewish ethics and Jewish feminism. Supported by a large grant from the Ford Foundation, her recent book The Self beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of the Free Will (2013), rethinks Spinoza’s ethics in light of neuroscience.

Bruce Rosenstock is an associate professor of religion at University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He specializes in modern Jewish philosophy and biblical xiv contributors theology, and his main publications include New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology and Society in Fifteen-Century Castile (2002) and Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond (2010).

Tamar Ross is professor emerita in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University. She continues to teach at Midreshet Lindenbaum, a women’s yeshivah in Jerusalem. Her current interests include Jewish theology, the confrontation of traditional Judaism with the challenges of modernity, philosophy of halakha, Orthodox feminism, theories of revelation, and religious epistemology. In addition to these issues, much of her earlier writing was focused on the thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and on the moral, philosophical, and educational implications of the modern Musar movement founded by Rabbi Israel Salanter. Her major recent works include Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (2004) and the essays, “Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age” and “Orthodoxy and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism: Some Reflections on the Importance of Asking the Right Question.”

Avi Sagi is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the founder of an interdisciplinary program for graduate students in hermeneutics and cultural studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is also a faculty member in the Shalom Hartman Institute. His fields include Continental philosophy; phenomenology and existentialism; hermeneutics and critical studies; philosophy of culture, religion, and morality; literature and philosophy; contemporary Jewish philosophy; and philosophy, sociology, and history of Jewish law. Among his numerous publications are Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002), The Open Canon (2007), and Jewish Religious after Theology (2009).

Kenneth Seeskin is the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University and a member of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, where he has served as chair for nearly twenty years. Currently, he is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies. His publications include Search for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides (2000), Maimonides on the Origin of the World (2005), and Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair (2013). contributors xv

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is the Irvin and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism and director of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University. Her fields include Jewish intellectual history, the history of Jewish philosophy and Jewish mysticism, science and religion, religion and ecology, and feminist theory. She is the author of Between Worlds: The Life and Thought of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) and Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge and Well-Being (2003); she is also the editor of several volumes, including Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (2004). Currently, she is the editor-in- chief of Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy, a multivolume series that features outstanding Jewish thinkers (2013–).

Shmuel Trigano is a professor of sociology of religion and politics at Paris University and the founding director of the Université Populaire du Judaïsme, as well as of Pardès, a European Journal of Jewish Studies and Culture. He is president of the Oservatoire du monde juif and the founding director of the College of Jewish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He has published numerous books in the fields of philosophy, political thought, and Jewish studies; among them are Le Judaisme et l’esprit du monde (2011), The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity (1999; 2009), and Philosophy of Law: The Political in the Torah (1991, 2011).

Elliot R. Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to assuming this position, he was the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University for over twenty-five years. His main area of scholarly research is the history of Jewish mysticism, but he has brought to bear on that field training in philosophy, literary criticism, feminist theory, postmodern hermeneutics, and the phenomenology of religion. He is the author of many publications including, most recently, Open Secret: Postmessinaic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (2009), A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011), and Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (2014).

Introduction Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century

Aaron W. Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Despite calls to the contrary, philosophy is an embodied activity. Entry into the field, the types of genres we are attracted to, and the types of argumentation we deem successful (or not) are not universal but rooted in the particular life stories of those who engage in philosophical reflection. The ability to philosophize and to reflect critically on matters is based on our own personal stories: where we come from, who we are as scholars, with whom we have studied, our daily interactions with the world in which we find ourselves, and the attachments we form with those around us, including our spouses and children. We cannot simply check such experiences at the door and think as if unencumbered by our own historical situatedness. Using the language of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), it is incumbent upon us to reflect on what motivates our wonder and connect it, not divorce it, from the “flow of life” (1999b, 40). Life flows from birth toward death, and philosophy is but one mechanism whereby we reflect on and categorize both our individual and collective journeys. This is not to imply that we all exist in shells, incommunicado in our mutual solipsism. What this attitude does afford us, however, is the very tangible realization that who we are and what we define as the human condition is ultimately defined by our creatureliness (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Our symbolic and epistemological productions, in other words, can neither be divorced nor disconnected from their material conditions. And while our intellectual categories do not map perfectly onto our biological realities, it is necessary that we are aware of their existence and how they mutually influence one another. This means that we need to be conscious of the fact that our mutual conversations emerge from somewhere, and that they do not take place outside the “flow of life.” Philosophical activity is a method of narration that informs the realization that we cannot know independently of time. Rosenzweig characterizes this as “speech thinking” (Sprachdenken), which forms the cornerstone of what he calls “New Thinking” (das neue Denken). He writes in an essay of the same name that

[t]he method of speech takes the place of the method of thinking, as developed in all earlier philosophies. Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless. With one stroke it wants to make a thousand connections; the last, the goal, is for it the first. Speech is bound to time, nourished by time, [and] it neither can nor wants to abandon this ground of nourishment; it does not know beforehand where it will emerge; it lets itself be given its cues from others; it actually lives by another’s life, whether that other is the one who listens to a story, or is the respondent in a dialogue, or the participant in a chorus; thinking, by contrast, is always solitary. (1999a, 86)

Although Rosenzweig wanted to avoid the term “Jewish philosophy,” he nonetheless was keenly aware that the universal gaze of philosophy, the perspective from the so-called “All,” threatened the particular by leveling it into something it was not nor could ever be. Since it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to frame its traditions in a universal light, Jewish philosophy can never be about pure thinking, if there can indeed ever be such a phenomenon (see our comments in Tirosh-Samuelson and Hughes 2013). Rather, Jewish philosophy, to return to Rosenzweig’s assessment, must be a form of narrative philosophy, one wherein philosophical thinking takes place in the unfolding stories of those who engage in its practice. Rather than provide a set of truth-claims to which all ought to be able to give assent, Jewish philosophy, on account of its particularistic focus, is interested in a set of other questions, many of which are inherently personal: Who am I? To what story do I belong? Why is my story different from that of the mainstream? (see, for example, Sacks 2013, 25). Because of its embeddedness in peoplehood, in religion, in the specifics inherent to particularism, Jewish philosophy has not and perhaps cannot be approached using the tools of analytic philosophy, which seeks to define the world using a set of universal truth-claims to which all can assent. These truth- claims, to quote Bertrand Russell, are defined by their

incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, in comparison with the philosophies of the system- builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods introduction 3

that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble. (1945, 834)

Analytic philosophy is about what words mean, and is not interested in the specific meanings of these words in particular contexts. It is, in short, neither interested in nor amenable to the particular. And the particular par excellence within Western civilization has been Judaism; its unwillingness to elide itself into the so-called universalism of the Christocentric West has often resulted in drastic consequences. Yet Jewish philosophy, as the set of discourses of and about a particular people, is and has always been about justifying why a particular life is justified in light of the universal to which philosophy aspires. Perhaps for this reason, Jewish philosophy has always been more interested in history and historicism than non-Jewish philosophy, especially of the analytic variety. What seems to differentiate Jewish philosophy from more universal strains of philosophy is its emphasis on difference and on the particular. Jewish philosophy must ultimately apologize for why the individual cannot be subsumed into the universal. The inherently apologetic strain to Jewish philosophy immediately raises this question: Is it philosophy or theology? Indeed, what we are accustomed to calling “Jewish philosophy” does not engage in truth independent of religious claims. If philosophy represents the critical and analytic approach to uncover truths based on rational argumentation, theology coincides with the systematic study of religion and the subsequent articulation of religious truth-claims. The difference between theology and philosophy would seem to reside both in their methods and aims. If philosophy has “truth” as its primary object of focus, theology concerns itself with ascertaining religious dogma. If philosophy seeks to elide the individual into the universal, theology—a form of constructive philosophy—desires to make room for the individual. It is, returning to Rosenzweig, a form of thinking defined by its own narrativity. “To be a theologian,” writes David R. Blumenthal, “is also to speak of the ought” (1993, 4). He elaborates that

it is not enough to explain, to explicate, and to exegete. It is to make a prior commitment to formulating a vision and to preaching that vision as an ideal toward which humanity should, indeed, must strive. Theology is not a value-free discipline; it is, rather, a value-laden discipline and it should be so consciously, unashamedly. (1993, 4)

Jewish philosophy has the potential to restore the individual to the activity of sustained reflection on tradition. Jewish philosophy, in other words, need 4 introduction not—in fact one might say “cannot”—be disinterested. It provides a context in which Jewish intellectuals—past, present, and future—think about issues that are of real concern to Jews and to Judaism. It is a mode of thinking that is concerned with life and with making sense of the difference inherent to it. But if Jewish philosophy is about acknowledging and justifying the particular, it must also reflect on those concerns and issues that Jews share with others. As Jewish thinkers increasingly reflect on issues that are of concern to all of humanity—science, politics, ethics—it becomes quite clear, as the chapters below demonstrate, that Jewish philosophy does not take place in a rarefied academic environment but forms an intimate part of what it means to reflect proactively on the human condition writ large.

Understanding Jewish Philosophy Today

Since the first encounter of Judaism with Greek thought, a particular type of Judaism has articulated itself through the performance of philosophy. In Philo of Alexandria’s account of allegory, Saadiah Gaon’s defense of the world’s creation, or Hermann Cohen’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s associations of Judaism with morality, philosophy has made Judaism compatible with the larger cultures in which Jews have lived. This desire for compatibility has created a set of religious, ethical, or political values that Judaism could contribute to those cultures. This has given a privileged place to a set of canonical thinkers and texts—Saadiah Gaon to Isaac Abarbanel in the medieval period and Moses Mendelssohn to Franz Rosenzweig in the modern—that are believed to articulate Judaism using universal and rationalist criteria.1 During the twentieth century, Jewish philosophy experienced a major renaissance, and Jewish thinkers (most notably, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Joseph Soloveitchik) have reshaped the discourse of Western thought for both Jews and non-Jews. These philosophical giants are no longer alive, but a significant group of living Jewish thinkers continues to produce innovative Jewish thought by showing the intersections between theology, hermeneutics, politics, ethics, science and technology, law, gender, and ecology. This new generation of Jewish philosophers has reflected on the Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, postmodernism, and feminism. Although not as well known as the great Jewish philosophers of the past, this contemporary generation has nevertheless made

1 This paragraph is based on conversation with Martin Kavka, and appears, slightly modified, in Hughes 2014, 15–16. introduction 5 major contributions to Jewish philosophy by showing its vitality, depth, and intellectual rigor. We, as editors, contend that it is important both to showcase this contribution and to show the activity of Jewish philosophy as a living and engaged conversation with the (post-) modern world. What follows features the uniqueness of Jewish philosophy as a distinctive discourse within the contemporary concerns associated with the humanities’ curricula. The chapters included herein reveal numerous features of Jewish philosophy at the present moment. To begin, Jewish philosophy is inherently interdisciplinary, encompassing the methodologies and concerns of other fields such as political theory, intellectual history, theology, religious studies, anthropology, education, comparative literature, and cultural studies. Second, Jewish philosophy is intensely personal: to think about the meaning of being Jewish or the meaning of Judaism in the modern world can never be separated from the personal biography of the thinker. The contributors to this volume present their reflections as the outcome of their own personal narratives, their academic training, their engagement with previous thinkers who have shaped their ideas, and the particular circumstances of their personal lives. In so doing, Jewish philosophy challenges the impersonal and arid manner that marks the style of contemporary philosophy, especially that found within the analytical tradition associated with most departments of philosophy, at least within North America. Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that the majority of Jewish philosophers today tends to work in departments of religious studies within the contemporary university. Third, Jewish philosophy is socially embedded and, thus, inseparable from the lived experience of Jews. The contributors to this volume, accordingly, reflect on a range of political, social, ethical, and educational challenges that face Jews and Judaism at the current moment. By showcasing how Jewish thinkers address contemporary challenges of Jewish existence, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the humanities as a whole, especially at a time when the humanities are increasingly under duress for being irrelevant. This volume seeks to make a strong case as to why Jewish philosophy, as an integral part of the humanities, is both culturally relevant and intellectually valuable. Within this context, it is worth noting that this project is intimately connected to another one that we, the editors, are involved in with Brill. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers (LCJP) is a twenty-volume collection, a “library,” that showcases an older generation of living Jewish philosophers (for example, Eliezer Schweid, Eugene Borowitz, David Novak, and Norbert Samuelson), including their relationship to the Jewish philosophical past and contemporary Jewish existence. If that library features an older generation, the present volume is an attempt to introduce readers to some of the most 6 introduction dynamic voices of a new generation of Jewish philosophers, many of whom are both in conversation with and, not infrequently, critical of earlier generations. Taken together, Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: Personal Reflections and the volumes that comprise The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers show the vibrancy of Jewish philosophical thought at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These overlapping projects exhibit the wide-ranging engagement of Jewish thinkers with contemporary philosophy, theology, political science, ethics, hermeneutics, environmentalism, and gender studies. In so doing, the Library and the present volume display the richness of topics and concerns among contemporary Jewish thinkers, identify the salient intellectual challenges for the twenty-first century, and articulate issues that require special philosophical attention for further analysis.

Jewish Philosophy: Reintroducing the Personal

Jewish philosophy, as we have just discussed, is a constructive activity as well as an academic discipline. Jewish philosophy today is comprised of a set of overlapping and, at times, mutually exclusive discourses that reflect those who engage in its practice. As the essays in this volume reveal, there is no singular way to engage in something that is monolithically referred to as “Jewish philosophy.” Indeed, this is the main reason that we have decided against offering summary of the chapters here in the introduction: to lump them into themes would be to impose an order and a structure on disparate voices. Instead, we see a set of scholars—from across the religious and ideological spectrum, from those living in the Land of Israel and in the Diaspora—who reflect systematically and personally on issues that are relevant to their understanding of Judaism and its engagement with and in the modern world. What unites the volume is self-reflection on the activity of Jewish philosophy and of concern for the welfare of Judaism in the twenty-first century. The path to Jewish philosophy, as these essays reveal, is not necessarily a natural or even an expected one. On the contrary, each path reveals something of the idiosyncrasies of the particular journey. Conversion to Judaism, the pain witnessed as the children of Holocaust survivors, the desire for intellectual respectability, the experience of anti-Semitism—all of these journeys, and others, shows how the urge to philosophize from a Jewish perspective is both convoluted and specific to the individual engaging in such activity. Rather than remove the personal and get straight to the argument, we contend that the two are intimately intertwined. Each philosopher’s argument introduction 7 only makes sense in light of a specific narrative, and this narrative, in turn, helps illumine for us that which is important to each individual. The reintro- duction of the personal, we contend, is an important feature that is lacking in so much contemporary philosophy. This approach permits each individual to tell a personal and idiosyncratic story, as opposed to offering a more discursive and traditional presentation on a particular theme. Rather than assume that the traditional is the real or authentic, we hope to show that this need not be the case. The result is a series of essays that are situated and embedded, as opposed to offering us a view from “on high,” as it were.

This Volume

Each chapter below provides an original essay, written by a Jewish philosopher, theologian, intellectual historian, ethicist, and/or social theorist. We have asked each author to identify what he or she considers to be the major philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and social challenges to Judaism in the twenty-first century. In addition, we have asked each contributor to address these challenges from a Jewish perspective and reflect on his or her unique contribution to the manifold discourses that comprise Jewish philosophy. The result, taken together, is a volume that showcases Jewish philosophy as a living practice that responds to contemporary issues and charts potential paths for the future growth of the discipline. Each essay has a title that captures the distinctive approach, focus, or argument of the essay. We have chosen to arrange the chapters alphabetically in order to allow each author to speak in his or her own voice, without imposing on the thinker a preconceived thematic focus. We intentionally do not wish to cluster the essays into subsections, because such division proves to be artificial and at cross-purposes with the volume’s tenor. Nonetheless, an ambiguity runs across this volume because the term “Jewish philosophy” refers both to the academic discipline and to the constructive endeavor that transcends the boundaries of the modern academy. Instead of glossing over this ambiguity or trying to explain it away, we endorse it because it invites the readers to reflect on the complexity of Jewish philosophy. How does Jewish philosophy relate to Judaism? What relevance does Jewish philosophy have to contemporary Jewish life? How does Jewish philosophy frame the relationship between Jews and non-Jews? There is no one correct answer to these questions, and herein lies the richness of Jewish philosophy. We could go even further and say that given the inherently subjective, nature of Jewish philosophizing, it is doubtful that we can even speak about “Jewish philosophy” as a coherent, unified discourse. 8 introduction

Each essay includes a biographical narrative, a reflection on one’s place within and relationship to the various discourses that comprise Jewish philosophy, an analysis of what the author considers to be the task of Jewish philosophy, and finally a philosophical engagement with a particular set of intellectual challenges that come out of the philosopher’s existing body of work. We, as editors, have asked each author to address a set of questions: How did you embark on Jewish philosophy? What is the intellectual task of Jewish philosophy? How does your thinking relate to the traditional Jewish sources? How do these sources shape your thinking about contemporary issues? Is there a Jewish philosophical canon; if so, is your work informed by the earlier Jewish philosophical canon? What are the major problems facing Judaism in the twenty-first century? How does your distinctive approach to Jewish philosophy address these problems? How can Jewish philosophy ensure its vitality in the future? The diverse answers make it clear that to practice Jewish philosophy is to engage in a highly self-reflective activity. This volume, we are convinced, provides a real alternative to existing books on Jewish philosophy. For the past two decades, leading academic publishers have published large, edited volumes surveying the history of Jewish philosophy (for example, Frank and Leaman 1997, 2003; Nadler and Rudavsky 2009; Kavka, Braiterman, and Novak 2012). These volumes have provided immense and valuable information about the Jewish philosophical past, and they have showcased the strength of Jewish philosophy as an academic discipline in the present. However, these volumes deliberately obscured the authors’ own voices because they were committed to the conventions of nineteenth-century historicism about the ability of academic research to uncover the past “as it truly was.” In addition, many of these reference works are descriptive as opposed to critical. By contrast, we have attempted to move away from historical descriptions of philosophical issues to personal, constructive reflections by Jewish philosophers who can evaluate their own life’s work, explore their approach to theoretical challenges, and assess their individual path to Jewish philosophical activity. Jewish philosophy, thus, emerges as a living and lively intellectual experience of utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews alike. We offer it as the best proof for the vitality and creativity of Jewish philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The essays in this volume enrich the discourse of Jewish philosophy in numerous ways. In terms of topics, this volume invites Jewish philosophers to engage science and technology (Ravven and Tirosh-Samuelson), art and literature (Braiterman), politics and sociology (Mittleman, Hughes, Trigano, and Harvey), and civic life (Pessin, Sagi, and Katz). In terms of methodology, several essays offer new ways to overcome the religious-secular divide by exploring introduction 9 the positive role of religious doubt and philosophical skepticism (Wolfson and Magid), by offering new epistemological, linguistic, and hermeneutical paradigms (Cass, Ross, and Diamond), or by reflecting on the philosophical meaning of history and historicity (Biemann, Morgan, and Rosenstock). While theology is discussed in several essays (for example, Pessin, Diamond, Magid, Trigano, Cass, and Seeskin), the volume either reframes Jewish theology by bridging the divide between Judaism and Christianity (Kavka-Rashkover, Meir, and Pessin) or, conversely, by taking secularism and secular ideologies such as feminism, psychoanalysis, and socialism to be Jewishly and philosophically relevant (Oppenheim, Braiterman, and Tirosh-Samuelson). Philosophical activity, of course, requires the use of reason, but how reason is conceptualized varies greatly: for some, human reason paves the path for transcendence (Seeskin) even though it is embodied activity (Ravven); for others, reason is crucial to ground faith communities (Cass and Ross), and, for yet another (Wolfson), it is the paradoxical power of reason that enables us to probe knowledge while denying the possibility of knowledge. The new topics, methodologies, and sources thus revitalize the discourse of Jewish philosophy while insisting that this discourse has a unique role to play in Western education (Katz, Goodman, and Hughes). Although the contributors to this volume philosophize in their own unique and even idiosyncratic ways, collectively the volume makes clear how Jewish philosophy as a self-reflective activity has a responsibility toward the world in which it is socially embedded; Jewish philosophy is not mere speculation but a guide for action. We envision this volume as contribution to the discipline of Jewish philosophy within the context of Jewish studies and more broadly to the discipline of philosophy within the context of the humanities. By showcasing the inherently interdisciplinary, contextual, and cross-cultural dimensions of Jewish philosophy, we present it as a model for the humanities in the twenty-first century. In this model, the humanities interact with the natural sciences and the social sciences, engage with and respond to contemporary culture, and transcend the religious/secular divide. In the twenty-first century, the disciplines that comprise the humanities will continue to wrestle with the meaning and purpose of being human, but will do so in light of the knowledge that has been accu- mulated and will continue to be generated in other scientific disciplines, and in such a manner that they will no longer be stifled by the academic debates of the late twentieth century (most notably between modernism and postmodernism). Should Jewish philosophy become the model for the humanities in the current century, we will no longer ponder humanities’ relevance and importance, nor will we doubt the need of Judaism to encompass philosophy. 10 introduction

References

Blumenthal, David R. 1993. Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press. Frank, Daniel H., and Oliver Leaman, eds. 1997. The Routledge History of Jewish Philosophy. London and New York: Routlege. ———, eds. 2003. The Cambridge Companion of Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Aaron W. 2014. Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Kavka, Martin, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak, eds. 2012. The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nadler, Steven, and T. M. Rudavsky, eds. 2009. The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1999a. The New Thinking. Edited and translated by Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ———. 1999b. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God. Translated by Nahum Glazer, with an introduction by Hilary Putnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sacks, Jonathan. 2013. “Finding God.” In Tirosh-Samuelson and Hughes, Jonathan Sacks, 21–37. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, and Aaron W. Hughes. 2013. “Editors Introduction to Series.” In Jonathan Sacks: Universalizing Particularity, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, vii–xiii. Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy 2. Leiden: E.J. Brill. chapter 1 The Historian as Thinker Reflections on (Jewish) Intellectual History

Asher D. Biemann

1 Ideas

“Ideas,” Arthur Lovejoy wrote in 1940, “are the most migratory things in the world” (4).1 They exist, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would say, “in the air” and in “curious contemporaneousness,” allowing for the minds of any one period to live in invisible kinship with another (1983, 965). But this does not render ideas unhistorical. Intellectual history, as Lovejoy argued, still remains a history of ideas, a history that is both “in the air” and rooted in the world of time. To be an intellectual historian requires us to recognize an idea’s traffic and territory, its embodied life of the moment, yet also, as it were, its “eternal” life. To know both, so Lovejoy, would be no less than the human being’s knowledge of him- or herself. “Self-understanding,” Isaiah Berlin later wrote, “is man’s highest requirement” (1980, 286). Intellectual history has grown, since Lovejoy’s manifesto, into a field of its own contestations and imperatives whose admiration for “eternal” ideas has surely sobered and whose claims have yielded to the need of self-justification. Indeed, the very timelessness of ideas—their “dateless wisdom” and “universal application,” their enduring relevance and meaning—belongs to what Quentin Skinner, one of Lovejoy’s staunchest critics, called the inherent “mytholo- gies” of intellectual history, or history’s conversion into a sort of “non-history” ignoring the essential alienness of the past and the inevitable temporality of meaning (Skinner 1969, esp. 4, 7–11). There are, to Skinner, no “eternal” ideas, no perennial questions, no transhistorical channels permitting us to understand a thinker on our terms. No historian can, in good conscience, look at a text sub specie aeternitatis.2 Skinner’s critique, in this respect, remains valid for all intellectual history claiming to be history. Yet, Lovejoy’s confidence in the autonomy of ideas and his “Delphian imperative” (Lovejoy 1940, 8), which anticipated, incidentally, also Skinner’s own “lesson in self-knowledge” (cf. Skinner 1969, 53), resonates in a peculiar way with what follows in this essay.

1 For dating Lovejoy’s concept of the history of ideas to 1919, see Kelley 2002, esp. 277–82. 2 For a recent critique of Skinner, see Rosen 2011.

For I shall reflect upon intellectual history not on its possibility or impossibility, neither of which I take for granted or deny, but on its self-image, its own thinking, or, for lack of better answers, its self-reflection. To complicate matters, I shall reflect not just on any intellectual history but on Jewish intellectual history. My argument is unspectacular, stating no more than that intellectual history has become an integral part of what we consider Jewish thought today, a part not merely of its past but of its present. I argue, then, that contemporary Jewish thought, precisely on account of its contemporariness, always is intellectual history, that it emerges from the consciousness of its genealogy, and that, in turn, the intellectual historian belongs to the process of thinking Jewish thought.3 But my argument is also contradictory, stating that Jewish thought always seeks to be more than Jewish thought, that its “Jewishness” exists, like the work of culture, as “point of passage,” a Durchgangspunkt, as Ernst Cassirer wrote, a bridge leading from “one I-pole to another.” Thought is a work of culture and, at the same time, a work of the “air.” It lives, as any work, but perhaps also more than any other work, in a space between, in a space that mediates across cultural boundaries and timelines. As we relate to it, a work, Cassirer writes, “becomes the mediator between I and you, not by transposing a finished content from one person to another, but by kindling in one what exists in another” (1967, 192–93; 2011, 115). The work thus relinquishes its ownership, confronting us no longer as fixed and unchanging and belonging no longer to a particular “spirit.” A work confronting us always sacrifices its claims of self. It becomes a self-and and yet remains a self-despite. Indeed, all great works of culture, writes Cassirer, begin to live only as they begin to migrate in our minds: they must be “continually possessed anew, and hence continually recreated” (1967, 194).

2 Late Beginnings

Here I must pause. What I have been asked to do is reflect upon a self that includes, even puts forward, however briefly, my self. I must follow this directive with the greatest reluctance and only insofar as it explains an intellectual trajectory relevant to the essay itself. I arrived at Jewish intellectual history late in my life, and I arrived at Judaism late in my life—if lateness in one’s life has a measurable measure. Both arrivals coincided in a peculiar manner and in both lay something paradoxical, for neither history nor Judaism tolerates

3 Veltri 2000, 144: “Es scheint fast so, als wäre die Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie zur eigentlichen Philosophie des Judentums geworden.” the historian as thinker 13 late arrivals. To both, sudden appearance and radical newness are sources of scandal and ambivalence. History demystifies interruption and questions discontinuous turning points. To the historian, even the most spontaneous of events must be rid of its foreignness: it must have a history, a chain of events leading up to it. Likewise, Judaism has devised ingenious ways to assure itself that its eventual newcomers are not new at all but merely return- ers returning to the first beginnings of their historical existence. The daughters of Sarah, the sons of Abraham, whose newness is never a source of pride but one of silence, even shame, are imagined merely to return from a journey of forgetfulness, as if exiled by historical error; uprooted like the first patriarch and wrenched away from their accustomed milieu, they are home-comers to Jewish Geschichtlichkeit, immigrants into a shared past, strange sojourners who, at the same time, are made in the image of the most primordial natives. To Judaism, its newcomers have always been there. Their lives are interrupted and torn apart only to be mended and repaired; they not merely intersect with but are, as it were, naturalized by the very porousness of Jewish history. Fictitious as they may be, and as they are, these ways of retroactive integration are neither naïve nor merely fantastic. They are, in a sense, Realfiktionen, self- assurances of an historical community, whose continuance can be conceived only in a simultaneous affirmation and rejection of history’s course—through the workings of memory and the power of imagination. Again, I speak of them only to the extent that they illuminate how I understand the work of the intellectual historian as a thinker, the work that occurs, to use an image by Martin Buber, between the “passion for new beginnings” and the “ability to make oneself part of something [Sicheinfügenkönnen].” Like Buber’s perplexed youth, the thinker speaks: “I carry in me the generations which have brought me forth, and the new things I bring forth myself receive from them their proper meaning” (Buber 1993, 698; my translation). To the thinker as historian, this meaning and carrying of intellectual generations are tacitly assumed, yet not self-evident; rather, they need to be affirmed, uncovered, and elected. To be capable of making a beginning, to be a fashioner of its own despite the mind’s historical condition and lineage, is thought’s first self-reassurance. A human being’s beginning, Hannah Arendt writes in the Human Condition, “is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself” (1998, 176; italics added). Thinking, in this respect, is always uprooting and, as Immanuel Kant once wrote, the desire for beginning; it is beginning, not, however, as F. W. J. Schelling held against René Descartes, the wiping out of everything that came before us “with a sponge,” but the thinker’s flight from, and the simultaneous reinsertion into, thought’s continuous past. The thinker, the human being, is always initium, as Arendt would say, 14 biemann a “newcomer” taking initiative, a necessary beginner whose insertion into history is like a “second birth,” a beginning, which, to Arendt, however, was not the annihilation of the first but rather its “actualization.” My own philosophical formation began with the critical rationalists shaped by the intellectual heirs to Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle (particularly in its reception by Viktor Kraft [cf. Kraft 1953]), and a reading of the classical tradition that stressed the origins of philosophical critique and disenchantment. Ideologiekritik (especially through the works of Hans Kelsen),4 the sociology of knowledge, and logical empiricism were principal schools in my first encounter with philosophy. “Historicism,” on the other hand, and any form of “historical hermeneutics,” or what passed for it, seemed relegated to the realms of religion and even theopolitics: “Historicism,” as Popper devastatingly wrote, “is a social, political, and moral (or shall I say immoral) philosophy” (1958, 320; my translation of Popper here and throughout).5 Conceived as a purely humanistic discipline, history, as Hans Albert, one of Popper’s closest followers at that time, argued, was marred by an “anti-naturalist” tendency, a notion of Geist, which offered—like J. G. Droysen or Wilhelm Dilthey—“understanding,” Verstehen, where explanation should be. While not rejecting the humanities entirely, critical rationalism rejected their autonomy. To Albert, critical rationality served as a bridge between the empirical sciences and what is known in the German tradition as Geisteswissenschaften, yet it was also a form of social and political engagement—the only legitimate form: “Rationality is always a matter of method and, therefore, of praxis” (Albert 1991, 7–8; 78–79; my translation). Like Kant’s understanding of conscience, Ideologiekritik and critical rationalism engendered a normativity of reason “passing judgment on itself.” The history of ideas, thus, appeared to it as the disenchantment of ideologies, a history modeled in the dark shadow of the twentieth century. From Popper’s perspective, Hegel was indeed but the “missing link between Plato and modern forms of totalitarian thought” (Popper 1958, 41).6

4 Hans Kelsen’s work on constitutional law is currently experiencing an interesting renaissance among American scholars (Kelsen himself emigrated to the United States in 1940). His essays on the critique of ideology formed an important part of our curriculum. Cf. Kelsen 1964; see also Krawietz 1982). 5 For a detailed account of Popper’s Viennese-Jewish upbringing and later reception, see Hacohen 2000. 6 Likewise, Topitsch 1967. The historian Fritz Stern, on the other hand, offered a more nuanced reception of Hegel in Stern 1965. While Hegel’s dialectical method informed, of course, totalitarian ideologies Left and Right, his conception of the state, argues Stern, was contrary to the “folk community” to which German nationalists aspired (cf. ibid., 342–43). the historian as thinker 15

One must not underestimate the salvific expectations of a new rationalism after 1945, competing with a second wave of existential philosophy, which would last through the 1960s and which was mediated to us, in the 1990s, chiefly through the works of the “moderate” philosopher of existence Karl Jaspers. Especially German idealism and its penchant for total systems became the subject of scathing review: “It knows everything about everything,” wrote Popper about Hegel’s system (Popper 1958, 40), a critique of idealism’s “all” or “totality,” which will inevitably remind this essay’s reader of similar critiques by Franz Rosenzweig (writing long before Popper) or Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed, modern Jewish thought, owing, perhaps, to its marginal perspective, has always been Ideologiekritik in one form or another: skepticism directed toward its own foundations and toward philosophy’s universal claims. Critical intellectual history encompasses the perspective from the margins, Rosenzweig’s Standpunkt, a thinker’s locus of being; and, being critical, it will look at intellectuals not as immaculate but as faulty human beings, whose minds can at once produce the most admirable and most hideous of thoughts.7 But the error of totality is not necessarily the same as totalitarianism. By linking one to the other, Ideologiekritik espoused a historical inevitability that, in fact, assigned to ideas the very transhistorical powers good historians seek to deny them. And by subsuming the humanities under one empirical science, the new rationalism ignored the reasons that had led already Vico’s New Science to reserve a domain not only for observation but also for imagination. We observe events, but we tell history to ourselves through the faculty of fantasia, an insight that traveled from Aristotle to Wilhelm von Humboldt to the recent “narrativists.” To Vico, we tell history like a novelist trying to understand her own novel’s protagonists. This is more than what J. G. von Herder later described as Einfühlen (empathy); it is the “making” of history for oneself how it “had, has, and will have to be”—the making of “ideal” history in the language of imperatives (Vico 1987, 247; book 1, section 4; my translation).8 Thus, Isaiah Berlin looked toward Vico to establish the humanities as a distinct field, for they required, like the artist, poet, or novelist, an “imaginative power

7 Thus, when history yields to thought, we must often remind ourselves to consider less the “who” but the “what” of thought. Critical intellectual history has many excellent exponents, from Martin Jay to Richard Wolin, Alan Megill, and Peter Gordon, all of whom have powerfully pointed to the limits of intellectual integrity in the history of thought. 8 Cf. also Lilla 1993, 134: “The axioms of Vico’s ‘metaphysics of the mind’ thus become the elements with which the historian recreates the general pattern of the past; he becomes an active ‘maker’ of this ideal account of the course of events once ‘made’ my past minds.” And especially Mali 2003, 36–90. 16 biemann of a high degree,” not, however, in order to invent but to understand how men have imagined their world: “[T]o understand history,” writes Berlin of Vico’s method, “is to understand what men made of the world in which they found themselves, what they demanded of it, what their felt needs, aims, ideals were” (1980, 105). This knowledge, Berlin concludes, is not the knowledge of facts or logical truths, resembling instead “the knowledge we claim of a friend,” an intellectual compassion inseparable from the work of acknowledgment. If asked to sketch the path to my thinking, then, I would have to describe it as a constructive project, one from critical rationalism to critical intellectual history, a path that shares many a skepticism with the critics of ideology, while affirming the formative role of ideas and the profound social meaning of history and historicity. My attention turned from the sociology of knowledge to the sociality of knowledge (especially dialogical thought) and from an analytical to an overall synthetic project. Having elected Judaism as both my return and new beginning and having experienced, in addition to my academic studies in Israel, a style of learning rooted in the “old world” of a traditional Jerusalem yeshiva, Jewish intellectual history presented itself to me as a “conscious continuity,” an act of permanent retrieval, a “conscious effort in remembering and renewing,” as Karl Löwith put it once, a return that resembled a Kierkegaardian repetition: “Conscious historical continuity,” writes Löwith, “constitutes tradition and frees us in relation to it” (1949, 22). Tradition as an act not of continuity but of “resumption” (Wiederaufnahme) and “putting oneself-into” (er-innern) was Martin Buber’s reckoning with the same hermeneutics of distance, where memory acts not only as retrieval but also as renewal (cf. Buber 2005, 220). Jewish thought and intellectual history thus became entwined in the same critical and constructive endeavor that characterized Vico’s principle of humanistic studies as historical awareness and self-formation: it became a form of Jewish paideia.9 Many historians, of course, have looked at the modern Jewish penchant for Bildung, occasionally at the exclusion of Jewish popular culture and “nonintel lectual” behavior. But the significance of Jewish paideia as an imperative beyond emulation of, and participation in, humanistic culture frequently eludes us. Cultural exchange is an effect of Bildung and its pursuit of respectability

9 One rightly thinks of Werner Jaeger’s seminal work Paideia (1945), a commitment to humanistic education, which did not, however, prevent Jaeger—like other German classicists— from expressing enthusiasm for the National-Socialist Party before leaving Germany in 1936. Pierre Hadot (1994) later linked the idea of paideia to reclaiming philosophical wisdom in a predominantly Christian context. For the distinctions between paideia and Bildung see also Giustiniani 1985, 183–89. the historian as thinker 17

(cf. Mosse 1993). But Jewish paideia constitutes also self-fashioning and total transformation, taking seriously the lessons of the early humanists, which were the lessons of modernity as well: that the human being is a maker and molder of him- or herself, an interrupted being whose creative forces are the desires to mend and make new. Here, Jewish thought coincides with the meaning of being a newcomer, for thought always engenders remoteness or, as Rosenzweig expressed it, the movement “from the outside, in,” a reversal of perspective, then, in which the one “who brings with him the maximum of what is alien” brings with him the surest aptitude—an aptitude of difference (Rosenzweig 2002, 98–99). But it also coincides with being a home-comer, for, unlike thought itself, which can and must exist in flight, Jewish thought must and can “return.” Its beginning is not merely a setting itself free but also—and no matter how rebellious—a shaping subordination to the past.

3 Return to Difference

Here my brief interlude of self must close. It could describe no more than a state of remoteness—not exclusion, I should add, no cruelty of fate, no heroic intervention, but the simple remoteness experienced by all and many elect- ing to live in different languages and lives—the remoteness of all beginners. A commonplace and mere trifle, this remoteness lies far from cosmopolitan coquetry and borderless passion. Remoteness still enjoys a place, and election still has its own allegiances. But their hermeneutics are significant to the project of thought, to Jewish thought perhaps in particular, for this thought and its history exist in the constant struggle of remoteness and return, of distance and familiarity. Distance and proximity, strangeness and familiarity, return and difference constitute no mere dilemmas but are foundational categories of understanding. Already Abraham Geiger noted in an essay of 1847 that “distant time” and “total difference” were more conducive to historical understanding—and to the project of reform—than the “proximity of times” (13–14; my translation). Likewise, Leo Strauss’s understanding of the new as a “deepening of the old” engaged the interplay of the remote and the recent, the very factors Strauss considered at work in a “living tradition” (1988, 155; 1997, 24). To Hans-Georg Gadamer, it was, in fact, the space “between” them, the space between “distanced objectivity” and “belonging to tradition” that marked the “true locus of hermeneutics” (1986, 300; my translation). Distance, in this respect, need not be overcome but can be viewed as a condition for hermeneutic productivity. The recognition of distance, then, which, for Gadamer, frees hermeneutics and 18 biemann historical Verstehen from “naïve” historicism and its confidence in transposing itself into the spirit of a certain time, enables history to become dialogical, history addressing and engaging us, ansprechend and angehend (cf. Gadamer 1972, 237); it enables understanding to know difference and to stop short of what Strauss chastised as the Besserwissen (know-it-all) of unqualified historicism. Difference, as Gadamer put it, is not a “gaping abyss, but is filled with a continuity of provenience [Herkommen]” (ibid., 237). What for Buber was Wiederaufnahme and er-innern and what for Rosenzweig was the return from the most distant to the near, Gadamer reconceived as Wiedererkennung (recognition), the encounter with the familiar in which, paradoxically, more than the familiar is met: “The familiar enters its true being and reveals itself as that which it is only through its recognition” (Gadamer 1986, 110; my translation). Return, then, involves a surplus of understanding that is both open-ended and anchored in an enduring presence. The historian “returns,” as it were, to the event, while the event endures to “speak” to us at different times. Thus, the event becomes a “text” assuming, as Dominick LaCapra argues, a “transhistorical dimension,” indeed “transcendence,” irreducible to its contexts and, in fact, able to disorient them. The text ceases to be an ephemeral event as it ceases to be a merely timeless source, and intellectual history, in LaCapra’s understanding, ceases to be documentary as it ceases to be purely reconstruc- tive to become a “dialogue between past and present—dialogue that requires a subtle interplay between proximity and distance in the historian’s relation to the ‘object’ of study’ ” (LaCapra 1980, 246–47; also 1983, 5, 17–20). This subtle interplay lies at the core of historicity and, as such, of modern Judaism as well. “Judaism is about history and transcendence and their intermingling,” writes Michael Morgan, reminding us that the “remoteness of the past and its separation from the present” have been the critical challenge of Jewish modernity (1992, 13). Yet understanding differently involves also a hermeneutic inversion, the recognition of the different as familiar, a certain fantasia in Vico’s sense, which also enables the self to bridge remoteness, to see itself even as another. The Platonic anamnesis and the kindling of the idea in the other, which Cassirer borrowed from Plato’s Seventh Letter (341c–d) and which connects re-remembrance and innovation, serves as one such model of recognition: the “return” to tradition or, as Gadamer writes, “entering into an event of passing-on,” another (1986, 295). In both, there is at work a certain naïveté, the assumption that one could return to the mandates of tradition unharmed, return to unbroken, primordial continuity. But, in both, there is also the awareness that remembrance is not mere recollection but a creative power, a forward action, and that the returner returns not only to but also from, returning always from the other side, as acher, as an “other otherwise.” It is not the historian as thinker 19 the object of return but the possibility of turning that establishes continuity and surpasses arbitrariness.

4 Teshuvah and Philosophy

To the intellectual historian, return and turning, teshuvah, Kehre, repair, repentance, are root words of twentieth-century Jewish and continental thought, whose normative power has yet to be sufficiently studied. “Not utopianism but repentance is the most revolutionary force in the moral world,” Max Scheler noted in 1918 (1960, 56). “Repentance,” Joseph Soloveitchik wrote in the Halakhic Man, “is an act of creation—self-creation” (1983, 110). Repentance is a concept not only of religion but one intimately connected to ideas, as Scheler put it, and to the modern perception of “crisis,” kairos, Wende, turning point. Modernity itself appears to us as universal crisis and, subjectively, as consciousness of crisis (cf. Meyer 1989, 151–64). Jacob Burckhardt rightly observed that the historical road from crisis to despotism is alarmingly short; yet even he could not but recognize in crises the “real signs of life”: “Crises clean up,” wrote Burckhardt; they remove lifelessness and fear of change (1949, 188–89; my translation). Crises are history’s repentance. Their danger, as Burckhardt clearly saw, is their need for great beginnings and redemption; their inherent creativity, however, is the passion in which the old is not demolished but “the existing and the new culminate.” Thus, it comes as no surprise that the late Gillian Rose, reflecting on the relation between Judaism and philosophy, rejected both the search for self-identity and the belief in opposition. Only when “cast into crisis, chronic and acute” can Judaism imagine becoming a philosophy and philosophy becoming Jewish thought (Rose 1993, 18). Crisis enables, necessitates turning, and demands return, the retrieval, as Soloveitchik put it, from the past what belonged to the “reign of the future.” In the idea of repentance, writes Scheler “ ‘[h]istorical reality’ is incomplete and, so to speak, redeemable” (1960, 41). No other concept than “crisis” and “return” could achieve the same paradoxical bond, the same “and,” between the existing and the new, between the heretic and the faithful, between tradition and self- fashioning. No other concept, finally, could so closely entangle the outward and the inward. For return, as Hermann Cohen did not tire to remind us, is the sister concept of introspection: Umkehr occurs in Einkehr; return, to Cohen, is introspection. It allows for “homecoming,” whose hermeneutic counterpart is the recognition of Herkommen. This recognition, to Hermann Cohen, differed dramatically from the myth of origin. “[T]he origin,” Cohen writes, “does not only stand for the first beginning—this would be mythological—but must 20 biemann become the founding principle of permanence and ongoing preservation” (1966, 79; my translation here and below). The return to the first beginning, for Cohen, was not the return to a golden past but the return to beginning itself, the act of a beginning anew. Thus, preservation (Erhaltung), to Cohen, following Schelling, meant itself “incessant rebirth” (unaufhörliche Wiederbelebung), and it was, likewise, the “incessant re-creation of the mind” that shielded the human being from the “all-power of sin”: “Man’s humanity begins from his rebirth which follows the recognition of sin” (ibid., 119, 247). With or without sin, return, for Cohen, was an act of self-improvement but an act also of self- preservation, of Forterhaltung, despite the powerful flux of modern time. Only the remotest, the most future ones, can turn to return and possess anew and re-create. Only the remotest from home can return to become the custodians of the self.

5 Excursus: The Intellectual as Modern

Return requires the multiplicity of thought. It accounts for thought’s minimal ambiguity and ambivalence. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s intellectual credo “I am an impure thinker” is, in some variation or another, the credo of all intellectual historians. But it is a credo that is both credo and condition, reflecting what Erich Auerbach, writing on Montaigne, described as the condition of modern man, that “fluctuating creature” suspended in a world “boundless and incomprehensible” and in need of constant self-orientation: “the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support” (Auerbach 1953, 311). Auerbach’s modern man lived what Erich Frank called the life of the “spirit,” a life in “motion . . ., in constant negation of rest, in the wresting-free from merely unmediated natural life” (1955, 313; my translation). Modern man, in other words, lives, like ideas, in the air, freischwebend, as Max Weber wrote, and driven by turbulences and uncertain forces: “Nowhere at home,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal characterized this modern individual, “he is carried forth by every wave and ripple” (1950–52, 12).10 There exists a peculiar affinity between intellectual history and the modern condition because the tendency of ideas to migrate and fill the hungry ves- sels and crevasses of culture, to overflow into each other, suggests their own, primordial presentness, their own “modernity,” while the figure of the intellectual resembles the idea and is constituted by it. Intellectual history engages the intellectual because it recognizes continuity between the intellectual and the idea and because it recognizes the intellectual’s condition as its own. When

10 See also Barnouw 1988, 3. the historian as thinker 21

Jacob Taubes concluded that “intellectuals belong in a supreme sense to the history of modernity,” he affirmed this continuity and mutual constitution (1996, 318; my translation). Intellectuals belong to the history of modernity because they experience and interpret themselves in the image of the idea, without a fatherland, vaterlandslos, and transient for their love of knowledge, self-exiled and outcast, yet also connected and united by a new bond, by a new and entirely immanent form of communal life: “The homeless unite in the uni- versitas, in a community of teachers and scholars” (ibid., 322). Constituting a class of their own, the intellectuals at the dawn of modernity lived, as Taubes writes, in a secular monasticism opposed to the church and in opposition, even enmity, to the world surrounding them. The university became their refuge, for it was molded in the image of the mind; but as it descended into an institution, into a “new church” requiring a new conformity, it ceased to be a home to those remaining true to the idea of the intellectual, forcing them to seek asylum in new places of “spiritual unrest”—in the coffeehouses and salons of the revolutionary period. Minimally defined, the intellectual, in J. P. Nettl’s words, “must, at least initially, be free of all forms of institutional attachment” (1969, 55). To be free from institutional attachment is an ideal rooted in Kant’s notion of the “self-thinker,” whose need for orientation in thought served as the intellectual blueprint for Auerbach’s description of the modern condition. Freed from all self-incurred tutelage and from all institutional bonds, the self-thinker thus became the model of the modern freethinker, and it is with this definition in mind that the intellectual has come to be perceived at once as an enemy to the established order and, at the same time, as society’s “conscience” (Eisenstadt 1972, 1–2). Consequently, the ideal type of the intellectual has been associated with cultural codes of dissent (Nettl 1969, 106–20; cf. also Mendes- Flohr 1991, 23–53). Dissent seemed to distinguish the self-avowed intellectual from the ideologue. But dissent is of no value in itself, and not seldom are we fooled by intellectuals carrying dissent as an unquestioned badge of honor. Lewis Coser’s characterization of modern intellectuals as “descendants of the biblical prophets . . . castigating the men of power for the wickedness of their ways” is emblematic of the intellectual’s self-image of being a voice in the void (1965, viii).11 It is an image that reflects and celebrates the migrant consciousness

11 The self-perception of the intellectual as prophet is a common symptom frequently combined with praise for powerlessness, of late especially with regard to Israel. See, more recently Shatz 2004. Coser, however, viewed intellectuals not only as prophets outcast but also as “priestly upholders of the sacred tradition,” and it can be argued, as Edward Shils (1972) did, that intellectuals, even if free from institutions and claiming to be antitraditional, are formed and dominated by “primary traditions,” not least their own tradition of being antitraditional. 22 biemann of the modern human, turning it from condition to imperative, deriving, thus, an “ought” from a state of being, or a virtue from the image of self-perception. “Intellectuals,” Coser writes, “live for rather than off ideas” (ibid., viii). Their lives are protestations against the fixity of institutional power and accepted habits, reenacting, as it were, the effusiveness of ideas and the evanescence of their ownership. Intellectuals, Coser sums it all up, “are those who ‘think otherwise,’ the disturbers of intellectual peace” (ibid., x; similarly Habermas 1989).

6 Protest and Presence

The image of the intellectual as thinker engagé in and against an unredeemed world has formed both our idea of the intellectual’s task and our idea of the idea itself as a forming category in real life. Intellectual history, in that very sense, has always been about ideas as much as about intellectuals shaping, receiving, and transmitting them; it has never been about ideas “in the air” but, as Donald Kelley recently put it, reviving a distinctly young-Hegelian idiom, about their “incarnation” (cf. Kelley 2002, 1–8). This incarnation, to be sure, works against the faulty premise that ideas have no historical reality. But it undercuts the powerful formation of the “intellectual” in our minds and the methodological dilemma that intellectuals, even if considered in their cultural milieu, are rarely seen as historical individuals but, rather, as living maxims. Intellectuals, as Karl Mannheim wrote, have a “mission” (1960, 64). The intellectuals conceived and embraced by intellectual historians are generally thinkers whose thoughts extend, in one form or another, into our minds and whose mission becomes, for better or worse, ours. Intellectual historians, though far from uncritical, write from amid a continuum of ideas, which, unlike ideologies, are viewed as unfinished and belonging to us, enduring not because of their afterlife but because we consider them work-to-be-done. Intellectual history, in this respect, always engenders “effective history,” as Gadamer would say, Wirkungsgeschichte not only conscious of itself but seeking itself. Indeed, the intellectuals sought and singled out are sought and singled out because they represent something to the project of intellectual history itself, because their ideas do not belong to history but to the present. Benedetto Croce’s famous dictum that all history is, in its last analysis, storia contemporanea, history of the present, is true even more acutely of intellectual history: because ideas, unlike physical events and living bodies, do not pass and wither away but exist in an untimely between that refuses itself to the historian’s most poetic craft—that of epochization. In that sense, intellectual the historian as thinker 23 history itself becomes, like the intellectual, a symbol of dissent and untimeli- ness, a history otherwise, as it were, a protest against the institutions of time. If protest, as Shmuel Eisenstadt rightly saw, always implies a “strong emphasis on the suspension of difference between various time dimensions—between past, present, and future” (Eisenstadt 1972, 7), then this history emerges as a fusion of horizons, a sort of total image, or, as Herder put it, Allanblick of the historical world. “No one lives in one age alone,” Herder wrote in his “other” “Philosophy of History” of 1775, and it was one of Moses Mendelssohn’s deepest insights against G. E. Lessing’s violent historicism that “in reality, the human race is . . . in almost every century, child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different regions of the world” (Herder 1990, 38; Mendelssohn 1983, 96). To the mind, to the life of Geist, these different regions are simultaneously present, and we can understand why Hannah Arendt spoke of the thinking ego as “ageless” and of the works of thought as being born in a “small, incon- spicuous track of non-time,” whose presence encompasses a “kind of timeless time,” a continuous moment, in which the mind “is active without doing anything.” “The temporal dimension of the nunc stans experienced in the activity of thinking,” writes Arendt, “gathers the absent tenses, the not-yet and the no-more, together into its own presence” (1978, 206–11). The mind is a gath- erer of time and appears, therefore, unmoved by history. But this repose is, in truth, filled with activity, for the eternal requires work. Being ageless, or as Rosenstock-Huessy put it, “pluri-aged,” requires the work of protest, of defiance against what Arendt calls the “thinking ego’s greatest enemy”—against time. And in this protest, the thinking ego and its intellectual historiographer become unlikely allies joined together by their recognition that the history of ideas occurs not in but despite history.

7 Despite History

The “despite” I am suggesting has itself a considerable history not limited to the history of thought. Indeed, Jewish history has always been imagined as a history of such “despites,” a history af-al-pi-khen, in spite of everything: the survival of Judaism despite its countless enemies, despite destruction, despite assimilation, despite Christianity, despite history, despite nature, despite its ever imminent end, and even despite philosophy. “The Jewish people has become the eternal people not because it was allowed to live,” wrote Buber once, “but because it was not allowed to live” (1933, 297; my translation; cf. also Baron 1952, 19). When Heinrich Graetz in his famous historical sketch 24 biemann of 1846, described Judaism’s entrance into history as an act of protestation, negating the pagan cosmos and continuing to exist in a state of constant defiance, he pictured a Trotzjudentum from its very inception, whose persistence and dissent offered immunity not only to nature but also to history’s own laws. Unperturbed by the forces of history and unafflicted by the rise and fall of worldly nations, Graetz’s history of Judaism was at once the history of an idea ( judentümliche Grundidee) and the history of its manifestations, the history of the historical and, at the same time, the history of that which cannot become history. “The spirit of Judaism,” Franz Rosenzweig would later write, “does not tolerate epochs. But this also means: It does not tolerate history” (1984, 537; my translation). A narrow ridge separates Jewish historicism from what has come to be known as Jewish “antihistoricism” (cf. Myers 2003). This narrow ridge complicates not only the history of Jewish history but also the writing of Jewish history itself. However we approach, define, and practice the field of Jewish history, we do not want it to be ruled by ideas, not even by unified narratives (which always require an idea), but by events alone. Salo Baron’s doubts over Isaac Jost’s disjointed vision of Jewish history as a province of Universalgeschichte remains emblematic of all Jewish historiography: “It is perhaps one of his essential weaknesses that, treating a subject like the history of the Jewish people, he had no definite view as to what this people really was” (Baron 1964, 245). But how could such “definite view” emerge without an idea?

8 Origins

To some measure, then, Jewish history has always been “intellectual” history, a history “otherwise,” even if it studies the social, cultural, political, or economic history of “the Jews.”12 To some measure, it can be argued, all national history is

12 Recent historians, of course, are deeply aware of this dilemma and have offered alternative models of Jewish historiography. In his collaborative La société juive à travers l’histoire (1992–93), Shmuel Trigano has tried to adopt a nonnational and largely nonperiodic approach to Jewish history focusing on cultural transfer, synchronicity, and sociological diversity. Yet it could be argued that, despite his resistance to a unified narrative and “idea,” Trigano must rely on the reader’s preformed concept of “Jewish history,” a unity of the mind conjoining what the collection seeks to dismember. For such unity made explicit, see Trigano 2002, where “le retour de l’histoire juive dans l’histoire des Juifs” is envisioned as a return of Judaism’s “vocation prophétique,” promising nothing less than an “époque de renaissance.” Similarly, David Biale’s collaborative Cultures of the Jews the historian as thinker 25 intellectual history, if we grant that nations are, as Hans Kohn admonished us in 1944, a state of mind: “Nationalism is an idea, an idée force, which fills man’s brain and heart with new thoughts an new sentiments, and drives him to translate his consciousness into deeds of organized action” (1961, 19). Kohn was well attentive to the paradox that the most migrant things, that things in the air, can create the most concrete forms of particularity and the most concrete forms of loyalty: that from ideas in the air, belonging to no one (for is there indeed such a thing as a “Jewish” idea?), can emerge the most powerful sentiment of origin, of Herkunft. But this sentiment of coming-from need not be the same as what Marc Bloch called the “idol of origins” (1953, 29). It is, in my view, precisely not the “obsession with origins” that has characterized Jewish intellectual history or, for that matter, Jewish history itself, but the acknowledgment that the centrifugal forces of dissent are accompanied by simultaneous forces of retrieval and that, where these forces of retrieval cease to exist, Jewish history remains but history. The boundaries of “Jewishness,” then, are set not by the fiction of authenticity, which always carries in itself the violence of the supposedly inau- thentic, but by the idea—the mere idea—that Judaism is unlike history: that its course, though far from eternal and imperishable, defies the ephemeral for it includes the idea of recourse, a mere idea, to be sure, but also a regulative idea. Jewish history, then, is “intellectual” history in the same way Vico’s history was guided by an identità in sostanza d’intendere, a kinship of understanding allowing us to recognize it as Jewish history: the possibility of Wiedererkennung that occurs even in the most mundane, the most material, the most unintel- lectual and remote manifestations.

(2002) is an effort to write a “new history” turning away from texts, unified narratives, essences, and ideas toward time-bound multiplicity. Yet again, Biale must ask what holds this multiplicity together, arriving, ultimately, at a “dialectic between, on the one hand, the idea of one Jewish people and of a unified Jewish culture, and, on the other, the history of multiple communities and cultures,” rendering the task of the contemporary Jewish historian “paradoxical: to find commonalities between past and present, but also to preserve all that is different and strange in that past” (Cf. Biale 2002, xxiv; xxxi). As recent and timely as it may be, the dilemma of “Jewish” history is not new. Thus, Moritz Lazarus could proclaim in 1894, “We no longer live in Jewish history. We live in Prussian history, German history, French history; we are parts and members of these nations; this is the historical life we live and feel as our Jewish part—but there no longer exists Jewish history.” Instead, Lazarus championed a “history of Judaism in which all participate” (Lazarus 1900, 9–11; my translation). 26 biemann

9 Self-Knowledge

Because Wiedererkennung, as we have seen, recognizes more than the familiar, it differs from essence and authenticity, qualifying both. Indeed, what the Prague philosopher and Zionist Felix Weltsch wrote for the first issue of the Hebrew philosophical quarterly Iyyun in October 1945 remained true for a generation of intellectuals suspicious of, yet also pining for, such authenticity: “We must indeed be wary of national attributes, all the more as we still can see before us what has been termed ‘German’ by Germans in literature and philosophy over the past twenty years, and how ‘German’ all this became in the last years of terror” (1945, 60; my translation).13 Even if Jewish thought and its history have left us with no particular legacy of terror, Weltsch was perhaps right to wonder whether, given the history of national attributions, Jewish philosophy was still a timely invention. Must there be, should there be, such a thing as “Jewish thought”? To Weltsch, who, together with Max Brod, had fled Czechoslovakia for Palestine in 1939, a “national” science was an egregious contradiction and a betrayal of philosophy’s proper methods. Indeed, Iyyun, founded by his fellow émigrés Hugo Bergman, Martin Buber, and Julius Guttmann, envisioned itself to be journal of philosophy and thought beyond national boundaries, not expressly Jewish, not historical, but devoted to ideas and critical inquiry, to “thinking” as a universal discipline, even if articulated in the Hebrew language. At the same time, however, Weltsch argued that philosophy and thought could not be fully captured in terms of strict science and method for, like literature and art, they constituted receptacles of historical experience, whose “concealed bonds” to culture—one’s own and the culture of others—were inseparable from its ideas, and whose awareness of these bonds would become a philosophical task in it own right: to reflect upon everything and to know oneself. “To know this,” Weltsch maintained, “philosophy requires what we might call self-knowledge, the impulse to retrace its evolutionary path, to return to its origins, from where it receives its intuitions for new directions and new possibilities” (ibid., 64). Philosophy, then, unlike the sciences, must know its “origins” of thought, and in this self-knowledge history can coincide with national self-knowledge, can even become “Jewish” or “German” or “French.” But it cannot exhaust itself in it, can neither be defined by nor take possession of its national “essence”—it cannot be Jewish or German or French alone. To the contrary, knowing the genealogy of thought, like thought pondering upon itself, becomes an act of

13 In the following, my reading of Weltsch’s essay will be a deliberate “misreading,” isolating what may be the most, perhaps even single, valuable point in his far more extensive reflections. On Weltsch, see Schmidt 2010. the historian as thinker 27 self-questioning and, at the same time, of depurification: the conscious con- tamination of thought with its own history and historicity, which cannot but embrace its intellectual mobility and the blurring of its boundaries.14 In a certain sense, the thinker, for Weltsch, had to become a historian—not to dif- fuse or relativize the rigor of thought but to become a thinker. From thought’s historical self-recognition a “new” Jewish philosophy would emerge, a thinking that was part of its own genealogy, of its own tradition and historical consciousness. What Weltsch articulated was Jewish thought as a form of self-incurred intellectual history, Geistesgeschichte, perhaps the only honest possibility of “Jewish” philosophy, as it seemed to him, after 1945. To the historian, the question whether and what Jewish thought should be was but irrelevant, for it existed by virtue of its own history, just as Judaism existed by virtue of its history, or as Abraham Geiger put it in 1869 with pragmatic simplicity, “Es ist” (it is) (1875, 438). To the historian, the “it is” was both the spiritual and common sense a priori that made Jewish history possible. Even if Weltsch collapsed, in effect, the philosopher and the historian, risking the unsettling prospect that the project of Jewish thought might retreat behind its own historiography and, thus, fall prey to the same “historical suicide” as the old Wissenschaft in the eyes of its critics, there was also something inherently constructive about this prospect: the possibility of legitimizing Jewish philosophy through historical introspection rather than method, necessary allegiance, or object of study. This possibility was not itself intellectual history; it was the possibility of a particular intellectual history to become, or give birth to, a particular philosophy. A short path, though not a necessarily straight one, leads from Geiger’s “it is” to Franz Rosenzweig’s famous “one is it” to the affirmation of Jewish thought as “one does it.”

10 Encounters

But how does one do it? When, in 1949, Alexander Altmann contributed an essay on “Judaism and World Philosophy” to Louis Finkelstein’s volume The Jews: Their Role in Civilization, he affirmed at once the existence of “Jewish concepts” and the absence of a Jewish philosophical tradition (Altmann 1971). Without being philosophical, Jewish concepts, for Altmann, came to humanity’s assistance, contributing to the idea of civilization as a universal project, whose origins were formed by many pasts, still originating, as in Hermann Cohen, and

14 In this respect, Weltsch may have been thinking of the concept of “blurriness” (Verschwommentheit) he and Max Brod had developed (Brod and Weltsch 1913, 43–71). 28 biemann still in need of re-creation. Altmann’s position could easily be characterized as “contributionist,” a classically modern apologia for the utility of Judaism in society’s progress. But even contribution required, for Altmann, a certain Jewish “quality” asserting itself in and through the history of Jewish thought, encompassing “intensely Jewish” thinkers such as Hermann Cohen and thinkers at Judaism’s “extreme periphery,” such as (the Catholic) Henri Bergson. Little of this “quality,” of course, could be delineated, as little as the “essence” of Judaism so fervently defended by the masters of the old Wissenschaft. If, for Altmann, a Jewish quality indeed emerged, then it was not in terms of essence but in the encounter of the history of world philosophy with the “concepts” of Judaism. Neither philosophical nor purely Jewish, these concepts—such as the unity and incorporeality of God—were Jewish not because Judaism had coined them from the air but because they mattered to Judaism and remained unalterably present in the history of Jewish thought, an “origin” to return to, a spiritual center formed and always reshaped, not unlike Buber’s dialogical “I,” by the encounter with its distant “You.” This encounter, which, for Buber, was always a form of risk and crisis, became for Altmann the “how” of modern Jewish thought. Hermann Cohen, on whom Altmann could rely, described this encounter as Berührung, a coming into contact of Judaism and Hellenism to shatter the “unity” of myth and national spirit in both religion and philosophy, purifying both—an act of mutual decontamination—and creating what, to Cohen, was the meaning of Geisteswissenschaft: the creation of a “new logic” where “pure thought emerges as pure will” (Cohen 1915, 8; see also Bienenstock 2012, esp. 63–65). All Geisteswissenschaft, to Cohen, stems from ethics, an Abstammung, an intellectual genealogy, that is at once historically evident and given beyond history, in the concept of “philosophical history” itself. To Geisteswissenschaft, ethics is a “second logic.” Its concepts precede the concepts of nature and remain in “conflict with history” (Cohen 1966, 3). It is precisely because of their origin in ethics that the humanities, including the “cultural fact” of religion, can never be historicized. The history of religion, the history of thought, is unable to historicize the concept of religion, the concept of thought, the concept as such. “Wherever the problem of the concept arises,” writes Cohen, “nothing else matters than the quest for meaning and value of something original, something eternal, something that surpasses all modes of development . . . , the question, then, whether the imperative of the a priori is empty folly or whether without this imperative all scholarship remains a blind searching” (1915, 5; my translation of Cohen here and throughout). The history of thought, then, cannot dispense with that which is unhisto- ricizable; it cannot dispense with concepts founded in ideas. The concept of the historian as thinker 29 religion cannot be thought without the idea of God, and the concept of the humanities cannot be thought without the idea of the human being. In fact, these ideas are presupposed in both, and they presuppose ethics as their inner logic. But this also means that the idea, for Cohen, unlike the concept itself, occupies a middle between logic and ethics, that it belongs to a liminal space (Grenzgebiet) which, precisely because of its liminality, vouchsafes its autonomy (Selbständigkeit) (cf. Cohen 1915, 49). From the perspective of the humanities, the idea of the individual and of humankind is both a postulate and a foundation. And as the human individual is grounded in the idea of humankind, it cannot be conceived outside the laws of morality, the temporal laws human beings make for themselves and the eternal laws originating in the idea: “Humanity reveals [to man] the fellow-man [Mitmensch] in the one next- to-him [Nebenmensch]” (cf. ibid., 53). Thus, the humanities cannot but understand human life and creativity as “eternal moral striving,” whose eternity is vouchsafed in the idea of the “infinite future,” in the idea of God as the idea of the enduring world: “The idea of God means the guarantee that there will always be a being-there for the infinite work of morality” (ibid., 51). Without this idea, the idea of humankind would have to be subsumed under the idea of nature and, worse still, the idea of the individual under the idea of humankind, which, to Cohen, would, must needs, culminate in the “self-destruction” of the individual for the sake of the whole. But the opposite, for Cohen, must follow from the idea of humankind. The idea needs the “correlate of its manifestation,” it needs the individual, the self, the particular: “Thus mankind postulates man so that in the eternal process of self-formation man may refine himself to be mankind” (ibid., 53). And here, the humanities, Cohen’s Geisteswissenschaften, whose place is between the logic of cognition and the ethics of human self-formation, yield to man what otherwise only the idea of humanity itself can yield: the “historical ground of his personality” without which the human person would remain but a “mask.” The humanities recognize the enduring uniqueness of the human individual, as they recognize the endurance of humanity’s idea and its need for the “future of being-there”; they recognize both, for they stand in a precarious position between allowing them to acknowledge the a prioris of history not as empty follies but as visionary signposts.

11 Intellectual History as Formation

Hermann Cohen’s concept of the humanities thus allowed for and necessi- tated the uniqueness of the individual, just as his concept of culture, which, 30 biemann in his system, belonged to aesthetics, allowed for the individuality of nations. Building on Cohen, as well as on the “neohumanisms” of Goethe, Herder, and Humboldt (Cohen’s own sources), Ernst Cassirer later reiterated the mandate of the humanities to conjoin the individual and humankind in its understanding: “Every universal in the sphere of culture, whether discovered in language, art, religion, or philosophy, is as individual as it is universal. For in this sphere we perceive the universal only within the actuality of the particular” (Cassirer 1967, 25). This was no philosophical platitude, for Cassirer. To the contrary, relying on Humboldt’s philosophy of language, which had shaped also Martin Buber’s dialogical system, Cassirer stressed the fact that individuals must not be thought of as “self-enclosed” but as in continual encounter with others and with the idea of humanity, in a sphere where the “I” and “You” become virtually “identical.” “All historical life,” Cassirer writes about Humboldt, “is nationally conditioned and limited; but in this very conditioning, indeed by virtue of it, it exemplifies the universality, the unbroken oneness of the human race” (ibid.). A particular school of thought, then, a particular tradition, may be replete with ideas, but it is not itself an idea. It is a condition, a situatedness in history, whose meaning transpires into the idea of humankind. But this idea, Cassirer insists against Hegel and the Hegelians, is not an “absolute power” but an “infinite problem.” It does not allow for Hegel’s historical optimism, yet it also refuses the “fatalistic pessimism” of decline. The idea of humanity, by virtue of remaining infinitely problematic, offers space to human action, creativity, and self-formation, through which humankind remains ever changing but in which it is also formed. Here, the meaning of Geistesgeschichte emerged more clearly for Cassirer: unlike the sciences of nature and unlike all other history, intellectual history apprehends not only the transformation of humankind (Umbildung) but its formation (Bildung), the molding of humankind in its idea. This formation justified the assumption of a “spirit” in history. And here Cassirer’s “logic” of the humanities connected with his own intellectual history of the Enlightenment not merely as an epoch but as a particular and enduring Denkform, as a figura of thought. The Enlightenment, Cassirer maintained, was able to develop a total view (Gesamtbild) of the human spirit, a primordial and ultimate “unity,” to which all science and knowledge strove and which mediated between the energy of reason, the unstoppable and universal “doing,” and the continuance, or “endurance” (Beharrlichkeit), of its foundational elements. Reason has no owners, and the mind’s incessant energeia seems to diverge, to disperse, in all directions. But as the mind reaches its periphery, it also makes familiar to itself what it traverses, settles, and becomes at home [heimisch], always conscious of its forward striving and the “decisive turning-back to its real and particular the historian as thinker 31 center” (cf. Cassirer 1998, 4; my translation). This center, of course, is reason; but as the Enlightenment views reason and humankind in one, the center is also the idea of the human being. To this idea, the restless mind returns and is conscious of being a returner, as Cassirer writes: “The mind does not create nor invent, but repeats and reconfigures. But in this repetition it demonstrates its nearly inexhaustible power” (ibid., 32). Emmanuel Levinas will later chastise the same power of reason to assimilate everything to itself, to be at home everywhere, and to deny the radically new. Cassirer, however, reads the mind’s conscious repetition not as violation against the new but as profound confidence in the existence of “simple ideas” and their certainty, without which there would be no idea of the human being. And he understands that the meaning of repetition is not sameness. Rather, in the meaning of repetition, the Enlightenment as a way of thought coincides with another way of thought to which Cassirer felt devoted: the idea of the renaissance. Following Burckhardt, Cassirer maintains that “all genuine and great renaissances in world history have always been triumphs of spontaneity, instead of mere receptivity” (Cassirer 1967, 194). Their repetitions and rebirths are but vivid imaginations of their own inherent creativity, ruptures with the past following the engagement with the past. As in the Enlightenment, these imaginations were no mere fantasies but signs of self-reflection, of Selbstbesinnung, the awareness that creation in the human realm is return and reconfiguration, and the possibility to protest against the present and to connect to ideas past: “Whenever an individual, or indeed an entire age, is prepared to abandon itself completely to another, always, it has found itself in a new and deeper sense” (ibid.). Repetition, like the Platonic idea of anamnesis, is a refoundation of the self, the recognition of oneself over distance, which permits, as in the Italian Renaissance, the “genuine penetra- tion into what is one’s own and what is foreign”; it is the turning that moves from the periphery inward, the mind’s simultaneous introspection and looking forward, the mind’s teshuvah, in a word, which Cassirer calls the “purpose” and “essential task” of thinking—the task of self-fashioning (cf. ibid., 195; Cassirer 1998, 3). Only from this perspective can we understand Cassirer’s attempt to offer an account of German Geistesgeschichte in 1916, “amidst the wars,” and to search for a nation’s “intellectual character of being” (geistige Wesensart), a search that had taken on a new urgency, foreshadowing the urgency that the quest for humanity’s self-knowledge would take on to Cassirer himself less than two decades later. Addressing this question, for Cassirer, was an act of Selbstbesinnung, a radical introspection, which could not, however, be deduced from an existing essence nor from a unified idea. If there was—and there was indeed, for Cassirer—an essential unity in the intellectual character 32 biemann of a nation, then it could only be surmised from its effects and afterlife, from its history. But this history was not “historical” history; it was the history in the image of the Enlightenment thinker, a thinking history, guided not by events and things past but by thought itself, by what Cassirer called the Leitgedanke. The history of German thought thus became the thinking historian’s repetition of the ideas—form and freedom, in Cassirer’s case—imprinted on its genealogy. This was no hermeneutic circle to Cassirer; it was the writing of a history that assumed a unity of thought. In the eyes of the mind’s Gesamtbild, no time had elapsed from Erasmus to Hegel. Development, divergence, contradictions existed, of course, in the “individuality” of phenomena. But their individuality pointed toward a “universal,” toward a unity, whose national individuality pointed itself toward another unity: “Thus, when viewed from its goal and results, the [German intellectual] movement, which in its first origins and beginnings appeared as purely national, is raised above all specific-national conditions and boundaries” (Cassirer 1961, xvi; my translation). Indeed, Cassirer adds, the “truly creative” minds of German thought have always been above cultural “self-sufficiency,” receptive to the “voices of the nations,” and emblematic of the “world of the spirit as a whole.” Through German intellectual history, Cassirer hoped to help us historically acquire the intellectual history of humanity itself: the nation as point of passage for human paideia.

12 Demanding Speech

It can be argued, of course, that Cassirer’s German Geistesgeschichte, just as his intellectual history of the Enlightenment was more program than history, wishful thinking in the same manner as, say, Rudolf Borchardt’s essays on the German traveller and German landscapes were projections of Jewish history onto German history, a rewriting of the German past into the past of an “old wanderer of history,” at home “everywhere and nowhere,” a “guest in earth,” “centrifugal” and “cosmopolitan,” opposed to the national idea and accustomed to living, “as no other people on earth,” in “tremendous diaspora” (Borchardt 1960, 16; 26; my translation). The examples of such wishful thinking among Jewish (and non-Jewish) writers and historians are many and well known, their reasons obvious to the eye. If, as Simon Dubnow wrote, “Jewish history in its entirety comes to vouchsafe the spiritual unity between the Jews and the rest of the nations,” then we understand the desire to view history in the image of the idea (1921, 110; my translation). Yet, behind this desire and wishfulness lay also wakefulness. As in Cassirer’s history of Enlightenment thought, the concepts of intellectual history “turn the historian as thinker 33 from fixed and finished artifacts to active forces, from mere results to imperatives” (Cassirer 1998, xi). Because the history of thought, unlike the history of the past, remains unfinished and conscious of its unfinishedness, it cannot simply “borrow from the past.” Its concepts and ideas are thought through again, repeated in the mind, worked over. Its sources are openings. The historian gathering them gathers not to relay their content but to call out to them, to call forth. It is not only the past addressing us: it is also our addressing, our engaging of the past, that shapes the historian’s dialogue. Every cultural encounter, Cassirer argued, and every encounter of generations, is one of speech and rejoinder, Rede and Gegenrede.15 Calling forth is not merely a from of “reading-into”: it becomes the historian’s demanding speech. “The past,” as Soloveitchik wrote, “will heed his word and attach itself to him” (1983, 117). Writing history, to Cassirer, meant shaping it, bilden, and letting oneself being formed by it.

13 Going Back

There is no doubt that demanding speech constitutes bad history, for it is always filled with love and accusation, distorted by ira and studium. There is no doubt that history with a Leitgedanke is bad history. History does not tolerate guiding concepts and ideas. It cannot tolerate ideas, for ideas do not tolerate history. This conflict remains unsolvable to the intellectual historian as thinker, whose craft cannot but resemble the craft of epochization. Ideas may not tolerate history, but they still have a history. “The spirit of history,” Rosenzweig wrote, “creates for itself a body in the epochs of history” (1984, 530; my translation). An idea, always migrant and nowhere at home, can create itself a home in an epoch’s mode of thought, in Cassirer’s idea of a renaissance and the Enlightenment, or in a present epoch conscious of itself; and it can find itself a home in a nation’s history of thought, in Cassirer’s German Geistesgeschichte or in Altmann’s Jewish intellectual history or in contemporary Jewish thought. Ideas may be ownerless, but this does not render them orphaned. Indeed, the intellectual historian rightly sets out to chronicle their adoption and to trace their elective affinities. But adoption and election do not simply “happen”; they are always forms of protest, confrontation, and defiance.

15 Cf. also Heidegger’s notion of Erwiderung and Widerruf (reciprocal rejoinder and calling back), which informed Gadamer and remains—despite the “continental divide,” as Peter Gordon recently put it—close to Cassirer as well. I should like to refer to Watson 1997, esp. 3–20. 34 biemann

They create familiarity where is none and call for answers where is muteness. To chronicle ideas is to chronicle another history, a history in despite of history, a history of protestations against history happening in history. This history, as Cassirer and Cohen, Graetz and Dubnow, Baron and Rosenzweig, perhaps the history of Jewish thought and thinking altogether, illustrates, would not exist, would not be thinkable, without the idea’s a priori. It would not exist without the concept and not without the thinker. It would not exist without the image of the intellectual as the thinker otherwise. Jewish history, in this respect, if it claims to be Jewish history and not merely a history of the Jews, will always be “bad” history, for it will always be Geistesgeschichte, history with a Leitgedanke, history despite history. Now the “despites” of Jewish history become clearer, as become the “ands.” Jewish history cannot be conceived outside its “idea,” but its idea is replete with historical “ands,” with adoptions and affinities, encounters and fusions, migrations and contradictions, replete, then, from its very beginning with the last cry of scholarship—hybridity. But it is also “Jewish” despite these “ands,” Jewish in despite of hybridity, Jewish for no other reason than its own protest and election, for its “it is” in despite of time. And now becomes clearer the concept of Geistesgeschichte we encountered in Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. There cannot be a unified history without the simultaneous recognition of its despites and ands, and there can be no simultaneity of these despites and ands without a certain mode of apperception, without a Leitgedanke, gathering them, as in Herder’s Allanblick, to a whole whose peripheries must remain as porous as the center itself. It is, of course, the inescapable fate of the Leitgedanke that it cannot recognize more in history than its own image. But this does not stop the Leitgedanke from wishing more than it recognizes, from calling forth and making demands beyond the familiar. Intellectual history, like Cohen’s religion, postulates. It postulates ideas beyond their historical bodies, not to moralize but to expand their history. This was the meaning of Cassirer’s Selbstbesinnung, of introspection and return to one’s intellectual tradition conjoined with the great protest of turning and its Wiedererkennung of the unexpected. And this was the deeper meaning of Cohen’s “second logic” of the humanities. Every history needs a concept, for it needs the freedom to dehisto- ricize itself. The question of how there could be humanities without the idea of the human being was, to Cohen, but a methodological one. The question, however, of how there could be a human being without the idea of humankind, was an ethical one. No history, no culture, no particular school of thought, could extract itself from this question. But it could add to it. Every concept is a work of culture, whose existence marks a point of passage. Every concept is, as Hermann Cohen put it, a Durchgangsbegriff, a passage in the idea of the the historian as thinker 35 human. Jewish intellectual history, then, becomes at once Selbstbesinnung of Jewish thought, a return to the Judaism it imagines and possesses anew, and a passage to Menschheitsgeschichte, which cannot be, if we follow Cohen again, but Geistesgeschichte, a history despite history. “ ‘Spirit’ has accomplished what is denied to “life,’ ” writes Cassirer: “Here the coming-to-be and the activity of individuals are linked to that of the whole of mankind in a very different and profoundly formative manner” (1967, 215; trans. altered). Every work of culture, every school of thought, every religion thus becomes a double custodian: a home to the migratory self and a “symbol of recognition and remembrance of humankind.” No work, Cassirer would argue, can endure without with this double life. No thinking can occur without the encounter of strangeness and familiarity, without the “otherwise: that presupposes the possibility of coming home. Intellectual history recognizes this duality, though it remains unable to resolve it. It may be Jewish intellectual history, and it may afford the thinker to think “in Jewish,” not because of its incontrovertible “essence” but because of its Herkommen as the possibility of return; but it also must be a memorial to the human being, the manifestation of a “spirit” that endures not for its divine eternity but for its repossession by kindred souls extracting it, as Cassirer wrote, “from the husks of matter” (ibid.). Intellectual history, in that sense, forges the encounter of kindred souls, the election of kinship, the ability to return and re-create, to “go-back” and begin anew, but, most importantly, to kindle in one what exists in another.

14 Generations

Toldot, generations, is the classical Hebrew word to capture the idea of history. It differs from the younger, more “history-like” concept of divrey haya- mim, the chronicles of every day. Toldot is history not chronicled but carried on, the history aware not only of its narratedness but of its indebtedness. At every point of history, there exists, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one,” a Verabredung, really, a secret date, a whisper, an exchange of speech (1969, 254; 1977, 252). We have seen the concept of intellectual history emerge from a deeply dialogical path, from the consciousness of being spoken to and the conscience of response, a path perhaps without redemption and—it may well be—without messianic splinters altogether, but a path also that does not follow the “terror” of history alone, for it considers the irretrievable the irresponsible, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 1969, 255). In the moment of 36 biemann their own concerns, in the present experiencing itself as “meant” (gemeint), the historian and the thinker meet, and here the thinker takes flight finally from things to generations. Jewish thought, unlike philosophy, which must dis- obey genealogy, cannot linger on the wonders of the day, cannot wipe out and begin in its own astonishment, but must think, even when it thinks anew, with a genealogical mind. But this mind does not think a linear descent of ideas. It thinks in detours, excursions, and reversals. Indeed, the genealogy of Jewish thought has often, if not principally, been a genealogy in reverse, a process of retroreading, a remoteness offering ever deeper intimacy. To modern Jewish thought, the “total discontinuity” with the classical Jewish tradition, as one thinker observed (cf. Wyschogrod 1996, 53), is no departure but a foundation for what we have called “conscious continuity.” Thus, as to modern Jews Dante, Goethe, or Schiller became gateways not only to humanity but to their own Judaism, so the history of modern Jewish thought (and Jewish thought in prior ages) is a history of reading Judaism through alien sources, not by their influence but by making them familiar, through an act of mutual recognition, Wiedererkennung, the discovery, as it were, of what has always been there. In this respect, Jewish thought reads with an inherently conservative mind; conservative not because it resists the possibility of change but because it assumes, and seeks, a timelessness conversation. Conservatism, as Rudolf Borchardt wrote in 1931, is no self-assuring flatterer but an “acrid educator and a harsh friend” who has “absorbed the powerful thoughts of creative epochs and who has reborn them to endure” (1960, 386; my translation). Conservatism requires a “consciousness of the entire world of mind,” an experience of “the entirety of metaphysical time” in which every moment of empirical time is interwoven, a consciousness that is both Achtung and Ahnung, respect and premonition. Jewish thought, even when championing, as it frequently does, the most liberal of causes, thus engenders the conservatism of toldot, of generations, a history neither parochial nor derivative, nor necessarily homogenous, but receptive to the “secret agreement” between the generations. It requires not “Jewish” ideas, for there probably are none in the “authentic” sense, but a Jewish home for ideas. This was, perhaps, the meaning of Leo Strauss’s deepening of the old and of Rosenzweig’s Er-innern, internalizing, of the past; and here, in the incessant refoundation of consciousness, occurred, for Hermann Cohen, also the fictitious yet ideal unity of a people’s history, its Verinnerlichung zur Einheit (cf. Cohen 2005, 7). To Borchardt, the poet, such history was—like language at its best—a history of fearless acceptance and inclusion, a history of impurity, never ceasing to reconstitute itself, yet emerging ever stronger as a people’s self; and, thus, the historian turns must needs into a thinker standing again at the historian as thinker 37 the beginning, a thinker, to whom “the fact that no great thought in a nation’s past has ever been thought to its conclusion and that all thoughts remain inexhaustible, is the angelic elixir and secret air of life” (ibid., 441; my translation).

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Zachary J. Braiterman

Modern and contemporary Jewish philosophy should have to re-create itself in every generation, to unpack and reorganize itself. Yet Jewish philosophy today tends to come late to the task of turning the wheel of its own conceptual universe in sync with new times, places, and concepts. To count as scholars, those of us who commit to Jewish philosophy speak our own thoughts historically through the sieve of the great thinkers. We do not project in a transparent way a critical voice. Instead, we channel the voice of Martin Buber or Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas or Leo Strauss, and use them to mask our own thoughts. Caught in the past, Jewish philosophy will have lost the feel for time’s acceleration, as if unaware that the ninety to one hundred years already separating us today from Buber and Rosenzweig represent the same historical span that separated them from the early German romantics whose influence on them they sought hard to shake. My colleagues and friends hardly seem to notice that “modern” German Jewish philosophy is no longer “contemporary,” which it was in the 1920s or in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when the origin and the first impact of its concepts were young. In the blink of an eye, one hundred years go by. Everything changes, except Jewish philosophy, which has yet to shift its attention from Germany to America, from modernism to postmodernism and to theoretical frames that come after postmodernism. I begin these reflections under the assumption that “America” would constitute a primary locus of an American Jewish philosophy insofar as historical time and geographic space represent the aesthetic forms that condition possible philosophical inquiry. Accepting the offer extended by the editors of this volume to speak in an autobiographical voice, I am going to do so in relation to my own small place in the world, growing up in Baltimore in the late 1970s and early 1980s just prior to the popular advent of postmodernism. The ones who eventually brought me to the study of religion and Jewish philosophy belonged to a weird cabal of literature and philosophy, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Hermann Hesse, A. D. Gordon, I. B. Singer, and Y. L. Peretz. My corner of the world was an adolescent American Jewish microcosm defined by the old Modern Library

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_004 after germany 43 edition of the modern classics, emerging out from the shadows of Auschwitz, late 1960s youth culture, Labor Zionism, and the kibbutz socialist idea. Apart from an adolescent attraction to pantheism, none of this intellectual autobiography had much to do with religion, not with the sources of Judaism like the Bible, Talmud, or Zohar, and not with synagogue and the Siddur, which I neither understood nor liked. I came to those things later in college, to Martin Buber and Richard Rubenstein, and then in graduate school, plow- ing through Jewish and German philosophy, as well as rabbinic midrash and aggadah, vaguely under the rubric of “postmodernism” but without much theoretical direction imposed on me by my advisors. In my first book, (God) After Auschwitz (1998), I sought to explore the theological and textual revision shaping and reshaping the canon of Jewish theological ideas and traditional texts in post-Holocaust thought. And then I came to art and to aesthetics, moving on to stake my own independent intellectual identity as a thinker and scholar. My second book reflects more clearly new angles into religion and Judaism. The Shape of Revelation (2007) is a philosophical, aesthetic-theoretical excursus placing the German Jewish thought of Buber and Rosenzweig into conversation with German expressionism and “the spiritual in art.” America was nowhere in sight. My thoughts were elsewhere, driven first by the idea and image of catastrophe and the memory of the European Holocaust and then by the art of German modernism and the aesthetics of German Jewish philosophy. But instead of making my home there, I want to try to set aside, to place and replace modern German Jewish thought, and try to do something new. As will become clear, the only way to do this is polemically. Politics after 9/11 has something to do with my growing sense that, after Buber and Rosenzweig, there is not a lot of open space in modern German philosophy for contemporary forms of Jewish thought and philosophy. Following the art world from Europe to New York in the 1940s and 1950s, my pivot away from Germany has as much to do with aesthetics as it does with politics. To set aside the German-Jewish modernism in whose aesthetic and conceptual space I have worked so many years can only be a prologemena to the reter- ritorialization of an American Jewish philosophical place, to a preliminary scoping out of new things and new places, a new kind of contemporary style that might owe more to Andy Warhol than to Marc Chagall or German expres- sionist woodcuts. I have no doubt that Jewish philosophy will remain forever enmeshed in the history of modern German philosophy and modern German Jewish thought. If philosophy can be understood as nestled deep in the imagination, then the way one ultimately moves about in the world comes down to style, that is, the 44 braiterman modality under which the design of subjects, objects, and concepts are shaped as systematic articulations of sense impression. As I read them, German and German-Jewish philosophy and thought recommend themselves for the aesthetic energy of their conceptual thinking. About art and aesthetics in relation to thought and to the construction of concepts, everything was said with brio in works by G. W. Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, E. G. Lessing, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Nietzsche, Hermann Cohen, Buber and Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. As important as the theories actually theorized is the grand and musical way in which these theorists theorized, the way philosophical contents formed out of dramatic gestures and assumed a visual stamp. High style and strong spirit characterized Jewish thought and culture as conceived in Germany by thinkers as varied as Mendelssohn, nineteenth- century historians such as Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz, and Buber and Rosenzweig. In their own time in the history of art and design, they drew, respectively, on rococo charm and the cool marble-like surfaces of eighteenth- century neoclassicism, the warm domestic and bourgeois material comforts of Biedermeier design-aesthetics, and the hot, sharp-edged lines and roiled color- ing of German expressionism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In contrast, American Jewish philosophy has remained artless and unschooled in its own contemporary aesthetic cultures. One will not find there anything like the form creation, sheer presence, lyric pathos, rhythmic repetition, open spatial arrangements, and erotic pulse that moved German-Jewish thought in the first quarter of the last century. Framing this polemically, I would say that those of us at work today in Jewish philosophy do not genuinely understand the art or the craft of thought, the relationship between content and form, and we have yet to figure out how to place our own more contemporary form of Jewish philosophy in new aesthetic and conceptual environments. The problem is that, in Jewish philosophy, nothing and no one came after Buber and Rosenzweig, while to stay in Germany after them is to flail into the historical and philosophical abyss of “1933.”

1 Germany

About twenty years ago, Emmanuel Levinas stood to succeed Buber and Rosenzweig in the philosophical affections of contemporary Jewish thought. The fit was only natural. Heir to and critic of the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the philosophical world shaped by Levinas was steeped in the Bible and Talmud, whose sober philosophical stance after germany 45 was so dominated by ethics as to exhaust it. Whether or not they wanted to recognize Levinas as Jewish thinker, continental philosophers at least recognized him as one of their own, and this assured Jewish things a place at the table. Things change. In the years since 9/11, ethics has been eclipsed by “the political” in works by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek, leading continental philosophy and critical theory into conceptual territory from which Jewish philosophy tends to shy. What now stands out as the soft humanism of Jacques Derrida, Levinas, and Jean-François Lyotard and the 1970s French postmodernism of midrash, literature, ethics, and “the Jews” have been superseded by the figure of St. Paul and by the ultraconservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Paul was sought for concepts meant to forge a new universalism that is neither Greek nor Jewish, whereas Schmitt has been used by Left-leaning thinkers to gin up political theory against liberalism on the basis of “militant gestures,” power politics, “theo-politics,” and decid- ing “the friend/enemy distinction.” To borrow Buber’s sketch from the 1929 essay “Dialogue,” critical theory has been dominated by “men of the ‘collective’ who look down superciliously on the ‘sentimentality’ of the generation before them” (Buber 1965, 32). Taking further advantage of the license extended by the editors of this volume to speak both autobiographically and also polemically, I will admit that I do not know what to do with many of the sources that inspire contemporary critical thought, that is, the importance of Lenin for Žižek, the fidelity of Badiou to Mao, or the recourse made by Agamben to Schmitt. In the space of a polemic, I can only skim the surface of their work, but I do not believe that anything theoretically or practically sound comes from any of these sources. My own inclination is instead to see the compromised and compromising form of liberalism as a more corrigible, self-correcting historical, political, and theoretical platform upon which to reconstruct Jewish thought and political culture, and that contemporary critical theory and the discourse of political theology have offered no help out of our current theoretical and political jitters after 9/11. Aware of the historical contexts coming out of Germany right before and after the war, my own philosophical thinking remains distant from the antitech- nological, antimodern, antiliberal, and antidemocratic frames of reference, the “jargon of authenticity,” the harsh decisionism, the utter contempt for common sense and instrumental reason, or the violent political-cum-apocalyptic gesturing in the works of some. I am working here with a broad brush, trying to register a subjective impression that is not so much professional as it is polemical. Viewed as a whole under a blanket judgment, what strikes me about the discourse is how its authors seem consistently to combine a philosophy of crisis, contradiction, and predicament expressed in a cold, airless register, in the acid 46 braiterman either/or polarizing between one thing and another: Being/beings, Athens/ Jerusalem, secular/sacred, freedom/obedience, philosophy/law, poeisis/ratio, agora/oikos). On these hardened fields, there seems to be no middle ground given for the negotiated place for hybrid things, creatures, concepts, or systems between either point of dead-end oppositions. Without human warmth, the conceptual terrain precludes positions that are more irenic, felicitous, and open to the possibility that conflicts are fungible, if not entirely resolvable. In a nutshell, the Weimar and post-Weimar conceptual topoi that continue to orient my own work have mostly to do with the imagination and with spatial constructs, and less with politics per se. Arendt plumbed the space of appearance, a conception of the public sphere built on political action, political risk, natality, and the new. Benjamin remains unequalled in his mastery of the thought-image, philosophical surrealism, and profane illuminations. Heidegger, as well as his critic Hans Jonas, reorients Continental philosophy away from metaphysics back toward the natural attention to worldly things. Leo Strauss understood better than most how politics is based on images, against his own will, pointing his readers back into the Platonic cave. Strauss’s polemics with Jacob Taubes, a fringe figure in the field of modern Jewish philosophy, tells me that maybe there is something to be said for aggressive counterhisto- ries, heretical imperatives, antinomian world denial, and an apocalyptic excess of thought as intellectual performance. It is just not clear what one is supposed to do with the source material except to study it in terms of intellectual history. Immersed in its own world and time, it provides an uncertain basis on which to consider very well philosophical things that come after German modernism. For instance, take Bonnie Honig’s edited volume Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995). One notes the mighty labor to “rescue” Arendt for feminism, even as the most charitable contributors will have noted Arendt’s hostility toward gender and sex and her aversion to “the politics of the personal” (see chap. 1, 127–28, 135–36). In the end, one can appreciate the work, the theoretical tools, and the hermeneutical ingenuity brought to bear in these kinds of philosophical rescue attempts, without being sure that they are worth the effort. Another option would be more simply to identify and to take what one can from Arendt, to use this concept or that concept in relative isolation, while leaving the author and the larger scheme of the project behind without attempting this resurrection of the dead for a political purpose alien to the thinker’s work, historically considered. Consider another example closer to the Jewish conceptual canon, namely, messianism. It is a relic still bandied about in critical theory, as well as in contemporary Jewish thought, as if the idea were still fresh. An ancient idea with modern roots in the bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century liberal after germany 47

German-Jewish thought and the hot pathos of German expressionism, its dominant position in contemporary Jewish thought speaks to the synthesis of Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Levinas in Jewish philosophy, with disaster aesthetics gleaned from Benjamin, Schmitt, and Agamben in critical theory. My own view is that messianism has been forced to carry too much weight as a philosophical figure. In I and Thou (1970 [1922]), redemption plays for Buber a limited role in comparison to revelation, whereas, in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (1971 [1930]), the place of messianism is only penultimate to ungentle apocalyptic vision. As for Cohen, I can only suspect that, if he had had time to finish the Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1995 [1972]), the messianic ethos of the social prophets, along with the “holy” God of morality and pity, would have given way to atonement and to the peaceful death instanced in the last chapter of the book, assured to a stabilized human subject by the “good God” revealed by the prophet Ezekiel. As the messianic assumes all the rage in the discourse of political theology since 9/11, I have come to the opposite judgment that it was and remains the wrong answer to the problems of time and totalitarianism. For Schmitt, it was the state, whereas, for Benjamin, it was revolution or some other figure of divine violence that can force decision or break-shock the rigor mortis or indecision of liberal politics and bourgeois culture. Only one or the other can enjoy the status of absolute power. With Agamben, an inoperative divine law is an index to an inoperative state. I find myself wanting more critical distance on this bizarre philosophical figure. My own souring reflex is to wonder if the messianic was overacted and just too cute. Viewed critically, I suspect that, for Benjamin, messianism bridged his flirtation with Judaism and totalitarianism, with Scholem and Bertolt Brecht, and with Schmitt, as is now realized. Almost, but not nearly as bad are Buber’s reflections on the messianic in Kingship of God (1967 [1932]) and Prophetic Faith (1949). Buckling under pressure from Nazism, the idea that the sovereignty of God might staunch human kingship by occupying all areas of life sounds like a desperate flip side of the totalitarianism that the idea was meant to oppose. Placing these kinds of philosophical “things” in context, I increasingly suspect that, with the passage of so much history, philosophical concepts like the messianic and messianic now-times, “divine violence,” Dada and surrealist montage and shock aesthetics, or even clarion calls to “neighbor love” begin to run down and wear out. About messianism, the Babylonian rabbis seem to have been quite cold. At least the late redactors of the Babylonian Talmud seemed to have thought that, for the messiah to come, the whole world, their world, would be turned upside down. With “the face of a dog” and without the Torah, those who suffer the generation preceding the coming of the messiah live in a world 48 braiterman the rabbis do not want, one in which scholars are held in contempt, no longer holding the status that they themselves have always believed they should enjoy. The messianic signifies the end of the world loved by them because the world they loved was dominated not by God and not by the messiah but by the Torah and by their own hermeneutical acumen. The messiah turns into a fantasy figure. He occupies pride of place in the siddur, the Havdalah ceremony closing off the end of Shabbat, and the Passover Haggadah. But it has always been the mistake of hard and soft messianic thinking to confuse liturgical poetics with anything practical. The coming of the messiah is apolitical or antipolitical. That is at least how I read the main thrust of this material in BT Sanhedrin (97a ff.), the locus classicus for this kind of speculation in the Babylonian Talmud. Anti-catastrophists as they were, the Babylonian rabbis placed the messiah in a liturgical box, as a theoretical-conceptual limit point or poetic utterance, not as the object of a political desire or a program. The rabbis’s own sense of political place seems to have been more accommodating and pragmatic, which, in the context of twentieth-century Europe, might not have been so wise, as Richard Rubenstein reminded us. After Buber and Rosenzweig, the unhappy, unpragmatic place of Weimar and post-Weimar German philosophy leaves Jewish philosophy in the kind of place thought marked out by Franz Kafka in the very short “A Little Fable.” Its trapped protagonist is a sad little mouse caught up in a hostile world. From beginning to end, here is the tale. So brief it ends almost before it even begins:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller and every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly, that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. (Kafka 1946, 445)

In this tiny little thing, in this quick little fable, Kafka underscored the tightening tempo of time and space, in which an animal protagonist finds itself caught stuck in narrowed corners from which there is no exit. My interest here in Kafka has to do less with modern literature or even the history of German philosophy and more to do with contemporary Jewish philosophy. The polemical question I want to pose is whether Jewish philosophy should continue to commit itself conceptually to intellectual history, to the constricting space here in “A Little Fable,” to the ones suffered by the men, women, mice, dogs, vermin, jackals, and apes in so many of Kafka’s collected after germany 49 stories. Or might it be the case that these figures inhabit precisely the very kind of tight, immobilizing places and placing out of which an American Jewish philosophy might seek to move? Kafka’s were the narrowing corners that historically shaped the modern German Jewish philosophical tradition at its ter- minus. We visit these corners, even if they are no longer ours. They belong to a different time and place, and I do not see how one could, in anything other than bad faith, pose conceptually or dramatically the particularism of this place as a human universal, as our universal space.

2 America

“America” would represent a new horizon, an antipode to “German” philosophical seriousness. It is a Jewish America one can discover in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, with its queer historical arc grandly combining metaphysics and secularism, politics and sentiment, the comic and the serious sitting side by side; in bizarre hybrids like the feminist Talmud in Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism (1998), entering into a zone of conflict territorialized by misogynistic texts from which a feminist should otherwise flee, but sensing instead a kind of closeness to these psychologically damaged and damaging yet somehow endearing rabbis; in the mix of high-mindedness and low burlesque marked out in Daniel Boyarin’s study of the Babylonian rabbis, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (2009), which one can read as cultural performance just as much as for its scholarship. These are distinctly American contributions that encourage one to think about religion and Judaism in a secular key. To take, philosophically, the claims of Judaism or religion seriously but not too seriously requires the constant back-and-forth shift between credulity and incredulity maintained by all three authors, Kushner, Adler, and Boyarin. Without having to decide absolutely one way or the other, “America,” like the Talmud, offers new space for the possibility of Jewish philosophy in the form of credulous and incredulous wide-open spaces and rangy ruminations synchronized to a cultural environment marked by the reality of vulgarity, commercialism, and crass cheapness. Generous and self-centered, America and its liberal promise for Jewish philosophy, the promise of its ideal, has always been what Ralph Waldo Emerson in “On Art,” called the “production of a new and fairer whole” (cited by Kushner, epigraph). But why should it be the case that postwar and contemporary American Jewish philosophy seems always to fall short of German-Jewish philosophical modernism? I am contending here that the answer to this question has everything to do with art and aesthetics and with the fact that American Jewish 50 braiterman philosophy has never been “postmodern,” not in a genuine way. Aesthetics gave German-Jewish philosophical modernism its conceptual edge. In contrast, postwar and contemporary Jewish philosophy in the United States has been unable to steep its thinking in new conceptual vocabularies made possible by contemporaneous aesthetic cultures of architecture, art, cinema, digital media, drama, installation, music, novels, poetry, and video. Perhaps neither aesthetics nor American Judaism has yet to be considered sufficiently serious. Perhaps, too, American Jewish philosophy continues to rely overmuch on Germany and German Jews for its materials, and this has made it more difficult for Jewish philosophers to integrate Judaism into America, spiritually intellectually. Like the fourth child in the Passover Haggadah, we do not even know where to look or what to ask. Immersed too deeply in German intellectual history, the academically specialized discourse of Jewish philosophy remains out of touch with environments and object-worlds closer to home, while at the same time suffering under the impression that the thought-world of German Jewish modernism would continue to hold the key to our own contemporary predicaments. In this attempt to stake out new topoi for an American Jewish philosophy, I will start with house and home. Again taking advantage of the license given us to speak in a personal vein, this means with my parents and with adolescence, not only for obvious sentimental reasons but also for reasons that have as much to do with the self-constituting of my own work in Jewish philosophy. I will begin with my father, Sheldon (z”l). A quintessential second-generation American Jew, my father’s attachment to family, Jewish people, the Jewish people, and Israel was as emotional and nonreflexive as it was historically and culturally thick. In his experience of the world, these Jewish things were simple and bound up together. He ran an independent law firm because it was possible to do this in the 1970s and 1980s and still earn a decent living and because he did not work well with others. Devoted and domineering, aggressive and overbearing, he was brilliant, funny, charming, and irritating. I had figured out already in high school to avoid him at his most difficult, while accepting that his was the mode with which I came, unthinkingly, to my own ideological and intellectual commitments to Jewish “things” and Jewish “places.” From him, I learned crude arts of rebellion, non- assimilation, and rejection of bourgeois propriety and polite manners. As an adolescent and into my early twenties, I was in every sense devoted to Habonim-Dror, a Labor Zionist youth movement. It was for me an autonomous space, a second space, outside the constraints of the primary parental home. In the 1970s, the American Labor Zionism at Habonim-Dror was defined by a rump-end form of radical drug culture. Woodie Guthrie, American folk after germany 51 repertoire, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash meshed with the socialism of Ber Borochov and A. D. Gordon, with classical Israeli folksongs and folkdance. It is where I first heard Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird” read out loud or saw the Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. It seemed that we must have been shown The Producers, On the Waterfront, and Cool Hand Luke every summer. It is where I would have also read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and would have seen the movie adaptations of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Fixer and The Pawnbroker. The best movies were in black and white. There was no contradiction, no theological-political predicament. The combinations felt organic, not forced. They held together for as long as they did. My parents had grown up in America during the 1930s and 1940s, watching from this side of the Atlantic the destruction of European Jewry, the establishment of the State of Israel, and then the 1967 Six-Day War. They lived very much on the outside of mainstream society dominated by WASP culture, and a rebellious outsider sense still stamped my friends in the mid-to-late 1970s. We despised bourgeois American Judaism, which we thought was physically dull and politically compromised. This was our negation of the Diaspora. Ideologically self-righteousness and self-important, what mattered most of all was the intense social interaction between us, an intensity that I now believe is very “Jewish,” an old reflex, this shtetl-solidarity and bonding that my parents would have learned from their immigrant grandparents and that my friends and I would have learned from our grandparents. Looking back at old pictures from the 1970s, what strikes me is the almost naïve and open self-giving of ourselves to a camera. I am probably imagining it, but the faces seem more relaxed, less anxious, and happier than the way people appear in pictures today, when the relationship to cameras and other types of imaging technologies is more knowing and critical. We were closer in 1975 to 1945 (to the end of World War II and to the Holocaust) than we are today in 2013 to 1975—and closer still to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Six-Day War. Things looked different back then. Israel looked different; America looked different; we looked different. I will not say “better.” Worlds were smaller back then, perhaps less self-critical and self-aware than today, less cynical, and also less wise. I think we were better bonded back then, to each other, to history, and to political ideas. There is the notion now that none of this was “genuine,” that it was, indeed, all posed. This critical insight represents a little bit of postmodern wisdom, which may be true, if not in an absolute sense, then at least more or less, but in a way that is probably beside the point. This group consciousness was something that my father understood, my mother much less so. To her, this Jewish thing was limited and limiting, which, of course, it was. From my mother, Marilyn, I learned over time how to place 52 braiterman and to connect Jewish commitments out into a more cosmopolitan place. It is not as if she was ever interested in either German Jewish philosophy or Judaism. She was not and is not. But in her professional life, she remains very interested in the fin de siècle, the aesthetic milieu out of which, coincidentally, modern Jewish philosophy emerged. For years, she volunteered at the Smith College Used Book Sale, sponsored by the school’s Baltimore alumna. Helping set up the tables, I got first dibs on books and built my first philosophy library there on the cheap as a teenager. Later, my mother started Marilyn Braiterman Rare Books, selling books out of the house when my younger brother and I were in high school in the late 1970s. I remember one summer driving with her in a van full of books, with the windows open, back home to Baltimore from a show in Philadelphia. Although she claims to be sick of the business, Marilyn continues to find, buy, trade, show, and sell first-edition illuminated books related to art, architecture, travel, design, and photography, mostly from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, France, England, and America. When there was a market for it in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was always a lot of modern Judaica and some anti-Semitica around. I have been going to the annual book fairs of the Association of Antiquarian Booksellers of America for years now. I have always liked the culture of the fairs, the dealers from California, New York, New England, and from the European stores, the gossip and the back and forth. As often as not, antiquarian book dealers tend to be incredibly smart. Combining erudition and business, they know a lot and in a more worldly way than is common among most academics such as myself. The antiquarian book trade constituted my first practical introduction to the aesthetics of Jewish modernism, about which I might have otherwise not known a thing. Marilyn Braiterman Books modeled a small and rarified corner of the world where modern Jewish aesthetica cohabits with larger blocs of very old printed books, modern first editions, autographs, maps, anatomical and zoographical and ethnographic picture-books from the eighteenth century, and art books from the early and mid-twentieth century. Before my eyes, in three dimensional display, I first saw in her shop how one might put two and two together with three, four, and five: neoclassical architecture; art nou- veau, Jugendstil, and Bezalel design; German expressionism; neuesachlichkeit; Ballet Russe; English gardens; landscapes and landscape design; Japanese erot- ica; German and French anti-Semitica; the Song of Songs; and other modern rare-edition illuminated Hebrew books.1 These were among the first nontextual, visual cues with which I began to make sense of modern Judaism and modern Jewish thought and culture. Rare-book culture may have nothing to do

1 Cf. http://www.braitermanbooks.com/localimages/catalogue32.pdf, accessed Dec. 14, 2013. after germany 53 with ethics and social justice, with “the messianic” or “the call of the other.” But rare books remain deeply “moral” in the technical sense meant by anthropolo- gists. Relating to coded conduct and value, nothing matters more than style, including moral substance, which itself has always already been stylized. As for a practical payout to this aesthetic education, I am learning from my mother how to draw sharp, business-like conclusions. I do not believe that contemporary Jewish philosophy will ever be done with German Jewish philosophy, at least not for another hundred years. But German Jewish philosophy has already entered into an historical archive. There are wonderful things to look at. This is both a descriptive and a normative claim, reflecting my own attempt to arrange them vis-à-vis a different place and time. I have come to understand that the fancy that the dead continue to speak to us is an antihistoricist, philosophical conceit used to justify our own hermeneutical work. “Adorno,” “Benjamin,” “Buber,” “Cohen,” “Kafka,” “Rosenzweig,” “Scholem,” “Strauss” all belong now together as objects in a museum of philosophical ideas or at an antiquarian philosophy fair. Go to them like to any other period genre; handle them like any antiquarian object; pick them up mentally; look at them this way and then that way; turn them about. They continue to enjoy conceptual exhi- bition value. And then go home, leaving them there up on the wall or under a glass. Academic antiquarianism nests Jewish philosophy deeply, safely, and professionally inside a tight cocoon, But it does not encourage one to open up new ground, to allow Jewish philosophy to move around outside in search of new things, new mental leads and landscapes. A case in point is the aversion of Jewish philosophy to French theory and to American intellectual culture. Apart from Levinas and a little bit of Derrida, the vast majority of contemporary Jewish philosophers would seem to have never taken a look at thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, or Gilles Deleuze. As for American thought, with perhaps the exception of Charles Saunders Peirce, American thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell figure only dimly on the philosophical radar. What these thinkers could offer contemporary Jewish philosophy are more nuanced understandings of the relation between philosophy and nonphilosophy, the places between immanence and transcendence, the real and virtual lives of the body and bodies, their sex and affective dispositions, art and the visual imagination, the science and the technologies that underpin contemporary thought and culture, including religious life and thought. Ultimately, these varied things do not simply “deconstruct” as much as they hold together in time and in place. 54 braiterman

It is hard to say how, where, and with whom to begin. Any such decision would have to relate practically to any given project and, less practically, to accidents and sheer serendipity. Again, about this I can only speak personally. Back when I was still more deeply immersed in German Jewish philosophy, I am sure, for instance, that I would not have bothered to notice a review in the New York Times of Alfred Kazin’s recently published diaries (Cook 2011). A god- send to me now, Kazin could only have been, at the time, a complete stranger. One of the great New York Jewish intellectuals, here was a leading light of American letters at midcentury ensconced for years at the New Republic, a randy man about town, the kind of unreligious Jewish Jew whom my father and mother would have instantly recognized. If I were to try to reset Jewish thought and philosophy and to provide it new conceptual and historical legs, and a visual sense in mid-twentieth-century America, it would be with him. I do not know exactly why I immediately ordered Alfred Kazin’s Journals as well as A Walker in the City (1948), Kazin’s stream-of-consciousness memoir of growing in the 1920s in the wilds of Brownsville on the outer edge of Brooklyn. I was looking for something new, for an American form of Jewish theoretical discourse, some still-uncharted expression of an American Jewish philosophy, built on American aesthetic and philosophical sources. But why Kazin in particular? That I still do not understand, apart from dumb luck. What I did not expect to find in him and what my parents, in their atheism, would not have seen themselves or even recognized is the strong metaphysical and pungent spiritual impulse pervading this secular American Jewish worldview at midcentury. In Walker in the City, Kazin lets us feel this impulse standing in a state of pronounced tension with the light and smells of intense summer heat, the moldering form of traditional Judaism, the stifling Judaism of his grandparents’ generation, which was the only Judaism it seems he encountered growing up in faraway Brownsville. Jewishness is defined in this text not by religion but rather by second-generation American Jewish culture. For Kazin, however, the memory of Shabbat at home, with his working-class parents and with his cousin and her friends who would drop in, Shabbat with its whiff of socialism and sex, never integrates into a spiritual landscape defined by the author’s own adolescent yearnings and his passionate love for “the old America” of the 1890s. Reflecting on his pilgrimage walks to the public library in a “better” part of Brooklyn, Kazin remembers having no one in Brownsville to talk to about these things. There would have been no one with whom to pose better questions about religion and Judaism and to generate new forms of response, to find better concepts with which to frame them and with which to put together diverse things, secular and religious. So, Kazin picked up a free copy of the New Testament on the street, flirting with the Christ idea in order to make new after germany 55 and broader connections, to fan his mind out into more capacious directions; and then, in the story that is these memoirs, he gave it all up for a girl and sexual awakenings in Highland Park. If the memoir betrays an unsatisfied and inchoate spiritual impulse, the journals are just as “religious, or as Kazin said of Kafka, “plus religieux que les religieux” (Cook 2011, 111). But what is this spiritual impulse, and where is one to see it? Again, there is this particular thread in Kazin’s writings between second-generation ethnic Jewishness, the socialism indigenous to that generation of Jewish immigrants and their children, and American transcenden- talism. It all comes together as some new form of what Harold Bloom calls “the American Religion,” which he describes as self-centered, “gnostic,” and energetic (Bloom 1992). The American religion comes from Blake, Whitman, Melville, and Emerson, not from biblical sources per se and certainly not from rabbinic texts. But the conversation with these old Americans, the geographic sense of place and the social affiliations in Kazin’s writings are profoundly Jewish, even when the author in the earlier entries claims to preserve the best of Judaism in passing beyond it (Cook 2011, 189). For Kazin, this meant the overriding sense of oneness and the transcending of all the kinds of difference that separate people from each other and from spontaneous living in the world. What Kazin even early on says he appreciated in Judaism is the intense overinvolvement in “the smallest details of living,” the notion that Judaism represents a humanization of the world that allows human beings to live in it (ibid., 560; 322). If there is any single entry in Kazin’s diaries that gets to the nub of “the American religion,” in sync with Whitman, with “the song of myself” that “I utter En-Masse,” it would be this one from Kazin’s journal. In the spirit of Spinoza’s famous motto “God or nature,” Kazin might have offered “God siva Brooklyn.” It is from May 8, 1949, its subject the Brooklyn Bridge:

Along the River Road. Picking up the old life as I go, walking parallel to the river, I feel that I march alongside my hidden genius, who sleeps in the river at my side. How slowly and gently he paces me, leading me on. . . . As soon as I look up to the coil and swing of the cable, I am threaded through, caught up and threaded through, by millions of lines. Going through the arches of the towers I slowly and unbelievingly make my way through the eye of a needle; then with the lines streaming back and forth, and up and down on every side of me, I am threaded through, I am led on. Into the thousand thicknesses and coiled strength of the lines, I am led on. This is my only understanding of the divine . . . in the continuing, in the apprehension of an interminating [sic] energy, and infinity of suggestiveness. 56 braiterman

How the lines course back again on every side of me! Plenitude over the river, in the full light of day. I open my arm to the plenitude. In the day it is the threads that I see, for it is in me that they do their work. At night, in the rain and the mist, it is the towers—the implacable surface of the divine. . . . But especially I think of the Bridge as I have walked across it on a hot day . . . a day when the metal plates that reinforce the worn, wooden floor are glowing in the heat, when the boards of the promenade seem to come up to meet you, and melting, expanding, warm, the worn gray and sooty, sooted blocks of the promenade clamped back by your feet. You feel that the whole bridge is fluid, familiar to every sense, its lines, its odors, its deeply engrained familiarity swimming in your blood. (Cook 2011, 129)

I love this passage, to read it aloud to my students, overdramatically and with special emphasis on the words I have italicized here. I love the threading of lines, colors, smells, and the moving, melting undulations that shape this secular theology, and I also love the Brooklyn Bridge. The Germans called this Schwärmerei. I don’t care. Lord Shaftesbury called it “enthusiasm.” Despite important differences between religion and art, these analytic differences are not absolute or categorical. I am more inclined to see art and religion, like religion and politics, as synthetic “things,” overlapping into and staining each other. If the rabbis and kabbalists entertained the notion of God as place (makom), Kazin’s modernist dithyramb spools spiritual filament into the representation of space, coiling it through the time of rhythmic expression and style. The immanent streak reads like Deleuze and reminds me of Kaplan; the self-reliance is Emerson. Should Kazin be the new face of American Judaism, American Jewish philosophy, and religious thought? This is a pragmatic question, and a personal one, but I can think of no American Jewish thought that to date has pulled together or modeled all these spiritual strands with such care for indigenous place and literary texture. No doubt, my own thoughts here reflect the kind of rank romanticism reflected in this little bit of Kafka, “The Wish to Be a Red Indian.” It is another short piece by him, which I quote here also in its entirety:

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and harshly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone. (Kafka 1946, 390) after germany 57

For Kafka, of course, the wish to be “a Red Indian” was an impossible one. It strikes a chord with his famous quip to Max Brod: “Oh yes! There is, an infinite amount of hope, just not for us.” Maybe not in Prague at the start of the last century, but maybe in America, there might be a small hope for us that Jewish thought and culture might make for itself a little more room and a lot more space in which to move around, affectively and conceptually. To be “a Red Indian” is to go outside, out into the city, driving fast at 79 mph, back to the suburbs, or into the countryside; to take with us the impressions that they have made on us and that we hope to share with others; to try something new, inside and outside the synagogue and seminar room and on the blogosphere with the Bible, Talmud, and Zohar and a new group of concepts, and new modalities with which to connect them. I see this clearly at the antiquarian book fairs; in my walks in New York through Riverside Park and Central Park, places designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux at the turn of the last century; or in galleries and museums, at synagogue on Shabbat and holidays, on the subways, the tunnels and bridges that stitch points in the city together and along the highways that connect cities and suburbs together, the seasonal landscapes and nightscapes where sense impressions, the work of imagination, and concepts can gel into a poiesis proper to the articulation of an American Jewish philosophy. Sensibility and concepts determine each other, capacious and dynamic space sensations yielding concepts that are more flexible and free than would be the case under more confined spatial models, in which thought tends to get trapped and congealed. Careful attention is demanded at the intersections between open space and closed circuits in contemporary culture, between pure and flow, on the one hand, and fractured aesthetic and conceptual environments. Looking past a more pure form of classical poststructuralism, America, as a place and concept, as network culture, allows one to locate and to structure small nodal units within a large mass and information flows (Teranova 2004). Or what Deleuze throughout the entirety of his oeuvre called a “line of flight,” something that creates for an American Jewish philosophy a connection between points of difference, allowing one to look past more narrow and parochial confines, yet always with the realization that these open-closed networks are assembled and reassembled in some particular place and time. Out to where and into what kind of metaphysical space do these constructs eventually open? In his crypto-mystical book on Henri Bergson, Deleuze came to see how what we call “actuality” is always constituted as a force of division, whereas “virtuality” stands for radical surplus and excess. The virtual posits pure creative potential, like naturing nature (natura naturans) in Spinoza. “Actual” differences in their division are combined with their “virtual” coexistence in 58 braiterman

“a single time” or duration, or what Deleuze would soon call “a plane of immanence” (Deleuze 1988, 93–94). As modeled here, “thought” divides and differentiates in a single impetus along two paths, matter and “spirit.” By “spirit,” Deleuze means a thought’s “qualities and changes” (ibid., 116). The single- differentiating impulse that constitutes duration as its condition propels thought beyond the human field into a more cosmic-mystical vision defined as superabundant activity, action, and creation. The visible world has been transformed into “something” invisible. Turning to art and mysticism at the end of the Bergson book, Deleuze writes how with the “[s]ervant of an open and finite God (such are the characteristics of the élan vital), the mystical soul actively plays the whole of the universe, and reproduces the opening of a [virtual?] Whole in which there is nothing to see or to contemplate” (ibid., 112). It is at this mystical juncture that I give up on Deleuze. At the end of the day, I would like there to be some “thing” to look at, some “thing” to consider. It might be a picture of my father, or an antiquarian book, or a stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike, or a cat or a door in a stitch of Talmud, things that relate to some particular place and time, be it the time and place of their first formation, as well as and no less than the time and place of our encounter with them. The interdependence between aesthetic form and philosophical possibility was the one flagged by Kant’s basic insight in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant 1965, 95). Local forms of sensibility and local concepts are always already going to have determined each other as the “actuality” of philosophical inquiry. As I mis-read him, Kant allows that neither sensibility nor intelligibility is prior to the other. Not one before the other, they are copresent simultaneously. The posture posed in this little polemical reflection is both aesthetic and metapolitical. Abstract aesthetic form is inseparable from some local manifestation as contingent time and physical place. One such time and place is now in America, whose reality can be as cold, calculating, irascible, and cruel as it can be gracious, inviting, and naïve. As an idealized construct, America presents itself as creation itself, the world we come to as our own, the world we share with other people, a capacious whole under and over the Brooklyn Bridge or vis-à-vis other local landmarks or indexical image points. For an American Jewish philosophy, it forms the space around which to get a bead on our own temporal life today, our own being in the world in the overlap between times and places that is basic to the structure of memory and to other forms of externalized human consciousness as they work themselves out in the open space of an appearance. after germany 59

My own philosophical belief is a skeptical one, namely, that the concepts, impressions, and animating sentiments that mark the walls of Jewish philosophy can only be presented: they cannot be verified by or to an outside observer as obligating or binding in any direct or self-evident way. What that leaves are constellations of concepts caught up with images, whose rhetorical force is caught up in the quality of the image itself as an open or closed possibility. Necessity seems to be the wrong modal form for an American Jewish philosophy. For his part, Leo Strauss very much opposed the imagistic character that he identified in the work of Cohen, Buber, and Rosenzweig. The problem, however, is and was an image of the modern world that Strauss could reject out of hand only on the basis of another set of images, including among them an image of religion based on an image of the Bible or on an image of an ancient or a medieval past, in which revealed visions of truth and obedience to them were established on putatively absolute, normative foundations (cf. Braiterman 2007, 253–56). While it might be impossible to “verify” an image, it is also true that images are not utterly unfalsifiable, which means that they are not completely unrea- soning. About an image there are, indeed, grounds to dispute. Images are not, however, falsified by concepts, ideas, and the truths they represent, whether inadequately or adequately. As Spinoza understood, “imagination is an idea, which indicates rather the present disposition of the human body than the nature of the external body; not indeed distinctly, but confusedly.” Just as emotions can only be controlled by other emotions, so too “imaginations do not vanish at the present of the truth, in virtue of its being true, but because other imaginations, stronger than the first, supervene and exclude the present existence of that we have imagined” (Spinoza 1955, 192; 194). The truth of an image, the abiding power of an image, rests internal to the world of images, to an image world. Like at the movies, the critical condition of an American Jewish philosophy is that an image always in time will give way to another image inside the mental cave of a place.

References

Adler, Rachel. 1998. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Bloom, Harold. 1992. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster. Boyarin, Daniel. 2009. Socrates and the Fat Rabbis. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 60 braiterman

Braiterman, Zachary. 1998. (God) after Auschwitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Jewish Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Buber, Martin. 1949. The Prophetic Faith. Translated by Carlyle Witton-Davies. New York: Macmillan Co. ———. 1965. Between Man and Man. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Collier Books. ———. 1967 [1932]. Kingship of God. Translated by Richard Scheimann. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1970. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cohen, Hermann. 1995 [1972]. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated with introduction by Simon Kaplan. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Cook, Richard M., ed. 2011. Alfred Kazin’s Journals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. Honig, Bonnie, ed. 1995. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kafka, Franz. 1946. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1965 [1929]. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Saint Martin’s Press. Kazin, Alfred. 1948. A Walker in the City: The Open Street. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Kushner, Tony. 1993. Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Rosenzweig. Franz. 1971 [1930]. Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. Spinoza, Bendedict de. 1955. The Ethics. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications. Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. chapter 3 Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being toward Death

James A. Diamond

Autobiographical Sketch for Practicing Jewish Philosophy

In a certain sense, my entire intellectual biography can be charted along a series of engagements with what are, for me, three primary layers of the Jewish textual canon. It is first anchored in the nascent roots of the Hebrew Bible, which itself reflects many centuries of editorial tinkering throughout the biblical period and bears an even later imprint in its very canonization and final “publication.” Every aspect of biblical thought, be it legal, theological, historical, narratological, poetic, or otherwise, is then subjected to the radical rabbinic transformation of the Mishnah and Talmud in the early centuries of the common era. It was fueled by new historical circumstances of catastrophe, absence, exile, and challenges of competing theologies that were to develop into two other major religions that far eclipsed it in terms of membership, power, and influence. Most important was the development of the academic house of study and debate, or beit midrash, as its new intellectual and spiritual center of gravity. Despite its lack of formal philosophical treatises or dialogues in the classical sense, Judaism produced a vast compendium of disparate ideas on every facet of human and divine life, and their intersection, which ensured both existential and philosophical survival. The Middle Ages then layers Judaism further for me, perfecting the foundational canon with the new thinking of the “early ones,” or rishonim. Particularly dominated by the Maimonidean and Nahmanidean oeuvre, it equipped Judaism with the divergent philosophical and spiritual means and parlance to address the challenges posed by what was then a modern period. There was a certain beauty, charm, and comfort to the intellectual naïveté that suffused the orthodox familial, educational, and social milieu of my own formative years. The Jewish foundational texts of the Bible, Talmud, Midrash, biblical commentaries, liturgy, and responsa, all evolved, although that is certainly not the term that would have been used, within a hermetically sealed world, untouched by any “outside” influences, be they historical, cultural, or intellectual. There was no sense of linear time or “periods” such as ancient,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_005 62 diamond medieval, and modern, since all these texts were timeless, floating, and pro- tective, recalling the primordial “wind of God” over the preeternal waters that preceded creation. One of the most poignant descriptions of this pristine rabbinic mindset is offered by R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1903–93), himself a scion of lineage considered royalty in the yeshiva world of the last two centuries, recollect- ing what he had absorbed from both his father, R. Moshe, and grandfather R. Chaim of Brisk (1853–1918), the founder of the modern, yet ahistorical, analytic approach to rabbinic texts known as the “Brisker” method. What R. Joseph Dov felt as an “ever-present historical psychological reality in the depths of my soul” translated into a perpetual engagement with his predecessors, elevating mere study to experiential encounter:

When I prepare to learn, I find myself suddenly and immediately in the company of the sages of the tradition. The relationship between us is personal. The Rambam [Maimonides, 1138–1205] is at my right, Rabbenu Tam [a French Tosafist, 1100–71] is at my left, Rashi [the most prominent of biblical and talmudic exegetes, 1040–1105] leads the discussion, Rabbenu Tam casts doubt, Rambam codifies, and Ra’avad [Abraham ben David of Posquieres, 1125–98] critiques. They are all sitting around the table with me in close quarters. They look at me with affection[,] engage me in logic and argument, encouraging and strengthening me like a parent. . . . Those that transmitted the Torah and those that received it con- vene in one historical gathering. (Soloveitchik 1978, 64–65)

Though, as a critical scholar of Jewish studies I can no longer subscribe in toto to such an approach to Jewish texts, there is something here worth preserving when we in the academy conduct our “research.” What was once conceived of, during the incipient period of my career as a Jewish thinker in the world of the yeshiva, as a monolithic continuum of voices engaging each other on common ground then graduated to the critical perspective of the academy. As a result, Judaism for me could have gone the way of the self-declared decent burial prepared for it by the scholarship of the early founders of Jewish Wissenschaft. However, I was fortunate enough to have been introduced to the broader world of philosophy by Emil Fackenheim, who, resisting Jewish Wissenschaft’s own initial impulse to surrender to G. W. F. Hegel’s relegation of Judaism to anachronism and Immanuel Kant’s recommendation for its euthanization, broadened the philosophical horizon enough to bridge the divide between Jewish thought and philosophy. Despite its deceptively simple form, his consideration of midrashic discourse as a profound medium a jewish philosophy of being 63 of sophisticated theology (Fackenheim 1973, 15) opened the door to what has become a central focus of my own scholarship and contemplation of what precisely constitutes a Jewish way of doing philosophy. In a way, there is a need to retrieve some of the continuum of that yeshiva naïveté of my youth as it relates to a midrashic ingenuity spanning different historical periods and cutting across the range of Jewish “disciplines.” Whether halakhist/lawyer, philosopher, biblical exegete, or mystic, the canonical thinkers I consider instrumental to any determination of the future of Jewish thought share a common language and mode of midrashic thinking unique to their rabbinic antecedents. The boundaries between what are often regarded in Jewish studies as rigid disciplines of law, rabbinics, philosophy, and mysticism are more permeable than it appears. This connective midrashic thread weaves them all into an intertextual discourse that can be authentically qualified as “Jewish.” Much of the philosophical distortion of Judaism flows from misconceiving Sinai, the radically formative event/revelation of Jewish history, as an imposition of positive law crushing all human freedom and suppressing human participation. As Fackenheim points out, it is, in fact, more of a hybrid of “human freedom and Divine grace” (1973, 97). A prominent rabbinic rereading of the Torah’s unvowelized text, in fact, grounds the entire law in freedom when the classical rabbis transformed the term that described the divine text, or the “Ten Utterances,” as “incised” in the stone tablets, into “freedom”: “Do not read it charut [incised], but rather cherut [freedom]” (Blackman 1951; Avot 6:2, 4:540). What originated in the divine realm becomes humanized through interpretation, the freedom of which is exquisitely conveyed by this very misreading. In line with this rabbinic freedom, the single factor to my mind that must be most credited with guaranteeing Jewish thought its survival, vitality, adaptability, and philosophical capability is the further rabbinic mis/reading of the biblical assertion “it is not in heaven” (Deut. 30:12). Wrenched out of its context, it was read as mandating the exclusion of God from all subsequent legal discussions. God is forever barred from the beit midrash, because “heaven” has no place in the interpretive process (Babylonian Talmud 1990, Baba Metzia 59b). This rule became so sacrosanct as to warrant the death pen- alty for any prophetic citation of God to substantiate one legal position over another (Maimonides 1975–2001, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 9:4). Otherwise, reason and thought would be squelched: how can one respond to the word of God other than with submissive silence? Without this principle, the divine word would indeed remain frozen in time and immutable, as the proverbial “etched in stone” indicates. Years of law school and the subsequent practice of law prior to entering the academy have also taught me that halakha 64 diamond and secular legal systems share more jurisprudential principles than my adolescent yeshiva training would have had me believe. Once the letters on the tablets lost their ability to be heard, they flew off, leaving Moses holding an unbearable dead weight that came crashing down (Friedlander 1981, chap. 44). So, any system based on positive law must always be tempered by equity and judicial reasoning that is judicious, lest the system simply deteriorate into dead-letter law. Unsatisfied with just the freedom they granted themselves vis-à-vis the tablets, or the textual mode of communication at Sinai, the rabbis also addressed its oral dimension. The inimitable divine sound that ceased and “was no more” (Deut. 5:18) is revived and resonates throughout time when the phrase is mis- read as “did not cease.”1 Though God is restricted from the Jewish house of study, his word continues to be heard in the human interpretive freedom exer- cised within its walls. The spirit of Sinaitic orality and textuality is perpetuated in the ongoing engagement with its jagged edges, inconsistencies, lacunae, and generally its “surface irregularities” (Kugel 1986, 92), all posing opportunities, rather than problems, for the advancement of Jewish thought. How appropriate, then, is the first commandment, or rather preamble, for all this rabbinically assumed freedom, originating, as it does, in the event from which all Jewish law and thought emanates? The God who commands authority and allegiance is not the Creator, nor the One, nor does he consist of any of those attributes commonly associated with the rationalist monotheistic deity of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. He is the liberator, the “one who took you out of Egypt,” the one who is incensed by oppression and the human treatment of others as means rather than ends. Despite later medieval debates whether this introductory preface constitutes a formal command, God does not demand “belief in,” but rather grounds all law and obedience in moral authority. If imitatio dei inspires such ethical behavior as clothing the naked and visiting the sick, then surely it must also compel the cultivation of freedom—the essence of God’s inaugural relational act with Israel. Thus, the hermeneutical freedom the rabbis appropriated for themselves only initiates the supreme religious mandate of imitatio dei. Such a hermeneutic is ultimately consummated by thought that is launched by interpretive freedom but heads in the direction of a freedom that bears the most compelling of ethical connotations—resisting and releasing from oppression. The primary boundary that cordons off thought as “Jewish” is its gaze back even as it looks forward—its engagement with the scriptures of the Jewish canon. What, for example, transforms a work such as Maimonides’ Guide of

1 See Rashi’s commentary, Katzenellenbogen 1988, 7:52. a jewish philosophy of being 65 the Perplexed from a philosophical treatise into Jewish philosophy is the ever- present verse, midrash, or halakha that confronts the reader at every turn and its obsessive concern with biblical language. That textual Jewishness is com- pounded by its living Jewishness in the Guide’s intended audience, which is plagued by the uniquely Jewish angst generated by a potentially lethal clash between “knowledge of the true sciences” and belief in “matters pertaining to the Law”(Maimonides 1963, 10). But more than that, its Jewishness lies in the imitatio dei that is its driving force. It begins in the compassion aroused by absence of a beloved disciple (ibid., 4), then in the overarching goal to relieve the “heartache and great perplexity” suffered by the religiously devout intellectual (ibid., 6), and finally manifests in its ultimate destination of a “way of life” that will “always have in view loving-kindness, righteousness and judgment, through assimilation to His actions” (ibid., 638, italics in original). One more biographical detail is necessary as a prologue to the Jewish philosophical theology I am about to offer here that explains my particular choice of subject matter around which it is constructed. My parents and those of virtually every one of my classmates and friends had inhabited a world— indeed, another “planet”—gone mad, which ended, it has been argued, with the deaths of both human civilization and God. However, many of those parents, continued to live, raise families, and conduct themselves despite total devastation, as if there still remained a pulsating breath in both the human and the divine. I say “many” fully aware of the premature deaths, suicides, and madness that were the unspoken fate others chose or succumbed to. To extract meaning, therefore, out of unrelenting death that in some infinitesimal sense defeats its perpetrators is one component of the fulfillment of Fackenheim’s 614th commandment to survive as Jews. Thus, in keeping with the mandate of this volume, I here embark on the “practice” of Jewish philosophy, rather than its historical or sociological investigation, concerning the issue of death, which can only be confronted through a confluence of my rabbinic, philosophical, and legal training, as well as existential conditioning. However, looking toward the future would be myopically non-Jewish, without what I consider a deep “midrashic” engagement with my Jewish textual and experiential past. As such, I set out now to address the meaning of death for authentic living by forging a Jewish philosophical discourse that spans a continuum of Jewish texts, thinkers, and exegetes from the Bible to the classical rabbis to the medieval parshanim, to Hasidism, modern secular philosophy, and, ultimately, the Warsaw Ghetto. In the spirit of R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik’s own experience, the result is a formulation that emerges from an encounter with some of the “teacher/friends” I have made at various junctures of my life- long engagement with Jewish thought. 66 diamond

Questioning the Meaning of Death

How are Jewish views of life, ethics, law, and the pursuit of knowledge informed by the prospect of death or impending death? For Socrates of the Phaedo, the philosophical endeavor itself is melete thanatou, or a rehearsal for death, and the authentic philosopher, in his progressive noetic diversion from the body inward and upward toward the mind, is continuously engaged in the pursuit of death and dying. Socrates embraced death when it was imminent, as the culmination of his philosophical life or what he considered a ceaseless occupation with the “practice or cultivation of dying” (Plato 2002, 80e). Why evade what he had been practicing all his informed life? While an uncommon biblical occurrence, a number of central characters such as Jonah, Elijah, Samson, and Saul desired death, with the latter two actually consummating that desire. Is their yearning for death devoid of philosophical meaning? Is it simply attributable to distress, revenge, or emotional frustration, depending on the circumstance? Or, as is the case with Socrates, does it relate to some climactic attainment of wisdom or self-realization? Is Moses’s death at the conclusion of Deuteronomy simply accountable as punishment, an unfulfilled life, a frustrated political mission, or a cruel exercise of divine whimsy? Or is there something more philosophically sublime conveyed by a death divinely ordained? What precisely is the meaning of dying by “the mouth of God,” an erotic departure that is depicted as an unnatural intrusion into an otherwise physically robust life whose “eyes were undimmed and vigor unabated” (Deut. 34:7)?

The Tree of Knowledge: Introducing Cunning and Shame

The relationship between the two notionally designated trees of life and of knowledge in primeval Eden might provide the initial clues as to the precise meaning of death for human existence. The prohibition not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad (Gen. 2:18) is preceded by an accompanying positive directive to “eat of all the trees of the Garden” (2:17). Presumably, at this point of the Eden narrative consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Life is permissible, or even obligatory, to Adam. Once Adam’s dietary regime is set, a divine assessment immediately follows as to Adam’s wanting state of loneliness, which is declared “not good”—“it is not good for man to be alone”—the remedy to which is companionship—“I will make a fitting helper for him.” Despite being ignorant of the knowledge of good and bad, man experiences the “not good” of loneliness. He exists in a wanting state, lacking an essential a jewish philosophy of being 67 social dimension of relationship. At this point, a life consumed exclusively by the social, or by the political the social necessitates, could be fully accomplished absent any awareness of mortality, and, thus, would not be impeded by eating from the Tree of Life, or at least knowing that it can be eaten of. Life, no matter how long, is simply intolerable without camaraderie or company. This divine evaluation is merely a utilitarian appraisal without any moral connotations—man and woman need each other for support, procreation, friendship, and dialogue, without any regard for a relational “between” that is good in and of itself. An experiential “not good” merely needs an experiential corrective of togetherness. But there is yet to be a life that can be lived for the other. The only textual clue we have as to what the knowledge the primordial couple illicitly acquires of “good and bad” consists of lies in its immediate effect of the awareness of nakedness and the feeling of shame in front of each other (Gen. 3:7). There is no doubt that the strategic word play using the same term, arum, for nakedness as that used just prior for the trait singling out the snake from all other creatures connoting “cunning” or “shrewdness”—“and the snake was more arum than all the animals of the field” (3:1)—contributes substantively to its meaning.2 To be cunning is to gain advantage by means of knowledge. In this case, the snake exploits Eve’s lack of the knowledge associated with the tree, holding out an expectation of enlightenment (“and your eyes will be opened”) and becoming “godlike”—“and you will be like divine beings” (3:5). The latter connotes some mastery over creation that the divine epithet elohim has been so closely identified with thus far in the creation narrative. It is a potency that fails, in its most important expectation, to materialize. Enlightenment indeed ensues (3:7—“then the eyes of both of them were opened”) but, instead of empowerment, it consists in the weakness of emas- culating nakedness and the experience of shame. In the world of quotidian nakedness, cunning is not possible. In a world where everything is exposed, where nothing is hidden from the other, no advantage can be had at the expense of the other, for what is known to one is known to the other. Once man and woman succumbed to the snake’s cunningness, they felt vulnerable in the face of each other’s now exploitive gaze. They understood the need to conceal from each other what each might know or have, both as a defensive shield from and possible offensive weapon for exploitation. They can no longer simply be with each other but must always entertain the choice of being over and against each other by concealing or manipulating knowledge unequally

2 See the tight semantic connection created between the two meanings of the term arum noted by Kimmelman 1998. 68 diamond shared between them. Rather than a leveling agent, knowledge becomes an instrument of advantage and disparity.3 That clothing does not remedy this state of nakedness is evident when man hides from God out of “fear for his nakedness” (3:10—“and I was afraid because of my nakedness and I hid”) immediately after they had just fashioned clothing for themselves. Nakedness now means a consciousness of vulnerability that clothing cannot dispel, especially realized in the context of an extreme imbalance of power presented by God’s confronting man. Clothing oneself does nothing to correct this consciousness or existential state. One more layer is needed, but this time through the act of clothing others undertaken by God: “and God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and He clothed them” (Gen. 3:21). Here the most extreme latent situation of power imbalance— God confronting human beings—results in compassion and care rather than exploitation and dominance. Maimonides may very well have determined the sense of this narrative in its tracing of Adam’s intellectual decline from a single-minded focus on universals (truth and falsehood) to one engaged with the contingencies of subjective knowledge (good and bad) (Maimonides 1963, 25). In other words, man moves from knowledge that is common to all—and is, therefore, unifying—to knowledge that fluctuates between all and is, thus, fragmenting—from knowledge that concerns all to knowledge that concerns the self. Another type of “aloneness” now threatens to undermine the “togetherness” that the creation of other human beings was meant to provide as a corrective to solitude. Although there are others, their presence now poses the potential simply to supplement the self rather than bolster some relational mutuality. This is evident from the various relationships that are realized as a result of the seduction of the Tree of Knowledge, all defined by dominance, alienation, and exploitation:

1. hatred between the woman and the snake with a clear hierarchy of people above striking at the head of the snake and the snake below striking at the heel of people (Gen. 3:15—“they shall strike at your head and you shall strike at their heel”); 2. master/slave relationship of dependence between man and woman (3:16—“and he shall rule over you”); 3. man placed in opposition to his very environment (3:17–19—“cursed shall be the soil because of you; by toil shall you eat of it; by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread”);

3 For rabbinic views of nakedness, see Satlow 1997. a jewish philosophy of being 69

4. mothers and children situated at conception and gestation in a context of pain and opposition (16—“in pain shall you bear children”).

All actors at this stage of the narrative are caught in each other’s gaze of objectification.4

The Tree of Life: Mortality and the Life of Dying for Others

Only mortality and the shadow of impending death can transform this complex web of opposing aims and self-interested opportunities into some kind of integrated, mutually reinforcing whole. First, death is the only unifying dimension of all human existence. All face this common fate of nonexistence, an unavoidable phenomenon captured best by Ecclesiastes’ cynical, yet morally instructive,5 leveling of all creation: “For human beings and beast share one and the same fate, as one dies so does the other, and both have the same life-breath, and man is not superior to beast, since both amount to nothing” (Eccles. 3:19). Although, at this early stage of Ecclesiastes’ meditations on life, the thought of death merely reinforces his crude materialism (“for there is nothing better for man than to enjoy his possessions” [3:22]), it articulates the kernel of what will eventually temper it: the humility that looking toward death inculcates in the thought that “man is not superior to beast.” The question that death raises is an existential one that would surely stimu- late a quest for some quality that might elevate the human over the beast.6 In what sense is man, in fact, superior to the beast?7 Death itself poses the answer, for it is in the human power over death that no beast has, the ability to choose it freely on behalf of others. A talmudic legend relates a query put to the rabbis by Alexander the Great seeking an answer to a primal question: “What should one do in order to live?” The question elicits an enigmatic yet assumedly figurative rabbinic response: one should “kill oneself” (Babylonian

4 In the pre-sin state, there would have been no need for concealment since there would be no possibility of a “crippling external gaze.” See Nagel 1998, 17ff. 5 See Crenshaw 1995. 6 In fact, death is the overarching theme that links the entire book of Ecclesiastes (Lo 2008). 7 As one would expect, the subject of death is of great concern to philosophy as well as to religion, so the literature is vast. For but one survey of philosophical approaches through the ages, see Choron 1963. 70 diamond

Talmud 1990, Tamid 32a).8 Curiously, an authentic life consists of dying. Despite its patent figurativeness, for Emmanuel Levinas, the profundity of this rabbinic version of Socrates’ “practicing death” lies also in its literalness: that what “animates the kindness of human beings between themselves” is the ultimate intention of self-sacrifice, of dying for another, and, as such, “is the dying that renders living possible . . . that requires all the forces of life to take up this wager of dying” (Levinas 1999, 92–93). Barring Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life enables a life overshadowed by mortality, by the specter of that which expresses humanity more than anything else, of choosing death on behalf of others. Death allows for the potential of the absolutely supreme act of “for others” that vitalizes all other such acts, that humanizes the world of knowledge that can so easily lapse into living for oneself. As Levinas argues, there is nothing more tragic or comic than a life doomed for destruction that is lived only for its own sake, while living a life where “the Other concerns me despite myself” dispels its absurdity (Levinas 2006, 56–57).9 The narrative sequence positioning Cain’s fratricide immediately after obstructing entry to the Tree of Life, corroborates this interpretation. If biblical history can in some sense be viewed as a series of failures to live up to ideals, murder, of course, is the most extreme vitiation of the notion of dying for the other that an inaccessible Tree of Life and mortality teaches. Correspondingly, if self-sacrifice animates all other compassionate behavior, then Cain’s rejection of a life as a “brother’s keeper” is an apt description of a life for itself that ultimately will annihilate others in pursuit of pure self-preservation.10

Elijah and the Silent Whirlwind of Dying for Others

Many of those narratives in the Hebrew Bible related to the yearning for death or actual suicide can now be appreciated in light of this moral dimension to death. Here I restrict the discussion to perhaps the most poignant of them. Elijah both craves death at a crossroads in his prophetic career and experiences the most spectacular death, or non-death, as the case may be, recorded

8 See Fishbane 1994 who traces the life of this Hellenistically influenced adage through its various incarnations in Jewish mystical and rationalist thought from Philo to Bialik. 9 See also Levinas 1988, especially his conclusion that “[t]he humanness of dying for the other would be the very meaning of love in its responsibility for one’s fellowman” (216). 10 See also Levinas’s analysis of Cain’s act, which claims that Cain should have possessed the knowledge that “we approach death as nothingness in the passion for murder” (1991, 232). a jewish philosophy of being 71 of any biblical character. Elijah’s victorious confrontation with the idolatrous prophets on Mount Carmel turns out to be hollow, for he is still hunted by the regime he opposed. Like Moses and Jonah, he becomes so despondently frustrated with his apparently failed leadership that he begs God for death: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” (1Kings 19:4). Though Elijah’s opposition to the cult of Baal was publicly vindicated by a dramatic supernatural sign, just prior to this moment of extreme despair, he bolsters his authority further by seizing and “slaughtering” the opposition (18:40). The exegetical struggle by various commentators to rationalize this extraordinary extrajudicial measure simply highlights its legal and moral dubiousness.11 Could Elijah’s success at Mount Carmel restoring religious dedication to the rightful God have been scuttled by a brash moral failure, a murderous rage reflecting some other facet of his character antithetical to the dying for others lesson of death? In fact, Isaac Arama, a major fifteenth-century Spanish exegete, draws this conclusion and interprets the revelation that follows Elijah’s plea for death as a direct rejoinder to this very moral collapse, to the “zeal for God” Elijah claims was the purpose of that murderous purge (19:10). The epiphany that places God within the “soft murmuring sound” rather than earth shattering wind, earthquakes, or fire (1Kings 19:11–13) is an indict- ment of Elijah’s actions. Divine presence is not reflected in destructive rage, but rather in conduct that is, in Arama’s words, “calm, composed, and for the sake of truth, humility, and justice” (Arama 1960, 4:127). Elijah’s petition for death prods the conveyance of the authentic lesson of death that challenges Elijah to surmount his ideological fanaticism with an equally fierce care for others, to transform his willingness to die for himself to an empathic way of life animated by a willingness to die for others. Elijah’s preference for death inspires a new philosophical theology that is driven not by the assertion of power as signified by the brute force of various destructive natural phenomena but by the moral suasion of humility that emanates from the quiet and the calm. As a reenactment of Sinai, this transcends Elijah’s personal predicament, completely transforming the original thunderous, terrifying, and imposing basis for God’s relationship with Israel into a benign “softness.” Compassion now replaces passion. Elijah’s moral transformation at Mt. Horeb pursuant to his death wish culminates in his actual (or rather virtual) death when he is whisked up to heaven

11 See Gersonides, Nahmanides, and Isaac Abarbanel on Exod. 32:27 (Katzenellenbogen 1988, 4:199). The use of the term shachat is almost exclusively reserved for slaughtering animals. For other instances of such “butchery” indicating inordinate cruelty, see 2Kings 10:7, 14; Jer. 39:6; 41:7; and Ezek. 23:39. 72 diamond in a whirlwind. Central to that narrative is the relationship between Elijah and his disciple Elisha, whose repeated refusal to abandon his master is one of the most sublime expressions of devotion to another human being in the entire Bible. Exasperated by his student’s refusal to leave his side, Elijah offers to accommodate one last request before surrendering his life. Elisha responds with what at first appears an arrogant demand that he be granted “double the spirit” Elijah possesses.12 Though Elijah considers it a difficult request, he conditions its fulfillment on witnessing his death: “if you see me taken away from you then it will be granted and if not, it will not” (2Kings 2:10). Thus, Elisha’s future reputation is guaranteed by observing a death. Clearly, as in the case of Moses’s viewing from Mt. Nebo, the test cannot be visual, or even accessible to anyone capable of sight, but rather must present a conceptual challenge. Elisha must understand this death. If the lesson of death is “dying for others,” then Elijah’s strikingly conveys it, in that its very essence is the enabling of his beloved successor to eclipse his own life’s work and prophetic legacy. For Elisha to see Elijah’s death is to absorb it as a supreme gesture of self-sacrifice. The death for others Elijah finally experiences overwhelms the self-centered death he yearned for prior to his moral transition effected by the sounds of silence at Horeb. The fact that Elisha comprehends this conception of death is evident from the confusion of the group of fifty other prophetic disciples who perceived displacement rather than death, or, in other words, failed to assimilate the lesson of death (2:16–19). Elisha “sees” Elijah transported heavenward by a whirlwind (sa’arah), a natural force that plays a revelatory role two other times in the Hebrew Bible, once as the initiator of Ezekiel’s graphically mysterious account of the chariot (Ezek. 1:4) and once as the medium of Job’s revelation in response to his theologically inscrutable suffering (Job 38:1). Despite its enigmatic character, a series of questions and overpowering images rather than definitive answers are intended to subdue Job’s ego into a state of enlightened ignorance “of things beyond me which I did not know” (Job 42:3). However, rather than endow some theoretical knowledge, the whirlwind accomplishes a moral transformation. Job’s final act retrieves the original prophetic role introduced by Abraham (Gen. 20:7), to care and intercede for others in their time of need. Indeed, the act of praying on his “friends’ ” behalf, is what the narrative credits with Job’s augmented restoration to the wholesome life that preceded all his suffering—

12 Although, grammatically, the phrase pi shenayim might mean “two-thirds,” the context and Elijah’s difficulty with it seems to accord with its rabbinic interpretation as twice as much (Babylonian Talmud 1990, Sanhedrin 47a). See also Deut. 21:17, where the phrase certainly means double. a jewish philosophy of being 73

“The Lord restored Job’s fortunes when he prayed on behalf of his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice what he had before” (42:10). In perfect symmetry, the revelatory whirlwind doubles Job’s previous fortunes and, likewise, doubles Elisha’s prophetic prowess because of the teaching of death. According to one rabbinic opinion, the message of Job is that, since death is the “end of man” one should cultivate a “good name” in anticipation of death (Babylonian Talmud 1990, Berakhot 17a). What is missing from the initial description of Job as “blameless, upright, God-fearing, and shunning evil” is care for others. That is the meaning of Satan’s challenge, whose claim is that Job’s whole world hinges on himself and his family. The test will determine what remains of his faith once all is lost concerning his own welfare, and nothing else remains but the other’s interests. Finally, Elisha’s lament, “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen,” is a powerful testament to death’s teaching. Virtually every biblical instance of the pairing of chariots and horsemen signals the aggressive power of the monarch and that self-serving military complex that maintains his oppressive grip on the reins of government.13 By substituting the father for the king as synonymous with these armaments, Elisha discerns true power in the relationship of father/child, one that is defined by self-sacrifice, rather than the king’s forces, which signify its polar opposite—the expendability of others in the king’s service or the dying of others for oneself. Elaborating on the rabbinic tradition that counts Elijah as one of a number of biblical personalities who entered Eden alive, David Kimhi, the prominent medieval exegete of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, asserts that, Elijah’s clothes burned off and “God admitted him physically to the Garden of Eden just as Adam existed before he sinned.”14 The image is striking for its preservation of Elijah’s death as a symbol of the pre-sinGarden, where comfortable nakedness indicated relational bliss. Remnants of Elijah’s clothing remain behind for Elisha—“And he picked up Elijah’s mantle that had fallen from him” (2Kings 2:13–14)—who must succeed Elijah in this world, to wear as a testament to the utopian moral state where it is otiose. Indeed, the very biblical proof text that catapulted Elijah into the forefront of Jewish imagination throughout history as the harbinger of the messianic period casts his role that enables a utopian historical climax in terms of father/child relationship who “shall reconcile fathers with children and children with their fathers”

13 Every reference in Exodus, except one, attributes them to Pharaoh (14:9, 17, 18, 23; 15:19), while the remainder of the prophetic references link them to the king (1Sam. 8:11; 2Kings 9:22; 2Chron. 8:9). 14 On verse 2:1. 74 diamond

(Mal. 3:24). In other words, only the one who died as a father for the benefit of a child can reignite that same parental/filial relationship with the dying for others necessary to consummate human history itself. It is no wonder, then, that Ezekiel’s account of the chariot, the only other product of a revelatory whirlwind aside from Job’s, is rabbinically identified as the last subject Elisha and Elijah were engaged in at the time of Elijah’s departure.15

Dying for God versus Choosing Life

Of course, no discussion of a Jewish philosophy of death would be anywhere near complete by focusing only on the issue of dying for others without dealing with the further question of dying for God. I believe I am on secure footing to state that the general thrust of biblical and classical rabbinic theology is oriented toward valuing life rather than ideological death or martyrdom.16 Even the one classic case of the martyrs Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the book of Daniel concerns only a willingness to die that was never consummated. Suffice it for our purposes to mention two biblical dictates and their rabbinic interpretations that endorse this position. Lev. 18:5 (“You shall keep my laws and statutes, so that man may practice them and live by them”) betrays the biblical penchant for life and is the locus classicus for restricting martyrdom to a bare minimum of three cases of idolatry, incest/adultery, and murder.17 It is important to note that these are rare exceptions to the general rule that pro- scribes rather than prescribes martyrdom. The other passage, Deut. 30:15–20, poses various options from which to choose—“life and good or death and bad”—and adjures the choice of life, in the here and now, a life “of lengthy days on the land” (v. 20). The alternatives presented, apropos the thesis developed thus far, look back at Eden and its obstructed entrance to access the Tree of Life. Once eternal life is ruled out and death becomes an inescapable fate, one is mandated to choose life over death in the performance of commandments. But if the goal of obedience is life, and not just individual but national survival specifically on “the soil that God swore to your ancestors” (v. 20), then surely any command must give way when it comes into conflict with that overarching aim of life. Life and death are inextricably bound with the knowledge of good and bad, so all choices between good

15 Yerushalmi Talmud, Berakhot 5. 16 Greenberg 1992, 53, who concludes after a detailed review that “choosing life and hope trumps their renouncement and defeatism.” 17 Babylonian Talmud 1990, Sanhedrin 74a; Yoma 85b; Avodat Zarah 27b. a jewish philosophy of being 75 and bad must be determined in the shadow of the lesson of death as dying for others as its supreme expression. Choosing life, therefore, entails choosing the life of others since the consequences mentioned are all in terms of community and nation: “populating and blessings in the land” (v. 16); “loss of land” (v. 18); “lengthy life in the land” (v. 20). In this sense, all three exceptions of mandatory martyrdom are cases of dying for others. Choosing death rather than committing adultery, incest, and murder is for the sake of others, but, even in the case of idolatry, as the antithesis of a monotheistic belief that binds, death for its sake is a dying for others in its resistance to an assault on national cohesion.18 This is indicated by the extension of obligatory martyrdom to all commandments in a time of religious persecution aimed at destroying Judaism (sha’at hashemad). The example of even the most insignificant “commandment” that one must die for during such systematic attack on Jews is “changing a shoe strap.”19 By singling out something that is devoid of religious significance in itself but rather represents some national characteristic that culturally distinguishes Jews from others, the rabbis perceive shemad as an assault on the nation, as well as on Judaism. As such, martyrdom in this case is a dying for others: a dying so that others can continue to fulfill their lives; a dying that, in fact, loves life, rather than primarily a dying for God. The name of God is sanctified when life is preserved.20

Death at the Summit: Recalling the Blocked Tree of Life

We can now return to the death with which we began this study, the death toward which the Five Books of Moses unfolds from the point of death’s introduction at the expulsion from Eden. Moses’s death by the “kiss,” and his prophetic singularity of the “face to face,” recovers his origins in the living for others that was often overshadowed by the exigencies of political leadership. The first time the Bible relates the Mosaic distinction of the “face to face” is instructive, for it appears in the aftermath of a violent purge conducted by Moses at Mount Sinai, that precisely parallels Elijah’s at Mount Carmel, exceeding it only in the numbers executed. Here, Moses rationalizes his decimating order by attributing it to divine fiat: “So says the Lord, God of Israel, each of you put your sword

18 See Faur 2006. 19 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 74b. 20 Soloveitchik 2004 considers the halakhic justifications of Jewish martyrdom under the Crusades “bad law” spurred by tragic circumstances and, thus, not determinative of normative Jewish positions. 76 diamond on your thigh and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp and slay each man his brother, each man his friend, each man his kin” (Exod. 32:27). The suspect nature of his claim is indicated by the rabbinic attempts to locate its source, and, like Elijah, the rabbinic tradition struggles with its questionable ethical and juridical dimensions.21 The thrice reiterated identification of the victims as “brother, friend, and family” extends its ruinous consequences to the ravaging of every relational dimension that grounds society. The cost of the mass killing of others is a community devoid of relationship where there is no longer an ethos of dying for others. Even in the shadow of this massacre, Moses’s origins are not entirely suppressed but peak through with his interces- sion, challenging God with an ultimatum to either forgive or erase him “from the book You have written” (33:32). He is willing to die and obliterate his existence from the historical record altogether, in defense of others. As a result of his extreme action, however, not only have the individual members of his community become alienated from each other, but Moses has become alienated from his people. This is indicated by Moses having to pitch the sacral tent outside the camp to commune with God distantly and, shrouded in clouds, obscurely (Exod. 33:7–10). At this juncture Moses’s dialogical relationship with God is first described as “face to face.” However, considering the relational impoverishment Moses has effected among his people, this “face-to-face” feature is meant to be didactically restorative, by its analogy to the dialogue between friends, “as a man speaks to his friend” (33:11). Moses’s zealousness for God problematically submerged his zealousness for others, compelling him to sacrifice others for God’s sake. The face to face of divine friendship ironically, but correctively, reorients Moses away from God’s face: “you cannot see My face for no man can see Me and live” (33:20). In other words, the lesson of the face-to-face relationship of divine immediacy actually veers Moses away from the divine face, since life must concentrate on the human face to live. The account of Moses’s death, therefore, does not simply end on a private note describing his prophetic uniqueness, superior vision, and erotic death, but rather with his public persona in the face of the entire nation: “for all the great might and all the awesome power that Moses displayed before the eyes of all Israel.” The very last words of the Pentateuch focus on the community, not the individual, and Moses’s image fades into the image of the whole, of others. Though barring him from entry into the Promised Land may have been some form of punishment, Moses’s death is not. In the midrashic tradition, God himself cannot rescue Moses from the inevitable fate of all human beings

21 See Mechilta, Pisha, Bo, 12, and Nahmanides’ rationalization of the extrajudicial nature of Moses’s executions without due legal process. a jewish philosophy of being 77 for, “despite the fact that God attested to his superior uniqueness, it was not within His capacity to save him from the death all human beings are destined for” (Liebermann 1992, 130). To conclude with Moses’s death, then, and not his extraordinary intimacy with God, is to emphasize his humanity in the service of others and close the circle begun with cordoning off the Tree of Life and the awareness of dying for others. Just as every human being anticipates death by virtue of God’s quaran- tining of the Tree of Life, so every human being, no matter the righteousness animated by that anticipation, experiences death. Moses’s death, then, is an ethical archetype rather than a supreme model of metaphysical knowledge. The implication of the literary interplay between death and knowledge, then, is not to value death as an epistemologically accomplished life where the soul or intellect reaches its ideal disembodied state; rather, it is that knowledge as ethics is a process of being toward death, toward that which all of humanity faces in common and that equalizes rather than empowers. The final words of the Pentateuch, the “eyes of all of Israel,” to which Moses dedicated his life, signals that Moses’s absorbing focal point veers away from God and toward the human.

Postscript: Sarah’s Suicide in the Ghetto

In a sustained act of supreme resistance to suffering the hasidic master Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), the Piaseczner Rebbe, more pop- ularly known as the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe, vigorously maintained his role as rebbe to his followers even in the face of unimaginable pain and loss. His collection of sermons, The Holy Fire (Shapira 1960), delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1942, were transcribed, buried, and then fortuitously retrieved after World War II. It is a rare and vital testament to both console his followers and wrest spiritual meaning out of evil of such magnitude as to defy all theological reason. One of the most daring theological statements on death, or any aspect of Jewish theology, for that matter, to my mind is his reinvention of the midrashic causal link between the akedah and the subsequent narrative of Sarah’s death. Her death, as R. Shapira recalls it, is a consciously chosen and defiant response to the perceived news of her son’s death. Despite the traditionally acknowledged purgative function of suffering, Sarah undertakes death voluntarily “to demonstrate to God how Jews cannot tolerate excessive suffering” (Shapira 1960, 10). In a brilliant exegetical move, the apparently redundant phrase “years of the life of Sarah” (Gen 23:1), midrashically accounted for as attributing righteous consistency to each and every phase of Sarah’s lifetime of 127 years, are taken to refer even to 78 diamond the years Sarah could have lived had she not taken her own life. That saintli- ness evidenced throughout her physical lifespan extends even to those post- humous years that suicide, in its preclusion of, would normatively have been condemned for, “since she performed it for the welfare of Israel.” This lesson on the destructive nature of disproportionate suffering mate- rializes as a result of Moses’s own editorial strategy who “placed the death of Sarah in proximity to the binding of Isaac in order to champion our cause and to illustrate the consequences of excessive suffering—her soul took flight. In addition if such occurred to Sarah . . . whose years were thoroughly righteous and still could not withstand the extreme suffering, all the more would we be unable” (Shapira 1960, 10). R. Shapira’s sermons themselves, in their hermeneutical ingenuity, perpetuate the editorial legacy of Moses contrived to reorient the divine vista to encompass the human plane that cannot endure the torment of such suffering as the loss of a child, a loss that R. Shapira himself experienced just prior to delivering this sermon in the fall of 1939.22 The final sentiment expressed in the sermon then should not be viewed as a standard sermonic conclusion of pious quietistic anticipation of God’s grace but rather as dictating what God is obliged to do as a result of resurrecting Moses’s editorial tendency: “therefore God will have mercy on us and all of Israel and rescue us spiritually and physically immediately with manifest kindnesses.” It is the concrete expression of his own willingness to die for others, reflected in his refusal to escape when afforded the opportunity to do so, insisting, “I will not consent to saving myself while leaving my hasidim abandoned” (Polen 2004, 7). R. Shapira, the Warsaw Ghetto’s own Moses, casts Sarah’s death, like those suicides discussed at the start of this study, as the supreme expression of a dying for others, a willing death to evoke compassion and effect an end to suffering. However, this time it was aimed at halting a divinely sanctioned suffering. The ghettos of Europe and the ultimate murder of its inhabitants could only have taken root in an ideology that considers death in terms of Martin Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode (Being toward Death). Such a state of being primarily concerns the self, whose fundamental framework consists of terms such as “ownmost” and “nonrelational.”23 An evil of such magnitude could never have

22 R. Shapira’s “son, his favored one, whom he loved,” R. Elimelekh Ben Zion, passed away on Friday, September 29, 1939, as a result of injuries sustained in the bombing of Warsaw. This sermon was delivered November 4 of that same year (Polen 2004, 6–10). 23 See Levinas’s response to Heidegger’s notion of “being toward death,” especially his analysis of David’s funeral chant for Saul and Jonathan in 2Sam. 1:23, which takes it as a contra Heideggerian proposition that “in death all relationship to the other person were not undone” (1988, 215). a jewish philosophy of being 79 materialized had the Bible, Midrash, Levinas, and the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe shaped the world’s conception of death and defined it in terms of the other rather than the self. Though the philosophical core of this being toward death may not be uniquely Jewish, its development and presentation here are functions of a unique practice of Jewish philosophy arriving at a universal ethic. That ethic conditions the very height of humanity on a care for the other whose life and suffering takes precedence over one’s own.

References

Arama, Isaac. 1960. Akedat Yitshak. 5 vols. Jerusalem: np. Babylonian Talmud. 1990. 26 vols. Edited by Isidore Epstein. London: Soncino Press. Blackman, Philip. 1951. Mishnayoth. 6 vols. London: Mishnah Press. Choron, Jacques. 1963. Death and Western Thought. New York: Macmillan Co. Cohen, Hermann. 1995. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated by Simon Kaplan. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Crenshaw, James. 1995. “The Shadow of Death in Qoheleth.” In Urgent Advice and Probing Questions: Collected Writings on Old Testament Wisdom, 573–85. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Fackenheim, Emil. 1973. Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken Books. Faur, Jose. 2006. “On Martyrdom in Jewish Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides” (Heb.). Bar Ilan Annual 30–31: 373–408. Fishbane, Michael. 1994. The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Friedlander, Gerald, trans. 1981. Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer: The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great. New York: Sepher Hermon Press. Greenberg, Moshe. 1992. “The Value of Life in the Bible” (Heb.). In Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel, edited by I. Gafni and A. Ravitzky, 35–54. Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar. Katzenellenbogen, Mordechai. 1988. Torat Chaim Chumash. 7 vols. Jerusalem: Mossad HarAv Kook. Kimmelman, Reuven. 1998. “The Seduction of Eve and Feminist Readings of the Garden of Eden.” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 1, no. 2: 1–39. Kugel, James. 1986. “Two Introductions to Midrash.” In Midrash and Literature, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, 77–104. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 80 diamond

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “Dying for . . . .” In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 207–17. Translated by M. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1999. New Talmudic Readings. Translated by Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2006. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Liebermann, Saul. 1992. Deuteronomy Rabbah. Jerusalem: Shalem Books. Lo, Alison. 2008. “Death in Qohelet.” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 31: 85–98. Maimonides, Moses. 1963. Guide of the Perplexed. Edited by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1975–2001. Mishneh Torah. 7 vols. Edited by Shabse Frankel. Jerusalem: Ohel Yosef. Mandelbaum, Bernard. 1987. Pesiqta DeRav Kahana. 2 vols. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary. Nagel, Thomas. 1998. “Concealment and Exposure.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 27, no. 1: 3–30. Niditch, Susan. 1990. “Samson as Culture Hero, Trickster, and Bandit: The Empowerment of the Weak.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 52, no. 4: 608–24. Plato. 2002. Phaedo. Translated by David Gallop. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Polen, Nehemiah. 2004. The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Satlow, Michael. 1997. “Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Biblical Literature 116, no. 3: 429–54. Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman. 1960. Esh Kodesh. Jerusalem: Vaad Hasidei Piaseczno. Shemesh, Yael. 2009. “Suicide in the Bible.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 37, no. 3: 157–68. Soloveitchik, Haym. 2004. “Halakha, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz.” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 1: 77–108 (pt. 1); 94, no. 2: 278–99 (pt. 2). Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov. 1978. “But from Thence shall you Seek” (Heb.). Hadarom 47: 1–83. Translation is mine. chapter 4 Jewish Philosophy Living Language at Its Limits

Cass Fisher

I practice Jewish philosophy as philosophy of religion. For those who think that philosophy cannot be “Jewish” and that there is nothing philosophical about religion, my declaration will be tantamount to answering a riddle with a riddle. I identify as a philosopher of religion because I inquire into fundamental questions regarding religious language, interpretation, epistemology, and experience. I am a Jewish philosopher, or a Jewish philosopher of religion, because I explore the power and limits of theological language, the dynamics of religious hermeneutics, and the problem of religious epistemology as those topics are refracted through the prism of classical Jewish texts. While it is certainly true that these issues look different from a Jewish perspective, I do not believe the results of such an inquiry are necessarily parochial. Philosophical hermeneutics, for instance, will come to a more adequate concept of textuality if it can account for the complex textual form of the rabbinic commentary. Similarly, an encounter with Jewish texts and their diverse forms of theological expression will enrich approaches to religious language that privilege systematic and dogmatic formulations. Although I practice Jewish philosophy as a philosophy of religion, I readily acknowledge that there is a host of other subjects to which Jewish philosophers must also attend. Just as halakha seeks to guide the practitioner in all aspects of life and within the context of ever-changing cultural horizons, so too must Jewish philosophy be expansive, dynamic, and practical. When I was growing up, my family attended a classical Reform temple in St. Louis. In hindsight, I would say that we were quite assimilated, but, at the time, our Jewish observance, or lack thereof, did not seem out of step from the other Jews I knew. There were high holidays and Passover, but otherwise Judaism did not figure into our lives. My Jewish identity was not just under- developed; it was to some extent negative. Being Jewish marked me as different. The neighborhood directly across the street from our house did not sell property to Jews and the regular intrusions of Christianity on public life and education struck me as an affront. For reasons that I cannot identify, I was deeply aware of the Holocaust both for its devastation of the Jewish people and the theological quandaries that it spurred. Despite my feelings of otherness, I knew that I was leading a privileged existence. That fact was evident every time I saw an African-American pulled over by the local police for no

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_��6 82 Fisher reason other than being black. Around the age of twelve, I came to the conclusion that suffering was pervasive and that this was not compatible with the idea of an all-powerful and all-good God. I abandoned God and Judaism. College brought the typical personal crises, and I was fortunate to work through those issues at the Claremont Colleges. I was delighted to learn that across the colleges was a group of scholars who took seriously the problem of theodicy—the concern that had driven me from religion in the first place (Davis 1981). It was a revelation to me that not only was religion a subject of academic study but that one could also engage in constructive work in theology and philosophy of religion within an academic context. Early in my graduate studies at the University of Chicago, I came to realize that any substantive work in theology or philosophy of religion—let alone a topic like theodicy—would require that I have a better understanding of the forms of theological language across the different strata of the Jewish tradition. I studied as much of the tradition as I could: the Hebrew Bible, Hellenistic Judaism, rabbinics, targum, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah, and modern Jewish thought. I was captivated by all of it, and, in every stage of the tradition, I found thinkers with an astonishing ability to articulate their best understandings of God and the divine-human relationship. As I was intensively studying Jewish theology, I was simultaneously completing a degree in philosophy of religion with a focus on hermeneutics and religious epistemology. The fundamental problem I found myself confronting was this: while I had come to cherish the rich theological reflection of the Jewish tradition, there seemed to be multiple forces across the field of Jewish studies intent on denying theology a central role within Judaism. What would justify doing constructive work on basic questions of philosophy of religion from a Jewish perspective if Judaism is fundamentally disinterested in thinking about God and the divine-human relationship? Attempting to understand better how theological reflection functions within Judaism—in particular, the forms of theological language and the relationship between reflection and practice—has become the overarching concern of my research to date. Documenting the marginalization of theology within Jewish studies would get in the way of fulfilling my charge to address Jewish philosophy for the twenty-first century (see Fisher 2012, 1–16). Still, it is necessary to make a few remarks on this matter as it informs my philosophical methodology. I would like to draw attention to the kind of arguments that are commonly proffered against Jewish theology. Classical Judaism, it is said, has no synonym for theol ogy. It should be evident that this observation is of little consequence. That Jews in the ancient world did not adopt the Greek-derived word theology does not mean they were not invested in thinking about God. A more forceful jewish philosophy 83 argument is that theology is inherently systematic and dogmatic, and, since Jewish thought about God does not generally exhibit these features, Judaism knows little or no theology. But why think that theology is necessarily systematic and dogmatic? Christianity is replete with theological texts that are not systematic and dogmatic, so why hold Jewish theology to this standard? It is widely accepted that the Mishnah and the Talmud do not treat halakha in a systematic fashion. Does it follow that halakha is not a central concern of these texts? Not at all. Another line of argumentation turns to the aggadah and claims that aggadah is an edifying discourse intended to form the laity but that the theological reflection embedded in the aggadah was not a vital concern of the rabbis (Fisher 2010). This argument runs counter to a mounting body of evidence: that the rabbis were a small insular group (Hezser 1997); that the rabbis did not have control over the ancient synagogue (Cohen 1981); and that the homiletical midrashim are scholastic texts rather than collections of sermons (Sarason 1982). Simply put, it sacrifices all credulity to suggest that the enormous body of aggadic literature that the rabbis produced, studied, and preserved was not a defining feature of their religious lives. The reader might think that the problems associated with Jewish theology are nothing more than the challenges of understanding across great historical distance. The myriad interpretations of Franz Rosenzweig’s thought suggest otherwise. Rosenzweig, a near contemporary, has been interpreted by scholars as a neo-Hegelian, as an antisystematic forerunner of postmodern philosophy, as the completer of German idealism or of F. W. J. Schelling’s philosophical program, as a theological critic of metaphysics, as an apophatic thinker, or as sharing his basic views with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emmanuel Levinas, or George Lindbeck. Needless to say, these presentations of his thought are highly contradictory. One cause of the prolif- eration of conflicting interpretations of Rosenzweig’s thought is the failure to appreciate his basic theological commitments and the role of theology in the construction of his philosophical system. In my view, the most generous and honest way to account for problems like scholars’ indifference to rabbinic theology and the welter of Rosenzweig interpretation is to admit that our readings of classical Jewish texts are shaped by our own philosophical and theological prejudices. Adopting such a hermeneutic view imparts to Jewish philosophy a host of important responsibilities. I will return to this point in what follows. Jewish philosophy, as I practice it, proceeds by way of an engagement with classical Jewish sources. There are two pervasive elements within classical Jewish texts that I take to be pivotal to the enterprise of Jewish philosophy. The first is the dynamic and interactive nature of Jewish literature that I am referring to here as “living language,” and the second element is the persistent 84 Fisher concern for the limits of language and knowledge. The Hebrew Bible is, perhaps, the epitome of a multivoiced text. One need not accept the documentary hypothesis to see the truth in this. Even the most cursory glance shows that the Hebrew Bible is a wildly diverse text containing narrative, law, prophecy, poetry, history, wisdom literature, and many other genres. As the rabbis model for us, all of this demands to be read together. Indeed, at every Shabbat we follow their exegetical procedure by juxtaposing Torah and Haftarah and looking for thematic connections to better understand the text and the insights that come from the sages’ framing of our readings. I find compelling Paul Ricoeur’s view that each genre of the Bible, what he calls a form of discourse, reflects a distinct aspect of the divine-human relationship and that these multiple forms of discourse function together in the effort to understand God (1995, 217–35). Rabbinic literature is equally dynamic and not only because of the seemingly haphazard way it assembles the comments of the sages. Rabbinic theology, for instance, oscillates between speaking about God in the third person to speaking directly to God in the second person to speaking for God in the first person. The shift in voices draws the reader (auditor) in and compels him or her to engage in theological reflection. The rabbinic exegetical techniques like the use of parables, paronomasia, and notarikon that turn scripture into a puzzle have the same effect; scriptural meaning only reveals itself to one who actively engages both the oral and written Torah. Jewish liturgy functions similarly. The prayers posit the future individual saying their words and, thus, absorb the practitioner into the religious world of the siddur. Along the same lines, antiphonal recitation transforms the congregation into the Israelites singing as they cross the Sea of Reeds, bodily movement during the Amidah kedushah likens the congregants to the angels, and a deictic act at the beginning of the Passover seder asserts that our matzah is in fact the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate on their way out of Egypt. One might expect liturgy to be a “living language” but is the same true of philosophy? Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in its final chapters provides guidance about how to incorporate philosophical reflection into daily life. That the kabbalistic tradition is a whirl of textualized experience and text inducing experience can hardly be gainsaid. Even with a modern thinker like Rosenzweig, the emphasis on living language is clear. The Star of Redemption charts in its final book the liturgical year with a focus on God’s presence in the synagogue, and, of course, Rosenzweig concludes the entire volume with the phrase “into life.” As I see it, it is the task of Jewish philosophy to make sense of all of this: the forms of theological language, the interpretive acts that shape the tradition, the philosophical status of religious experience, and, what follows from the belief in a divine-human relationship. jewish philosophy 85

Modern philosophy has consistently sought to define—some might say “restrict”—what constitutes knowledge and what is a proper object of human cognition. In many such discussions, metaphysics is the example par excellence of a type of knowledge that brazenly exceeds its powers; the necessary and universal claims of metaphysics, it is argued, refer to nothing but its own ideas. For many, the demise of metaphysics also entails the collapse of theology as if all theology is a species of metaphysics. Leaving aside the many problems with this narrative, I believe it is incumbent on Jewish philosophers to acknowledge that Judaism has long shared this concern about the limits of knowledge, particularly as it bears on theological language. This is evident in the riddle of a name that God bestows upon God’s self, Deuteronomy’s recasting of Sinai such that the Israelites saw no image, and Second Isaiah’s refrain “to whom will you compare me?” (Isa. 40:18, 40:25, 46:5). Rabbinic literature regularly circumscribes its theological assertions as well as those of scripture by arguing that scripture speaks in the language of humans to “break open the ear.” The liturgy shares the same concern for the shortcoming of language through the assertion in the kaddish that God is “beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world” (Birnbaum 1997, 70). For medieval Jewish philosophers, it is their bread and butter to place limits on human knowledge. Even kabbalists, who make such bold claims about the inner life of God in the sefirot, accept that the divine ultimately exceeds human knowledge in its infinite and unknowable being in ein sof. Moses Mendelssohn famously claims that Judaism has no revealed truths. Rosenzweig places such sharp limits on knowledge about God that it was recently suggested that he was the greatest apophatic thinker of the twentieth century (Franke 2005). Jewish religious life is a decision to live in the language of the oral and written Torah and, to a greater or lesser extent, the rest of the Jewish literary tradition as well. As I have only hinted at, this is a living in “living language”; that is, a series of textual forms and modes of expression that demand the active intellectual and personal engagement of the practitioner. Combined with this is a persistent admission throughout the tradition of the limits of our language and knowledge. Holding these two seemingly contradictory ideas in tension is, to my mind, one of the principal tasks of Jewish philosophy. My view of Jewish philosophy as an effort to negotiate the power and limit of our language is deeply informed by Franz Rosenzweig’s work. In his translation and commentary on the poems of Judah Halevi, Rosenzweig writes, “But just as we have to heed the limits of our knowledge, so too, and not less, the limits of our not-knowing. Beyond all our knowledge, God lives. But before our not-knowing begins, your God presents Himself to you, to your call, to your 86 Fisher assent, to your readiness, to your glance, to your life” (Galli 1995, 200). On my reading, the most central claims of the Star address the possibility of personal and communal relationship with God, a position that puts Rosenzweig at odds with much modern and contemporary Jewish thought. His stand is, I believe, well chosen. What remains of Judaism without the fundamental possibility of God being in relationship with Israel, both individually and collectively? In what follows, I will try to describe my research and my vision for twenty- first-century Jewish philosophy along the trajectory that Rosenzweig has set in which it is imperative that we deploy all of our resources in understanding the divine-human relationship while at the same time acknowledging the limits of human cognition. John Locke famously begins his book An Essay Concerning Human Under standing by depicting himself as an “Under-Labourer” clearing the ground “and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge” (Locke 1975, 10). While my research also begins with an attempt to clear the ground— in this case, to provide new ways of thinking about theology in Judaism—I do not see the positions I am arguing against as “rubbish” that prevents access to knowledge. The antitheological attitude that has shaped much Jewish thought and scholarship over the last two centuries is in no way nefarious or even impious. Judaism’s remarkable perseverance is in large part due to its continual act of self-interpretation that has allowed for its renewal in ever-changing cultural and political contexts. This work of self-reflection and self-definition often occurs in conversation with resources drawn from the wider culture. The forces driving the antitheological presentation of Judaism are complex, and I do not want to oversimplify, but it should be abundantly clear that Jewish antitheology mirrors attitudes toward theology in much modern and contemporary philosophy. The academic study of Judaism emerged in an intellectual environment in which German idealism was de rigueur, and contemporary Jewish studies draws most of its philosophical resources from Continental philosophy. It is no surprise, then, that the embrace of philosophies that launch serious critiques of metaphysics and ontotheology would result in depictions of Judaism in which theology plays little role. One way to understand the antitheological approach to Judaism is to say that scholars have utilized the best available philosophical tools to construct accounts of Judaism that they and their contemporaries find intellectually and religiously compelling. A hermeneutic of good will suggests that even these depictions of Judaism that minimize the role of theology are “also the words of the living God” in as much as they seek the preservation and vitality of the Jewish tradition within cultural horizons in which theology has lost its footing (BT Eruvin, 13b). jewish philosophy 87

While we can understand and appreciate the motivations for Jewish antitheology, that does not mean that we should accept the claim that Judaism has little interest in thinking about God. Indeed, there are good hermeneutic reasons that bear on both historical and constructive concerns that should lead us to reject antitheology and to seek an alternative account of the role of theological reflection within Judaism. Hermeneutics is the philosophical discipline that focuses on the processes of understanding and interpretation. I take hermeneutics as the philosophical starting point for my engagement with Judaism on the basis of the fact that Judaism is a scriptural tradition that has consistently renewed itself through creative interpretation of earlier textual resources. In addition to illuminating Judaism’s internal interpretive dynamics, philosophical hermeneutics can also shed light on the forces that drive academic interpretations of Judaism, including antitheology. Hans-Georg Gadamer in his seminal work Truth and Method argues that our prejudices play a pivotal role in the act of understanding. Gadamer comes to this view through his adoption of a Heideggerian account of the human person as a “thrown projection.” The prejudices that Gadamer argues determine the act of understanding are the product of our historicity (our being “thrown” into our environment) and our interests or goals in that we are always oriented toward our future projects. Without the prejudices that define our interests, we would have no connection to tradition at all. Nonetheless, prejudices that go unchecked can become an obstacle to understanding the truth-claims of a traditional text. Along these lines, Gadamer says, “[I]t is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that make us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition” (Gadamer 1989, 270). He, thus, counsels that the hermeneut attempt to foreground his or her prejudices with the caveat that such prejudices are often unconscious and out of our control. In such cases, we only become aware of our prejudices as they are “provoked” and “put at risk” by our encounter with tradition (ibid., 299). As a result of this tension, hermeneutics, for Gadamer, is a constant negotiation of “familiarity” and “strangeness” in the traditionary text (ibid., 295). With these points in mind, I would argue that antitheological readings of Judaism go too far in adapting Judaism to contemporary philosophical and theological sensibilities. Purging Judaism of its theological reflection makes the tradition familiar in a way that prevents us from hearing its claims to truth. If our aim is to understand Judaism in all of its facets and vicissitudes, we cannot do so without acknowledging that which it holds to be true. It hardly makes sense to ignore a key cognitive component of the Jewish tradition—its beliefs—on the basis of our own theological and philosophical proclivities. One source of confusion on this point is the failure to distinguish between 88 Fisher

“truth” and “truth-claims.” As scholars we have a hermeneutic responsibility to hear the truth-claims of the Jewish tradition. If we fail to do so, our accounts of Judaism will be nothing more than wishful thinking about how the past should have looked according to our personal preferences. This hermeneutic responsibility to hear the truth-claims of the tradition has no bearing on whether one accepts such claims as “true.” From an historical perspective, reclaiming theological reflection as part of the Jewish tradition is an important corrective to the prejudices that have shaped the academic study of Judaism. This is not, however, just a matter of historical methodology. Allowing historical research to minimize the role of Jewish theology alienates constructive thinkers from the theological resources that have played a crucial role in the development of the Jewish tradition. Absent the tools for theological reflection, Judaism will struggle to adapt its beliefs and practices to the present and to articulate and defend its best understandings of God and the divine-human relationship. While Jewish philosophy can help remedy this situation by providing a hermeneutic critique of the philosophical and theological prejudices that motivate scholarship on Judaism, this is not all that it can do. Jewish philosophy can also construct models of Jewish theological language that respond to the challenges of its critics and that give more adequate accounts of the role of theological reflection in Jewish life and practice. Anyone offering a new account of Jewish theology would be foolish not to give serious consideration to the widespread reservations about such an enterprise. The critics are surely correct that most Jewish thought about God is not systematic or dogmatic. Who would deny that much Jewish theology arises from scriptural interpretation and utilizes figurative forms of language? Furthermore, even though Jews pray thrice daily (except Shabbat) for God to bestow knowledge upon them, knowledge in itself is not salvific. It is also undeniably true that Judaism is fundamentally concerned with matters of practice. Any account of Jewish theology that is adequate to its sources must be able to answer these concerns. In my own work, creating a model of Jewish theological language that can accommodate its multiple linguistic forms and its diverse theoretical and practical functions required that I draw on a range of philosophical resources from both the Continental and analytic traditions. Because I see Jewish theological claims arising out of religious practices and often providing the justification for Jewish practice, I refer to my model as JTP, which stands for Jewish theological practice. As I have already mentioned, theology in the modern period, and not just Jewish theology, has suffered as a result of its conflation with metaphysics. Metaphysics, it should be noted, is a more ominous and damning term to the extent that it remains undefined. If we take metaphysical claims to be those jewish philosophy 89 that are universal or necessary, it is evident that much Jewish theology does not belong under that rubric. Furthermore, why assume that theology, Jewish or otherwise, is a single form of discourse? The advantage of seeing theology on singular terms is that only one set of arguments is then necessary to undermine its claim to truth. From a Jewish perspective, the question is whether classical Jewish sources exhibit such uniformity in their theological claims. My view on this matter is inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of biblical discourse. In an essay entitled “Naming God” Ricoeur writes,

The naming of God, in the originary expressions of faith, is not simple but multiple. It is not a single tone, but polyphonic. The originary expressions of faith are complex forms of discourse as diverse as narratives, prophecies, laws, proverbs, prayers, hymns, liturgical formulas, and wisdom writings. As a whole, these forms of discourse name God. But they do so in various ways. Indeed, it is worth noting that each of the forms of discourse just mentioned encompasses a particular style of confession of faith where God is named in an original fashion. This is why we miss what is unique about biblical faith if we take categories such as narrative, ora- cle, commandment, and so on, as rhetorical devices that are alien to the content they transmit. What is admirable, on the contrary, is that structure and kerygma accommodate each other in each form of narration. It is within this mutual accommodation of the form and the confession of faith that the naming of God diversifies itself. (1995, 224)

Ricoeur, by my lights, is entirely correct that God and the divine-human relationship look different within each form of biblical discourse and that the modes of reasoning within each form of discourse are equally distinct. His analysis of biblical discourse can serve as the basis for a more complex account of Jewish theology that pays closer attention to the forms of theological expression and the forms of reason and experience that produce and support theological claims. In addition, his idea that religious language is “polyphonic” can help defenders of Jewish theology answer the criticism that Jewish thought about God is not systematic. Simply put, Jewish theology has no pretensions to systematicity, as it is comprised of a variety of ways of thinking and speaking about God. As important as Ricoeur’s insights are, several factors complicate the work of extending his thought to postbiblical Judaism. Most notably, the forms of Jewish discourse change with the canonization of the Tanakh. An equally significant problem is that Ricoeur’s acceptance of the critique of ontotheology leads him to view biblical discourse as a poetic and “originary” discourse that makes no claims about reality. Theology, in contrast, for Ricoeur 90 Fisher is a second-order discourse in which religious language is corrupted by philosophy. Such a position will hardly advance the effort to hear the theological truth-claims of classical Jewish texts. Preserving Ricoeur’s insights and applying them to the later Jewish tradition requires consideration of religious epistemology and the relationship between theological reflection and religious practice in Judaism. In constructing JTP, I have found Pierre Hadot’s work on ancient philosophy to be a helpful segue between hermeneutics and epistemology. Hadot argues that ancient philosophy was not the purely theoretical discipline that philosophy has become. Much to the contrary, ancient philosophy sought to bring about the self-transformation of the practitioner through intensive spiritual exercises. Along these lines, Hadot states, “The relationship between theory and practice in the philosophy of this period must be understood from the perspective of these exercises. . . . Theory is never considered an end in itself; it is clearly and decidedly put in the service of practice” (1995, 60). Similarly, Jewish theology can also benefit from an effort to ground theological reflection within religious practice. Consider rabbinic theology. Embarrassed by the rabbis’ anthropomorphic theological language, scholars argue that rabbinic theology is homiletic rather than speculative. A far better alternative to the speculative-homiletic dichotomy is to see Jewish theology as arising out of religious practice and providing the justification for religious practice. While I agree with Hadot’s critics that he goes too far in subjugating theory to practice, one instance where he draws a more delicate balance is the following:

We can consider the relationship between philosophical life and philosophical discourse in three different ways, which are closely linked. First, discourse justifies our choice of life and develops all its implications. We could say that through a kind of reciprocal causality, the choice of life determines discourse, and discourse determines our choice of life, as it justifies it theoretically. Second, in order to live philosophically, we must perform actions on ourselves and on others; and if philosophical discourse is truly the expression of an existential option, then from this perspective it is an indispensable means. Finally, philosophical discourse is one of the very forms of the exercise of the philosophical way of life, as dialogue with others or with oneself. (Hadot 2002, 175)

Just as we will come to a more complex understanding of Jewish theology if we acknowledge its multiple forms of expression, so too will an appreciation of the multiple functions of Jewish theology enrich our understanding. Hadot argues that ancient philosophical discourse served justificatory and formative jewish philosophy 91 functions and that the production and study of philosophical discourse was a spiritual exercise. Much the same can be said of Jewish theology. Jewish theology serves a justificatory function in that it articulates our best understandings of God and the divine-human relationship and provides support for Judaism’s religious practice and worldview. Attributing a formative function to Jewish theology is a significant improvement over the language of homiletics. Describing Jewish theology as homiletics suggests that it is a discourse that is edifying but not true and that its context is limited to the synagogue. In contrast, identifying a formative function within theology implies that theology orients the practitioner toward the truth and that this occurs wherever theology might be found, which in Judaism includes the home and the house of study as well as the synagogue. Finally, seeing the production and study of theology as a spiritual exercise makes theological reflection a crucial part of Jewish religious life that is inherently valuable and not simply a means of indoctrinating the laity. Despite the insights that Hadot’s work can bring to Jewish theology, JTP cannot stop with Hadot for two reasons. First, Hadot is relentless in depicting ancient philosophy on practical terms. Influenced by both Neoplatonism and by Wittgenstein, Hadot comes to identify ancient philosophy with nonpropositional knowledge that, in Gilbert Ryle’s terms is a “knowing-how” rather than a “knowing-that.” This undermines the possibility of theological truth-claims just as much as Ricoeur’s acceptance of the critique of ontotheology, and so the hermeneutic dilemma stands: how can we encounter the theological truth-claims of classical Jewish texts without denying them from the start? Second, as important as Hadot’s grounding of discourse in practice is, it does not give us the forms of theological language needed to extend Ricoeur’s analysis of biblical discourse to postbiblical Jewish theology. William Alston’s work on religious epistemology provides the resources to fuse these disparate insights into a compelling model of Jewish theological language. Alston’s most extensive treatment of religious epistemology is his book Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. In the book, Alston argues that mystical perception makes a vital contribution to our beliefs about God and that, in the absence of such perceptions, “there could be no intimate relationship of love, devotion, and dialogue that, according to Christianity, constitutes our highest good” (1991, 12). For the purposes of JTP, it is not so much Alston’s defense of mystical perception that is crucial as the epistemological model that he proposes. Like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alston follows Thomas Reid and adopts an externalist epistemology that holds that we have no alternative but to rely on our standard ways of forming beliefs. Internalist epistemologies require that the believer have cognitive access to the grounds of her beliefs, a criterion that externalists claim 92 Fisher exceeds our cognitive powers and that fails to capture the ways we typically form beliefs. Alston analyzes sense perception—generally taken to be our most secure source of beliefs—and argues that the leading internalist theories in support of sense perception either suffer from epistemic circularity or fail to establish the reliability of sense perception. Alston argues that it is a condition of our reason that we are not able to “get beyond, or behind” our standard belief-forming practices in order to defend them (ibid., 150). His response to this “crisis of rationality” is to propose an externalist epistemology that follows Reid in accepting our innate belief-forming practices such as memory, sense perception, and introspection but that adds to that Wittgenstein’s insights regarding the social aspect of our belief-forming practices (ibid., 103). Wittgenstein’s contribution is critical from a religious perspective, as most of the belief-forming practices that contribute to religious life are cultivated rather than innate. For Alston, belief-forming practices, which he calls “doxastic practices,” are typically comprised of multiple belief-forming mechanisms. He distinguishes belief-forming mechanisms by their inputs, that is, the con- stituents out of which beliefs are formed, and by the function that produces a belief (an output) from a given input. Sense perception, for instance, is a doxastic practice consisting of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile belief-forming mechanisms. Alston argues that our doxastic practices do not function independently; on the contrary, they work together to form a “system or constellation” of belief formation (ibid., 155). This allows doxastic practices to provide each other with mutual support as well as contribute to a “background system” of beliefs that contains the resources for adjudicating true and false belief (ibid., 104). Alston’s understanding of doxastic practices lays the groundwork for an account of Jewish theology that acknowledges its multiple forms of expression, discloses the diverse forms of reason and experience that produce theological claims, and draws a tighter connection between theological reflection and religious practice. JTP, as I have so far developed it, focuses on four sources of theological claims that I take to be central to Jewish theology: exegesis, hermeneutics, reflection on divine perfection, and religious experience. Each of these sources makes a unique contribution to Jewish theology on the basis of the distinct input it utilizes to produce beliefs about God. The four sources function together to strengthen Jewish theology through their mutual support and in their contribution to a background system of belief that contains the resources for assessing the truth or falsity of Jewish theological claims. An important caveat is that JTP is an open model, and I by no means think that these are the only belief-forming practices that produce Jewish theological claims. I am only suggesting that these practices are so basic that they are jewish philosophy 93 likely to be found throughout the tradition. Because I am making claims about Jewish theology in general, it is necessary that JTP be adequate to a wide range of classical Jewish texts that are predicated on and advance diverse theological and philosophical views and that do so by means of disparate discursive forms. To demonstrate that JTP is sufficiently flexible to accommodate significantly different textual forms, I have deployed it in close readings of an early rabbinic commentary on the book of Exodus, Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, and in a modern philosophical theology, Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. To give a sense of the fruits of this approach to Jewish theology, I will briefly describe how I understand exegesis, hermeneutics, and reflection on divine perfection as basic sources of Jewish theology and how applying JTP to the Mekhilta and the Star has contributed to the study of rabbinic theology and the thought of Franz Rosenzweig. Exegesis and hermeneutics are ubiquitous terms in contemporary Jewish studies. Breaking from the standard usage of these terms as synonyms, JTP distinguishes “exegesis” and “hermeneutics” as two different modes of scriptural interpretation that are critical to Jewish theological reflection. Exegesis, I suggest, is the reading practice that demonstrates that the Torah is self-coherent and free of any textual defect that would undermine its authoritative status, and hermeneutics is the reading practice that harmonizes scripture with the contemporary intellectual and cultural horizon. Two principal points justify this distinction. First, following Alston’s account of doxastic practices, exegesis and hermeneutics have different inputs and functions. The input for exegesis is principally scripture (along with the presumption that scripture should exhibit self-coherence and be free of defects), and its function is to unify scripture. The input for hermeneutics includes not only scripture but the entire theological, philosophical, and culture horizon in which scripture is being interpreted and its function is to make scripture meaningful within the contemporary world. It is imperative to acknowledge that these are fluid categories; real textual (that is, exegetical) difficulties can produce hermeneutic solutions and vice versa. The second point justifying the distinction is the simple fact that Judaism has a long and rich history of reading scripture to demonstrate both its unity and its continued relevance within new cultural worlds. Although exegesis and hermeneutics do far more than produce theological beliefs, from the perspective of JTP, these reading practices are two of its most fundamental sources. Identifying exegesis and hermeneutics as distinct sources of theological beliefs helps resolve ongoing difficulties in both rabbinics and research on Rosenzweig. Scholars of rabbinics have struggled to understand the relationship between plain-sense meaning (peshat) and interpreted meaning (derash) that properly captures the rabbis’s attitudes toward scripture. David Weiss 94 Fisher

Halivni argues that the rabbis gave no privilege to peshat over derash (1991, 10). James Kugel shows concern that the rabbis did attend to the kind of textual difficulties that I identify with exegesis; but, because he (rightfully) rejects the idea of pure exegesis, he makes no distinction between the different types of reading practices (1997, 26). With JTP, it is possible to make important distinctions regarding the rabbis’s reading practices and the theological claims that those practices produce without attributing to the rabbis an anachronistic concern for the plain-sense meaning of the text. Seeing exegesis and hermeneutics as distinct sources for theological claims also resolves ongoing difficulties in the study of Franz Rosenzweig’s thought. Scholars have recently argued that Rosenzweig held Judaism and philosophy to be “incommensurable” (Batnitzky 2000, 4) and that the Star is only “incidentally” Jewish (Gordon 2003, 120n2). Attending to the crucial role of exegesis and hermeneutics in Rosenzweig’s philosophical system reveals that his religious and philosophical views are deeply integrated and that the Star is a profoundly Jewish book. While scholars such as Arthur Marmorstein and Ephraim Urbach have gone to great lengths to demonstrate rational elements within rabbinic theology, JTP brings new sensitivities and insights to the contribution of rational reflection on divine perfection in rabbinic theology. Since JTP emphasizes the multiplicity of Jewish theological discourse, it has no interest in presenting the rabbis on rationalistic terms. This means that the rabbis’s genuine concern for divine perfection can stand alongside alternative theological views that are anthropomorphic or anthropopathic. Unlike exegesis and hermeneutics that have no inherent thematic content, rational reflection on divine perfection is a source for theological claims that coheres around the theologoumenon of God’s greatness. Analyzing rational reflection on divine perfection tells us not only about the source of the rabbis’s theological claims but their content as well. With this material, JTP makes the case that the rabbis were genuinely concerned with theological matters and that their intense effort to understand and articulate God’s greatness was a vital part of their religious lives. JTP seeks to draw a tighter connection between reflection and practice by grounding belief-forming practices within religious practices. In this case, the theoretical concern with divine perfection cannot be separated from the practical concern to praise God. Turning to Rosenzweig, divine perfection is a decisive issue for many competing interpretations of his thought. In the last twenty years, scholars have depicted Rosenzweig as a precursor to postmodern thought due to his rejection of Hegel’s totalized thinking, as a postliberal advocating a nonpropositional theology, as a postmetaphysical theologian, and as an apophatic thinker. All of these positions fail to account for the fact that divine perfection jewish philosophy 95 is one of the key building blocks in Rosenzweig’s philosophical system and that God’s perfection was an abiding concern for Rosenzweig from the Star to his last writings. Divine perfection underlies Rosenzweig’s two-fold account of God as transcendent and relational in which God’s perfection is linked to both divine aseity and divine love. Rosenzweig is emphatic that these seemingly contradictory divine perfections do not endanger God’s unity. Rosenzweig, again in his translation and commentary on the poems of Judah Halevi, speaks to this point in a manner that further amplifies my account of Jewish philosophy as living language at its limits: “[I]t is the last thought that human thinking can grasp, and the first that Jewish thinking grasps: that the faraway God is none other than the near God, the unknown God none other than the revealed one, the Creator none other than the Redeemer” (Galli 1995, 204). Applying JTP to texts as different as the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael and The Star of Redemption does more than simply demonstrate JTP’s ability to adapt to diverse textual and discursive forms. It reveals the fact that Jewish theology is a constellation of distinct belief-forming practices that change over time. Exegesis in an early rabbinic commentary where every letter is a potential object of interpretation looks significantly different from exegesis in a modern philosophical theology that does not hold the same assumptions about the nature of scripture. Similarly, a concern for divine perfection partially motivated by the need to refashion Judaism in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and closely connected to the desire to praise God should not be conflated with a modern philosophical system advancing a metaphysical account of God inspired by Schelling. A point on which Gadamer and Alston agree and that can shed significant light on Jewish theological language is that our belief-forming practices change over time. By identifying the belief- forming practices that constitute Jewish theology at different stages of the tradition, JTP can make those changes explicit. This work can aid in the recovery of lost belief-forming practices and the renewal of contemporary ones. It can also help us to better understand why the tradition, in Gadamer’s terms, is both “familiar” and “strange,” and it can provide the resources to negotiate that tension in a manner that is philosophically and theologically productive. Jewish philosophy can and must be more than philosophy of religion, but there is reason to think that philosophy of religion deserves a privileged place among the many topics that Jewish philosophy addresses. If Judaism has no claims to truth, there would seem to be little to justify a philosophical encounter with the tradition. I have attempted to outline my own responses to some of the fundamental questions confronting contemporary Jewish philosophy, but there is much work to be done. For me, it has seemed a necessary 96 Fisher bit of ground clearing to do the hermeneutic work to preserve the theological truth-claims of the tradition. To that end, I produced a model for understanding Jewish theology that better suits the multiple forms and functions of theological language in Judaism. It should be obvious that there is a significant difference between preserving the possibility of truth-claims and adjudicating the truth or falsity of specific theological positions. Jewish philosophy needs to do both. It is my hope that Jewish philosophers in the twenty-first century will infuse the historical concerns of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy with an equally vital interest in constructive research. As for my own work, one way that it could take a more constructive position is to give further consideration to epistemological issues. Identifying the forms and functions of Jewish theological language says nothing in itself about whether it is rational to form beliefs on the basis of such belief-forming practices. Alston, in his defense of mystical perception, gives good indications about what such an argument would entail. He argues that we would be obligated to abandon a practice that produces an overwhelming amount of inconsistent beliefs or a practice that produces beliefs that contradict the outputs of a more deeply rooted and “socially-established” doxastic practice (1991, 163). Defending the rationality of forming beliefs on the basis of JTP would require arguments showing that Jewish theology does not run afoul of either of these criteria. One would also want to bring positive evidence that Jewish theology has been effective in helping practitioners to understand God and to cultivate a relationship with the divine. This is what Alston calls “significant self-support” (ibid., 174). He defuses the criticism that such self-support is epistemically circular by framing his argument in terms of practical rationality. Alston does not argue that a given practice is reliable, only that it is rational to form beliefs on the basis of the practice. While such an approach would not address all the philosophical problems associated with Jewish theological language, it would open up ways of thinking about theological reflection that are more firmly rooted in the religious life. Two related topics that I hope will occupy Jewish philosophers in the near term are theological realism and theological reference. There is a growing consensus among Jewish philosophers and theologians from across the religious spectrum (for example, Alexander Altmann, Eugene Borowitz, Alan Mittleman, Hilary Putnam, Tamar Ross, Avi Sagi, and Howard Wettstein) that Wittgenstein’s notion of the “language-game” is a viable solution to the philosophical problems associated with Jewish theological language. The Witt gensteinian approach emphasizes that Jewish theology is a reflective practice learned in a social setting and that its truth-claims are only meaningful within the context of its own language-game or form of life. On such readings, theology is restricted to sociological functions to the exclusion of any ontological jewish philosophy 97 considerations; that is, theology shapes and secures religious identity and practice, but it does not tell us anything about God or the divine-human relationship. As such, a common refrain among Wittgensteinians is that theology says nothing about the furniture of the universe. My views on Wittgenstein largely follow those of Alston. Wittgenstein has much to contribute on a variety of philosophical topics, including religion, but his thought demands critical engagement, particularly at the points at which language-games appear to be so discrete that they undermine realism and reference. It is surprising that it is exactly these features of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that have captivated Jewish philosophers. Their appeal to Wittgenstein raises two questions. First, why are Jewish philosophers and theologians so enamored with Wittgenstein when their Christian counterparts claim that he has had little impact on Christian theology and that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion in the antirealist variety, such as that of D. Z. Phillips, is thank- fully “on the wane” (Kerr 2005; Wolterstorff 2010, 350). Second, why would a philosophy that rejects theological realism and the referential power of theological language be a rallying cry for Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox thinkers? I see no simple answers to these questions. Perhaps, all the major branches of Judaism have accepted the view that Judaism has little to say about God. Alternatively, maybe we have all become Maimonideans and have renounced positive knowledge of the divine. Neither explanation should be a cause for celebration. Jewish thinkers have reflected deeply about God and the divine-human relationship at every stage of the tradition. Closing our eyes to that fact does not make it any less true. That we would all seek refuge in Maimonides makes sense after two centuries in which metaphysics and ontotheology have been under perpetual attack. Why not hold fast to a philosophical account that affirms Jewish life and practice and that also relishes in the epistemological limits that are the mainstay of contemporary philosophy? First, it hardly needs to be said that Maimonides’ philosophical and theological views represent an exceedingly small part of what the Jewish tradition has had to say about God. For instance, much of the tradition has gravitated toward a theology that depicts God as a personal agent with whom Israel, individually and collectively, has a dynamic relationship. It would be a travesty for Jewish philosophy in its entirety to collapse into a Maimonidean account and thus abandon Judaism’s rich theological resources. Second, while I have no problem with hierarchies and elitism in general, I do not find Maimonides’ vision of intellectual elitism compelling. Recall that, in the famous parable of the palace in Guide of the Perplexed 3:51, even those who would normally be the epitome of the religious elite—the jurists—do not make it into the palace and, thus, into God’s presence until they have begun the process of rectifying their beliefs 98 Fisher through the acquisition of natural and divine science. Woe to the “ignoramuses who observe the law”! While I certainly value the corrective function that philosophical reflection can have within a religious context, I am not inclined to think that religious practitioners get things wrong most of the time in formulating their beliefs about God. Mirroring the multiplicity of Jewish theological language itself, I think Jewish philosophy would be strengthened by defending a range of alternative philosophical and theological perspectives. Given that modern philosophy and Jewish studies have developed along trajectories that are unfavorable to metaphysics and theology, the onus is on the defenders of theology to argue how they can preserve the truth and meaning of Jewish theological language. As at many previous junctures, Judaism in the twenty-first century finds itself once again evaluating the motivations for its way of life and the justifications for its beliefs. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and with the pressures of secularization and intermarriage, this is important work. While Jewish philosophy cannot make itself Judaism’s caretaker, those doing constructive work certainly have a vested interest in the preservation and vitality of the tradition. Jewish philosophy will be of service to the larger tradition to the extent that it continues to debate and get clear about fundamental issues like religious language and epistemology. How those matters get decided may be less significant than how we approach the questions. I close with a few last lines from Rosenzweig:

Even in the most dreadful nearness the human can look away and then does not know in the least what has happened to him. And in the farthest distance the glance of God and of the human can burn into one another, so that the coldest abstractions become warm in the mouth of Maimonides or Hermann Cohen—more than all our distressed prattle. Near, far, it doesn’t matter! What does matter is that here as there, what is spoken is spoken before His countenance—with the You of the refrain of our poem, the You that never turns away for a moment. (Galli 1995, 206)

References

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Batnitzky, Leora. 2000. Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Birnbaum, Philip. 1997 [1949]. Daily Prayer Book: Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem. New York: Hebrew Publishing. Borowitz, Eugene. 2006. The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game: A Philosophical Discourse Analysis. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cohen, Shaye. 1981. “Epigraphical Rabbis.” Jewish Quarterly Review 72, no. 1: 1–17. Davis, Stephen T., ed. 1981. Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy. Atlanta: John Knox Press. Fisher, Cass. 2010. “Beyond the Homiletical: Rabbinic Theology as Discursive and Reflective Practice.” Journal of Religion 90, no. 2: 199–236. ———. 2011. “Divine Perfections at the Center of the Star: Reassessing Rosenzweig’s Theological Language.” Modern Judaism 31, no. 2: 188–212. ———. 2012. Contemplative Nation: A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Franke, William. 2005. “Franz Rosenzweig and the Emergence of a Postsecular Philosophy of the Unsayable.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58, no. 3: 161–80. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2d rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Galli, Barbara Ellen. 1995. Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halvei: Translating, Translations, and Translators. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Gordon, Peter. 2003. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited by Arnold Davidson. Translated by Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halivni, David Weiss. 1991. Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hezser, Catherine. 1997. The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Kerr, Fergus. 2005. “The Reception of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy by Theologians.” In Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, edited by D. Z. Phillips, 253–72. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Kugel, James. 1997. The Bible as It Was. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maimonides, Moses. 1963. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 100 Fisher

Marmorstein, Arthur. 1927. The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mittleman, Alan. 2009. “Asking the Wrong Question.” First Things 189: 15–17. Putnam, Hilary. 2008. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark Wallace. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1970. The Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. ———. 1976. Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. 4 vols. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Ross, Tamar. 2004. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Sagi, Avi. 2009. Jewish Religion after Theology. Translated by Batya Stein. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Sarason, Richard. 1982. “The Petiḥot in Leviticus Rabba: ‘Oral Homilies’ or Redactional Constructions?” Journal of Jewish Studies 33, nos. 1–2: 557–67. Urbach, Ephraim. 1975. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs. Translated by Israel Abrahams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wettstein, Howard. 2012. The Significance of Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2010. Practices of Belief. Edited by Terence Cuneo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. chapter 5 Toward a Synthetic Philosophy

Lenn Evan Goodman

In common usage, any complex of beliefs and attitudes can be called a philosophy, especially if their roots are left untouched. So philosophers are often seen as apologists of an ideology, a culture, or a way of life, perhaps caught in some simple phrase, as though a snapshot might capture all that gives meaning to a blur of gestures and tangle of movement and even comprehend the welter of voices it leaves unheard. To philosophers themselves, their calling means something rather different, a commitment to probe and problematize—but not just to problematize. Philosophy begins in wonder, as Aristotle wrote, but, as his work shows, it does not end there. Philosophers prosecute their quest partly out of curiosity but also from a deep faith in the possibility of understanding. Philosophy, as I see it, is an open inquiry, ideally leaving no question off the table but calling on practitioners to interrogate their own assumptions and explore any option that might yield insight. If so, a philosopher needs bottom—textually, to understand the traditions that have tried to make sense of experience, but also morally, to address the values rival outlooks may canon- ize. Jewish philosophy lives among those traditions. At its most introspective, the philosophy of Judaism examines what being Jewish means. But Jewish philosophy pursues the full range of issues that have perennially vexed humanity: questions about God and nature, goodness and truth, knowledge and doubt, justice and equity, individual and community, beauty and sublimity, body and soul, suffering and hope, freedom and creativity, meaning and worth. The thinking of Jewish philosophers, often cogent and penetrating, sometimes acknowledged, often erased or undervalued, has long enriched the philosophic enterprise. Philo, Saadiah Gaon, Judah Halevi, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Bahya ibn Pakuda, Moses Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosensweig, Martin Buber, and Emanuel Levinas, among many others, have probed the depths of the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic literature, and other texts, working at the forefront of philosophic creativity, seeking to understand nature and society, reality at large, and the human condition. Their contributions, in dialogue with Plato and the Stoics, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, Avicenna and Aquinas, Descartes and Machiavelli, Kant, the philosophes, existentialists and postmoderns, are neither isolated nor

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_��7 102 goodman dependent. Secular Jews like Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Ernst Cassirer, and the gestalt psychologists—even sharply alienated Jews like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud—have responded deeply to the currents reaching them from Jewish norms and experience. Jewish philosophers have never spoken in unison or walked in lockstep, nor should they. We do not expect Monets and Derains to look alike. If two paintings in the Louvre looked a bit too similar, we would likely suspect one to be a copy or a forgery. Life is rich enough to allow more than one truthful way to paint it. But that fact does not entail the existence of multiple realities or conflicting truths. Those who ask the Pontius Pilate question, challenging the very idea of truth, usually have an ax to grind. Perhaps truth claims conjure bitter memories for them or fears of a beetling dogmatism. Any thoughtful person knows that error is possible. But corrigibility does not sap the claims of truth. Quite the contrary. Awareness of the varieties of fallibility leads one to search for ways of testing one’s standards of judgment and those that one finds in use. The variance of tastes cannot make a Rembrandt of a Thomas Kinkade. Nor does originality make tradition less precious. Creativity works within as well as against a milieu. Honest thinkers need to reflect on what predecessors had to say and learn from their successes and mistakes. Creativity in philosophy, as in art, is more than novelty (See Goodman, 2001, 229–336; Goodman and Caramenico 2014, 232–35.). Philosophers often say it is easy to say something true (although not always as easy as it seems) and easy to say something unexpected; the trick is to say what is both original and true, something important that presses beyond what everyone always thought obvious. But it is not hard to mask banality with noodling—executing a method, sawing away at sayisms like “No good deed goes unpunished.” One trick, now common in a crowded field, is fractal work, commenting on X’s version of Y’s third argument against Z’s way of cracking some philosophical chestnut, while earnestly denying any intent to resolve the problem itself but flying high above it in ever-diminishing circles, with predict- able results. Commitment is more demanding. The themes broached in Jewish philosophy do have family resemblances— not because they commandeer the same premises or target identical conclusions nor because they draw on a uniform armory of arguments. Arguments, like arms and armor, are readily captured and repurposed. One philosopher’s modus ponens, old veterans slyly note, is another’s modus tollens. But values— moral, political, epistemic, ontological—can link claimants in a tradition, as empiricism of a certain sort spins a unifying thread among some British thinkers, or a commitment to objectivity might plait a thicker cable, uniting moral and ontic realists. The values to which Jewish philosophers, working as such, are most sensitive are typically those found in Jewish texts and traditions. A glint catches the toward a synthetic philosophy 103 eye. Something looks appropriable. But what looks precious might be problematized by local or external challenges. Precious metals need assaying; gem- stones must be cut, faceted, polished. We can see similar work ongoing when Deuteronomy assays the narrative and prescriptions of the earlier Mosaic books, or when Job and Kohelet qualify pentateuchal promises, or Proverbs transposes the lyricism of Psalms into parables of prose. Scripture grows by layers, more like a coral bed than a palimpsest, each stratum adding depth and density, a new image or idiom. Insights are illuminated by experience, personal or communal. Dialogue feeds discovery. But that is never a one-way street. Jewish philosophy reflects, and reflects on, a long and troubled history. It finds nourishment even in forbidding surroundings. But it flourishes in moments of respite. Many philosophers today call themselves analysts (as though philosophy has ever eschewed analysis). Others are called Continental, as though that were the logical alternative. Often the Continental label announces romantic attachments. I admire the rigor the analysts reach for. But I find much of their work sterile. Some miss the great oaks for the moss at their base. Continentalists proudly salute the passions, but they are often turgid and irra- tionalist. I am inclined to blame institutional structures when I see would-be philosophers falling into dogma or falling into line. Philosophy, to keep its freshness, is rarely a school affair. But neophytes get the impression (sometimes under stern direction) that there is not much future for them if they keep thinking for themselves and fail to hitch their wagon to someone else’s star. Eager for currency, they try to catch a trend, still unaware that nothing dates faster than yesterday’s buzz words. Hot topics cool. When meteorites flare they are already plummeting to earth. Acolytes seeking an imprimatur blunt their talents and betray the passions that first drew them to philosophy. My own philosophical approach is synthetic, not eclectic, but also not sec- tarian (2012a). I am open to ideas from a variety of texts, Jewish and general, with their varied idioms—mythic or fictive, historical or prescriptive, dialectical, discursive, poetic or apodictic. Sometimes gems appear at the interface of idioms. So I have done my share of translating and interpreting, exploring classical and Arabic texts, often raising R. G. Collingwood’s question: what question was this thinker asking? What was at stake? What was never questioned here? Comparative work is the infrared that can light up blind spots of our own. Beyond the essential figures of philosophy in the West, I have engaged pretty extensively with Razi (Goodman 1971a; 1972b; 1999b, 35–67), Saadiah (Goodman 1976, 1990; see also Saadiah 1988), Farabi (Goodman 1972a), the Ikhwan al-Safa (Ikhwan al-Safa 2009), Miskawayh (Goodman 2003, 101–21), Avicenna (Goodman 2006), Ibn Tufayl (Goodman 2000; Ibn Tufayl 2009) Halevi 104 goodman

(Goodman 1997, 2008c), Bahya (Goodman 1999a, 68–88), Ghazali (Goodman (1971b, 1978a, 2013), Maimonides (Goodman 1978b, 1980, 2009), and Ibn Khaldun (Goodman 1999a, 2003). My colleague Phil Lieberman and I are now preparing a new translation and commentary of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Many of the issues that I find of greatest philosophic import are confronted in these texts. But in Islamic philosophy, I am an interpreter; in Jewish philosophy, I am existentially involved. In both cases, I read the works for their own sakes. I think intellectual history runs straighter when philosophically engaged, and philosophy probes deeper when textually informed. Bracketing the work of historic thinkers, as if they had no lasting relevance, is reading with a closed mind. Indeed, many who approach old texts with purely “scientific” intent, I find, deceive themselves about their neutrality and import unexamined, even procrustean frames for laying out (and drying) the artifacts they favor. A text that fails to fit their lattice works is branded incoherent (thus, Taylor 1937, with Spinoza), or disingenuous (Strauss 1952, 1963, with Maimonides). Reading more humbly is more enriching. There is not a lot that Philo, Maimonides, or Spinoza can learn from me. But my students and I can always learn from them. I do see progress in philosophy. But I am wary of the triumphal (and the accusatory) “we.” My allergies here partly reflect my Jewish background. Even as a child I heard accounts of the Crusades and Pizarro’s Mexican conquest sharply at variance with the then-celebratory grade school versions. In college, I balked at hearing that we study the past to learn “what made us” what we are. I have never thought who or what we are quite so passive an affair; and Whiggish (or later, deconstructionist) histories of philosophy did not convince me that some caricature of reason, drawn by its adversaries or would be execu- tors, was a fair portrait of its powers. I did not find secularized, deracinated distillates of European philosophy somehow universal—or its Jewish conversation partners somehow parochial. A creative philosopher, I believe, like a creative artist, needs to be somewhat alienated—not utterly lost in nature, or so severely at odds with the social milieu as to find no way of communicating with others—but not so comfortable as to see nothing and say nothing. Tocqueville can describe young America because he sees it with fresh eyes. He notices what many take for granted. Convention will say ‘Grass is green,’ ‘Snow is white.’ But Dürer finds a sym- phony in a patch of turf. An allrightnick can never be a philosopher and even makes a poor apologist, stuck with conventional pieties, not knowing what or how to thematize. But a good philosopher, who can see and sense with love and care, can be more than a critic. Acid cannot titrate itself. Balance comes in part from being alive to others’ thoughts. toward a synthetic philosophy 105

So my aim in studying past philosophers is neither to debunk nor to correct them but to learn and share insights that others may find useful in their philosophic quest. I would like my students to think critically. But sensitivity, I explain, does not mean knowing when someone’s standing on your toe. It is more in evidence when you notice that you have stepped on someone else’s. The critical thinker, similarly, is not the one most skilled in poking holes in others’ arguments (although that is a useful tool to hone) but the one keenest in spotting the weaknesses in his own. What I find most admirable in a philosopher is not analytic skill. Analysis is nice. But it can get too nice. David Hume is a paradigm case. It was by isolating fact from value and thought from emotion that he conveyed the impression that reality has nothing to do with value and that ideas are powerless to move us. It was by atomizing time and experience that he convinced himself that causes have no real link to their effects and that selves are insubstantial. I value synthesis not as an alternative to analysis but as its counterpart—or counter- weight. One cannot make distinctions without seeing connections, just as one cannot make comparisons without seeing differences. I think Plato’s greatness is visible in the synthesis he forged between Parmenides and Heraclitus, capturing truths along the way from such disparate voices as the Sophists, Pythogoreans, and pre-Socratic physikoi. Avicenna, less familiarly (See Goodman 2006), overcomes the dichotomy between the metaphysic of necessity spawned by Aristotle’s eternalism and the metaphysic of contingency inspired by scriptural creationism. The radical monotheists of the Islamic kalam had sought to vindicate creation by highlighting the radical contingency of finite being: divine agency eclipsed natural causality. Neoplatonic philosophers, following Aristotle, rejected creation as a tale that diverts attention from the essential givenness and determinacy of being. Avicenna’s synthesis recognized contingency in nature but reaffirmed natural causality: finite things were contingent in themselves but necessary given their causes. That synthesis won a cold welcome among thinkers more loyal to scripture than to Neoplatonic reasoning. As Ghazali complained, an eternal world needs no God: the Neoplatonists were atheists despite themselves, their God, a hollow mechanism whose clanking logic they expected somehow to precipitate the world. Maimonides offered a more irenic response. Neoplatonists were not atheists. Their eternalism allowed a consistent theism. Creation seemed a preferable, more probable hypothesis. But the preservation of natural causality was to be applauded. Kalam occasionalism paid God a false compliment, implicitly negating the worth of medicine and even the relevance of food. Why did God create so many seeming causal dependencies if natural means are irrelevant to 106 goodman his ends? Still, Maimonides saw insight in the kalam insistence that not every necessity is a matter of logic. Some, he argued, belong to the order of nature. By opening a space between nature and logic, Maimonides left room for contingency (and, thus, empiricism in science) and for divine will and grace: the world need not have been as we find it. God is no fifth wheel. His creative act made (and still makes) discernible differences in nature, allowing us to discern the wisdom in its order and the determinations of his will even where the wisdom may elude us. We miss wisdom most, perhaps, in the vulnerability and fallibility to which our embodiment subjects us. But it is that embodiment, in fact, that anchors life and consciousness, rendering us capable of personality, community, joy, compassion, and fulfillment of the spiritual and intellectual nature that warrants scripture’s calling us creatures in God’s image. Note the syntheses here: of order with contingency, rationalism with empiricism, theism with naturalism, will with wisdom in divinity, matter with form as expressions of God in nature, anticipating Spinoza’s treatment of God’s attributes (Goodman 1987). Few philosophers have welded syntheses as robust as Spinoza’s. He overcomes false dichotomies by the rigor and radicalism of his definitions: if substance is what exists in itself and is conceived through itself, then only God, the infinite reality, deserves the name of substance, vindicating the idea of God as Causa Sui, whose essence is identical with his existence. God remains the ultimate cause (not despite the natures of things but through them). But matter is brought in from the Neoplatonic cold, no longer the sump of evil and alienation but one of the infinity of infinite attributes in which God’s reality is expressed. The ancient polarity of unity and diversity is overcome, not by wishful thinking but by seriousness about the implications of divine infinity. The dualism that René Descartes bequeathed is overcome as well, not simply by calling body and soul facets of one reality but by seeing that thought begins in awareness of the body—making mind the idea of the body; and the body, correspondingly, the first object of our consciousness. With equal elegance, Spinoza overcomes the standoff between freedom and determinism, recognizing that indeterminism is no safe refuge of freedom (Goodman 1999a, 146–200). To be free is to be self-determined, not undetermined. Only God is wholly free in this sense. But we humans are free insofar as our actions are explained by who we are. We enhance our freedom by overcoming the passive emotions that diminish our power and render us subject to external things. Passions, in essence, are inadequate ideas, fragmentary notions, torn from their causal contexts. Through more adequate ideas, more fully cognizant of physical and psychological causes, we see through our prejudices and become more adequate actors—agents rather than victims. toward a synthetic philosophy 107

Not least among the ideas that augment our freedom is the recognition that nothing is more useful to us in seeking genuine fulfillment than our fellow human beings, for collaboration can ameliorate the human condition in ways that no one could manage alone. There is not space here to detail all the false dichotomies that Spinoza overcomes (see Goodman 2002, 17–89). His thinking about collaboration clearly touches on the presumed tension between individuals and their community, no casual question for Spinoza, a founder of modern liberal, constitutional, and democratic republicanism. But the few examples I have cited typify his successful syntheses. Philosophical problems, I believe, often spring not from linguistic confusions, as so often imagined in the last century, but from unrec- onciled insights, reflected in language and enshrined in rival systems of philosophy, religion, or ideology. Historical cases like those I have cited matter to me. I could have described at length Kant’s brilliant synthesis of Hume’s empiricism with Leibniz’s rationalism, allowing him to rediscover Aristotle’s developmental treatment of what Kant would call the a priori concepts on which science and understanding rely (Goodman 2001, 179–228). But I think the point is clear. I do not believe we talk faster or think sharper than our predecessors. People in every milieu have ideas worth grappling with. Behind that assumption lies a broader faith in reason that rests in turn on two working hypotheses repeatedly confirmed in experience: that things make sense and that insight, patience, constructive, and, yes, collaborative effort can discover how. My own work has pursued a number of syntheses, and I find collabora- tors in a variety of contexts and eras, not least among the poets, jurists, and philosophers who entrusted their ideas to the narratives and norms of Jewish canonical, traditional, and overtly philosophical texts. Worthy of special mention here, among our own contemporaries, is Yoram Hazony’s battle (2012) against the false dichotomy of reason and revelation, boldly seeking to clear the clustered friends and enemies of faith away from the scriptural page, so as to give its insights light and room to breathe. Among the philosophic syntheses I have essayed, perhaps most prominent is my effort to reconnect being with value (1998, 2007, 2008b; Mittleman 2011). Spinoza makes the view explicit: “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing” (Ethics II, Definition 6). Many recent philosophers have worried whether ‘good’ names a natural or a nonnatural property. Those who claim the first must face G. E. Moore’s open- question method: definitions, being analytic, should not be open to doubt. But attempts to define ‘good’ naturalistically seem always to leave room for the question ‘But is that really good?’ Moore’s method strikes utilitarianism, for example, tellingly: is maximizing pleasure really good? The sheer fact that 108 goodman the question makes sense shows that ‘good’ was not successfully defined. Does ‘good’ name a nonnatural property, then? That seems to push ethics out of the world where its norms might apply. My own thought is that good is not a property at all. Being itself is good. It is good that there is something rather than nothing and good that living and conscious beings exist, not just lifeless things. The ethical payoff is palpable. Rather than try to derive moral values from contracts or conventions (which themselves hang from a skyhook), I find value in reality: all beings have worth. All make claims and have deserts. Beings should be seen and treated as what they are. Prima facie, deserts are identical with the claims a being makes. Objective deserts weigh those claims comparatively, an enduring concern of human cultures. I see a hierarchy here. The virus is not equal to the baby it attacks. But beyond the relativity of claims, deserts, I think, rise to a plateau: persons, subjects capable of consideration, deserve special regard. Humans are the persons familiar to us; but, should we encounter subjects of another species, they too would merit the dignity and rights of persons. I do not see animals’ deserts as rights—although the closer animals approach subjecthood the more they deserve regard. The rhetoric of rights, far from raising animals to a status they can hardly enjoy, often blurs the safeguards of human life and dignity. But I count it as a strength that my ontological approach to ethics does not confine deserts to those who can sign a contract: not only animals but plants and species, populations, ecosystems, and the monuments of nature and culture have deserts. They deserve respect and protection proportioned to their claims— their conatus—the project that defines their being. The chief weakness of my stance is pretty clear. How does one prove anything so basic as the identity of good with being? It is easy enough to overcome the impression that I am violating Hume’s strictures against deriving an ought from an is. What gives color to the is/ought dichotomy is an elemental confusion of being with facticity: not everything that is so should be so. But the identity I have proposed does not pretend otherwise. The real difficulty is that being and goodness are such basic notions that they leave little to rest my claims on. Any consideration I appeal to might prove dependent on my most basic claim. So any move I make risks circularity. I might appeal to instinct or intuition, but those who differ might cite rival instincts or intuitions of their own. Still, the picture is not as bleak as it may seem. Aristotle defended the law of contradiction dialectically: consider what is lost by its rejection. Similarly, I ask those who doubt the value of being whether they see a reason to stay toward a synthetic philosophy 109 the hand of some madman ready to annihilate the universe. Would that be a thing indifferent? I have gotten mixed responses, often depending on what is negated—persons, loved ones, living beings. The variance confirms my thoughts about the hierarchy of claims. More positively, as in geometry, the worth of a premise shows up heuristically in its yield: the identity of being with value offers objective foundations for moral regard of all beings, a rough if ready rule for scaling deserts and good grounds for according special regard to persons. One need not peg ethics to conventions (a damaging defect, as I have argued in John Rawls’s theory of justice—see 2014) or bind it to likeness to ourselves or to our emotional or empathic responses, say, to sentience, which are all too readily subverted as fashions change, moods alter, or care shifts to cruelty in the alchemy of human sensibilities. One fruit of the union of being with value is a strategy for overcoming the polarity between deontological and teleological ethics. Purist deontology, when pressed, declares external goods irrelevant. But consequentialist schemes readily decline into reductive analyses that slight the transcendent dimensions of goodness and risk prostituting principle for some presumed gain. Ideals of happiness and fulfillment are denuded when cut off from generosity and caring. But a sense of duty uncoupled from any human good is rudderless: how can I aid another if I ignore his needs or abstract from what defines her heart’s desire? One cannot interpret or even classify norms without knowing their purposes. The Torah’s thematic, as Maimonides shows exhaustively, is human fulfillment. God does not legislate for his own sake. But enlightened self-interest can never be mere egoism; it pursues moral and social as well as intellectual and spiritual growth, as classical philosophers argued and as the Jewish sources clearly prescribe. Counseled by the eudaimonism and virtue ethics that Maimonides elicits from the Torah (Goodman 2005, 2007, 2008c), I have worked to restore a more holistic ethical vision. As I paraphrased a famous remark of Kant’s: “Morality without interests is empty; pragmatism without principles is blind” (2008b, 118). Synthetic work can help bridge the troubled gap between individuals and their communities. Communitarianism, given its head, begins to look like fascism writ polite. Yet there are fearsome portents, too, in the libertarian fantasies that Sam Beer once labeled “ragged individualism.” Ancient Jewish texts open vistas of a sane and sensible middle ground: Im ein ani li, mi li, u-khe- she-ani le-atzmi ma ani—If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am for myself alone, what am I? As social beings we do not fulfill ourselves and flourish in isolation. Rabbinically, “What is mine is mine; what is thine is thine” was middat Sedom, the ethos of Sodom. Jewish sources celebrate individuality, an 110 goodman ideal that some of the greatest Greek philosophers deprecated as mere idiosyn- crasy (Goodman 2011b). Knowing that free persons flourish in an integrated community, those sources bear the seeds of Bergson’s ideal of an open society. In search of the dynamics that sustain our human sense of balance, I have argued consistently that we are not mere creatures of past influences but self- affirming, in some measure self-defining subjects. Yet we are born into families, tribes, and nations; and we construct, enter and leave, appraise and redesign the formal structures in which we live. Communities (Gemeinschaften) are natural and intimate. Societies (Gesellschaften) are fabricated, but no less real. Societies lay down rules; communities inculcate roles. But the very intimacy that lends power to our more organic relations demands their regulation. The more impersonal structures of laws and institutions protect the dignity and rights of individuals at the margins and extremes of communal power. Synthesis, again, may help resolve what I see as a false dispute over autonomy and heteronomy, pitting command ethics (and legal positivism) against moral and intellectual integrity (2011a, 2012b). I have sought to answer secularist polemicists by highlighting the inextricable activity of conscience and consciousness in biblical and rabbinic legal and moral reasoning. But I have sought to reassure traditionalists that the quest for understanding in the realm of norms need not undermine the ideals of law, or license the free-for-all they fear. Autonomy that fancies itself not just the discoverer but the creator of norms is not autonomy but hubris. The image I have proposed for use in this terrain, less a map than a guide for those who feel caught in a crevasse, is that of chimneying—critical appropriation made dynamic. Rock climbers can gain altitude by pushing off from one side of a defile and then the other. Just as they need pressure and support from both sides, sincere questers confronting positive norms with personal insights (if they do not dream of knocking down one rock wall or aspire to crush their own intelligence and conscience against another) can bring their understanding to a tradition and learn from sources that seem at first unpromising of a hand hold. The pertinent virtues, as in any parlay between seeming givens and apparent reason, are fair measures of tenacity and openness. Polemical spirits have a predictably hard time. Uneven give and pressure make a slip and fall more likely. A synthetic approach may even help thinkers uncomfortable with Godtalk to see that it is misleading to play off the claims of autonomy against those of divine or natural law (Goodman 2008a). But good faith remains critical in any honest negotiation. So it cannot hurt, in all Socratic humility, to recognize that much of what we may be pleased to call reason has proved fallible in the past, just as much of what is proudly presented in the trappings of revelation toward a synthetic philosophy 111 remains open to question in its provenance and meaning. Tradition has a history of revision. As long as it is alive, it continues to grow and change. But reason too, being human and alive, is as prone to senescence as tradition, unless discovery gives it air. There is a familiar polarity among Jewish thinkers over so-called rational and ritual laws. Again, I see a false dichotomy, in the suggestion (vehemently rejected by Maimonides) that ritual laws are somehow nonrational. Defining ritual acts as those bearing a symbolic valence in their modalities, expressive of attitudes toward specific values, I see ritual in quite a variety of human activities, sacred or secular in intent. I do not equate ritual with magic or confine ritual expressions to the performative. Nor do I imagine that ritual acts must be repetitious or equate them with inanity, as polemic may. I think the meaning of a ritual lies, in the first instance, in the intentions of those who practice it. How their gestures are received by fellow practitioners or perceived by others is quite another matter, not irrelevant but not identical. Using the broad definition I have proposed, I am able to see how ritual norms may be legitimately prescriptive. All laws, I have argued, have ritual dimensions. For all are underdetermined by the core values that legitimate them: some situations demand an apology, others demand punishment or reward. But the manner in which apologies are tendered—or, in the legal realm, the boundary between the sanctions for petty and grand theft or for manslaugh- ter and murder, the rules of evidence and procedure in adjudicating civil torts and crimes—are matters not specified by the values that motivate the laws in which we seek to safeguard human life and property, privacy and dignity. It is by spelling out the parameters of manner and degree, sanction and reward, and the overt markers of unseen intent, that legal norms become performable. Here ritual enters the domain of laws. Modalities become prescriptive insofar as they are organic to the norms they bring into the realm of practice. Their semeiotic presence makes the laws in which they operate powerful if often implicit expressions of a social ethos. There is a familiar polarity in Jewish thinking about the messianic age, and here too I have tried to bridge a gap. Some moderns, eager to naturalize an eschatology they find embarrassing, resolve biblical visions into secular promises of better times to come. World peace and social harmony, warmly equated with some form of socialism, are presented as the bottom line of human hope. (Alan Mittleman, 2009, offers a wholesome antidote to the often heated radicalism of such enthusiasms.) Others hold fast to the apocalyptic imagery of scripture, if not from sheer literalism, then, as Gershom Scholem does (1971), in distaste for the seeming inauthenticity of anything that seems too reasoned. Scholem’s conviction, evidently, is that powerlessness in the days 112 goodman before Zionist activism or effectual socialism must surely have bred dreams of the violent overthrow of the natural order. A third alternative, spelled out in the final pages of Maimonides’ magisterial Mishneh Torah, is grounded in the Talmud: “The only difference between this age and the days of the Messiah is the subjection of Israel to alien dominion” (B. Sanhedrin 91b). My thinking here (2008b, 156–94) is that Jewish messianism is trivialized by reduction to a potted political program but equally affronted by projections of an apocalypse imposed even in the teeth of moral recalcitrance. Recalling how Spinoza applied the then-new word utopia to any program that presupposes radical transformation of human nature (Tractatus Politicus 1.1), I argue that the prophets’ promises of national redemption and universal peace do not presume such transformation but seek it as the reward constitutive in fulfillment of the Torah’s mitzvot. For those commandments seek to reform the ethos, individually and communally (thus, Maimonides’ reading of Psalms 19:8). If Israel is to light the nations’ pathway, as the prophets hoped, the world can be transformed not by threat of force but by example, as the little child who leads once-warlike nations to an age of lasting peace. That is no small order. It sows an ideal large enough to light up the course of history with meaning (cf. Psalms 97:11). But it asks no breach of natural law and invites no false triumphalism, turning history into the mere manipulation of humanity. Epistemically, I have found myself loyal to the realism championed by Saadiah. Methodologically, I like Spinoza’s technique of bringing coherence to the aid of correspondence. Inference to best explanation, in my view, warrants our trust in the reality of the external world. The same standard gives us both neo-Darwinism and our knowledge of God. Consilience, as I argue in In Defense of Truth (2001), is our best source of confirmation. We have no external standard to validate the conformance of our ideas to anything outside our ken. But in seeking to explain appearances, we pursue and rightly favor hypotheses that cohere. As evidence mounts up and hypotheses proliferate, we rightly favor those that do not demand discarding others. Outrageous and outlandish notions spin to the periphery of credence and credibility when they demand discarding too much and beg for ad hoc and unsupported supple- mentary assumptions. Credible hypotheses, by contrast, reinforce each other; and, by confirming one another’s predictions, they provide new evidentiary buttresses from (often unanticipated) quarters and open up new salients of discovery. Characteristic of the synthetic tenor of my work in philosophy (but also of my distaste for romanticism, if romanticism means setting up a false competition between reason and emotion and then passing the lead to the emotions) are my thoughts about truth in the arts. An odd romantic ambivalence toward a synthetic philosophy 113 assigns artistic sensibilities special access to special truths but (often simultaneously) exempts artists from responsibility to or for the truth. I find such attitudes misleading and disrespectful of the arts themselves. I see the work of artists as essentially communicative, and I find it patronizing to exempt artists from responsibility to truth. This does not mean that art should be literal or propagandistic. It does not favor the conventions deemed “realist” or repre- sentational. The arts have many idioms, and artists often seek out or devise new or exotic languages of expression. Indeed, I have long suspected that the arts strikingly qualify Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument, since many of the most original artists introduce symbolisms that ask their audience to meet them part way along a semeiotic continuum, to penetrate a personal symbolic world or perhaps to stand at its periphery. I do not exclude abstract expressionism or so-called absolute music from the purview of the arts. But I do deny that abstract works have nothing to communicate. Artists are often concerned to address other artists and to challenge or respond to conventions and traditions of their metier. So it is not unusual for an artwork to be about color or a musical composition to be about sounds (and silences). Whether such reflexivity declines into self-indulgence can become a matter for debate. But the same is true of any idiom: thoughtlessness and overuse can turn a fresh idea trite. Still, it is not unheard of for manifestos of artistic autonomy to bear social or political or personal overtones. Suffice it here to say that I find truths in works of art that are worth exploring and that can be sources of insight, whether or not they prove translatable from one idiom to another. As a moral realist, I have argued for moral and political, religious and spiritual truths. I have sought to show how myth can be a vehicle of truth (2001, 337–412), not in ways antithetical to science and commensurate with magic and the obscurantism that rides shotgun for it but in ways more than amenable (and indeed helpful) to reason, properly construed. The ontologically grounded value theory I have espoused bespeaks an interest in the truths of things, each in its own way pursuing its own nature—a reflection in my thinking both of Aristotle’s thoughts about teleology and the pros hen equivocity of good and being and of Spinoza’s idea of the conatus. Against that backdrop, it is not surprising that I do not wish to excuse the arts and artists from a responsibility to the truth and responsiveness to it. Space here does not permit examining every false dichotomy I have sought to overcome—between reason and emotion, say, or between rationalism and empiricism. The work I have done along these lines reflects my belief that philosophy is not simply about language. Still less do I believe that philosophy is about itself or that philosophers write and speak only for others who ply the 114 goodman same craft. In my belief, philosophy surveys the expanse of human experience, and philosophers need to be alive and awake to what we know and to address their thoughts to making what sense we can of what is known about the world. I have had a fascination with biology since my high school days. That is reflected in my early collaborations with my first wife, Madeleine Goodman (1945–96), a specialist in human biology and medical anthropology. These interests persist in syntheses pursued in my more recent work. In early coauthored studies (Goodman and Goodman 1983, 1989), Madeleine and I unmasked misogynist notions harbored in the sciences, exposed the persistence of sexual racism in bioscience, and explored the motives of religious anti-Darwinism and its scientistic adversaries. I have never accepted racial or gender stereotypes, and I parried some of them in discussing mythic discourse in In Defense of Truth. Moving beyond the groundwork laid in our early joint work on evolution, my book Creation and Evolution (2010) walks readers through the opening chapters of Genesis, showing how would-be literalism reads extraneous notions into the text and repeatedly masks its emphatic and explicit themes. The appeal to irreducible complexity in behalf of intelligent design is bracketed in that book as biologically ill- founded and suppositious, leaning on the fallacy Spinoza labeled reductio ad ignorantiam—an unwise tack for theists, since the God of the gaps that is the refuge of such appeals retreats into the cobwebs as science advances. A bolder theism sees God everywhere, not just in the darker corners science has not yet illuminated. Evolution, I argue, is not inimical but a powerful support to theism. Far from eliminating purpose and value in nature, it presupposes teleology. For purposes are what Darwinism aims to explain, using the historical method, in fact, that Aristotle (and classical biologists in his wake) long side- lined as unduly mythical—the same approach that is so brilliantly exemplified in Genesis. My most recent work in biophilosophy is again collaborative. Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body (2014), jointly written with Greg Caramenico, draws on contemporary science to make its case: contrary to popular rumor, brain science has not banished the human soul. If what acts is real, then souls are real, not as ethereal wisps of smoke, nominally spiritual yet somehow capable of passing through walls, bending spoons, or fighting off cancer by sheer right thinking. Resting our brief on scientific studies of perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity, we argue that souls are among those complex realities that are not reducible to the sum of their humbler parts. Intimately connected to the body, they are emergent from it but not describable in physical terms. toward a synthetic philosophy 115

Again combating a false dichotomy, we do not pit body against soul in a zero-sum explanatory turf battle. Rather, as we argue, the scientific study of the brain and of psychology leads one to the recognition of an integrated self capable of discovery, caring, and love. Our aim is to stake out ground for a newly confident humanism rooted in some of the richest philosophical and intellectual traditions of the West—and the East. A hallmark of our synthetic approach, aiming in this case to overcome the false dichotomy of body and soul, is an ancient midrash quoted near the outset of our book. A lame and a blind watchman were plundering figs from the royal orchard. Both pled innocence when charged. One protested that he could not even see the fruit, the other that he could never climb the orchard wall. But, seeing through their ruse, the king mounted the lame thief on the blind one’s back and punished them together (Sanhedrin 91b). Body and soul, we argue, act together. The brain is organ to the soul. Neither is effectual without the other. And no account of humanity will succeed as science that omits consciousness and caring, love and hope, creativity and invention, gifts that rise beyond the given and point far beyond themselves.

References

Goodman, L. E. 1971a. “The Epicurean Ethic of Muammad Ibn Zakariya’ ar-Razi.” Studia Islamica 34: 5–26. ———. 1971b. “Ghazali’s Argument from Creation.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2, nos. 1 and 2: 67–85, 168–88. ———. 1972a. “Al-Farabi’s Modalities” (Heb.). Iyyun 23: 100–112. ———. 1972b. “Razi’s Psychology.” Philosophical Forum 4: 26–48; reprinted in Islamic Philosophy and Theology: Critical Concepts in Islamic Thought, edited by Ian Netton, 3: 310–29 (New York: Routledge, 2007). ———. 1975. “Razi’s Myth of the Fall of the Soul.” In Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science, edited by G. Hourani, 25–40. Albany: SUNY Press; reprinted in Islamic Philosophy and Theology, 3: 330–44. ———. 1976. “Saadya Gaon on the Human Condition.” Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 67: 23–29. ———. 1978a. “Did Ghazali Deny Causality?” Studia Islamica 47: 83–120. ———. 1978b. “Maimonides’ Philosophy of Law.” Jewish Law Annual 1: 72–107. ———. 1980. “Maimonides and Leibniz.” Journal of Jewish Studies 31: 214–25; translation from Leibniz: “Observations on Rabbi Moses Maimonides’ Book Entitled The Teacher of the Perplexed,” 225–36. 116 goodman

———. 1987. “Matter and Form as Attributes of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy.” In A Straight Path: Studies in Honor of Arthur Hyman, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, M. S. Hyman, R. Long, and Charles H. Manekin, 86–97. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. ———. 1990. “Saadiah Gaon’s Interpretive Technique in Translating the Book of Job.” In Translation of Scripture Jewish Quarterly Review, edited by D. M. Goldenberg, supplement: 47–76. ———. 1996. God of Abraham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. “Judah Halevi.” In History of Jewish Philosophy, edited by Daniel Frank and Oliver Leaman, 188–227. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. Judaism, Human Rights and Human Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999a. Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age. Edinburgh and New Brunswick, NJ: Edinburgh University Press and Rutgers University Press. ———. 1999b. “Razi vs. Razi.” In The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, edited by Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Mark R. Cohen, Sasson Somekh, and Sidney H. Griffith, 77–100. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ———. 2000. “Ibn Tufayl.” In Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by Maria Menocal, R. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, 318–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. Amherst, NY: Humanity Press. ———. 2002. “What Does Spinoza’s Ethics Contribute to Jewish Philosophy.” In Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, edited by H. Ravven and L. E. Goodman, 3–89. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2003. Islamic Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. “God and the Good Life: Maimonides’ Virtue Ethics and the Idea of Perfection.” In Die Trias Maimonides, edited by George Tamer, 123–35. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2006. Avicenna. Updated ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. First edition: Routledge, 1992. ———. 2007. “Value and the Dynamics of Being.” Review of Metaphysics 61: 723–42. ———. 2008a. Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself. Gifford Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008b. On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy. Updated ed. Oxford: Littman Library. First edition: Yale University Press, 1991. ———. 2008c. “The Psychology of Maimonides and Halevi” (Heb.). In Maimonides: Thought and Innovation, edited by A. Ravitzky, 317–49. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center. toward a synthetic philosophy 117

———. 2009. “Bahya and Maimonides on the Worth of Medicine.” In Maimonides and His Heritage, edited by I. Dobbs-Weinstein, L. E. Goodman, and J. A. Grady, 61–93. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2010. Creation and Evolution. New York: Routledge. ———. 2011a. “Ethics and God.” Philosophical Investigations 34: 135–50. ———. 2011b. “Individuality.” In Judaic Sources and Western Thought: Jerusalem’s Enduring Presence, edited by Jonathan Jacobs, 238–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012a. “Doing Jewish Philosophy in America.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 33–56. Boston: Academic Studies Press. ———. 2012b. “Monotheism and Ethics.” In Monotheism and Ethics: Historical and Contemporary Intersections among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann, 11–24. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2013. al-Ghazālī and Hume on Causality. In Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook. Vol. 4. Moscow: Vostochnaya Literatura, 2013, 448–72; another version in The Misty Land of Ideas and the Light of Dialogue, edited by Ali Paya, 49–80 (London: ICAS Press, 2013). ———. 2014. Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, L. E., and D. G. Caramenico. 2014. Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodman, L. E., and M. J. Goodman M. J. 1981. “Is There a Feminist Biology?” International Journal of Women’s Studies 4: 393–413. ———. 1983. “Creation and Evolution: Another Round in an Ancient Struggle.” Zygon 18: 3–43. ———. 1989. “‘Particularly Amongst the Sunburnt Nations . . .’: The Persistence of Sexual Stereotypes of Race in Bio-Science.” International Journal of Group Tensions 19: 3–4 221–43, 365–84. Hazony, Yoram. 2012. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ibn Tufayl. 2009. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Translated with commentary by L. E. Goodman. Updated ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First edition: Twayne, 1972. Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity). 2009. The Case of the Animals vs. Man before the King of the Jinn. Edited and translated with commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mittleman, Alan. 2009. Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. “The Durability of Goodness.” In Judaic Sources and Western Thought: Jerusalem’s Enduring Presence, edited by Jonathan Jacobs, 21–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 118 goodman

Saadiah Gaon. 1988. Book of Theodicy, Commentary and Translation of the Book of Job. Translated with commentary by L. E. Goodman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1971. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Others Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken. Esp. 1–36. Strauss, Leo. 1952. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1963. “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed.” In The Guide of the Perplexed, translated by Shlomo Pines, xi–lvi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, A. E. 1937. “Some Incoherencies in Spinozism.” Mind N.S. 46: nos. 182 and 183, 137–58, 281–301; reprinted in Studies in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by S. P. Kashap, 189–211, 289–309 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). chapter 6 Jewish Philosophy Tomorrow Post-Messianic and Post-Lachrymose

Warren Zev Harvey

Jerusalem and New York, the two main centers of contemporary Judaism, are the cities in which I have lived most of my life. Born in New York, I studied philosophy at Columbia University (BA, 1965; PhD, 1973), spending two years as a visiting student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—once as an undergraduate and once as a graduate. I taught in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal (1972–77) and, since 1977, have been teaching in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I am now professor emeritus.

New York

How did I come to specialize in Jewish philosophy? I do not remember precisely. It happened when I was a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia. I recall consulting with Sidney Morgenbesser, David Sidorsky, and other professors regarding possible dissertation topics. I found myself hesitating between two very different subjects: one was “The Quine- Cratylus Thesis,” which was to be a study of the indeterminacy of meaning; the other was the anarchic political philosophy of William Godwin. In the back of my mind, however, I was dreaming about writing on medieval Hebrew philosophy, although I realized that such a topic would be difficult and require working with arcane texts in Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin. One day I made bold and approached Professor Arthur Hyman, who was then an adjunct professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia, and asked him whether he would consider the possibility of my writing under his supervision a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, the vaunted fourteenth- century anti-Maimonidean philosopher. I had been exposed to Crescas in Jerusalem in the lectures of Professor Shlomo Pines and was fascinated by his critique of Aristotelian physics and by his metaphysics of love. Hyman knew Crescas well, since he was a leading student of Harry Austryn Wolfson, author of the magisterial Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle (1929). He discussed my ideas on Crescas with me and agreed to supervise my dissertation, which eventually

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_��8 120 harvey became “Hasdai Crescas’ Critique of the Theory of the Acquired Intellect” (1973). I thus have Hyman to thank for my getting into Jewish philosophy. I also have the late Isaac Barzilay to thank for it. Barzilay, professor of Hebrew literature, had an abiding interest in philosophy and, throughout my years at Columbia, encouraged me in my study of medieval and modern Hebrew philosophic texts. Medieval philosophy was taught at Columbia in those days by James J. Walsh and by Hyman. They rejected the view still prevalent today in many universities that medieval philosophy means Christian philosophy and taught it as a tradition common to Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Their approach was embodied in their superb textbook Philosophy in the Middle Ages (first edition 1967). As I am writing these words, I am in New York, serving as a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia and now have the privilege to teach the medieval philosophy course here using the third edition of Hyman and Walsh’s Philosophy in the Middle Ages, recently revised by Thomas Williams (2010). I had used the original version of Philosophy in the Middle Ages when I taught medieval philosophy at McGill in the early 1970s. A similar approach to medieval philosophy is found in another excellent textbook I have used in teaching: Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi’s Medieval Political Philosophy (first edition 1963), recently revised by Joshua Parens and Joseph C. Macfarland (2011). My fascination with medieval philosophy was admittedly not shared by most of my fellow philosophy students at Columbia. Many of them thought there was no philosophy worth studying before Immanuel Kant or Gottlob Frege or Charles Peirce or Edmund Husserl or Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Don’t you know there’s been a revolution in philosophy?” they would say to me. However, I did not believe in progress in philosophy and agreed with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that all Western philosophy is nothing but “a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead 1979, 39). Medieval philosophy was of particular interest to me since its footnotes were written by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers who lived in the world of scripture and could not avoid confronting the grand ethical and metaphysical questions posed by the prophets. Medieval philosophy was challenged and enriched by the visions of the prophets, and this gave it a distinctive depth and charm.

Montreal

I moved to Montreal in January 1972 to take up my first regular academic position. McGill University had a strong Department of Philosophy and an jewish philosophy tomorrow 121 outstanding Jewish Studies Program, conceived by Ruth Wisse, Harry Bracken, and David Hartman. At McGill, I learned that “Jewish philosophy” included not only medieval authors but also modern and contemporary ones, and I was expected to teach all periods. Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish “religious existentialists” had been taught at Columbia, but they were taught in the Religion Department (by the dialogical theorist Harold Stahmer) and never mentioned in the Department of Philosophy. I now had to disabuse myself of the prejudice that they were not philosophers. I remember the precise moment I realized that Rosenzweig was a philosopher and not merely a “religious existentialist.” Soon after I began teaching at McGill, the chair of the Department of Philosophy, a serious Hegel scholar and pious Christian, invited me for a get-acquainted lunch. “I know there were medieval Jewish philosophers,” he said, “but are there any modern ones?” His wry tone seemed to me to reflect the Hegelian prejudice that Judaism is anachronistic and modern Jewish philosophy a contradictio in adjecto. “Well,” I answered hesitatingly, “there have been Jewish religious existentialists, like . . . Franz Rosenzweig.” He suddenly perked up. “Franz who?” he asked? “Rosenzweig,” I repeated. “Do you mean the Franz Rosenzweig who wrote Hegel und der Staat?” he asked excitedly. I assured him it was the same man. “I always wanted to know what happened to him,” he said. “He wrote the best book on Hegel’s political philosophy, and then vanished into thin air!” “Not quite into thin air,” I said. “He became a Jewish philosopher and wrote the great Stern der Erlösung.” It was an epiphany for me. All of a sudden, I saw Rosenzweig in a new light. He was no longer simply a “religious existentialist” but was now the masterful student of Hegel’s political philosophy, who wrote a book of Jewish philosophy that challenged Hegel and went beyond him. If Hegel was a philosopher, so was Rosenzweig. The chair of my department, who previously may have believed that Judaism was obsolete and modern Jewish philosophy impossible, was now begging me for more information about Rosenzweig’s Jewish philosophy. We both left that lunch with changed attitudes toward modern Jewish philosophy. I started thinking at McGill about the tradition of Jewish philosophy from Philo of Alexandria until today and welcomed the opportunity to teach modern and contemporary Jewish philosophers, and not only the medievals. I gave courses in Baruch Spinoza, reading him in the light of the medieval Maimonideans. I taught Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem and noticed he was significantly influenced by Hasdai Crescas. I read Karl Marx but preferred to 122 harvey teach Ber Borochov. In Francophone Montreal, I began to study the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and, taking advantage of the fact that my students could read French, I gave seminars in his Difficile liberté. My first MA student, Richard Kearney, wrote his thesis on Levinas. Teaching very diverse Jewish philosophers like Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Borochov, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, I was, not surprisingly, asked by colleagues and students to define “Jewish philosophy.” In response, I resorted to a nominalistic definition, which I still find useful. Jewish philosophy is any philosophy that is created in some meaningful way against the background of Jewish life or culture, just as French philosophy is any philosophy created in a meaningful way against that of French life or culture and German philosophy is any philosophy created in a meaningful way against that of German life or culture. To be sure, a philosopher could bear more than one adjective. Maimonides is not only a Jewish philosopher, but also an Andalusian one and an Egyptian one. Spinoza is both a Dutch philosopher and a Jewish one. Borochov is a Jewish philosopher but also a Russian one and a Yiddish one. Levinas is a French philosopher and a Jewish one, and some might see him also as a Lithuanian one. Needless to say, every commentator has the right to decide what it means to say that a philosophy or philosopher is Jewish, French, or German “in a meaningful way.” I was happy teaching at McGill and enjoyed la belle ville. However, one day in 1976, there arrived out of the blue a letter from Shlomo Pines, then chair of the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offering me a position in Jerusalem. Ever since my studies in Israel as an undergraduate, I had hoped to move there. Moreover, my sabra wife Nurit was eager to return home; and we both wanted our baby daughter, Noa Eve, to grow up in Israel. Pines’s offer was one I could not refuse.

Jerusalem

When, in fall 1977, I began teaching Jewish philosophy in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I had questions about the academic framework. What, I wondered, is this discipline called “Jewish Thought” (Maḥashevet Yisrael)? Is it really a discipline? As a student of Arthur Hyman, it was clear to me that Jewish philosophy can be taught properly only in a philosophy department, and a philosophy department that does not teach Jewish philosophy is incomplete, especially if it is in Jerusalem. My favor- able experience at McGill reinforced my views on this subject. I was, to put it jewish philosophy tomorrow 123 mildly, unhappy with the separation between the departments of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I eventually wrote a critical article about this problem, “Where Should Jewish Philosophy Be Taught?” (1994). Nonetheless, I am a pragmatist in life as well as in philosophy and was thrilled to be teaching in Jerusalem, no matter in what the department. Teaching Jewish philosophy in Jerusalem was a delight. With students whose mother tongue was Hebrew, who had a solid background in classical Jewish literature, and who often had a good knowledge of Arabic, I could teach seminars in esoteric philosophic books like Crescas’s Light of the Lord. In addition, I taught each year a lecture course on a chosen theme “from Philo of Alexandria to Today”: for example, “Political Theory in Jewish Philosophy form Philo to Today,” “The Concept of Love in Jewish Philosophy from Philo to Today,” or “The Theory of Prophecy in Jewish Thought from Philo to Today.” I came to appreciate the advantages of studying Jewish philosophy in the framework of the Hebrew University’s Institute for Jewish Studies together with scholars of the Bible, Talmud, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history. I sought ways to integrate the historical-philological approach that characterizes the “Jerusalem School” of Jewish studies with the analytic philosophic approach I had learned at Columbia. Beyond all this, I found myself part of a truly exciting department. Among my friends in the Department of Jewish Thought were two brilliant young philosophers, Shalom Rosenberg and Aviezer Ravitzky, who taught Jewish philosophy with rigor, creativity, and intellectual passion. My friends in the department included also two amazing young teachers of Kabbalah, Moshe Idel and Yehuda Liebes, who, like Gershom Scholem before them, did not only know about sefirot and incantations but were also expert in the history of philosophy and original thinkers in their own right. Other members of the department in its heyday, which extended well into the late 1990s, were Joseph Dan, Suzanne Daniel-Nataf, Rachel Elior, Moshe Halbertal, David Hartman, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Eliezer Schweid, Giuseppe Sermoneta, Sarah Stroumsa, and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer. It was a privilege for me to be part of such a vital department, which was distinguished by its innovative scholarship and was extremely popular with the students. The Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was in those days the intellectual hub of all the departments of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah in Israeli universities and the center of the study of Jewish thought in the world. It also played an active role in the revival of Maimonideanism in the second half of the twentieth century, which was associated with the names of Leon Roth, Leo Strauss, Shlomo Pines, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Abraham Nuriel, and David Hartman (see Harvey 1981). Maimonides was not studied merely as a 124 harvey historical personality but as a formidable philosopher who has urgent importance today—especially with regard to his views on political philosophy and their meaning for the new Jewish state. Given such extraordinary colleagues and students and given the flourishing of Jewish philosophy in Jerusalem, it seemed silly to complain about being in a Department of Jewish Thought. However, I was convinced then and remain convinced today that Jewish philosophy can be taught effectively as philosophy only in a philosophy department. For example, if one teaches Maimonides’ discussion of the Garden of Eden story (Guide of the Perplexed, I:2) in a department of philosophy, the students recognize that he is using it as a state of nature parable and ask questions about why, according to him, laws and political organization are necessary; but if one teaches the very same discussion in a department of Jewish thought, the students will be interested in the place of Maimonides’ interpretation in the history of Jewish literature and will ask questions about how he developed interpretations from Genesis Rabbah or Onqelos. It is surely important to study the Guide as midrash, but if you want to teach it as philosophy, it can be done satisfactorily only in a philosophy department. Moreover, since Maimonides is not taught in the Department of Philosophy in Jerusalem, young Israeli philosophers commonly complete their undergraduate and graduate studies without ever having read the Guide of the Perplexed—which is analogous to French students of philosophy never reading Descartes or German students of philosophy never reading Kant. The Department of Jewish Thought had been founded not long before I came to Jerusalem. In the old days, there had been two departments that worked closely together: the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah. Most students of one studied also in the other. The interests of the Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah began with the Middle Ages and ended with the early modern period. The new Department of Jewish Thought was more ambitious, claiming within its purview all Jewish thought from the Bible, through the rabbinic period to the Middle Ages and up until the present. In fact, the Department of Jewish Thought was created by the merger of the Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah with two recent academic units: the Department of the History of Jewish Thought (founded by Professor R. J. Z. Werblowsky) and the Section of Contemplative and Moral Literature in the Department of Hebrew Literature (founded by Professor I. Tishby). Although the Department of Jewish Thought may thus be said to have been the accidental product of a bureaucratic compromise, it was, nonetheless, born with a very strong ideology. The fundamental concept behind the discipline of Jewish thought is that there is a distinctive and clearly defined tradition of ideas and values that extends from the Bible jewish philosophy tomorrow 125 and Talmud until today. The two chief ideologues of the new discipline were Professors Eliezer Schweid and Joseph Dan, both versatile scholars and articulate lecturers. Schweid was a student of Pines, and Dan a student of Scholem. Pines had reservations about the discipline of Jewish thought. Once in the late 1980s, he told me that he had years ago remarked to Schweid that the discipline of Jewish thought could not be justified academically but could perhaps be justified from the point of view of fostering national culture, but now, he continued, he had come to the conclusion that it could not be justified even from that point of view. His argument was that the banner of “Jewish thought” was to some extent successful in getting young Israelis interested in philosophy and Kabbalah as national culture, but the rather general nature of the discipline did not encourage an adequate focus on either philosophic or kabbalistic texts. Over the past decade or so, as a new generation of professors has taken its place, the focus of the Department of Jewish Thought has indeed shifted from the Guide of the Perplexed and the Zohar to modern and contemporary theology and sociology, for example, Sabbateanism, Hasidism, religious Zionism, and ultra-Orthodoxy. The department today has only seven tenured positions, half of what it had in its heyday. The new young faculty members are all top- notch scholars and teachers, each a star in his or her own field. However, the department has only one full-time faculty member teaching medieval Jewish philosophy (Dr. Caterina Rigo), no full-time faculty member teaching medieval Kabbalah, and no full-time faculty member teaching modern Jewish philosophy (Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, etc.). The reduction in the number of faculty members has been accompanied by a similar reduction in the number of students. There are many reasons for the drop in the number of students majoring in the Department of Jewish Thought. The university’s drastic reduction of the number of faculty positions in the department is one reason—but not the only one. Over the past two decades or so, there has been throughout the world a general lessening of interest in the humanities, and this trend has affected Israel. In addition, over roughly the same period, there has been in Israel a progressive lessening of interest in Jewish studies. This is in large measure the result of curriculum changes in Israeli high schools. The old emphasis on the Bible and classical Hebrew literature has been replaced by a more utilitarian curriculum, emphasizing mathematics, English, and other “practical” subjects. Israeli students, in the general public high schools, study little Bible, almost no rabbinic literature, and little medieval Hebrew literature. The situation in the religious public high schools is different, since classical Jewish texts are taught there. The result is that fewer nonreligious Israelis pursue Jewish Studies at Israeli universities and colleges. When I first attended classes at the Hebrew 126 harvey

University of Jerusalem in 1963, most students and teachers in Jewish Studies were secular, but this is no longer the case. Furthermore, there has been a decrease in the number of Israelis studying Arabic in high school, and this has contributed to the decline of the study of medieval Jewish philosophy in Israeli academic institutions. With fewer faculty members, fewer students, and a new ideological focus, the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem faces an uncertain future. Some argue it should be disbanded, and its faculty dispersed in other departments (for example, philosophy, history, religion, Hebrew literature), for, according to them, the Israeli Zeitgeist is different today from what it was in the department’s heyday, and the cultural climate that made possible its remarkable success cannot be recreated. Others argue that the department can be easily restored to its former greatness, if only it is given half a dozen new faculty appointments. Still others would like to see a return to the original Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah, which would have a special relationship with the Department of Philosophy. Difficulties concerning the teaching of Jewish philosophy have also befallen other Israeli universities. The situation at Bar-Ilan University is particularly demoralizing. When Bar-Ilan was founded in 1955, its philosophy staff, headed by the renowned Moshe Schwarcz, wisely decided that Jewish philosophy would be taught in the Philosophy Department. This arrangement worked very well and enabled Bar-Ilan to develop a highly successful program in Jewish philosophy, which astutely combined Jewish philosophy with Greek philosophy, Arabic philosophy, Latin philosophy, and modern German, French, and English philosophy. As a member of the Jewish Thought Department in Jerusalem, I envied my colleagues at Bar-Ilan who taught Jewish Philosophy in a Philosophy Department. Recently, however, the Bar-Ilan administration decided to seg- regate Jewish philosophy from philosophy and create two separate departments. This decision countered the recommendation of the Israel Council for Higher Education (= Malag). Many Bar-Ilan professors, including my brother, Professor Steven (Shmuel) Harvey, the previous head of the Division of Jewish Philosophy, and Professor Ephraim Meir, the current head, tried hard to prevent the change, but to no avail. The Jewish Philosophy Division has now been moved from the Faculty of the Humanities to the Faculty of Jewish Studies, and its name changed to “The Department of Jewish Thought.” This ghettoiza- tion is a serious blow to Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan. However, even in the face of the abovementioned problems, Israel remains the undisputed center for the study of medieval Jewish philosophy. In a recent publication of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy (SIEPM), there was a survey of twenty-two doctoral dissertations written over jewish philosophy tomorrow 127 the past five years in the field of medieval Jewish philosophy (S. Harvey and Fontaine 2012). Strikingly, only two were written outside Israel (one at Harvard University and one at Yeshiva University), and one of the two was written by an Israeli who had done her BA and MA degrees in Israel. Of the twenty dissertations written in Israel, six were written at Ben-Gurion University, five at Jerusalem, five at Bar-Ilan, three at Haifa, and one at Tel-Aviv. During more than three and a half gratifying decades teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I have continued my studies on medieval Jewish philosophers, like Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Gersonides, and Crescas; and modern ones, like Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Buber, and Levinas. Living in Israel has been stimulating and rewarding and has made a marked difference in my work. Our rabbis used to say, “The air of the Land of Israel makes one wise” (BT Baba Batra 158b). Teaching and writing in Hebrew have given me a more intimate understanding of the primary language of Jewish thought and culture. My scholarship has benefited from dialogue with Israeli colleagues, experts in classical Jewish literature. I have also lectured and written on Zionist thought and on problems concerning education, state, and religion in Israel (for example, Harvey 2012).

The Twenty-First Century

What will Jewish philosophy be like in the future decades of the twenty-first century? A few years ago, I wrote about “New and Unexpected Problems Facing 21st-century Jewish Philosophy” (2004). I noted three tasks of tomorrow’s Jewish philosophy: (1) to rethink the meaning of the Diaspora for Jewish civilization and find ways to strengthen it; (2) to formulate an economic and political philosophy that will point the way to a just and egalitarian society in the State of Israel; and (3) to relearn Arabic, the language of Israel’s neighbors and the language of the formative works of Jewish philosophy, like Saadiah Gaon’s Beliefs and Opinions, Bahia ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. I would like now to discuss briefly two anticipated characteristics of twenty-first-century Jewish philosophy. It will, I suspect, be less messianic and less lachrymose.

1 Less Messianic Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century was very messianic, perhaps more so than in any previous century. Its messianism had two main sources: first, the Kantian and Hegelian notions of historical progress (for example, in the thought of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig); and second, the popular 128 harvey hopes of national redemption connected with Zionism (for example, in the thought of Martin Buber and André Neher). Often the two were interconnected (for example, in the thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Gershom Scholem, and Emil Fackenheim). The messianic interpretation of Zionism preceded Zionism itself. It goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Rabbi Judah Alkalai, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and Moses Hess. The early twentieth-century kabbalistic messianism of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook has had a powerful impact on religious Zionism that continues today. Students of Jewish thought at Israeli universities and colleges have in recent years shown more interest in his writings than in those of any other medieval or modern Jewish thinker. In addition, the more simplistic geotheological messianism of his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, has had a widespread influence. This mystical messianism of the Rabbis Kook has sometimes conflicted with reasoned political decision making. Messianic faith, for example, has been cited by some hard-line Israelis as an argument for rejecting territorial compromise with the Palestinians. The subversive potential of messianism was noted long ago by Maimonides. Although he held the belief in the messiah to be a basic dogma of Judaism, he taught that one should not spend much time on messianic speculations, since they distract one from responsible action and “lead neither to love nor fear” of God (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 12:2). He did not use the word messiah even once in the entire Guide of the Perplexed. A similar binary attitude toward messianism is found in Gershom Scholem, whose anti-Maimonidean Judaism was on some issues profoundly influenced by Maimonides. Scholem was fervently enamored of the messianic idea but, nonetheless, spoke of the antiex- istentialist “price of messianism,” namely, “a life lived in deferment” (Scholem 1971, 35). It should be noted also that some leading religious Zionist philosophers, like Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, shunned the messianic interpretation of Zionism. Furthermore, in spite of the inordinate emphasis on messianism characteristic of Jewish culture in the twentieth century, Hilary Putnam was recently able to write in his Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (2008, 84, 119) that Judaism is “most often” understood to be “austere,” not charismatic or messianic. Be that as it may, in the days of Alkalai, Kalischer, and Hess, the messianic interpretation of the Jewish return to Zion was creative, thought provoking, and inspiring. After one-and-a-half centuries of repetition, it has become dogmatic, thought stultifying, and tedious. Given disproportionate importance, it serves today to obfuscate philosophic analysis of the meaning and vocation of the State of Israel. The twenty-first century is beginning to witness the unexpected rebuilding of many old Jewish communities in the Diaspora—communities in Europe jewish philosophy tomorrow 129 that had been destroyed in the Holocaust and communities in Arab lands that, in the years following the establishment of the State of Israel, had been depleted owing to idealistic and sometimes messianic immigration to the new state and also owing to emigration caused by anti-Jewish hostility exacerbated by the state’s proclamation. When Israel concludes peace with the Palestinians, it will be confronted by a new and unfamiliar normalcy and will need to reas- sess its role in the Middle East. This development may be expected to bring about a strengthening of the Jewish communities in Arab lands. As the twentieth century was characterized by the construction of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, the twenty-first century may be characterized by their construction in the Diaspora. In a related development, Jewish languages that had been thought dying, like Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino, are today showing incipient signs of recuperation in both Israel and the Diaspora. The revival of Jewish life and culture in different countries will necessitate new definitions of the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. Closer relations between all Jewish communities are facilitated by improved transportation and by the revolution in electric communications. The border between Israel and the Diaspora is becoming blurred. The categories of aliyah and yeridah are no longer self-evident. Many European Jews, in particular from France, live partly in Israel and partly in the Diaspora and are both Europeans and Israelis. One is already today able to speak of a “global Judaism.” New definitions of the partnership between Israel and the Diaspora will render the old messianic interpretation of Zionism less attractive. As the category of messianism loses prominence in Zionist discourse, Jewish philosophy too will become less messianic. Jewish philosophers will be able to concentrate on the hic et nunc. If tomorrow’s Jewish philosophers do sometimes mention the messianic idea, they will do so in novel and unforeseen ways and, we can only hope, with the critical sobriety of Maimonides and Scholem.

2 Less Lachrymose The twentieth century was the century of Zionism but also that of the Holocaust. It is understandable, therefore, that much of post-World War II Jewish philosophy was lachrymose. Jewish philosophy could not ignore the Holocaust. Significant discussions of the Holocaust were written by Jewish philosophers in the first decades after it. These discussions were written mainly by philosophers who had lived in pre-Holocaust Germany and witnessed the rise of Nazism. One may mention Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “The Meaning of This Hour” (1943), Buber’s At the Turning (1952), Hans Jonas’s “The Concept of God after Auschwitz” (1962), Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), or Emil Fackenheim’s Quest for Past and Future (1968). Levinas’s “Reflections 130 harvey on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” written in 1934 shortly after Hitler took power, already had argued that Nazism “questions the very principles of a civilization” (1990, 64). There have been many philosophic responses to the Holocaust written in later years, but they are for the most part elaborations of those significant early discussions. It is important for all human beings to study the Holocaust and remember it, and it is certainly important for Jews to do so. However, in the past few decades, the Holocaust, like messianism, has assumed too central a place in Jewish culture in general and in Jewish philosophy in particular. Too much preoccupation with the Holocaust, like too much preoccupation with messianism, is not healthy either for Jewish life or for Jewish thought. It fosters insecurity, timidity, and a mentality of victimhood and is inevitably at the expense of the ancient Jewish teaching, “Choose life!” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Like messianism, it can be subversive to reasoned political decision making. Abba Eban’s apocryphal description of Israel’s pre-Six Day War borders as “Auschwitz lines” was incisive rhetoric when the eloquent foreign minister defended Israel in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. However, latter-day Israeli politicians and ideologists have dogmatically used and reused the metaphor to justify a doctrine of inaction. The phrase “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history was coined by Salo Wittmayer Baron in his essay “Ghetto and Emancipation” (1928). The famed historian never tired of arguing—even in the years following the Holocaust— that Jewish history is not primarily a story of suffering and persecution but one of social, cultural, and religious creativity and one of joy and hope. The lachrymose theory, he insisted, was not only historically false but also pedagogically bad, for it leads to passivity and fatalism. The linkage between the State of Israel and the lachrymose view of Jewish history is found today not only in politics and ideology but even in high art. In June 2012, my wife and I attended one of the six performances of the Israeli Opera’s spectacular production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, held in the Judean Desert at the foot of Masada, conducted by Daniel Oren and starring Nancy Fabiola Herrera (and one night Naʿama‍ Goldman). The performance, attended by 7,500, was preceded by the playing of Hatikvah, perhaps to remind us to cherish our Jewish independence. The ancient defenders of Masada, who did not have the privilege to sing Hatikvah, fought unsuccessfully for Jewish independence and chose suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. The most striking innovation of the Israeli Opera’s production was the finale. Carmen, it will be recalled, tells Don José, “Jamais Carmen ne cédera! Libre elle est née, libre elle mourra.” These words were written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy but could have been written by Eleazar ben Jair. Then, according to the jewish philosophy tomorrow 131 script, Don José attacks Carmen, murdering her with a dagger. In the Masada production, however, Carmen runs deliberately toward Don José and throws herself upon his dagger. She commits suicide at Masada. As she fell on the dagger, bright crimson light was cast on the Rock of Masada, covering it, as it were, with blood. The blood of Carmen was one with that of the defenders of Masada. It was awesome. I do not think there was anyone in the audience who at that moment could have doubted the arguable interpretation according to which the gypsy Carmen, the outsider, symbolizes the Jewish people. Here was the lachrymose conception of Jewish history in all its seductive power: the Gentiles persecute us, and we choose death over surrender. In the twenty-first century, as European Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust are rebuilt and as Israel forges new social and economic relations with the Arab world, preoccupation with the Holocaust may be expected to recede. Jewish philosophy, like Jewish art, will be less lachrymose. It will concentrate on life. Liberation from the excesses of messianism and lachrymosity will be good for Jewish philosophy. Less eschatological and less focused on anti-Semitism, Jewish philosophers in the twenty-first century will not only be able to rediscover the medieval Judeo-Arabic philosophic classics but also will be free to turn their attention to the new and as yet unimagined forms of Jewish cultural and religious life that wait to be born in the Land of Israel and all over the globe.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: The Viking Press. Baron, Salo Wittmayer. 1928. “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Menorah Journal 14, no. 6: 515–26. Buber, Martin. 1952. At the Turning: Three Addresses on Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. Hebrew original, 1951. Fackenheim, Emil Ludwig. 1968. Quest for Past and Future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harvey, Steven (Shmuel), and Resianne Fontaine. 2012. “Commission VII: Jewish Philosophy (2008–2012).” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 54: 23–46. Harvey, Warren Zev. 1973. “Hasdai Crescas’ Critique of the Theory of the Active Intellect.” Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University. Xerox Microfilms, no. 74– 1488. ———. 1981. “The Return of Maimonideanism.” Jewish Social Studies 42, nos. 3–4: 249–68. 132 harvey

———. 1994. “Where Should Jewish Philosophy Be Taught?” Jewish Studies 34: 13–16. ———. 2004. “New and Unexpected Problems Facing 21st-Century Jewish Philosophy.” Studia Judaica 11–12: 178–87. ———. 2012. “Some Thoughts on the Role of Judaism in the State of Israel.” Conversations 14: 71–81. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. 1943. “The Meaning of This War.” Hebrew Union College Bulletin 2–3: 1–2, 18. Revised and often reprinted as “The Meaning of This Hour.” Hyman, Arthur, and James J. Walsh. 1967. Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions. 1st ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. ———. 2010. Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions. 3d ed. Revised by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Jonas, Hans. 1962. “The Concept of God after Auschwitz.” Harvard Theological Review 55, no. 1: 1–20. Lerner, Ralph and Muhsin Mahdin. 1963. Medieval Political Philosophy. 1st ed., Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. ———. 2011. Medieval Political Philosophy. 2d ed. Revised by Joshua Parens and Joseph C. Macfarland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1: 62–71. French original, 1934. Putnam, Hilary. 2008. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1971. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books. German original, 1959. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1979. Process and Reality. Gifford Lectures 1927–28. Edited by D. R. Griffen and D. W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press. Wolfson, Harry Austryn. 1929. Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. chapter 7 Transgressing Boundaries Jewish Philosophy and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Aaron W. Hughes

All of the diverse discourses associated with Jewish philosophy share one feature: how to account for Jewish difference or particularity using the language of universalism. In so doing, there is an explicit tendency to essentialize Judaism, neatly differentiating it from that which is marked as “non-Jewish.” This, however, sets up an artificial binary between the so-called Jewish/non- Jewish or, as it is more customarily framed, between Jerusalem/Athens and revelation/reason. My interest is not in the binary per se, but in the border (the “/”) that separates them. How does this border keep the two terms on either side of it apart? What sorts of intellectual work, in other words, does it perform? Through a detailed discussion, I will argue that Jewish philosophy is potentially a problematic endeavor that maintains rather than challenges the notion of Jewish particularism. This is not just an academic discussion, however, because it is a construct that can just as easily be used to silence dissent and deprive others of their basic human rights. Because ideas do not exist independently of individuals who think them, it might come as little surprise to learn that I perceive my place in the discourse of Jewish philosophy as “no-place” or, framed somewhat differently, as that of an outsider. Having grown up non-Jewishly in a home completely devoid of Judaism, let alone any religion, my path to the tradition, both intellectual and spiritual, for all intents and purposes only began in graduate school, where I went to pursue further academic and linguistic training necessary for work in Jewish-Muslim thought in the Middle Ages. Whereas, prior to this, I had been, since an undergraduate, attracted to Judaism intellectually, it was only as a graduate student—especially in Oxford as a senior PhD student—that I began to learn and appreciate the liturgical, ritualistic, and social dimension of the tradition. Keeping shomer shabbes and attending a daily minyan, I began to appreciate the rhythm of Jewish life and time. Although unable to maintain such a level of observance, I nevertheless remain, as I trust will become clear in what follows, simultaneously close to and aloof from the tradition. I believed at the time that the best disciplinary setting to undertake work in Jewish-Muslim relations was in religious studies, one of the few fields that did not patrol disciplinary boundaries and was instead open to a variety of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_��9 134 hughes theoretical and methodological frameworks. Luckily, I entered a graduate program at Indiana University that was very sophisticated when it came to thinking not only about how religions interact but about whether the category “religion” was even a valid category of intellectual analysis. I was trained in Jewish intellectual history by my coeditor to this volume, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, in addition to Islamic philosophy with John Walbridge and theory and method in the study of religion with, among others, J. Samuel Preus, Robert Orsi, and Robert F. Campany. My work since has largely involved all three areas, and I primarily use the discourses associated with the academic study of religion to mine the datasets provided by Jewish and Islamic philosophy. While good for my intellectual development, in subsequent years, it has not proved conducive to my religious journey! I, thus, came to see “religion” as a social formation, one that is invented, maintained, and patrolled by a host of ideologically charged discourses that have been sublimated as either divine or as existing naturally in the world. Such discourses, not surprisingly, invoke categories that Jewish thinkers have used to define Judaism for millennia, such as chosenness and divine election (see Hughes 2012). This skepticism defines me and, for the most part, informs my primary intellectual orientation. It translates into the fact that I am always uncomfortable with both the status quo (something that reinforces my self-perception as a self-defined outsider) and of accepting received opinion simply because this is what tradition demands of us. Within this context, I understand Jewish philosophy as the attempt to disseminate (and even enforce) so-called proper Judaism. Because of this, I have become increasingly mistrustful of the project, at least as traditionally carried out (see Hughes 2014). Yet, I remain a seeker, one who never feels at “home” in organized religious life because of its rigidity and desire for certainty. The academy has become for me, as it has for many others, a place of respite from the dystopia of religious community. Pronouncements of what Judaism is or should be increasingly make me uneasy since implicit in such pronouncements is the attempt to flatten difference and, in the process, silence critique. The desire to create a normative Judaism, or a normative anything, for that matter, forces order on chaos, and the result is frequently violence, whether of the literal or metaphorical variety. My understanding of Judaism, not surprisingly, is pluralistic and inclusive, open ended and dynamic. This does not derive from the ideology of a particular denomination but from my own understanding of the ways in which social memory and the construction of identity work. At the same time, however, I would be remiss if I did not say that I was and continue to be drawn to the intellectual diversity in both the Jewish past and present. Transgressing Boundaries 135

In is within this latter context that I regard previous Jewish philosophers— from Saadiah Gaon to Franz Rosenzweig—as my conversation partners. This does not mean that I consider it my main job to be an amanuensis, repro- ducing their works descriptively or even faithfully. On the contrary, I invoke and use their philosophical and other works simultaneously as primary and secondary sources. This means that I refuse to write their hagiographies; instead, I struggle with them, learn from them, but, at the same time, I am not afraid to take them to task whenever I can. Because my concerns are often so radically different from theirs, I find myself in the habit of using them— sometimes selectively, sometimes in ways that they or others might not even agree with—to enter and be part of a larger conversation of Jewish philosophizing. This will become clearer in the second half of this chapter. Most of my early work in Jewish thought has primarily been that of the intellectual historian, trying to isolate problems that are of particular interest to me (for example, imagination, genre, aesthetics), contextualizing them within the larger intellectual and social cultures in which Jews lived, and, subsequently, clarifying them. Because I have always been interested in the poros- ity of the borders between Judaism and non-Judaism, particularly the way the former uses the language of the latter to articulate itself, it becomes difficult for me to separate neatly what is “Jewish” from what is “non-Jewish.” I, thus, find it impossible—again, reflecting my skeptical approach—to say that there exists a uniquely Jewish contribution to world civilization, any more than we can isolate a uniquely Greek, German, or Scottish one. Even monotheism, what some consider the great gift of the Jews, was little more than a political invention under the Deuteronomic reforms in the First Temple Period. To claim the ancient Israelites were ethical monotheists implies that Israel formed in a vacuum and that Israel’s neighbors were somehow “unethical.” This is a highly apologetical claim grounded more in contemporary politics than historical fact. In recent years, I have tried to theorize the processes that seek to define, but that ultimately succeed in blurring, the interface between Jews and non-Jews, Judaism and non-Judaism. This has involved jettisoning simple historical contextualization and instead putting Jewish philosophers from diverse periods in direct conversation with one another and with me. In my The Invention of Jewish Identity (2010), for example, I tried to argue that Jewish thinkers— through the activity of translating the Bible into different languages (for example, Arabic, German) and idioms (for example, Aristotelianism, Renaissance humanism)—actively produced Judaism in ways that were dependent on the category of the “non-Jewish.” Too often the distinction between the two is 136 hughes portrayed in Hegelian terms, wherein “the Jew” derives its meaning by opposition to the “non-Jew.” I suggest, on the contrary, that the very techniques, methods, and languages used to imagine and manufacture diverse Jewish identities have been (and continue to be) ultimately derived from non-Jewish contexts. Rather than uphold reified borders between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish”— borders that are often constructed and projected retroactively—I instead prefer to examine their fluidity. The result is that the desire to produce a particular type of Judaism, a rational Judaism as it were, ultimately “others” Judaism to itself, so that the very goal of maintaining Jewish distinctiveness ends up collapsing on itself. This is certainly not to proclaim that Judaism is simply con- jured into existence using other languages that are produced from more stable social groups. It is, on the contrary, to claim that all cultures are fluid and that, too often, this fluidity and instability masquerade—in texts past and present, in thinkers premodern and modern—as a set of essential traits. My contribution to Jewish philosophy is not to prove the truths of Judaism or even to clarify its basic principles. I leave this to those who have more at stake in theology, interfaith dialogue, and issues of science and Judaism. Rather than clarify, I seek to complicate and, in the process, to bring a modicum of order or taxonomy to this complexity. For this reason, I am interested in what I like to call Jewish metaphilosophy: that is, how does Jewish philosophy—both in the past and in the present—construct its narrative: for whom, for what purposes, and with what consequences (see Hughes 2004, 2008, 2010)? An interest in such questions, as I hope should be obvious, puts me firmly on the side of Continental philosophy in the great debate that currently plagues contemporary philosophy. Within this context, I value my intellectual collaboration with Elliot R. Wolfson (see Hughes and Wolfson 2010, 1–16). For me, the task of Jewish philosophy is to undo that which it has done since antiquity. Rather than construct a normative Judaism based on the rhetoric of authenticity, it is to deconstruct our notion of what Jewishness is. This has all sorts of consequences for how Jews perceive other religions and, especially in Israel, for how to create a tolerant, inclusive, and multicultural society. My worry is that, if Jewish philosophy continues to reify Jewishness (for example, this is the “Jewish” take on ethics, the natural world, and so on), it will be unable or unwilling either to account for or accept the complex inter- relations between what is considered to be Judaism and what is considered not to be. Jewish philosophy, in other words, risks becoming little more than state or ethnic philosophy that upholds a set of constructed values that are seen to exist naturally in the world. In terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict this means that boundaries—political, legal, cultural, ethnic—come to be perceived as firm instead of fluid and ontological as opposed to invented. Transgressing Boundaries 137

Jewish Philosophy Confronts the Twenty-First Century

The intellectual task of Jewish philosophy, as it is customarily defined, is to carve out a set of overlapping spaces—intellectual, cultural, and religious—to reflect on pressing issues that impinge on the human condition from a so-called Jewish perspective. The question immediately arises, however, as to what constitutes “Jewish.” How, in other words, do we differentiate the so-called Jewish from the so-called non-Jewish, and, just as importantly, who gets to decide on the criteria? These are, not surprisingly, politically and ideologically loaded statements. The quest for an authentic Judaism—what Judaism really is, what its “true” teachings consist of, and so on—has become, in our present anties- sentialist world, highly contentious. Yet, in many ways, this is potentially the problem with Jewish philosophy. In its desire to put together a certain reading of Judaism and a certain reading of rationalism, it has ultimately produced something that cannot exist in reality and perhaps should not. Philosophy also has its problems. Who gets to decide what “philosophy” is? For many, including, I would imagine, the vast majority of faculty in philosophy departments across this country, it is about establishing “truth” by means of a set of logically verifiable propositions. (Even though, paradoxically, they would not consider Jewish philosophy to be “true” philosophy because of the religio-ethnic adjective appended to it.) On this reading, Jewish philosophy is that which clarifies Judaism by making it conform to a set of rationally derived principles. Others, however, regard philosophy as invested in the production of a set of “truth-claims” that are as invested as much in ideology and truth making as they are in delineating some vaguely defined truth that exists “out there.” I prefer to follow this approach to philosophy and, as such, situate myself in a line of thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, all of whom doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals. My interest, as I mentioned above, is in Jewish metaphilosophy: that is, how does the practice of philosophizing itself produce philosophy in general and Jewish philosophy in particular (see Rescher 2006, 1–3). What are the various contexts—textual, historical, social, and cultural—that make Jewish philosophy possible? These are not simply academic pursuits; rather, they call into question the very project of Jewish philosophy as producing a set of truths about Judaism and Jewish peoplehood. What can Jewish philosophy legitimate or justify? How can it be co-opted in the service of particular ideological agendas? If Jewish philosophy is about intellectual space and not about producing veritable Judaism, however, it becomes possible to use the texts of those 138 hughes generally believed to be “Jewish philosophers” as discursive sites, to read the texts of such diverse figures as Saadiah Gaon to Derrida as providing creative insights into a variety of issues that is of concern to us at the dawn of the twenty-first century (even though they may not have been of concern to the thinkers in question). To me, one of the greatest threats to Jewish philosophy and Jewish philosophizing is relevance. How do we make dead, Semitic male philosophers relevant to today’s world? Our concerns are not their concerns, and our world faces a different set of social, ecological, and political challenges than theirs did. A question no less challenging is how we can make our contemporaries interested in the pleasure of thinking. Framed somewhat differently, why should today’s Jews be interested in the complexities that philosophy introduces into their already busy lives? To try to answer this question of relevance, I contend that our reading of the Jewish philosophical canon must be creative and broad ranging if we are to make it engage present concerns. Unless we engage in such creative endeavors, the Jewish philosophical past becomes little more than a museum wing wherein previous philosophers become a collection of dusty characters who have nothing to say either to one another or to us.

Jewishness and Identity Formation

One of the major problems with most Jewish philosophers is their reification of “Judaism” and their essentialization of an amorphous quality that they are willing to call “Jewishness.” Rather than perceive either of these previous terms that are in quotations as fixed or eternal qualities that move effortlessly through time and to which individuals passively subscribe, I prefer to see both as actively constructed and constantly maintained. Here my training in religious studies—especially the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, Bruce Lincoln, and Russell McCutcheon—informs my methodology. Unlike many other contemporary Jewish philosophers who often unwillingly inhabit departments of religious studies for no other reason than that they work on “religion,” I take seriously this discipline’s theory and methods (see, for example, Hughes 2012). Recent years have witnessed extensive examination of the ways in which group identity is both formed and disseminated. Instead of regarding identity—for example, Muslim, Buddhist, or American—as inherited, certain scholars have attuned us to think about the ways in which such identity is actively created or produced in response to changing social conditions. We should, accordingly, be cautious of using an ahistorical model of the past as something uniform, in Transgressing Boundaries 139 which pristine and clear meanings are simply handed down through the ages until they arrive in the present. Indeed, the very idea of a “stable past” is often a later invention used to serve a particular agenda (see, for example Darnton 2003, 60–67). In 1983, Benedict Anderson published the influential book Imagined Communities, in which he argued that communities—he had in mind nations, but we can just as easily say religions—are socially constructed or imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group (Anderson 2006 [1983], 1–6.). Because all the members of a nation or a religion lack face-to- face interaction, they must hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. Through shared symbols and texts, groups are able to imagine themselves as belonging to a community that is much larger than they would otherwise realize. This belonging, in turn, is predicated on perceived borders that distinguish each community from other communities—often constructed as other nations or religions. At around the same time, Pierre Bourdieu argued that how groups imagine themselves is based on a set of criteria that people within these groups internalize at a young age. Taste, he claims, is not—as we would think—an innate disposition but something constructed by one’s social group (Bourdieu 1984). People from different classes, for example, are habituated to like certain foods and not others. This social construction of taste and related judgments (what smells good or bad, concepts of beauty) further aids the construction of social identity and group belonging. Many of these discussions are highly technical, and their intricacies need not detain us here. I mention them briefly, however, to call attention to modern discussions that inform my understanding of identity formation and to entice the interested reader to pursue them. One thing worth noting is that these theorists and others agree that we cannot take as given traditional models that assume identity is something handed down to us from our ancestors to be accepted passively. Rather, identity is something that was and is actively constructed in response to various needs, and these constructions derive their potency from being projected onto the past, where they are thought to exist in a pure form. Inheritance and its creative use in forming religious identity are constitutive features of religion. Unfortunately, one of the major features of religious philosophy, sometimes referred to as theology, is to sanction such formations as opposed to query them. The past—or, perhaps better, the memory of the past—provides a basic map against which various interpretations of the present are charted and understood. This act of imagination or interpretation creates various religious identities, which include a variety of political, social, 140 hughes gendered, economic, and intellectual forces. If we ignore these forces and simply assume that religious identity is strictly “religious” and inherited, we risk overlooking how and why such identities form.

Problems

Before I explore how these issues play out in our understanding of Jewish philosophy and its role in the new century, it is important to note that many— both scholars and nonscholars—would find fault with my claim that Jewish identity, like any identity, is ultimately fluid. My comments, in other words, fly in the face of what the religion and those who uphold it claim. Indeed, Jewish particularism is predicated on the notion that there exists some sui generis core to Jewishness. This core, whether described in the language of science or the rhetoric of authenticity, however, amounts to little more than a cultural construct, a strategy of self-making in the face of numerous centripetal and centrifugal forces. The objection could certainly be raised that my claim of construction is contradicted by biology; for example, the fact that certain diseases (for example, Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis) are found more frequently among Jewish (especially Ashkenazic) populations than in non-Jewish populations and that this is proof of Jewish “genes” or whatever else we want to call them. This I do not doubt, nor is it my concern. That there is a biological reality of Jewishness in no way abnegates how Jewish identity is constructed and understood in different times and places. (By way of comparison, death is a biological necessity, but this does not negate the fact that various groups and cultures understand, construct, and commemorate death in different ways.) The problem with this conception of Jewishness, however, is that it is not what people want to hear. In times of crisis or rapid change, there is a desire to hold onto something as permanent. Students and adults alike are accustomed to think of themselves as passively ascribing to a set of religious, cultural, and ethnic characteristics that are eternal and, because of this, never undergo transformation. They perceive themselves as existing at the end of a long line that runs back to Sinai, an understanding that they, in turn, pass on to their children. Such a proposition, however, ignores the fact that identity is never based on assenting to or recuperating group identity but is part and parcel of active cultural work and construction in response to a host of social, economic, and intellectual variables (see, for example, Bodian 1997, 96–131; J. Boyarin 2008). If Jewishness is constructed and invented, then how does this square with the common assumption that Jews and/or Jewishness is chosen or special? I would argue that it does not. Concepts such as Jews introducing ethical Transgressing Boundaries 141 monotheism to the world, as functioning as a holy nation of priests or as being a light unto the nations (or ha-goyim) are rhetorical devices that function apologetically (see, for example, Kaplan 1994 [1934], 43). Instead, I think it important to resist the temptation of assuming that communities simply constitute themselves around an essential core. In this regard, borders between Jews and Christians and Jews and Muslims in different periods and eras might well have looked much different than they do today in a post-1948 world (see, for example, D. Boyarin 2004, 2012; Nirenberg 2002). So, rather than assume that identities in the premodern world were fixed and inherited in predetermined ways, we ought to be aware of the ways in which they were invented, reinvented, enforced, and patrolled. Unfortunately, the history of Jewish philosophy has simultaneously ignored and contributed to these problems. It has taken this sui generis core of Jewish identity as its defining mark and, in the process, contributed to the creation of a pristine Ur-Judaism. Let me take two examples, one medieval and one modern, to illustrate my claims.

The Totalitarian Dimension of Jewish Philosophy: The Case of Maimonides and Rosenzweig

Can there be such a thing as a pure and abstract quest for philosophic truth? I contend that there cannot and that philosophy represents yet another system of rhetoric that seeks to justify and legitimate various nationalist and religious causes through appeals to universalism. The danger with universalist claims—from a sociological as opposed to a philosophical perspective, though it is admittedly difficult, if not impossible, to separate them—is that they can quickly become both totalitarian and tyrannical. In the words of Robert Eisen, universalism “may become uncompromising in assuming that there is one truth for all human beings, and therefore it can easily lead to intolerance and violence against those who are unwilling to adopt that truth” (2011, 73). With its grand and totalizing vision, philosophy—whether in its Jewish or non- Jewish iterations—has the potential to marginalize, ostracize, and persecute all who do not subscribe to its rationalist vision of the universe. Maimonides and Rosenzweig are customarily held up as polar opposites in Jewish philosophy. There is a tendency to perceive Maimonides as the great rationalist of Judaism, a standard bearer of Greek-inflected universalism, just as there is a tendency to envisage Rosenzweig as a proponent of Jewish particularism. Like his predecessor Judah Halevi, Rosenzweig resisted the urge to philosophize, but nonetheless ended up using the philosophical terms and categories of his day to create what he considered to be an authentic Judaism 142 hughes

(see Gordon 2003, 237–45; and Braiterman 2007, 187–90). Despite their differences, however, both Maimonides and Rosenzweig share a totalitarian streak, one that is ultimately predicated on their idiosyncratic understandings of the quiddity of Jewish chosenness. Let me examine Maimonides first. Read on one level, the tradition of medieval Jewish Aristotelianism was extremely intolerant of difference. It sought to impose its rationalist vision on the entirety of Judaism, and those who refused to subscribe to its first principles could be neatly written off as obscurantist, illiterate, or obtuse. According to this philosophy, such Jews know nothing of proper belief and worship and represent little more than internal polytheists and idolaters. In fact, Maimonides warns all those who are inclined to matters philosophical to avoid the ignoramuses—the majority of Jews within the tradition. Although Maimonides may well hold, in theory, that anyone is capable of actualizing the potential power of their intellect, he acknowledges that, in many instances, the intellect “remains in its defective state either because of certain obstacles or because of paucity in training in what transforms that potentiality into actuality” (Maimonides 1963, 73; see also Eisen 2011, 121–22). Most individuals, on Maimonides’ account, are quite simply incapable of engaging the higher states of thinking that are required for theoretical or philosophical analysis. This is especially the case when it comes to women who, according to Maimonides, “are prone to anger, [are] easily affected, and have weak souls” (Maimonides 1963, 600). Maimonides’ Judaism is rationalist, masculine, and highly exclusive. And while he may be praised in the modern period for his universalism because he invokes non-Jewish philosophers (for example, Plato, Aristotle, Alfarabi), his vision is no less totalitarian than theirs. While the medieval Jewish philosophers may well be celebrated for their reliance on non-Jews to develop and articulate their perceived universalism, it is worth pointing out that many of these philosophers did not see it in this way at all. On the contrary, they believed that philosophy was not a Greek invention, but a Jewish one that was subsequently plagiarized by the Greek tradition (Roth 1978). The “universalism” of the medieval Jewish philosophers, in other words, was in many ways a fiction because they saw themselves not as borrowing “universal” principles from the Greeks or the Arabs but as reparticularizing what had been stolen from them and subsequently corrupted with universalist garb. Maimonides’ goal, as it is the goal of every other thinker in the Jewish philosophical canon past and present, is to re-create this pristine past. For Maimonides, this involves, among other things, removing all traces of polytheism. By polytheism, Maimonides does not refer to the worship of other dei- ties in a quasi-pantheon, but the improper worship of the one God. For him, Transgressing Boundaries 143 the overwhelming majority of his fellow Jews worships God incorrectly and is, thus, prone to polytheism. Most pernicious to Maimonides was the human desire to make God into larger versions of ourselves, to ascribe qualities to him that we do to ourselves (for example, anger, contentment). “You must not believe,” writes Maimonides in Guide I.56, “that there exist in Him notions superadded to His essence that are like the attributes that are superadded to our essence, because the name is common” (1963, 131; see the discussion in Seeskin 2000, 23–42). The result is that Maimonides must go to great lengths to expurgate from the tradition, including the Bible itself, all those places wherein God is described in what he considers to be improper ways. A correct reading of the Bible, for Maimonides, is ultimately a misreading, one in which the reader translates the beauty of the text’s fabric or the tradition’s literal level for silent contemplation of philosophy. All those who do not possess this proper attitude toward God are guilty of idolatry and infidelity (kufr). The danger of idolatry, according to Maimonides, is that it can spread and infect the proper worship of others, that is, the worship of those who are informed by the principles of philosophy. Such incorrect beliefs and worship must be eradicated, and those who possess the wherewithal to function as the arbiters of “good” (that is, rational) Judaism, according to Maimonides, are, perhaps not surprisingly, those like himself, the philosophers (see Maimonides 1963, 85). Maimonides contends that the majority of Jews must submit to the will of the philosopher. It is the philosopher who is “engaged in speculation” and, thus, the one who is responsible for articulating the tradition for nonphiloso- phers. The latter must, in other words, heed the philosophers—the ones who, on Maimonides’ reading, imagine Judaism in the “proper” way and who are responsible for defining what constitutes “correct” worship and belief. All those who do not subscribe to this vision, according to Maimonides, risk punishment. In Guide I. 54, for example, he proclaims

do you not see in the texts of the Torah, when it commanded the extermination of the seven nations and said thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, that it immediately follows this by saying: That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods and so ye sin against the Lord your God? Thus it says: do not think that this is hard-heartedness or desire for vengeance. It is rather an act required by human opinion, which considers that everyone who deviates from the ways of truth should be put an end to and that all the obstacles impeding the achievement of the perfection of the apprehension of Him, may He be exalted, should be interdicted. (Maimonides 1963, 126–27) 144 hughes

Here we see the tyranny of the philosopher and his totalitarian vision. In this bold passage, Maimonides actually implies that all those who do not abide by the tenets of the philosophers—here symbolized by the “seven nations” that threatened ancient Israel—should live under the threat of extermination (see Eisen 2011, 116–18). Such collectivities, indeed like individuals, threaten the well-being of the philosophers and those who live according to the principles set down by them. All who deviate from the way of truth, according to Maimonides, deserve to be put to death because they have the potential to lead others astray. In his totalitarian and authoritarian vision of Judaism, Maimonides put an end to the syncretistic literary, mystical, and philosophical tradition of the earlier medieval Jewish philosophical tradition, which is often given the imprecise name of “Neoplatonism.” For Maimonides, the syncretism of this vision— rationalism composed in poetic from and that culminated in a quasi-mystical vision—threatened to undermine the Aristotelian vision of pure rationality. Maimonides’ vision sought to make philosophy—a philosophy unblemished by poetic license or mystical flights of fancy—the key to unlock Judaism. Those who did not agree with him or who violated his terms of definition were now to be regarded as infidels. If Maimonides represents the so-called zenith of Jewish philosophical thinking in the Middle Ages, it is probably safe to say that this pride of place goes to Franz Rosenzweig in the modern period. The Jewish people, in Rosenzweig’s vision, live in large part closed off from the rest of the world, abiding in both their insular communal life and their liturgical calendar. Such features, he argues, remove Jews from the historical ebb and flow of other peoples and nations. Bereft of their own spoken language, their own homeland, and their own historical consciousness, Jews lack the basic principles that define other peoples and their nation-states. On account of their organic insularity and their ability to exist outside historical time, Rosenzweig claims that Jews anticipate the ultimate redemption of the world, thereby representing to others the goal they must ultimately pursue. If the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition was premised on the notion that Jews need philosophy, in Rosenzweig’s deft hands, Jewish philosophy now begins with the premise that the end of universalism is hegemony unless it is reminded of its task by the particularism of Judaism. Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is arguably the greatest work of modern Jewish philosophy. However, in our encomium of its breadth and vision, we must not lose sight of its problematic elevation of authenticity, of Jewishness, and of chosenness. His reification of the Jewish people risks nourishing a pro- toracist and atavistic nationalism. To establish the superiority of Judaism is to Transgressing Boundaries 145 set up a highly problematic (and faulty) comparison, one that is powered by a problematic juxtaposition between an essentialized “eternal people” (“das ewige Volk”) and an equally essentialized “peoples of the world” (“die Völker der Welt”). An early twentieth-century philosophical system that is grounded in racial and religious superiority and that seeks rejuvenation based on an acknowledgment of shared ancestry, culture, and blood should immediately alert us to its implicit and explicit fascism. For ultimately, Rosenzweig’s philosophy of Judaism is one that is predicated on Jewish difference and, as such, is highly exclusive. In book one, part three of the Star, Rosenzweig provides a portrait of the Jewish people grounded in religious nationalism. He defines the Jews as the only people that possess “a connection to eternal life” (“Zusammenhang ewi- gen Lebens”).1 Making this connection possible is the fact that this same blood “runs warmly through [the eternal people’s] veins” (“warm durch die Adern rollen”) (Rosenzweig 1984, 332/317). This blood, the defining element of the Jewish people, is what makes them eternal and, thus, removes them from history’s shackles. Jews, on Rosenzweig’s reading, are ontologically different from other peoples:

Whereas every other community [“jede andre Gemeinschaft”] that lays claim to eternity must make arrangement in order to pass the torch of the present on to the future, only the community of the same blood [“Blutsgemeinschaft”; literally, “blood community”] does not have need of making such arrangements for the tradition; it does not need to trou- ble its mind; in the natural propagation of the body it has the guarantee of its eternity [“die Gewähr ihrer Ewigkeit”]. (Rosenzweig 1984, 332/318)

Whereas Christianity comes together spiritually in the future hope of redemption, Jews share the same genetic relationship with one another, and this makes redemption always potentially present in the here and now, the eternal present. In so doing, however, Rosenzweig dangerously transfers romantic notions of modern, secular nations onto a religious grid. His argument for the eternity of the Jewish people would seem to differ little from contemporaneous German nationalism, itself grounded in racial theory and “blood” purity. Although Rosenzweig sought to differentiate between Jews and Christians, his rhetoric of particularism is clearly grounded in contemporaneous non-Jewish

1 Rosenzweig 1984, 331. English translation in Rosenzweig 2005, 317. Future citations will have pages from the German followed by pages from the English (for example, Rosenzweig 1984, 331/317). 146 hughes rhetoric of “blood community.” This is particularly evident when he argues that what differentiates Jews from the nations they currently inhabit resides in three features: land (“das Land”), language (“die Sprache”), and law (“das Gesetz”). Because it is bears on my discussion in the following section, let me briefly examine Rosenzweig’s conception of land, which figures highly in his juxtaposition between Jews and non-Jews. Whereas the latter lack the permanence of eternal existence, they must invest their energies in other phenomena to try to attain it. They do so, however, in the wrong places and with incorrect intensity. One such place that these so-called other nations try to locate this is in physical land. However, their very attachment to the corporeality of land ensures that they are bound to fail in the endeavor. Jews, by contrast, do not need such attachments because they intrinsically possess eternity through blood (“das Blut”). Since Jews form a “blood community” (“der Blutsgemeinschaft”), they have relinquished the connection to mundane or quotidian phenomena that only ephemerally unite other nations. Because they lack such community, Rosenzweig reasons that other nations—though they are unnamed, we can assume that he means German, French, and other European nation-states— need the land to guarantee their own permanence. Rosenzweig writes that

[w]e alone have put our trust in the blood and parted with the land; in this way we saved the precious life fluid [“also sparten wir den kostbaren Lebenssaft”] that offers us a guarantee of our own eternity and alone among all the peoples of the earth we have awakened out of every community our living with the dead. For the earth nourishes, but it also binds; and when a people loves the soil of the homeland more than its own life, then the danger hangs over it [“und woe in Volk den Boden der Heimat mehr liebt als das eigene Leben, da hängt stets die Gefahr über ihm”]. . . . In this way the earth betrays the people that entrusts to the permanence of the earth its own permanence; the earth itself persists, but the people on it perish [“sie selbst dauert wohl, aber das Volk auf ihr vergeht”]. (Rosenzweig 1984, 332–33/318–19)

Juxtaposed against the temporal existence and thus impermanence of others, Rosenzweig locates the Jews, the only people (“Volk”) grounded in the blood of eternity. Their very landlessness ensures their noncorporeal permanence. Building his case on the patriarch Abraham, Rosenzweig argues that God required him to emigrate from the land of his birth and, to this day, Jews have lacked autochthonous existence (“Autochthonie”) in a particular land (Rosenzweig 1984, 333/319). This admixture of mythopoeia and contemporary Transgressing Boundaries 147 statelessness leads Rosenzweig to elevate the principle of “the holy land” (“das heilege Land”), a dis-located land, a land that is not a land in the technical sense of the term. Rosenzweig argues apologetically that other nations love their land more than their own people. Because of this, they are paradoxically bound to their lands by death and bloodshed. Jews, by contrast, have evolved beyond such a visceral connection and instead are connected to their land through their holiness and eternity. It should perhaps come as no surprise that Rosenzweig was extremely critical of political Zionism because it was a movement that, according to him, sought to normalize Jews by putting them firmly within the folds of history. To exist in history was to exist outside eternity. The movement to give the Jews a physical land was tantamount to spiritual death. Of course, Rosenzweig was writing before the horrors of mid-century. Had he lived to see them, he might well have gravitated to a form of religious Zionism, one that regarded the physical land of Israel as spiritually and morally superior to other nations. Rosenzweig’s system in the Star is highly problematic. His use of race, of chosenness, and of essentialism produces a reading of Judaism that is highly insular and inner focused. It is based on a set of polarized identities, between Jew and non-Jew, and between Judaism and philosophy. The former terms in each of these binaries seek to naturalize what it is not, to inscribe its essence on the other, an essence that paradoxically can only be articulated by that which the other brings into existence. The creation of a philosophy of Jewish peoplehood grounded in racial and religious superiority has dangerous repercussions. The creation of a political aesthetic grounded in the authenticity of the past articulates a path toward contemporary renewal. However, this antiquity, its shape and form of revelation, is nothing more than the projection of the present. It is a projection, moreover, of exclusion and insularity. Rosenzweig conjures up a Judaism that has little use for the pluralism of the modern age, preferring the heavily roman- ticized era of an organic and holistic community that remains closed to outside forces. As potentially troubling as some of Rosenzweig’s comments are, his exclu- sionary and racialist language sets a dangerous precedent. Although he was opposed to Zionism on account of its desire to normalize Jews by returning to them what he had taken away—land and history—his atavistic “unnational” nationalism would certainly echo in later strains of religious Zionism. His philosophy of peoplehood, when applied to a modern nation state grounded in the historical order, both justifies and legitimates the occupation of constructed enemies that serve as a foil to “the Jewish people.” 148 hughes

The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

I hope it is becoming clear how and why I envisage many of the discourses associated with Jewish philosophy as potentially totalitarian, based as they are on reified notions of Jewishness or Jewish peoplehood. While we may be able to defang these discourses historically or contextually, they represent real problems if and when they are applied to the contemporary period, which they all too frequently are. And while perhaps we can excuse the twelfth-century Maimonides or the early twentieth-century Rosenzweig for their indiscre- tions, they are ones that have no place in our world wherein Jews are neither a persecuted minority nor deprived of their legal rights. Jews, for example, have become an integral part within the multiethnic and multicultural fabric in North America. Furthermore, Israel now exists as a country among other countries. The question must not be about how to articulate new understandings of Jewish chosenness but about how to interact with others using discourses that are no longer predicated on the self/other binary. Perhaps nowhere is this more pressing than in Israel, which today lives in a state of perpetual war- fare with its neighbors over a host of legal, geographic, and increasingly self- perceived ontological differences. I certainly do not want to imply that Jewish philosophy can solve any of these dilemmas. My goal, on the contrary, is much more modest: one of the current tasks of Jewish philosophy is to remind us of how social groups form, define, interact, and engage in the process of othering. Because borders, broadly conceived and defined, are porous creations, not natural markers, they need to be interrogated and appreciated for what they are. Jew and Arab are not locked in some eternal conflict, if for no other reason that what constitutes “Jew’” and “Arab” is in constant flux. If Jewish philosophy is to think about and through these problems, it must begin with an open-ended notion of what constitutes social groups as opposed to further reifying them. This returns me to a previous section where I argued that, for me, Jewish philosophy is about dismantling old-fashioned notions of identity. It can no longer be about identifying some unspeakable and/or unidentifiable notion of peoplehood, an amorphous notion that is mysteri- ously passed down through the generations. Far too often, in both Jewish and non-Jewish history, this has resulted in the creation of an enemy, the Arab. This creation, to use the language of Gil Anidjar, unfortunately finds one of its fullest expressions in the writings of Rosenzweig, generally upheld as the most important modern Jewish philosopher. “No one,” Anidjar writes, “has gone as explicitly far as Rosenzweig in extirpating, ultimately eradicating, Islam from the figure of humanity, that is to say, from the theologico-political, from the Transgressing Boundaries 149 religious and historical world configuration that is constituted by Judaism and Christianity” (2003, 97). Unfortunately, the story of Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century, much like that in the premodern period, has been about adumbrating others, whether internal (that is, Jews who do not share a particular vision) or external (that is, Arabs), at the expense of understanding or trying to understand them. This is because, in order to create a discourse of itself, Jewish philosophy— as any discourse—needs a discourse of the other. Self and other, as we have seen, subsequently become essentialized as natural properties as opposed to be seen for what they are: taxonomic indicators. It is unfortunate that Jewish philosophy at the turn of the present century has largely failed to deal with the Arab question. In fact, I would go even further and say that it has failed to deal adequately with this issue because it lacks the conceptual vocabulary to do so, precisely because it mistakes the taxonomic for the natural. Although Rosenzweig, writing and living before the horrors of the last century, was opposed to Zionism, his investiture of the land with sacred meaning and his desire to create an ontological gap between Israel and other lands, informed as it is by centuries of rabbinic thought, are highly problematic. They reinforce essential claims that connect the Jewish people to a particular body of land. Both of these concepts are subsequently defined as qualitatively different from other peoples and other lands. This particular discourse of Jewish philosophy results in the sanctification of Jews and Israel, just as it simultaneously denigrates others. What are the implications for those, today, who live in the “holy” land but are not Jewish? How have the many discourses produced by Jewish philosophy attuned us to deal with such individuals? I would argue that, for the most part, they have not. They have either habituated us not to take them seriously or, following Levinas, they have made the State of Israel and the Jewish people into universal models or representatives of ethics (Batnitsky 2011, 92). All, in other words, have succeeded in further romanticizing and reifying some trait as essential to Jewishness. In so doing, however, this essence can subsequently be used to exclude and demean.

Conclusions

I certainly have no illusions that a new conception of Jewish philosophy can solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. It is just too protracted and the stakes on each side too high. I do, however, mention this problem as the most important 150 hughes and insurmountable one for Jewish philosophy at the turn of the twenty-first century. In so doing, I have tried to argue that Jewish philosophy must reorient itself by moving away from the rhetoric of authenticity and the search for a pristine Jewish past that informs some amorphous and monolithic Jewish experience. We must look at how Jewish philosophy in the past has contributed to precisely this sense of Jewish peoplehood. What has it taken for granted? What has it accomplished? What assumptions about amorphous categories such as “Jew” and “non-Jew” have informed it? Only a discourse of Jewish philosophy that is pluralistic, that is self- conscious of the rhetoric that it manufactures, and that admits of change and development in response to conflict and violence (whether literal or metaphorical) can survive at the present moment.2

References

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Anidjar, Gil. 2003. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Batnitsky, Leora. 2011. How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bayart, Jean-François. 2005. The Illusion of Cultural Identity. Translated by Steven Rendall, Janet Roitman, Cynthia Schoch, and Jonathan Derrick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bodian, Miriam. 1997. Hebrew of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 2004. The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2012. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: The New Press. Boyarin, Jonathan. 2008. “Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography.” In Jewishness and the Human Dimension, 25–44. New York: Fordham University Press. Braiterman, Zachary. 2007. The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

2 A much expanded and modified version of this chapter appears as Hughes 2014. Transgressing Boundaries 151

Darnton, Robert. George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century. New York: Norton, 2003. Eisen, Robert. 2011. The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gordon, Peter Eli. 2003. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hughes, Aaron W. 2004. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Aaron W., and Elliot R. Wolfson. 2010. “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy.” In New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, edited by Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, 1–16. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaplan, Mordechai. 1994 [1934]. Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Maimonides. 1963. The Guide of the Perplexed. 2 vols. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nirenberg, David. 2002. “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain.” Past and Present 174, no. 1: 3–41. Rescher, Nicholas. 2006. Philosophical Dialectics: An Essay on Metaphilosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1984. Der Stern der Erlösung. In Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2. Edited by Reinhold Mayer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. ———. 2005. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Roth, Norman. 1978. “The ‘Theft of Philosophy’ by the Greeks from the Jews.” Classical Folio 32: 52–67. Seeskin, Kenneth. 2000. Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfson, Harry A. 1921. “The Needs of Jewish Scholarship in America.” The Menorah Journal 7, no. 1: 28–35. chapter 8 Philosophy, the Academy, and the Future of Jewish Learning

Claire E. Katz

I came to Jewish philosophy through a back door, so to speak. My path to my research in Jewish philosophy began when I was an undergraduate. I had been trained primarily in analytic philosophy, but, through my undergraduate education, I developed an appreciation for the history of philosophy and ethics. As much as I loved ethical theory, I always had a nagging feeling that there was something more to moral theory than what I was able to express. The language of analytic ethics never quite captured how I understood ethics to work. I initially set aside the idea of pursuing a PhD in philosophy and instead entered the Philosophy for Children Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program, at Montclair State University, which focused on philosophy of education, critical thinking, and pedagogy. My experience tutoring logic as an undergraduate taught me that critical thinking habits of mind needed to be formed early; it was too late when someone entered college without already having these habits ready to hand. I finished the MAT, returned to Baltimore, and taught for three years in the community college system. After teaching for three years in Baltimore, I was offered a full-time visiting appointment at Salisbury University on the eastern shore of Maryland, which would become a turning point for me intellectually and professionally. My department at Salisbury comprised three other faculty members who were all Continental in their approach to philosophy. In this department, a collegial space that was also intellectually vibrant, I really learned the language of Continental philosophy. These colleagues were able to talk about ideas and theories in a way that made sense to me and that filled an intellectual void that I had noticed as an undergraduate. It was also here that I was first exposed to Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy (which, I must confess, made absolutely no sense to me at the time). After teaching full time at Salisbury for three years, I began graduate work in philosophy at the University of Memphis. I intended to focus on the history of philosophy. In addition to taking classes on Kant and Hegel, I also took classes in recent Continental philosophy. In my second year, I took a course with Tina Chanter called “The Other” (Chanter 1995, 2001a, 2001b). The course focused on G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and

Luce Irigaray. For the Levinas section, we read large sections of Totality and Infinity. Levinas’s use of the biblical refrain “the stranger, the widow, and the orphan,” to express his philosophical point that we have an obligation to the most vulnerable among us, resonated with me. I sat in the university library, reading the Midrash Rabbah on all the biblical references to this phrase. The one that interested me the most was the reference in the book of Ruth. As I read the book of Ruth with the Levinas material in the background, I could see so many points of connection. What does Levinas say about the feminine? How does his Jewish background influence this view? Does it matter? Does philosophy transcend biography, or is Christianity—in particular, Protestantism— another false neutral the way that “man” and “white” have been for women and people of color in the Western philosophical canon. In this paper, my first on Levinas’s work, I explored Levinas’s ethical project and the role of the feminine as described in Totality and Infinity (Katz 2001). I coupled this discussion with an examination of the character of Ruth in the eponymous biblical story. I found the convergences and divergences in the biblical story to be rich and productive, yielding some answers but also more questions. The relationship that Ruth shared with her mother-in-law, Naomi, exemplified the ethical relationship that Levinas described. And yet, Ruth was herself a stranger and a widow. Levinas’s philosophical project did not afford a place for relations among or between women. Described from the position of Levinas as the subject, the ethical subject was male, ultimately in an erotic and domestic relationship with a woman. Yet my exploration of the story helped me push the limits of Levinas’s project and consider why these limits were present, what function they served, and whether they were structural and, thus, necessary for his larger project. My initial interest in exploring these themes was connected to the richness of the Jewish sacred texts and the myriad ways they opened up philosophical conversation. I was raised in a secular home. Although I spent every Friday night at my grandparents’ house, I was exposed to very little in the way of Jewish education. I also grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and experienced very little anti-Semitism. My relationship to privilege had more to do with issues about sexism than anti-Jewish sentiment. When I moved to the eastern shore of Maryland to take the position at Salisbury State University, my own sensitivity to the parochial interpretations of the Hebrew Bible was awakened. When I arrived in Memphis, which I perceived as “not exactly a hotbed of Jewish life,” even as it did have a relatively old and thriving Jewish community, my own relationship to Judaism and the study of Judaism had already become deepened. I must confess here also that the city of Memphis has an old and rich relationship to Judaism. 154 katz

The following year, I took a class that focused solely on Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being. That same semester, I was preparing for an adult bat mitzvah, which I did not experience growing up. The biblical references—both that Levinas does and does not cite—were striking. I made it a point to examine each one, using midrash and other secondary material. It became ever more apparent that many of Levinas’s references were intended to convey an explicitly Jewish reading. For example, when he cites the Lamentations reference to turn the cheek outward, we can see the significance that he does not, for example, cite Matthew’s instruction to “turn the other cheek.” These two references are very different. The former refers to an initial vulnerability; the second to a form of pacifism that is often, even if wrongly, attributed to his ethics. Most interesting and troubling to me was the tension I felt from fellow graduate students who were uncomfortable with my reference to the Jewish references or Hebrew citations. It became increasingly clear that, while referencing Christian texts was important for understanding Nietzsche or Hegel, citing Jewish texts made Levinas—or the person citing the text—suspect. This response did not deter me from pursuing this line of research; in fact, it became a challenge. That semester was the watershed for me in two senses. First, the richness of the Jewish sacred texts and the way that Levinas deployed them to do “work” that he could not do with philosophy I found both fascinating and intellectually compelling. Second, my awareness of the obfuscation of Levinas’s Jewish identity by not only my graduate student peers but also even more seasoned scholars led me from philosophy to Jewish philosophy. I returned to Totality and Infinity and considered Levinas’s statement in the preface that “Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption [is] a work too often present in this book to be cited” (1969, 28). Although the accuracy of this claim has been disputed, that Levinas believes it to be true such that he says it in the preface is of interest. It means that, regardless of whether the statement is actually true, he believes his book is framed by the ideas of an early twentieth century German-Jewish philosopher. My dissertation and then my first book focused on the relationship between Levinas’s philosophical project and his writings on Judaism. I read Levinas as a Jewish philosopher in the fullest sense of that term. I view him as a philosopher who was not only Jewish but also as one who advanced a philosophy that was in a Jewish register. My early work demonstrated that we could see this connection most clearly in his use of the feminine in his philosophical writings. This early project allowed me to engage Levinas’s work with that of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Yet, Levinas’s own place in the Jewish philosophy canon appears to remain suspect. With few exceptions, the vast majority of “Introductions to Modern Jewish Thought/ Philosophy” do not include a section on Levinas, or, if they do, Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 155 they pay scant attention to him. In part, this can be attributed to his historical period. He died in 1995; thus, his place in the canon had not been determined. But it can also be the case that Jewish philosophy has become subject to some of the same prejudices that dominate the larger philosophical framework. Levinas’s thinking, influenced by Husserl, Heidegger, and the postmodern tradition, is viewed as highly speculative and not as rigorous as “real” philosophical thought requires. Additionally, comments I hear frequently at conferences or public talks indicate that traditional Talmudic scholars believe Levinas to have such an idiosyncratic view of Judaism that they find it difficult to include him in a traditional canon. Thus, his work is often excluded from the traditional canon in modern Jewish philosophy. The major figures in this canon include Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. The canon itself would be determined by how one understands the term philosophy and if the canon is referring to thought as well as philosophy. Philosophy has come to mean that which can be applied universally as opposed to idiosyncratically. Thus, some scholars see any philosophy that has a modifier, for example, feminist, African American, Jewish, and so forth, as by definition not philosophy. Jewish philosophy, then, as situated inside the Western canon, already experiences a suspect position. Some of modern Jewish philosophy has worked precisely on this question—to show how questions about Judaism can be situated within the larger philosophical project of Western philosophy. The question of Jewish thought is more interesting— where do we locate or position thinkers who appear more theological, such as Abraham Joshua Heschel or Joseph Soloveitchik. Are they Jewish philosophers? If so, are they Jewish philosophers who are similar to or different from a thinker like Mendelssohn who was clearly trying to write within the tradition of the German Enlightenment? Is their philosophy idiosyncratic to Jews— observant Jews? Judaism? Does this render their thought not philosophy? Or does philosophy itself need to be reimagined and redefined to include thinkers whose work carries this kind of specificity? It is all the more disappointing when one reads the history of modern philosophy and discovers that some of the marginalization is relatively recent. While it might not be the case that Moses Mendelssohn would be included in a class devoted to the Enlightenment or to a course in modern philosophy, it is the case that he was read by Immanuel Kant and was considered one of the most formidable intellects of the time. Rosenzweig wrote his dissertation on Hegel and the state. The categories that have exiled these thinkers have deprived contemporary students of a significant part of Western philosophy. More recent divisions in the philosophical landscape—for example, the Continental-analytic divide and the marginalization of classical American 156 katz philosophy—complicate the category we call “philosophy” and who gets to be included in it. These divisions, in turn, further marginalize the more contemporary Jewish philosophers on multiple levels. If the philosophers in question are part of the existential/ phenomenological tradition of the twentieth century, they are viewed suspiciously by the more dominant tradition in Anglo-American philosophy. For example, how we situate thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévich is complicated not only by their connection to contemporary French philosophy but also whether their work would be considered Jewish. Levinas occupies an interesting position—if one invokes his Jewish writings to supplement his philosophical thought, he is viewed by “mainstream” Continental philosophers as “too Jewish” and, thus, not really a philosopher. Consequently, he is an interesting marginal figure whose voice calls us to examine the failure of what the Enlightenment promised, regardless of who promoted it, for example, Mendelssohn or Kant. Over the past ten or so years, we can see an increase in the scholarship on Levinas’s writings on Judaism.1 These writings had been absent from most of the secondary philosophical literature on Levinas (Critchley 1992; Peperzak 1993; Perpich 2008). Most recently, we can see philosophers who once eschewed this body of work now taking it seriously, even arguing that it is significant to a robust understanding of Levinas’s thought. Yet Levinas remains marginal within the Jewish philosophy canon. Ironically, this might be the case precisely because of the way he calls philosophy itself into question. I see him in a task parallel to what Husserl called philosophy to do. In “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” Husserl suggested that the task of philosophy was to become a philosophy of philosophy, to examine philosophy itself. Levinas, taking Husserl seriously, responds to this request, only he uses the perspective of Jewish philosophy to accomplish this task.2 One can certainly worry that, as his writings on Judaism are taken more seriously, he will be taken less seriously by Continental philosophy, leaving him without an intellectual home.

1 It is difficult still to point to philosophers who have turned to Levinvas’s writings on Judaism; however, Robert Bernasconi, a prominent scholar of Levinas’s philosophy, is one such person. In a lecture course in Italy (2003) and more recently in his public lecture at the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association (2011), Bernasconi announced to the audience that he thought it was imperative to read Levinas’s essays on Judaism. If one looks at the majority of Bernasconi’s writings up to that point, they do not include Levinas’s writings on Judaism. The same can be said for several other Levinas scholars: for example, Adriaan Peperzak and Simon Critchley. 2 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, 71–147 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 157

The intellectual task of modern Jewish philosophy, then, is to function as the voice of the critic. Today, Jewish philosophy is positioned outside the boundary of modern Western philosophy, which has been dominated by thinkers of Protestant background. This position allows Jewish thought to expose the myth of philosophy’s neutrality and objectivity. If that is the case, then Levinas’s position in relationship to Jewish philosophy is similar to Husserl’s position in relationship to philosophy. Their methods allow them to critique their own lineage. That is, where philosophy has historically enjoyed being the critic of all other disciplines, now philosophy’s eye turns on itself. If Jewish philosophy is the critic of Western Protestant philosophy, then Levinas is the critic of the critics. Writing as a phenomenologist after the Shoah, he witnessed the spectacular failure of the Enlightenment. Levinas is both modern and postmodern, enabling him to be both the Jewish philosopher and the critic of modern Jewish philosophy. Contra Mendelssohn and Cohen, for example, who were largely supportive of the Enlightenment project and who situate the Jew within the Enlightenment and ask “Why not?,” Levinas presses us to consider what is at stake. Why should not the Jew have full rights under the law? What are the boundaries of state authority? Is secular society really secular? Is it really secular for Jews? Similar to how Mendelssohn called out the unfairness of the quotas imposed on Jewish citizenship, Levinas is able to see that what appears as secular to Christian society is not secular to those who sit at its margins. When national exams are given on Saturdays, for example, the observant Jewish population is excluded. Levinas has the benefit of hindsight. Looking back over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he can see that history. And he can see where their ideas were successful and where they fell short. I am sympathetic to the intellectual position that rejects defining Jewish studies around the Holocaust as the only significant event in Jewish history, but it is, nonetheless, a significant event in the story of the Enlightenment and the failure of ethical theory that was produced by modernity’s thinkers. I have no idea how Levinas’s thought or philosophy would have developed had the Holocaust not happened. In philosophy, we call that a hypothesis contrary to fact. The fact that the Holocaust did happen shaped Levinas as a teacher and a philosopher (Levinas 1946, 1994; Katz 2013). That event brought into relief the spectacular failure of the Western ideal of the power of the intellect—that the intellect, that the power of rationality, will be enough to confront evil. Additionally, it questioned the view that, by virtue of our intellects (a secular trade with the religious view of the soul), we are all the same under the law. The philosophy that guided Hitler, and indeed that was not new to Nazi Germany, returned us to a view of materialism and the body that rendered Enlightenment thinking powerless. 158 katz

As a result, Levinas’s thought, in particular, his critique of the Enlightenment, which I argue he advances not only because of his experiences as a Jew but also because he was subjected to the horrors of Nazi Germany, is significant not only within the canon of Jewish philosophy but also “mainstream” political theory. His thinking, then, provides a fresh way of examining questions that cannot be answered adequately by other modern thinkers. His ethical project provides new tools to reconsider not only old questions but also contemporary problems. ∵ In his 1920 letter to Eduard Strauss, published as “Toward a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” Franz Rosenzweig laments the death of Jewish study and teaching, of Jewish learning and education (Rosenzweig 1955). What is the future of Jewish learning for Jews? Writing nearly fifty years later and after returning from a German POW camp after World War II, Emmanuel Levinas revisits these same questions in his essays on Jewish education (Levinas 1990a).3 Indeed, Levinas implores his audience to return to a practice of Judaism that will be informed by a deeper emphasis on Jewish education. The question posed by both of these twentieth-century writers is as pressing today in the twenty-first century as it was when Rosenzweig penned these words nearly one hundred years ago. Yet my own interest in the question is less about what this means for Jews and Judaism per se than what it means for everyone. Over the past fifteen years, I have approached Jewish philosophy with an interest in revealing its relevance to the philosophical works that are included in the traditional canon. I situate Jewish philosophy as simultaneously inside and outside the traditional canon of Western philosophy. On the one hand, philosophers as early as the eighteenth century, like Moses Mendelssohn, and as late as the twentieth century like Emmanuel Levinas, contributed essays on traditional philosophical themes, such as the sentiments, the soul, and Husserl’s theory of intuition. Additionally, we see Jewish philosophers engaging questions in ethics on themes such as the environment. On the other hand, while living under political conditions that had still not fully integrated Jews into political and social life, Jewish philosophers, like Mendelssohn and Levinas, were able to see the flaws in the political and ethical theory that informed the philosophical canon. Pressed to defend his continued life as a

3 Levinas penned several essays that appear in Difficult Freedom. These essays are then directly connected to other essays in the same collection that continue the discussion of similar themes: particularity, assimilation, anti-Semitism, the decline of Judaism, and the future of Jewish education. Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 159

Jew, Mendelssohn writes Jerusalem, a work we could easily classify as social- political philosophy. Jerusalem examines the boundaries of state authority and specifically considers what it means to be Jewish in the larger public space. Yet, the work could be theorized more generally to consider questions that are fundamental to social and political philosophy: what does it mean to live as a particular within a republic that emphasizes universal equality? How do we address questions about assimilation? What are universal rights? What role does religion play in moral education? What is the boundary between the public and the private, and what authority do we ascribe to each category? These questions are still relevant today, and the task of Jewish philosophy is to address them. In all of my work, I use Jewish philosophy and Jewish sources to provide a fresh perspective on perennial philosophical questions, in particular, questions about ethics. I approach Jewish philosophy with the view that it has something to say within its own canon of thought and that its unique perspective can rein- vigorate discussions within traditional philosophy and other disciplines. When I approach Levinas’s thought, I do so as both a Jew and a feminist, indeed, as a feminist informed by Judaism and vice versa. Thus, something as “simple” as gender takes on a fresh face when approached through Jewish sources rather than those that dominate Western Protestant philosophy. For me, Judaism has become a way to engage feminist theory that is outside a Protestant reading of male and female. The standard feminist critiques make sense within that context, but the Protestant image never appealed to me in the first place. Thus, Jewish philosophy provides a more interesting way for me to think through questions in social and political philosophy—in this case, feminism—that remain unanswered. Returning to the observation I made above, that Levinas employs a view of Judaism that is idiosyncratic at best and at worst unrecognizable to some as Judaism, I see Levinas’s thought as giving all of us a new perspective on Judaism with which to think about the canon itself. Using the stories from the Torah, midrashim, and Levinas’s writings on Judaism, my early work asked feminist critics to reexamine their concerns in light of the Jewish context that frames his project, in particular, his use of the feminine. I suggested that Levinas’s philosophy could provide new tools for feminist theory not in spite of his analysis of the feminine—strongly influenced by the Jewish biblical sources—but because of it.4

4 This is the approach I take with regard to the canon of modern Jewish philosophy in my An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2014). Modern Jewish philosophy can indeed be a resource for feminist thought, rather than be viewed as the need for it. 160 katz

Let me give an example. On one reading, Levinas’s conception of the feminine in his philosophical writings led many feminist theorists to worry about what his description of the feminine would mean for women—real, embodied women. In particular, the account of maternity in Otherwise Than Being (1998 [1974]), with his description of a responsibility that is an extreme passivity and his description of the maternal body using terms like “hostage” and “persecution,” might make anyone wince. His description led some commentators to label his ethics a “rape ethics” that implied, if a woman were being raped, she had no grounds to fight back and, if she became pregnant via this violent act, she would have no moral recourse for abortion. Yet, ironically, I read Levinas in the opposite way (Katz 2003). His radical distinction between ethics and politics and his focus on, for example, Lamentations rather than on Matthew, indicates that, while he hopes for the initial vulnerability, he does not encourage the humiliation one might endure by turning the cheek again. One is not morally prohibited from stopping a violence being done to the self or to another. Indeed, so many other writings indicate that we have a responsibility to stop violence. I found in Levinas’s work a productive tension between ethics and politics that exemplifies more closely my own experience of responsibility and obligation to others and, quite honestly, that of my students. Although his philosophy resonated with me early in my reading of his work, the experience of having my own children made his philosophy all the more compelling. The decisions we make about our own lives and those around us are not easy ones, and they frequently come with consequences that we did not anticipate. Ethics and politics are messy—and my students have often found that the readings in the history of philosophy and the way they have been taught to act do not reflect how difficult it can be to know the right thing to do, to act on it, and to handle what follows next.5 Levinas, for me, captured more honestly the trauma of ethical responsibility itself. The concern the feminist theorists expressed remains a concern (Chanter 1995; Sandford 2000). However, contrary to how many of them read Levinas’s views on the feminine, I found his writings provided a different perspective

5 Indeed, I recently received an email request to participate in a survey examining how philosophers engage moral quandaries. The request was issued by an assistant professor in psychology at a major university. I initially deleted the message, knowing what this survey would entail. But it reappeared and I thought, “Okay, I will at least look at it.” My assumption was correct. The first question was that “trolley question.” Whenever I see that, all I can think is, really, that trolley question is still around? Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 161 from which to consider, for example, the thorny moral issue of abortion. His description of the maternal body as one that is unchosen and nonetheless responsible captured my own experience of pregnancy more closely than any account I had ever read, including those by feminist theorists who largely focused on rights. In contrast to an increasingly common view that argues that Levinas’s account renders abortion immoral under any circumstance, I found his view opened up the complexity of the issue, thus making impossible the reduction of this issue to any one particular response. By exemplifying the intimate relationship between the fetus and the woman’s body, the argument that the woman’s body can be threatened by the mere presence of the fetus carries more force. As a teacher of women’s and gender studies, I have been able to explain to my students the moral difficulty and the moral complexity of this state of being more effectively than I was able to do prior to reading Levinas’s description. His account of the maternal body swiftly shifted my own thinking about this issue from rights to responsibility. Similar to Levinas’s methodology, my explanation to my students was not intended to tell them under what circumstances abortion was and was not moral. Rather, my intention was to help them think about the moral complexity of the problem, rather than to see it in the simplistic terms in which it has always been presented. More strongly, my aim was to help them shift the discussion of a complex moral issue like abortion away from the language of rights and into a language that would allow us to consider all that is involved and to keep all those parts alive in the discussion, even if that means they remain in tension, even if it means there is no right answer if only we could just reason a little bit better about it. Additionally, the tension related to being a “particular” living within a “universal,” as expressed by the majority of the modern Jewish philosophers, especially those writing within the context of the Enlightenment, relates so closely to twenty- and twenty-first-century concerns still experienced in France. For example, the discussion of the veil worn by Muslim women, especially in France, parallels the question of granting citizenship to Jews in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. The issue of particularity as expressed by religious garments is not a recent phenomenon. Although complicated by contemporary politics surrounding the Arab states and Muslim women, by reading the history of modern philosophy, we see that the discussion of clerical clothing dates at least as far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, Rousseau discusses the problem of the clerical collar in his writings. By including these discussions, we can frame a discussion of the veil within a larger theoretical discussion about secularity, particularity, and the nation-state (Gordon 2008; Baehr and Gordon, forthcoming). 162 katz

In my most recent work in philosophy of education, I employ a similar strategy to the one in my previous work (Katz 2013). Levinas offers his description of ethical subjectivity as the answer to the crisis of humanism he identifies in his philosophical work. He believes that Judaism lost its way just before World War II and, in doing so, gave up the very thing that made it unique—its moral compass. Although Levinas describes this crisis in a similar way in both his philosophical writings and his writings on Judaism—the crisis is a crisis in ethical subjectivity—we find that it is only in his writings on Judaism that he locates the origins of the humanism in the Jewish Bible. Levinas’s project began by articulating a Jewish philosophy in an idiom that would have broad appeal outside the Jewish community. Thus, contrary to the view that Levinas’s Jewish writings render his work parochial, I argue that this dimension of his work provides us with a new set of tools for examining philosophical problems. I use this work to argue that, if we are serious about certain kinds of changes, then we must begin with how we educate our children. This recent book allowed me to return to my early interest in philosophy of education. Fascinated by the relationship between political philosophy and philosophy of education, I was also concerned that the two fields suffered from an intellectual divorce that occurred in the early twentieth century for reasons that are most likely overdetermined. My interest lay in responding to the accurate diagnoses regarding the failure of certain educational methods and the subsequent failure of the cures that were offered. If the failure was a structural problem with the Western conception of education, the subject, and so forth, then the cure would need to emerge from outside of that traditional canon. Levinas’s essays on Jewish education not only provided a more interesting solution to the problems posed by contemporary educational methods, but also clearly represented his position as ambivalent with regard to the Enlightenment values he inherited and from which he knew he had benefited. As a result of this recent project, I could see more clearly how Levinas fit into a lineage of modern Jewish philosophy that begins with Moses Mendelssohn, passes through Hermann Cohen, and arrives at Franz Rosenzweig. By the time we read Roseznweig’s essays on Jewish education, we see a strikingly similar set of concerns to those that will be voiced by Levinas forty years after Rosenzweig writes. However, both sets of writings are bookends to the Shoah. Thus, Rosenzweig writes his essays at the height of the German Enlightenment and without the failure of that project; Levinas writes his essays in direct response to the events of World War II. I saw and continue to view Levinas in the lineage of modern Jewish thought with much to offer both in terms of his Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 163 inheritance of these ideas and the way that he deploys them to respond to the traditional canon in Western philosophy. For example, in Levinas’s view, the language of rights has covered over any conception of a more basic obligation to or responsibility for another, a responsibility that Levinas claims is one from which I cannot recuse myself. It claims me prior to my ability to make a choice. For Levinas, the assumption of “my place in the sun” gives way to “whose place in the sun takes precedence?” and inevitably leads to war. Indeed, even to pose the question in this manner already frames the discussion toward life and ethics as a zero-sum game: my place in the sun is in competition with yours. His ethical project, then, requires us to reframe our view of subjectivity in order to draw the ethical landscape as something other than a fight for what is rightfully mine. If ethics were about developing the self in relationship to another for whom I am responsible, whose life comes before mine, my claim to that place in the sun is put into question from the start. As long as the sovereignty of the ego remains central, then neither philosophy in particular nor a humanities education in general will be sufficient to change the heart.6 Levinas seems clear in his early writings that ethics is not to be a punctua- tion mark in a life otherwise dominated by a self-centered ego. Rather, this ceding of the self will define the new subjectivity. He identifies this failure to turn toward the other, to put the other first, as a crisis in humanism.7 The

6 And yet those who are professional philosophers are also subject to a series of jokes that imply the opposite, for example, those who work on applied ethics are not ethical, etc. Indeed, some of the worst critical thinkers are philosophers . . . at faculty meetings. 7 See Cohen 2001, 216 ff. Chapter 7 of Cohen’s book focuses on Levinas’s “humanism.” He opens a subsection, titled “Biblical Humanism,” with this statement: “Levinas—and not only Levinas—has been accused of humanism. As if this were an accusation!” He then provides an interesting reading of Levinas’s humanism, by which Cohen means, “at the very least, a pragmatic and fundamental respect for the dignity and worth of each and every human being qua human being—is it [humanism] not rather a great human good, and hence indi- rectly also a great religious good?” (218). Cohen’s definition is certainly not controversial, but he does add that, for Levinas, humanism takes on a different meaning, one that is precisely positioned against the way it emerges from modernity. He writes, “For Levinas, humanism, respect for the human qua human, does not derive from or remain limited to some Greek or Renaissance or Enlightenment ‘definition’ of the human being: ‘rational animal,’ ‘worker,’ ‘artist,’ ‘homo sapiens,’ ‘homo politicus,’ ‘language user.’ Rather, more deeply it recalls and animates a central biblical teaching, the idea—and not merely an idea—that each and every human being, regardless of differences in wealth, power, talent, position or status, is ‘created’ in the ‘image and likeness of God’” (219). 164 katz solution he offers in response is a new humanism based on a subjectivity defined by ceding the egocentric status for the other. The writings that come under the category “philosophical” describe that subjectivity, and one can look to primarily Totality and Infinity (1969 [1961]), Otherwise Than Being (1998 [1974]), and the essays collected under the title Humanism of the Other (1972), for the strongest descriptions of this new humanism and his description of the subject and ethical responsibility. The argument that underlies Levinas’s ethical project is that our obligation toward another person makes possible the very nature of an ethical dilemma and what often appears to us as a horrifying set of choices.8 No matter how “rightly” we might act, even to the point of saving another’s life at great risk to our own, our other obligations do not disappear. They are not canceled by the choice I make, no matter how right or complicated or even impossible that choice might appear to be. I cannot walk away self-satisfied, content that I have fulfilled my responsibility. The Levinasian point is that the obligation to the other remains even when our own life is threatened—this is what makes ethical obligation so radical. My intellectual interests in philosophy of education, ethics, and social and political philosophy have led me to consider the way in which Levinas’s radical view of subjectivity and responsibility, as well as his insight into Talmudic learning, can offer an new perspective on how to rethink education. Levinas’s plea to the French Jewish community to return to a robust Jewish education that includes Hebrew, Talmud, and the biblical narratives interpreted through rabbinic commentary reveals his complex views of education. Education should include moral development without sacrificing the development of an intellectually sophisticated mind. Indeed, these two parts are necessary for any real education to take place. His view that Jewish education is the single most important issue for the French Jewish community reflects his view, similar to that expressed by Theodor Adorno, that education, and in particular Jewish education, is the only thing that will prevent another Holocaust. It also reflects his own observations that assimilation and the promise of the Enlightenment, while certainly benefitting Jews in some very important ways, did not, and maybe could not, go far enough. Additionally, this benefit came at the expense

8 William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice comes to mind when thinking about the point Levinas makes. Sophie was given a choice that was not really a choice: choose one child to live (by implication, choose one child to die), or they will both be killed. She cannot help but feel herself responsible for the death of the other child even though, in a sense, this choice was taken out of her hands. The mere posing of the “choice” brings into relief that saving one child, not having both children killed, does not relieve her of a responsibility that is seemingly not really in her control. Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 165 of Judaism. That is, Jews were able to enjoy what rights were granted to them under emancipation, but only if they were willing to give up the public practice of Judaism, which might include asking that a national exam not be given on a Saturday. My project returns to Levinas’s relationship to Jewish education, which he first expressed in these very early essays. These essays were published only a few years after his release from a German POW camp and his return to France. I argue that Levinas’s diagnosis of the problem is a “crisis of humanism,” which finds its seeds in modernity but comes to fruition in the inhumanities of the twentieth century. These inhumanities, Levinas would say, signify a violence toward the other that is of a wholly different order from those that preceded them. I argue that the relationship between Levinas’s ethical project and his essays on Jewish education might help us think about other ways to educate, other ways to teach, and other ways to design our schools. If we are serious about the ethical problems that we face, and if Levinas’s radical revision of ethical subjectivity is compelling, then we need a new way of cultivating that subjectivity. Like his predecessors, Levinas offers an educational model as a solution, but here the model—Jewish education—is significantly different from those offered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is crucial to understand what distinguishes Levinas from these other philosophers of education. Simultaneous with his turn to Jewish education, Levinas also identifies the need for a different subjectivity than has been cultivated through modernity. In his writings on Jewish education, he tethers the development of this subjectivity to the return to Jewish education, which includes a sustained relationship with the Hebrew language and the Talmud. His proposed solution, which he develops specifically in the essays in Difficult Freedom, is not only original, but it also allows his readers a glimpse of the fundamental role that education plays in his larger philosophical project—one that I would argue is indispensable to its coherence and its success. Levinas’s essays pressed me to reflect on the following question: what is the significance of these essays on Jewish education for his larger philosophical project in which he transforms the traditional conception of subjectivity? Levinas identifies a crisis of humanism in both his philosophical writings and his writings on Judaism. He describes the crisis in the same way. In both sets of writings, he believes that the humanism modernity produced, one that leads us to believe we are each free, autonomous, and hold a privileged place in the sun led to the cascade of inhumanities we experienced in the twentieth century. Reading against the conventional interpretations of his work, my project makes two claims: first, that Levinas indeed wants to secure ethical obligation; 166 katz and, second, that a particular form of education will prepare one to be open to the face of the other and respond to it, even if, as I acknowledge, he intentionally leaves open or unanswered how one is to respond.9 My approach to Levinas’s entire body of work demonstrates that his writings on Judaism not only provide coherence to his larger philosophical project but also that they advance a view of ethical subjectivity that goes beyond what modern ethical theory has been able to provide. In general, my approach has been to read Levinas’s Jewish writings alongside his philosophical writings—the set of writings thought to be nonreligious—in order to create a productive discussion between them. This most recent project argues more strongly than I have in the past that Levinas’s writings on specifically Jewish education are not only helpful to understanding his philosophical project but also necessary. These essays on Jewish education were written contemporaneously with several essays in which Levinas argues for Judaism’s universalism. Additionally, most of these essays were written while he was developing his ideas, and indeed writing his first major philosophical book, Totality and Infinity (1969 [1961]), which describes his ethical project. Read together, these seemingly disparate bodies of writing ask us to consider both the peculiar nature of Judaism and its potential for a universal application. There is a dimension of Judaism, Levinas argues, that is universal, and this dimension is also what makes Judaism uniquely Jewish.10 Thus, while Jewish education hopes to succeed in maintaining that which makes Judaism unique, it is clear from Levinas’s writings on Judaism in general that he believes the ethical impulse that is fundamentally and uniquely expressed in Judaism applies to everyone. These essays on Jewish education also indicate that he sees something unique in the way that Jewish education works—with regard to both content and method—and that the cultivation of those who would be a light unto the nations (Isaiah) had been put aside. More significantly, we find many of Levinas’s strongest political statements in these essays. He laments the loss of Jewish education not simply because this might signal the loss of

9 What does Levinas mean by “the face”? A difficult question to answer but, in the negative, he indicates that he does not mean the actual face of a person. He does not mean the collection of eyes, nose, mouth, and so on. Rather, he means what the face conveys— vulnerability, openness, and mortality of the other. See Totality and Infinity for his early description of the face. See also the interviews with Philippe Nemo published as Ethics and Infinity (1985). 10 Although the influence of Hermann Cohen’s philosophy on Levinas’s philosophical thought is not made explicit, it is difficult not to see at least some resonance between the two thinkers. Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 167

Judaism but because the loss of Judaism would be a loss for the world. The loss of Judaism and Jewish education puts both Judaism and the world at risk in their confrontation with evil. ∵ In her recent book Emergency Politics (2009), the political theorist Bonnie Honig expresses dismay that the political theories commonly available to her are not effective for answering the difficult questions in politics that plague us today. She turns to Jewish philosophy hoping that this will offer a new set of resources that will also be more useful. My experience was similar to Honig’s. My questions about ethical subjectivity lay at a deeper level than the analyses provided by Western philosophy. I find Levinas’s thought compelling because he sits at the intersection of Jewish philosophy and contemporary European philosophy. He is able to blend the methods and perspectives of both to press our thinking about themes that are generally common—subjectivity, ethical responsibility, God, religion, reading, interpretation, the particular and the universal, and so forth. Bringing together tools from both of these traditions makes his critique ever more effective. As a teacher, I remain convinced that Jewish philosophy is ever more important in the academy. My faculty appointment at Penn State, prior to coming to Texas A&M, was a joint appointment in philosophy and Jewish studies. I miss that affiliation with Jewish studies a great deal. However, what I enjoy about my appointment at Texas A&M, a joint appointment in philosophy and women’s and gender studies, is that, in addition to teaching all the other courses that are part of philosophy’s canon, I have an opportunity to introduce Jewish philosophy to students who might never take either a religion class or a class in Jewish philosophy. The majority of the students whom I teach are grateful for this exposure. Some are grateful simply because they have always been taught that philosophy and religion and feminism and religion are permanently and structurally at odds with each other. Some are grateful because they are Jewish but never realized that Judaism had an intellectual component. Some have fallen away from their own religion but, through a different reading of similar texts, can see what drew them to religion in the first place. Some of these students are simply fascinated by the idea of midrash, biblical interpretation, Talmudic thinking, and so on.11 If we as teachers and scholars use the idea that the bigger

11 This is certainly true of the first-year seminar students I teach in a one-hour weekly critical thinking seminar. They now delight in using the word “perhaps” to engage the stories in the Hebrew Bible. 168 katz the toolbox the better, then our task as scholars of Jewish philosophy is to consider this canon a set of tools that can enrich not only our students’ intellectual lives but also the intellectual lives of our colleagues. My own experience as a colleague in philosophy departments where I am the only person interested in Jewish philosophy has been a positive one. My colleagues have been supportive of the classes I teach, the research I do, and the speakers I bring to campus—indeed, in response to one speaker in particular, the person had barely left campus when my colleagues were asking when he could be brought back. I have engaged colleagues, students, and community folks, the majority of whom are not Jewish, in day-long seminars on Levinas’s Talmudic readings, again, with an enormously positive response from those who attended. I suppose I have understood my position as a scholar who works on Jewish philosophy to be responsible for introducing this material to a larger audience—both to benefit them and to benefit Jewish philosophy. Here is an example. My colleague Linda Radzik, who had recently published a book that engaged a philosophical analysis of atonement, invited me to respond to her book as part of our department’s authors-meet-readers event. She told me that she was especially interested in a Jewish philosophy perspective on the theme. My response included references to Levinas and Jankélévich, in addition to the Talmud and Torah, which she then incorporated into a class she taught the following spring semester. The material was out of her particular subfield, and she invited me to guest lecture on it, but, because of how she incorporated the material into her syllabus, the students were simply introduced to this material—not as marginal material, but as philosophy that presents a different perspective on the theme of forgiveness. When I reflect on these experiences, my impression is that students and colleagues actually yearn for material like what we find in Jewish philosophy. The analyses are erudite, and they do not shy away from the productive tension that is naturally found in thorny questions of everyday ethical and political life. My sense is that, to keep Jewish philosophy alive, we must integrate this material into our “regular” philosophy courses, namely, courses that do not deal with Jews and Judaism. When I teach courses in philosophy of education, existentialism, feminist theory, or even my introductory class in women’s and gender studies, I include reading material written by Jewish philosophers. I am not suggesting that courses solely devoted to Jewish philosophy, for example, a course on modern Jewish philosophy, should no longer be taught. Rather, I am calling for the inclusion of Jewish thinkers in courses that, on the face of it, do not seem to pertain to Judaism. Put differently, just as John Locke would be included in a course on social and political theory, so too should Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 169

Moses Mendelssohn. Similarly, a course on Kant should include readings by Hermann Cohen, and a course on Levinas, typically taught as a course in Continental philosophy, should include readings that have traditionally been bracketed as “writings on Judaism.” There is a particular responsibility for those of us in philosophy departments to incorporate this material into our “regular” classes so that the generations of students who come up behind us do not see philosophy in this segregated manner. I do not know that we can count on our colleagues who teach non-Jewish philosophy to do this also. I am currently teaching critical thinking class to first-year students—a one-credit course—in which I engage them in discussions about the biblical texts and the idea of interpretation as a tool for critical thinking. I am doing this not only because the material is fascinating and rich and engaging but also because I have a responsibility as someone not in religious studies to bring that material to my students. I want my colleagues and my students to see that philosophy and religion, in particular, Jewish thought, do not have to be antagonistic, but rather that the discussion can be rich and productive. The more I infuse my courses with the ideas from the Jewish thinkers, the more I can encourage my students and my colleagues to see how Jewish philosophy can address questions in our contemporary life for which we, as philosophers, normally turn to the standard thinkers in the Western canon. I do not know if my colleagues will ever fully or even partially include Jewish philosophers in their classes. But I can help them see that their classes are less rich—that they are denying important material to their students—if they do not. My concern about the future of Judaism is linked to the future of Jewish philosophy. Not that long ago, I was told by Micah Greenstein, a Reform rabbi in Memphis, Tennessee, that, although Jewish studies programs in the United States seem to be growing at an exponential rate, this growth is not matched by the Jewish population itself, thus creating a deception in the relationship between the two. There is a view that both are outdated, old, and irrelevant. Because Jewish philosophy concerns itself with perennial ideas, discussions that include these themes will always be relevant. Because Jewish philosophy pulls from the Jewish tradition, utilizing Torah, midrash, and Talmud, Jewish philosophy is, I believe, uniquely situated, unlike many other parts of Jewish studies, to demonstrate that relevance. The return to biblical wisdom, if done in a way that exemplifies the complexity of thought rather than a parochial dogma normally associated with religion, might be refreshing. A recent irony, for example, was a quote from Isaiah recently circulated on the Internet by people who might consider themselves on the political Left. The quote was used to promote the support of health care, and care in general, for people in 170 katz our community who are most vulnerable, in particular, those who are poor. Since religious thinking in this country has become equated with fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, right-wing thinking, and so forth, I found the circulation of this quote particularly remarkable. My approach as a teacher and a researcher keeps this problem in mind. I try always to consider my audience—who it is and who it might be. How do I speak to people who are generally antagonistic to religion? How do I speak to people who are not antagonistic to religion but who are parochial in their own religious thinking? How do I speak to Jews, many of whom know very little of about Judaism yet nonetheless remain critical of it? If we believe that Jewish philosophy has a universal accent, that it could be of interest to scholars and students inside and outside Judaism—and, of course, not everyone will believe this about Jewish philosophy—then our task is to teach and discuss this material in a way that reflects that possibility.

References

Baehr, Peter, and Daniel Gordon. “From the Headscarf to the Burqa: The Role of Social Theorists in Shaping Laws against the Veil.” Economy and Society, forthcoming. Chanter, Tina. 1995. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York: Routledge. ———. 2001a. Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———, ed. 2001b. Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. Rereading the Canon series. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press. Cohen, Hermann. 1971. Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen. Edited and translated by Eva Jospe. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. ———. 1995. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated by Simon Kaplan. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Cohen, Richard A. Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Critchley, Simon. 1992. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. London: Blackwell. Gordon, Daniel. 2008. “Why Is There No Headscarf Affair in the United States?” Historical Reflections 34, no. 3: 37–60. Honig, Bonnie. 2009. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Philosophy, the Academy, and Learning 171

Katz, Claire. 2001. “Rehinhabiting the House of Ruth: Exceeding the limits of the Feminine in Totality and Infinity.” Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Tina Chanter, 145–70. University Park: Penn State University Press. ———. 2003. Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy. London: I.B. Tauris. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1946. “La réouverture de l’Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale.” Cahiers l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 9 (July): 1–2. ———. 1969 [1961]. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univeristy Press. ———. 1990a. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1990b. “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Translated by Seán Hand. Critical Inquiry 17: 63–71. Original: “Quelques Réflexions sur la Philosophie de L’Hitlérisme.” Esprit 2 (1934): 199–208. ———. 1994. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998 [1974]. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2003. On Escape. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mendelssohn, Moses. 1983. Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism. Translated by Allan Arkush. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Peperzak, Adriaan. 1993. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Perpich, Diane. 2008. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1995. On Jewish Learning. Edited by N. N. Glatzer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sandford, Stella. 2000. The Metaphysis of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. London: Continuum. chapter 9 Revisioning the Jewish Philosophical Encounter with Christianity

Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover

At least in the modern era, Jewish philosophy has been as much about Christianity as it has been about Judaism. A community that does not have equal political power articulates its own self-image not only to itself for theological reasons, or as if philosophy were an innocently natural human activity, but also to the dominant powers that watch and sanction the minorities under their thumbs. Sometimes a minority community will resist agents of power; at other times, it will seek to make common cause with them. Sometimes a minority community will recognize itself in how the majority talks about it; at other times, it will refuse that recognition and refuse the cultural authority of the majority in the process. And sometimes it does both of these things simultaneously. In the history of modern Jewish philosophy, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) argued for the equivalence of Judaism and Christianity since both acknowledge eternal truths of reason; he also argued for the superiority of Judaism over Christianity in his description of Judaism as nondogmatic and noncoercive, possessing the skills of suasion that the modern state requires (Mendelssohn 1983a, 156–57, 140; 1983b, 89–90, 73). Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1918) too claimed that Judaism is rational, and the second edition’s correction of the title from The Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism to omit the initial definite article shows that Cohen did not think that Judaism had any exclusive hold on rationality at the expense of other religious traditions.1 Nevertheless, even a beginning reader of Cohen can see that he argued that, because Judaism’s messiah has not yet come, Judaism contains a propulsive ethical energy that seeks to bring the future into the present by working for a truly cosmopolitan state. Christianity, on the other hand, in Paul’s rejection of the law, posits a strict opposition between the moral law and the Christian’s faith in the salvific power of Christ’s death and resurrection; the clear implication is that Christianity is amoral (H. Cohen 1974, 343; 1978, 399). And in the 1980s, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with Bishop Klaus Hemmerle, claimed that the human meaning

1 For detail on the change in title, see Rosenzweig 1984, 323–26; Rosenzweig 2000, 146–52.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_�11 Jewish Encounter with Christianity 173 of the Christian gospels (apparent in texts such as Matt. 25:31–46) was “compromised” by history. This echoed a statement made in Levinas’s 1934 essay on Hitlerism that Christianity’s doctrine of the soul has “the concrete and positive power to detach, to abstract or withdraw itself” into a noumenal or transcendent realm. Christianity’s ability to change history as unmentioned, but Judaism’s was (Levinas 1988, 190; 1994a, 31; 1994b, 162; 2004, 15). The fact that Jewish philosophy is intertwined with Christian culture is not just a historical fact about Enlightenment Germany or twentieth-century France in the example just given. It is also a fact about the training of this essay’s authors. When we met as graduate students at the University of Virginia in 1992, we were students in a philosophical-theology program that dictated to all students a curriculum of Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and other Christian theologians and philosophers of religion. Students like us, who arrived with nascent interests in Jewish thought (interests that were nourished and deepened in coursework with David Novak), were still responsible for a doctoral exam in Christian theology; the students planning on writing dissertations in figures in the Christian canon were not required to gain knowledge of thinkers in other traditions. Our work in Jewish philosophy remains marked by this asymmetry in different ways. For one of us (Rashkover), it has led to a career focused on Jewish- Christian theological dialogue. Her interest in Jewish-Christian discussions was originally a product of what in hindsight appears as naïveté, simply because the categories of the conversation in the academic subfield of philosophy of religion during her student years—learning with Francis Fiorenza, Gordon Kaufman, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Scharlemann, and others—were taken directly from Christian systematic theology. To be seen as a budding scholar was to speak this language, so she strove to speak Christian conceptual language as a Jew. Her first book, Revelation and Theopolitics, established commonalities between Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth, arguing that their theocentrism, centered on an understanding of revelation as an “event which exceeds its own testimony and temporalization” (2005, 178) that places both Jews and Christians outside secular culture, allowing Jews and Christians to share a religious culture centered on what she called the “politics of praise” serving to expose the limits of secular culture, which fails to acknowledge (much less redress) the needs of its citizens. Her second book, Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics (2011), argued that Christian theology should open itself up to accounts in the Jewish philosophical canon of revelation expressing itself in law, and that revelatory law is uniquely able to affirm persons’ desires. This marked a path away from her earlier naïveté, insofar as she no longer premised Jewish-Christian dialogue on the assumption that 174 Kavka and Rashkover

Judaism and Christianity were conceptually equal traditions, and no longer maintained the self-image of a Jewish scholar demanding a seat at the table by deploying theological language in as equally sophisticated a way as Christians do. Now Rashkover showed Christians the theological costs of taking up Pauline supersessionism, ignoring how law makes for stability and flourishing. In this way, her work has sought to extricate Jewish thinking from the Christianized conceptual mold of its history in the modern era. For Kavka, this interruptive power of Jewish philosophy to show the limits of Christianity has been a theme of his work for a bit longer. Shortly after abandoning his plan to live as a Benedictine monk, he became entranced by the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas and of Martin Buber in his late teens and early twenties, and then almost converted to Judaism before his Czech relatives told him an unverifiable story that his mother’s family’s secret was its Jewish identity (making his conversion unnecessary). Perhaps in line with his status as a quasi-convert, Kavka has written on the attempts of thinkers in the Jewish philosophical canon to defend the truth of their beliefs. His 2004 book Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy was a philosophical mask of his spiritual autobiography, arguing that a strand of Jewish philosophers from Moses Maimonides through Jacques Derrida staked their Jewish identity—an identity premised on the claim that the Messiah is still to come—on an argument about the unfinished and not yet fully formed nature of the world, to be interpreted as becoming and not as being. Philosophy for him became a tool by which Jewish intellectuals could defend Judaism against Christian claims of realized eschatology. To the extent that the construction of Christianity in this strand of thinkers could be occasionally tendentious, fantastical, or ignorantly one-dimensional, it only mirrored a prior Christian construction of Judaism that was equally tendentious, fantastical, or ignorant. Kavka has continued to articulate and assess the arguments of thinkers in the modern Jewish philosophical canon, most recently showing how Jewish thinkers have dealt strangely with the issue of history as a scene in which beliefs can be verified or falsified, either confusedly describing apocalyptic events as signs of divine care (Kavka 2012b), unjustifiably describing death as bliss (Kavka 2012a), or irresponsibly claiming that secularism causes evil (Kavka 2006). Despite his critiques of thinkers in the canon, what remains continuous with his earlier work as well as his own autobiography is a desire to justify commitment to a religious tradition, as difficult as it may be to satisfy that desire. We are committed to Jewish philosophy as a field of inquiry that does not simply use the various languages of the university to articulate Judaism to self- identifying Jews and/or to students desiring to learn the meaning of Jewish vocabulary and actions. We are committed to Jewish philosophy as a field Jewish Encounter with Christianity 175 of inquiry that irrupts the modern West, either understood as dominantly Christian or as a secularity that reoccupies the positions of the Christian past. In this commitment, we see ourselves as representative of the field of Jewish studies more broadly. One of the most important advances in Jewish studies in the last generation, in our view, is the increase of Jewish scholars working on the New Testament and early Christianity at a time when the assumption that there was once a “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity has been challenged, whether deferring the date of such a parting or questioning whether it ever took place (Becker and Reed 2003). The most visible material evidence of this advance is The Jewish Annotated New Testament, an edition of the New Revised Standard Reversion of the New Testament with commentary and explanatory essays by fifty Jewish scholars. While, in their introduction, the editors Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler express their desire that American Jews move past their ignorance (or fear) of the New Testament, they also see the volume as minimally ensuring “guidance to Christian teachers and preachers, so that when they proclaim the ‘good news’ . . . of Jesus, they will not stain that good news by anti-Jewish stereotypes” (2011, xii). Nevertheless, perhaps unlike our colleagues who study antiquity, we are also wary of what might result from our commitment to the irruptive power of Jewish thinking. For if one of the things that Jewish thinking does is show the limits of Christianity, this limit must necessarily be recursive. When we show the effects of Christian rhetoric or language—whether we claim that the use of “the Jews” in the gospel of John is a rhetorical device or question the rhetoric of “Israel” in the theology of Barth or expose the anti-Judaism of Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek—we subject these effects to the labor of reflection. But reflection affects the author as much as it does the subject matter of authorship; it shows that the conception of “Judaism” from which such resistance takes place is just as open to examination as the “Christianity” being resisted. In the remainder of this essay, we sketch out both the promises and the risks of Jewish thinking as a mode of resistance. In the next section (first drafted by Kavka), we claim that the current trend of a “new Augustinianism” in religious ethics, promulgating a modest social-political ethic in response to what it sees as the overweening power of the state in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, misses an integral element of Augustinian political theology. The work of the new Augustinians offers a particularly useful instance of the asymmetry between Christian and Jewish thought, since this scholarship presumes to have resolved the question of how to express Christianity authentically in a multicultural world. By implication, it would also presume to have resolved the tension between Judaism and Christianity. However, while the new Augustinians see themselves as participating only in the broad currents of 176 Kavka and Rashkover

Augustinian tradition, it remains the case for us that Augustine’s narrative of the heavenly and earthly cities makes an important psychological point that is echoed by Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century: confidence in one’s own blissful end is ineluctably bound up with the confidence that the ends of others—pagans and especially Jews—are utterly devoid of that bliss. As long as this psychological claim remains unacknowledged and untested, the appli- cability of Augustine to contemporary theopolitics will remain vexed by its abstraction. In the final section (first drafted by Rashkover), we apply the same standard of testing and reflection to Jewish thought. In particular, we examine the attempt in the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Leo Strauss to recover Jewish theological thinking from the influence of early twentieth-century Christian thought and thereby mark a difference between Jewish and Christian theology. Yet, for us, their theological account of Jewish identity is grounded in a radically transcendent notion of God that ironically can be interpreted as just as “Protestant” (Barthian) as it can be interpreted to be authentically or natively “Jewish.” And so, just as we read Christian theology against the grain, we with equal insistence read Jewish theology against the grain. We do not argue in the pages that follow that the self-reflexivity of Judaism’s immanent critique of Christianity implies that Jews should stop challenging, or relating to, Christianity. Self-articulation requires an Other to whom one articulates. We do argue that the role of Jewish philosophy should not simply be one of interruption but also one of showing how speculative discourse—a type of thinking about the nature of the absolute and how the absolute relates to beings embedded in nature and history—has the potential to cut through the negative social and political effects of enmity, effects that threaten to falsify Jews’ and Christians’ belief in revelation. (For one of us—Rashkover—it also has the potential to cut through enmity itself.) We assume that the twenty- first century will continue the currents of the twentieth. In other words, we assume that the task of twenty-first-century thinking will be to stop enmity from expressing itself by showing that claims to infallible knowledge—claims that make others worthy of discrimination and death or that hold up a utopian future in which it is alleged that all will be happy but no evidence of actual human flourishing is given—collapse not because an external critic has superior skills but as a result of the incapacity of such claims to recognize other possible articulations of the absolute. For Jewish thinking, the task will be to curb Jewish philosophy’s penchant for unverifiable prophetic exhortation in God’s name and turn to a speculative thinking about the absolute in which the authority of the theologian opens itself up to the democratic give and take of a community’s reasoning processes—whether with, through, or even against the canonic textual tradition—over the long arc of Jewish history. Jewish Encounter with Christianity 177

This is not easy. It will be the twenty-first century’s version of the classic dilemma into which Jewish philosophy always risks falling, that of offering a story in which either Judaism or philosophy is only the handmaiden of the other. As we suggest at the end of this essay, we think that the canon offers various paths forward in which Judaism and philosophy express each other. All of these paths are immanentist ones, so we think that twenty-first-century Jewish thinking must depart from the doctrine of God as radically transcendent. Such a philosophical theology—reflecting an attachment to Heilsgeschichte common to both Augustine and the pre-1921 Rosenzweig—only serves to demean the value of the historical and natural order. When theology can take into account the human forms of scriptural, philosophical, and scientific reasoning, responding to them and changing itself as needed, it develops the capacity to adjudicate the tensions generated by polemical thought. After all, Torah is not in the heavens. It is very close to us, in our mouths and in our hearts, in this place and at this season. ∵ The return to an Augustinian politics that is found in recent scholarship in religious ethics represents an attempt for Christian theology to defend a robust presence for Christian thinking in public life, without giving the appearance that such a presence will involve public coercion of Christians’ fellow (non- Christian) citizens to accept Christian views. (This makes it of particular interest to Kavka, who left Christianity after having spent his teens being educated by Benedictines). For scholars such as Eric Gregory and Charles Mathewes— the two Christian ethicists who will be the focus of this section of the essay, although others could be invoked—Augustine’s focus on the sinful nature of humans teaches his readers how to be humble political agents and also to release ourselves from egoism to others in the movement of love. While Mathewes imagines a primarily Christian audience both for Augustine and for his own writings, Gregory takes Augustine as a voice that all moderns might heed. For him, Augustine’s account of love, a topic underemphasized in contemporary liberal political theory, can serve as a bulwark for Western culture in general against the trends of “increasing self-absorption displayed in a rights- governed and consumer-oriented liberal culture” (2008, 369). Otherworldliness does political work, and, when it does that work, it becomes a specific kind of this-worldly ethic (thereby exploding a facile distinction between the natural and the supernatural in Augustine). If God is the true aim of the Christian, and if God is above all temporal things, then a temporal political order can only be our aim insofar as that political order supports the Christian’s striving after 178 Kavka and Rashkover the eternal God and sees itself as being judged by God. And if striving after the eternal God means following God’s command, it involves loving the neighbor as much as it loves the God, or seeing these two loves as rather flip sides of the same coin. As Gregory quotes Augustine’s On The Trinity (ca. 417), “[W]hen the mind loves God, and consequently as has been said remembers and understands him, it can rightly be commanded to love its neighbor as itself. . . . Now it loves with a straight, not a twisted love, now that it loves God” (2008, 345). In showing the limits of readings of Augustine, such as that of Hannah Arendt, that charge Augustine with privileging the otherworldly over the natural order, the new Augustinianism makes Christian politics into something other than, and better than, either political power-mongering or a private pietism. Most bluntly, for Mathewes and Gregory, Augustine makes Christian politics humble. This seems to be part and parcel of Gregory’s argument that sin and love in Augustine are dialectically related to each other. On the one hand, consciousness of sin produces love. Since sin involves self-aggrandizement and self-satisfaction—as Augustine wrote in the City of God, “[T]he first evil came, then, when man began to be pleased with himself, as if he were his own light” (1998, 610 [De civ. Dei 14.13])—turning toward God modulates the libido dominandi that places humans over God and places the satisfaction of desires as an agent’s end, externalizing the self into a community that ideally is one in which “all serve one another in charity” (Augustine 1998, 632 [De civ. Dei 14.28]; see also Mathewes 2007, 135). On the other hand, acts of love, if they are truly to be acts of love, require consciousness on the agent’s part of her or his sin- fulness. Neighbor love can never be self-satisfied; analyzing passages from Augustine’s Tractates on the First Epistle of John, Gregory claims that love “does not grasp the neighbor with an agenda” (2008, 253). Thus, since faith must be expressed—since there is no love of God without love of neighbor—it must be expressed humbly, with acknowledgment of what Robert A. Markus rightly described as Augustine’s sense of the “ ‘tragic’ character” (1970, 83) of all pre- eschaton historical existence, when the earthly city and the City of God “are indeed entangled and mingled with one another” (Augustine 1998, 49 [De civ. Dei 1.35]), giving history meaning but not clarity. Mathewes is more explicit about the healing powers of humility in the polis (2007, 108): Augustinians will urge “both those excessively in love with and those excessively hostile to a nation . . . to confess with humility to a faith in a Lord of history whose true face remains crucially hidden, and to acknowledge that we remain pilgrims still on the way, in a story whose author we are not.” Both Mathewes and Gregory are concerned to show that this Augustinian framework can be applied to a multicultural polity without it appearing that other citizens’ political options are constrained by the narrative frame of Jewish Encounter with Christianity 179 the Christian story. For Mathewes, it is the eschatological thrust of history that leads Christian citizens to be involved in their polities without trying to predetermine the result of their engagement. To not speak in the public square is to resign oneself to the meaninglessness of history; to keep wrestling with public disagreements is to be confident that “more is coming, that the new is not yet fully delivered to us, that we cannot come to conclusions yet” (Mathewes 2007, 134). As a result, Mathewes thinks of dialogue in the public square between people of different comprehensive doctrines (to use John Rawls’s phrase) as something different than either element of the taxonomy of religious dialogue introduced by Leora Batnitzky, in which dialogue is either mutual affirmation or judgment of one partner by the other (Batnitzky 1999; 2000, 157–62). The Augustinian Christian, for Mathewes, does not seek agreement with her conversation partner, hastening the peaceful end of history that can only be brought about by God, but neither does the Augustinian Christian claim the surety that would be necessary to judge (2007, 140). And Gregory ends his book by claiming that “ambivalence [about modernity] is a good Augustinian disposition, although it should not trump works of love and justice” (2008, 384). In other words, the new Augustinians ask, like Rodney King (beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991), why we can’t all get along. But unlike others who ask that question, they argue that the getting along requires not hoping too strongly that their desires can be satisfied. For them, politics offers neither verification nor falsification of their commitments; it only offers the time to love and to act justly. This minimal conception of the political makes tarrying in it a matter of ease. This assumes, however, that, when Christians express their neighbor-love, it is untempered by judgment. While this may be true of the actual and/or the possible Augustinian traditions—both Gregory and Mathewes are insistent that they are offering Augustinian accounts of politics, not Augustine’s account of politics— Augustine in The City of God raises what we take to be a key psychological point about how a Christian copes with a political sphere in which there are also non-Christian, and in particular Jewish, agents. As scholars who want to resist elisions of religious difference, and in particular Jewish-Christian difference, in discussions of religion in the public sphere, we find it necessary to test Mathewes and Gregory’s claims of the ease of Christian theopolitics by returning to Augustine’s texts. While their work may very well represent a need within Christian theological communities to articulate a Christian theology that shapes the secular world more than it is shaped by it, and while Augustine may be an apt figure onto whom Christian theologians might project such a desire, we think that turning to Augustine’s texts shows that Mathewes’s and 180 Kavka and Rashkover

Gregory’s theopolitical vision is of more use to Christian theologians than it is to anyone else. One way to test these claims is to link their vision with Augustine’s writings on Jews and Judaism, which have recently become an active locus for thinking through the possibilities of Jewish-Christian relations. Just before the turn of the millennium, Jeremy Cohen rooted medieval anti-Jewish stereotypes in Augustine’s witness myth, which read Psalms 59:12 (“slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might”) as commanding both that Christians ensure Jews’ survival and that they guarantee “that the conditions of their survival demonstrate the gravity of their error and the reality of their punishment” (1999, 33). On the other hand, in her recent Augustine and the Jews, Paula Fredriksen has argued that, within the context of Augustine’s own biography and place, his rhetorical construction of the Jew marked a turn away from the adversus Judaeos tradition of antiquity: “God himself, Augustine insisted, wanted Jews to remain Jews” (2008, xii), unlike earlier Christian theologians, according to Fredriksen’s patient and detailed reconstruction of Augustine’s views. Augustine’s defense of halakhic practice as something that “truly and appropriately fulfilled God’s command” was “the single brightest star in the constellation of his original ideas in Augustine’s theology of Judaism” (ibid., 316–17). Fredriksen’s account has been somewhat controversial, but not because other scholars have argued with her description of Augustine’s texts. Rather, the debate has been over what the significance of that description is. As both Jeremy Cohen (2009) and David Nirenberg (2009) have written, Augustine still serves as an authority for later theologians who use hostile anti-Jewish rhetoric, and that rhetoric had real historical events. So, while Augustine’s witness doctrine may have protected Jewish lives, it is also the case that, in 1146, Peter the Venerable asked King Louis VII of France to cease protecting Jews, following Augustine in invoking Psalm 59:12 (“slay them not, for God does not wish them to be entirely killed and altogether wiped out, but to be preserved for greater torment and reproach, like the fratricide Cain, in a life worse than death”). To protect Augustine from this reading, as Nirenberg points out (2009, 47), requires taking Augustine’s theology out of its historical reception “at the cost of de-materializing that thought, leaving it floating weightlessly outside of the gravity of history.” For Fredriksen, Augustine’s theology licenses her reading and not Peter the Venerable’s, but the criteria by which scholars might decide why Peter the Venerable is unjustified in his appropriation of Augustine (in a time and society where Roman law is no longer in force) are not to be found. The only inference that one might grasp at is the sense in Fredriksen’s book that affirming bare life—the pulsing of blood through a body—is all that one Jewish Encounter with Christianity 181 needs to affirm someone’s value and dignity. For her, and I assume for many in our post-Holocaust age, the notion of a “life worse than death” is apparently a meaningless phrase; the question over whether life support for those in persistent vegetative states is justifiable might give pause to such a belief. Like Mathewes and Gregory, Fredriksen describes the “stunning achievement” (2008, xx) of Augustine’s theology in a way that makes humility seem easy. If a great thinker like Augustine could affirm the justified nature of Jewish praxis, qal ve-ḥomer (a fortiori) why cannot non-Jews in contemporary multicultural societies, who are not nearly as stunning as Augustine was, do the same? The answer to this question, in our view, requires a fuller treatment of what it means for Christians to affirm that Jewish praxis is justified. As we see it (and as Fredriksen sees it), on the one hand, the justifiability of Jewish praxis exists only within a certain reading of sacred history. For without carnal Israel, there could be no Christianity: “Christ, Augustine insisted, was God in a male Jewish body, which was necessary for the perfect fulfillment of the law” (Fredriksen 2008, 317). Only Jesus the halakhic Jew could have been Christ. On the other hand, one could affirm the justifiability of Jewish praxis in an ahistorical manner, by being self-conscious about the necessary context-dependence of justification claims. If, as Jeffrey Stout has claimed, “being justified in believing something—being entitled to believe it—is a status that can vary from context to context” (2004, 231), then halakhic praxis is perhaps justified for Jews but not for others who make different inferences from biblical verses. This latter point is surely not Augustine’s view! But marking the difference between these accounts of justifiability highlights one of the most important stakes for us of Augustine’s heilgeschichtlich account of halakha, one that makes the link between “slay them not” and “scatter them” in Psalms 59:12 a far tighter one than Fredriksen’s account would have it. As Gregory notes, most scholars of Augustine find the core of his political thought in book 19 of City of God, where the humility of Augustine’s virtue ethics is made clear (Augustine 1998, 924 [De civ. Dei 19.4]): true virtues “do, however, claim that, though human life is compelled to be miserable by all the great evils of this world, it is happy in the hope of the world to come, and in the hope of salvation. For how else could it be happy, seeing that it is not yet saved?” In this relativization of the importance of this worldly politics, a space for pluralism opens up. As Oliver O’Donovan (2004) has noted, such an argument was central to Robert Markus’s Saeculum. In the final chapter to that book, Markus wrote,

Christian hope, just because it is eschatological, resists the invest- ing of immediate projects, policies and social ideals, with any absolute 182 Kavka and Rashkover

character. It draws the believer into participation in political life and into full membership of his society without tethering him to any ideology or any final political vision. . . . In the saeculum we must be content with the provisional, the ultimately ambiguous, the “secular”; for the ulti- mates are here inextricably intertwined, and must not be prematurely unraveled. . . . Even Christians have not generally learned to welcome the disintegration of a “Christian society” as a profound liberation for the Gospel. Augustinian theology should at least undermine Christian opposition to an open, pluralist, secular society. (1970, 173)

Yet, as O’Donovan remarked, this reading of book 19 of City of God ignores an important fact about how Augustine perceived secular society: “for Augustine, the earthly city, with its earthly peace, did have an ultimate commitment in which all its members shared, ‘the love of self to the exclusion of love of God.’ . . . ‘Love of self’ is no mere circumlocution for diversity of ends. It is the name of a terrible moral unity” (2004, 58). Implicit in O’Donovan’s criticism of Markus, for us, is the premise that Augustine’s contentment with the ambiguity of history is driven by his confidence that Christians will enjoy the fruits of their faith in the peace of the heavenly city. More precisely, it is Augustine’s belief that Christians have more reason to be confident in the ends of the Christian message, should they believe in it, than in the ends of either pagan or Jewish messages. In other words, the power of book 19 of City of God is a result of the content of the previous books, which make the argument that these other ways of life will not produce the results that their followers desire. The four preceding books of Heilsgeschichte, narrating the histories of the City of God and the earthly city, are essential here. Especially important is book 18, where the locus classicus for Augustine’s theology of the Jews is to be found (including one version of his exegesis of Psalm 59). The function of this historical narrative is to bolster Augustine’s readers’ belief that the church will carry people through history to a blessed end. This is apparent from the end of book 15, in which Augustine writes that, after learning the true nature of antediluvian history, “no one, no matter how stubborn, will dare to suppose that the story of the Flood was written without purpose. . . . Rather, we are to believe that the writing of this account had a wise purpose, that the events recorded are historical; that they have a symbolic meaning also, and that that symbolic meaning is intended to prefigure the Church” (Augustine 1998, 692 [De civ. Dei 15.27]). But in the remainder of the history, it becomes clear that the argument for Christian eschatological confidence cannot exist without arguments against any confidence that other ways of life can bring about the supreme good. Jewish Encounter with Christianity 183

It is apparent in book 16, when Augustine separates God’s two promises to Abraham: the promise of terrestrial independence and biological fertility and the “far greater promise” that concerns Abraham’s “spiritual” seed, “whereby he is not only the father of the nation of Israel, but of all the nations that follow in the footsteps of his faith” (Augustine 1998, 766 [De civ. Dei 17.2]). It is apparent in the immanent critique of philosophy in book 18, where Augustine takes the disagreement between philosophers as evident of philosophy’s inability to inculcate proper ends among the people, as opposed to the uniformity of biblical prophecy that sets out a clear teleological arc for its readers and interpreters (Augustine 1998, 879–83 [De civ. Dei 18.41]). And most clearly it is apparent in what Augustine has to say not only about the Hebrew Bible but also about Jews. When Augustine’s readers read about Jews’ inability to read—about their “amazing blindness to Him Who was promised and is now so manifestly declared” (Augustine 1998, 792 [De civ. Dei 17.8])—and are taught to associate this illiteracy with the trope of Jews’ con- torted bodies and are taught to read this other trope as signifying the inner viciousness of Jews—their conviction of the wholesomeness of Christianity is verified:

What wonder is it, then, if those whose eyes were “darkened, that they see not” [Psalm 69:23] do not see even such manifest truths? What wonder is it if those whose backs are always bent, so that they bend down towards earthly things, do not behold the things of heaven? For these bodily images are to be understood as referring to vices of the soul. (Augustine 1998, 812 [De civ. Dei 17.19])

It is from these passages and others that Karl Löwith rightly saw that, for Augustine, “it is, in particular, the historical destiny of the Jews which reveals to Augustine the history of the world as a court of justice and thereby the meaningfulness of purposeful history” (1949, 170). Our point in citing these passages is not to expose Augustinian anti-Judaism. We take the point of Fredriksen and other scholars that Augustine’s theology is not identical to that of the earlier adversus Judaeos tradition. Nevertheless, what Augustine pointed out in these passages of City of God was not simply a list of traits that he saw as belonging to Jews; when taken in their narrative context, he pointed out that it is a real possibility that Christians might need a narrative of “adversaries” to bolster their own adherence to the Christian tradition. Augustinian Heilsgeschichte means that halakhic praxis is only justified for Jews to display the fact that it is not justified for anyone else, a sign that should be read by non-Jews “correctly” by virtue of the Jews’ being scattered throughout 184 Kavka and Rashkover a diaspora. Justification is, to some degree, context-dependent for Augustine; but, in this case, the fact that one context is more justified than all others does not produce the kind of humility that Stout derives from his account of justification (2004, 233ff.). In other words, while Augustine’s philosophy of history would not prove the correctness of Christianity, it still was plastic enough to prove the falsity of at least one other form of life; those who hold the reins of history could steer it in order to demonstrate this more strongly, as Peter the Venerable asked King Louis VII to do. As we suggested in our introduction, this psychological need for a religious adversary is not unique to Augustine; we see it in Mendelssohn’s and Cohen’s arguments that Judaism is ethically superior to Christianity, as well as in Franz Rosenzweig’s account of the eternal enmity between Jew and Christian throughout history in the Star of Redemption. If this is true—and we affirm that it is true for a prominent strand of the canon of modern Jewish philosophy that has been handed down to us—then we think that the political theology opened up by Gregory and Mathewes and other new Augustinians is limited in its possible effectiveness. Mathewes, in acknowledging religious difference, described interreligious dialogue as simply gloomy in its deferral of consensus. Yet what may be going on in these scenes of dialogue—at least when they are between Jews and Christians and possibly when they are between members of any two groups in which the confidence displayed by one is a threat to the confidence sought by the other—is not just the deferral of consensus but an act of judgment that prohibits love of neighbor from attaining its full flower- ing in our contemporary multicultural polity. Again, Rosenzweig’s account of Jewish-Christian dialogue is instructive. This dialogue is one of judgment by one religious community on another. This does not mean that it is essentially unloving; we judge and are judged by those whom we love. Nevertheless, “judgment becomes love only when the beloved allows her- or himself to be loved. But to be loved is to be wholly changed and transformed and it is this change and transformation that Judaism and Christianity each refuse in respect to the other” (Batnitzky 2000, 162; see also Batnitzky 1999, 535) when they insist on the other as an inevitable adversary. Gregory too writes as if the boundaries between religious communities were immaterial for neighbor-love. Agreeing with Thomas Breidenthal, he describes the “Augustinian self” as one who “loves the neighbor in God who lovingly identifies with the neighbor as God’s own” (2008, 240). Yet God does not lovingly identify with the blindness of the Jew, either for Augustine or (in our view) for an Augustinian. For God sees, while the Jew does not. It is for reasons similar to this that we read Hannah Arendt as also having missed a salient point in her Love and Saint Augustine. Arendt, whom Gregory follows, Jewish Encounter with Christianity 185 saw neighbor-love as extending to every individual in the human race and saw the singularity of the neighbor as that which relieves the nihilism that comes with historical determinism. Yet at one point near the end of her dissertation, Arendt rightly states that Augustine’s account of neighbor-love is an account of a relation that loves “only insofar as divine grace can be at work in” the neighbor (1996, 111). Here, in Arendt’s blindness as to the difference between various neighbors, the humanism of any new Augustinianism is threatened. For if the work of divine grace might require Christians to believe that divine grace is not at work in others—others whose backs are bent and are looking away from heaven—then neighbor-love does not extend as far as Arendt thought (or Gregory thinks) it does. In the case of both Mathewes and Gregory, it seems to us that their Augustinian political theologies require a deeper account of how theology engenders political emotions for Christians and Jews, and a deeper account of what believers psychologically need to believe in order not to fall into despair before the eschaton arrives. We make this argument as Jewish philosophers. Like our ancestors in this field, it is our task to interrupt the easy equation that majority communities might make between their own belief systems and the universal. Nevertheless, our ancestors were at times pressured to convert to Christianity by their interlocutors or to battle a culture that saw little or nothing of value in Judaism. Neither of these is true today, for us. And so, unlike our ancestors, we make this argument out of friendship; Gregory and Mathewes are first and foremost our colleagues. One might, therefore, infer that the stakes are smaller than they were earlier in modernity. And, in some way, this is true; we are simply calling friends to make their theologies more precise and reminding them that theologies should respond, as they have responded in the past, both to tradition and to the shapes of human lives and needs. Nevertheless, in the increased environment of political and social equality in which our theological activity takes place, we see a new problem that twenty-first-century Jewish philosophy must solve. ∵ Our affirmation that a critique of Christianity must remain a part of Jewish philosophical thinking has everything to do with the unique configuration of our shared graduate education, in which we were affected by a residual Christian triumphalism in philosophical theology. However, the target of critique cannot be selective. To be a critic should also involve being a critic of oneself, modeling the very theological humility that Gregory and Mathewes try to associate with the Augustinian tradition and refusing to take the position from which the critic speaks for granted, lest it become an unexamined Jewish identitarianism 186 Kavka and Rashkover that speaks from a position of superior and infallible truth. Immanent critique of Christianity is a way of affirming Jewish particularity—letting Christians know once again that there are people outside the church and that they are armed with arguments—and it does so in a register that calls Christians to consistency or to more complex notions of “Augustinian” or “psyche.” But on its own, it makes for a very superficial kind of Jewish philosophy—that is, a discourse that would aim to show that Judaism is not merely a set of opinions about the right, the good, and the commanded but a set of truths i.e., examined claims. If philosophy moves from opinion to truth (as Socrates argued in the Gorgias), then should not Jewish philosophy, if it is to be truly philosophical, do the same? If twenty-first-century Jewish thought is going to come to terms with the persistent tension between Judaism and Christianity, then we maintain that it must not only practice a logic of resistance but must also fully examine the assumption of a stable conception of Judaism, in the name of which any correction of Christian theological thinking has been and might be presented. In addition, it must think through these practices of Jewish critique. Critique cannot be the end of the story, because Jewish philosophers must speak in the name of something (a text, a tradition, an idea, a canon). Nevertheless, in granting authority to a segment of the philosophical-theological past, they must also be aware of the assumptions that invariably accompany their use of the past. And so, in this section, we return to some of the Jewish thinkers whose work has proved so formative for us. Their texts have been key roads along which we traveled and came to see what Jewish philosophy might be. We return to them again, but this time seeking to distance ourselves from our earlier unreflective appropriations of them, hoping to begin to provide the guidelines for our own future efforts in developing a postidentitar- ian Jewish philosophy. Often the story of modern and contemporary Jewish thought is described as the effort to reassert the authority of Jewish law within the framework of Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Yet equally significant, and a central focus of much of our own work (see Kavka and Rashkover 2004), is the dominant effort within modern and contemporary Jewish thought to recover a Jewish theological realism—that is, an account of divine objectivity—and to do so in response to the influence of Christianity on Jewish thinking. We now think that there is an apparent contradiction in this theological retrieval— one that, because it is only apparent, contains the seeds of its own resolution and repair. Though presented as a Jewish response to Christian betrayals of the monotheistic and revelatory God of Israel, this very theological realism unwittingly casts a shadow of doubt over the possibility of theological knowledge. Jewish Encounter with Christianity 187

Assertions of theological reality, divine presence, and divine activity are found alongside a dramatic and insistent assertion of the unknowability of God. As a result, the Jewish effort to recover theology has gotten itself into a bit of jam—a Barthian jam, to be specific. Readers familiar with the second edition of Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and his subsequent work can recognize the motif of a wholly other God, who exists over and above a sinful humanity, in the account of the theological realism that characterizes the work of Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and others. The influence of Barth on twentieth-century Jewish thought is widely recognized (Rashkover 2005; Moyn 2005, 113–63) and is most clearly visible in the form of a presupposition about the logic of the divine-human relation. However, this logic produces effects that oppose the intentions of the thinkers who adopted it. In short, a theological realism rooted in a wholly other God and an absolutely finite humanity does not result in the recovery of theological claims; it results in the undoing of them and, consequently, destabilizes the apparent basis from which Jewish thought sought to respond to the ever-encroaching influence of Christian theology. At first glance, such a charge seems wholly unfounded. Is it not the case, as Rashkover has herself previously argued (Rashkover 2011), that Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption and later writings produce an account of the justifiability of theological discourse as the narration of the event of the divine-human encounter? Similarly, does not Leo Strauss’s Philosophy and Law offer grounds for making theological claims that are dependent on an account of the divine as a lawgiver and sovereign ruler? Do not both present viable accounts of the justifiability of God-talk despite the limits of our knowledge of this same God? Nevertheless, inquiry into the justifiability of theological claims in light of divine alterity presupposes an oppositional relation between justification and truth. While clearly a claim can be both rightful and true, it is also possible for a claim to be rightful and not true or even incapable of truth altogether. It is the last of these scenarios that we think is the case, since the condition of theological realism stipulates that God is beyond the bounds of human knowledge. In this instance, the inquiry into justifiability stands as a substitute for an inquiry into the possibility of truth-claims; justifiability presupposes a lack of access to truth. Rather than support divine objectivity, the discourse of justifiability works as a theological conversation-stopper. Conversely, when the possibility of access to divine reality is acknowledged, the question of whether we can defend our justified claims as knowledge-claims—the question of whether we have the right to say that we know anything about God—does not arise, and it becomes possible once again to issue theological claims that, whether right or wrong, are, nonetheless, taken seriously as knowledge-claims about God. 188 Kavka and Rashkover

In other words, the modern Jewish philosophical canon speaks as if knowledge of God were possible, yet God is described as so radically transcendent that knowledge of God is simultaneously impossible. The assumptions driving this problematic logic are, ironically enough, an amalgamation of Christian theological structures and Kantian epistemology. When appropriated by the above-mentioned Jewish thinkers and passed on to students, they give rise to a contradictory (and antinomian) theological position. One might list these assumptions as follows:

1. God is wholly other, for the claim that God is real entails God’s hyperes- sentiality, or God’s status beyond the being of spatiotemporal existents. 2. If God is wholly other, then we are so different from God as to be incapable of knowing God. 3. Our knowledge is that of a finite creature who cannot mirror objects in the world in subjective mental concepts. In the case of God, this gap between subject and object is amplified because God, unlike normal objects, exists beyond our sense intuition.

The first assumption concerns the identification of a divine realism with a God beyond being. Both Rosenzweig and Strauss maintain this assumption. As well, each insists that claims about divine reality are inextricable from this identification of God as beyond being. Such a position, we now think, is mystifying. Once we apprehend how, we will strengthen our case that it operates as an externally imposed assumption and be able to consider both what their positions would look like without it and what possibilities lie ahead for those of us so profoundly influenced by them. The assumption that divine reality is associated with a God who is beyond being is, in both Rosenzweig and Strauss, linked to their accounts of divine revelation or engagement with persons. Both assume that there is an event of divine revelation through which persons are exposed to another whom they cannot control and who thereby asserts authority over them. God’s reality comes to be tied to a transcendence that is other than being, or other than what can be comprehended, because divine reality is associated with a divine commandingness or authoritative alterity. God is real because God is authoritative over us. It is not surprising that Jewish thinkers would have gravitated toward such a position. It seems to resonate with the Torah’s own position on divine revelation and human understanding reflected in the Israelites response to God’s command: “all that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Still, this link between divine authority and absolute transcendence appears odd. Why would we succumb to an authority about which we know nothing? Jewish Encounter with Christianity 189

Moreover, how would we obey an authority about whom we know nothing?2 To link God’s authority to God’s unknowability is confounding. This link might be less confounding if one supposed that this same God issued specific commandments or instructions indicative of what obedience to God entailed. Yet if such commandments were really a point of access between persons and God, by virtue of this mediation, they would betray the alleged dramatic alterity of the divine. One might also ease the oddness of the link between divine authority and divine unknowability by following a Rosenzwieigan path and imagining an authoritative God beyond being who loves us (Rosenzweig 1970, 181–82; 1988, 201–03). Nevertheless, with such an admission, we think that Rosenzweig also ended up posing a powerful challenge to divine unknowability, for by virtue of its effects upon us, divine love enters into and participates in being. It therefore becomes knowable in some sense, at least in the same sense that we find other experiences of love knowable and communicable. In other words, the love of neighbor that Rosenzweig described as the human response to divine love—the “publication of the miracle” of divine love (1970, 183–84; 1988, 204–5)—assumes that there is some aspect of the “miracle” that is communicable and accessible to our knowing. Why would Rosenzweig and Strauss have retained such an identity between divine objectivity and radical transcendence when it makes little sense? As their later readers, we stand in sufficient temporal distance from them to recognize that they inherited this notion from the theological culture and discourse of their day. However, if twenty-first-century Jewish philosophy were to leave behind the assumption that both divine objectivity and divine transcendence were necessary elements of any thinking worthy of the name “Jewish philosophy,” it need not fall into the trap of accepting complete divine knowability. For example, we may, as Spinoza suggested, have an adequate knowledge of God (substance) even when such an adequate knowledge is within the limits of the human perspective. I can be right about what I know even if I do not know everything.3

2 For a discussion of the pragmatic and, therefore, humanly generated character of specific norms as they develop from a nonpropositional account of divine command, see Kavka and Rashkover 2004. 3 There is no false but only partial or incomplete knowledge in Spinoza’s view. All knowledge is true but most of it is incomplete: “Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge . . . but falsity cannot consist in absolute privation, nor again in absolute ignorance, for to be ignorant and to err are different,” while “all ideas are in God and insofar as they are related to God, they are true” (Spinoza 2002, 264 [Ethics IIp35–36]). 190 Kavka and Rashkover

The insistence on divine unknowability does not stand alone in Rosenz- weig’s and Strauss’s (and other twentieth-century Jewish thinkers’) work but is tied to two related claims. Assumption 2 above, on its own, would be enough to support the unknowability of the divine; as finite and limited, persons are said to be incapable of having knowledge of a God who is wholly other. Still, Rosen- zweig and Strauss also assume the Kantian profile of human epistemology, which, when added to the caricature of human finitude, deepens the claim concerning divine unknowability (assumption 3). For Kant, human knowledge emerges out of the distinction between concepts and intuitions, with concepts provided by the subject and intuitions deriving from the object (Kant 1998, 193ff. [B75ff.]). Persons are therefore by nature distanced from the knowable world; only a particular synthetic arrangement between concepts and intuitions successfully links the two. Even when we claim to know the world, such knowledge can be subject to doubt given the implicit structural difference between our ideas and the objects with which they are to be coordinated. Moreover, if for Kant, knowledge of the sensory world is shadowed by the persistent difference between concepts and intuitions, access to a God outside of sense-intuition is theoretically impossible. In this way, the Kantian epistemological divide between subject and object offers the backdrop to the assumption in twentieth-century Jewish philosophy of the unknowing finite recipient of divine revelation. This configuration of assumptions is an amalgamation of Christian theology and Kantian epistemology, as can be evidenced by the similarities between twentieth-century Jewish philosophy and Barth’s earlier account,4 as well as the appearance of this argument even earlier in Hegel’s 1802 essay “Faith and Knowledge.” Hegel’s description and diagnosis of the philosophy of his day parallel our own account of the plight of modern and contemporary Jewish thought. The central thesis of the essay consists of two claims. First, the Enlightenment’s conception of reason as triumphant over religion is illusory since it describes an intellect limited by the restrictions of subjectivity, i.e., the perpetual difference between the subject and the object of its knowledge. In other words, the Enlightenment promotes the negativity of reason and its indebtedness to a beyond of faith from which it remains eternally separated. Second, the focus on the finite self characteristic of Enlightenment

4 In the second edition of Epistle to the Romans, Barth wrote, “We know that God is He whom we do not know, and that our ignorance is precisely the problem and the source of our knowledge. . . . The recognition of absolute heteronomy under which we stand is itself an autonomous recognition; and this is precisely that which may be known of God” (Barth 1968, 46). Jewish Encounter with Christianity 191 reason derives from a Protestant principle. Long before Barth’s insistence on the wholly other God and the finitude and sinful character of human persons, Protestantism (suggested Hegel) took “as its sublime aspect . . . feeling [Empfindung], the love filled with eternal longing. . . . What it seeks and what is not given to it in intuition is the Absolute and the eternal” (Hegel 1977a, 58; 1986, 290–91). Both Protestant and Enlightenment thinkers hypostatized the difference between the finite and the infinite. Taken together, this structural amalgamation of Enlightenment thought and Protestant cultural thinking produces the absurdity of a reason hailed for its nothingness and eternally humbled before a God whom it cannot know. Our discovery of this antinomy in thinkers whose work has shaped our own has had significant effects on how we think about the project of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand, we have awoken from the slumber that is our own prior appropriation of this logic. For years, both of us have taken for granted the Jewish character of a logic of divine transcendence and unknowability. On the other hand, recognition of this apparent antinomy offers guidance for how we might move forward in our own work in Jewish philosophy. To understand how, we will now point to examples of these assumptions within Rosenzweig and Strauss and show how there are resources in their own thinking for ridding their works of this antinomy, leading to a noncontradictory (and potentially nonantinomian) account of the divine-human relation. We can begin with Rosenzweig’s work since it is the easier to assess. It is common knowledge among scholars that Rosenzweig’s work presents a structure of divine alterity and command in relation to an account of human finitude and theological not-knowing. One need only turn to the Star’s account of revelation drawn in part from sections of Genesis and the lovers’ testimony in the Song of Songs to identify the structure of the unknowable God and finite person. That Rosenzweig identifies divine love as the motivation for divine obedience (Rosenzweig 1988, 199; 1970, 177) does not in his view subject divine alterity to the conditions of being. Rosenzweig holds that this love is “other” from the love we know. To publicize it is to express it in and through language of wish or verification premised on the memory and hope for more of it.5

5 Rosenzweig writes, “Thus the soul must pray for the coming of the kingdom. God once descended and founded his kingdom. The soul prays for the future repetition of this miracle. . . . [R]evelation climaxes in an unfulfilled wish, in the cry of an open question. That the soul has the courage to wish thus . . . shows the completeness of the trust reposed in God . . . but to fulfill the wish—that is beyond its power” (1970, 185; 1988, 206). 192 Kavka and Rashkover

Rosenzweig’s account in the Star falls prey to the antinomy described above. How can human publication of, or witness to, God take place when the language employed in witnessing is an inadequate expression of the divine reality? Moreover, Rosenzweig’s account of obedience stumbles in the face of a mystifying claim to authority. For all of the comparisons between Rosenzweig and Martin Buber on law, there is far less difference between the two than one might initially think. Rosenzweig insisted that the God of revelation is a commanding God and there is an inextricable link between commandment (Gebot) and specific law (Gesetz). Rosenzweig claimed in “The Builders” that law “must again become commandment” (1965, 85; 1984, 707). It must; therefore, it can. In a letter dated June 24, 1924, Buber contested such inextricability: “I do not believe that revelation is ever a formulation of law [Gesetzgebung]; and in the fact, that from revelation always develops the positing of law, I see the fact of human self-contradiction, the fact of humanity” (1972–75, 2:196; see Rosenzweig 1965, 111 [translation altered]). For his part, Rosenzweig replied that “the difference between us is a trifle, nothing inconceivable” since, in his own estimation, the link between commandment and law does not override the difference between them such that “even for him who observes the Law, revelation is not what you call law-giving [Gesetzgebung]” (Rosenzweig 1965, 113; see Buber 1972–75, 2:198). As David Novak has interpreted the exchange, “both Rosenzweig and Buber seem to be saying that revelation is just that, revelation and nothing else” (1995, 86). Rosenzweig’s position on revelation seems to preclude the possibility of law-giving at Sinai, thereby leaving the development of Gesetz in the hands of recipients only, since “the only thing that can be experienced as divine is God’s direct revelation of his love” (ibid., 90). The implications of such an account are significant. Rosenzweig’s supposed support for a life of halakha becomes little more than support for a humanly contrived response to a mysterious divine authority. The determination of specific norms is at best a good guess of divine intent and at worst mere projections of human wishes. Rosenzweig’s phenomenology waxes Lutheran6 by virtue of its inability to offer an account of the possibility of a divine law that would be available to and exercisable by persons. Despite this analysis, we remain convinced that the implicit Christian influence on Rosenzweig’s thought is an unnecessary imposition. One could

6 In On Liberty, Luther describes persons’ inability to do God’s will as follows: “[T]he entire scriptures is divided into two parts: commandments and promises. Although the commandments teach things that are good, the things taught are not done as soon as they are taught. . . . [A]s we fare with one commandment, so we fare with all for it is equally impossible to keep any of them” (2003, 12). Jewish Encounter with Christianity 193 substantiate this position in a number of ways. One strategy would be to capi- talize on Rosenzweig’s use of biblical texts as the bases for his own positions and demonstrate how these biblical texts do not presuppose an account of radical alterity and finitude but, nonetheless, do support a more moderate account of divine transcendence and authority, which is commensurate with an account of halakha as divine. Genesis 22:1, in which God calls to Abraham, who replies by saying hineni (here I am), works as one such model. In the Star, Rosenzweig used this verse to convey the purity of the divine command (because it “makes no provision for the future and [therefore is not] law” [1970, 177; 1988, 197) and the finitude of the subject who, Rosenzweig stated, can only respond with an initial “I have sinned.” “The soul which God summons with the command to love” Rosenzweig continues, “is ashamed to acknowledge to him its love, for it can only acknowledge its love by acknowledging its weakness at the same time” (1970, 179; 1988, 200). But this is not Abraham’s response to God. In the biblical account. Abraham’s hineni signifies a willingness to obey and a sense of his own ability to obey. Moreover, such a willingness and ability is, at least from a rabbinic7 and a Maimonidean8 perspective, predicated in part on Abraham’s prior knowledge of God. Rosenzweig imposed a dramatic distance between God and persons that is present neither in the biblical account nor in the Jewish tradition’s later elucidation of it. Indeed, imposing such a distance seems to us to be a greater justification for a challenge to theological authority than its exercise. Another approach would be to examine areas of Rosenzweig’s philosophical work, identify instances at which he appropriated the assumption of human finitude, and imagine his thought without it. For example, in his 1925 essay “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig described the first part of The Star of Redemption as a critique of knowledge of essences, by which he means knowledge predicated on a division between subject and object (1984, 143–44; 2000, 115–17). Rosenzweig’s challenge parallels ours; his claim is that predicative knowledge is unstable because it is based on the difference between subject and object. In his analysis, to say that x is y is to nullify x, for if any x is y, then clearly it is not x! On the other side of the predicative divide, to say that x is y is equally to nullify y, since what it means to be y is now predicated on something

7 According to Genesis Rabbah 39:1, Abraham inferred the existence of God by contemplating the universe, “Can it be that the universe and all that exists within it is without a directing mind?” See Novak 1995, 132. 8 See Maimonides 1963, 379 (II:39): “Thus Abraham taught the people and explained to them by means of speculative proofs that the world has but one deity, that He has created all the things that are other than Himself.” 194 Kavka and Rashkover other than itself.9 Structured propositionally as concept and intuition (subject and object), thought maintains an internal tension. Implicit within such a structure is a tendency to assert one aspect of the structure, either universal concept or particular intuition, as the essential and determinative element of a claim. Either the concept determines the intuition, or the intuition determines the concept. In an early essay, “Atheistic Theology” (1914), Rosenzweig used the Jewish people as an example of this dilemma. If, in the early nineteenth century, the Jewish people were the bearers of a “world-renewing ‘Idea’ ”— fully determined by their inner concept, but thereby merely accidental and not integral to that essence—then the rise of Zionism posited that the particular people was the idea, a “content of faith [for] a positivistically meticulous generation” that was unable to derive a transhistorical concept from any portrait of the Jewish people at any moment in time (Rosenzweig 1984, 691–92; 2000, 17). In either case, attempts to privilege either concepts or intuitions as sites of “essence” do little to alleviate the difference between them and the problems that emerge from thinking through how judgments (say, about the Jewish people) might be justified. Consequently, Rosenzweig held that such propositions will succumb inevitably to their own opposites. They determine their worth by the extent that they predominate over other points of view. However, to determine worth through power in this fashion is to succumb to the master-slave paradox. As Hegel made clear in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the master needs the slave as much as the slave needs the master in order to acquire “a mind of his own” (Hegel 1970, 155; 1977b, 119 [par. 196]). In the Rosenzweigian context, when one pursues the knowledge of essences, the articulation of knowledge-claims privileges the essence only in relation to so-called nonessential elements of an object (either the universal vis-à-vis the particular or vice versa). The object itself, in its multifacetedness, destabilizes and nullifies knowledge-claims made from any perspective. Nevertheless, Rosenzweig also held that the nullification of the possibility of knowledge of essences does not entail the nullification of the possibility of something about which the knower tries (but fails) to capture in propositional terms. There is a something or somethings to which both the concept and the intuition refer, even if neither refers adequately to it. Still, this something or these somethings—be it God, or be they persons or things in our world—cannot be known; they can only be experienced. Rosenzweig’s “new thinking” is, therefore, beyond knowledge understood within a Kantian structure of synthetic judgments. To speak of “knowing” is not to speak of capturing the

9 For further discussion, see Rashkover 2011, 157ff. Jewish Encounter with Christianity 195 essence of a thing but to speak of engaging with the unknowable facticity of a thing and to narrate the encounter: “To know God, world and man means to know what in the tenses of actuality they do or what happens to them” (Rosenzweig 1984, 150; 2000, 124). Rosenzweig was right to challenge assumption number 3 above and to open philosophical-theological thought out onto a different account of knowledge. But such a conclusion is only partially correct. But while Rosenzweig did successfully challenge Kant’s account of synthetic knowledge, he did not challenge the conclusion of the Kantian approach. Both affirmed the finitude of the subjective knower. While Kant and Rosenzweig differ with regard to what counts as the best knowledge possible, they agree in their assumption that complete knowledge of world, persons, or God remains off the table as a possibility for human knowers overall. Kant famously maintains the thing- in-itself as unavailable to theoretical cognition (Kant 1998, 360 [B306]), and Rosenzweig’s healthy thinking presupposes the unknowability of God, world, and persons. Because of this fundamental incapacity for truth, Rosenzweig’s theological account begins with a God beyond being, precipitates the antinomy of a theological recovery minus the prospect of theological knowledge. Still, Rosenzweig’s critique could yield a different conclusion, one that we think could present a new paradigm for Jewish philosophy, in particular one based in an account of the knowability of God. Consider Rosenzweig’s review of the failure of knowledge of essences. One might say that what takes place here is a demonstration that each side of a dichotomous relation has its identity only in relation to the other. Neither the “essential” nor the “nonessential” exists independently; both are only in and through the relation. On Rosenzweig’s account, to say that x is y, or that y is x, is not to make a statement of identity; it is to make a statement of predication, in which the “is” marks the relation between each allegedly independent element. If we cannot separate the essence of a subject apart from certain predicates (or any predicate at all), then it is this relationality between x and y that is primary. To see this as a failure in knowledge is already to be caught in what Rosenzweig showed to be the hornet’s nest of essential thinking. Where in the canon of modern philosophy—whether Jewish or non- Jewish—might one find resources to proceed with such a recognition of the primacy of relation, whether between subject and object, concept and intuition, or universal and particular? Two possibilities emerge. First, one might consider the relation between the subject and the objects it intuits as a Spinozistic substance, or common essence, in which both are defined qua idea and ideatum, or idea and extension. The order of ideas is the same as the order of things, Spinoza argues; to appreciate the identity of the former in the latter 196 Kavka and Rashkover is to recognize the lawfulness of matter and the embodiedness of law.10 While such a route does not immediately seem to open up possibilities for accounts of Jewish law in particular, there is no reason to suggest that these possibilities are closed off once and for all, if one follows Lenn Goodman’s suggestion that we understand substance as God, absolute in thought, extension, and goodness. As such, divine laws would not be limited to physical or natural orders but would constitute moral orders as well.11 A second possible move would follow a path presented by F. W. J. Schelling in his Philosophy of Art and the Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy. In each, Schelling presents the relationality between concepts and intuitions, or between the ideal and the real, as individual instances of the absolute. In the Further Presentations, Schelling maintains that, if the ontological argument asserts the necessary existence of the concept of the divine, such an identity between concept and reality cannot be delimited to something outside human conception (Schelling 1962, 4:364–65; 2001, 378–79). Rather, the identity between concept and existence in God means that God is the absolute concept that knows itself as identical with its absolute existence. All reality is included in the identity between the ideal and the real; every instance of their relation is a full expression of this absolute. Since the absolute is the all, then the all is and participates in the absolute. Our recognition of the covalence of subject and object is a reflection of the self-knowing of the absolute, as well as our participation in it. Schelling differentiated his account of the absolute from a Christian insistence on the separation between the divine and the human. But while Schelling described art as an objective representation of the absolute, it was also the case that “pure suffering can never be the subject matter of art” (Schelling 1982, 221; 1989, 64). The alienation of the divine and the human perpetuated by the Christian account of sin and passion could be repaired through aesthetic means, allowing individuals to appreciate the absolute

10 Spinoza 2002, 234 (Ethics Ip29): “Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are from the necessity of the divine nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way.” 11 Drawing out the implications of Spinoza’s monism, Goodman compares Spinoza’s account of the ubiquity of the divine to Maimonides’s notion of the unitive vision of the absolute. For him, both assert the same logic. Maimonides’ “blueprint matches Spinoza’s: monism on the upper storeys opens out onto . . . a naturalistic scientific enterprise and an integrated ethical program. The style may differ. For Maimonides, like Bahya, fills the space with the ethics and ritual of Halakha. Spinoza sets out the sparer furnishings of a more generic life plan. . . . The monistic clerestory remains and preserves its articulation to the main body of theory and practice. For both are Mosaic” (Goodman 2002, 24). Jewish Encounter with Christianity 197 and its positive identification with human knowledge.12 An inquiry into the utility of such a theological position for Judaism would be tricky, especially since Schelling identifies pagan mythology as the epitome of the apprehension of the absolute. Nonetheless, Schelling’s conception of the absolute moves far closer to Jewish accounts of the divine-human relation than the Barthian insistence on their radical separation does. One might even consider Martin Buber’s I-You relation as an example of such an account, since the relation between subject and object that emerges from Schelling’s analysis might resonate with Buber’s account of the relation between the I and You. Such a possibility would demonstrate a possible route of repair of the problems that bedevil Buber’s attempt to narrate how the eternal You relates to persons.13 While a full examination of these possibilities requires additional work, they do mark the beginning of a recovery of a Jewish theological knowledge that reorients how we think about knowledge in general. On the one hand, it moves thought away from the separation between subject and object characteristic of Kantian and Protestant assessments of the conditions and limits of human knowledge. On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of access to a knowable absolute, knowledge-claims no longer struggle to achieve justificatory status but express partial or incomplete but never absolutely false accounts of reality. Any effort to reconsider the turn to a logic of divine transcendence and unknowability in Jewish thought as the salient difference between Judaism and a supposed hegemony of Christian theology must examine the work of Leo Strauss. It is not surprising that we find ourselves in the company of colleagues who, deeply influenced by Rosenzweig’s covenantal logic, also found themselves drawn to Strauss’s work (Novak 1996, Batnitzky 2006). In certain respects, this is because Strauss amplifies the separation between reason and revelation implicit in Rosenzweig’s account of a transcendent and unknowable God and identifies this structure as characteristically Jewish. Still, like Rosenzweig, Strauss was deeply influenced by Protestant theology. Although Strauss wrote Philosophy and Law in 1935 to recover Jewish theology from

12 Schelling 1982, 234; 1989, 74: “[W]e can assert that until that time in the yet undetermined and distant future when the world spirit itself has completed the great poem upon which it now reflects, and when the succession of the modern world has transformed itself into a simultaneity—until that point, every great poet is called to structure from this evolving mythological world . . . from this world he is to structure into a whole that particular part revealed to him.” 13 See, for example, mysterious sentences such as “Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the being of the world finds him whom one cannot seek” (Buber 1970, 127; 1962, 1:131). 198 Kavka and Rashkover the influence of Christian theology, that book is also suffused with Barthian- Kantian thinking. In Strauss’s view, the modern focus on human religious consciousness common to modern Christian and Jewish thought is a residue of medieval Christian scholasticism. Scholasticism’s identification of reason and revelation resulted in the loss of revelation and the objective reality of God. Concerned with the influence of this structure on modern Jewish thought in particular, Philosophy and Law aims to restore the validity of divine revelation through a recovery of Maimonidean rationalism. Still, Strauss’s recovery of Maimonides contains two contradictory points. On the one hand, Maimonides acknowledges that philosophy operates under and within the limits of revelation whose authority is self-evident. Human persons have knowledge of the lower world only, not of God and the angels. Yet, on the other hand, given the alterity of the divine reality and the inadequacy of human knowledge, revelation requires mediation available through the prophet, who alone has an immediate intuition of the truths of the upper world and can figuratively communicate the truths needed by the multitude for its obedience to divine law. Therefore, Strauss both insists on the unknowability of the God of revelation and posits the mediation of the prophet whose communication of his knowledge is required for obedience to the law. A closer look at the role of the philosopher will illuminate the contradiction. Four points in particular require attention. First, the philosopher has knowledge only of the lower world and so “his knowledge of ‘God and the angels,’ remains necessarily fragmentary and dubious” (Strauss 1995, 65; 1935, 53). Second, while the philosopher may have a practical need for some knowledge of the upper world and may accept the possibility of revelation to meet that need, such an acceptance does not alter the limits of the philosopher’s knowledge (Strauss 1935, 52, 59–60; 1995, 64, 71). To use Kantian terminology, one might say that theological truths are, in this case, only postulated as a result of this practical need. Third, Strauss affirms that the philosopher can disregard the law (Strauss 1935, 56; 1995, 67). Finally, Strauss affirms that philosophical work ought to be esoteric; philosophers should lead secret lives and not be permitted to influence the multitude (Strauss 1935, 71–72; 1995, 84–85). Taken together, these four points expose the antinomy surrounding obedience to a God we do not know. If the philosopher does not have theoretical knowledge of God and if the philosopher “need not and cannot be guided and bound by the sense of revelation in the fulfillment of his circumscribed task [Aufgabe]” (Strauss 1995, 67 [translation altered]; 1935, 56), it would seem that the philosopher is perfectly capable of disregarding the obligation of revelation, at least in certain instances. This freedom for antinomianism is in no way disturbed by the philosopher’s lack of knowledge of revelation; indeed, it is supported by Jewish Encounter with Christianity 199 it. The philosopher has some needs that lead him to postulate the possibility of God. But when the philosopher arrives at needs that do not require such a postulation, he is within his rational rights to disregard such a claim. As such, he becomes the thorn in the side of Strauss’s effort to link divine objectivity to absolute transcendence and human fallibility. This is why Strauss insists that philosophers lead esoteric lives. Public exposure of the philosopher’s knowledge is “against the law” (Strauss 1995, 35; 1935, 25) since philosophical skepticism, which Strauss earlier suggests constitutes the cornerstone of the appeal to revelation, can have the opposite effect of engendering doubt of the puta- tive self-evidence of revelation and its accompanying laws. Interestingly enough, Strauss’s appeal to the role of the prophet operates as a kind of admission of this problem and offers, therefore, the seeds of repair for resolving the apparent antinomy between philosophical knowledge and revelatory authority:

If the revelation is to communicate the fundamental theoretical truths, then the bringer of the revelation, the prophet must have at his disposal the knowledge of these truths. He must at least be also a philosopher. . . . The simply binding revelation is addressed to all, but only few have the capacity for the theoretical life. Hence the truths to which, or on the basis of which the revelation is simply binding must be communicated to the multitude in proportion to their power of comprehension. (Strauss 1995, 105; 1935, 91)

The prophet, according to Strauss, must “be a teacher of men . . . for the instruction of the multitude” (1995, 111; 1935, 97). Strauss understands that persons (prophets and masses alike) need to have knowledge of the God they obey. The authority of revelation is not incommensurate with theological knowledge but arguably dependent on it. Nevertheless, having recognized this crucial point, Strauss falls back into the fault lines of his insistence on divine transcendence and human fallibility. Strauss insists that the prophet is extraordinary in his access to these truths and that the knowledge he passes along is only figuratively presented; it does not provide theological knowledge to the masses or the philosophers. His admission of the need for the prophet, therefore, does little to ameliorate the tension between believers and philosophers. The obedient community remains vulnerable to philosophical skepticism, for it is unaware of the additional knowledge required to secure against the persistent prospect of theological doubt. Nonetheless, we maintain that Strauss’s account of the prophet signals a way forward for Jewish thought past the Barthian-Kantian antinomy. Strauss’s 200 Kavka and Rashkover implicit recognition of the value of theological knowledge for obedience points to a notion of divine knowability that we see as the key to reevaluating Strauss’s work and to opening up a postcritical approach for Jewish thought. In particular, our reevaluation of Strauss’s contribution would focus on his account of the prophet’s intellectual intuition of the divine and examine (given his admission of the need of all persons to have access to this knowledge) whether such knowledge could be appreciated as available to persons besides the prophet. Rabbinic arguments concerning the loss of prophecy might offer a traditional basis for such an idea. In several places, rabbinic texts emphasize the knowability of God by all members of a Jewish community, whether or not they are scholarly elites. On the one hand, rabbinic study is seen as an equivalent to prophecy as a route to sacred knowledge: for example, the Talmud’s affirmation that “although [prophecy] has been taken from the prophets, it has not been taken from the wise” (B. Baba Batra 12a). But if the divine is unlimited, so must access to knowledge of the divine be unlimited; the sugya continues by claiming that prophecy remains not only with the wise, but also with fools and children (B. Baba Batra 12b).14 As Spinoza’s account of the union of the idea and the ideatum within the order of substance, Schelling’s appreciation for the covalence of the subject and the object within the knowing of God as absolute, and rabbinic accounts of the knowability of the divine through text and law all show, the absolute can and will assume any number of presentations. Even accounts or worldviews formerly deemed erroneous are, when reflected on through the absolute, apprehended as nothing less than partial or potential mediations. The paths forward that we have introduced dramatically alter prior conceptions of Judaism in Jewish philosophy, which mimic Protestant accounts of divine transcendence. But, in the process of showing the multiplicity of possible presentations of the absolute, they also dramatically alter prior conceptions of Christianity, freeing Jewish philosophy from the possibility of taking the contradictory path that so many thinkers in the canon have taken, in which readers today find affirmations of both the equality of Judaism and Christianity as well as the superiority of Judaism to Christianity. To call for Jewish philosophy to stop thinking about Christianity is to live in a dreamland that denies the

14 See also Emil Fackenheim’s interpretation of Song of Songs Rabbah to Song of Songs 5:16 (Fackenheim 1973, 163): “Qua present the divine Infinity destroys the human ‘family’ in its humanity. . . . Qua commanding, however, it requires a response that is human. . . . [T]his paradox is resolved by the Midrash in the second descent of the Divine which, ‘sweeten- ing the Word,’ makes a divine commandment capable of free human appropriation and performance.” Jewish Encounter with Christianity 201 historicity of scholars of Judaism. Insofar as Jewish philosophy takes place in a majority Christian culture, the ways between Jewish and Christian philosophical theologies have never parted and will never part. Yet fully restoring the link between Judaism and speculative philosophy—a move that is unjustly seen as assimilationist by those scholars who see the modern philosophical tradition as already Greek or Christian and thereby foreign to Judaism—allows Judaism and Christianity to relate to each other productively, instead of instilling a nonnegotiable difference that guarantees their relationship to be one of solely inimical opposition. In the twenty-first century, such paths offer multiple possibilities for identifying the ills that often affect Jewish-Christian relations and for recognizing the self-correcting possibilities afforded by both traditions, with respect to themselves as well as to each other.

References

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Cohen, Jeremy. 1999. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. “Revisiting Augustine’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness.” Journal of Religion 89, no. 4: 564–78. Fackenheim, Emil. 1973. Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken. Fredriksen, Paula. 2008. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New York: Doubleday. Goodman, Lenn E. 2002. “What Does Spinoza’s Ethics Contribute to Jewish Philosophy?” In Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, edited by Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, 17–89. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gregory, Eric. 2008. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1977a. Faith and Knowledge. Edited and translated by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1977b. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1986. Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kavka, Martin. 2004. Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. “The Meaning of That Hour: Prophecy, Phenomenology and the Public Sphere in the Early Heschel.” In Religion and Violence in a Secular World: Toward a New Political Theology, edited by Clayton Crockett, 108–36. Charlottsville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2012a. “Verification (Bewährung) in Franz Rosenzweig.” In German-Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics: Festschrift in Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Christian Wiese and Martina Urban, 167–83. Berlin: de Gruyter. ———. 2012b. “Verification (Bewährung) in Martin Buber.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20, no. 1: 71–98. Kavka, Martin, and Randi Rashkover. 2004. “A Modified Jewish Divine Command Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 32, no. 2: 387–414. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. A l’heure des nations. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1994a. Les imprévus de l’histoire. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. ———. 1994b. In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jewish Encounter with Christianity 203

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———. 1988. Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2000. Philosophical and Theological Writings. Edited and translated by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1962. Werke. Edited by Manfred Schröter. Munich: Beck. ———. 1982. Texte zur Philosophie der Kunst. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1989. The Philosophy of Art. Translated by Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2001. “Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802).” Translated by Michael Vater. The Philosophical Forum 32, no. 4: 373–97. Spinoza, Benedictus de. 2002. Complete Works. Edited by Michael L. Morgan. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Stout, Jeffrey. 2004. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1935. Philosophie und Gesetz: Beiträge zum Verständnis Maimunis und seiner Vorläufer. Berlin: Schocken. ———. 1995. Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors. Translated by Eve Adler. Albany: State University of New York Press. chapter 10 Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Jewish Piety

Shaul Magid

For what is more miserable than uncertainty? Martin Luther … My interest in believing in something is not a proof of the thing’s existence. Voltaire … Faith is potentially fundamentalist, like the adolescent. Romeo and Juliet are its blazon. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe ∵

Introducing the Problem: Philosophizing from Where We Stand

Jewish philosophy is by definition reactive. By this, I mean it is a thought experiment that reacts to at least two phenomena simultaneously: first, the intellectual and spiritual trends that exist in the larger society in which Jewish philosophers find themselves; and second, the status and needs of the (Jewish) community in which Jewish philosophers live. On philosophy more generally, Lenn Goodman notes, “I find philosophers more usefully employed in addressing the questions real people ask, or might have asked had their natural curiosity not been stifled by dogma or hemmed in by convention” (Goodman 2012, 50). Regarding Jewish philosophy, I think both criteria (the surrounding society and the Jewish community) are in part the result of its functioning inside a minority community with its own rich textual and spiritual tradition, albeit a tradition where philosophy per se is not an endemic component.

And yet it has often been the case that philosophy constructs the lenses through which the Jewish textual and devotional tradition is reinterpreted for a new generation of readers and practitioners. We can see this from the Kalamists to Maimonides and Nahmanides and from Hermann Cohen to Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. In this light, to explore the nature of Jewish philosophy for a new generation, one must first delineate the intellectual and spiritual world in which Jews (and Jewish philosophers) find themselves and how Jews are choosing to enact or perform their Jewishness and/or Judaism in that light. I begin with two personal remarks. First, this essay proceeds under an assumption that is not a foregone conclusion: that Jewish philosophy is the handmaiden of Judaism and, thus, primarily in service to Jews. I fully acknowledge that this assumption is problematic, and I often find myself arguing the opposite; but I begin with this premise as a frame for my remarks. I accept that Jewish philosophy should offer the world—that is, those who have no invested interest in Judaism per se—new understandings of the Jewish tradition and contribute to a more textured way of reinterpreting classical philosophical ideas in the present day. In this light, Jewish philosophy—both its practitioners and its audience—should not be limited to Jews. But, in addition, Jewish philosophy has contributed, and I believe should continue to contribute, to new modes of Jewish living to those for whom Judaism remains a life.1 In short, Jewish philosophy—and I would include Jewish mysticism—is, as Rosenzweig argued, apologetic by nature and by definition (Rosenzweig 2000, 95–109; Novak 2012, 92–94). I include Jewish mysticism because, by the modern period, Kabbalah had become such an accepted paradigm of Jewish thought, even by most Jewish philosophers who did not utilize it, that it was an integrated as part of the metahalakhic Jewish discourse. Thus, while we often divide Jewish thought between Jewish philosophy proper and Kabbalah, more broadly these two thought experiments are not as distinct as we imagine. Michael Morgan notes regarding Jewish philosophy more generally, “It would have to be sensitive to those contextual and situational features that most influenced a contemporary sense of what was important, acceptable, and urgent, and also sensitive to reading the past in terms of those contextual factors that make past texts and actions meaningful and intelligible” (2012, 72). In this light, Jewish philosophizing should not shy away from offering a renewed understanding of Jewish devotion, albeit it should not be limited to that. Second, I believe that, as scholars of this tradition, or any tradition or discipline, we never venture too from where we begin, including the reasons we

1 For example, Emmanuel Levinas notes that “being-Jewish” is a necessary condition of (his) philosophy (Levinas 2009, cited in Kleinberg 2012, 118–20). Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 207 pursued this vocation in the first place. Confessing one’s personal investment has increasingly become a sign of contemporary philosophy from Jacques Derrida to Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Judith Butler. I entered the scholarly world of Jewish studies from ultra-Orthodoxy, having entered that world as a baal teshuva at the age of twenty (raised as a secular Jew in the New York suburbs). The foundations of my intellectual and spiritual life were forged in the various haredi yeshivot I attended and communities I lived in in Jerusalem and Boro Park, Brooklyn, for about six years. While Jewish academia served as a kind of escape from a religious world I loved but ultimately rejected (here I am hardly alone), I also acknowledge that the spiritual inclinations and intellectual aspirations that brought me from the American counterculture to ultra-Orthodoxy remain part of my personal, spiritual, and scholarly profile and that the texts I continue to read and write about are largely from that world I rejected. After leaving the haredi world, I became part of the progressive religious world in Jerusalem and later in the United States where, after receiving my PhD writing a doctorate on Polish Hasidism at Brandeis University in 1994 and a two-year tenure position at Rice University, I taught at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary for six years. Here I confronted a student body of aspiring rabbis and Jewish intellectuals who were rebelling against the assimi- latory culture of a previous generation. Many were attracted to Jewish mystical literature and a focus on religious practice as an expression of meaning that was an articulation of a growing neo-Hasidic perspective among this new generation. Teaching these texts to those students made me question how issues of certainty and doubt surrounded questions of religious meaning and how those fundamental issues of certainty and doubt, both as philosophical and practical categories, were treated with subtlety in the texts I read and taught. It also made me realize that, while many of these students desired to enter into the world of these texts, basic questions of belief, certainty, and doubt were not foremost on their minds. Thus, the fact that this essay is devoted to the relationship between philosophy and piety, between doubt and certainty, and the avoidance of fundamentalism, is no accident. It is my attempt to make good on my decision to show how the literature of traditional Judaism can be used as a source to philosophize about questions that are of importance today, to borrow a phrase from Robert Orsi, a kind of “theology of the streets” (1985, 219). I will argue that the questions of certainty and doubt surrounding contemporary religious practice are, in fact, questions that are also relevant to Judaism in the twenty-first century, especially in the United States, fully knowing that I become vulnerable to the accusation that I am simply generalizing about my own particular interest. This may indeed be true, but one can only “philosophize” from one’s station; 208 Magid thus, my presentist concerns are invariably determined by my own narrative and the inclinations that generated that history. I begin with an example of how one contemporary Jewish philosopher, Steven Schwarzschild, responded to the dilemma of Jewish philosophy in his time, a time quite close to our own but one that is, also, quite different. I briefly engage Schwarzschild because he is an example of a Jewish philosopher who remained deeply embedded in the European philosophical tradition of his youth while translating those concerns to his station in postwar America. In his 1966 essay “The Lure of Immanence: The Crisis in Contemporary Religious Thought,” Schwarzschild makes a case for Judaism (or Jewish philosophy) as a response to the crisis of contemporary religious thought in the twentieth century. For him, the crisis exists between two poles he calls “the theology of blas- phemy” (“death of God” theology beginning with Hegel) and “the social-secular Gospel” initiated perhaps by Marxist readings of religion but exemplified in Paul Van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel and Harvey Cox’s Secular City. Schwarzschild argues that contemporary Judaism must respond to these two poles: on the one hand, the “lure of immanence” of an incarnational theology where transcendence as categorical “other” has been usurped and the transcendent has become embedded deeply in the immanence of the world or history; on the other hand, the secularization of Christianity that views everything in the vertical plane of ethics without transcendence. For Schwarzschild, the erasure of transcendence as the categorical “other” (the secular-social gospel) undermines the possibility of ethics, but he similarly argues that the collapse of transcendence into immanence (Baruch Spinoza, G. W. F. Hegel, and then Martin Heidegger) undermines the Jewish rejection of incarnationalism, as well as making ethics, or at least “Jewish” ethics, inoperable. He offers Judaism as a religion that accepts immanence only as divine “will,” and not physicality/corporeality, and views all Jewish ethics as founded in the Law (halakha) that must be rooted in a transcendent commanding God, a God that may be absent but not “dead.” The merits or deficiencies of Schwarzschild’s solution are not relevant here. I use him heuristically to suggest a case study of a Jewish philosopher who reacted to the trends of his time by presenting a philosophical rendering of Judaism that responds to and can serve as an antidote for the survival of “ethics” or perhaps “metaethics” founded in religion. Schwarzschild’s paradigm is indeed neo-Maimonidean, based on the neo-Kantian philosophy of Hermann Cohen, adapted to an era that, from his perspective, only slightly differed from Cohen’s. Apparently, for Schwarzschild, the burning issue in 1966 when this essay was first published was still the “lure of immanence” in terms of secularism and the collapse of transcendence into immanence that not only gives us the (secular) incarnationalism of Hegel Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 209 but also Heidegger’s philosophy where ethics seems to disappear in the cloud of Dasein.2 In some sense, Schwarzschild does not venture far from Weimar Germany, albeit he philosophizes in a post-Holocaust/cold-war paradigm, Nazism and secularism being the two central challenges that Judaism must respond to. For Schwarzschild, Judaism’s response is threefold; immanence can never be physical, only volitional; God is always categorically “other” (absent but very much alive); and ethics is founded in the transcendent divine will that descends into the world in the form of the Law. According to Schwarzschild, in this manner Judaism avoids the collapse into ethics and is able to continue to reject incarnationalism in all its forms, thereby simultaneously offering the world a solution to the present dilemma—how to reconstitute ethics—and offering a philosophical rendering of Judaism for the Jews—transcendence without the “death of God” or incarnation. The Law becomes a philosophical and not only obligatory category of Jewish living. Scharzschild’s essay was published almost half a century ago, yet many Jewish philosophers today still think inside its intellectual paradigm. I suggest that we are already living in a new era, a social/spiritual framework with new issues, challenges, and modes of thinking and a readership, both scholarly and popular, whose interest in Judaism as a lived religion is different. Much has changed since 1966. Post-Holocaust theology has come and gone. Religious fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has demanded our attention, not only because of the violence it often generates but also because of the challenges it poses to the failures of liberal religion (Lilla 2007, 55–106). New Age religion, a child of the early 1970s that was still marginal through the 1990s, is now firmly embedded in contemporary religiosity, having given rise to environmentalism, a renewed interest in religious practice, social-activist movements, and what one might call “global spirituality” (Spretnak 1986; Wuthnow, 1998; Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000; Heelas 1996; Roof 1999).3 Below, I focus on two issues that I believe are better suited to early twenty- first-century Jewish “philosophizing,” particularly in America. They both

2 Writing about a similar paradigm in early twentieth-century Germany, Benjamin Lazier in his God Interrupted calls this this situation a dichotomy between gnosticism and pantheism that served as the frame of much of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. See Lazier 2008, 49–59, 93–110. 3 While it is true that not all forms of Jewish environmentalism are directly the result of the influence of New Age religion, they are all, in my view, the product of a New Age sensibility that has its roots in the New Age revival. I want to thank Hava Tirosh-Samuelson for her comment on this point. 210 Magid revolve around one larger issue that serves as a central concern for many American Jews who choose to live inside Judaism, both those interested and uninterested in Jewish philosophy. This concern I call “new piety.” By “new piety,” I refer to a renewed interest in religious practice and thinking about practice that contributes to renewed religious identity. I do not mean halakha in the sense that Schwarzschild meant it as a source for metaethics nor the way it is understood in traditional Judaism as a response to obligation. And I do not mean Law as folkways as suggested by Mordecai Kaplan as a means toward social cohesion. I mean, rather, the idea that many Jews today seek to embody their Judaism in some form of praxis as a vehicle for meaning aligned in some loose way with religious experience. This is born from a combination of New Age religion in the 1970s and multiculturalism of the 1980s, both of which sev- ered religious praxis from orthodoxy, enabling progressive Judaism to rethink its relationship to religious devotion without abandoning its progressive and liberal agenda. Yet this renewed interest in ritual and devotion inside a progressive agenda equally devoted to pluralism and, at times, its ambivalent stance toward truth- claims, has its challenges. This essay will explore the ways in which this new pietism with its focus on ritual as a vehicle for experience and meaning problematizes contemporary Judaism’s commitment to what I would call a kind of religious ambivalence, articulated in one way as pluralism. I do not mean “ambivalence” in the formal sense of holding together two contradictory claims but the more colloquial sense of an unwillingness to take a definitive stand, a kind of systemic position of equivocation. I argue that certainty, in opposition to ambivalence, is arguably a prerequisite for a devotional life. The notion of “certainty” as a theological or social category raises concerns for progressive Jews precisely because certainty stands at the center of religious fundamentalism, the other contemporary articulation of the New Age/multicultural paradigm. Yet, in avoiding certainty as a category of exclusion and, thus, arguably antithetical to pluralism, can this new piety function in a meaningful way? That is, can a devotional life where ritual is the vehicle for religious experience and not simply a performance of identity function within a pluralistic framework where certainty is hazardous. The two external frames of my discussion consist of (1) the rise of fundamentalism in what Peter Berger calls the “desecularization of the world” and (2) the impact of New Age religion and its particular form of “immanentism” that is different in degree but not necessarily in kind from the pantheism of an earlier period. Fundamentalism is often viewed as a product of certainty universalized, the collapse of any distinction between one’s internal spiritual space, the communal way a collective understands the world in relationship Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 211 to itself, and how the world is, in fact, constructed. Alternatively, according to Julia Kristeva, fundamentalism can be viewed as a form of adolescence. Kristeva posits that adolescence is a posture of belief in a paradisic absolute, a belief in another ideal that enables him/her to break away from the childhood attachment to the parent. In some cases, adolescence results in a kind of nihilism and, in other cases, a form of fundamentalism, the latter being, contrary to what we may think, quite close to the former. Both are founded on the realization of an absolute: absolute nothing or absolute redemption. Both, thus, have realizable goals that solve the dilemma of human existence. In either case, “[T]he adolescent is easily carried away by enthusiasm and romanticism to the point of fanaticism” (Kristeva 2009, 14, 19). On one reading, certainty, or Kristeva’s ideality, stands at the very center of fundamentalism; thus, its status as a philosophical point of view has understandably suffered as a result. Below, I will suggest a way in which certainty can still exist as a spiritual posture, perhaps even a philosophical category, without it collapsing into fundamentalism, that is, without universalizing one’s personal commitment to truth as a posture of devotion.4 New Age religion is the other external societal/spiritual frame of presentist philosophizing about Judaism. The impact of New Age religion is only now being explored by scholars of Judaism. I do not limit this phenomenon to those communities who maintain allegiance to this movement but argue that its tentacles have reached into the deep recesses of religion in America and the West. From Jewish environmentalism and the Jewish Farm School to Heksher Zedek, the Conservative kashrut organization that considers workers’ rights and animal abuse as part of its religious mandate, and the Independent Minyan Movement to meditation and feminism in Modern Orthodoxy, New Age religion has created the conditions for an expansion of religious life beyond the confines of tradition (Magid 2013a). Thus, to philosophize about Judaism today, one must consider this spiritual frame as an operative category. My internal claim is that this new piety and the condition that brought it about—including a renewed interest in mysticism—has made at least some earlier prewar philosophers (and philosophies) less relevant than they were thirty years ago. It would be presumptuous to claim that the turn toward a new piety in the twentieth century is structurally a reaction against Hermann Cohen and his neo-Maimonideanism, a reaction and, perhaps, repudiation that does not mature until they collide with the counterculture of the 1960s, New Age religion of the 1970s, and multiculturalism in the 1980s. There are many other complex issues at play in any social transition. Yet there is a

4 For a philosophical study of truth is a pluralistic context, see Goodman 2001. 212 Magid trajectory of Jewish thought that begins perhaps with the collaborative work of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in the early twentieth century and continues through Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emmanuel Levinas in the early postwar years that may be the precursor to what we are now living.5 If we view this “prequel” of Jewish philosophical thinking beginning with the romantic existentialism of Buber and Rosenzweig, their debate around the efficacy of the Law and Rosenzweig’s interest in Jewish practice as a lived philosophical exercise, and follow that to Heschel’s new pietism, founded on his reading of Hasidism and the prophets, to Levinas’s call to reinstitute transcendence as a source for ethics beyond ontology, we find ourselves in a place where the experiential component has overcome systematic and rationalist thinking. Of note is the popularization of Kabbalah, largely through the work of Gershom Scholem and his students, that has introduced postwar Jews to an alternative metaphysical and philosophical template in which to live their Judaism. Jewish philosophers today simply cannot dismiss Kabbalah as they could before, even as they may resist its influence on intellectual and theological grounds (Kellner 2006; Berman 2009). One could say that, from the 1950s until today, Jewish philosophy simultaneously reacts to two disparate intellectual models: the remnants of Cohen’s rational Judaism and the dangers of Heidegger’s deontological and immanentist thinking (Denken). The seeming irrelevance of Cohen’s “Religion of Reason” regarding Jewish devotional life today (his work is still very relevant in academic circles) is that it arguably does not meet the needs of a society that wants religious practice to engender experiential meaning. Alternatively, Heidegger’s philosophy, still very much alive among scholars of Jewish philosophy, does not seem to give enough credence beyond the here and now to satisfy the needs of some form of transcendence that many contemporary practitioners who have been influenced by New Age religion deem necessary. Finally, postmodernism, in all its forms and perhaps particularly, for Jews at least, in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, offers indeterminacy as an end in itself, a kind of philosophical desideratum, which may be intellectually compelling but spiritually stultifying (which may precisely be its point) (Handelman 1982, 163–224; Stern 1998). In short, New Age religion, combined with multiculturalism and a sustained period of religious tolerance, has offered contemporary

5 In a similar, albeit not identical, vein, Leora Barnitsky writes on American Judaism, “My point, then is not to show an absolute dichotomy on German-Jewish philosophy and American- Jewish philosophy, but rather to show how the renaissance of Jewish philosophy in America works itself out in large part through a rejection of a problem set in motion by, and also recognized by, German Jewish philosophers” (Batnitzky 2012, 22). Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 213

Jews a very different way of experiencing Judaism and the world, thus challenging Jewish philosophers to think of new ways of philosophizing about Judaism in response. Some Jews have reacted to the postmodern turn by looking for new ways of expressing their Jewishness through devotional means, not necessarily by abandoning the critique of traditional religion but by resisting the nihilistic inclinations of some forms of postmodernism. Below, I offer some philosophical ruminations of the aforementioned “new piety,” taking into account the figures mentioned above who point us in the direction of piety as a practice focused on experience as opposed to the adherence to law as obligation, part of which opens the possibility of experiencing the world (or God) in a more unmediated way. In some sense, then, this is a philosophical argument for neo-Hasidism. As mentioned above, the challenges of this new piety I will address here are twofold. Many contemporary Jews are committed to pluralism as an expression of tolerance and openness to alternative visions of truth. In addition, they are wary of claims of certainty not only because postmodernism has undermined the viability of certainty through indeterminacy and deconstruction but also, perhaps even more so, because of the fear of fundamentalism where “certainty” serves as a crucial component.6 I argue that piety requires some conception of certainty to function experientially. Doubt and ambivalence do not breed devotional passion. To address the question of doubt verses certainty as models of religion and philosophical life, I turn to an era where these questions were paramount: the debates around salvation in the early Protestant Reformation. Here we will be introduced to a series of positions that, while specific to sixteenth-century Christianity, may help us better understand what is at stake in an attempt to philosophize about a new Jewish piety in the twenty-first century. I will then turn to two creative (nonphilosophical) Jewish thinkers, Yosef Yuzel Hurvitz of Novordok (1847–1919) and Nahman of Bratslav (d. 1810) as offering two alternatives to how certainty can function as a devotional posture without universalizing it. That is, a certainty that exists within, not in opposition to, doubt. Neither Hurvitz nor Nahman are “philosophers,” and their writings would not constitute philosophical literature according to any responsible definition of the term. Yet their writings engage issues that are relevant to “philosophizing,” for example, questions of doubt and certainty, even as they do so outside the rules of formal philosophical discourse. I thus present them not as philosophical texts but as texts that contemporary Jews, and Jewish philosophers, can use as resources for “philosophizing” about

6 For a broader discussion of fundamentalism, especially in a Jewish context, see Magid 2013b. 214 Magid the questions that I believe are relevant to our present age where meaning is sought through a devotional life conceived outside the confines of earlier paradigms of belief. In both cases, the thinkers engaged are “fundamentalists.” Hence, I argue it is precisely in the fundamentalist framework that one can find the way out of it without completely undermining a notion of “certainty” that it has to offer.

Doubt and Certainty, the Protestant Reformation, and Religious Devotion

I turn briefly to the early Reformation to clarity some points on the question of certainty and doubt in regard to religious devotion largely because here we see some of the most vehement debates on this matter in the history of Western religion. Susan Schreiner has argued that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, centuries that gave us the Reformation and also René Descartes, were a time almost obsessed with “certitude” (2011, 1–35). We often think that the central protest against the church that ignited the Protestant Reformation was the question of the church’s attempt to maintain hegemony on the interpretation of scripture. While this was an important part of the equation, Schreiner argues that “[t]he problem of Word and Spirit swirled around the Reformation in many contexts and in various circumstances. Always, however, the issue concluded with the problem of certitude. All the reformers agreed that the Spirit was necessary to understand the true meaning of Scripture, but how and where the Spirit provided that certainty was disputed” (2011, 129). The fact that the Catholic Church declared that we must remain in doubt about salvation seemed to drive Martin Luther’s reformation project. Luther wrote,

If everything else were sound [in the papacy], still the monster of uncertainty [my italics] is worse than all the other monsters. And although it is obvious that the enemies of Christ teach what is uncertain, because they command consciences to be in doubt, still they are so filled with the madness of Satan that in their smugness they condemn and kill those who disagree with them as though we were heretics and they were completely certain of their doctrine. . . . We should make every effort to wipe out completely that most wicked idea that has consumed the entire world; namely, that a man does not know whether he is in a state of grace. (Cited in Schreiner 2011, 59, 60) Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 215

Luther became increasingly obsessed with certainty as the sine qua non of the religious life. For him, certainty was not the result of reason (reason was, in his words, a “whore”) but faith in Christ’s salvific death. It is not that reason could never attain truth (we will see that later with Michel de Montaigne); rather, reason is certainty’s most ardent enemy. Reason is, thus, not the arbiter of truth but its opposite: its basis in self-reliance was, for Luther, the product of original sin. Luther did not have a naïve understand of certainty and knew that it required constant attention and care. But he was committed to the notion that uncertainty opens the adept up to the vagrancies of Satan himself, leading one to the sin of idolatry. For many in the Reformation, including Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, certainty is not achieved but given, through faith, through Spirit, or through grace. And certainty was the witness to its own truth (Schreiner 2011, 66). Arguably for individuals such as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, the certitude of one’s belief bears witness to its own truth. Since certainty can never be achieved through reason or any other human faculty—that is, it can never be verified—it can become, must become, the posture of human devotion: “For all these reformers the fundamental assumption that faith is not within human ability is the foundation for the belief that certitude comes from outside the self. Since faith is a gift, and faith is certitude [my italics], they could believe that this certainty of the soul must be true and from God” (Schreiner 2011, 74). Certainty, for these reformers, revolves around two interrelated but not identical things: first, the inward, spiritual, and experiential certainty that one is saved as a prerequisite to serve God properly and, second, the certainty of authority in interpreting scripture (ibid., 83). The first is required to achieve the second, which is why Zwingli argues that “[t]o interpret Scripture correctly one must be illumined by the same Spirit who wrote that Scripture” (Schreiner 2011, 101). Uncertainty is viewed as the fallen state of the human. In Luther’s locution, uncertainty is idolatry. To tease out a bit more what Luther means by equating uncertainty with idolatry, we need to turn to Luther’s claim that idolatry is equated with “original sin.” On Luther’s logic, since certainty is beyond the capacity of reason, uncertainty is viewing the world solely from the vantage point of the human (through reason). This is illustrated in the advice of the serpent to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. For Luther, uncertainty, and thus idolatry, is a self-contained world (that is, viewing the world solely through the confines of the human).7

7 Parenthetically, Luther shares this sentiment with some rabbinic and later Zoharic teaching that links the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3) with the sin of the golden calf (Exodus 32). 216 Magid

As we will see below with Nahman of Bratslav, for Luther certainty can never be “reasoned out” of deep uncertainty; therefore, the idolater never knowingly commits idolatry: it is simply that his or her divine worship is idolatry, even as it may be viewed as holy by the worshiper or his/her witnesses: “The all- encompassing nature of idolatry was clear to Luther in the fact that idolatry amply satisfied the human need for religion. Luther recognized that no one ever thinks he is committing idolatry; no one ever sets out to worship idols” (Schreiner 2011, 328). Having established that idolatry is a mind set and not (only) a type of worship, Luther, contrary to the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, for example, seems to suggest that the natural human state is one of idolatry. In his “Laws of Idolatry,” Maimonides argues that monotheism is the natural human state that slides into idolatry as a result of a rational error, that is, mis- taking the stars as divine entities rather than pointing to a God who created them (Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Idolatry,” chapter one). The difference lies in the fact that Maimonides identifies human reason as the “image of God” in Genesis 1:26 (Guide of the Perplexed 1:1), thus linking reason and truth such that the natural human state is one that can achieve certainty through reason. For Luther, if that were the case, Christianity (that is, the death and resurrection of Christ) would not have been necessary since it is precisely the cross, and only the cross, that serves as the vehicle for the certainty of salvation, and thus the antidote to the deception of reason (also likened to Satan), offering certainty through faith to escape the natural idolatrous state of the human. For our limited purposes, the danger of Luther’s position is that once the mind is viewed as incapable of perceiving truth and largely a tool of deception, truth remains essentialized as ontological; the certitude that is born from faith is too easily universalized and becomes the truth that all must adhere to. If, on the other hand, we de-essentialize truth, making certainty inoperative either through the mind’s inadequacy or faith’s unverifiability, we enter the realm of skepticism that, in one case, creates a kind of indeterminacy that makes religious devotion both challenging and problematic. We will see this

See Magid 2008, 34–74. Moshe Halbertal claims that, while self-transcendence is the foundation of the moral act, it can also serve idolatry: “The religious sensitivity to such a phenomenon [self-transcendence] is the reason why misguided self-transcendence constitutes the ultimate sin of idolatry. Idolatry, in this sense, is the utmost surrender to a cause that is not worthy of the corresponding sacrifice. . . . An absolute commitment to an unworthy cause is the modern form of the old problem if idolatry” (2012, 78, 113). In other words, Luther’s claim that idolatry is the consequence of absolutizing the human perspective requires more nuance. Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 217 below with Yosef Yuzel Hurvitz of Novordok. The question I am asking in this essay is whether certainty can be maintained in light of, and in spite of, a de- essentialized truth that would prevent it from becoming universalized and the foundation on which all must adhere, believe, and practice. That is, can there be a certainty that is not a handmaiden of fundamentalism? Here Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) may help. Called by Victoria Kahn a “secularization of Luther,” Montaigne rejects the mind’s ability to realize truth (“We no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except falsified by our sense,” cited in Schreiner 2011, 335) and deems faith a false attempt to free the mind from itself. But the real danger for Montaigne was not that we cannot know anything or, pace Luther, that the mind will always deceive us, but that uncertainty is founded on the presumption that we can know the truth. Once we abandon that presumption, we can live a good life, given the limited knowledge the mind can provide. As I understand Montaigne here, the attempt to perceive truth becomes an end instead of a means, always leaving open the possibility of change even as truth is affirmed with a stance of certainty about it at every moment. Below I suggest that Nahman of Bratslav offers a similar solution using a kabbalistic metaphysical template. The following passage from Montaigne will serve as a transition to what I will argue may be a way to think “Jewishly” about certainty without immutable “truth”:

How diversely we judge things! How many times we change our notions! What I hold today and what I believe, I hold and believe with all my belief; all my tools and all my springs of action grip this opinion and sponsor it for me in every way they can. I could not embrace or preserve any truth with more strength than this one. I belong to it entirely. I belong to it truly. But has it not happened to me, not once but a hundred times, a thousand times, and every day to have embraced with these same instruments, in this same condition, something else that I have since judged false? (Schreiner 2011, 339)

While rejecting any attempt to suggest that we can penetrate the essential truth, or at least being skeptical of all eternal truth-claims, Montaigne nonetheless holds that, in any moment, what I believe I believe with utter certainty and act on that certainty to the fullness of my being. This is all premised on the fact that this certainty is not absolute in any timeless way, meaning it is not eternal, but, in that moment, there is nothing other than that which I believe. Put otherwise, in that moment, what I believe to be true is eternal. Truth is, according to Montaigne, contingent and ephemeral but that contingency 218 Magid does not dilute in any way its efficacy as the driving force behind the choices I make from that place. In what follows, I will suggest that Yosef Yuzel Hurvitz of Novordok and Nahman of Bratslav offer us different Jewish models that share certain components of both Luther and Montaigne and that both present models of philosophizing about the new piety I am suggesting.

A Philosophical Prolegomenon of New Piety: Doubt and Certainty in Yosef Yuzel Hurvitz of Novordok and Nahman of Bratslav

Yosef Yuzel Hurvitz of Novordok (1847–1919) was a student of the founder of the Mussar movement, Israel Salanter (1810–83) (Fishman 1988). After short stints in various yeshivot in Eastern Europe, Hurvitz founded a yeshiva in Novordok, Russia, that later expanded to a network of “Novordok yeshivot” throughout Eastern Europe. He was a fairly obscure figure outside Mussar circles until he was satirized in Chaim Grada’s Tsemakh/Di Yeshiva (The Yeshiva 1967). Hurvitz’s way in Mussar was austere and ascetic. He focused on breaking the will of the student by putting the pupil in embarrassing situations that would expose him to ridicule and, thus, break his ego (Katz 1963, 323–24; Fishman 1988, 43).8 Hurvitz’s collected teachings are included in one book Medragat ha-Adam (the Levels of Man), a modest work written in Hebrew (all translations below are mine) that is divided according to topics: moral traits, repentance, trust in God, and so forth. His piety is not mystical. It is, however, very much antira- tional and shares much with Luther’s belief that reason is, in large measure, deceptive. Hurvitz divides up the world between incompatible binaries; light and dark, faith and reason, Torah (which he refers to simply as “the yeshiva”) and “the world.” For him, the gravest sin is compromise, that is, when one attempts to integrate the holy with the profane (“secular”): “In truth we can understand that there is no greater destruction in the world than the bringing together Torah and the world” (Hurvitz n.d., 140). It would take some, but not much, interpretive license to say that compromise is a kind of original sin for Hurvitz and, thus, is the root of all evil. Eve’s intermingling of the holy (Adam) and the profane (the serpent) created “division” (perud) and destruction. On this reading, compromise and doubt, or perhaps indecision or uncertainty, are

8 Hurvitz’s lasting legacy may best be secured in that he was the teacher of sainted Israeli sage from Bnei Brak, R. Ya’akov Yisrael Kaniecsky (d. 1985), also known as the Steipler Rav, a saintly figure in contemporary Israel who was part of the resurgence of haredi Judaism at the end of the twentieth century. Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 219 intertwined, the former giving birth to the latter. Hurvitz makes his commitment to the utter separation of incomparable realms quite clear in his chapter “The Epochs of the World” (Tekufat ha-Olam) when he writes,

In order to fix the world we must begin by building yeshivot on the foundation of faith. They will slowly rebuild the world. We cannot begin from the world [my italics] because this is literally the generation of Babel [lit. the generation of separation]! We must recognize there are only two alternatives before us; either to abandon the Torah entirely and choose the world; or strengthen our situation and build an independent existence for ourselves. (Hurvitz n.d., 20)

I am particularly interested in two related concepts in Medragat ha-Adam; the first is “compromise” (peshara), and the second, admittedly a more ambiguous term, Hurvitz calls haskama, which literally means “agreement,” but I translate here as “conviction” or, put otherwise, “certainty.” Both of these ideas function as polar opposites in Hurvitz’s notion of repentance (teshuva):

All human failing can be captured in the human propensity to jump from sin to mitzvah without teshuva until one no longer understands that transgression and mitzvah are two incompatible opposites that are separate and cannot be united. If one accustoms oneself to repentance [as a transition from sin to mitzvah] and first regrets his sin and only afterward accepts upon himself to be a new person, then he can be pure and clean. This is because one who jumps from sin to mitzvah [without teshuva] joins these two things together in the form of compromise. Once compromise exists as an operative category how [or why, or for what] would one repent? Compromise is the polar opposite of teshuva. Teshuva undermines compromise. If compromise is considered true [ke-torah nekhshe- vet lo] what is one repenting from? (Hurvitz n.d., 173–74)

For Hurvitz, the naturalness of the world is one of compromise, viewing all actions in a relative and, perhaps, dialectical, way. Part of this, for him, is driven by human doubt and uncertainty or not knowing how to evaluate an action in terms of its merits or deficiencies. In response to that “ignorance” or psychological malady, we fashion that the two things do not contradict at all. Compromise is, thus, a reaction to uncertainty. This uncertainty is precisely what enables one to live successfully “in” the world. As opposed to Luther, for Hurvitz it is not Satan who deceives but one’s own inability to transcend uncertainty, thereby thinking and acting as if uncertainty were not a crisis but 220 Magid a norm. Here, uncertainty is the very crisis of human existence because, and here I extrapolate, it makes human devotion (avodat ha-Shem) impossible since devotion is predicated on teshuva, also viewed as the ability to see the categorical difference between mitzvah and sin. Moreover, devotion is impossible here because compromise, for Hurvitz, essentially erases sin since all things can be viewed as capable of coexistence. If there is no sin, there is no need to repent, thus collapsing the entire edifice of human devotion. Devotion for Hurvitz is precisely to separate the good from the evil, which is only possible when they are viewed as incompatible. Hurvitz suggests two dimensions of repentance: “the law of repentance” and the “reality of repentance.” The law of repentance only requires thought (the Talmud suggests that, if one has sincere thoughts of repentance, he is, in that moment, a complete zaddik, BT Kiddushin 49b), while the reality of repentance requires action. Full repentance, that is, repentance that erases sin, requires both. The problem for Hurvitz is that humans (through reason) cannot fathom how repentance can actually work, that is, how changing one’s behavior can erase the past. In this sense, for him and others, repentance is thus irrational; it constitutively does not make sense. Humans fear two things: first, the question of how the past can be erased (this is the skepticism of the reality of repentance); and second, the skepticism of the law or thought of repentance (even if I commit to act otherwise, I will invariably fail). This is all founded on doubt, not doubt about the existence of God but self-doubt: “Regarding ‘the reality of repentance’ the person argues [to himself] that he will not be able to maintain his own conviction [la-amod ‘al haskamaro]” (Hurvitz n.d., 174). The easier way, the way most of us choose, is to avoid this entire dilemma through compromise. Putting everything in relation to everything else, a kind of systemic spiritual contextualization, foregoes the need to repent (repent from what?) and, thus, alleviates the self-doubt that tortures us, since self-doubt is founded on the prospect of the possibility repentance or, more precisely, the fear of its impossibility. According to Hurvitz, the fear that moves us to choose compromise not only perpetuates the very foundation of sin, but it makes devotion impossible. The reason, he surmises, is that compromise blinds us from the recognition of contradiction (setira) that is the prerequisite of conviction (haskama). His essay “The Essence of the Human” (Nekudat ha-Adam) begins by citing an ingenious amalgam of two verses from Malachi 3, 7 and 18: “ ‘Turn back to Me and I will turn back to you’—said the Lord of Hosts. . . . “And you shall come to see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between him who has served the Lord and him who has not served the Lord.” This becomes the frame of the arresting comment by Elijah on Mount Carmel: “Elijah approached the people Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 221 and said, ‘How long will you keep hopping between two opinions [literally, on the boughs]. If the Lord is God, follow Him, and if Baal follow him!’ ” (I Kings 18:21). Hurvitz writes,

What brings one to the state of ambivalence [i.e. hopping between two opinions (lit. on the boughs)]? It is for one of two reasons; either one lacks the capacity for clarification [birur]; or lacks the ability to maintain the clarification. One of the powers of reason [sekhel] is the experience of contradiction [hargashat ha-setira], that is, the realization that one cannot maintain two opposites in one matter.[9] Our ability to make distinctions is founded on this. And in relation to its more lofty purpose, reason also experiences contradiction: that one’s action cannot contradict one’s words. If reason recognizes something is good, why would it act against it? And if it realizes this is the very purpose of human existence [ki zeh kol ha-Adam, Ecclesiastes 12:13], why would it be seduced by nonsense and become distanced from the truth and create a unity between falsity and truth. This would not happen in a healthy person [bar da’at bar’i]. He would not affirm two opposites and see things sometimes this way and sometimes that way simply because he cannot suffer the burden of contradiction. Rather, he must abandon one and retain one and not dwell in that contradiction. If a healthy person experiences contradiction and still [hops between two opinions (lit. on the boughs)], it is not because he wants to exist with opposites. This is not the case with someone who experiences contradiction. Rather, it is because he is indecisive [hisaron birur]. . . . Only one who does not feel contradiction can choose all sides and connect all opposites because what would prevent him from doing so? . . . It is just he does not have a strong enough da’at [here, I would say the term conviction is more accurate than knowledge] to experience whether the things he is doing are contradictory. For him, experience is rooted in the imagination and there is no contradiction in the imagination, as we see that in the imagination, an elephant can fit through the eye of a needle (BT Baba Meziah 38b) (Hurvitz n.d., 227).

There is much one can say about Hurvitz’s’s description of the human condition here. My purpose, however, is quite limited. Let us follow his interpretive logic. Hurvitz juxtaposes the two verses in Malachi to suggest that repentance

9 Perhaps a form of Aristotle’s excluded middle or the principle of noncontradiction, that is, for any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is. 222 Magid is the fundamental act of conviction, an act that experiences the depth of contradiction because to repent one must deeply see the difference—the incompatibility—between the righteous and the wicked. Only by choosing one and rejecting the other can one serve the Lord. Hurvitz presents Elijah as demanding the same calculus. You cannot serve God (or Ba’al) if you hop between two opinions. Choose one and take your stand! Interestingly, for Hurvitz, the foundation of conviction seems to be the experience of contradiction, that is, the deep experience of incompatibility that is unbearable and, thus, forces one to choose. The one who lacks conviction (haskama), who ostensibly holds on to contradiction, is the one who does not feel it. To connect this with his earlier discussion, the way to avoid the experience of contradiction is through compromise. By relativizing or contextualizing opposites, by viewing them as not in irreconcilable contradiction, one does not experience their coexistence as a crisis and, thus, has little need to make a choice. This notion of compromise he calls “the way of the world.” But, for Hurvitz, it is not the way to God. Nahman of Bratslav is much more well-known than Hurvitz. The great- grandson of Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism (d. ca. 1760), Nahman rose to be viewed as one of Hasidism’s most brilliant and enigmatic figures. Joseph Weiss deemed his Hasidic worldview “the Hasidism of faith [hasidut shel emunah]” (Weiss 1974, 87), but it could just as easily be viewed as “the Hasidism of doubt [hasidut shel safek]” (Green 1992, 285–336; Magid 1996). Much of what is described below is taken from one of Nahman’s most complex and well-known sermons known as Likkutei MoHaRan I:64, or “Go to Pharaoh” (taken from the verse in Exodus that serves as its lemma). Here, Nahman presents Pharaoh as the arch-heretic, the one who embodies the “Vacant Space” (Halal Ha-Panui) of creation, the place where the heretical question has no answer, and Moses as the zaddik who is the only one who can confront Pharaoh and, in doing so, create the necessary conditions to liber- ate Israel from the Vacant Space, thus bringing them to Sinai and revelation.10 The operative dimension of this sermon for my concerns is the ways in which Nahman at once acknowledges the human experience of doubt and yet ada- mantly argues that doubt and/or uncertainty must not, cannot, go unanswered, lest we sink into what I would call Nahman’s “idolatry of uncertainty.” For Nahman, the quest for certainty as the unrelenting fear of doubt, or fear of unrelenting doubt, surrounds his entire worldview. Like Luther, he was not a fan of reason and largely viewed it, and “philosophy,” with disdain.

10 The Sabbatean resonances for such an idea in Nahman have been explored by scholars. But this is not central to the issue at hand. Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 223

And, like Luther, he seemed infatuated with heresy and heretics and sought various ways to counter them (Piekarz 1995, 21–55). I engage Nahman here because he suggests that unknowing, or uncertainty (in this case, the unknowability of the heretic’s question) is a state that must be overcome to serve God. And yet it cannot be fully overcome. The unanswered question, like Luther’s Satan, is embedded in creation itself. Yet succumbing to it leads one to a path of heresy that cannot be resolved through reason:

Know: there are two types of heresy. One is the heresy that stems from secular wisdom. Of this it is said, “And know what to answer the heretic” (Avot 2:14). [T]his heresy has an answer. . . . However, there is another type of heresy. . . . In truth, it is impossible to answer their [the second heretic’s] questions. This is because the questions from this heresy come from the Vacated Space [halal ha-panui] in which, so to speak, there is no Godliness. . . . But through faith, the Jewish people prevail over all the wisdoms and even this heresy that stems from the Vacated Space. This is because they believe in God, without any philosophical enquiry and intellection, but only with perfect faith. . . . For God “fills all worlds and encircles all worlds.” . . . Yet there has to be a separation, so to speak, between the filling and the encircling, for if not, then it is all one. That it is not [all one] is due to the Vacated Space. (Nahman 2003, 7:393–97)

One might say that, for Nahman, succumbing to not-knowing—that is, the question of the second heretic whose question has no answer—is, not unlike Luther, the seductress of modernity; that no response to uncertainty is idolatry. For both, the heretic does not simply want to convince you of heretical ideas; the idolater does not want to convince you to bow down to idols. Both want to convince you that there is a question that has no answer and, thus, that there is a place void of God. For Nahman, only faith that provides the solution to the second type of heretic, although that too is no solution because faith does not the answer the question, for which there is no answer, but avoids the trap the unanswerable question proposes: that there is a place in the world where God does not exist. For Nahman, there is such a place, psychologically manifest in doubt (or skepticism) and metaphysically manifest as the Vacant Space of creation (halal ha-panui). One might think that, for Nahman, there is divinity even in that Vacant Space, even as every indication is that there is not. In fact, Nahman states above that there must not be divinity in this Vacated Space in order for creation to exist! But if there is no God there, there is no God anywhere. For Nahman, the certainty only available via faith is attained by denying the 224 Magid undeniable, by accepting through faith that even the place where God does not exist, where God must not exist, God exists. In this sense, for Nahman, faith is not in God per se but in the negation of any space void of God: “The Vacated Space is the result of the contraction; that [God], so to speak, withdrew his Godliness from that place. Thus there is, so to speak, no Godliness there. Were it not so, it would not be vacated. . . . However, the actual truth [emet le-amito] is that, even so, there is surely Godliness there as well” (Nahman 2003, 7:387). But what of the first heretic’s question, the question that does have an answer, “And know what to answer the heretic” (Avot 2:14)? As we will pres- ently see, the certainty the answer provides is unstable precisely because this heretical question is a moving target. Knowledge, or certainty, only produces new levels of unknowing and, thus, a new heretical question. It is precisely this instability that constantly disables the propensity to universalize this certainty in the production of fundamentalism. Certainty for Nahman is endlessly relative at the same time that it is unassailable in every moment. Unknowing must constantly be effaced but can never be erased from human experience. The true devotional personality for Nahman is, in some sense, a skeptic who constantly rejects skepticism. In another sermon, Likkutei MoHaRan II:7, 7 (Nahman 2010, 13:36–60), Nahman offers a novel interpretation of the kabbalistic notion of the hovering lights (‘or makifim) and integrated lights (‘or penimi) in classical kabbalistic metaphysics. Metaphysically, the hovering lights constitute light that was too refined to enter into the Vacated Space created by tzimtzum. For Nahman, they represent the dimension of the unknown. He uses the teacher-student relationship to illustrate his point. The makifim represents knowledge that the student is unable to integrate to achieve understanding. The vocation of the teacher is to enact a kind of tzimtzum, whereby he or she makes the hovering light available to the student who can then integrate that light and achieve understanding. But as soon as that happens, another dimension of the hovering light appears on the horizon, another element of not-knowing, so that the teacher has once again to enact tzimtzum to repeat the process (Nahman 2010, 13:45–47). The point is that all knowing gives birth to not-knowing, all certainty gives birth to uncertainty ad infinitum. This notion, which is sometimes called “learned ignorance,” is a basic tenet of medieval pietism in thinkers such as Bahya ibn Pakuda and even Moses Maimonides (for example, Guide of the Perplexed I:59) and is pretty standard Socratic teaching. Unlike Socrates and the medieval pietists, however, the danger for Nahman is not ignorance; it is that uncertainty always holds the potential for heresy. Without certainty (in this case facilitated by the teacher), the hovering light holds the potential for heresy because it makes uncertainty permanent. For Nahman, if uncertainty is Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 225 made permanent, the omnipresence of God vanishes from human experience. And the vanishing of that experience is heresy. One must always answer this first heretic, but the answer only produces another heretical question. The necessity of certainty and its inherent instability is what I want to adopt as a devotional model for the new piety of twenty- first-century Jewish devotional life. Every certainty is passing, yet, without certainty, devotion is problematic. Where I stand in the moment of ritual, prayer, contemplation, I must enact, perhaps perform, a dimension of certainty that is unassailable and, in that moment, eternal. Nothing else exists. I do so with full knowledge, following Montaigne, that I may become certain of something different in the next moment. But the potential of that next moment cannot be allowed to exist, or at least not be operative, in the present. Thus, any attempt to universalize, concretize, and fossilize the moment of certainty (that is, fundamentalism) undermines the very foundation on which that certainty is produced. My interest here is not to defend or reject these worldviews but solely to suggest that these expressions of certainty, Hurvitz’s notion of conviction (haskama) and Nahman’s notion of uncertainty as the heretical question, can be adopted to suggest a rubric whereby one’s inner life can function with a posture of certainty, enabling focus and depth to one’s devotional life without resulting in fundamentalism. I took interpretive license to refract Hurvitz’s and Nahman’s idea’s through Montaigne’s notion of certainty as a temporal category that is always in flux but must always be operative. I am certain at every moment. What makes me unable to universalize that certainty and thus force it on others is that I know that, potentially, in another moment, I may be certain of something else. This is not a question of ambivalence as much as an understanding that every moment requires a decision, an act of separation (in one rendering, an act of teshuva), yet that which one chooses, and about which one then becomes certain, is never predetermined. By most accounts, Hurvitz and Nahman would be considered religious fundamentalists (the anachronism of the term notwithstanding). In my reading of them here, I do not think they are as concerned with the “truth” of one’s belief (pace Voltaire in the epigraph to this essay) as much as the certainty one has in those beliefs and the extent to which one acts on that conviction in the moment of devotion. The fact that one’s conviction could change is, I submit, less crucial for them than its very existence and the function it plays in serving God. This comes through in Nahman’s notion of the ever-emerging “hovering light” that is the product of understanding and opens up new questions to be answered, new uncertainties to overcome. This is obviously not a historical 226 Magid reading of either Hurvitz or Nahman but a conscious constructivist interpretation of their work. We are living in a time when social, political, and spiritual conditions have produced a world where ritual and the quest for some kind of devotional practice and meaning have become an integral part of living Jewishly, even among many in the nontraditional Jewish world, equal perhaps to the commitment to pluralism and the justifiable suspicion of universal truth-claims. More than eighty years ago, Mordecai Kaplan gave us a vision of ritual as a category of social identity. Today, many desire something different, even those who consider themselves secular and unbelievers. For them, it may be multiculturalism more than New Age religion that motivates their desire for nonexclusive difference. For the more ritually inclined, New Age religion has moved their thinking toward spiritual sustenance of another kind. Interest in, and the practice of, religious experimentation in the Jewish world is flourishing. Perhaps it is time we begin to philosophize about the implications and, equally important, the challenges of this new piety.

References

Batnitzky, Leora. 2012. “Coming After: American Jewish Thought in Light of German Judaism.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 20–32. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Berman, Nathaniel. 2009. “Aestheticism, Rationalism, and Esotericism: Medieval Scholarship and Contemporary Polemics.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 4: 563–85. Fishman, David. 1988. “Mussar and Modernity: The Case of Novordok.” Modern Judaism 8, no. 1: 41–64. Goodman, Lenn E. 2001. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. New York: Humanities Books. ———. 2012. “Doing Jewish Philosophy in America.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 33–56. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Green, Arthur. 1992. Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Press. Halbertal, Moshe. 2012. Sacrifice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Handelman, Susan. 1982. The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Heelas, Paul. 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Doubt and Certainty in Jewish Piety 227

Hurvitz, Yosef Yuvel. n.d. Madregat Ha-Adam. Jerusalem: N.p. Katz, Dov. 1963. Tenuat ha-Mussar. Vol. 4. Tel Aviv: Brody-Katz Press. Kellner, Menachem. 2006. Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Kleinberg, Ethan. 2012. “Back to Where We’ve Never Been: Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida on Tradition and History.” History and Theory 51, no. 4: 114–35. Kristeva, Julia. 2009. This Incredible Need to Believe. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press. Lazier, Benjamin. 2008. God Interrupted. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2009. Carnets de la captivite. Collected and annotated by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. Paris: Bernard Grasset/IMEC. Lilla, Mark. 2007. The Stillborn God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Magid, Shaul. 1996. “Through the Void: The Absence of God in R. Nahman of Bratzlav’s Likkutei MoHaRan.” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 4: 495–519. ———. 2008. From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbalah. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013a. American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013b. “Is There an American Jewish Fundamentalism, Part I: Habad.” In Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History, edited by David Watt and Simon Wood, 70–91. Charleston: University of South Carolina Press. Maimonides, Moses. 1963. Guide of the Perplexed. Edited by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1975–2001. Mishneh Torah. 7 vols. Edited by Shabse Frankel. Jerusalem: Ohel Yosef. Morgan, Michael. 2012. “Jewish Thought and Contemporary Philosophy.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 71–78. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Nahman ben Simha. 2003. Likkutei MoHaRan (bilingual edition). Translated by Moshe Myfoff. Vol. 7. Monsey, NY: Breslov Research Institute. ———. 2010. Likkutei MoHaRan (bilingual edition). Translated by Moshe Myfoff. Vol. 13. Monsey, NY: Breslov Research Institute. Novak, David. 2012. “Jewish Philosophy in North America.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 79–103. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Orsi, Robert. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Piekarz, Mendel. 1995. Studies in Bratslav Hasidism (Heb.). 2d ed. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. 228 Magid

Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 2000. “Atheistic Thinking [1923].” In Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, edited and translated by Paul Franks and Michael Morgan, 10–24. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Schreiner, Susan. 2011. Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era. New York: Oxford University Press. Schwarzschild, Steven. 1990. “The Lure of Immanence: The Crisis in Contemporary Religious Thought.” In The Pursuit of the Ideal, edited by Menachem Kellner, 61–81. Albany: State University of New York Press. Spretnak, Charlene. 1986. The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics. Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company Books. Stern, David. 1998. Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sutcliffe, Steven, and Marion Bowman. 2000. Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weiss, Joseph. 1974. Studies in Bratslav Hasidism (Heb.). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press. chapter 11 Otherness and a Vital Jewish Religious Identity

Ephraim Meir

Thirty years ago, I started a spiritual odyssey with my wife and then four little children, which led us to leave Belgium and the Netherlands and to become part of the Jewish people as it lives in Israel. The motives that conducted us to this existential decision, to move from Christianity to Judaism and from Europe to Israel, are multiple and complex. The Jewish way of life and the Jewish worldview was so attractive that we identified. Although we are now about half of our lifetime Israeli Jews, enjoying our Jewish grandchildren, I still discover various aspects of this much-desired Jewish identity. Long before our passage to Judaism, I read the Bible in Hebrew and came into contact with Martin Buber’s Hasidic stories, which opened for me the world of Jewish Eastern Europe. I became gradually fascinated by a world-oriented and family- centered religiosity, in which one hallows each and every act in daily life, as well as by an approach of God as a loving father and demanding king, a concept with deep anthropological consequences. Moreover, the utopian vision of contributing to the construction of an exemplary society in Israel, inspired by humanizing Jewish values seemed to me a real entrance in history. We felt part of a saga that rolled out before our eyes. Since my engagement toward the Jewish people was both existential and intellectual, reflecting on the meaning of Jewish existence became for me a necessity. I was privileged to become part of the academic word in Israel, which allowed me freely to explore Jewish existence in its historical dimension and in its relevance for today. My books on Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as my teaching of these philosophers for years, testify to my lively interest in modern Jewish philosophy. Asked to contribute to this volume that strives to present Jewish philosophy as “a living practice,” I immediately thought to offer a sustained reflection on the problem of Jewish identity today, which is at the center of contemporary Jewish dialogical philosophy. Jewish philosophy is for me first of all a thorough and coherent reflection on Jewish identity. The great challenge of Jewish philosophy today lies, for me, foremost in the reflection on the self and on the relationship between Judaism and the world at large. In this essay, I respond to this challenge, offering my definition of the Jewish self in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_�13 230 Meir the framework of a yet-to-be-built Jewish dialogical, interreligious theology and hermeneutics. In a nonessentialist approach to Jewish identity as part of the problem of identity as such, I adopt a radically dialogical standpoint and conceive Jewish identity as anti-identical. The “I” is visited by nonabsorbable otherness, by the appeal of the “non-I.” The other is not to be defined by the I, but also the I escapes definition because of ungraspable otherness that makes up its greatness and mystery. That the other is different and that I am different from the other is the condition for what I call “transdifference,” a marvelous human possibility, that I see eminently present in Jewish tradition at its best. Discussing identity, I pay special attention to religious identity. First of all, I perceive a great tension between religions and religiosity. On the other hand, I appreciate the concreteness of Judaism in its traditional form. I do not think that such a concreteness is in contradiction with universalism. In what follows, I opt for a paradigm of religiosity that has a multitude of manifestations. Moreover, I present Judaism not only as compatible with the rights of the human being, but I argue that human rights are at its heart. In presenting my own distinctive Jewish dialogical philosophy, I plead for the development of a dialogical hermeneutics. Accepting the otherness of the other, as well as the otherness of the self in “self-transcendence,” and building transdifferent bridges has, therefore, philosophical and hermeneutical aspects that I spell out in my dialogical view on a future, vital Jewish identity.

The Other in the I

In my view on identity, the permanent feature in the self is the change of the self in service of the other. Alterity or the insertion of a foreign element into the self is the precondition for the self, necessary for the creation of a “higher” identity. In this “othered” identity, the tie to society or lived fraternity on a radically heterogeneous basis is inherent in identity. The xenologic element in the I is not an estrangement from the self, nor an estrangement from society, but rather the ennoblement of the self in “passing” to the time of the other and engaging in conversation with him, in “translating” his world into mine and my world into his. Alterity at the heart of identity constitutes one’s real transcendence. The process of becoming different to oneself is present in what I call “self-transcendence.” The result of an altered self I call “self-difference.” Consequently, the I that becomes other to himself in a relationship is not the I that is psychologically in need of recognition by the other, but rather the I that, challenged by the other, recognizes the other in his concrete needs and Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 231 wishes. The I as different from the other and the other as different from the I may both further develop a transdifferent attitude and strive for a lofty, dialogical condition. With my approach of the I that makes an exodus out of itself, I do not go back to an essentialist definition of the I. Rather, I develop an approach to the I as embodying reception of otherness, since the I is not only self-created but also “created,” a gift to others, a “me” embedded in a network of relationships. The I does not only shape itself; it is also shaped by the other. It constantly transforms itself and is transformed by the non-I. The self transcends itself in relation to the other; in doing so, it is no longer itself but outside itself, projected to the other. I consider, therefore, the otherness in the self as a result of the basic openness of the self to the other as the higher dimension in a particular existence. Concomitantly, the I also creates itself in a unique manner. In my perspective, the existence of every human being is also a self-shaping, self-building process, although the individual’s existence is primarily shaped. In the metaidentity that I discuss, the I is bound to the rights of the other human being. To be is to care; to be yourself is to live with concern for the other. The self is not first of all to be known by oneself, for the self is located elsewhere: in being concerned with the other. The deepest layer of the I is experienced and uncovered in the shaping of a unique self that is other to the other as well as in humble service of the other. In my philosophy of care, metaidentity and self-difference are realized when one leaves, like Abraham, the land of the self and all that is known and that links one to oneself, to go to an unknown country, to a non-place, an u-topos. There are two sides in the self, which is called upon, shaped, but also shapes itself, and as such, is uniquely interrelated with the other. Neither the self nor the other is definable or objectivizable. They both are linked to the ineffable that informs the dynamics of the human being, who constantly looks for more possibilities. In his or her uniqueness, a person is an unidentifiable, ineffable “mystery,” a text that cannot be exhaustively decoded. The life of the self is not the individual’s exclusive property, since it is brim of what cannot be reduced to it. The particular roots of the human being bring an estrangement or positive alienation toward what is natural and ask for justification of human acts. I perceive a person’s identity not as primarily linked to what is written on one’s identity card. For me, identity is the insertion of alterity into the self as the result of being called by the other human being. Identity stems from being addressed. I hold that the human being escapes any definition because the dynamism, the indeterminism, and, indeed, the loftiness of his life stem from his unique presence for the other. 232 Meir

The self-difference of the I as a challenge in human life is the result of the welcoming of and care for the non-I. One might argue that the challenge of dynamic self-transcendence—and, consequently, of self-difference—sets the standard for the good life too high and that, therefore, it is unrealistic and even dangerous because it is unrealizable in a normal human life. Yet I think that the recognition of the possibility of self-transcendence as a factual dimension in human existence is compatible with a realistic view that copes with evil. The I who realizes otherness in himself is required to be critical toward himself as well as toward others. The self-different I is not the slave of the non-I since he does not give up his autonomy, which he orients toward the other. He is critical toward eventual totalizing tendencies in the other and in himself. I consider that the much-repressed condition of human existence is to live with and for the other. Far from ethical fanaticism, a too heavy burden, or an extreme standpoint, the vision of an “oriented” identity or of the altering of the self recalls what is formative in human life. In the complex fabric of our lives, alterity as hospitality toward the other within ourselves and as the dramatic change in the self is the guiding force or orientation that creates a dimension of disin- terestedness in life. I maintain that to be other to oneself, to change oneself, not remaining within the same but “conversing” with the other, are the conditions for any intercultural encounter and life. It is not the knowledge of the I or the other but the acknowledgment of the other and the approach of the I as destined to a creative life for the other that make a difference. I am challenged by the other, and this challenge makes up the uniqueness of my self. The self does not have to become the other, nor to remain enclosed and encapsulated in itself. It is, rather, “self-different.” “Transdifference” means that the other is different from me, just as I am different from him, and that, notwithstanding these differences, “bridging” between the differences and “translating” is a sublime human possibility. I am both constructing myself and constructed by the other. The self is “altered” but also concretely situated and, as such, has a difference that is added to the difference of the other. Embedded in a well-defined situation, the I is also unique, uncategorized, and different from any other. It is possible to bring together the particularity or difference of the self and the difference in the self, caused by the other.

Religious Identity

The approach to the self that I just spelled out profoundly affects my view on Judaism and on the interpretation of Jewish religious texts. It constitutes the setting for my discussion on the particularity of Jewish existence and on the Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 233 construction of a future, other-centered dialogical hermeneutics that combines cultures and libraries. In my approach to the religious self, I maintain that the I is not definable since it is in contact with what cannot be defined, with the ineffable. The religious self is, therefore, in connection with what is greater than the self, and it contains the traces of what surpasses it. Every I is chosen and elected. My vision of the religious self is that of a self that is not limited to itself and that is challenged by the other. I see the religious self as basically connected to the non-I. The construction of a dialogical hermeneutics of religious texts, which I propose, is a practical application of my view on the religious self. I deem that the religious self is necessarily connected to others in intrareligious and interreligious dialogues and in the dialogue between religions and the world at large.

Dialogical Thinkers Responding to the challenge of rethinking the self, I see the I in discontinuity with the same and not doomed to eternally return to itself, thanks to the call of the non-I. Each I is, therefore, always unique since, biblically speaking, it is “created”: God, who cares for his children, expects an answer from every I. The I is the object of God’s personal concern. Before it interprets, the I is interpreted. The condition for interpreting is the fact that, even before its birth, the I is interpreted by God and by the other. Prior to its essence and commitment, the I is responsible, preoriginally called (Levinas 1991, 10). It is God who calls the human being by his name (Rosenzweig 1988, 204). This reality comes into expression in Isaiah 43:1: “I have called you by your name, you are Mine” (Rosenzweig 2005, 197). The I is entrusted with the sublime task of alleviating the pain and misery of the non-I and taking care of the deprived, the poor and the oppressed. All are God’s beloved children, each of them uniquely elected to give life to others. It follows that one has to animate the other as the only means by which one can bring the divine kingdom near. As such, the subject is never a thing: it is a no-thing, unique and spoken to. The individual is not one of his kind, not to be dissolved into a genus or general category. He is extraordinary. One’s inner world, one’s interiority, is shaped by the unavoidable summoning of the other. The self is, therefore, “something transcendent in disguise” (Heschel 1951, 47). The self may begin to feel like a stranger in his normal consciousness. It may become conscious that existence is not a property, but a trust (ibid.). Life is “a transcendent loan,” and “[t]he essence of what I am is not mine. I am what is not mine. I am that I am not” (ibid., 48). The question of the I is, therefore, not a speculative one; it is situated on a responsive, preconceptual level (Heschel 234 Meir

1993, 115). The question of the I is, therefore, not a mere speculation of the mind; rather, it is an existential question concerning the I, who may become a stranger to himself by receiving the stranger. In Jewish dialogical thinking, the other is not a means for the thinking I to find itself again; on the contrary, the I is existentially transfigurated, so radically altered by the other that it becomes impossible for the I to return to itself in sameness. Accordingly, the time of the I is not its private property, but rather a social event, born in the relationship to the non-I. The Jewish dialogical thinkers underscored that the I is in dialogue (Buber), in conversation and under the command to love (Rosenzweig), the object of God’s care (Heschel), and confronted with the prohibition to murder (Levinas). In continuity with these thinkers, I consider the I from a social and metaphysical viewpoint; its meaning stems from its being assigned by the other to see him as a sister or brother, equally and uniquely created by the Father.

Dialogical I and Metareligion I envisage the I as immediately related to a non-I, and, in this perspective, the divine comes into perspective. In my transdifferent dialogical philosophy, I deem that the relation with the divine presence through the presence to the other takes place in and beyond religions. Moreover, such a “metareligious” standpoint allows me to remain critical toward manifestations of religion that are not or are less dialogical. One has always to link religion to the unutterable and undefinable higher reality. If religion is not dialogical, it misses its goal. This implies the duty of creating a dialogical hermeneutics of the sources. In keeping religion on the dialogical path, I occasionally criticize nondialogical attitudes. I think that self-criticism is a necessity if one wants religion to be vital and relevant. Religion should not be divorced from daily life. I prefer the insecurity of a dialogical life over the false security of possessing God in rituals and customs. Dialogical life that is the criterion and heart of living religion implies the risk and insecurity that is inherent in living the risk of the interhuman relation. Religion is, therefore, never to be restricted to a sacred sphere if it wants to be relevant for the whole of life. It is in living everyday life that one meets God. Religions themselves are ambiguous. I value the concreteness of religions with their own specific traditions. However, I go also beyond the different religions, pleading for a transdifferent religiosity or a dialogue between religions. I am alert to nondialogical hermeneutics that are inherent in each and every religious tradition and propose an interreligious theology or a theology in the plural, in which dialogical interpretations of the various religious foundational texts are essential. Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 235

I protest against religions that corrode once they claim to possess God, who makes them vivid and alive. At the same time, I value a unity of humankind that is based on differences between people and religions. I am not opposing separation in striving for unity; I am fascinated by differences and, concomitantly, by the possibility of going beyond them.

Jewish Identity and Transdifference

Since I come from Christianity, I am particularly interested in the relationship between the twin religions of Judaism and Christianity. Rosenzweig placed Christianity courageously in proximity to Judaism. The two communities were mutually complementary but also critical of each other. His creative correspondence with Gritli Rosenstock-Huessy (Rosenzweig 2002), on which I wrote a book (Meir 2006a), is exemplary of a dialogue that respects different identities and goes beyond them in the effort to create a common world. This document humain is prototypical for transdifferent approaches today. Although Rosenzweig narrowed his viewpoint to two religions, he nevertheless developed a model of interreligious dialogue, which I would enlarge to include other religions, as they are all human organizations around the unutterable.

Translating Rosenzweig was an expert in “translating.” He translated the Bible together with Buber, as well as ninety-two poems of Jehuda Halevi (Rosenzweig 2000). In translating, he felt that he participated in the world of someone else and that such a participation was a truly human possibility. He believed that only in translation does one’s voice become really audible (Rosenzweig 1979, 460–61). Rosenzweig deemed that everybody had to translate and, in fact, translates. He recognized that a real conversation between persons or groups of persons is at the bottom a question of translation (Glatzer 1953, 225). He did not only conceive of human existence as essentially plural, but he also believed that this world in all its plurality was intended to be one. Differences were necessary, and transdifference was a miraculous event. In my own view, every conversation is a crossing of the border, an act of translation, since there are different worlds that are in contact with each other that are at stake. Hence, in each real meeting, there is an act of hospitality. Through the act of translating, the translator becomes other to himself; he is “self-different” as the result of othering himself in contact with alterity. In his philosophy of language, Rosenzweig insisted that the depth of language stems from the command to love. It is at root about the expression of the availability 236 Meir of the one for the other. It is ultimately about being there for the other, “for it is possible for many languages to exist, but there is only one language” (Rosenzweig 2005, 159). Language is the possibility of conversation, the possibility of unity beyond and through diversity. His argument is that there is the possibility of being open to a “strangeness” that will always escape our own understanding (Glatzer 1953, 254). He further claims that our own subjectivity is changed when we encounter this strangeness. The subject does have to allow the other to transform or alter him (Rosenzweig 2000, xlv). To my mind, translating means believing that the realization of the oneness and connectedness of humankind is always a possibility, not in spite of but because of the differences. In a transdifferent attitude, a bridge is made to the other by letting the strangeness of the other influence the world of the “same.” In translation and, in fact, in every real conversation, the I surprises itself with something that escapes any familiarity. In hospitality extended to the non-I, the same is changed; alterity visits him, which leads to a human being’s renewal. In touch with the other, the self-transcending I allows otherness to enter into the same. The result is a self-different I, in which the other may come home.

Unity and Diversity After the completion of the Star (Rosenzweig 1988), in which he placed Christianity next to Judaism, Rosenzweig went beyond G. E. Lessing’s viewpoint that was too abstract and opted for a dynamic coexistence that included differences and similarities, opposition and symbiosis. In his adoption and criticism of Lessing’s view, Rosenzweig strived for equality that did not exclude particularity. One has indeed to be careful in comparing religions according to surface details. Not everything is easily communicable, and one has to take into account incommensurable particularities. Dissimilation is crucial and a condition for relationship. The egalitarian position does not have to conceal or obscure the specificity of the different religions. At the same time, divine inclusivity forbids religious exclusivity. In this sense, Rosenzweig’s idea of God as the truth, in which the human being participates, is still a useful concept. Another useful concept of his is the idea that God did not create religions but the entire world. With all its flaws, notably present in his hierarchical vision on religions, Rosenzweig’s dialogical interreligious thought serves as the beginning of a yet to be built interreligious theology. Perry Schmidt-Leukel is today one of the most eminent representatives of such a pluralistic theology of religions (Schmidt-Leukel 2009). He accentuates the possibility of learning from each other as well as transformation as a result of interfaith encounters. Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 237

All religions, he claims, are around the ultimate reality, about something transcendent. Once one accepts this thesis, one is open to learn new things about how others organize their lives around the transcendent. Crucial for an interreligious dialogue and theology to be built in the future are the recognition of the disparities between different religious persons and the recognition of the other. A careful thinker like Schmidt-Leukel avoids the pitfall of dismissing differences between religions and pluralizes theology without jumping hast- ily into a global, unifying religion (Schmidt-Leukel 2012, 19–33). I can imagine an interreligious theology that does not dismiss differences. In such a case, theology in the plural will be the result of interreligious learning and is not arrived at aprioristically but inductively (ibid., 28). In an interreligious, pluralist theology, one may come to appreciate the different approaches of what is beyond pure reason and of what is ultimately unutterable; one may learn from the other and even, in the course of dialogue, come to courageous revisions of old views. To my mind, an interreligious theology, a plurality of religious lives and respect for heterogeneity in religiosis, could become exemplary for an intercultural, peaceful society as such, where consensus and necessary dis- sensus coexist.

Judaism and the World

If religion is for the sake of the world, the religious person becomes involved in social and political action. To be religious means per definition to deal with the secular world and with the concrete problems of human existence. Judaism is singular but has no reason to exist unless in openness to others with whom one gets involved. The I has to step out of the narrow borders of its own community and religion, into the wider world, in care and compassion for the other. All religions deal with the ineffable and are, therefore, relative. I use here the word “relative” in two senses: first, no religion is absolute or higher than the other; second, all religions are related to each other. That is, all religions are connected: nobody expressed this more effectively than Heschel. In his depth-theology, the I imbued by God had to share the divine care for the neighbor. Whereas Heschel focuses on the divine care for the human being and on God’s demand for our sympathetic care, I stress more the upward movement of the I toward the other. I do not forget that this movement is conditioned by the call of the other from above. Yet, it is dynamic self-transcendence that leads to self-difference and to the elevated reality of trans-difference. Heschel’s engagement in the interreligious dialogue was the direct consequence of what he conceived of as the sympathetic character of the religious 238 Meir person, who identifies with God’s pathos. Although Heschel’s standpoint on religions was similar to that of Buber and Rosenzweig in that he concentrated on Judaism and Christianity, he nevertheless developed, in his famous lecture “No Religion is an Island,” a broad perspective on the different religions. He was ready to see the plurality of religions as the will of God. He refused to equate religions and God. One had to search for God passionately, but this quest had to be humble, in the consciousness that others too are searching for God. Heschel put the sense of wonder and mystery at the heart of the religious experience that characterized religious man as such. One had to keep alive the divine sparks in the souls of all. However, Heschel articulated a theory of interreligious pluralism, and not a Jewish theory of interreligious dialogue, which implies the active interaction between people of different religions. True, he was very influential in the Vatican II Council and actively contributed to the document “Nostra Aetate,” that marked a new age in the relationship between Catholics and Jews. He was a pioneer in courageously correcting Christianity. But he did not go far enough. The mushrooming interreligious dialogue of today implies much more than pluralism and the correction of others; it also involves self-criticism, self-examination, and the humility of recognizing that one’s own religion is imperfect and that only God is perfect. Buber went further than Heschel in positing that Jews could learn from the Christian accent on the individual and that Christians could learn from the Jewish accent on the collective (Buber 1962, 782). Heschel did not foster such a mutual criticism. He was more than merely tolerant, more than a religious pluralist, but less than a promoter of interactive interreligious dialogue. He paid special attention to Christianity and, more broadly, to the Abrahamitic religions but did not relate to the Asian religions. Heschel was far from being an exclusivist. As Harold Kasimow writes, he was more like an inclusivist, recognizing truth in other religions but remaining convinced of the truth of his own religion (Kasimow 2009, 200). In my opinion, his depth-theology provides us with a theory that permits the creation of an interactive interreligious dialogue, but, in practice, Heschel did not reach this stage. It has been noted that, in his critique of other religions, Heschel differs from pluralists like John Hick and Paul Knitter, since he did see all traditions as valid but not as equally valid (ibid., 199). I deem that the time is ripe to promote the idea that all religions try to organize the lives of people around what is beyond the boundaries of pure reason and that, therefore, one has to listen to and to learn from the narrative of others. Such an attitude seems to me to be the consequence of the idea that there are multiple ways of approaching the ultimate reality that could be more intertwined than in the past. Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 239

Hebrew Identity as Fraternity

Working in Jewish philosophy as the encounter between Jewish existence and philosophy is a tremendous task today. I suggest to get rid of apologetics and to see the special contribution of Jewish existence and thought for philosophy as such. In the past, most of Jewish philosophy was defensive. Time has come to discuss Jewish identity philosophically as a unique identity of fraternity.

Jewish Education In one of his articles in Difficult Freedom, Levinas reflects on the need for Jewish education (1990a, 277–88). Jewish civilization, as discussed in ancient books, certainly does not involve the abandonment of human ideals but does denounce an eloquence that disguises misery and does mistrust the spontaneity of one’s natural movements. Instead of promoting any form of freedom, Levinas refers to the law that is limiting and that brings forth a freedom “inscribed on the tablets of stone.” The Jewish spirit does not see every law as repressive; neither does it perceive of freedom as per se arbitrary or subversive. In this sense, Levinas rediscovers the originality of ancient Jewish values and the importance of a Jewish education that is more than mere religious instruction and more than an echo of the surrounding civilization or the simple rejection of this civilization. Love and law, love and obligation, spirit and letter, all go together in Jewish education. Judaism maintains “a law within freedom” and guarantees “freedom through law” (ibid., 288). It entails a ritual that creates a distance from one’s spontaneity and from nature. In Jewish education, one has to reopen the ancient books and build an active memory of the wisdom of the sages, a source of wisdom that the love of wisdom has to take into account. Judaism, Levinas writes, protests against the simple will to power; it doubts the peace of the conqueror, and it still believes in the humanism of patience. In the suffering servant, Levinas finds “all the suffering that demands justice until the end of time, a justice beyond the triumph of the triumphant” (ibid., 287). I am profoundly impressed by Levinas’s philosophical interpretation of Judaism, which in its best moments is open ended, in touch with the infinite that cannot be reduced to the same, but instead connects the same with the other. The challenge for Jewish philosophy today is not to search for the compatibility of Judaism with contemporary culture but to describe the spiritual power of Jewish civilization and its forgotten values that still may inspire Western civilization. Like his master Chouchani, Levinas saw Israel as a name for everyone who has received the Law (Levinas 1990b, 98). Israel is, therefore, a particular 240 Meir universal and stands for all those who, like Abraham, open their tent wide open on all sides to receive and feed man. Israel is, therefore, a large category of people who take care of another person’s body, who give others food and shelter. Levinas was a unique thinker who wrote philosophy. As a philosopher, he wrote on Judaism, although he would have denied that he constructed Jewish philosophy. He knew how to pass from one language to another: in his Jewish essays, he speaks “Hebrew,” and, in his philosophical writings, he speaks “Greek,” yet, there are passages that switch from one language to another. He is faithful to philosophy and to prophecy, to the Bible and to the Greeks, and he acknowledges the tension and the occasional conflict between them (Chalier 2002, 100–101). He was a philosopher, a Greek, but certainly a Jewish one (Meir 2008). Philosophy as love of wisdom had to take Judaism as wisdom of love into account. There was no rigorous border between philosophy and simply thinking; Levinas’s philosophy was indeed inspired by the particular Jewish tradition of thought (Chalier 2002, 110). Judaism and philosophy were not brought into synthesis, and Levinas certainly did not write theology in his philosophy, but Jewish elements were inserted in his philosophy and philosophical considerations can be found in his Jewish writings. There were parallels between Judaism and philosophy. Philosophy and Judaism were for him each other’s other (Meir 2010). Prophets and philosophers belonged together. I retain from Levinas some basic elements that are constructive building blocks for my own standpoint. I lean on Levinas’s view of the self as “here I am,” in other words, as disponsibility caused by the other’s call. I greatly appreciate Levinas’s idea of Judaism as a humanism of the other man, universal and particular at the same time. Moreover, the idea of the necessity of multiple interpretations of the inspiring religious texts and of the ongoing discussions between students of the Torah as the social context in which the ancient texts come alive helps me discuss and construct a much needed dialogical hermeneutics of ancient sacred books. Finally, the interaction between Judaism and philosophy in the form of dialogue remains exemplary to me.

Combining Cultures and Sharing God’s Care for the Human Being I maintain that to be a Jew is to live the impossibility of simply being equal to yourself: a Jew does not live in the one-dimensionality of the self, since he carries in him the dimension of alterity that links him to others. Consequently, interpreting Jewish existence will always go beyond the principle of identity. To be Jewish is to know how to “pass” to others. Great Jews are not only concerned with themselves but with the broader picture. If Judaism is equivalent to “passing” to others, it becomes less relevant what “kind” of Judaism one belongs to. Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 241

Judaism is too profound to be pinpointed or nailed down to some “stream” and hyphenated. To be Jewish is to testify to the humanity of the human being and to universality. Judaism is indeed universal, but it is also a particularity that contributes to universality. My view is that a particular Judaism without universality is fanatic, whereas a universality without particularity forgets the specificity that is never to be erased in a universe without differences. The Jewish interest in the world has led to complex identities (Meir 2006b, 25–35). Rosenzweig’s well-chosen image of two rivers implies that one may live within different cultures that are separate but not unrelated. The Jewish and the German rivers fertilized his spiritual landscape and brought vitality to it. I think that the identities of people like Rosenzweig were less broken or hybrid than identities creatively forged in dialogue with their cultural environment. These men lived their lives in the dialogue between the same and the other, between the own and the different. In a way, modern Jews are likewise children of different cultures, products of a mixed world. People with a strong Jewish engagement will not be afraid to be in touch with different cultures or with philosophy. On the contrary, the I becomes particular through its being called and through its answer to this call. To be in touch with the divine becomes possible in the answer to this call. Since the I is an I for the other, religious groups as well as hermeneutics of religious texts have to be open to others. Religiosity, as I see it, causes an exodus out of the self by extending hospitality to the other. This leads to the creation of the I, who becomes other to itself through confrontation with the non-I. Hermeneutics is, therefore, not only dialogical and ethical but also “othering,” as it changes the interpreting I.

Dialogical Hermeneutics

Different views of the other are eminently expressed in the commentaries on the founding documents of religions. It is, therefore, a task of the first order to develop dialogical interpretations of the different sacred writings that take into account the gaze of the other, whose face interprets the I as the one-for- the-other. The other’s ethical demand obliges the interpreter not to neglect the other in his approach to his religious sources. The interpreter is, therefore, invited to interpret the written texts in an act of hospitality, in a nontotalitar- ian, nonexclusivist way. This urgent invitation will be answered in a person- and other-centered approach to texts about God, who is not to be represented, and about men, who are created in God’s image. Texts are not mere historical artifacts; they ask to be interpreted, and readers give their explanations in a continual process of interpretation. The ancient texts are to be understood 242 Meir and reinterpreted on new terms. Understanding sacred texts presupposes an ethical community of interpreters who have knowledge of the fact that “no religion is an island.” Reading religions’ foundational texts always takes place in a present-day context in which one interprets, and the challenge is to keep the other in mind in the process of interpreting. It is a positive development when religious people interpret their sources in ways that promote democracy, pluralism, critical thinking, and the rights of the human being. A new dialogue between religions and modern Western values such as feminism or equality is possible. A new field of interaction between religions has been opened, as people are shaping their religions to adapt them to our times and to do innovative things in reference to traditional texts. When confronted with modern values as democracy or human rights, several options remain possible for thinkers on religious topics. One is that one leaves foundational religious texts aside and judges that they are incompatible with modernity. Another option is to read these texts in view of modern values. A third way consists in “making” religion by incorporating modern values into theology. In the last option, a feminist religious person who wants a different society and is confronted with archaic, paternalist patterns of thinking could say, “This is not religion.” She could also say, “It is not my religion.” A third way consists of saying, “We make religion” and renew religion. Traditions are remodeled through creative new thinking. For the most part, this is a long process. Without interpretation, texts remain closed and irrelevant for today. In interpretations, one may refuse to develop a critical philological-historical point of view or, on the contrary, admit that, without such a point of view, real understanding of texts remains impossible. All interpreters, however, will have to deal with the violent passages that are present in their traditions and will have to take into account that religions do not contain truths that are established once and for all. Religions are changing, whether one wants this or not, and we all permanently continue to shape our religions as we reinterpret our religious sources. Texts and commentaries are necessarily historically situated and written for a well-defined public. Therefore, they have to be constantly reinterpreted. It is essential to know what a text meant at the time it was written down, but it is likewise pivotal to know what it may mean today. The question of what the text meant and the question of what it could mean today, for us, are equally important. The latter question does not bring the text out of its historical context but places it in an actual context, which is as vital as understanding its original Sitz im Leben. The main issue here is the function of a given text within an intercultural context and in view of the formation of a positive, inclusive identity. Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 243

Rereading foundational religious texts in an intercultural context is necessary to avoid the shaping of negative identities. It is true that documents shape specific group identities. But basic religious documents do not only contain historical memories that consolidate a group; they are central in the formation of a group identity, and, as such, they either contribute to the creation of intercultural, dialogical societies or they do not. Exclusivists with absolute truth-claims are not interested in reading the texts of others since they possess the truth. Inclusivists recognize some truth in the texts of other groups, but the all truth resides for them in their own foundational texts. Pluralists tolerate (in a weak pluralism) or celebrate (in a strong pluralism) other thoughts embedded in foundational texts of other religions. But a dialogical openness to the texts of others as well as an intercultural and interreligious attitude, in which one acknowledges the other, learns from him, and is ready also to be self-critical, is still largely absent. Holy texts frequently function as a means for consolidating the I’s own group on the negative background of other groups. They play an enormous role in the formation of narratives and memories that contribute to group solidarity. Multiple intrareligious perspectives are possible and desirable, but the dialogical interpretation of the Jewish sources is even more worthwhile in the pursuit of creating a developing interreligious dialogue.

The New Dialogue between Secularism and Religion Today, scholars in sociology of religion have revised the former secularization theory, which assumed that religion was gradually losing adherents and that secularization would finally become dominant. Religion has reemerged and still has social significance. There has even been a revival of religion. The anticipated massive social change from the influence of religion transferring over to the secular did not take place, in contrast to predictions that the end of the religious era in Western Europe was in sight. Peter Berger has rightly observed that, in the industrial and postindustrial world, secularization is great but “the rest of the world is as furiously religious as ever” (Berger 1993, 32). One recognizes today that secularization and religion are linked. Religion may promote secular values, and secular values may also be sacralized. Religion and “its other” are not necessarily contradictory (Knecht and Feuchter 2008, 16–17). One may hallow everyday life, without escaping the world and without making secularism into a religion. It used to be normative to think about religion and the secular in a dichotomous way. One contrasted the sacred with the profane, belief with knowledge. However, interactions could be recognized, exchanges stimulated, and “translation” made possible. A new 244 Meir dialogue becomes conceivable if secularism is not perforce antireligious, as it is in France, and if religion is not antisecular as is true in Iran. Religion and modernity may be combined. In Israel, for instance, one thinks about the coexistence of Judaism and democracy and talks about a “Jewish democratic state.” Of course, the concept of Judaism itself is much disputed, given the truth in the dictum “two Jews, three opinions.” Some think about religion when they say “Jewish,” while others think about the Jewish people. Moreover, the Jewish religion has many voices. There is a tension between tradition and modernity. Reformulations, remodeling, and changes, even mutations, take place. More than ever, we feel the need to reshape religion, in view of present-day events and evolutions. Within the secularized world, Israel presents a special case. There are people who adopt the largely diffused West European belief in secularism at the expense of religion. They hope that religion will have less impact on society and politics. There are, further, people who protest against Western values and, in a rather fundamentalist way, represent secularism as a threat that may be overcome in religion as an all-encompassing meaning system. Finally, people also may combine a religious lifestyle with secular reality. Among Israeli Jews, a growing spiritual interest is manifest, not necessarily in structures of traditional religiosity. Frequently, in polarized Israel, there is little consciousness that both secularization and religious transformation and revival are mutually constituted global processes rather than exclusive developments.

Permanent and Plural Exegesis Hermeneutics will have to be responsive. This implies that each and every answer will have to see itself in the chorus of answers to the same call. The inexpressible, around which the ancient biblical texts pivot, invites a plurality of answers. God, of whom the texts testify, is not to be encapsulated in a concept: he escapes any grasp. He, so to speak, interprets the human being and allows for a multitude of interpretations of his call. The text is inspired insofar as the reader inspires him- or herself through the act of reading in order to create a just society. In an inspirational reading, one produces every new meaning in answer to the voice that becomes audible in the Bible, Midrash, and Talmud. One has to interpret texts to make them new again in the present. Partaking in a tradition involves also that one bring the past into the future. In this process, it is possible that one not accept certain aspects of the tradition that one shares. In all events, it is impossible to be linked to the whole of a tradition in all its aspects. On the other hand, to shape one’s own unique religious personality, one should not become estranged from the living community that bears Otherness and Jewish Religious Identity 245 and transmits the tradition. However, while connectedness to others who interpret is imperative, everyone has the task to reshape the tradition in which he stands or which he chooses, out of his own experience. There is no other way than one’s own way in interpreting texts and the world. Texts always function in a context. In our present context, we care, for instance, for democracy that includes a diversity of people. Incorporating present-day contexts is indispensable to discover new aspects in old texts. With our present-day sensitivities, we read the ancient sources differently. The point is that exegesis will always have to be renewed, since contexts change. Nobody can claim to have the “right” interpretation of ancient texts, because they remain perpetually open to novel approaches. Biblical hermeneutics implies ever-new understandings of the old texts.

Interpreting with the Other in Mind Texts as such are dead if people do not make them alive again by reverberating in their mouths, hearts, and minds. The echo of the divine living voice in the appeal of the other can be heard only if sacred texts are interpreted from within a dialogical context. Only when sacred texts lose their condition of being written down—only when they become a living voice in the mouth and heart of the interpreter—do they get rid of their dead state and become alive again. The sacred texts appear in the context of Jewish liturgy, which may renew the Jew throughout the cyclical course of the year. In the best case, the participants in the liturgy do not merely understand the texts, but they are made alive by them. The biblical words spoken in liturgy simultaneously presuppose a community and foster this community. In a still broader perspective, sacred texts that ask for interpretation make the divine voice audible through the living dialogue with others that significantly differ from us. In speaking with others about the challenging divine voice, self-transcendence is realized. Only in dialogue with the stranger is the solitary position of the I left and the condition created for hearing the divine word in all its living and vitalizing force, in all its transforming exteriority. In intersubjective encounters, the voice of the sacred texts becomes audible again. The result is a novel way of approaching texts, in which one “sees the voices” (Exodus 20:18). Hearing the voice within and beyond the text is a potential of human beings, who say, “We will do and hear” (Exodus 24:7). Before any rational understanding, one becomes practically available for the other, and, in this unconditional availability, one understands in a deeper way. In listening to the divine word, community is created. The praxis of openness to the other has an impact on the understanding of texts that deal with the unspeakable. In other words, religious texts relate to the ineffable; they contain words about what 246 Meir never can come to full expression, and these words become meaningful in dialogical exercises. In interpreting these texts, the I becomes inspired. There is ineffability in the I that is in touch with the ineffable, of which the texts speak. The less contains the more. With this idea, my view of the I comes full circle: the I is I, thanks to the unthematizable other, and it becomes unthematizable for others. The I is, therefore, a mystery, never fully understood, since it is always open to what it cannot contain. With this new vantage point on the I, one does not find the I by searching for oneself, but only in relation, in trans difference. In the continuous process of self-transcendence, the I becomes self-different, with otherness in himself. From this perspective, the real identity crisis consists of the self-centeredness of the isolated I. The way out of this crisis is through dialogue with or answer to the non-I. In my view, Jewish vitality depends on the creation of a dialogical self; the genesis of a vital religious self is conditional on the building of a dialogical hermeneutics.

References

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———. 1990b. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press. ———. 1991. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Meir, Ephraim. 2006a. Letters of Love: Franz Rosenzweig’s Spiritual Biography and Oeuvre in Light of the Gritli Letters. Studies in Judaism 2. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 2006b. “Reinterpreting Judaism in the German Context: On German-Jewish Thinkers as Jews and Germans.” In The Legacy of the German-Jewish Religious and Cultural Heritage: A Basis for German Israeli Dialogue? Edited by Ben Mollov, 25–35. Proceedings of an international conference held at Bar-Ilan University, June 1, 2005. Jerusalem: Yuval Press. ———. 2008. Levinas’s Jewish Thought: Between Jerusalem and Athens. Jerusalem: Magnes. ———. 2010. “Judaism and Philosophy: Each Other’s Other in Levinas.” Modern Judaism 30, no. 3: 348–62. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1979. Briefe und Tagebücher. 1.Band. 1900–1918. (Franz Rosenzweig. Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften I). Edited by Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann, in collaboration with Bernhard Casper. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1988. Der Stern der Erlösung. Bibliothek Suhrkamp 973. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2000. Ninety-two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi. Edited and with an introduction by Richard A. Cohen. Translated by Thomas Kovach, Eva Jospe, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt. Albany. State University of New York Press. ———. 2002. Die “Gritli”—Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy. Edited by Inken Ruehle and Reinhold Mayer. Tübingen: Bilam Verlag. ———. 2005. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Schmidt-Leukel. Perry. 2009. Transformation by Integration: How Inter-faith Encounter Changes Christianity. London: SCM Press. ———. 2012. “Religious Pluralism and the Need for an Interreligious Theology.” In Religious Pluralism and the Modern World: An Ongoing Engagement with John Hick, edited by Sharada Sugirtharajah, 19–33. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. chapter 12 The Need for Jewish Philosophy

Alan Mittleman

I came to Jewish philosophy through the intellectual provocations of my undergraduate experience. I studied both philosophy and Jewish intellectual history. In philosophy, I found a critical engagement with enduring human questions. Although much of what I studied seemed sterile—particularly in comparison with literature and religion—I appreciated philosophy’s rigor, its focus on argument. If there were to be answers one could live with, I thought, they would likely come from philosophy in concert with science. Simultaneously, my engagement with biblical and Jewish studies brought me into an adult confrontation with my own Judaism and Jewish identity. Academic study deepened my commitment but also left me intellectually perplexed. What could Judaism say about the kinds of questions that animated the great philosophers? Could Judaism speak philosophically in the present, as it seemed to have done in the past? The courses I took in Jewish philosophy were largely studies of intellectual history. I was dissatisfied. We honor past thinkers like John Locke or David Hume by taking their arguments seriously as philosophical arguments, not as artifacts from another time. Should we not treat Moses Maimonides that way, too? My early experiences of perplexity about this disproportion stuck with me, prompting me to pursue philosophical inquiry under the guise of Jewish intellectual history. Although my first books on German-Jewish thought were ostensibly historical studies, they were motivated by abiding philosophical questions. Eventually, I gained the courage to “come out of the closet” and wear my philosophical curiosity cum perplexity for any reader (or student) to see. Yet, the world in which I work, academic Jewish studies, is still a world dominated by historians. Making sense of what philosophy may mean in such a world is my focus in the first part of this paper. In the second part, I shall discuss my way of doing Jewish philosophy on its own terms. As mentioned, academic Jewish studies is primarily a historical field. There are also social scientists, scholars of belles-lettres, and others, but historians— and, with them, an outlook known as historicism—rule. The reason for this is perhaps to be found in the circumstances under which the academic study of Judaism emerged. In the nineteenth century, historical inquiry was thought not only to reveal the genius or spirit (Volksgeist) of a people but to justify its

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_014 The Need For Jewish Philosophy 249 place in the new order of European nation states. The Jews were keen to show that they too had a history, that they too belonged to a world of peoples whose past disclosed the power of the human spirit. Wissenschaft des Judentums, which we today call Jewish studies, was to bring worldly respectability, as well as spiritual benefit to Jews and non-Jews alike. The metaphysical significance of historiography has long since vanished (Iggers 1968). Its political and cultural utility may have also ebbed. Yet the pursuit of the Jewish past remains the principal focus for Jewish studies. Why should this continue to be the case? Why should the philosophical enterprise, by contrast, be marginal? One could argue that there are legitimate traditional reasons, not just arbitrary academic ones, for the marginal status of constructive Jewish philosophy. First, one could claim that Judaism has never been—Maimonides’ efforts at dogmatizing notwithstanding—a creedal phenomenon (Kellner 2006). The kind of critical inquiry into belief that has characterized Christian theology from the beginning has no extensive phenomenological counterpart in Judaism. If beliefs are not at the center, then the critical inquiry into and refinement of beliefs may remain at the periphery. Unlike Christianity or Buddhism, Judaism puts the story of a people, its sacred history, its sacred law, and so on at the center. Overemphasis on the conceptual expressions of Jewish life distorts how Jews have traditionally weighted their concerns. Judah Halevi got it right, on this view. God’s dealings in history with a specific people rather than God’s creation of the cosmos is the fons et origo of Judaism. Second, given the centrality of the Jewish people, the locus of concern has always been the survival of the Jewish people, whether as the faithful servants of the God of Israel or, in the secular present, for less elevated but no less urgent reasons. The critical engagement of philosophy needs to be weighed on a survivalist scale. Put crudely, is it good for the Jews? Maimonides had to veil his most stringently philosophical views, lest the masses draw impious or subversive conclusions from them. Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret’s ban against the study of philosophy in medieval Spain is as “authentically Jewish” as is the study of philosophy. Philosophy should be answerable both to law and to communal policy. Third, even when philosophy flourished among the Jews, in the period between Saadiah Gaon and Joseph Albo, it flourished for reasons that show the primacy, not the dispensability of history and politics. That is, Jews cultivated philosophy because that is what educated Muslims and Christians did and, furthermore, that is what Jews needed to defend themselves against their educated, non-Jewish detractors. At best, philosophy is a species of what Franz Rosenzweig called “apologetic thinking.” Against unwanted offense, it provides a good defense. Contemporary Jewish studies, therefore, is not wholly 250 Mittleman contemporary in its consignment of philosophizing to the margins of Jewish intellectual activity. I think that these points have merit, but I do not think that they clinch an argument against philosophy. There are good and urgent reasons that Jewish philosophy ought to be cultivated—“good” in terms of the phenomenology of Judaism, “urgent” in terms of the condition of the Jews. In what follows, I will try to explicate those reasons, sketching along the way my own understanding of what a constructive Jewish philosophy entails. Why should we cultivate Jewish philosophy today? I would argue that, as valuable as the study of history is—including the history of Jewish thought generally and philosophy particularly—it is inadequate. It requires the complement that philosophy can provide. History can inform us about the Jewish past, but can it inform us about why we should care about the Jewish past? The explanations and justifications we offer for why history matters are not themselves historical claims. What claims does history have on us? Why should our temporal consciousness exceed the scope of our own memories and anticipations? Is the acquisition of historical knowledge, of a historical consciousness or orientation optional, desirable, obligatory? The answer to such questions likely correlates with one’s position on the normative relations among individual and society, nation, and polity. Whether we care about, in this case, Jewish history relates to whether we (do, should, must) care about the Jews. If caring about Jewish history is an expression of caring about the Jews, how should it be ranked against other objects of care? What values and interests does an historical orientation serve? How should we evaluate the epistemic, moral, and political claims embedded in an historical orientation? All of these are essentially philosophical questions. It does not seem to me that they get asked very much. Where I teach, the historical orientation is thought to be self-evidently valuable. Of course, getting bogged down in such questions would stand in the way of actual historical research, teaching, and learning. It may be unfair or unreasonable to suppose that historians should attend to them, as it may be unfair or unreasonable to suppose that working physicists should care about philosophy of science. Nonetheless, I would like to see some sustained effort at justification. In educational settings, it seems simply to be assumed that committed Jews should be curious about the Jewish past and, therefore, committed to the study of it—full stop. Or, more expansively, that the past is instructive: it offers guidance for the present. Or, that without the past, we lose our identity in the present. Or that this subject matter, like any other academic subject matter, does not stand in need of justification: it is simply worth knowing. All The Need For Jewish Philosophy 251 of these views are tenable; none of them is self-justifying. I would not want to defend self-willed historical ignorance, but I would not want uncritically to believe that the value of history is self-evident. We need to make a case for it, and any such case will be philosophical. Pushing a bit more deeply, I am very much struck, as I teach at an institution spiritually descended from the original center of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, by how completely a historical approach frames the study of Judaism even for rabbinical students. Nothing and no one stands outside history. Every text, especially the documents of Jewish law, is approached as a historical artifact. How the future rabbi gets from the text qua product of historical Jewish agency to the text as authoritative, as making a normative claim requiring a response, is left to theology. But theology, in a historicist setting, means the history of theology (philosophy, Jewish thought, and so forth). This is, if not exactly a vicious, then not quite a virtuous circle. How can authority be established on the basis of history, which is to say, on the basis of descriptions of past expressions of authority? The ground gives way before a kind of fact/value distinction. That people believed in the authority of the Torah in the past does not rise to a normative argument on behalf of the authority of the Torah today. That smoking causes cancer is not—pace Hume—an argument against smoking. In both cases, additional, normative premises need to be supplied to make the argument. (We ought to follow in the ways of our ancestors; we ought to strive to be healthy.) History problematizes but does not preempt normativity. To respond to the problem and to avoid the unnecessary pitfall of preemption, history needs philosophy. The dominance of history as the framework of inquiry into Judaism conditions—indeed, constrains—what we can think about Judaism in the present. One is unable to say, unless one is naïve or ideological, that “Judaism holds x” or “Judaism stands for y.” Such assertions need to be tied to strict temporal and spatial contexts. Indeed, the very premise that there is some “Judaism” capable of saying anything in a straightforward fashion is disallowed. Judaism can be nothing other than an historical construct. The influential historian Jacob Neusner prefers to speak of “Judaisms” when describing the competing “Judaic systems” of late antiquity (Neusner et al. 1987). But even that idea, based on an assumption that Judaism is a religion, can be shown to assume too much. A recent book by the Princeton scholar Leora Batnitzky (2011) argues that Judaism “became a religion,” that is, the amorphous theopolitical self-understanding of the Jewish people was translated into religious terms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to ease the passage of the Jews into the emerging order of European nation-states and national cultures. Jews suppressed the political 252 Mittleman elements of their self-understanding as a divine nation in exile. They substi- tuted a religious paradigm so as to give no offense to the exclusive sovereignty of the modern state (Mittleman 2000). Thus, even describing Judaism as a religion is a reckless move, from a historicist point of view. (And, of course, the concept of religion also has a history [Cantwell Smith 1991].) As Karl Marx said, everything that is solid melts into air. History provides no fixed points; everything is a flux of development and change, including any and all candidate concepts of Judaism per se. To talk about Judaism simpliciter is to reveal an immense lack of sophistication, an embarrassing naiveté. If one were then to try to get at the conceptual claims that Jewish texts or thinkers have made over the centuries, the best one could do is to explicate them in historical context. One could say that this concept of the soul, for example, reflects these Neoplatonized, Aristotelian elements for these reasons. One could trace how this Jewish thinker came to have that idea and what uses the idea had within his particular intellectual project. One could not begin to say whether the idea makes sense in our context; whether the idea, once retrieved and explicated, can be shown to be plausible or warranted or true—whether we should believe it. That is simply not the historian’s concern. Nor, from the point of view of a historicist, should it be anyone’s concern. There is no metahistorical truth. Our descriptions of a presumed historical reality are as subject to historical conditioning as is whatever we attempt to describe, analyze, and explain. None of this gets at a truth that vaults beyond a strictly delimited context. Such an orientation creates an atmosphere inhospitable to philosophical inquiry, let alone to an intelligent fidelity or piety to tradition. But, without philosophical inquiry, I do not see how continued fidelity or piety can be intelligent or, dare I say, rational. Without rationality, the continued affirmation of Judaism will be motivated by brute tribal loyalty, leaps of romantic faith, incor- rigible chauvinism, or decision for decision’s sake. How then might philosophy help relieve the distress of historicism? First, by showing that it is unnecessary. There is as little reason that historical study should lead to historicism as there is that science should give rise to scientism. Both are ideological excrescences, which extend the authority of their underlying epistemological projects beyond their proper bounds. Both historicism and scientism make ontological wagers. In the case of scientism, there is an assumption of physicalism: everything that exists permits in principle of a physical explanation. This explanation is reductive, in the sense that it accounts for wholes through analyses of parts and their interactions. If some x does not allow for a reductive, physical explanation, then it likely does not exist. Dimensions of existence that resist objective modes of description and The Need For Jewish Philosophy 253 explanation—such as qualia or the phenomenological experience of free will—have to be eliminated, declared illusory; they are the residue of “folk psychology.” Scientism, like science, is quite properly committed to naturalism. But its naturalism is not capacious; it equates naturalism with physicalism, thereby preempting the emergent possibilities of nature. The success of the powerful mode of reductive scientific explanation is generalized and abso- lutized as the model for all explanation. Explanations that are not reductive and physicalist are thought to be non- or pseudoexplanations. Thus, explanatory frameworks that assume the integrity of their subject matters are suspect. In principle, the social sciences should be reducible to biology (Wilson 1999). Modes of inquiry such as aesthetics or ethics are today reduced to “neuroaes- thetics” or “evolutionary ethics.” The results often underwhelm (Kitcher 1985). Historicism also has ontological commitments. But whereas scientism is a realism (either naïve or causal), historicism is an antirealism. Scientism thinks that mind-independent things exist, physically exist, and that the job of scientific explanation is to theorize them, to represent them linguistically or mathematically and to account for what they are, how they work, and so forth. Historicism does not think that the objects of historical inquiry have mind- independent existence; they are ontologically subjective in the sense that they originate in the minds and, hence, in the agency of human subjects (Searle 1997). The objects of historical inquiry are human acts arising from (and interpreted by) human minds. There is nothing behind or above them—no divine hand, no Geist, no march of human progress; history is metaphysically sterile. The societies and cultures that contextualize human action are also products of human construction and creativity. It is ontological subjectivity all the way down. That does not mean that human actions are unreal. Law books, like Mount Everest, are real. But they are real in different ways. The former requires the intersubjective agreement of human minds; the latter does not. For scientism, all the causal arrows point downward to physics. For historicism, all the causal arrows point to the projects of human beings in specific societies and cultures at specific times. For one, everything is found. For the other, everything is made. Both causal orders are ontologically parsimonious. In both cases, there is the assumption of causal closure. Physics has no need for God. (He has no need “for that hypothesis,” Pierre-Simon Laplace memorably said of God.) But history has no need for nonimmanent causation either. The explanation that Deuteronomy, Joshua, or Judges gave for Israel’s success or failure, for example, is by definition incredible because it imports another order of causation into a closed system. But so is the kind of explanation that Immanuel Kant or Nicolas de Condorcet—or Heinrich Graetz—might have 254 Mittleman given. There can be no master narrative, no tale of rising enlightenment or liberation or heroic survival in the face of continual tragedy. All of these order- ings and teleologies are arbitrary, imposed, and post facto. There is nothing but time-bound particulars. Like Hilary Putnam’s ants drawing lines in the sand, they represent nothing beyond themselves (Putnam 1981). What meaning the student of history might take away from history is subjective, the stuff of sermons, not of sober research. As Leo Strauss pointed out more than half a century ago, historicism is a kind of relativism similar to the ancient conventionalism of the Athenian Sophists (Strauss 1953). One problem with relativism is its self-refuting character: all truth-claims are relative to time, place, context, and such, except this claim. Relativism carves out an exception for itself from its central, implacable dogma. The framework-dependence of all claims is itself exempt from dependence on a framework. This one claim is a universal law. That will not do. The alternative to relativism is a healthy appreciation for the contextual character of truth-claims without eliminating standards that transcend context. Epistemological pluralism captures some of the values (such as tolerance) sought by relativism without succumbing to relativism’s nihilist inclinations (Goodman 2001). Epistemological pluralism acknowledges that a truth-claim in mathematics needs to be assessed differently from a truth-claim in ethics or aesthetics. Historical statements and statements about fictional characters in literature can both have truth-value, but that value is sought and ascertained differently. We can search for truth in different areas, in different ways without giving up on truth altogether or limiting its sphere to some narrow empirical or logical domain. Nor do we have to give up on a real world that we can share in common. An epistemological pluralist might then embrace the value of historical inquiry without falling into historicist relativism or antirealism. Everything has a history (literally everything insofar as the universe per se has a history), but that does not imply that everything can only be studied, characterized, and understood historically. Nor does it imply that meaning is imprisoned within a limited historical context. Nothing human needs to be alien to us. Nor need we be silenced by relativism, as we stand before the normative claims of a bygone practice or belief. Standards of rightness, fairness, justice, and other moral values have a history, but that fact does not leave us powerless (or arbitrarily imperious) when it comes to evaluating the acts of persons in cultures far or remote from our own. The hunting of persons for sport or the sexual abuse of children can be judged heinous without regard to historical context. People have cared about and valued many different and conflicting things, but caring and valuing per se, having interests and ranking them are context- independent features of human life. Treating like beings in like ways is equally The Need For Jewish Philosophy 255 fundamental. It is a basic corollary of rationality, emergent perhaps from the pattern-forming consciousness that enabled the survival of our hominid ancestors on the African plains millions of years ago. Much moral disagreement between cultures occurs over what constitutes likeness. Are members of other castes, tribes, nations, classes, racial groups, and other classifications like us? If they are not, they can be treated differently (and usually invidiously). Much of the moral history of the West over the last few centuries has involved expanding the sphere of those who are “like us” by discounting differences that were previously thought salient (Glover 2012). A good thing, I hope all would agree. But whether we reach consensus on who is like us or not, our very attention to differences attests to the principle of treating like beings in like ways. Whether we want to include or exclude others from the circle of likeness, our underlying concern reveals the sway of the principle of like treatment for like beings. Evidently, hypothetical human-hunting sportsmen or child abusers do not regard their victims as human in the same way that they are. But they do think that at least some others are human in the same way that they are and should not therefore be hunted or abused. Given their fundamental (if defective) grasp of the principle, one can argue with them, the divide of time, space, and culture notwithstanding. One could argue that the descriptions on which they base their discriminations lack the weight or force they ascribe to them, that, but for accident or luck, they or their loved ones could be in the situation of their victims. One could argue that their truncated application of the principle renders their beliefs self-impeaching and their actions self- undermining. Even within their own (warped) scheme of values, there is something contradictory about their lives. They are acting irrationally by arresting inquiry into the moral status of others and entrenching some set of differences as ultimate and determinative of worth. If they could be persuaded that the principle that animates their moral lives (treat like beings in like ways) applies to those they mistreat, that those others are not as unlike themselves as they once believed, then they would come to act more rationally. They would both continue the intellectual adventure of moral learning and think more coherently about the implications of treating like beings in like ways. The notion of rational coherence, ultimately based on the principle of noncontradiction is crucial here. This too is not local or temporal, subject to historicist capture. Noncontradiction is so basic, as Aristotle pointed out, that it cannot be proven. Any proof for it would already presuppose it. Similarly, any supposed refutation of it would already acknowledge its force. I have been trying to show the limits and failures of historicism, while gesturing toward the value of history. History must be freed from historicism, as science must be freed from scientism. Philosophy can help with this extraction. 256 Mittleman

Jewish philosophy can help illumine why Jews or anyone should care about the Jewish past. This is an argument for the complementarity of Jewish philosophy, with a Jewish studies universe largely defined by historical inquiry. But beyond those services that Jewish philosophy can provide to the Jewish studies academy, what merits does it have on its own? What are the broader intellectual tasks of Jewish philosophy? How do they relate to the history of Jewish philosophy? What responsibility does Jewish philosophy have for the Jewish future? How should Jewish philosophy relate to its own past? The last question makes the assumption that there is a tradition of Jewish philosophy. This assumption has been called into question by Daniel Frank (Frank and Leaman 2004), who argues that Jewish philosophy is an invented tradition, a cobbling together of certain medieval writings by nineteenth- century Jewish scholars in the interest of presenting a highly universalistic, rationalized portrayal of Judaism. Prior to this invention, there were philosophically minded Jews, but there was no coherent tradition of Jewish philosophy; that is an artifact of hindsight. This may be true, but I am not sure that it ought to matter much for contemporary Jewish philosophy. The latter ranges over the entire corpus of Jewish texts, including philosophical ones; it should not confine itself to commentary on or further development of some existing tradition or canon. Jewish philosophy should certainly be interested in the views of Philo, Saadiah, Rambam, Halevi, Gersonides, Crescas, Albo and others. But it should be equally interested in reflection on halakha and aggadah, on the Tanakh, on midrash, responsa, sifrut ha-musar, and so forth. This is to say that contemporary Jewish philosophy is a mode of engagement with (potentially) the entire heritage of Judaism. It is not nor need it be the extension of some existing tradition. What is or ought to be the manner of that engagement? My own work has been influenced by Hermann Cohen. I take from Cohen (who took from Maimonides) that philosophy should seek the rationality implicit in Jewish texts and bring that rationality into view. I take it that Jewish texts often pro- pound a worldview and an ethos and that these metaphysical and ethical stances need to be clarified and brought into dialogue with other positions. Texts make tacit (or sometimes explicit) arguments. These arguments can be brought into what Michael Oakeshott called “the conversation of mankind” (Oakeshott 1991). Jewish philosophy involves the work of discovering and reconstructing, appropriating and presenting the deepest claims that Judaism makes. I think that those claims are rationally intelligible. By that I mean that Judaism, philosophically considered, makes a case that does not demand the sacrifice of intellect or the suspension of any portion of the holistic network of beliefs about the world that one derives from science and from The Need For Jewish Philosophy 257 personal experience. Rational beliefs are capable of being integrated with other well-founded beliefs; they do not require a special compartment where they are impeccable and immune from interrogation. Compartmentalization, as sociologists of modern Orthodoxy have pointed out, is a familiar strategy for living a traditional Jewish life and simultaneously participating in the contemporary world. Nonetheless, it seems to me a failure of nerve. It would be better, in my opinion, to continue to struggle with the implications of one’s various epistemic and axiological commitments than to conclude an uneasy and premature armistice between them. There is no guarantee, of course, that some splendid holistic synthesis of one’s “religious” and one’s “secular” beliefs will come about. But to arrest the intellectual adventure before it even begins shows a lack of courage. Jewish philosophy is the expression and medium of that struggle. On my view, Jewish philosophy should articulate a Judaism that is robustly rational and that shuns various irrational extremes. One extreme is supersti- tion, the presentation of Judaism as a set of just-so stories (and practices) that must be believed (and followed) in their sheer positivity on the basis of an authority that is essentially arbitrary. On this view, Judaism should get a free pass. If an aggadah talks about demons, then we ought to believe that demons exist. A tanna said so! Who are we to question? This is a kind of teleological suspension of the rational. Judaism occupies an evidence-free zone. We need go no further than the Rambam’s “Letter on Astrology” to remind ourselves how unworthy of serious men and women magical thinking is (Twersky 1972). Another extreme is eliminativism in the sense of a reflexive dismissal of all claims that, on their face, do not comply with some privileged epistemic norm or rule. This is the common sense of contemporary secularism. From this point of view, Judaism is a compilation of Iron Age fairy tales pretending to be explanations for matters better explained by science. Or it is a set of retrograde practices (including circumcision, shechita, opposition to same-sex marriage, among others) that ought to be jettisoned. The shrill views of the New Atheists need not concern us. What is of concern, however, is how global debunking arguments make their way into the minds of otherwise well-intentioned Jews. Such Jews conclude that their love for Judaism and the Jewish people is simply irreconcilable with their intellectual commitment to modern Enlightenment or their moral commitment to liberal values. This does not necessarily drive them away from Judaism, but it does prompt the thought that Judaism must be excused. It is defensible only by appeal to ideas such as identity or multiculturalism. Judaism’s ideas cannot stand on their own. Jewish philosophy should help Jewish ideas to stand on their own and get a hearing. Related to this is another position: the pragmatic construal of Judaism. We need not worry 258 Mittleman about the rationality, warrant, or justification of Jewish claims—none of us can know the truth about these matters anyway. We simply need to be committed to a Jewish praxis or to the Jewish people on moral, political, or psychological grounds. Let the cognitive chips fall where they may. A Rortian Judaism would relieve us of innumerable worries about “Godtalk,” the authority of the halakha, and so on. But why would any consistent Rortian affirm Judaism in the first place? My work has tried to address these challenges. In every instance, I have tried to explore the rationality of Jewish responses to fundamental human questions. In one recent essay, for example, I focused on the question of whether being is good (Mittleman 2011). I was much impressed by the repeated use of the term good (tov) in the first creation story of Genesis and wondered what it means to affirm the goodness of creation. I compared biblical understandings of goodness with Platonic and Aristotelian approaches, using the analytic tools of contemporary value theory to flesh out the core issues. I defended the view that the biblical and subsequent Judaic vision sees existence as grounded in goodness. Although suffering is unavoidable, tragedy—with its vision of incompatible values locked in perpetual, zero-sum conflict—is not the best way to conceptualize suffering. The biblical understanding of existence ordered by the good opposes the essentially pagan (polytheistic) affirmation of the tragic character of being. What is fundamental is goodness, not conflict, chaos, or some ontic dichotomy of good and evil. I make the case for the underlying rationality of the biblical vision through appeal to the idea of basic goods (see Finnis 2011). Skepticism about the good founders on the very intention of skepticism: to rule out counterfeit knowledge in the quest for genuine knowledge. (To question whether knowledge is a good is to seek knowledge and thereby attest to its basic value.) Basic goods, such as knowledge or friendship, are not subject to scarcity or mutual exclusion. The Bible offers a vision of the goodness of being, underwritten by divine goodness. The same impulse lay behind my study of hope (Mittleman 2009). An avid reader of the Psalms, I came to the view that biblical writers thought of hope not just as an emotion or a psychological disposition but as a virtue, that is, as a human excellence that ought to be cultivated. Hopefulness for the psalmist was a fundamental, positive response to the goodness of being, anchored by the goodness of God. The book was motivated by the desire to offer an account of hope that was phenomenologically adequate to its object, as well as metaphysically rich. But it was also prompted by Kant’s question: what may we hope for? That is, what kind of hope is compatible with reason (as opposed to wishful or magical thinking)? By developing an account of hope as a virtue and by integrating virtue with reason, as in classical Greek thought, I wanted to secure The Need For Jewish Philosophy 259 hope against fantasy. My particular concern was to focus Kant’s question on politics: what may we hope for from democracy? How much improvement of the human condition ought we to expect? To what extent should we invest our hope in political activity? Acknowledging that there is an empirical dimension to such judgments, I nonetheless wanted to pursue a principled account. I argued for the “sobriety” rather than (pace Barack Obama) the “audacity” of hope. Hope is essential to a democratic politics, but the investment of excessive hope is dangerous. It may lead to utopian projects that lose their tether to ethics and political responsibility. I argued on behalf of a sober form of hope that can underwrite the political engagement of faithful Jews (and Christians) while remaining realistic about what is possible. Religion, especially Judaism, as a resource for sober hopefulness, can offset both utopian political enthusiasm and apolitical quietism, despair, or cynicism. All of my Jewish philosophical work begins in reflection on traditional texts. My studies of political thought in Judaism attempted to read biblical and rabbinic texts with questions motivated by Western political theory (Mittleman 2000). Guided by the history and contemporary status of the theoretical questions, I inquired into such matters as obligation, authority, rights, duties, power, constitutions, statism, and federalism. By the same token, I used the positions embedded in the Jewish texts to question Western approaches. Communitarian critics, at the time, sought to address problems of individual and community, rights and obligations, or the “lexical priority” of the right over the good. My work offered Jewish materials, such as Talmudic discussions, which might shed light on the moral and political issues at stake in the discussion. I also wanted to suggest that the contemporary secular democratic discussion was impover- ished in its disregard of biblical and Jewish materials. (This point has recently been argued with great power by Eric Nelson [2011].) Although these studies were primarily historical and analytic in character, the constructive motive was to try to think through what a Jewish view of fundamental, political- theoretical matters ought to be. The great questions of religion and politics with which the West struggled (and still struggles) are alive in contemporary Jewish experience. Although Israel is, in an important sense, a Western communal (not strictly liberal) democracy, its religious-secular tensions are massive. The recovery of the fragmentary expressions of the historic Jewish political tradition needs to be complemented by an active synthesis and advancement of that tradition. My book and various other essays in Jewish political thought were very much focused on that abiding task. Political theory is analytically distinct from moral theory as an academic field, but the domains these bodies of thought address are not, of course, distinct in life. My work in Jewish ethics also sought to explore the Jewish moral 260 Mittleman tradition with the tools of philosophical ethics and to reconstruct, synthesize, and advance that tradition (Mittleman 2012). My book is a close reading of dozens of classic texts, from the Bible to the Talmud and midrash, medieval philosophy, popular piety, kabbalah, and ethical tractates (sifrut ha-musar), as well as modern and contemporary work. My concern was to discern the argument that the text was making. What kind of life does the text imagine as the best life for human beings? How does it justify its view? What counterargu- ments does it try to answer? Or, how does the text explain or justify a law? How does it relate law to conscience? What role does it envision for autonomy? How does it address the potential of a Euthyphro-type challenge? How essential is a robust metaphysics of free will? To what extent does Judaism have a divine command ethics? Questions of this sort—the concern of normative rather than applied ethics—animate the book. What, if anything, unifies the various readings of various texts across the whole span of Jewish history? I argue that there is a persistent, characteristic way of thinking about human flourishing across the Jewish textual corpus. That way integrates the right and the good, the deontic and the aretaic, in a mutually complementary whole. As one medieval Ashkenazi source put it, “ayn Torah v’ayn mitzvah bli tikkun ha- middot” (there is neither Torah nor commandment without the improvement of character). While modern ethical theory has sundered these axiological categories and works with difficulty to reintegrate them, they are second nature to Jewish ethical thought (as they are to the thought of other ancient outlooks; see O’Neill 1996). The severing of halakha from the cultivation of character and the virtues, as well as positivist interpretations of the meaning and authority of halakha, are deformations of the Jewish moral tradition. Analysis and advancement of this tradition may help restore balance in contemporary Jewish thought and life, where halakha and ethics tend to fall into the hands of competing partisans of tradition and modernity. My current work addresses an area I have heretofore somewhat neglected: the dialogue between Judaism and science. What concerns me is the overall credibility of Jewish religious commitment in a scientific age. One facet of this is the challenge of articulating the fundamental value claims of Judaism, such as the status of the human person as the image of God, in a naturalistic language. Can human dignity, broadly speaking, be rationally defensible within a framework increasingly shaped by neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology (previously known as sociobiology) and neuroscience/neurophilosophy? Authors such as Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, or Steve Stewart-Williams do not think so. They think, in fact, that the continued attempt to prop up a biblically informed view of the person as a uniquely dignified, morally responsible agent is pernicious. For Singer, it is a form of The Need For Jewish Philosophy 261

“speciesism.” His commitment is to “unsanctifying human life” (Singer 2002). My current work is an attempt to articulate a Jewish understanding of human nature that is philosophically or rationally defensible. As in previous books and articles, I read relevant Jewish texts in a philosophical manner and seek to bring them into conversation with canonical and contemporary thinkers who have written on aspects of human nature. Especially vexing today is the question—for many, it is no longer a question—of free will. All of those capacities and functions that we call “mind” originate in the brain. The brain is an organ, a complex physical object existing in the physical world and subject, therefore, to the laws of physics. No matter how far we scale up into the full complexity of consciousness, the dependence of mind on brain and brain as neurochemical/bioelectrical system seems to rule out real indeterminacy. Our thoughts and intentions must be, deep down, determined by physical causes. Free will is an illusion. Is such a view fatal to Judaism, with its apparent need for the free choice (beḥirat ḥofshit) of morally responsible human agents? The texts themselves yield conflicting messages, from Deuteronomy’s full-throated “choose life!” to the Mishnah’s obscure “all is foreseen but freedom is given” to Crescas’s principled rejection of human free will. The tradition is complex and subtle enough to sustain a compatibilist account of free will—that is, an account where moral responsibility is preserved in the face of an underlying neural determinism. I do not think that Judaism needs to bow before science or trim its sails to suit whatever intellectual wind blows from afar. I do think, however, that Jewish philosophy must reckon with the best of historical and contemporary intellectual culture and answer the genuine challenges to its fundamental beliefs and values. Neurobiological determinism is a genuine but not an insuperable challenge. The desk on which I am writing might be mostly empty space, but the physics that proffers that picture has not abolished the tactile experience of solidity. Similarly, neuroscience may explicate consciousness in a way that problematizes my felt experience of executive agency, but it does not eliminate it. My experience of making the decision to do x cannot be discarded; the experience per se is a piece of the natural world in need of explanation (Nagel 1986). The thought that I am a being capable of thinking, willing, and acting is a primitive one (Nagel 1997). The neuroscientist or philosopher who wants to eliminate thought, to resolve it into more primitive processes, say, neuronal firings, can only do so through the medium of thought. Thought has, as Nagel puts it, the last word. Descartes, in founding knowledge on the cogito, was not completely wrong (Robinson 2008). What strikes me as a more formidable challenge is the current dismissal, from a Darwinian point of view, of the concept of human dignity. One important 262 Mittleman root of the contemporary concept is the biblical heritage. The other is Stoicism, which informed Kant’s canonical modern treatment. The Kantian account, like the Stoic one, privileges the dignity of rational creatures (a broader category than human beings, although it is unclear whether there are any other occupants of the category). From the point of view of Darwinian sociobiology, however, this is self-serving. Rationality, as these debunkers view it, is an adaptation that conferred a survival advantage early in our evolutionary history. Other animals, in particular higher primates, share rationality, albeit to a lesser degree. But why should the possession of rationality in any degree be dignity- conferring or confirming? Once you accept the “universal acid” of Darwinian explanation, the elevation of this trait seems arbitrary. “We like to think that reason is the supreme adaptation,” Stewart-Williams writes, “that rational animals deserve preferential treatment and that non-humans, because they don’t have reason, have no intrinsic moral value. However, after Darwin, this is no different and no more convincing than, say, an elephant thinking that trunks are the supreme adaptation; that animals with trunks deserve preferential treatment and that non-elephants, because they don’t have trunks, have no intrinsic moral value” (Stewart-Williams 2010, 264). Just as we would dismiss an “elephant-biased view of the world,” we ought also to dismiss a “human- biased or anthropocentric” view. Thus, Darwinism leaves human dignity without “intellectual foundations”: “With the corrective lens of evolutionary theory, the view that human life is infinitely valuable suddenly seems like a vast and unjustified over-valuation of human life” (Stewart-Williams 2010, 262). It is not clear that an account of dignity based purely on rationality can withstand this critique and do the normative work that it has hitherto accomplished. The Stoic-Kantian heritage could use support from the biblical one. The biblical one, with its rich notion of humanity made in the image of God, expresses a wider range of values than the philosophical tradition’s focus on rationality. Critics like Stewart-Williams believe that they are attacking the biblical heritage, but arguably their sights are trained on the philosophical tradition. How to work the biblical line of thought about the dignity of human beings into a philosophically cogent account is, I think, the most urgent (and the most universalistic) task of Jewish philosophy today. In my view, reasoning about the highest things has to start from the bottom up. My own outlook is indel- ibly shaped by an early exposure to (the later) Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although I disagree that philosophical problems are spurious and need to be untangled more than honestly addressed, I agree that we need to look at how concepts, delineated by language, are employed in actual life. Accordingly, I would find the meaning of the concept of human dignity within the network of practices, institutions, and claims that give the concept its point and its power. The Need For Jewish Philosophy 263

Critics, such as Stewart-Williams, tend to isolate human dignity from the moral universe in which it has purpose. They make it contingent on a property, such as rationality, and then dispute the significance of the property, as if human dignity were a term with extension like chubby. Human dignity, on the contrary, gains its meaning through intension, through the role it plays in a form of life where human beings practice care for one another and have a language to express it. Caring (protecting, nurturing, loving, respecting, honoring, and all that term implies) is fundamental. Human beings who are incapable of showing the emotions or engaging in the actions related to caring are thought to be flawed. That human beings deserve, by virtue of their humanity as such, the care they need suggests a universal ground for caring. Emmanual Levinas finds it in the experience of the human face. Biblical faith articulated it in the trope of universal humanity’s likeness to the divine. Whatever metaphor we use to evoke the warrant for caring, we seek something broad, radical, transcendent, and authoritative. Caring for human beings is that important. From my point of view, we need not begin the argument in philosophy of religion to get to ethics; we need not argue for the existence of God to get to a humanity made in the divine image. Our experience of the worth of human beings, our immersion in a moral-legal order that sustains that worth prepares us to think about the telos toward which human dignity points. As Aristotle maintained, someone who was not raised to be a moral being would not have the ability to understand moral concepts. We cannot reason our way to moral concepts unless we have experience of at least the rudiments of a moral order. A concept such as humanity made in the image of God captures a truth about caring and creatures worth caring for. The concept resonates only insofar as we have experienced the power of the norm it seeks to convey. I very much doubt that projects such as Stewart-Williams’s or Peter Singer’s, which deconstruct human dignity yet aim to expand human liberty or animal rights, can be carried through without self-contradiction. There is something perverse about trying, as philosophers, to rationally persuade readers to scant or devalue their own rationality. I doubt that the moral and legal institutions, from promise keeping to criminal law, that instantiate the concept of human dignity are sustainable without that concept. Nonetheless, this is to some extent an empirical question. We might have to wait and see how the new post-Judeo-Christian moral order might turn out. It is not an empirical matter, however, to inquire into what the moral implications of a robust principle of human dignity are. What does the special worth, dignity, or sanctity of human life entail for dilemmas on the bioethical frontier? What action-guiding principles flow from the assertion of human dignity? For Catholic theology, where this discourse is very much alive, restrictive consequences for bioethics and 264 Mittleman biomedical research flow directly from the theological metaphysics. Is that, should that, be true for Judaism as well? Similarly, Catholic theology rejects the idea of animal rights. Would that necessarily be the case for Jewish ethics? Should Jewish ethics, shaped by philosophical reflection, reject chimeras, human-animal hybrids, or reproductive cloning? Are these violative of human dignity, or, in their potential to cure disease and enhance life, are they compatible with it? These are important questions, but I cannot address them directly. I am respectful of the project of normative Jewish ethics, but my own work has tended to focus on philosophical issues one metalevel removed from normative and applied judgments. I have tried to argue that Jewish philosophy is needed both within the little world of academic Jewish studies and within the wider world of contemporary Judaism. I do not think that Jewish philosophy should be judged solely by its service either to Jewish studies or to actual, existing Jews. There will always be something marginal, peculiar, perhaps avant garde (or rear guard—the owl of Minerva and all that) about philosophizing. Nonetheless, the service of the Jewish philosopher to the Jewish people should be a desideratum. The clarification and expression of the best intellectual and axiological commitments of Judaism are the philosopher’s service both to the Jews and to the world.

References

Batnitzky, Leora. 2011. How Judaism Became a Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cantwell Smith, Wilfred. 1991. The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Finnis, John. 2011. Natural Law and Natural Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Frank, Daniel, and Oliver Leaman. 2004. History of Jewish Philosophy. London: Routledge. Glover, Jonathan. 2012. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goodman, Lenn E. 2001. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Iggers, George. 1968. The German Conception of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Jacobs, Jonathan, ed. 2011. Judaic Sources and Western Thought: Jerusalem’s Enduring Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kellner, Menachem. 2006. Must a Jew Believe Anything? Portland, OR: Littman Library. Kitcher, Philip. 1985. Vaulting Ambition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The Need For Jewish Philosophy 265

Mittleman, Alan. 2000. The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ―――. 2009. Hope in a Democratic Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ―――. 2011. “The Durability of Goodness.” In Judaic Sources and Western Thought, edited by Jonathan Jacobs, 21–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ―――. 2012. A Short History of Jewish Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. ―――. 1997. The Last Word. New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Eric. 2011. The Hebrew Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neusner, Jacob, et al., eds. 1987. Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era. New York: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, Michael. 1991. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press. O’Neill, Onora. 1996. Towards Justice and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinker, Steven. “The Stupidity of Dignity.” The New Republic, May 28, 2008. http:// pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/The%20Stupidity%20of%20Dignity.htm. Accessed Feb. 18, 2014. Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Daniel N. 2008. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Searle, John R. 1997. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. Singer, Peter. 2002. Unsanctifying Human Life. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Stewart-Williams, Steve. 2010. Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Twersky, Isadore. 1972. A Maimonides Reader. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House. Wilson, E. O. 1999. Consilience. New York: Vintage Books. chapter 13 Historicity, Dialogical Philosophy, and Moral Normativity Discovering the Second Person

Michael L. Morgan

For nearly four decades, my thinking about Judaism and Jewish philosophy has turned on what might be called the problem of historicity. The problem concerns the relationship between thought and history: is thought transcendent? Or to what degree and in what ways is thought essentially historical? And what does the answer imply for objectivity and especially moral normativity? “Thought” includes scientific theory, moral principles and convictions, metaphysical and other philosophical claims, and religious beliefs or doctrines; “history” includes historical events, human actions, and experiences. The problem of historicity asks of such modes of thought whether they are thoroughly and unqualifiedly immersed in the conditions of human action and experience or whether there might be some thoughts or claims that are “timeless” and general. During the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University, I was deeply interested in Jewish theology of the postwar period and the ways in which it drew upon existentialism and German philosophy. In those years, the most pressing issue was whether Jewish thinking could articulate and defend a compelling conception of revelation and a notion of faith. In class, I studied phenomenology and existentialism, literary theory and the history of philosophy, and, on my own, twentieth-century Jewish thought; and, when I decided to study for the rabbinate at the Hebrew Union College- Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, it was with the hope of deepening my understanding of Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology. My best opportunity came in Eugene Borowitz’s survey of modern Jewish thought, for which I read widely and passionately and wrote hundreds of pages, a book-length record of my central commitment. In the evenings, on several occasions, I took courses on phenomenology at the New School with Aron Gurwitsch and Dorian Cairns, and I kept reading, debating with friends, engaging with the newest developments in analytic philosophy. After ordination, I entered the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Toronto, to become a philosopher I hoped, and there I found extraordinary resources for studying the history of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_015 Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 267 philosophy and the most contemporary developments in analytic philosophy. I also found—indeed I had in part come in order to find—Emil Fackenheim. I became Fackenheim’s teaching assistant and then research assistant, and he became my teacher and my friend. I had met him in New York in 1967, and we had talked again during the time when he was delivering his Deems Lectures at New York University, which became God’s Presence in History. In Toronto, beginning in 1970, we came to be partners in what became a decades-long philosophical conversation. I entered Emil’s life and he entered mine at just the moment when the issue of the dialectic of thought and history was driving his thinking in the most powerful way, as the framework in which he was first engaging with the philosophical and theological implications of the Nazi death camps and the extermination of European Jewry. My earlier interest in the problem of revelation was now framed in questions about objectivity and historicity (see Morgan 2012). Clearly, I was not driven to this interest by worries about the nature of scientific reasoning or by Willard Quine’s attack on the a priori and the distinction between empirical and nonempirical knowledge or truths (Quine 1953). Nor was I drawn to it by the relativist implications of historiography and anthropology. The importance of the issue arose for me in a religious setting. Of particular interest to me was the character of Jewish beliefs and Jewish self-understanding and how a responsible exposure of such beliefs to the events of the Holocaust might have led some theologians to reconsider the historical nature of Jewish belief, that is, not only to reconsider the content of particular beliefs but also to reconsider the very status of those beliefs. In short, I wondered if one outcome of the Holocaust and taking it seriously intellectually—philosophically and theologically in particular—was not a revised estimate of what might be called the “transcendence” of thought. The study of a number of figures led me to these worries. As I have indicated, the most notable was Emil Fackenheim, for whom the issue of the historicity of religious thought and philosophy was, I have argued, a central preoccupation in his early years and remained so throughout his career. As early as 1968, he acknowledged that the central moment in his philosophical career came when he realized that he could no long claim, as he had in 1964, that religious faith is verifiable by history and human experience but that it could never be refuted by them. What he had in mind, very clearly, in 1968, was the impact of the reality of Auschwitz on philosophical and religious beliefs. Other figures were Jewish and Christian theologians who tried to confront the horrors of the death camps and to respond with some theological articulation.1

1 I wrote about Fackenheim in Morgan 1992, 2011, and 2013. 268 Morgan

But I was also led to think about these issues by Thomas Kuhn and the swirl of response to his claims about the historicity and political character of scientific theories; by E. D. Hirsch, Stanley Fish, and other literary critics influenced by Hans-Georg Gadamer and by questions about the hermeneutics of textual interpretation; by Ronald Dworkin and debates about legal interpretation; by the exchange between Alasdair MacIntyre and Peter Winch about anthropology, ethnography, and the incommensurability of languages and the problem of translation; by the emergence of a tendency to treat philosophy as historical, in the work of MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor; and by similar work on political theory, associated with the Cambridge school of John Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock, and especially Quentin Skinner. One thing after another seemed to reinforce in my mind the conviction that our historically situated selfhood was undeniable and yet posed for us serious problems about objectivity. This issue of historicity dictated for me how I thought any serious Jewish philosophy would have to be conducted. It would have to be sensitive to those contextual or situational features that most influenced a contemporary sense of what was important, acceptable, and urgent and also to be sensitive to reading the past in terms of those contextual factors that make past texts and actions meaningful and intelligible. Only then could Jewish philosophy ask what significance the past could have for the present, what of the past could be recovered and what should be recovered, and what access the present could have to the past. In the 1980s, I wrote several essays on these topics. They influenced my work substantively and methodologically. My book on Platonic philosophy (Morgan 1990) and its place in Greek religious life of the fourth century was not only about these themes. It was also written with an attention to the historical context for Plato’s understanding of the very character and role of philosophy as a way of life. By 2000 or so, I had come to think that, insofar as thinking is unavoidably hermeneutical and historically situated, it would find itself constantly wrestling with the implication some might draw that it is also relative and qualified, that is, that there is no objectivity. And this would hold for science, ethics, religious thought, philosophy, and more. As time had gone by and postmodernism had become an expression for a host of tendencies, among which was a radical pluralism and relativism, I became convinced that, from the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, this problem of objectivity had been at the center of philosophical debates and much of Western intellectual culture in general. In Interim Judaism (2001), I wrote about various engagements with that problem early in the century in Europe and then in America after the Holocaust. The problem of objectivity raises the question whether there are any principles or truths or ideals that are permanent, fixed, and secure, Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 269 or whether all is not historically, culturally, socially, or personally conditioned and conditional. If one thinks that there are or ought to be such principles or truths or ideals, what gives them their authority? What is the ground of their objective status? Is that ground to be found in nature or in rationality or rather in some connectedness with transcendence? This, it strikes me, is the great question of the twentieth century, and it remains so to our day. In the early part of the century, in Europe, this problem of objectivity arose as a consequence of the development of historiography and the study of cultures. It was associated with figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, Ernst Troeltsch, and a host of others. Terms like relativism and nihilism were associated with the lack of secure and firm principles or ideals. The problem was called the “crisis of historicism” by some and by others the “problem of alienation.” My own thinking about these issues continues to draw on European philosophical and theological figures—Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas preeminent among them, but also Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have also come to appreciate the important ways in which these issues have emerged in Anglo-American philosophy of the past several decades, in English-speaking philosophy, and have been thus rearticulated and clarified. This is so for several figures whose work, I think, has untapped significance for Jewish philosophy: Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, and especially Stanley Cavell. Jewish philosophy and thought should seek to articulate what Jewish existence is and what it means. It will want to clarify the Jew’s relationships with nature and other persons, with Jews and non-Jews, with various types of institutions and practices, and indeed with God. To do so, it will have to say something about Jews as selves and agents, about the Jewish people as a community of Jews, and about the way that Jewish life is related to God. It will also have to say something about texts and language, about human conduct—ritual, ethical, and more, and about ultimate issues, life and death, and so forth. For its foundations, that is, Jewish philosophy must turn to philosophy for its understanding of what it is for us to be persons, agents, and social beings. Much philosophy of mind today and for several decades has been decidedly naturalist and anchored to the subject-object relationship and to the confrontation between idealism and realism. Charles Taylor is a very good case of someone who has challenged this model about what it is to be a self or person and done so throughout his career. To him, our ethical experience and our linguistic abilities, when understood correctly, tell against the accounts that begin with an atomic self and understand its epistemic achievements and personal agency in terms of it. Emotions and states such as shame cannot be 270 Morgan adequately appreciated by such accounts. Nor can knowledge and language be understood without taking the person as agent to be engaged or situated in a context or background. The outcome of Taylor’s argument is a conception of selfhood and agency as situated in a nexus of connectedness with the world and others; it is Taylor’s version of an appreciation of human agency that he finds in Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, among others.2 I think that this same outcome, that the self is not an originally isolated, atomic entity, whose relationships with objects in the world and other persons must be conceived as a supplement to what it is in itself, can also be found, variously conceived in other Anglo-American philosophers as well, John McDowell and certainly Stanley Cavell, and perhaps also Hilary Putnam in his later work and Robert Brandom. Indeed, there is reason to think as well that it is a feature of the neo-Aristotelian style of ethical theory that can be found in figures like Rosalind Hursthouse and Sabina Lovibond, with their emphasis on the role and education of moral sensibility. There are reasons that this kind of account of human agency strikes me as appropriate for Jewish philosophy and even requisite for it. First, if it is a more compelling account of selfhood and agency in general, then it is more compelling than alternative accounts for a Jewish self-understanding rooted in an appreciation of Jewish selfhood and agency in particular. What is true for all human existence is surely true for Jewish existence as well. Second, precisely this kind of understanding of human selfhood and agency is found in the dialogical philosophies of Jewish thinkers whose work I find significant and compelling—from Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig to Emil Fackenheim and Emmanuel Levinas. It is assumed in all of Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust Jewish thought, perhaps most explicitly in his appropriation of a Gadamer- style hermeneutical account of human agency in To Mend the World, and it is very explicitly presented and defended in his early work Metaphysics and Historicity. The way in which that work draws on Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, R. G. Collingwood, Buber, and Rosenzweig is transparent. In Levinas, whose patrimony includes Edmund Husserl and Heidegger, the connection is equally obvious. Third, however, such an account of selfhood or human-situated existence is immediately encouraged by the richly textured relational ties that make up Jewish life—between individual Jews, the Jewish community, traditional practices and texts, and ultimately God. To show this, of course, would take a great deal of time, but it is one of the virtues of the work of Buber and Rosenzweig in the early part of the century and then of Fackenheim in the

2 These themes are addressed in several of Taylor’s early essays and then in a magisterial way in Sources of the Self (1989). Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 271

1950s and 1960s that they seek to show this precisely in their defense of the centrality of revelation and the experience of faith for Jewish existence. Such a notion of selfhood presents us with a new formulation of the setting in which the problem of objectivity becomes central. It seems to run the risk of relativism or historicism. Something like this recognition can be found in Putnam’s Reason, Truth, and History (1981), with his response to it then, which he called “internal realism.” But Putnam is not alone. What goes by the name “postmodernism” also privileges the problem in the work of figures from Foucault and Derrida to Rorty and Levinas. What is the ground, if there is such a ground, for the normativity of values, in particular moral values? Are there moral values, obligations, or ideals that are universal, binding, and permanent? In the Anglo-American tradition, there are a host of responses to this problem—various forms of naturalism, rationalisms, and those based on the role of communities and traditions. This set of problems concerning the ground or grounds of moral normativity, provoked by our understanding of selfhood and agency, challenges Jewish philosophical reflection. The traditional vocabulary of God, covenant, and commandment is difficult to appropriate without reinterpretation and revision. Such reflection and revision can only benefit from contemporary engagement with the issues I have raised and with the figures I have discussed. For Jewish philosophy, it is a matter of newly articulating what Judaism is in terms of the historical and intellectual changes that we have experienced for a century or more and to do so in a world unlike that of the earlier centuries. But at the same time, there is much to be learned about the problems concerning the very authority and force of moral normativity from considering that strand of twentieth-century Jewish philosophical thinking that focuses on the primacy of the second-person and dialogical relations amid the variegated texture of human experience. In short, by looking at the various twentieth- century philosophical attempts to understand human existence and moral experience, both within Continental and analytic philosophy, we might appreciate an important way in which dialogical thinking within Jewish philosophy contributes to the Western philosophical tradition.

The Problem

In Judaism, moral imperatives—duties or obligations—are a subset of religious obligations called “mitzvoth” or divine commandments. Within the Jewish legal tradition are included divine commandments that prescribe or proscribe actions of a moral character; they are authoritatively binding 272 Morgan because they originate in some way in divine will. They articulate what God commands Jews to do when it comes to moral matters. There are many forms of Judaism; within them, there are differences about how distinctive or how primary the moral dimensions of human experience are to Jewish life. But, in general, these distinctions notwithstanding, Judaism, from the late eighteenth century through the twentieth century, has by and large retained the vocabulary of divine command to express the grounds of moral normativity and the authority of morality. Various strategies have been employed by Jewish theologians and philosophers to show that divine command is not incompatible with our humanity or with our rationality or our autonomy. But the outcome generally seems to be the same: that moral norms in Judaism are grounded in divine command and, for this reason, have moral force, a kind of preeminence and bindingness. In a sense, that is, I believe that the advocates of a divine command theory for Judaism have been taken in by a fairly straightforward and simple interpretation of what divine command theories of moral authority provide. The interpretation I have in mind is that biblical and rabbinic norms, moral norms among them, gain their authority—the right to expect obedience—from the character of the agency that legislates them, and that legislation, divine will, has the authority because of God’s power, His beneficence, and His status as preeminent benefactor and ruler of the Jewish people and, indeed, of all humankind. Even if the details of such a reading are disputed, the basic idea is not: moral commandments are binding because they are imperatives issued by an appropriately legitimate and powerful God. The role of moral citizen, so to speak, is a function of a prior difference in status between God and humankind; the binding character of morality derives from a difference of natural role or perhaps a difference in power. Such a reading, moreover, takes the notion of command seriously as the vehicle by which divine will is revealed to humankind. But in so doing, the reading, a fairly literal one, takes the idea of divine command to emphasize the power of the agent and the force of the imperative by focusing on the mechanism whereby that imperative is conveyed. In the expression “divine command,” the emphasis is on the “divine” feature of it. “Command” is simply one expression for the way a ruler publicizes, communicates, or informs His subjects of His will. But, I contend, this reading of the notion of divine command is mistaken, or, if it is not mistaken, it is at least misguided and implausible. In its place, I want to propose another. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the existence of God and the idea of divine revelation, as well as all those concepts that have Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 273 been employed to characterize God’s relationship to history and human experience and conduct, have been subject to withering critique. The outcome is that skepticism about God’s existence and the divine role in human affairs has become widespread and pervasive. In an age, then, when the presuppositions on which any notion of divine command is based have been discredited or at least are subject to such skepticism, where does that leave the question of what grounds moral norms and ideals? This question, of course, is one raised by Nietzsche’s famous proposal about the death of God. Where does the crisis of commitment to the absolute foundations of moral value leave our sense of the primacy of moral aspirations and ideals? Without the secure foundation of divine will, is there anything that can ground the absoluteness of moral obligation or the authority of moral duties? Even before Nietzsche’s provocative formulation, philosophers had been responding to this question. In a recent book Robert Stern (2012) has shown how Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard all confronted this same problem. In Kant’s case, his response is, in part, a way of coping with his critique of traditional metaphysics, in particular, his refutations of the arguments for God’s existence and, hence, the unavailability of a notion of divine will to ground divine command. Kant’s argument for autonomous, rational agency as the source of moral normativity and the account of God and the Summum Bonum in the Second Critique should be viewed as one way of recov- ering an absolute ground for moral obligation in the wake of such results and finding an alternative role for God. And what Kant finds in rational agency, Hegel finds in community, and Kierkegaard responds in his own way. Alongside this tradition of ways of dealing with the decline of divine voluntarism, moreover, there is the tradition of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and other naturalists, who take our natural desires and drives to be as much of a foundation as moral convictions can have. Here there is no role left for God, and what takes God’s place as the source of moral normativity are our dispositions or tendencies built into human nature, especially the tendency toward self-preservation. Hence, modern moral philosophy—at the metaethical level—is largely about finding a replacement for divine voluntarism, once that notion and its presuppositions are ruled out. To be sure, there are alternatives—skepticism, relativism, historicism, and nihilism—but, for those who find none of them appealing, a surrogate must be found. These developments have led to the elimination of the legislative model of moral obligation. Elizabeth Anscombe, in her famous paper of 1958, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” argued that the abandonment of this model points to a problem with the very language of moral obligation, for, if the meaningfulness 274 Morgan of the latter depends on the former, then the demise of the legislative model should have led to the elimination of the language of moral duties and obligations as well. But it has not. One strand of Anscombe’s paper’s complex and rich tapestry concerns these questions. If our concepts of moral obligation and moral duty, of what is morally right and wrong, and of what we morally ought and ought not to do are embedded in a context—social, political, historical—that no longer applies— that is, the context of divine legislation—then they are relics and should be jettisoned. On another reading, of course, we need this terminology and the concepts that it articulates, so we should recover the abandoned framework in a new way.3 Anscombe distinguishes between an ordinary sense of terms such as “should,” “ought,” and “needs” and a special moral sense. The ordinary sense occurs in sentences such as “this machine needs oil” or “this machine ought to be oiled” or “this machine should be oiled” and “this machine would run badly without oil” or “this machine won’t run properly without oil.” That is, in their ordinary sense, these expressions concern the functioning of the subject and what it takes for that subject to function well. This is familiar from Plato and Aristotle, especially from the discussion of the notions of ergon and arête in the Republic and the Nichomachean Ethics. Alternatively, the special moral sense occurs in sentences such as “I ought to tell Sara the truth” or “I really should take some time to volunteer to work in that soup kitchen.” Anscombe asks how the ordinary sense of this vocabulary became a special moral sense, and her answer, which is a speculative or imaginative proposal and not by any means an historically rigorous one, is that the shift occurred when “ought” and “should” and “must” came to be equated with “is obliged” and “is bound” and “is required to.” This shift, moreover, came about when the ordinary terms came to be used in a legal context, so that “ought,” for example, came to mean “is bound by law” or “is required by law.” Furthermore, as Anscombe claims, this association of functional terms with law and nomos came about through Christianity, which derived it from the Torah, for Judaism and Christianity have a law conception of ethics. This is the critical development, the emergence of a law conception of ethics, according to which a divine law requires what is needed to conform with virtues that bad persons do not have. The core— and here I am adding to Anscombe—is that the ideal is to become like God; this requires cultivating virtues that are God-like; to do this, one must follow a

3 Gary Watson (2007), commenting on Stephen Darwall’s The Second-person Standpoint (2006), begins by suggesting one take Darwall’s book as a response to Anscombe (1958). Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 275 divine law. This divine law—and here we return to Anscombe—requires belief in God as a lawgiver, as one finds in Judaism, Stoicism, and Christianity. Hence, Anscombe makes her historically imaginative proposal: people once held a law conception of ethics but then abandoned it. We still use the terms like “ought” and “should” to mean obligation, being bound or required as by a law, but now these terms are used without the context, the roots, in virtue of which they carry their meaning. What we have is the survival of a vocabulary and set of concepts outside the framework that made them intelligible. The most reasonable thing to do, then, is to drop from use the moral “ought” and to reconfigure our moral vocabulary in terms of a terminology of virtues and what Bernard Williams called “thick” moral concepts. But this disposal of such a special moral vocabulary of obligation, duty, and so forth is only one alternative. Another would be to consider ways of retaining the law conception of moral obligation but without a divine legislator (Anscombe 1958, 37). Anscombe points out that some, for example, have turned to the idea of norms of society—David Hume, say, or even Wittgenstein. But, she argues, such a move will not work. Legislating for oneself is simply incoherent, and following the customs and practices of a group is just that and only that. Others, however, look for “laws of nature” as if somehow the universe or nature itself were a legislator (ibid.). On the one hand, such laws of nature are little more than a metaphor for a set of genuine or real laws; on the other, they will not do as the author of rules of justice and humane conduct, for such a conception might lead to overwhelming others but hardly to justice. Similar arguments can be constructed against Hobbesian- or Kantian-style proposals, all of which seek to retain the law conception of moral obligations but without the assumption of a real, operative legislator. Part of Anscombe’s project is the reform of our moral sensibilities and a kind of reorientation from matters of obligation and duty to a concern for virtue and self-cultivation. If, however, any serious Jewish moral thinking would want to retain the vocabulary of commandment and obligation, it is worth considering the implications of what she says for Judaism and moral normativity from a Jewish point of view. Is there more to the moral “ought” than its psychological compellingness? If the model is a legal one, then the psychological force comes with sanctions, promises of reward and threats of punishment. But is this all there is, in Judaism, to the moral “ought”? Hardly. And part of the “more” is that the moral obligation or duty is a reason for doing or not doing certain things. It is justifying for me and others concerning why an action is worth praise and endorsement or why another action is to be avoided or opposed. It is not just a motive; it is a reason and a demanding one, a privileged or dominant one. But where does this additional force, this moral force, come from? 276 Morgan

Moral philosophy in the twentieth century, metaethical inquiry into the grounds of moral normativity, has offered various options in the face of the problematic portrayed by Anscombe. One option is to admit that there is such a thing as moral force and to take it to be a real property, which we grasp intui- tively, even if it is a nonnatural property. Another option is to reject altogether the very idea of such a nonnatural moral property as a complete mystification, as “queer,” to use J. L. Mackie’s expression. But if such a real, nonnatural moral property does not exist, then how do we account for the moral character of certain rules or norms? One approach would be to say that moral character is derived from natural properties that we have; another would be to argue that it is the result of certain features that we and our actions have insofar as we are rational agents. A different alternative altogether is to consider the very practice of rule following as a socially constructed one and to follow Wittgenstein by understanding what I have called “normative force” and “moral force” as a socially determined mode of response. This is not to say that such force is an artifice and, hence, a kind of phantasm. It is real, to be sure. But it is just not an objective property of rules or obligations; rather it is a characteristic of how we respond to certain types of sentences and a characteristic that is determined by social life and, hence, ultimately by natural life. In a longer treatment, these and other responses to Anscombe’s problematic would require detailed discussion.4 For now, what I propose is to move directly to a different proposal. It is one that emerges in important ways in twentieth-century Jewish self-understanding, philosophical and theological, regarding how to understand the role of the moral obligations in our lives and especially the framework in which their moral force or sense of demanding- ness arises. This proposal is unlike the ones I have identified, and it is worth serious reflection on its own terms. It is a way, I will argue, to take the vocabulary of divine command seriously but without treating it as normative because of its legal character. The key that unlocks the secrets of divine command is the fact that it is a second-person interpersonal relation.

Emmanuel Levinas and Relational Normativity

This core insight can be found in several twentieth century Jewish philosophers—among them, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Fackenheim. In recent

4 I plan to develop such an account in a book on Jewish philosophy and moral normativity in the twentieth century. Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 277 years, however, I have been engaged in exploring the work of Levinas as an especially powerful representative of this dialogical tradition. We can summarize the gist of Levinas’s contribution in the following way.5 First, Levinas is not engaged in moral theory or in a metaethical inquiry into the grounds of moral normativity. His central insight regarding the role of the face-to-face encounter in human existence is a claim about the centrality to human existence of social relations and the fundamentally normative character of all such relations. Throughout his career, he emphasizes the fact that ethics precedes ontology; this means, at least in part, that an account of human existence must acknowledge the primary and determinative role of the fact of sociality, of human relatedness, and its ethically normative dimension. Second, this face-to-face dimension of all human social interactions is present in every particular human encounter, even when, in ordinary, everyday life and all that such life incorporates, we do not show significant awareness of it or act in behalf of it. That is, even when we do not act on our responsibilities to other persons, that responsibility is “always already there” as a feature of every human relation. The face-to-face dimension of each relational encounter is both a transcendental-like condition for human relations to occur and, insofar as it has normative character, it can be (must be) more or less “realized” or “acted on” in any given encounter. Third, this dimension of social relations does have a normative character. From the subject’s point of view, it is responsibility to and for the other person; from the other person’s point of view, it is a claim made against the subject; it is a “putting into question” of the subject (Levinas 1996c, 16–17). Levinas also calls the other person, insofar as she makes such a claim, “transcendence,” “the infinite,” and “enigma”; and he calls this putting-into-question “persecution,” “accusation,” “hostage,” and “substitution.” The terminology is important, and it does change in the course of Levinas’s career, but, for our purposes, I need not consider the differences.6 The crucial point is that the other makes a claim against the subject or summons the subject to respond to its needs; this is what Levinas calls the vulnerability or nudity or nakedness of the other and its height. Levinas, in “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” claims that the recognition of the face is conscience and that it involves shame.7 The face gives rise to morality. Levinas regularly considers ways of formulating the ethical character

5 For a fuller account, see Morgan 2007 and Perpich 2008. 6 I discuss a number of the expressions Levinas uses for the face-to-face in Morgan 2007. 7 See Levinas 1969, 83–84; 1987, 57–59; and 1996c, 17. The debt to the role of shame in Rosenzweig is obvious. 278 Morgan of the face-to-face and explaining why this ethical dimension brings morality to human existence. It is, he says, what makes justice and injustice possible. Without the relation with the other person, in which the other person makes the subject responsive to her needs, indeed for her very life, and responsible to her for those needs, there is no morality. In short, what each of us ought to do for and to others is brought to us by the dependency the other aims at us for her life, her needs, everything about her. Ethics is about the pleas with which others target us and about the command intrinsic to those pleas and petitions that make them demands as well as petitions. The two aspects of the face- to-face, vulnerability and height, are inextricable. Moreover, this dependency aimed at the subject is both a need for recognition, support, and assistance and a command for it. Unlike God, for example, in Rosenzweig’s dialectic of love, the other person begins with a need that is also a command, a command to recognition, concern, and help that is also a need. There is a great deal more one might say about Levinas’s central insight, but it is sufficient to summarize its central point: moral normativity is constitutive of interpersonal encounters, and there is nothing more fundamental on which it depends and which grounds it. To be sure, a quasi-phenomenological elucidation of its features can disclose the aspects of it that I have mentioned— vulnerability, command, particularity, its infinity, and its enigmatic character as beyond ontology, thought, and conceptualization; but, in the event, all is one, and the event’s normative force relies on nothing other than the relationship. The kinds of authority, capacities, and expectations built into everyday relations supervene on this fundamental relatedness. They provide the presuppositions or conditions without which everyday institutional roles—between teacher and student, parent and child, friend and friend, and so forth—would not have their typical responsibilities, privileges, and expectations. But what Levinas is talking about as the ground of moral normativity underlies all these; it is foundational and nonderivative and absolutely determinative. Finally, there is one more consideration to add to this account of the basic Levinasian insight. Let me introduce the consideration by pointing to a feature of the conception of revelation we find in Buber and Rosenzweig. In both cases, while there is attention given to the human interpersonal encounter or relation as the setting in which moral normativity—the “how I ought to act toward the other”—arises, for both, the ultimate source of the normative force is present in the relation between the I or subject and the divine other, God, which supervenes on or is presupposed by the interpersonal encounter. In Buber, every Thou is a glimpse of the eternal Thou; for Rosenzweig, redemption and the love of one’s neighbor are presupposed by and follow from revelation, the love between God and the individual. In Levinas, God and the relation Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 279 with God seem to have fallen out of the picture altogether. Is this the case? Is the interhuman encounter sufficient to ground moral normativity? Is the weight of the face, so to speak, all there is? In a paper titled “Meaning and Sense” (1996b), Levinas discusses this issue, that is, the relationship between discourse about God and the face-to-face or responsibility to the other person, between religion and ethics (see esp. 59–64).8 Before I turn to Levinas’s text, let me try to characterize the problem he faces in terms of the thinking of Buber and Rosenzweig. Against the background of their work, how is the divine-human relation itself related to human interpersonal relations? For Buber, the I-Eternal Thou relation occurs together with or supervenes on the human I-Thou encounter. Moreover, every human I-Thou encounter is a glimpse of the Eternal Thou, that is, each particular subject, each I, in relating to a particular other person, is also related to one and the same Eternal Thou. To be sure, as Buber says in “Dialogue,” the identity of the Eternal Thou or God is not something that can be verified empirically or a priori; rather he offers what he calls a “gauche comparison” (17–18). The singularity of the Eternal Thou is akin to the singularity of a poet’s authorial voice that speaks to various readers as they read various poems by that same poet. In part, then, Buber’s point is that the relation to God provides a ground of the meaningfulness of human existence; it is a common dimension of all human interpersonal relations, within which that meaningfulness is articulated and experienced. Rosenzweig advances this same point and the connection between the divine-human encounter and human interpersonal relations. For him, the issue is how revelation is related to redemption or how the mutual human relation of recognition and concern is related to and presupposes the relation of love between the subject and God. On the one hand, the relation of love with God provides the ground of human selfhood; it gives a point, a significance, to human existence by virtue of a divine love or grace that gives and also commands recognition and love in return. In short, the secure relation with God becomes the matrix for all of what the individual does and for how he or she lives. Moreover, the divine-human relation bears within it a sense of command, of responsibility, and also points beyond itself by motivating the subject, with its sense of fullness, to imitate God and to reach out in love to others. In short, what revelation does is to give human relationships their normative force and their motivation.

8 The paper, originally published in 1964, incorporates, in section 9, the text of a lecture from 1963, “The Trace of the Other,” on ethics and religion. Levinas developed these themes in “God and Philosophy” in 1975 (see Levinas 1996a). 280 Morgan

How does Levinas’s thinking compare to these predecessors? Levinas’s narrative is constructed around a question regarding the “epiphany” or revelation of the face. He asks this question: if the face is a revelation or disclosure, from whence does it reveal itself? That place cannot itself be an object of observation or thought. It must be an absence that makes the revelation possible but is itself not simply the hiddenness of the face. Just as the face is an other that is wholly separated from the self or subject and yet is related to the subject, so this absence is wholly negative and yet is somehow positive. To clarify this absence, Levinas introduces the vocabulary of “trace”: “the beyond from which the trace comes signifies as a trace” (1996b, 60).9 The terminology is intended to point to a feature of the face-to-face that is somehow “oblique” to its direct- ness and adds something, without which the face cannot be what it is and without which the face-to-face would not be the relation it is. Levinas then adds a further step: the trace is a trace of what? It is a trace of a dimension that is wholly inaccessible to second-person encounter. He calls it Illeity [He-ness or That-ness] or the Third Person; it is what is being called to our attention by the vocabulary of God and divinity (ibid., 61). Then, after clarifying what it is to be a trace, Levinas associates this “trace of Illeity” with divinity and points out that it “obliges” and bears “the weight of being” (ibid., 62). All of this account is picturesque and almost graphic. It is tempting to treat it as literally as one can and to interpret Levinas’s allusion to Exodus 33 at the end of the chapter, the text in which Moses is instructed to hide behind a rock as God passes by so that only His back is visible, as an image of this narrative picture. But I suggest that we treat the biblical passage as the religious way of expressing the teaching of Levinas’s account, which is itself highly metaphorical and figural. The point behind it, I believe, is this. Each face-to-face encounter is utterly particular, between a particular I or subject and a particular other person. It establishes a relationship that is prior to or presupposed by everyday relationships. The presupposed dimension is the relationship of ethical responsibility, let us call it, the relationship that calls for the subject to accept, acknowledge, assist, support, and care for the other person. But the encounter and the relationship are utterly particular. The dependency of the other person on the self is particular, and the precise ways in which that dependency expresses itself in everyday life are particular. Nonetheless, the force of the dependency, the claim it makes on the subject or its commanded- ness, is both particular in that it is aimed at the particular subject and also general in that it is the same force in all such relations, a morally normative force. In a sense, this moral normative force is born in the particular other’s relation

9 See also Levinas 1996b, 63: “[I]t is in the face of the Other that the trace shines.” Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 281 to the subject, and in a sense, it comes from elsewhere, so to speak. It is both in the particular other person’s claim on the subject and also not only in it but comes from a different sort of relation. Levinas’s narrative of absence, trace, Illeity, and such is intended to depict this fact, as it were, that moral normativity is grounded in our particular relations and relationships and yet is also a common feature of all our interpersonal relationships. It accounts, as it were, for the objectivity of moral normativity. It is what brings moral standards, ideals, and obligations in all their universality into our lives; there is nothing other than this to account for what makes morality real for us. Talk about God, divinity, revelation or epiphany, and divine command—all such discourse points in the direction of this fact. From Levinas’s point of view, the problem with Buber is that he takes the I-Eternal Thou to be a separate but complementary relation, and this fault occurs in Rosenzweig too, for, to him, revelation and redemption are connected but different. For them, the encounter with God has an intimate second-person character; for Levinas, it does and it does not, both at once. For Levinas, the trace of Illeity is manifest in the face-to-face relation. They are not two separate relations, the face-to-face and then some relation to God. Religious vocabulary about divine command and relation to God is a way of calling attention to “features” or “aspects” of human interpersonal relations. That is all that is given in experience. Such relations or encounters and the relationships established by them are the matrix for morality and religion.10 The relational matrix in which moral experience takes place is not exactly the same for Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. What they share, however, is the fact that the normative force of moral obligations is derived from second-person encounters and the ongoing relationships that they establish and modify. Moreover, for the three, there is a role for God to play, and, even if it is the role of a commanding presence, it is not as a lawgiver. Buber does not develop the connection between revelation and interhuman I-Thou encounters, on the one hand, and interpersonal experience in the I-It world. Rosenzweig’s narrative does place revelation between creation and redemption; hence, there is a sense in which the love that is characteristic of redemption does presuppose the love and the command of revelation. For Levinas, the normative force of the face-to-face manifests the presence of transcendence as a trace, which is itself a metaphor for what gives the commonality of normative force to all human relations and the fact that it is related to but different from the relation to the other person.

10 For Levinas, there is a sense in which morality is religion and also a sense in which religion is other than morality. In this respect, he finds himself within the Kantian tradition, as many have noticed and discussed. 282 Morgan

To defend this account of the ground of moral normativity in detail would require much more than I have done here. But, for now, I want to settle for one additional comment, and it concerns a recent attempt within Anglo-American analytic philosophy to locate the source of moral normativity in second- person encounters and relations.

In Conversation with Darwall on Relational Normativity, Morality, and the Second-Person Standpoint

In 2006, Stephen Darwall published a book that might appear to be dealing precisely with questions like these. The Second-person Standpoint is an ambitious and complex work. There has been a great deal of discussion of it, some of it aimed at clarifying what Darwall’s main claims are and some critically evaluating what the book contains.11 Darwall has had an opportunity on several occasions to restate and to clarify what he takes his main claims about morality and the second-person standpoint to be.12 What I want to do is to use parts of his account and responses to it to clarify what Levinas is saying and also perhaps to raise problems for my attempt to use Levinas’s conception to respond to Anscombe’s problem about moral obligation and moral vocabulary. Darwall asks us to consider a case of someone stepping on your foot, either before it has occurred or once it has occurred.13 What grounds your right to demand that he not do it or that he remove his foot once it has been done (I will ignore this second case)? That is, what reason do you have to demand of him that he not step on your foot? Darwall admits that one reason is that stepping on your foot will cause you harm or pain, and it is wrong to cause pain. Using a vocabulary that goes back to Thomas Nagel, Darwall calls this an agent-neutral reason. It is the kind of reason that would be part of a utilitarian calculation. But Darwall claims that there is another kind of reason that is relevant in this kind of case. He calls it a “second-person reason.”14 It is relevant

11 For example, see symposia on the book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81, no. 1 (2010) and Ethics 118, no. 1 (2007). 12 I am thinking particularly of his response to Christine Korsgaard, R. Jay Wallace, and Gary Watson in Darwall 2007; the interviews in Darwall 2008 and 2009; and his précis of the book in Darwall 2010. 13 Jay Wallace (2007, 25) points out that this example—of a person with a gouty toe protest- ing that you should remove your foot from on top of his painful toe—comes from David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. 14 Thomas Nagel also calls “agent-neutral reasons” “objective.” There are other reasons that are tied to the agent’s situation or interests; these are “agent-centered” or better Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 283 in this case because it is a reason that arises from your taking up a “second- person standpoint” toward the person who might step on your foot and to whom you address your claim or demand and who receives your demand or claim and acts in terms of it, whether the demand is explicit and actually uttered or implicit in the interpersonal situation. In such situations, when you make this claim or demand, explicitly or implicitly, “you presuppose an authority to demand certain conduct of him and to hold him accountable for complying with your demand.”15 That is, you have a second-person reason when you are in a situation of second-person encounter and when the claim you make of the other person depends on (a) authority to make and receive such demands that you and he both have, (b) authority to hold each other answerable or accountable, and (c) the competencies required to make and receive such demands. In such an encounter, one person addresses another with a demand, but, Darwall points out, not all forms of address “invoke second-person reasons.” Some demands are more like orders or even like coercive acts; not all call on authority but rather something like force. Furthermore, not all moral reasons are second-person reasons. In the case of someone’s stepping on one’s foot, for example, causing harm and pain is a moral reason not to do so, as is causing “discomfort, embarrassment, . . . inconvenience, or even suffering and injury” (Darwall 2010, 217). But these might hold from a third-person point of view. Moreover, as Darwall puts it,

second-personal reasons operate within a circle of mutually involving concepts: (a) the authority to make a claim on or demand or expect something of someone, (b) an authoritative (legitimate) claim or demand, (c) a (second-personal) reason (for complying), [and] (d) being accountable (to someone with the requisite authority) for complying. (2010, 217– 18; cf. Darwall 2009, 124).

This circle of concepts defines, in a certain sense, a kind of moral reason, and it is “a central claim of [Darwall’s book] . . . that there is no way into this

“agent-relative.” Sometimes Nagel calls them “subjective,” and his argument is that not all reasons are subjective. Darwall can be seen as trying to identify an agent-relative type of reason that is not relative because it is implicated in all cases of person-to-person address, that is, first-person– second-person interactions where demands are made or implied. See Darwall 2009, 122. Darwall’s best discussion of his debt to Thomas Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism (1970) is in Darwall 2007, 52–54. 15 Darwall 2010, 216. The point here is that it is one thing to cause you pain; it is another to defy your authority as a claimant against me. 284 Morgan

conceptual circle from the outside” (Darwall 2010, 218). Since it is within this circle that the notion of my having a right against someone not to act in a certain way against me arises, no account of harm or injury can entail such a claim about rights. This circle, then, provides the “irreducible” foundation for making sense of the notions of rights, moral responsibility, moral obligation, the dignity of persons, respect for such dignity, and what it means to be a moral agent. As Darwall argues, each of these ideas is clarified by this circle of concepts.16 Darwall defines “moral obligation” as “what we are warrantedly held responsible for doing, what would warrant blame and be culpable if done without adequate excuse” (2010, 221).17 This notion of moral obligation is tied to the notion of the “authority to address commands.” One is morally obligated to a person who has this authority to make demands of us; one is “accountable” to this person, to a person with the “standing to address moral demands” (ibid.). Darwall contrasts his own view with theological voluntarism, that is, with the tradition of divine command theories. In such theories, God has the authority or standing to make moral demands, and one is accountable to God to obey such demands. On Darwall’s view, the “morality of equal (or reciprocal) accountability,” any moral agent has that authority or standing, as a member of the moral community, and this means that he or she has “second-personal competence,” as he calls it, “the psychic capacities necessary to enter into relations of mutual accountability, that is, to take a second-person perspective on himself and others and regulate his conduct from this point of view” (ibid., 221–22). Darwall does have an argument against divine command theories and all such “hierarchical views,” as he calls them. Why should a subject obey God’s command? One reason is to avoid sanctions. But another reason is that the subject takes the command to be legitimate and, hence, would blame himself or hold himself culpable if he did not obey it. If so, Darwall argues, then second-personal competence is “sufficient for the authority to address moral demands and hold people accountable for complying with them” (2010, 222).18

16 The central idea is that all have a conceptual connection to the idea of accountability or being answerable to one who has authority to make demands of you. See Darwall 2008, 70. 17 In eighteenth-century terms, moral obligation is a perfect duty. 18 The point about self-judgment comes from Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations, I.6.5. Darwall calls this “Pufendorf’s Point” and makes much of it. Basically, divine compulsion via threats of punishment turns out to be redundant; the self-awareness of one’s being accountable to a legitimate authority for making moral demands is all that one needs. See also Darwall 2009, 126–28. Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 285

And if so, then what really grounds the moral obligation is not divine will but rather this second-personal reason to be responsible and accountable to God.19 I am particularly interested in what this account tells us about why morality has a “universal binding authority.”20 Darwall summarizes its role this way: it is not the presuppositions of first-person deliberation and agency that commit us to morality’s privileged status; it is bindingness. Rather, “it is presuppositions of interaction, of engaging one another second-personally and making claims on each other that commits us to this idea” (Darwall 2008, 67). Darwall’s point, at least in part, is that first-person and third-person reasons are the wrong kind of reasons to ground moral obligations; only second-personal reasons can do that.21 And the role of reasons is linked to the idea of being held accountable, subject to moral reactive attitudes like blame and resentment. At one point, in an interview, Darwall does refer to Buber as someone who appreciated the central role of second-person interactions. But Buber—and Rosenzweig and Levinas—is not doing the same thing as Darwall, and it is important for us to see how they differ. Suppose we leave aside, for the moment, Part 3 of I and Thou and Buber’s conception of revelation and focus on second- person interaction in his conception of human existence. At some times, he notices, the subject or I is related to other persons as objects of observation, within role-bound institutional interactions, and emotionally or pragmatically. Buber would not call these situations ones of “address.” They are I-It relations and specifically ones between an I and a person. Rather, for him, address only occurs when an I and a Thou speak to one another in the privileged or meaningful way he calls “I-Thou” encounter or dialogue. I do think that, for Buber, the moments of genuine dialogue and the relationships they establish or modify play a role in determining what conduct toward the other person, in the I-It world in which we live, is obligatory and which is not, what we ought

19 For a critique of Darwall’s argument, see Watson 2007, 40–46. 20 That is why morality matters the way that it does or that many have taken it to matter, why it has the status or weight to override other considerations. This is Levinas’s question at the beginning of Totality and Infinity (1969) about whether we are duped by morality or not. Darwall compares Hobbes’s distinction between command and counsel. Where do we get the idea, he asks, that we are subject to or bound by a moral obligation? The key idea is accountability or answerability, and this requires being responsible to the moral community for doing what is demanded of us. See Darwall 2009, 124–25. 21 In one interview, Darwall clarifies his strategy by suggesting that it is a response to H. A. Prichard’s famous paper, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Subjective and objective reasons are the wrong kind to establish reasons for moral obligations; second- personal reasons are not. It is, he says, and argues in the book, a point that he learned from J. G. Fichte. See Darwall 2009, 123–24. 286 Morgan to do and what we ought not to do. That is, if we look at Buber as giving an account of interpersonal or interactive encounters, we see that, from Buber’s point of view, there are two modes of such encounters. All human existence is relational; some human experiences are interpersonal, and a small subset of such interpersonal human experiences are I-Thou. The address and response within such relational encounters, immediate and reciprocal, carry the force of orientation. They direct subsequent decisions and actions for the participants in ways that only context and contextual interpretation can make clear. We could read Darwall as saying something structurally similar: that the second-personal reasons we have to act ground our moral obligations and that these do play a special, privileged role in how we ought to act in our lives. But this similarity is only apparent, and this is just as true of how Darwall’s account might appear to be similar to Levinas’s conception of responsibility and the face-to-face. First of all, for Darwall, we have first-person, third-person, and second- person reasons, and, while the latter are essential for there being moral responsibility, moral obligation, dignity, respect, and so forth, first-person reasons express our personal interests, tastes, and more, while third-person reasons express what we take to be wholly general and universal claims. On the other hand, for the Jewish dialogical thinkers, all human experience is relational and interpersonal in one way or another. Second, Buber’s I-Thou and Levinas’s face-to-face play a greater role than do the presuppositions of second- personal reasons for Darwall. For him, these presuppositions and the circle of concepts he identifies ground moral obligation and other moral concepts; for them, these relations account for the whole of life’s meaningfulness, including morality but not exclusively morality. Thirdly, Darwall’s second-person interaction has many dimensions, only one of which involves authority, accountability, and competence. Jewish dialogical thinkers differ about the relation between the normative character of human experience and all the rest. For example, Levinas also takes our everyday human relations or interactions to involve many aspects, one of which—he calls it the face-to-face—is ethical in character, but that relation makes the subject responsible by directing how the self ought to act and requires response to the other person’s dependencies and needs. Buber takes I-Thou relations to form the ground from which subsequent life, its decisions and conduct, take on meaning and purpose; they become ways of living within that relation and overall within the relation to God. Finally, for Darwall, the only relevant second-person interactions are ones in which one party demands something of the other or makes a claim on the other, and, while this can be explicit or implicit, what counts as such a demand or claim is determined by the kinds of things that would count as such in Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 287 everyday life. That is, for Darwall, the paradigm case is an explicit utterance of the demand. This is not the case for the relations to which Buber and Levinas give priority. For Buber, the I-Thou encounter is at its core an event of reciprocal generosity and benefaction; in addressing one another, an I and a Thou give themselves wholly to one another. Such encounters occur rarely. For Levinas, the self is the target of the other’s vulnerability and need and simultaneously of his demand; he or she is the subject of a claim, what I call targeted dependency; all that the other needs and does, up to and including his or her life, depends on me; I am responsive and responsible as subject to the other’s very existence. And in my daily life, I negotiate each particular such relationship and the vast collection of them that I face; this common fact about each of my relations determines how I act and live. The face-to-face is a transcendental condition or oft-hidden dimension of every interpersonal relation, that is, of all social life. Darwall’s second-person standpoint and the second-personal reasons that derive from it differ from Buber and Levinas, then, in three ways. His relational account is distinguished by being voluntary, restricted, and agent centered. Let me say more about each of these features. First, Darwall’s second-person interaction involves claim or demand. It is based on a paradigm case where one person voluntarily utters a verbal charge of another person to do or not to do something. Jay Wallace calls this model for interpreting second-personal reasons the “voluntarist” model. Wallace takes this to be Darwall’s “official” account of the kind of interaction he has in mind: where one person makes a claim on or issues a command to another person, when the one making the demand has the authority to do so. This is a case, then, when someone who has a right to do so tells someone else to do something and does so willfully or as a matter of choice. Clearly, Darwall likes cases that can be read this way because his account of the issue of accountability— and, hence, responsibility—reflected in the propriety of certain moral reactive attitudes is tied up with such voluntary agency. But Wallace thinks that there are problems with this model, so he offers another, what he—and Michael Thompson (2004)—call the “relational” model. Here, as Wallace puts it, “what makes a reason second-personal is not that it derives from the command of another person but that it is implicated in a structure of relational or ‘bipolar’ normativity” (2007, 28). It is tempting to think that the toe case is best understood according to the voluntary model, while cases like that of the relation between a teacher and a student or between a brother and sister or between friends might better be considered structurally bipolar with certain normative considerations built into them. But, in fact, Wallace—and Thompson—want to treat the toe case in a bipolar way as well. The notions of rights, claims, and 288 Morgan wrongs all are part of relations between people who are related as reason giv- ers and reason receivers, who are engaged with one another in relations of mutual recognition. But this still does not include all human relations. The central point here is that “facts about relational norms of this kind do not seem to depend on implicit or explicit demands that are actually made by one individual or another” (ibid.). The normative character of the relation is built into its structure as the relation that it is. But if it is unclear whether Darwall’s account can be treated on the bipolar model, it is clear, I think, that something like this model is best suited for understanding Levinas and probably other Jewish dialogical philosophers as well. Levinas’s quasi-phenomenological account of the petition and claim or command that occurs in every interpersonal relation is a way of articulating the normative structure of all human relations. As Wallace points out, the word “claim” may not help in these circumstances. Its ambiguities may camou- flage the distinction between the two models. Or, for this reason, “claim” may be just the right word. If we think about Levinas, for example, it may be that the ambiguity in the word “claim” hides the fact that there is both something about being burdened in a relationship and also something very particular about that being burdened.22 If I am the person with the sore toe, then there is a particularity about the claim not to step on it, in fact, a double particularity. It comes from me and targets you. Not only you, of course: it targets each and every other person. In short, the claim comes from a specific person and is made against a specific other person. I would say that the sense of obligation comes from the relation’s universality, and its sense of specific content and reality comes from the relation’s particularity. Levinas tries to capture both of these dimensions in his understanding of the face-to-face and the trace of Illeity. “Claim” is only one word he uses; he also says that the other person “calls the I into question,” that it “persecutes” the I or “accuses” the I. In every interpersonal relation, the other says, “I am dependent on you; I need you; acknowledge and accept me, and do something for me.” And yet the precise content of the dependencies, needs, and vulnerabilities depends on the circumstances of the particular relation. The second difference between Darwall and Jewish dialogical thinkers is that, for him, second-personal reasons give rise to moral obligations. But there are other reasons for being moral as well, and there are second-person interactions that have nothing to do with morality. This is what I meant when I said that Darwall’s second-person standpoint is restricted: restricted in the

22 This particularity of the relation to the other person is part of what Sam Fleischacker (2009, 121–23) argues for in his review of Darwall’s book. Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 289 way that it has moral implications. For Levinas, on the other hand, all human interpersonal relations have a moral dimension to them, so to speak. And this means that the face-to-face for Levinas—and revelation for Buber and Rosenzweig—is a condition that underlies all human experience. All we do is interpersonal in one way or another; that is unavoidable. And all interpersonal relations are morally implicated. This is part of what Levinas means by the priority of the ethical. At the everyday level, we distinguish between private first-personal interests and claims, second-personal interactions, and third- personal commitments or truths. But, for Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, there is a relational framework for all of our lives, and, in fact, since that relational framework is always connected with interpersonal encounters, all such encounters are ethical. In a sense, this orientation requires that we think of ourselves as primordially embedded in a social world and that we understand all our daily activities in terms of its ethical character, rather than thinking of ourselves first and foremost as individually isolated centers of desire, perception, and thought and take ethics to be some limited domain within this individual-centered selfhood.23 This point brings us to the third way in which Darwall’s account differs from the three Jewish thinkers, what I called his commitment to the agent- centered character of second-personal reasons. What I mean by this is that, while second-personal reasons are ones that arise in person-to-person interactions, Darwall is interested in features of the agency of the two parties. The authority, psychic competencies, and accountability that Darwall identifies as the presuppositions of taking up the second-person standpoint are all features of the subject who takes up that standpoint toward another person or of the other person as receiver of the claim, but both are treated as agents—indeed, voluntary and rational agents. The point is that moral agency arises in a para- digmatic form in second-person interactions. The parties have rights and obligations; one demands something of the other who responds. One is authorized to make the claim, while the other is competent to receive it. Various reactive evaluational attitudes are appropriate. Overall, that is, Darwall’s account is Kantian in the sense that it rests on some kind of autonomy and the primacy of rational agency. It is about reasons, reasoning, and acting on reasons—to be sure, in settings where two persons are encountering one another but, nonetheless, insofar as each is an active, rational participant. Things are decidedly different for Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. At one level, of course, they are interested in what it means for a person to live a

23 In his review of Darwall’s book, Fleischacker makes this point by arguing that we ought to extend the second-person standpoint to the epistemic realm; see ibid., 118–21. 290 Morgan meaningful and fulfilled life, and this involves acting toward others with an interest in justice, humane conduct, benevolence, and peace. But for each, what determines the self or subject’s plans for her life and her hopes and projects is grounded in relationships, and all of these several relationships occur for a self or person whose actions are guided by a primordial “passivity,” as Levinas calls it. In short, for Darwall, moral responsibility and obligation derive from authority and competencies; for Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, on the other hand, the responsibility and obligation come first, as it were. Primacy, for them, is being the reservoir for a permanent, particularized, and directly targeted dependency: your need for and claim on me are the starting points of my selfhood, so to speak. One way to see this difference is to consider how Darwall and Levinas would deal with shame. Shame, for Darwall, would be, like guilt, a matter of taking up a second-person attitude toward oneself; it would be a matter of feeling the inadequacy of failing to measure up to standards that you set for yourself but, in this case, especially insofar as you appropriated these standards from others who look at you and before whom you feel that failure. In shame, then, there is a sense of passivity, but there is also a sense of being passive toward oneself. For Levinas, the difference is even more stark, between shame as taking up a second-person standpoint on oneself and shame as conscience, shame as one’s moral self-awareness, precisely because it is the sign of passivity, of being exposed to the other person’s dependencies, vulnerability, and one’s own deficiencies. In facing the other, one is ashamed for what one can now want—to turn away, reject, and even negate the other person, and one is also ashamed at how limited is one’s capacity to respond, to provide for and support the other. Unlike those who take the experience of our own death to mark our sense of finitude, for Levinas, it is our experience of the death—the weakness and needs—of the other person that does so. Hence, our finitude is not a metaphysical matter; it is an ethical one. It is not about the limits to our freedom; it is about the limits to our responsibility. Sam Fleischacker has a nice way of putting this difference between the role of agency and that of passivity in the second-person relation that grounds our moral experience. He points out that Darwall’s account of the second-person standpoint is stylistically by and large a third-person account: “Darwall generally discusses his subject as if from the vantage point of disembodied reason: as if he occupied the view from nowhere, the third-personal stance from which, in morality, he wants to pry us away. Indeed, he shows no anxiety about the possibility that some thing about the second person may go missing when it is considered from the perspective of the third person” (Fleischacker 2009, 121). Fleischacker’s point is that, precisely because he is doing philosophy of a Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 291 traditional kind and takes up a third-person point of view on what is a distinctively second-person experience, Darwall fails to appreciate a central feature of what it means to take up the second-person standpoint toward you. He fails to appreciate “that taking up the second-person standpoint requires us to open ourselves to the possibility that a ‘you’ might tell us something we would never have come up with on our own.” When we face another person, we treat the other person as someone like ourselves, who addresses us as we do her, with whom we engage in mutual recognition, as having dignity as we do, accountable to us as we are to her, and so forth. But, Fleischacker argues, if the face- to-face encounter is genuine, we take the other person to be “different from me”—Levinas would say that the other person is wholly other. If not, then as Levinas argues, all communication would be talking to oneself, and idealism would have won a victory over genuine communication. Fleischacker sees this point, that we need to see others as similar to ourselves but also unconditionally different, as a key insight of figures like Levinas. This is part of what makes each such relation utterly particular and yet, as I have argued, to some degree like every other one. Another implication is that it may be not the presuppositions of moral agency that determine what is ethically required of us but rather the claim that distinct others make of each of us (see ibid., 121–22). Moral selfhood is grounded in passivity; activity derives from it. I hope that, by using Darwall’s discussion of the second-person standpoint and second-personal reasons, I have been able to clarify my proposal that Levinas and other Jewish dialogical thinkers be treated as offering responses to Anscombe’s challenge regarding moral normativity and moral obligation. Does this comparison also identify difficulties with their account? I think that it does. Darwall—and also Wallace and Thompson—provide accounts of relational normativity that are pluralist. That is, none of them proposes that one form of human experience or one mode of human action can illuminate all of morality. Darwall does argue that many central moral notions are explained as least as well by his account of the presuppositions of second-person interaction and its circle of conceptual claims as by any other means. But he never says that this account explains everything about morality. Given the complexity of human experience and all that we think is relevant to moral lives—our conduct, our character, and our goals—this pluralism is an advantage. On the other hand, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas all ground moral normativity—the moral “ought”—on one foundation. In this, they are like Kant, for example, and many others in the philosophical tradition. For Buber, this one foundation involves the way that the divine-human relation is implicated in all human lives that aspire to form genuine human community and to do so by establishing relationships based on moments of I-Thou encounter. For 292 Morgan

Rosenzweig, all human experience is meaningful insofar as it involves acting that is informed by the temporal modalities of creation, revelation, and redemption; to live in such terms is to live for the purpose of creating humane and just social groups whose model and motivating force is the divine ideal of interpersonal love. For Levinas, while history has no single narrative and no single purpose, personal or social, all human existence is lived in terms of interpersonal relations, some direct and proximate, others indirect and distal. The structure of these relations is intrinsically normative and ethical. This means that our second-person standpoint person to person is in each and every case carried out by every one of us in response to one another and with responsibility to and for one another. It is ethical through and through; our desire is to treat each and every other person justly insofar as we are able. One might doubt that the complexity of our moral experience can conve- niently, or at least without distortion, be shoe-horned into one framework or one model. On the one hand, the attempt to subordinate or derive all our experience from a Levinasian foundation runs the risk of distorting, say, factors like our character or our concern for ourselves or states like the reduction of pain simpliciter. One wonders why all fair and humane treatment of others ought to be thought of as expressions of interpersonal responsibility. On the other hand, if an important insight of Levinas’s is that other persons be treated as genuinely other or different from ourselves, then is not grounding all moral considerations in one thing, our second-person encounter with the other person’s vulnerability and dependencies, simply a case of ignoring difference and nuance and diversity in favor of a kind of imperialism or violence to difference and distinctness? This cluster of problems concerning the diversity of moral experience and indeed of other valued aspects of human experience and the singleminded- ness of the dialogical proposal is a serious matter. One answer to these doubts is to point out what should be obvious about Levinas’s account and is also true, I think, at least of Rosenzweig’s conception and perhaps also of Buber’s. All three are engaged in accounts of human existence overall. None is seeking, in any restricted way, to deal with Anscombe’s problem; none is doing metaethics or is narrowly seeking to ground the normativity of moral obligations. To be sure, all three are concerned with relativism and historicism. All three are seeking to find an unconditional ground of value and especially moral value. But the approach they take is to explore human existence overall and to identify within it the dimension or the condition that makes value and meaning possible. Their accounts have a transcendental character to them. Unlike Kant, the notion of transcendental inquiry does not have metaphysical implications or epistemological ones. But it does help us to distinguish between our Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 293 ordinary lives and the conditions or presuppositions that make such lives possible while recognizing that these conditions form a kind of background or framework of meaning within which ordinary life is lived. The upshot is that ethics for Levinas is not morality in a narrow sense; it is that aspect of our social existence that makes morality—our moral concepts, categories, ideals, and more—possible and meaningful. There is plurality and complexity in that ordinary existence, but the plurality is always in one way or another an expression of that common source of meaning. What I am suggesting is that Darwall, Wallace, and Thompson are dealing with a restricted domain within everyday, ordinary experience, while Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas are not. Their accounts are intended to deal with all human existence, and for Rosenzweig and Levinas at least, they disclose transcendental conditions for all such existence. If I am right, notions such as rights, obligations, responsibility, dignity, and more can all be derived from these conditions, albeit not in a reductive fashion. Rights and obligations, for example, express one way in which our interpersonal responsibilities and claims in utterly particular cases can be generalized to guide conduct and to justify public policies and programs. The face-to-face in any given particular manifestation is not what justice is, but justice can only be justice if it seeks to express how a society can seek to realize the responsibility we have to and for each other to the greatest degree possible. At least since Kant, moral philosophy and religious moral thinking in the West have sought ways to ground the normativity of moral obligation in a world in which divine command theories have been put in doubt. I have described Anscombe’s problem as the specific challenge of finding a way to retain the language of divine command in a way that seeks to deal with this problem and yet to take those doubts seriously. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, among Jewish dialogical thinkers, show us this way. Command concerns a normatively inflected second-person relationship. That is the core insight to their response. I have tried to show why it is a response worth our consideration.

References

Anscombe, Elizabeth [G. E. M]. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19. Buber, Martin. 1947. “Dialogue” (1929). In Between Man and Man, 1–45. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Darwall, Stephen. 2006. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 294 Morgan

―――. 2007. “Reply to Korsgaard, Wallace, and Watson.” Ethics 118: 52–69. ―――. 2008. “Interview with Stephen Darwall.” Conducted by Matthew Noah Smith. The Yale Philosophy Review 4: 65–76. ―――. 2009. “The Second-person Standpoint: An Interview with Stephen Darwall. Harvard Review of Philosophy 16: 118–38. ―――. 2010. “Précis of The Second-person Standpoint.” Philosophy and Phenomeno- logical Research 81, no. 1 (2010): 216–28. Fleischacker, Sam. 2009. “Review of Stephen Darwall, The Second-person Standpoint.” Utilitas 21, no. 1: 118–21. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ―――. 1987. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Collected Philosophy Papers, edited by Alphonso Lingis, 47–59. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ―――. 1996a. “God and Philosophy.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 129–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ―――. 1996b. “Meaning and Sense.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 33–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ―――. 1996c. “Transcendence and Height.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 11–31. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morgan, Michael L. 1990. Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ―――. 1992. “Philosophy, History, and the Jewish Thinker.” In Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, edited by G. Nicholson and L. Greenspan, 144–62. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ―――. 2001. Interim Judaism: Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ―――. 2007. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ―――. 2011. Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ―――. 2012. “Jewish Thought and Contemporary Philosophy.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 71–78. Boston: Academic Studies Press. ―――. 2013. Fackenheim’s Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Perpich, Diane. 2008. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Historicity, Philosophy, And Normativity 295

Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W. V. 1953. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, 20–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stern, Robert. 2012. Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Michael. 2004. “What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice.” In Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith, 333–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, R. Jay. 2007. “Reasons, Relations, and Commands: Reflections on Darwall.” Ethics 118, no. 1: 24–36. Watson, Gary. “Moral as Equal Accountability: Comments on Stephen Darwall The Second-Person Standpoint.” Ethics 118 (2007): 37–51. chapter 14 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Jewish Philosophers of Encounter

Michael D. Oppenheim

An entry in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals observed, “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forward” (1967, 450). I cite this to suggest that the coherence and integration that the following might communicate are very much the result of the narrative structure itself, dampening if not repress- ing the openness and messiness of a life’s work. This reflection about my efforts as a modern Jewish philosopher consists of three parts. The first is a brief intellectual autobiography, presenting some of the catalytic interests and concerns. The next features a more extensive examination of the contexts, issues, and ideas that have set the parameters for this production. It will conclude with a few fragmentary suggestions about the future of the discipline. All of this is obviously partial in so many senses. Like memory itself, the narrative contains selected shards of the past, but these have been reconfigured and recast by the pursuits of the present. If written at a different time, it could be much transformed. Early on in my studies, I was drawn to philosophy. Although there were no courses in that area until university, I was personally excited about the diverse yet sustained thinking about fundamental questions, such as the nature of the universe and the nature of life. Within a year of starting university, I settled on that discipline, although I could not imagine it having any real career possibilities. This was during the mid-1960s in southern California, and my decision drew on the Vietnam protests and the counterculture movement. It made sense to me to be studying philosophy as a way of participating in those wider rebellions against pragmatic and materialist concerns. It was primarily a participation through reflection. Like many young persons, existentialism spoke to me most directly. I often carried with me Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Walter Kauf mann’s Portable Nietzsche, a little later Kierkegaard, and then Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Buber was not necessarily de rigueur for everyone, but he was important for me. This touched on my growing up, and being schooled on Sundays, in Reform Judaism, and the notion of dialogue as depicting a path

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_016 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 297 toward authenticity struck me forcefully. Thus, Buber was my entrée to modern Jewish philosophy. Some features of “Classic Reform” Judaism still survived in the Los Angeles of the 1960s. There was little attachment to Hebrew or to most traditional Jewish ritual. The Holocaust was barely mentioned, only the Eichmann trial in 1961 bringing it some attention. The attitude toward the State of Israel varied, from the ambivalence of my parents—until the 1967 Six-Day War— to the enthusiasm of our rabbi. It appeared to me that the heart of Reform, following the founding document, the 1885 “Pittsburg Platform,” was still that commitment to what would later be termed tikkun olam, the eighth principle:

In full accordance with the spirit of the Mosaic legislation, which strives to regulate the relation between rich and poor, we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve on the basis of justice and righteousness the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society. (Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980, 372)

I remember Yom Kippur sermons, not always well received by the largely afflu- ent audience, extolling the freedom fighters going off to Selma, Alabama, the Vietnam War protest, and then Israel Bonds. Among the lessons to me in all of this was that Judaism was relevant and could contribute to contemporary culture and events, that it was personally engaging but also had a communal foundation, and that it required (commanded) a commitment to social justice. The second part of Buber’s appeal was that “life of dialogue” as Maurice Friedman expressed it (2002). Buber combined the main themes of existentialism—personal engagement, the concern with meaning and authenticity, the focus on decision within the concrete everyday—with the understanding that the most profound moments in a human life were those when one person touched/spoke to another. The pursuit of truth and meaning was not for him an individual affair, for they could not be achieved outside persons’ relationships to other persons. A growing love (philos) for the wisdom (sophia) of Søren Kierkegaard and his host of pseudonymous figures fully crystallized my dedication to philosophy and necessarily brought me to leave the discipline itself. After earning my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I moved on to do graduate work. However, I began to see that the type of philosophy that I wanted to study was not that of the prevailing Anglo-American analytic type. It was not a misspent year in that discipline at the University of California, Santa Barbara, thanks to courses in the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, Sigmund Freud, 298 Oppenheim and also in Indian philosophy, but the prospect of another year in that direction was not appealing. By now, I had read further in Kierkegaard. I saw that his issues were the ones that initially drew me to the discipline. As one of his pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript saw, philosophy could be about authenticity, the life of the person of guilt and sin, and truth could be seen not as the correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs in the world but in matters ethical and religious, “truth is subjectivity” (1968, 169). Subjectivity was understood as a passionate, transparent, purposeful—“purity of heart is to will one thing” (Kierkegaard 1956)—life in the world. His struggle with the relationship between “the single one” and other persons, and his insistence that authentic love of the other required God as the middle term, illuminated a Christian philosophical perspective that differed from yet engaged well with Buber. While he only regarded himself as “a corrective”—and which philosopher who carefully attends to her or his place and time can see themselves as more than that?—Kierkegaard was a consistent companion and dialogue partner for me. Plumbing his works, I believe that I learned what faith, as the living out of the religious life in the present, meant. At least in my case and in terms of the academic fields as they were drawn for me, to study him I had to move on to the discipline of religious studies. Ironically, an essay that argued against the view of Climacus that one could go beyond Abraham, that is, contesting the Postscript’s position concerning the superiority of “Religion B” (Christianity) to “Religion A” (Judaism) (Kierkegaard 1968, 493–98), was my ticket of admission to the doctoral program in that discipline. I had taken some other courses in religious studies before that decision. I was excited by the serious examination of a wide variety of religious traditions with their distinct, substantial histories, cultures, and communities. There was also the opportunity to study Judaism in an academic setting and especially to broaden my understanding of modern Jewish philosophy. The discovery of Franz Rosenzweig was the prized outcome of that endeavor. The incomparable The Star of Redemption had just been translated in 1972, and slowly I found that the incessant struggles with that book always paid dividends far beyond their cost. Here was a Jewish philosopher who could fully stand up to Kierkegaard, just as Rosenzweig had to stand up to, which meant be transformed by, his friend and teacher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (whose motto was Respondeo etsi mutabor, I respond although I will be changed) (1970, 10). Rosenzweig believed that one could address all of the traditional philosophical issues from the standpoint of Judaism, that actually “Philosophy” itself was a particular tradition—“from Iona to Jena” (Rosenzweig 2005, 18)— with its presuppositions, history, and such. Yet, the core or “heart” of the Star (Rosenzweig 1999, 86) was not about ontology, epistemology, logic, and Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 299

aesthetics, but about the concrete person “of first and last name” and the two commandments that contoured his or her life: “to love thy God with all thy heart, soul and mind” and “to love thy neighbor.” Unlike Kierkegaard, he was not ambivalent about the centrality of the life with others and in community. The Star was the place he took stock of philosophy and then declared his dedication to serve the Jewish community for the few years that remained to him. Still, Rosenzweig continued to philosophize and provide us with some of his most insightful views about the religious life and reflection; but, because he needed “to see the ‘other’” (1981, 91), this was done through letters—sometimes as Buber and others found out, very long letters (1965). My dissertation, “Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Rosenzweig: From Philosophy to Religion,” under the supervision of the inspiring teacher and scholar Walter Capps, addressed these themes. Following the brief but turbulent year of 1973 in Jerusalem, I found an academic position in Montreal, in the Department of Religion at Concordia University. The engagement with and support of my colleagues and students furthered my studies and work, especially in comparative religions and philosophy. To the concentration in modern Jewish philosophy of Buber and Rosenzweig, I later added the figure of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas, who in some contexts saw himself as a disciple of Rosenzweig, added the dynamics of the “face to face” to Buber’s “I and Thou” and Rosenzweig’s “love of the neighbor.” Together, they constituted those philosophers of encounter who have continued to be the platform for my work. However, over a number of decades, two other dialogue partners, as it were, came to be introduced into the conversation. The first was feminism, especially feminist Jewish philosophy, and the second, a stream of post-Freudian psychoanalysis that loosely coalesced into the school of relational psychoanalysis. There were two compelling reasons for my engagement with feminism and feminist Jewish philosophy. The first followed from my understanding of Judaism and that prophetic principle that, for many, was so intensely expressed in that tradition. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob insisted that justice and righteousness “roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24), and, for me, the concerns with women’s rights broadly and with the full participation of women in Jewish life and thought were simply logical extensions of the civil rights movement on which I had been nurtured. I also believed that the commitment to women’s total participation required more than an intellectual expression and worked to bring gender equity to my university community. In addition, I saw that the concerns of feminism and those of the three modern Jewish philosophers reinforced each other. Both spoke of humans as fundamentally relational beings, as well as the respect for difference, the 300 Oppenheim concern for justice, and full acknowledgment of the concreteness of human life. I agreed with two key propositions of the French philosopher and psycho analyst Luce Irigaray, that the respect for difference began with acknowledgment of sexual difference and that, therefore, the issue of sexual difference would be the defining question of our time (1991, 165–77). In the book Speaking/ Writing of God (1997), I set up a dialogue between Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, as well as Irigaray and some early feminist Jewish thinkers such as Judith Plaskow, Lynn Gottlieb, Sylvia Fishman, Rita Gross, and Marcia Falk. Over the past fifteen years, I have been studying and writing about a diverse group of psychoanalytic theorists who departed from Freud, including Erik Erikson, Melanie Klein, the British school of object relations, Hans Loewald, and, finally, the relational analysts. They provide a different perspective and way of addressing the interpersonal aspects of human development and transformation. Often profoundly influenced by feminism and postmodern currents, such contemporary psychoanalysts as Stephen Mitchell, Lewis Aron, Thomas Ogden, and Jessica Benjamin detail the unconscious or “intrapsychic” and conscious “intersubjective” ways that humans continuously “use” as well as engage others. My book Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2006) examined the earlier group of thinkers and my current work, “Two Languages of Love,” will focus on the contemporary theorists.

Philosophy and Philosophies

Having been trained in religious studies and teaching in a department of religion has had a significant impact on how I understand the context, nature, and tasks of modern Jewish philosophy. For the vast majority of philosophers educated in Europe and the Americas, which includes Jewish philosophers, Western philosophy constitutes the discipline of “Philosophy” itself. Philosophers working in religious studies often have a more comparative experience and outlook, arising out of their training and contact with colleagues, students, and programs that presuppose familiarity with the panorama of world cultures, religions, and philosophic systems. In this latter context, Western philosophy is seen as just one tradition along with two others, South Asian and Chinese philosophy.1 Each of these has particular concerns and empha- ses, reigning questions and issues, including such foci as logic, mathematics,

1 There is a more detailed presentation in my essay on the global nature of philosophy (Oppen- heim 2011, 120–22). Some of the following discussion has been taken and revised from that text. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 301 epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and political thought. There is also a great amount of internal diversity, since each philosophic heritage has multiple currents, shows changes over time, and waxes and wanes over a period of at least 1,500 years. In general, the major currents of South Asian, or what is often termed Indian philosophy, are linked to Hinduism and Buddhism, which have come to influence not only India but also the other countries of South Asia. Chinese philosophy includes Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist and Neo- Confucian philosophy, and the countries of China, Japan, and Korea. Western philosophy includes those traditions that draw on Greek philosophy, utilizing its nomenclature, definitions, and issues. There are Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions within this stream, as well as modern Western or what might be termed post-Christian philosophy. Distinctive to each of the three major traditions of philosophy are the culture(s) and history(ies) or the experiences out of which these streams of philosophy arise, the questions that are most prominent, and the methods used to address these questions. In terms of the prominent questions or fields, a number of scholars have noted the Indian philosophical concern with mok- sha or liberation, psychology, and dialectics; Chinese philosophical interests with ethical, political and social thought, as well as aesthetics; and Western philosophical considerations about ontology, epistemology, logic, and mathematics (Smart 1999, 1–11; Scharfstein 1998, 1–54). In the context of contemporary Western philosophy, one of my orientations is well reflected in an observation by Richard Rorty. In the essay “Pragmatism and Philosophy,” he described a shift in how philosophy is seen, which is also echoed in postmodern and feminist discourses. Some thinkers no longer envision philosophy as a discipline that searches for ultimate truths that transcend cultures, languages, and particular discourses. These adherents of philosophy “compare and contrast cultural traditions” and find that “in the process of playing vocabularies and cultures against each other, we produce new and better ways of talking and acting” (Rorty 1987, 54). These post-Philosophy philosophers explore “the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various ways of talking that our race has invented” (ibid., 58). I would like to augment Rorty’s perspective with the insights of the feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Jane Flax and of the feminist and relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin. In the process of evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses of psychoanalytic and postmodern discussions of subjectivity, Flax writes, “Each discourse tries to order the heterogeneous components of subjectivity within one master narrative or category. . . . We will need multiple stories in a variety of styles to appreciate its complexity” (1993, 98). Flax’s thought might be redrawn to suggest that philosophy should not just evaluate 302 Oppenheim the relative merits of specific philosophic systems but that it should recognize that multiple systems, with their diverse perspectives, are together required to account for the complexity of existence. Benjamin’s approach often highlights central tensions in human life, such as that between attachment and independence or between the individual’s need for identifying with what is similar in other persons and being excited and drawn by what is different. In her view, these tensions are not solved or resolved but lived with and through (1995, 76). For me the philosophic lesson here is that sometimes one must withstand the powerful rational urges toward determining a final answer or working toward a synthesis of conflicting emotions and ideas. Our best accounts often keep in tension different ideas and approaches, reflecting, once again, the complexities of personal and communal life. Bringing Flax and Benjamin together with Rorty, I see myself as a philosopher examining “the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various [cross-cultural] ways of talking,” recognizing the need for concurrent multiple perspectives, and respecting tensions and unresolved conflicts.

Modern Jewish Philosophy

There are multiple and divergent understandings of the nature and scope of Jewish philosophy.2 Some thinkers suggest that Jewish philosophy utilizes the methods of Western “Philosophy” to explore or interpret specific Jewish issues, while others propose a broader understanding. In terms of the former, modern Jewish philosophers have addressed such issues as the essence or character of Judaism, the nature of Jewish identity or what it means to be a Jew, what role Judaism has in the modern world, how continuity with the Jewish past can be maintained or reestablished, the importance of halakha for individual and communal life, the challenges to religious faith by secularism and the Holocaust, and the impact of both feminism and religious pluralism on Jewish life and thought (Oppenheim 2009, 3–33). Among the systems modern Jewish philosophers have used to elucidate these issues are German idealism, existentialism, and postmodernism. In harmony with the earlier discussion, coming out of a comparative perspective, Jewish philosophers also explore some of the widest and most profound human questions: the nature of the human, the universe, the true, and

2 There is a more detailed presentation in my essay on the global nature of philosophy (Oppenheim 2011, 123–24). Some of the following discussion has been taken and revised from that text. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 303 the beautiful, as well as what constitutes authentic existence, communal life, and relations with others. One of the best examples of this understanding of the extensive scope of Jewish philosophy is found in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. The Star looks at nothing less than God, humans or “man,” and the world, through the integral categories—and Jewish understandings of these categories—of creation, revelation, and redemption. In terms of this broader conception of Jewish philosophy, one of the defining characteristics of this discipline is that Jewish religion, literature, culture, and history provide the experiences and categories out of which Jewish philosophy is done. Some speak of Jewish experience or Jewish memory (Ravven 1997, 432–36), but these terms must always be put in the plural, reminding us of the multiplicity of experiences of Jewish communities and individuals, including the importance of cultural, economic, and social groupings, as well as gender. The themes of community and responsibility pervade the history of Jewish philosophy and continue to be prominent in the modern period. The solitary individual is never a topic in itself. The view that the individual must always be understood in relation to others, in the midst of community, is pervasive in Jewish philosophy and in Judaism overall (Geller 1987, 81–85). A full or authentic human life is lived with others. Classically, the relationship to the transcendent is treated within the context of covenant, the covenant between God and the Jewish people. For more secular positions, the individual is always seen within the umbrella of the people, Israel. Thus, whether the understanding of Judaism delineates a religious, cultural, or national viewpoint, the web of relationships between and among persons is a central matter of reflection. These others, further, are not mere dialogical partners in the present but persons of different generations who have formed and continue to form one’s family, community, and people.3 A second theme is that of responsibility. The web of relationships that links persons together is constituted by responsibilities or obligations. Classically, once again, the covenant is a love relationship articulated through obligations. Halakha was the instrument to live out these obligations, to the transcendent, to the people, and to the neighbor, stranger, poor, orphan, and widow. The philosophical rubric for this concern is, of course, ethics, and many Jewish

3 The Israeli philosopher Eliezer Schweid has argued that the individual’s ties to her or his family, people, culture, and history provide the platform for both authenticity and creativity (1974, 17). 304 Oppenheim philosophers have insisted that the centrality of ethics continually distinguishes Jewish philosophy from other streams of Western philosophy.4 Finally, there are consequences in light of seeing Jewish philosophy in a global perspective. It is important that its Western heritage be recognized and appreciated, but this does not mean it should be taken as the only model for the discipline of philosophy. Western presuppositions, definitions, and parameters must be examined and appraised. For example, while the “default position” for contemporary Western philosophy is atheism,5 this does not mean that Jewish philosophers for whom the term “God” has a vital place in their vocabulary need be exiled from the discipline.

Three Philosophers of Encounter

As indicated earlier, my own work has focused on a tributary that includes those twentieth-century Jewish philosophers of the interhuman: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. A brief examination of these thinkers will provide a glimpse of what has excited and intrigued me about their explorations of human relationships, the place of the divine, and the quest for meaning and authenticity. For Buber, others have a central place in every narrative of a life. In I and Thou, he insists that to become an authentic self—that is, an “I” or “person”— one must have significant relations with others. In his words, “Man becomes an I through a Thou”6 (1970, 80), and “Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons” (ibid., 112). Rosenzweig sees the quintessential relationship to another in terms of the love for the neighbor that both brings the development of the self to fruition and provides direction into the world. The Star of Redemption affirms that, with the commandment to love the neighbor, the “soul declared grown-up leaves the parental home of divine love to go out and travel through the world” (2005, 221). With Levinas, the authentic interhuman is the realm of ethics. For him, the subject comes to be, is born, through “serving”

4 Steven Schwarzschild has expressed the centrality of ethics throughout the history of Jewish philosophy as “[t]he view held here . . . is that philosophy is Jewish by virtue of a transhistorical primacy of ethics” (1987, 629). 5 My colleague at Concordia University, Kai Nielsen, once spoke of philosophy in terms of this “default position” in a symposium at that university. 6 I have converted the term “You” in this translation to “Thou,” which is the convention in terms of this text. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 305 the other. In Totality and Infinity, he writes, “The accomplishing of the I qua I and morality constitute one sole and same process in being . . . [coming] to birth . . . [in] serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan” (1969, 245). Of course, there is an important transcendent feature in their discussions. In particular, the transcendent is portrayed as person, what Buber refers to as “the absolute person” (1970, 181). The God relationship, for Buber, fulfills or completes all other truly defining relationships, that is, the realm of the I-Thou. He writes that the inner power in each person to turn toward another, that is, “the innate Thou . . . attains perfection solely in the immediate relationship to the Thou [God] that in accordance with its nature cannot become an It” (1970, 123). Rosenzweig holds that, for us to be able to transcend self-concern, including the debilitating fixation on death, and thus to become fully human, God must first transform the self. Thus, we find that it is “in the fact that he loves us, and awakens our dead Self” that the individual emerges to that status of “beloved soul that loves in return” (2005, 403). A common theme in Levinas’s writings is that the self is upheld or confirmed by standing before God’s judgment in the context of the relation to the other. In his terms, “To place oneself under the judgment of God is to exalt the [one’s] subjectivity. . . . The judgment of God that judges me at the same time confirms me” (1969, 246). These brief allusions to the interhuman allow us to examine the Jewish philosophers’ understanding of meaning. Buber sees meaning as the outgrowth or, alternatively, the gift of relationships, both human and divine. In terms of the former, he once powerfully expressed this insight: “What do we expect when we are in despair yet go to a man? Surely, a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning” (1965, 14). Buber’s classic statement about revelation, which for him is an ever-present possibility, and meaning is found in the third section of I and Thou. In discussing the main features of revelation, he writes,

[This is] the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. . . . It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability. . . . The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and in the uniqueness of his life. (1970, 158–59)

Rosenzweig took an epigram of his friend Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Revelation is orientation,” as the foundation for his understanding of the impact of revelation, that it brings “an absolute symbolic ordering to history” (Rosenstock-Huessy 1971, 161). Revelation provides a sense of where one stands, 306 Oppenheim as an individual and within community, as well as a direction that, again, is into the world, loving the neighbor (das Nebenmensch)—the one who appears next to one. For Levinas, the neighbor introduces meaning into life. There may be various traces of the divine in the other’s ethical height, but there are no direct relations with the divine that bestow meaning. Additionally, the topic of death is sometimes brought up in the treatment of meaning with Levinas, as it is with the other two philosophers:

The [authentic] approach, inasmuch as it is a sacrifice, confers a sense on death. . . . In it life is no longer measured by being, and death no longer introduces the absurd into it. . . . [W]e can have responsibilities and attachments through which death takes on a meaning. (1981, 129)

The examination of these three philosophers, beyond their personal appeal, fulfills a number of tasks that are central to my understanding of modern Jewish philosophy. I find that Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas eloquently present one type of response to the question of the relevance of Judaism, of being a Jew, for our time. They demonstrate that Judaism has power to provide direction to the individual, ties her or him to family, community and history, through the personal calling by others, including the divine Other. The prominent sociologists Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya once wrote, “The future of American Judaism depends on its capacity to engage the individual Jew at the personal and private level” (1984, 14). It is precisely at that personal level and into that future that I find these philosophers direct their words. Their importance and contribution go further. Since the period of Emancipation, Jewish philosophy has been in a critical dialogue with Western philosophy. In that dialogue, there have been moments of agreement and also disagreement. These three thinkers provide an important critique of the distorting individualism that pervades Western thought and culture. As we have seen, they answer that, in Judaism, the individual is not the autonomous source of all truth and value. Truth, value, and a life of authenticity develop through relationships to others. The two issues of personal meaning and contribution to the wider society and culture actually elide. Judaism is shown to be relevant to Jews because they can also see it as relevant to the wider social and cultural concerns of all persons. The convergence is well expressed in the somewhat reformulated words of Abraham Heschel: “The task of Jewish philosophy today, is not only to describe the essence but also to set forth the universal relevance of Judaism, the bearings of its demands upon the chance of man [that is to say, women and men] to remain [or better, to fully become] human” (1966, 421). Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 307

Finally, despite their real differences, these three Jewish philosophers offer a sensitive and sophisticated response to many of the modern critiques of religious faith. In brief, they recognized the thoroughly metaphoric character of religious language, of the religious life itself. Levinas’s statement “I do not take literally the ensemble of [religious] beliefs. The Torah is not a picture book” (2001, 198) could equally be attributed to the others. For them, God is not an additional thing or fact in the world, a deus ex machina from the heavens who intervenes to save the righteous. The term “God” refers to a transcendent dimension, something other than the everyday, historical plane that Rosenzweig characterized in terms of “war and revolution” (2005, 353). This dimension, “otherwise than being,” enters our lives through the two love commandments. With these, a meaning that even death cannot erase is established in that other plane, of “eternity.” Emunah (faith) is thus that trusting passion that directs a life to others. Still, as Buber concludes his 1957 “Afterword” to I and Thou,

The existence of the mutuality between God and man cannot be proved any more than the existence of God. Anyone who dares nevertheless to speak of it bears witness and invokes the witness of those whom he addresses—present and future. (1970, 182)

Feminism and Feminist Jewish Philosophy

While the substantial insights of feminist Jewish philosophy have largely been ignored by male Jewish philosophers, this area has had a lasting impact on my work. As discussed earlier, I believe that, as a Jew and as a philosopher, I am obligated to help in the task of aiding the full participation of Jewish women in the life of the Jewish community, including the community of Jewish philosophers. These are not responsibilities without reward. The participation of women is crucial to the relevance and revitalization of the Jewish community and of the philosophic enterprise. In fact, as will be obvious below, I believe that feminist Jewish philosophy is the most dynamic stream of modern Jewish philosophy today. Feminist Jewish philosophy draws deeply on the principles and insights of both feminism and feminist philosophy.7 I would suggest that some of

7 There is a more detailed presentation in my chapter “Feminist Jewish Philosophy: A Response” (Oppenheim 2009, 252–56). Some of the following discussion has been taken and revised from that text. 308 Oppenheim the most important and distinctive features of this heritage include a commitment to justice, the salience of gender as a category of experience and an analytic category, and heightened sensitivities for concrete experiences, especially the experiences and voices of those marginalized. Other features that are often prominent in feminist philosophy and feminist thought would include an understanding of humans as embodied, relational, and part of the natural order of living creatures and the environment.8 Feminist Jewish thinkers clearly demonstrate the commitment to justice and the attention to gender, as well as perspectives that highlight humans as embodied, relational, and within the natural order. They speak of some of the most important issues of human life out of the resources of Jewish experience or memory, especially the experiences and memories of Jewish women. Their commitment to justice would include the critical feature of the recognition of the historical ways that Jewish women have been oppressed, repressed, and marginalized in the Jewish tradition. Feminist Jewish philosophers feature a responsibility to transform those elements within the Jewish experience that have caused this situation, as well as to bring forgotten and silenced Jewish women’s voices of the past forward and to create room for such voices in the present and future. There is a growing list of those who define themselves as feminist Jewish philosophers, feminist Jewish thinkers, and feminist theologians.9 Some of those whose work has been especially helpful to me include Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Susan Shapiro, Susannah Heschel, Judith Plaskow, Heidi Ravven, Randi Raskover, Claire Katz, Leora Batnitzky, Laura Levitt, Tamar Ross, and Rachel Adler. I would like to provide a few examples of the distinctive philosophic contributions of feminist Jewish thinkers. In addressing particular issues about the absence of women’s experience in Torah or the lack of power in formulating halakha or the subordinate role of women in liturgy and communal life, they have found it necessary to ask more elemental questions. These questions explore the role of law and liturgy in religious life, as well as the very nature of Judaism as a religious tradition. Adler speaks of this in terms of the

8 A number of feminist philosophers could be cited who show the integration of all of these features. One of the most important is the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Additionally, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson provides an excellent description of the central characteristics of feminist philosophy (Tirosh-Rothschild 1994, 85–96). In a later article, “Feminism and Gender” (2012), she reviews the major developments and issues in feminist philosophy, as well as examining the contributions of key feminist Jewish philosophers. 9 At this time, such titles as feminist Jewish philosopher, feminist Jewish thinker, and feminist Jewish theologian have no consistent usage. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 309

“metadiscourse” of feminist Jewish philosophy, that is, of the need to uncover the fundamental purposes of sacred texts, religious language, law, and liturgy, before moving on to address specific challenges and concerns. Such discourse would commence with the examination of primary goods and values, of the deepest assumptions and methodologies, and thus allow that every “vital concern in the lives of community members could be articulated and heard” (Adler 1998, 43). For example, the problem of the “subordination and exclu- sions of women in communal life” through classical halakha brings Adler to discuss the wider relationship between religious praxis and communal narrative: “A praxis is more than the sum of the various practices that constitute it. A praxis is a holistic embodiment in action at a particular time of the values and commitments inherent to a particular story” (ibid., 26, italics in the original). For her, it is through examining, challenging, and reconstructing foundational stories, that is, in reworking narratives, that those needed changes in the values and commitments that are embodied in law are effected. In exposing and transforming the basic patriarchal character of the tradition, Adler gives prominence to forgotten stories or playfully uses humor to undermine others. She introduces the story of Skotsl who tried to scale heaven to present the grievance that “men seemed to own the world” (1998, 22). Her examination of the heroic story of Rabbi Akiva’s rise to prominence at the expense of his wife, Rachel, illuminates the tradition’s insistence that power and spirituality are exclusively male prerogatives. Yet, the acute examination of underlying values of religious life and tradition does not mean that problematic details are overlooked. In the concluding section of her book Engendering Judaism, Adler carefully seeks to remedy those features of the traditional marriage ceremony that imply that the bride is a mere object of “acquisition” and not a subject in her own right (172). Tamar Ross’s discussion of the challenge of feminist critiques of the ubiquitous androcentrism of the Torah provides another example of feminist Jewish examinations of underlying philosophic issues, in this case concerning revelation and religious language:

What makes feminist analysis unique is that the ultimate question it raises does not concern any particular difficulty in the contents of Torah. . . . Highlighting an all-pervasive male bias in the Torah seems to display a more general skepticism regarding divine revelation that is more profound. (Ross 2004, 186)

In the process of wrestling with this issue, Ross examines the claim that Torah is divine revelation, that is, of what a believer means by saying “I believe in Torah 310 Oppenheim from Heaven” (ibid., 193). Following the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, she holds that, to understand a statement, one must see it as part of a set of linguistic practices or “language games” grounded in particular “forms of life.” Language games are systems of interrelated statements that emerge out of the lives of different communities, such as religious communities or communities of scientists:

Religious language is a long-established form of discourse that does a particular set of jobs, imparting its own particular “form of life” to those who participate in its “language game.” The participants employ- ing religious discourse are engaging a system of symbols that legitimate their most basic patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. This “form of life” . . . reflects a picture of reality that shapes and produces profound sentiments, attitudes, and awarenesses. (Ibid., 195)

In the end, Ross holds that belief in Torah from Sinai or divine revelation is not meant to be a scientific or historical claim but a way that traditional Jews express “loyalty to the Torah and the way of life that it propagates” (ibid., 196). Thus, the serious examination of androcentrism proceeds to a sensitive examination of the passionate and communal nature of religious language. The exciting critical possibilities in the repertoire of feminist Jewish philosophers are well represented in much of the work of Susan Shapiro. In the essay “A Matter of Discipline: Reading for Gender in Jewish Philosophy,” she offers a fine example of the philosophical fruitfulness of interweaving a commitment to justice, focus on women, and sustained examination of gender tropes. She begins with a statement about methodology, which clarifies the meaning of “reading for gender”:

Reading for gender requires attending to the rhetoricity and textuality of a work, that is to its patterning of metaphors and other figures and tropes, not only to its logic. . . . [T]o read for gender is to read for constructions and performances of gender in these texts with an interest in the intellectual and cultural labor these tropes enact. It is to read, as well, with an interest in their consequences, both within these texts and for readers today. That is, the work performed by these gendered tropes will be found to be philosophical, requiring a rethinking of what we understand philosophical texts to be and how they, therefore, may best be read. (1997, 158–59) Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 311

Shapiro speaks here of the exploration of the systematic ways that gendered metaphors and tropes are used to construct philosophic arguments and texts. Uncovering the place of these elements in a discourse brings new insights not only to the understanding of the text but to the continuing effects of these texts on today’s readers, including their conceptions of philosophy itself. There are several areas where the concerns of the feminist Jewish philosophers overlap with those of the Jewish philosophers of encounter. The most prominent is the understanding of the human as relational and the overall topic of relationships. Turning away from Western images of the self that speak of the human in terms of autonomy and autarchy, that is, self-consciousness, self-reliance, and self-direction, many feminist and feminist Jewish thinkers refocus attention on the myriad avenues—especially in everyday and embodied ways—that each individual is linked to and develops through relationships with others. Tirosh-Samuelson writes, for example, about evidence suggesting that “personhood (or selfhood) is relational; the self is intrinsically social and the boundaries between the self and the world are extremely porous” (Tirosh- Rothschild 1994, 90). Following the philosopher Gillian Rose, the Jewish feminist Randi Rashkover speaks of philosophy in terms of “the conscious reflection upon the drama of human inter-subjective engagement” (1994, 315). Despite this important common feature, there are specific elements in the feminist Jewish critique and reconstruction of Judaism that would benefit the Jewish philosophers whom I study. The understanding of the centrality of gender in human relationships is one of these. Feminist Jewish philosophers point out that there are no humans in general and that one of the particularities that must always be kept in mind is gender, along with class, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation. Their insistence on an inclusive Judaism is also fruitful in a dialogue with the Jewish philosophers. For example, from an early period in the development of their perspective, the critique of patriarchal God language has been prominent. I believe this can be seen to be in harmony with some of the interests of the philosophers, although none took up this issue. One of the chapters in my book Speaking/Writing of God, argues that the addition of feminine metaphors to speak of God is fully consistent with Rosenzweig’s understanding of anthropomorphic metaphors to refer to the divine (1998, 135–45). For Rosenzweig, these metaphors, originating in the Bible, are not descriptions of God’s nature but refer to the ways that humans encounter the divine in their lives. In this light, the addition of feminine metaphors expands the possibilities of experiencing the divine for all Jews. There may also be an important conversation between feminist Jewish philosophers and the three philosophers in terms of the former’s commitment to justice and the latter’s emphasis on responsibility. 312 Oppenheim

Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis

While, in religious studies, comparative work is modeled on examining features or philosophic systems in different religious traditions, for me it may also be cross-disciplinary, the effort across disciplines to explore, again in Rorty’s words, “the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various ways of talking.” A third partner I have introduced into my pursuits in modern Jewish philosophy arose as a tributary to the work of Sigmund Freud. The initial reason for my virage or alteration of direction was that psychoanalysis offered sophisticated portrayals of the nature of human subjectivity that both complemented and challenged the insights of Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, as well as the feminist theorists. The possibilities in this other discipline are perceptively expressed by Jane Flax, who wrote, “For all its shortcomings psychoanalysis presents the best and most promising theories of how a self that is simultaneously embodied, social, ‘fictional,’ and real comes to be, changes, and persists over time” (1990, 16). While most philosophers, and academics more widely, view all of psychoanalysis in terms of the basic Freudian parameters, groups of post-Freudians have moved beyond these in significant ways. Among other developments, many post-Freudians reject the master’s discussion of subjectivity in terms of instincts or drives within the individual psyche and have moved the focus to human interconnectedness. Persons are seen as being programmed to need and relate to others, to be “object-seeking,” in the vocabulary of W. R. D. Fairbairn. Object relations theorists highlighted this departure, regarding the emergence of the psyche as the outcome of “interpersonal activity, reciprocity, and emotional exchange,” giving primary attention to the self’s need for connection and recognition (Elliott 1994, 22). Contemporary theorists have further deepened this perspective, especially relational psychoanalysts. For example, Stephen Mitchell has written that to speak of “an individual mind is an oxymoron; subjectivity always develops in the context of intersubjectivity” (1993, 57). Jessica Benjamin has been especially interested in the dynamics, both intrapsychic and interpersonal, of relationships, writing, “The relationship in which subjectivity develops is predicated on certain kinds of activity by the other” (1998, 27), and, “In the absence of intersubjectivity, the subject of reflection can only reflect upon itself, not account for the possible transformation made by the intervention of an other . . . fully independent of the subject” (ibid., 93). Many psychoanalysts have seriously studied and taken up the intricate preconceptual conversation or dance between the mother and infant, what Daniel Stern (2000) termed “the interpersonal world of the infant.” The developments during this period, deemphasized in traditional Freudian psychoanalysis for Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 313 the centrality of the later Oedipal stage, are seen to confirm that intersubjectivity is a fundamental need throughout a human life. Benjamin suggests that, without mutual engagement with outside others, the self is caught in destructive patterns fueled by intrapsychic fantasy (1995, 175–211). Another important departure from Freud is the recent psychoanalytic interest in meaning. Meaning making itself has come to be seen as a definitive human activity. As one critic, Anthony Elliott, stated it, “[T]he psyche is the launching pad from which people make meaning” (1999, 7). Speaking from within the same broad relational stream of post-Freudian psychoanalysts as we have been discussing, Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris see “the core activity of psychoanalytic work” once again as “meaning making” (2005, 311), and Karlen Lyons-Ruth writes about the patient and therapist working together to deconstruct old, limited meanings and “constructing more integrated, flexible, and hopeful ways of making meaning and being together” (2005, 342). Finally, Mitchell summarizes well the shift within psychoanalytic practice:

What the patient needs is not a rational reworking of unconscious infan- tile fantasies . . . [but] revitalization and expansion of his own capacity to generate experience that feels, real, meaningful, and valuable. (1993, 24)

He later adds to this, “The term meaningful here refers to a sense of personal value, importance, and devotion” (234). The discourses of psychoanalysis and Jewish philosophy articulate the nature of human meaning in characteristic ways. The psychoanalysts often describe meaning in terms of the individual’s creative, playful integration of unconscious and conscious activity, as well as of open and spontaneous relations with others. For example, Hans Loewald has written,

It is this interplay between unconscious and consciousness, between past and present, between the intense density of undifferentiated, inarticu- late experience and the lucidity of conscious articulate experience, that gives meaning to our life. Without such meaning-giving play we have no future of our own. (1978, 49–50)

The Jewish philosophers depict meaning in terms of fulfilling relationships with others and accentuate the element of responsibility. In I and Thou, Buber sees one of the cardinal aspects of revelation as “the inexpressible confirmation of meaning” (1970, 158). We saw that, for Levinas, it is in being responsible to the neighbor that life gains meaning. As he expresses it, “the face [of the other] is meaning all by itself” (1985, 86). 314 Oppenheim

The movement in post-Freudian psychoanalysis toward intersubjectivity and meaning sets the stage for transformative conversations with the philosophers. For both dialogue partners, engagements with others are pivotal in individual development and in living fully human lives. The psychoanalysts emphasize the earliest years, even the intrauterine period and the dual impact of others both intrapsychically and as real, outside others. The discourse of the Jewish philosophers focuses on the role of meetings with others in the maturing of the person and adds its own distinctive feature of the encounter with the divine other, along with the concomitant dimension of eternity. Additionally, the psychoanalysts are particularly powerful in describing how past relations impact the developing individual and her or his patterns of engagement, while the Jewish philosophers eloquently speak of the transformative possibilities of the present and the openness of the future. Buber once described the nature of the human in terms of “fettered surprise” (1965, 78). Each person has been formed in particular ways by the past, but humans are also capable of living and responding in an unanticipated, astonishing manner. In my mind, the sometimes hard “realism” of the psychoanalysts both grounds and requires that idealism and “moral perfectionism” of the philosophers (Putnam 2008, 59).10 Thus, the psychoanalysts focus on the element of human fetters, while the Jewish philosophers feature surprise. It should be added that there is much overlap with, and also places for creative dialogue between, the concerns of feminist and feminist Jewish philosophers on the one hand and the psychoanalytic theorists on the other. Rachel Adler and others have utilized post-Freudian perspectives to understand the dynamics of the patriarchal aspects of Judaism, and contemporary psychoanalysts, such as Stephen Mitchell, Lewis Aron, and Jessica Benjamin refer to the powerful impact of feminism on recent developments in their discipline. All of these theorists speak of the importance of the infant-mother dyad, the insistence on seeing the human in social terms, and the danger of men’s splitting off socially undesirable features of human life and projecting them on women. This splitting leads to those widespread associations of women with the body, nature, emotions, and unreason overall.

10 Taking the terms from Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam discusses Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas as those who portray “the commitment we ought to have [in this case, to others] in ways that seem impossibly demanding” (2008, 59). For me, there is a fertile tension between the psychological difficulties for attaining a life of self-transparency and meaning presented by the psychoanalysts and that neighbor love and ethical perfectionism discussed by the philosophers. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophers 315

Among the possible areas of cross-fertilization between feminist Jewish philosophy and the psychoanalysts, I would highlight two examples. The deep conviction among feminist Jewish philosophers in the continued relevance and promise of the Jewish tradition—despite its serious shortcomings, might counter that lingering Freudian legacy of distrust and disdain by many of the psychoanalysts concerning the significance of religious ways of life.11 On the other hand, Benjamin presents a very sophisticated critique of gender complementarity, arguing that it often hides psychological splitting (1995, 18, 73–76) that could both augment and challenge some of the feminist discussions of male-female complementarity within the Jewish tradition.

The Future

My teacher in Jerusalem, David Hartman, once described the tasks of the modern Jewish philosopher in terms of an obligation to the past, a commitment to present communities, and the encounter with Western culture. I have tried to maintain an awareness of these tasks throughout the decades. I think that most if not all modern Jewish philosophers endeavor to fulfill these in their own ways. Jewish philosophy has always been a diverse and multifaceted enterprise, and I hope and expect that this characterization will also hold true for the future. Each philosopher and group of like-minded thinkers have a significant and distinctive role in its unfolding. The discipline requires those dedicated to philosophically engaging traditional Jewish texts, from the Bible and Gemara to the Kabbalah and Piyyut. Others delve into the lives, contexts, and concerns of Jewish philosophers in the past to those of recent times; from Philo to Saadiah Gaon and the medievals through to Moses Mendelssohn—if not Baruch Spinoza—and the moderns to the postmodern theorists. And still others primarily reflect on the challenges to Jewish communities in our time. Work in each of these areas has value in itself but also deepens the explorations of all. I have endeavored to stress the dynamic, dialogic dimension of these engagements, in particular, the contributions of contemporary Jewish philosophers to cumulative Jewish life, as well as to the variety of philosophic traditions and positions. In terms of the former, I believe that feminist Jewish philosophy will continue to be a vibrant catalyst within modern Jewish philosophy. The

11 See, for example, Jane Flax’s characterization of religion in terms of “transcendental guarantees or illusions of innocence” (1993, 146). 316 Oppenheim fundamental commitment to the inclusion of women into Jewish history, texts, and contemporary communal life and the philosophic focus on those meta- questions that emerge from the preoccupation with justice, gender, the body, and relationships hold great promise for both Judaism and for Jewish philosophy. In terms of the latter, I also look forward to the further development of Jewish philosophical conversations concerning religious pluralism—especially in conjunction with actual dialogues with philosophers representing different religious and philosophic systems, and the environment, as well as such continuing topics as political theory, science, and ethics. Each of us adds an irreplaceable voice to our common enterprise. As it is said in the Pirke Avot, “It is not your duty to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist” (2:20–21).

References

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Irigaray, Luce. 1991. The Irigaray Reader. Edited by Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basel Blackwell. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1956. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Feast of Confession. Translated by Douglas V. Steere. New York: Harper and Row. ―――. 1967. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ―――. 1968. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ―――. 1981. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. ―――. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ―――. 2001. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Jill Robbins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Liebman, Charles, and Eliezer Don-Yehiya. 1984. Religion and Politics in Israel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Loewald, Hans. 1978. Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lyons-Ruth, Karlen. 2005. “The Two-Person Unconscious: Intersubjective Dialogue, Enactive Relational Representation, and the Emergence of New Forms of Relational Organization.” In Relational Psychoanalysis: Innovation and Expansion, vol. 2, edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, 312–49. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz, eds. 1980. The Jew in the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Stephen. 1993. Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. Oppenheim, Michael. 1997. Speaking/Writing of God. Albany: State University of New York Press. ―――. 2006. Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Narrating the Interhuman. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ―――. 2009. Encounters of Consequence. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. ―――. 2011. “Comparative Philosophy of Religion and Modern Jewish Philosophy: A Conversation.” In After Appropriation, edited by Morny Joy, 119–37. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Putnam, Hilary. 2008. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 318 Oppenheim

Rashkover, Randi. 2004. “Theological Desire: Feminism, Philosophy, and Exegetical Jewish Thought.” In Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, edited by Hava Tirosh- Samuelson, 314–39. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ravven, Heidi. 1997. “Observations on Jewish Philosophy and Feminist Thought.” Judaism 46, no. 4: 422–38. Rorty, Richard. 1987. “Pragmatism and Philosophy.” In After Philosophy: End Transfor- mation, edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, 26–66. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen. 1970. I Am an Impure Thinker. Norwich, VT: Argo Books. ―――, ed. 1971. Judaism despite Christianity. New York: Schocken Books. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1965. On Jewish Learning. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books. ―――. 1981. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. New York: Schocken Books. ―――. 1998. Franz Rosenzweig: God, Man, and the World: Essays and Lectures. Edited and translated by Barbara E. Galli. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ―――. 1999. Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking.” Edited and translated by Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ―――. 2005. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ross, Tamar. 2004. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Scharfstein, Ben-Ami. 1998. A Comparative History of World Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schwarzschild, Steven. 1987. “Modern Jewish Philosophy.” In Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, edited by Arthur Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, 629–34. New York: The Free Press. Schweid, Eliezer. 1974. The Solitary Jew and His Judaism (Heb.). Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Shapiro, Susan. 1997. “A Matter of Discipline: Reading for Gender in Jewish Philosophy.” In Judaism since Gender, edited by Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, 158–73. New York: Routledge. Smart, Ninian. 1999. World Philosophies. New York: Routledge. Stern, Daniel. 2000. The Interpresonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Tirosh-Rothschild, Hava. 1994. “‘Dare to Know’: Feminism and the Discipline of Jewish Philosophy.” In Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, edited by Lynn Davidman and Shelley Tenenbaum, 85–119. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. 2012. “Feminism and Gender.” In The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: Vol. 2: The Modern Era, edited by Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak, 154–89. New York: Cambridge University Press. chapter 15 A Shadowed Light Continuity and New Directions in Jewish Philosophy

Sarah Pessin

Occluded Memory as Starting Ground: Shadow First

I have always been unable to find Poland on a map—or Kentucky or Ireland or the Red Sea. With the exception of the visually mnemonic “geo-shapes” (for example, the boot of Italy and the panhandle of Florida), geography—and I might add, history—is mostly a black hole to me. In my own self-narrative, I have come to understand this as a manifestation of a Holocaust-rooted cultural/family trauma of displacement. All of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and none of them talked about the past. Growing up, I was able to glean only that part of my family was from Belarus and part was not, part of my family identified as Litvish and part as Galitzyaner (manifest in our day-today lives in Boro Park, Brooklyn, in the competing pronunciations of Yiddish [and Yiddishized Hebrew] words like baruch versus barich and bucher versus bicher), one grandmother survived World War II in a forced-labor camp in Siberia, one grandfather was ripped out of Mir yeshivah to have his back broken (literally) in a forced-labor camp, and another grandmother cried after watching part of a Fiddler on the Roof VHS in our living room. Over the years, I have tried to learn more details of my family’s history, but I always fail to grasp more than one or two details, as I also always fail even to remember the one or two details I had managed to grasp. I will often find small slips of paper tucked into my books and notebooks onto which I have frantically scrib- bled notes from conversations with my grandparents (later in their lives, my maternal grandmother and grandfather were more open to talking about their pasts); but these slips, and the details they attempt to capture, always slip away from me.

Religion and Philosophy between the Spaces

I was raised in the Orthodox tradition with an ideology best defined by two “nots”: not “ultra-Orthodox” (which we identified with Satmar and other Hasidic groups in Boro Park), and not “modern Orthodox” (which we identified

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_017 320 Pessin with Yeshiva of Flatbush and which was synonymous in our minds with “not religious”). In this respect, my early religious identity is defined in the space between two nots. My early religious identity is also deeply rooted in the space between two worlds. I was “Susan” (my legal name born of post-Holocaust fears about putting a “Jewish name” on a birth certificate) to my non-Jewish friends on the non-Jewish block on which we lived, and I was “Soroh” to my Orthodox Jewish friends at Bais Yaakov of Brooklyn (an Orthodox girls’ school that is, by all counts, to the far Right of the Jewish spectrum but that we experienced as being to the far Left as compared with the many Hasidic schools in the neighborhood, such as Bais Yaakov of Boro Park, which we envisioned as our ideological foil). While my high school experiences in Prospect Park, an Orthodox girls’ yeshiva (now Bnos Leah) led me forever to feel displaced from the Jewish community (my family’s modest financial status weighed against my strong academic profile to make me something of a misfit to the high school’s administration), my father’s strong love for God and for Judaism has always stuck with me. While I no longer identify with any branch of Judaism or with any Jewish community per se, I do identify as a God-loving Jew. In this spirit, I conduct not only my work in Jewish philosophy but (I hope) most of my efforts. On the spectrum of Judaism, I jointly (and dialogically) identify myself in the space between Neoplatonic and Levinasian Jewish thought. In this regard, I realize that I am in the minority of self-identifying Jews: I neither identify as culturally Jewish nor as religiously Jewish (even to the extent that I engage in ritual practices); my strong tie to Judaism is almost entirely theological and philosophical. I view my work in Jewish philosophy as part and parcel of my philosophical and theological identity as a Jew. In this respect, I view engaging in the field of Jewish philosophy—but also engaging in philosophy and humanities more generally—as a life decision to reflect on and attempt to embrace a form of life aimed at the good. In particular, I identify my own work in Jewish philosophy as part of a personal dedication to thinking about and acting on what I call the “Jewish philosophy of shadowed light,” which it is part of my aim to address in this chapter.

From Philosophy to Cosmo-Ontology to Cosmo-Ontology as Philosophy

When I discovered philosophy in my second year as an undergraduate at Stern College at Yeshiva University, it finally became clear to me how I would A Shadowed Light 321 combine what had until that point been my completely disjointed passions for poetry and creative writing on the one hand and the sciences (in particular, biology) on the other. My enthusiasm for Jewish philosophy came hand in hand with my enthusiasm for philosophy: following my favorite professor, Dr. David Shatz, from a philosophy of law class to my first seminar on Maimonides, I entered into a philosophical dialogue that has defined my life ever since, moving me from Maimonides to medieval Neoplatonism, from medieval Neoplatonism to ancient philosophy, and from ancient and medieval philosophy to modern Jewish thought and post-Holocaust theology. Interested early on in continuing to study Maimonides and Jewish philosophy, I considered the fact that Maimonides himself studied “regular philosophy” (that is, not just “Jewish philosophy”), and I concluded on that basis that I would have to further my own knowledge of philosophy in general if I were ever to become a solid philosophical reader of Maimonides. In that spirit, I went on to pursue an MA in philosophy at Columbia University with an emphasis on metaphysics; my study during that time of the philosophy of science and quantum mechanics with Dr. David Albert has proven particularly foundational for me. In the context of my first Maimonides class with Dr. Shatz as an undergraduate at Stern College, I developed an interest in Neoplatonism that would turn out to define a great deal of my future research. I found secondary texts claiming that Maimonides was “Neoplatonic” but without really explaining what that meant. In my attempt to understand this description of Maimonides, I set out on what would become a many-years’ journey into Greek, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian Neoplatonisms. Working with Dr. Tamar Rudavsky on medieval Jewish philosophy and Neoplatonism and studying her own important work on the topic (including her pivotal essay on conflicting motifs in Solomon Ibn Gabirol; see Rudavsky 1978), and working with Dr. Peter King on medieval Christian metaphysics, I went on to write my dissertation on Ibn Gabirol. As part of that period, I was also able to study Greek and Christian Neoplatonism with Dr. Stephen Gersh at the University of Notre Dame for what would turn out to be a life-changing semester. His Neoplatonic study From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (1978) continues to be an ongoing source of inspiration to me. Over the years, I grew increasingly perplexed about the status of Neoplatonism in the history of Western philosophy: why was Neoplatonism so understudied (and often ignored entirely) in surveys of Western philosophy? My ongoing perplexity about Neoplatonism’s “otherness” within the academy has led me most recently to a twofold set of interrelated questions about method: on the one hand, I aim to make our methods—as scholars studying traditions within the history of philosophy—more overt to ourselves (and to our readers); on 322 Pessin the other hand, I aim to examine our assumptions about the methods of the authors we study. In particular, I have been led to a set of questions about our own methods for reading texts, including questions about how our understanding of the methods, aims, and goals of a given text relates to whether we agree to add that text to one or another canon and, if so, in what way. How, for example, do the perceived aims, goals, and motivations of Neoplatonic thought fit (or fail to fit) into our categories of “science,” “philosophy,” “poetry,” “mysticism,” and/or “theology,” and how do our (often tacit) answers to this question lead to our either including or excluding Neoplatonic texts from ongoing philosophical and theological conversation? I have become worried in particular that Neoplatonism has been excluded precisely because Neoplatonic method has been tacitly misunderstood (and, as such, oversimplified) in the history of philosophy, either as some kind of outdated cosmology or as a hyperreifying and overly metaphorical version of Platonic realism. Reflecting in particular on the relationship of medieval Jewish philosophy to modern Jewish philosophy in this regard, it is noteworthy that, while Maimonides is of immediate interest to a whole range of later Jewish thinkers and scholars of philosophy, Isaac Israeli and Solomon Ibn Gabirol are not. The implications of this seem to me to point to deep questions about modern and postmodern values, as well as to resulting modern and postmodern interpretations of ancient and medieval texts. In my book on Ibn Gabirol, I put the concern this way:

In considering ways we might fail to see the actual spirit of Neoplatonism, it is instructive to consider Rosenzweig’s critique of modernity’s critique of revelation: Rosenzweig faults his modern reader with having completely missed the vibrant notion of Revelation at play in the Bible by having herself uncharitably obscured the Biblical notion by reading into the Bible a cartoonish sense of God that she then summarily rejects as cartoonish. In similar methodological spirit, we must be wary of paving over Neoplatonic cosmo-ontology’s subtle theological and existential concerns by reading it as if it were something archaic and arcane with little philosophical or theological relevance, which we then summarily reject as archaic and arcane and as having little philosophical or theological relevance. When we approach Neoplatonic method through our own methodologically erroneous lenses, we ensure that we get the Neoplatonic method—and with it, all or most of its content—wrong. (Pessin 2013, 141)

My reflections on method have led me to rethink the nature of Neoplatonic method and, as such, the nature and meaning of Neoplatonic writing. These A Shadowed Light 323 reflections have also led me to worry about our own methods, namely, how we construct the history of philosophy in light of the many tacit prejudices and presumptions that we bring to texts—often smuggled into our starting translations and categorizations. In the spirit of both of these methodological reappraisals, I aim in my own work to show how Neoplatonic texts are living, vibrant, and relevant resources with ongoing existential, ethical, and theological import.

Isaac Israeli on “Specificality”: Entering the Jewish Philosophy of Shadowed Light

A perfect example of what I have in mind can be seen in turning to a seemingly narrow, technical, cosmo-ontological rumination from Isaac Israeli’s own Jewish Neoplatonism:

[T]he ray and shade of the intellect are the specificality of the rational soul, the ray and shade of the rational soul are the specificality of the . . . soul, the ray and shade of the . . . soul are the specificality of nature. This being so, the intellect is the specificality of all substances, and the form which establishes their essence, as its ray and light, which emanate from its shade, are the fountain of their substantiality and the root of their forms and specificality. (Israeli, The Book of Substances; see Altmann and Stern 1958, 83–84; for Judeo-Arabic, see Stern 1958, 143, lines 6–13)

Recounting the unfolding of being itself in terms of a series of lights and shadows, Israeli here engages an insight—rooted in a pseudo-Empedoclean form of Jewish Neoplatonism found even more emphatically in Solomon Ibn Gabirol—that takes the more standard emanationist image of light’s down- pour and shadows it.1

1 As I discuss at greater length elsewhere (see Pessin 2011a and 2013), Greek Neoplatonism (rooted in Plotinus’s Enneads) is traditionally seen as emphasizing the emanation of the world from God in a process metaphorically described in terms of the illumination of a light downward (or outward). Within this Greek tradition (seen, too, in later Jewish, Islamic, and Christian contexts), the emanation from God moves first into Intellect, then into Soul, and then to the bodily realm of Nature. While, to be sure, Greek Neoplatonism also focuses heavily on the downward descent (from God to world) in terms of privation and, hence, in terms of a growing darkness as one moves further from God as the source of light, one does not find a metaphorical emphasis on emanation as a “shadowed light” (though one must consider Greek theories of the dyad and Plotinus’s own theory of “intelligible matter” in this regard—see 324 Pessin

As part of my own methodological reappraisal, however, I see in this Neoplatonic move something more than an odd, outdated, and irrelevant debate about whether a cosmic light is shadowed. I find, rather, an early Jewish example of what I call a “philosophy of shadowed light,” which I explain more fully below through consideration of the ideas of Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Emmanuel Levinas. Beckoning always to the beautiful, sacred, fragile, and imperfectly present presence of rupture and occlusion within any possible field of perfection, the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light—like the above example from Israeli—highlights not only one of the most important teachings of Judaism but one of the most important contributions of Jewish philosophy into the twenty-first century and beyond. Taking my start in Israeli’s reflection on shadows and rays, I turn in the remainder of this chapter to exploring two important ways that Jewish philosophy—precisely qua philosophy of shadowed light—helps pave a guiding path forward.

Jewish Philosophy as Curative to Unbearable Lightness

“Lighten Up”: Flight, Light and “Easy Freedom” Recently, in a classroom when I was exploring the anxiety of the Levinasian encounter with other qua Other and the deep theme of exile in redemption in Jewish philosophy and theology more broadly, a student asked why Jewish philosophy could not “lighten up” and just envision Judaism as a fun religion. In like spirit, there are those in Jewish studies who speak disparag- ingly of “weighing things down” with Holocaust studies and post-Holocaust philosophy, instead of giving students a more “hip” sense of Jewish identity for

Pessin 2013, appendix A5). This theme of “shadowed light” emerges explicitly in a range of Jewish and Islamic Neoplatonic texts (as well as mystical texts) and can be associated with what has been called a “pseudo-Empedoclean” set of traditions that emphasize a first- material reality “between” God and Intellect as compared with more standard Neoplatonic hierarchies that tend to emphasize the reality of Intellect as the first reality outside God. If one imagines a material reality “above” Intellect, then the metaphor will be one of shadowed light with pure matter occluding the downward light of Intellect (with a shadow) from the very start. For an account of this idea in Ibn Gabirol, see Pessin 2011a and 2013; on naming this pure material reality the “Grounding Element,” see Pessin 2013, section 2.5; for differences between Jewish and Islamic pseudo-Empedoclean traditions, see Pessin 2013, appendix A12; for the link between this set of ideas and love in Ibn Gabirol’s theology, see chapter 4 in Pessin 2013 and Pessin 2004; and for the direct implications of a pure matter at the core of reality for Ibn Gabirol’s Neoplatonic metaphor of “Return,” see Pessin 2013, section 4.4. A Shadowed Light 325 the twenty-first century. Along these lines, one thirty-something community leader recently assured me that he “doesn’t do Holocaust” and that the thirty- somethings for whom he helps coordinate programming “don’t do Holocaust” either. Along similar lines, I have been assured by a range of rabbis, from a variety of denominations, that they are looking to “keep things light” for their congregants, as their success in retaining congregants depends on it. For those who view “Jewish exile” only as a sociopolitical situation (either of the past and present or only of the past) with no deeper philosophical or theological significance for Judaism, it is simply something to overcome (or something that has already been overcome). In such a context, reflecting on Judaism in exilic terms becomes nothing more than a neurotic, harmful, and unnecessary approach to Jewish identity moving forward. “Lighten up,” “don’t weigh things down,” “keep things light”: playing on two different senses of lightness (as the absence of darkness and as the absence of weightiness), we may say that these turns of phrase conceptually converge in the demand for “easy freedom.” There is a growing surge of voices—including students, scholars, community members, and community leaders—demanding an empowering and freeing Judaism that entails absolute and immediate redemption, which is to say, exuberant joy and the end to all exiles (personal, social, and political). And in the demand itself, they have already found victory: in calling for a Judaism that leaves all exile behind, they accept their self- issued invitation and move quickly and all at once into the light. Baggage-free and illuminated of all shadows, these new sojourners look with suspicion on any remaining “wandering Jews” weighed down by their theologies of exile. In this demand for light and home, we ought to identify nothing less than the absolute rejection of—and absolute lack of appreciation for—the beauty of the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light. It is as a much-needed curative to this frenzied call to “easy freedom” that Jewish philosophy—and, in particular, the philosophy of shadowed light found in different ways in the teachings of Israeli and, as we will see, in the teachings of Soloveitchik and Levinas— escorts us into the twenty-first century.

Turbulent Majesty: On Leaving Childish Wishes and Enchanted Streams Behind (or, Jewish Philosophy as Curative to Flight, Light, and “Easy Freedom”) In a brilliant footnote to his classic text Halakhic Man, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik addresses the “light problem” in his own day. Addressing this problem in the context of religion’s encounter with modernity, Soloveitchik reflects on “the position that is prevalent nowadays in religious circles” that demands 326 Pessin

that the religious experience is of a very simple nature—that is, devoid of the spiritual tortuousness present in the secular cultural consciousness, of psychic upheavals, and of the pangs and torments that are inextricably connected with the development and refinement of man’s spiritual personality. This popular ideology contends that the religious experience is tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate; it is an enchanted stream for embittered souls and still waters for troubled spirits. The person “who comes in from the field, weary” (Gen. 25:29), from the battle- field and campaigns of life, from the secular domain which is filled with doubts and fears, contradictions and refutations, clings to religion as does a baby to its mother . . . and there is comforted for his disappoint- ments and tribulations. (Soloveitchik 1983, 139–40)

Religion, Soloveitchik notes, has been made into an “enchanted stream” and adults have reduced themselves to nursing babies. He goes on to describe this simplistic approach to living in terms of a

desire to escape from the turbulence of life to a magical, still, and quiet island and there to devote oneself to the ideal of naturalness and vitality. . . . [T]he representatives of religious communities are inclined to portray religion, in a wealth of colors that dazzle the eye, as a poetic Arcadia, a realm of simplicity, wholeness, and tranquility. (ibid., 140)

Magical, dazzling, vital, and whole, this enchanted form of life issues its allur- ing promise for burden-free lightness and shadow-free light:

If you wish to acquire tranquility without paying the price of spiritual agonies turn unto religion! If you wish to achieve a fine psychic equilib- rium without having to first undergo a slow, gradual personal development, turn unto religion. And if you wish to achieve an instant spiritual wholeness and simplicity that need not be forged out of the struggles and torments of consciousness, turn unto religion! “Get thee out of thy country,” which is filled with anxiety, anguish, and tension, “and from thy birthplace,” which is so frenzied, raging, and stormy, “to the land” Arcadia wherein religion reigns supreme. (Ibid., 140–41)

After critiquing this form of life for scoffing knowledge, Soloveitchik goes on to criticize it for cultivating an inappropriately simplistic attitude that, in striving to avoid the darker depths of human being, shuns the reality of redemption: A Shadowed Light 327

It would appear to me that there is no need to explain the self-evident falsity of this ideology. . . . [T]his ideology is intrinsically false and deceptive. That religious consciousness in man’s experience which is most profound and most elevated, which penetrates to the very depths and ascends to the very heights, is not that simple and comfortable. On the contrary, it is exceptionally complex, rigorous, and tortuous. Where you find its complexity, there you find its greatness. . . . The spiritual stature and countenance of the man of God are chiseled and formed by the pangs of redemption themselves. (Ibid., 141–43; in this selection, I skip over a large section from 141 to 143.)

Looking at his own emphasis on competing modes of religious living, we may read Soloveitchik as pointing more broadly to two competing modes of human life. On the one hand, there is the entirely relaxed and comfortable, laid back and content “enchanted stream” form of human life. Soloveitchik describes this as wrongly directed childish living—a mix of “childish naïveté and superficial belief” (Soloveitchik 1983, 140). On the other hand, there is the redemptive form of human life in which deep joy is born of deep turmoil. Soloveitchik describes this as rightly directed mature living. With Soloveitchik, Levinas also values mature religion and identifies mature human being with a form of engaged living that is more “austere” (Levinas 1990, 18) than it is “light.” With Soloveitchik, Levinas speaks too of what we may call a “life of shadowed light”—a joy born of uncomfortable encounter, a truth occasioned by a “difficult freedom” born of exacting living in and through responsibility. Invested through infinite responsibility for the Other, Levinas’ difficult freedom arises in a space of unease—a locus of trauma that, we might say, marks the difficult move from childish egotism to mature living. In fact, Levinas describes the move from egotistical “self-enchainment” to ethics and freedom in terms of the relinquishing of “games and sleep”—two activities clearly suggestive of the life of children:

[I]n the irreplaceable subject, unique and chosen as a responsibility and a substitution, a mode of freedom, ontologically impossible, breaks the unrendable essence. Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself, where the ego suffocates in itself due to the games and sleep in a movement that never wears out. (Levinas 1998, 124) 328 Pessin

Mirroring this theme in his revealingly entitled “A Religion for Adults,” Levinas emphasizes the importance of mature living over, to borrow Soloveitchik’s turn of phrase, the life of “enchanted streams” by reflecting on the rabbinic valorization of the human over the angelic form of life:

Human existence, in spite of the inferiority of its ontological level— because of this inferiority, because of its torment, unease and self- criticism—is the true place in which the divine word encounters the intellect and loses the rest of its supposedly mystical virtues. . . . [M]en accede to the divine word without ecstasy having to tear them away from their essence, their human nature. (Levinas 1990, 15; my italics)

It is precisely this mature opening to unease that marks the opening from “easy freedom” to “difficult freedom.” Unlike a childish freedom that stems from my power to do what I will, difficult freedom is a freedom that arises from my responsibilities, opening me to sustained, engaged, and anything but “light” living—both qua Jew and qua human being. In spite of their important differences, Soloveitchik and Levinas both offer us stunning examples of the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light. Their insights about joy born of unease and the move from childish enchanted dreams and streams to real living capture what is perhaps the most important teaching (and, for me, the most Jewish teaching) of Jewish philosophy—in our classrooms and in our societies—now and into the future. In their delicate and pained reflections on the delicate and pained reality of complex revelation, Soloveitchik and Levinas issue a call to earnest openness to the “pangs of redemption”—a call, we may say, to a life of shadowed light. This call has either not been heard or perhaps only not heeded by a growing culture of people who prefer “keeping things light.” In such a context, Jewish philosophy plays an especially critical role, offering readers (including our students) an increasingly rare ground on which to embrace their own most vulnerable, fragile, human selfhood without fear of embarrassment and without the fear of having become irrelevant.

My Litvish Sensibilities This Jewish philosophy of shadowed light allows me to engage the truth of my father’s dying reminder to me that Judaism is important and beautiful. Jewish philosophy is what allows me to identify—deeply and proudly identify—as a Jew. I hope in this respect that Jewish philosophy allows a growing number of students—Jewish and non-Jewish—a more refined and deep sense not only of what Judaism is about but of what human being is about as we move into A Shadowed Light 329 the twenty-first century. I hope that Jewish philosophy (as a discipline but also as a form of life)—in its deep insights about shadowed light—can help fix the “light problem” of modern and postmodern identity, Jewish and otherwise. I might note in all of this that I am not against fun. I am not even against fun vis-à-vis Judaism—I am, for example, quite excited about having introduced the hamantasch-latke debate into Denver,2 as I am even more excited about having helped lead Team Hamantasch to victory in 2012 with my Aristotelian defense of the essence of human beings in bipedalism, ergo, in pantedness and pocketedness. I am not against fun, fun vis-à-vis Judaism or fun within the development of one’s own human identity (in fact, I consider humor to be a core human virtue with deep theological significance and existential/ ethical value). But I am decidedly against making of Judaism (to borrow again from Soloveitchik’s phrase) an “enchanted stream.” Perhaps my wariness of the “enchanted stream” is the result of my own study of Soloveitchik and Levinas, perhaps it is strengthened by some truly silly attempts at “light” Jewish identity formation I have witnessed first-hand, and perhaps it is also partly illustrative of my own Litvish upbringing. Jewish philosophy, for me, is an opportunity to help myself and my students (both Jewish and non-Jewish) find a “philosophy for adults” in which perfectly imperfect comfort can be found in displacement, perfectly imperfect joy can be found in exile, and each light is made more perfectly imperfect by the endless play of shadows that occludes it. Jewish philosophy helps forge a more mature, responsive, and engaged Jewish identity, as it also helps forge a more mature, responsive, and engaged human identity. This, at any rate, is one of the main reasons that I am so enthusiastic about research and teaching in Jewish philosophy. In reflecting on the contrast between light and complex forms of life, I am reminded of a moment I experienced a few years back in the magazine aisle at a local bookstore. There I found Heeb magazine alongside its apparent Christian companion piece—a magazine for culturally engaged twenty- something Christians called Relevant. I cannot recall what exactly was on that

2 This debate originated at the Hillel at University of Chicago in 1946; each year, scholars following this tradition draw on their fields of study to offer mock-serious defenses of the excellence of the hamantasch (the traditional pastry associated with Purim) or the grandeur of the latke (the traditional deep-fried treat associated with Hanukkah). For an overview, see “Shticking to their Puns” in the University of Chicago Magazine, 98, no. 2 (2005) available online at http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0512/features/puns.shtml (accessed January 8, 2014), and see the Wikipedia entry for “Latke-Hamantash Debate”; for great content from some of these debates (including an enjoyable preface by philosopher-humorist Ted Cohen), see Fredman Cernea 2005. 330 Pessin particular Heeb cover, but it was, as it generally is, something aggressively cavalier: taboo-breaking per se becomes a form of life and philosophical insights about joys born of complexity are rendered passé. In contrast, the Christian magazine cover featured Radiohead’s lead singer Thom Yorke drenched in melted chocolate and read, “What You’re Really Buying this Christmas Might Surprise You,” alongside the promise of “50 Conscientious Christmas Gifts” (Relevant 36, November–December 2008). In raising social consciousness right alongside cutting-edge trends in art, music, and culture, Relevant is about defining a young Christian culture that is soul-searching and ethical. Repairing the world per se becomes a form of life and philosophical insights about joys born of complexity are taken to heart. It would appear that the magazine rack of contemporary twenty-something cutting-edge culture identifies me as Christian. The Jewish philosophy of shadowed light, however, keeps me firmly and proudly rooted in my Judaism.

Jewish Philosophy as Ground for Interreligious Bridges

The Jewish philosophy of shadowed light is also important for the opportunities it affords interfaith bridge building—true interfaith bridge building, which, to me, means appropriately uncomfortable interfaith bridge building and which, to me, carries with it direct methodological implications for the way we study and interpret texts from different religious and cultural traditions. My own relation to Judaism and to Jewish philosophy has almost always involved efforts on my part at interfaith and intercultural bridge building. Most recently, this has included my role in helping develop at the University of Denver (DU) a new Holocaust Memorial Social Action Site, a space dedicated to a wide range of diversity, social justice, and intercultural (including interfaith) learning and action initiatives. From its very inception—and even well before construction was completed—the site became home to a number of gatherings, including a “Digital Storytelling for Social Justice” project, a socially conscious student art installation, and an interfaith program bringing Denver Jewish and German Christian high school students together for dialogue about memory, history, and tikkun olam.3 (In 2012, the Holocaust Awareness Institute

3 On our vision of this site as a Levinasian Holocaust memorial, see Pessin 2011b. I also have spoken of the importance of ethics over art in any memorial project; in this regard, I presented “Otherwise Than Memorial, Otherwise Than Counter-Memorial: From Art to Ethics at the University of Denver’s Holocaust Memorial Social Action Site (or: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Space of Memory)” at Arizona State University’s “Memory and Countermemory: A Shadowed Light 331 at DU’s Center for Judaic Studies featured Dr. James Young as our annual Fred Marcus Memorial Holocaust Lecture speaker; we were encouraged and ener- gized by his positive response to our unique memorial project.) The memorial has also given rise to a community-wide interfaith bridge-building program; in 2011, the site brought together leaders from local Islamic, Native American, Jewish, and Christian communities for an afternoon of dialogue with about one hundred local community members and students. Interfaith relationship building is important to me. Working in a wide range of interfaith contexts has led me, though, to reflect on the nature and goals of interfaith work, which, in turn, has led me to uncomfortable questions about the possibility of tacit (or overt) conceptual mutings of Judaism—and of Jewish philosophy—within a Christian Western context. Moving into the twenty-first century, one of Jewish philosophy’s goals must be to diagnose this problem further and to help amplify Jewish (including Jewish philosophical) voices, with strong implications both for the future of civic discourse and for the future of the academic study of philosophy.

Making Interfaith Work Appropriately Uncomfortable Recently, I decided that I would try to move beyond the niceties that often accompany most well-intentioned interfaith programs. Invited to speak at a church group, I decided to scrap my original workshop-style investigation of shared virtues in Judaism and Christianity (I think I was going to focus on charity and compassion). Instead, I started the hour-long seminar with the following reflection:

Thank you all for kindly inviting me to speak with you today as part of our important interfaith work to build stronger and more diverse communities of respect and inclusion. As a scholar of Jewish philosophy, and also as a Jew, I hope it is okay for me to share that I think it important to learn how to face our differences—a much harder interfaith task than the enjoyable and far easier work of highlighting our similarities. In that spirit, but in a spirit most broadly of friendship and respect, I would like to start our interfaith discussion today with the following reminder: Jews do not believe in Christ; they do not one day hope to believe in Christ,

Memorialization of an Open Future” conference (November 6–8, 2011), organized by Martin Beck Matuštík and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, with the support of the Center for Jewish Studies (ASU-Tempe), the Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies (ASU-West), and the Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Literature Cluster (ASU). 332 Pessin

and, in fact, not believing in Christ is kind of a key defining aspect of Judaism in most philosophical and theological contexts.

One person immediately got up and left. A number of other people got upset as evidenced by their sudden arm crossings and displeased faces. By the end of the one hour (during which time I drew on Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man to help a group of Christians understand the deep spirituality of Jewish law and begin to question the history of Christianity’s own questionable narrative of “spirit versus law”), I had recovered most people’s sense of trust. Most arms got uncrossed, and most people came up to thank me personally after the seminar. One woman in particular approached me in tears, thanking me profusely for having forced her to rethink everything she had ever come to think about Judaism (and, as she added, about Christianity as well). There is a deep and complex “uncomfortable comfort” (linked precisely to the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light) that comes from feeling uncomfortable about ever having felt comfortable, or ever having even set out to feel comfortable, in an interfaith context. That said, one gentleman remained frustrated: Why did I have to be so negative, emphasizing—in an interfaith context no less—that Jews do not plan on ever believing in Christ? It is very hard for me face this kind of disappointment. Many of my own closest personal friends and professional mentors and colleagues are Christian. That, combined with my own love of Christian Neoplatonisms, as well as my own continued working through of Rosenzweig’s sense of the “dual truths” of Christianity and Judaism (notwithstanding my concerns about his less friendly readings of other religious traditions), has led me to a deep personal respect for—and connection to—Christianity and Christians. But as much as it pains me to evoke Christian disappointment with my more “renegade” approach to Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue, it pains me even more not to evoke that response if the alternative is a friendly and childish (and ultimately destructive) avoidance of the elephant in the room. Consider Levinas’s insight on this particular elephant:

Lest the union between men of goodwill which I desire to see be brought about only in a vague and abstract mode, I wish to insist here precisely on the particular routes open to Jewish monotheism. . . . The manner which this tradition [namely, oral tradition] instituted constitutes Rabbinic Judaism. . . . The paths that lead to God in this Judaism do not cross the same landscapes as the Christian paths. If you had been shocked or amazed by that, you would have been shocked or amazed that we remain Jews before you. (Levinas 1990, 13–14) A Shadowed Light 333

Judaism is deeply and essentially not Christianity. And, yes, many Christians (and probably even more Jews) are shocked and amazed (some tacitly, some overtly) that “we remain Jews before you” (notwithstanding the cohort of evangelical Christian students in my Judaism lecture in Fresno, California, who were all quite confident that Judaism was an ancient extinct religion—though one student did raise his hand to ask me whether Moses lived before or after Jesus converted all the Jews). Pointing to the “we remain Jews before you” elephant (of the particular species “because we do not believe or plan on believing in the divinity of Jesus”) is important to me not simply because it is true that Jews are not and do not care to become Christians; I think often of Søren Kierkegaard’s brilliant reminder that simply saying true things is a fine sign of insanity (see Kierkegaard in Hannay 2009, 163–64).4 Pointing to the elephant in question is important to me not simply because the pointing reveals a truth but for three separate (though ultimately interrelated) reasons:

1 Defending Judaism As you will see in points 2 and 3 below, my dedication to emphasizing Judaism’s difference from Christianity mostly comes from a constructive space. But I will admit also to a defensive reactive impulse in the mix: growing up as a Jew, it was frustrating to me to have on numerous occasions felt the accusatory gaze—or, more frequently, the unintentional insensitivities—of my Christian neighbors and colleagues. It is frustrating to have to explain to students and to colleagues why “New Testament” is not an innocuous turn of phrase and “Old Testament” even less so. It is frustrating to have to ask university administrators to please look into the campus carillonneurs playing denominationally specific tunes about Christ each December, as it is frustrating to have to remind a university annually that Yom Kippur continues not to be a great date for campus-wide programming (I would note that DU is exceptionally good about accommodating these religious requests, but it is still frustrating to have to ask [and often to have to ask for the same set of changes each year], as it is frustrating to worry that if I—or one of the other Jewish faculty—do not ask, there is a good chance that no one will even know there is a problem). It is frustrating to encounter Christianity’s sense that Jews have missed the boat, as it is frustrating to have on three occasions been the object of an attempted conversion (including [a] my neighbor asking me to consider a path to Jesus when I was eight years old, [b] a divinity student hounding me over beers during my summer at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Oxford to explain what possible reason I could have for not converting to Christianity, and—perhaps most surreally—[c] my city bus driver one morning in Columbus, Ohio,

4 My thanks to Rick Furtak for bringing this passage to my attention. 334 Pessin literally getting up out of his seat, walking down the center aisle of the bus, and witnessing Christ to the four of us on the bus, but—as my memory likes to remember it—mostly to me [in this regard, my memory has creatively also pulled visuals from the scene in Annie Hall where “Grammy Hall” sees Woody Allen as a Hasidic rabbi]). As much as I resonate with the notion of “the Other” as a philosophical concept and as much as I am personally and theologically proud to be the “Jewish Other,” I suppose that I often do not much like the feeling of being “othered” by Christians or by Christianity or seeing Judaism being “othered” by Christians or by Christianity. At the very least, I want people who use the term “Old Testament” (even innocently) to know that they have “othered” Judaism and to come to terms with what that means to me (and I hope what that means to them). If you are othering me, I want you to know that you are, and I want you to reflect on it. I might also add that I am sensitive to the “othering of Judaism by omission,” an unintentional (and in that sense innocuous but perhaps not at all innocuous) variety of the “othering of Judaism” in which Jewish ideas are simply left out. I remember once being thrilled—and secretly relieved—after learning that a group of medieval philosophy scholars were going to be organizing a conference session on Judah Halevi. “Wow,” I thought, “they normally focus only on Christian thinkers. What a relief that things are moving forward—and with Halevi no less!” I expressed my enthusiasm to one of the scholars involved with the upcoming event. “I am so excited to hear that your group is devoting a whole session to Halevi!” He replied that they too were excited finally to be moving beyond the usual Aquinas and Augustine panels and devoting a whole session to Peter Olivi. Cases like the ones above—ranging from the “othering of Judaism” by design, by oversight, by omission, or otherwise—often make me feel called upon to defend Judaism. This is one of the contexts—a somewhat more reactive context—in which I work to contrast Judaism from Christianity and to emphasize the beauty of Judaism through my work in Jewish philosophy, through my interreligious textual work, and through my work in interfaith bridge building.

2 A Rosenzweigian Approach to Christian-Jewish Partnership (or Reflecting on Judaism’s “No” as Essential to Christianity’s “Yes”) But there is often also an entirely different impetus behind my focus on the distance between Jewish and Christian identity. While I remain conflicted (for a number of competing reasons) about Franz Rosenzweig’s sense of the “dual truths” of Christianity and Judaism, I have always been intrigued by his sense of Judaism as the “no” that saves Christianity from totality. In the context of A Shadowed Light 335 part 3, book 3 of the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig speaks of “the eternal protest of the Jew” (1970, 413) and notes that “the existence of the Jew constantly subjects Christianity to the idea that it is not attaining the goal, the truth, that it ever remains—on the way” (ibid.). Following on this passage and related ideas in Rosenzweig, Leora Batnitzky expands as follows:

In the Star of Redemption’s discussion of Christianity, Rosenzweig elaborates on what Christians may learn from Jewish judgment. . . . As against Judaism, Christianity defines itself in terms of its universal mission, in terms of its potential for universal salvation. Judaism reminds Christianity, however, that it has not yet achieved its goal. Judaism’s prideful particularity saves Christianity from its own totalitarian tendency to believe that it has achieved its goal, and can teach the Christian about the ways in which she must learn to live with the discomfort of her own incompleteness. (Batnitzky 2000, 158)

Here the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light reenters—as a philosophy of Judaism as a shadow(ed light) that shadows the light. For, in the context of Rosenzweig’s view, we may precisely envision Judaism as the shadow (itself a shadowed light) that prevents the light of Christianity from completely illuminating/engulfing all. In a Levinasian key (though not necessarily based on Levinas’s own sense of Judaism’s relationship to Christianity), we may say that Judaism, in its “no,” is precisely what allows Christianity to avoid totality—or, as Batnitzky emphasizes, is precisely what allows Christianity to avoid the idolatry of perfection, self-completion, and totalitarianism. Returning to Soloveitchik’s and Levinas’s philosophy of shadowed light, we might also note that, in leading the Christian “to learn to live with the discomfort of her own incompleteness,” Judaism may be said to help Christianity embrace the complexity of “unease,” ultimately helping keep it from the “enchanted stream” and any hopes of full light and completion. While I expect most Christians would disagree with this overall Rosenzweigian assessment (and while I am myself unsure about whether I agree with Rosenzweig), I do find myself often reflecting on the Rosenzweigian sense of the Christian-Jewish relation and on Judaism’s role as the shadow (or shadowed light) that prevents totalizing light. The historical and (even more importantly) theological “Other,” Judaism resonates for me as a constant “no” to Christianity (including to the Christian sense of love in Western tradition about which I will say more below). In like spirit, Judaism resonates for me as the “no” to a whole range of totalizing impulses. 336 Pessin

In Rosenzweig’s reflections on Judaism and Christianity, we find further resonances of the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light. And it is precisely the grounding sense of complexity and unease emerging from this philosophy that can serve not only as a potentially transformational lens for Christian- Jewish interfaith relations and bridge building into the future, but also as a transformational lens through which to reconsider all intra- and interhuman encounter. As a potentially transformational lens in this regard, the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light helps reveal the possibility of Judaism as a shadowed light that conceptually and historically helps prevent totalizing illuminations. In this way, the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light also reveals a complex and uneasy love with distance (itself as a “shadowed light” of sorts) as a foundational element for all interfaith engagement and more broadly for all face-to- face encounter. About this complex “love with distance,” we will have more to say below.

3 Creating a More Charitable Space for Conducting Jewish (and Other Religious but Non-Christian Varieties of) Philosophy There is a third and most important reason for my interest in Jewish-Christian difference, and it has direct implications for academic integrity and the way we train ourselves and our students to read and interpret texts. If our goal is to be fair (to at least some reasonable extent) in the way we write and codify the history of philosophy, then we as scholars need to exercise greater charity in the way we approach texts. In this spirit, I often speak of Christianity’s tacit grip on the “Western thought-space,” including the conceptual space in which Jewish philosophy is read and interpreted. In this very regard, in my work on Ibn Gabirol, I have argued that an Augustinian notion of “Divine Will” has tacitly (and sometimes overtly) been read onto a Jewish pseudo-Empedoclean Neoplatonic notion of Divine Desire, thereby obscuring Ibn Gabirol’s theology from clear view (Pessin 2013). I have also argued in my work on Jewish Neoplatonism more broadly that various Christian-rooted (Pauline, Augustinian, and Thomistic) religious sensibilities about God, will, being, emanation, and creation have also tacitly influenced the way the history of philosophy has been canonized, with limiting implications for the way we read texts, including texts of Jewish philosophy (Pessin 2012). I have in this regard also commented more generally still on how a particularly Christian context to the Western academic study of religion has overdetermined the basic sense of many important theological concepts, rendering it difficult for a whole range of students and scholars to hear as conceptually basic Jewish immanent senses of transcendence and holiness, to hear as A Shadowed Light 337 conceptually basic the sense (operative in a range of religious philosophical texts—including Jewish, Islamic, and Christian ones) that “creation” can be another term for “emanation,” or to hear as conceptually basic a Jewish sense of love that is not an unconditional force of forgiveness (on this particular example, see more below). In working on this set of insights, I worry that my Christian friends and colleagues will become frustrated with me. Nothing could be further from my intentions, and nothing would upset me more. I hope that anyone who reads my work will ultimately come to find that my emphasis on the “Christian lens” is done in a spirit of kinship and honesty. It is also done in a spirit of urgency, as I can think of no greater stumbling block to interfaith bridge building or to academic integrity than failing to conduct open, real, and uncomfortable conversations about the particular prejudices and histories we each bring to the table—in conversations with our neighbors and in interpretations of our texts. (I hope in the current chapter, at any rate, to have given readers some sense of some of the many prejudices and histories that accompany my own work).

Justice in Love: On a Jewish Grace with Responsibility

Evil is not a mystical principle that can be effaced by a ritual, it is an offence perpetrated on man by man. No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim. The world in which pardon is all-powerful becomes inhuman. (Levinas 1990, 20)

“Love” is an especially important example of a philosophical and theological concept that many people tacitly hear in a Christian key—including interlocutors in the public square, as well as students and scholars working to interpret texts within the history of philosophy, theology, and religions. Here are some of the tacitly Christian teachings that inform many of our conceptually basic ideas about love in the West: (1) that love is unconditional, (2) that God’s loving grace serves as a paradigm for undeserved and absolute forgiveness, with the resulting tacit sense (3) that forgiving is always religiously (and humanly) “better” and “more pious” and “more loving” than not forgiving, and (4) that love is neatly discrete from desire. The latter point quickly emerges from Christian theologies of eros versus agape, as the other three ideas can also be easily shown to stem from a range of Christian origins. This is not to say that there is no value to be found in these ideas about love; nor is it to say that one cannot find Jewish rabbis, theologians, and philosophers who agree with one or more of these ideas about love. It is, however, to note that there are just as many “basic” and “pious” alternative ideas about love to be found within Judaism 338 Pessin

(and within other non-Christian traditions) that—because of the tacitly Christian context of Western thought—cannot help but come across as sound- ing odd (or, at least, “less basic”) as compared with the Christian sense of love, grace, and absolute forgiveness as absolute redemption. Following from my thoughts in the previous section, I think it is part of the task of Jewish philosophy into the twenty-first century to help broaden the “basic” range of meanings of “love.” In this spirit, I also think it is part of the task of Jewish philosophy into the twenty-first century to help problematize the tacit sense that absolute forgiveness is always “better,” “kinder,” and even “more pious” than a “love in justice” that does not grant pardon quite as lib- erally (if at all). And while this point is philosophically important to explore a priori, Auschwitz would seem to help render it necessary from even an a pos- teriori historical, practical, and political perspective. I recently attended a philosophy presentation arguing that Hannah Arendt’s love for Martin Heidegger offers a template for “true love.” The talk was erudite—the speaker was a well-known expert in Continental philosophy, and the paper exhibited a command of critical theoretical reflections on desire and subjectivity, historicity and love, Arendt and Heidegger. I was taken aback, however, at the audience’s almost unanimous sense that the speaker’s thesis held water. People were not just in agreement; they were in desperate agreement, physically nodding their heads and smiling from ear to ear at each development in the paper: love conquers all; love is greater than justice; love is boundless; love’s boundlessness opens to infinite forgiveness; and so forth (I am not doing justice to the details of the presentation as they do not impact my current point). What struck me as unmistakeable was the Christian undertone of the thesis, as well as the Christian undertone of the audience reaction. What struck me as worrisome was the tacit nature of said Christian undertone in both cases. A tacitly Christian sense of grace was tacitly rooting an entire room of philosophers’ relieved sense that even the Nazi Heidegger is lovable— and even to a Jewish woman in the immediate context of Auschwitz. What could be more beautiful and unconditional than the pure love of a Jewish woman for her Nazi beloved? After sitting through three or four doting comments during the Q&A, I recall being mortified to think that, in the whole room, it would have to be the Jewish scholar of Jewish philosophy and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who was going to have to introduce the “no.” While this upset me, it also structurally resonated deeply enough for me with Rosenzweig’s own sense of Judaism’s necessary relationship to Christianity as to inspire me to forge onward. Here is what I hope to have managed to convey to the speaker and to the audience in some form or another: Christian theology is important. But please let us A Shadowed Light 339 not allow ourselves, within the context of a scholarly nondenominational philosophy conference no less, to act as if love as understood within a Christian theology of grace is the only valid, compelling, pious, or moral sense of love to speak of. It is possible that Arendt’s own life and/or her own philosophy might perhaps reveal her own turn to Augustinian love as true love (and the ability, as such, to embrace without hesitation a Nazi beloved). I am not interested here one way or another in the nature and implications of Arendt’s personal or scholarly profile. What does concern me is that there is a competing sense of “responsibility with love” or “love in justice” within Jewish textual traditions that held no sway—did not even come up once until I brought it up—during the entire session (just as it seems to hold no sway in the way we have tended to write histories of religions and philosophy). Even if known to scholars of Levinas and other Jewish texts, this sense of “love in justice” is arguably less known (and certainly less known as a “basic” sense of love) to whole ranges of philosophical readers and audiences because of the tacitly Christian context of much of Western thinking. It is also, perhaps, less initially appealing not only to Christians (who might need to denounce some or all of it on theological grounds) but even to others who have lived within a tacitly Christian moral context long enough to feel deeply uncomfortable about even suggesting that forgiveness might in some cases be downright immoral. While I hope in future work more fully to explore the idea of Christian love alongside the idea (equally “basic”) of Jewish “love in justice,” we may here summarize two of the key aspects of “Jewish love” (as perhaps two of the key reasons that it has failed to gain traction as a “basic” sense of love within Western discourse):

1. It does not give a room full of scholars at a Continental philosophy conference the relieved sense that even Heidegger is loveable, and 2. It replaces the comfort and light of “unconditional love” with the complexity and shadowed light of “love under the weight of responsibility.”

This second point, of course, reenters us into the folds of the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light. As an uneasy blend of grace with responsibility and forgiveness with justice, the Jewish concept of love points yet again to shadowed light. It is in this sense importantly different from any notion of love, divine or otherwise, as a pure overflow of cleansing light. The ideal of Jewish love, uneas- ily balanced side by side with Christian love in a necessary compresence of alterities5 and in conversation with other basic senses of love from across a

5 While I continue to wrestle with whether I agree with Rosenzweig, in this turn of phrase, I am drawing on a Rosenzweigian sense that there is, theologically speaking, a deep and necessary 340 Pessin wide range of religious traditions, is a critical tool in the world’s continued negotiation of political, social, and interpersonal conflicts. It is also a critical tool in our continued reading and interpreting of Jewish (and other non- Christian) textual traditions and in our continued canonizing of themes and concepts within the history of philosophy, theology, and religions. For all these reasons, I consider it an essential role of Jewish philosophy into the twenty- first century to help the concept of “Jewish love” as love with justice make its way into the “basic lexicon” of religious and philosophical thinking, in interfaith public contexts and in textual scholarship.

Conclusion

In offering sustained insights into the beauty of “shadowed light,” Jewish philosophy is a vibrant and essential resource for the twenty-first century, providing critical content to processes of human identity formation in and out of our classrooms and providing important checks and balances to academic methodologies for reading, translating, and interpreting texts. Jewish philosophy is key both for the content of its reflections and for the (related) fact that it frequently stands as a conceptual foil to a wide range of Christian ideas tacitly viewed as “basic concepts” within the Western thought-space. In this way, Jewish philosophy helps push the boundaries of textual interpretation and of interhuman communication; in reminding us, for example, that there are different (which is, in this context, to say, non-Christian) senses of love (and of other concepts), Jewish philosophy not only provides important content (for example, the idea of “justice with love”) but can also help keep us alert to the radical alterity of—and, hence, the need for extreme charity in approaching— concepts at play in texts written by authors from all different backgrounds, and ideas at play in the hearts of people from all different backgrounds. In this way, Jewish philosophy—both in its content but also in its structural role as a strong “other” within the Western thought-space—offers critical insights for methodologies in interpreting texts in the academy and for intercultural civic relationship building in the world at large. We might also note that, in drawing our attention variously to the shadows in light, the turbulences of mature living, the difficulties of freedom, and the

relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Additionally, to emphasize the necessary duality of two realities that can never be unified or absorbed one into the other, I am drawing on the Levinasian language of alterity. I hope to pursue this idea in more detail in future work. A Shadowed Light 341 justice in love, the Jewish philosophy of shadowed light, seen in various forms in the works of Israeli, Soloveitchik, Levinas, and with them many others, points to exile, weightiness, rupture, and darkness as integral to redemption and, in so doing, invites us to challenging ideas about how we, as students, as scholars, and as human beings, might better strive after the good.

References

Altmann, Alexander, and S. M. Stern. 1958. Isaac Israeli. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprint. 2009. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, with introduction by Alfred Ivry. Batnitzky, Leora. 2000. Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fredman Cernea, Ruth, ed. 2005. The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gersh, Stephen. 1978. From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Hannay, Alistair, trans. 2009. Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ―――. 1987. “Freedom and Command.” In Collected Philosophical Papers: Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Alphonso Lingis, 15–23. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ―――. 1990. “A Religion for Adults.” In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand, 11–23. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ―――. 1998. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Pessin, Sarah. 2004. “Loss, Presence, and Gabirol’s Desire: Medieval Jewish Philosophy and the Possibility of a Feminist Ground.” In Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 27–50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ―――. 2011a. “Solomon Ibn Gabirol [Avicebron].” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring 2011 edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. . ―――. 2011b. “Cronos Swallows a Stone: From Calcified History to Hineni, ‘Enlivening Memory’ and the Call to Justice (On Creating a Levinasian Holocaust Memorial).” University of Toronto’s Journal for Jewish Thought 2 (online); for a pdf, see http:// portfolio.du.edu/spessin. 342 Pessin

―――. 2012. “On the Possibility of a Hidden Christian Will: Methodological Pitfalls in the Study of Medieval Jewish Philosophy.” In Encountering the Medieval in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by Aaron W. Hughes and James Diamond, 52–94 Leiden: E.J. Brill. ―――. 2013. Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1970. Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Rudavsky, T. M. 1978. “Conflicting Motifs: Ibn Gabirol on Matter and Evil.” The New Scholasticism 52, no. 1: 54–71. Soloveitchik, Joseph B. 1983. Halakhic Man. Translated by Lawrence Kaplan. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Stern, S. M. 1958. “The Fragments of Isaac Israeli’s ‘Book of Substances.’ ” In S. M. Stern, Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Thought, edited by F. W. Zimmerman, 135–45. London: Variorum Reprints. chapter 16 Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences

Heidi M. Ravven

Introduction

I reflect here on my trajectory from the exegetical and historical study of Jewish philosophical texts to my current project of the mining of those texts for insights into contemporary philosophical problems, especially in moral psychology. My particular interest is with how the Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic medieval philosophical tradition in moral psychology, radicalized by Moses Maimonides and built upon by Baruch Spinoza, offers ways of rethinking moral agency in keeping with discoveries in the brain sciences. So my focus is on how Jewish philosophy can be a fecund resource to philosophers trying to think about the human moral subject in truly innovative ways. Our philosophical sources, in contrast with those that emerged from the Latin West that still inform and dominate standard philosophical and general cultural notions of human nature, have largely been treated in historical contexts but not yet mined for their potential contributions to contemporary philosophical issues. They are a treasure trove of innovative thinking if we just bring them into contact with cutting-edge philosophical grappling and also with the sciences.

Whence and Wherefore

In 1968, at age sixteen, I fell in love—with Israel. It was hardly a surprise. I come from a family of ardent Zionists—mostly secular, left-wing, socialist, Shomer Hatzair-niks. Intellectual Litvaks on both sides. My father’s family, the Ravven- Rabin-Robins, originally from Meretz, Lithuania, but now in both Israel and the United States, are in psychology and philosophy, which are more or less the family professions. My daughter, Simha E. Ravven, MD, has continued the tradition as a psychiatrist. The Ravven family is also highly learned in Jewish texts, as was my mother’s family, the Morrisons (Movshovitz), from Troki, Lithuania. My father’s first cousin, Albert Israel Rabin, a Shomer Hatzair leader in Lithuania, reluctantly came to the United States at age eighteen, became

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_��8 344 ravven another brother in the Ravven household, and, within a couple of decades, was one of the founders of academic clinical psychology in America. Cousin Al Rabin spent years in Israel doing research and became well known for his psychological studies of kibbutz children. His subjects were largely children on his brother Yankel’s kibbutz, Mizra, where Yankel, with a twinkle in his eye, had introduced the pork sausage business. Yankel and a Christian Arab from Nazareth privately owned the pigs when the government no longer allowed pig grazing on Keren Hakayemet land. In 1986, upon “Uncle Yankel’s” death, the family inherited the pigs. My father, Robert M. Ravven, MD, PhD, a philosophy major at Harvard and a student and teaching assistant of W. V. Quine, became a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. Following in cousin/brother Al Rabin’s footsteps, my father took my mother and me to Israel for the first time when I was seven in 1959—the kids on Kibbutz Mizra thought I was “Heidi bat he-harim” and had come directly from the Swiss Alps. We spent a year in Jerusalem in 1962–63. My father taught and practiced at Hadassah Hospital and had an affiliation with the Jerusalem Psychoanalytic Institute. I spent fifth grade living and going to school in Rehavia. My parents’ circle, both in Israel and Boston, consisted largely of Israeli academics who were studying or on sabbatical at Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Brandeis, and the rest. All were ardent Zionists, founding faculty in various fields at Israel’s nascent universities, mostly Central European born, and several were prominent in the academic study of Judaism. There was no end to my admiration for these Israeli founders, for their idealism, for their courage, for the brilliance of their minds, and for the humanity of their social and political vision. At sixteen, I went with a NFTY (North American Federation of Temple Youth) group to Israel for the summer and fell in love for myself and not just as a member of the corporate Ravven family. So I am exactly who you would expect to come out of this background: a Zionist secularist, a philosopher, a moral psychologist. A Spinozist. Sometimes one strand of this identity has been dominant and sometimes another. I came into my own as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Brandeis University where I studied with Professor Alexander Altmann, and then in the Philosophy Department. At Brandeis, I was “discovered.” Professor Altmann once remarked to me, “You are Brandeis.”

Jewish Philosophy

Jewish philosophy can mean three things: (1) the historical study of the writings of thinkers who self-consciously engaged in the literary traditions and Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 345 conversations of Jewish philosophy; (2) the philosophical study of Judaism— its meaning, values, approaches, rituals, social and political structures, genres of rational discourse, and the like; and (3) the mining of past Jewish philosophical engagements to help address present questions of current philosophical interest and debate. The first enterprise is largely, if not strictly, descriptive rather than normative. The second tends toward engaging in a search for a normative Judaism, both in the past (that search can be descriptive) and in the present (that is, a present and engaged normative theological enterprise). The final model is of a normative philosophical search yet one whose content, unlike the second, is not restricted to Judaism as its object but instead ranges widely, focusing on any current philosophical questions to which the Jewish philosophical tradition might have something to contribute. The first model describes the history of the Jewish encounter and engagement with Greek classical philosophy in its various historical incarnations—Philonic, Arabic, Kantian, Hegelian, existentialist, and the like. Its questions are as wide ranging as the philosophic and scientific subjects of its various Jewish and non-Jewish partners in dialogue. The second engages the encounter with the classical and subsequent philosophical tradition with questions about our Jewish self-definition in mind, historically and/or normatively. It is philosophy as handmaid, subordinate, to religion. And the third harks back to the original wide-ranging encounters to engage in as broad an enterprise in search of universal insights and wisdom—to be contributed to the larger philosophical world—from its own particular philosophical tradition and texts. My interests and writings have for the most part fit into the first and the third models with a couple of brief forays into the second, the articulation of and speculation about a distinctive Jewishness or a normative characterization of Judaism. Initially, my interests were largely historical and explicatory— what did Maimonides actually say and what positions did he embrace in The Guide and Spinoza in The Ethics, The Theological-Political Treatise, and, to a lesser extent, in their other writings. In what sense can Spinoza be said to be a Maimonidean? What did he adopt and adapt, and what did he eschew? How does what Spinoza embraced from Maimonides fit into his other influences and doctrines? I then turned to ask deeper questions: What do their positions really amount to philosophically? Are any their questions, arguments, and doctrines still alive and, if so, which ones? Can we extract still-vital approaches, distinctions, and insights from the dated language and religious and other metaphors, or is that to do violence to the texts and betray their meanings and intentions? Do these texts still speak to us philosophically or only as historians and as Jews? Can we put these philosophical writings in conversation with philosophical concerns today, or must they be quarantined and mothballed in 346 ravven an antiquarian or Jewish corner? I learned from my teacher, Marvin Fox, not only to be infinitely careful to understand what a text is saying but also to ask, “Is it true?” As a philosopher, and not only or principally a historian of philosophy, and specifically as a Jewish philosopher, I search for greater understanding not only of texts but also of the questions that the texts raise. As Amos Oz has recently proposed, we Jews are joined together not principally by a bloodline but by a “textline” (Oz and Oz-Salzberger 2012). Through the immersion and creative, generative engagement in Jewish philosophical textual analysis, I want to come to a better understanding of the world and the human mind—and not just of the Jewish minds that engaged in philosophy so long ago. It would do an injustice to Maimonides and to Spinoza and to the Jewish “textline” itself not to care about what they cared about but to care only about understanding their thinking in their contexts. They cared passionately about coming to a greater understanding of nature and the universe, of human society, and of how to pursue a fulfilling life of broad significance and spiritual embrace. To study them is to honor their search by continuing it, and not just to worship their answers as if human knowledge ended with them, or worse, that their grappling with these questions is of none but historical interest or a source of ethnocentric pride.

Doing Philosophy in a Spinozist Key

My direction took a decisive turn toward doing contemporary philosophy in a Spinozist key as a result of two fortuitous events. The first, just after the turn of this century, resulted from a chance occurrence. I went on sabbatical leave in the spring of 2001 and had the leisure to read more widely and for the general enhancement of my knowledge of what was going on in the world of science, albeit as a layperson. One of the precariously stacked piles of books in my bedroom yielded up the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (2000). I started reading, and behold! It sounded just like empirical evidence confirming Spinoza’s account of the emotions. Uh oh, I thought. I have now reached the point where everything sounds like Spinoza. I put the book down for six months, and, when I returned to it, it still seemed to capture Spinoza’s theory. So, at that point, I looked up Damasio on Amazon.com and, lo and behold, a then-unpublished book was listed as his next: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003). I knew I was on to something. I decided to write up the precise aspects of Spinoza’s account that Damasio’s and other research Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 347 into the brain mechanisms of the emotions had confirmed and also to rethink and redescribe Spinoza’s theory of moral agency in terms of the mechanisms discovered by the new affective neuroscience. That led to a collaboration with several neuroscientists, including discussions with Damasio. The neuroscientists also showed a growing interest in Spinoza, not only Damasio but also Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience (2004), a textbook defining this new field, and foremost researcher into the evolutionary continuity of mammalian emotions. Several people working in neuropsychoanalysis were also intrigued by what Spinoza might have to offer in terms of understanding the philosophical implications of what the new brain sciences were exploring and exposing. The trajectory of my work took a new direction and sphere of publication. The second fortuitous event that set me decisively on the path of contributing Jewish philosophical insights and approaches to contemporary discussions was a call, out of the blue, from the Ford Foundation. My work on Spinoza had sparked the foundation’s interest and the upshot was that I was handed $500,000 over a five-year period to write a book that would introduce Spinozist and other Jewish philosophical approaches into the contemporary discourse in moral philosophy, debates that had largely reached, in their view, an impasse. I took that to mean revising the account of moral agency (why and when people are ethical, why and when they are not, and how to get them to be more ethical) implicit in philosophical discussions of ethics. In my view, that was where the problem lay. I wanted to explore whether a Spinozist account of moral agency—one backed up, revitalized, and modified by contemporary affective neuroscience—could be introduce to enliven, refocus, and broaden the philosophical conversation. Nine years later, I have completed the book: The Self beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will (2013b).

Jewish Medieval Rationalism Meets the New Brain Sciences and Philosophical Ethics via Spinoza

How can we rethink both moral agency and moral responsibility within a framework that acknowledges that human beings are fully biological organisms, that they are within the world and not beyond it or above it, and that the mind, particularly consciousness, is real and is as much a product of nature and embedded within causal networks and systems as is the body?1 These were the central questions I wrestled with in The Self beyond Itself (2013b).

1 The remainder of this essay draws on my book The Self beyond Itself (2013b). 348 ravven

At the dawn of modernity, Spinoza anticipated a number of important discoveries in the recent brain sciences and, stemming from his embodied account of the mind—an account profoundly influenced by Maimonides and the Jewish medieval embodied Aristotelian naturalism of the Arabic philosophical tradition of falsafa—he turned to rethink moral agency from a protobiological point of view. Spinoza’s principles—of the nonreductive identity of mind and body; of the affectivity of all thinking; of the mind as the very activity of understanding and desiring (rather than a Cartesian bounded thing that thinks and has ideas) expressive of one’s engagements with the environment as self- enhancing or self-diminishing; of the unconscious character of human motivation; his rejection of free will; his prescient insight into the biological urge to organic self-organization (mental as well as physical) within environments local and ultimately as large as the universe, to name some central theses— provide a fruitful and new starting point for making sense and synthesizing a lot of the new thinking about how the mind produces action. They go a long way to explaining moral action as well, while rethinking the human person as situated within environments, and expressive of those environments, internal and external, social-cultural and also natural. Spinoza’s account of moral agency, which he called “ethics,” represents, perhaps, the best starting point for trying to integrate the evidence emerging from the new brain sciences and other relevant disciplines to develop a composite view of the basic moral brain, of the optimal route to its development, and of the implications of such a view for how social, legal, political, and other institutions and practices might be redesigned. It also contributes a corrective to the dominant philosophical paradigm, a paradigm that retains many Cartesian presuppositions. In addition, it is a crucial part of the story—one that has not yet been adequately brought to light and to general attention—that the standard account of moral agency, in particular its Cartesian presuppositions and also its Kantian appropriation, originates in and remains expressive of a Christian theological story and anthropology, albeit in implicit and veiled ways. Spinoza’s embodied account of the human mind—in contrast to Descartes’ famous mind-body dualism—expresses not only a viable and welcome alternative but also comes out of a Judaeo-Arabic philosophic milieu quite different from the Latin Christian. I have argued at length that Latin Christian presuppositions about human nature have dominated mainstream philosophical discourse in moral psychology to such an extent that their cultural and theological particularist conception of the human has become normalized and universalized as “philosophical” and their theological agenda wiped from view and forgotten. Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 349

I propose that one agenda of future Jewish philosophy be an ongoing investigation and identification of (largely secularized and, hence, veiled) Christian theological presuppositions that still haunt standard philosophical discussions, the shaping of the questions, and the setting of the parameters of debate. A philosophical point of view from a medieval rationalist philosophical tradition emergent from classical Greece, yet not run through Latin Christendom, can be an enormously powerful corrective and source of contemporary creativity and insight. There is a pressing need, in my view, to bring falsafa into contemporary philosophic conversations. To do so will require the translation of many of its medieval terms and metaphors into contemporary idioms to modernize its worldview. Let Spinoza be our guide. The recent revival of Aristotle in ethics and especially in new accounts of moral agency that try to capture the findings of contemporary brain science (for example, Casebeer 2005) would be well served by routing that embodied Aristotelianism via Alexandria, Baghdad, and Iberia rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Augustine’s Invention of the Western Notion of Human Nature

Our standard Western philosophical and widespread cultural anthropology is provincially that of the Latin West. That the assumptions we hold about how and why we are moral, which set the terms of the philosophical debate, are provincial ones of the Latin West rather than universal conditions of agency can be exposed in their appeal to a deep yet implicit and particularist theological narrative that has gone underground as a deep cultural inheritance. These presuppositions too often appear to philosophers as universally true beliefs about moral agency and human nature because of their cultural ubiquity in the West and their implicit unconscious character. Yet the appeal and the warrant for them, I argue, is to a Christian myth about how the human person fits into the universe and into the natural world. That Christian myth, while it has been explicitly stricken from philosophical discussion, nevertheless still frames the concept of human nature dominant in standard philosophy. The explicit claim and picture of miraculous divine agency has dropped out of the story, yet the mythic portrayal of the human person as developed in the story has remained fundamentally unchanged. That account of human nature is captured in the notion of “freedom will.” I have argued at length that that account grants to the human person magical powers beyond nature and nurture. Rather than a universally valid feature of human moral nature, free will, I expose, is a fundamentally theological claim and relies for its plausibility on an implicit and specific cultural religious narrative. The free will account of moral 350 ravven agency and moral responsibility is a very specific Latin Christian theological invention whose history can be traced from its crystallization to its present near dominance in philosophy and generally in the West. Rather than a mere cultural commonplace, free will owes part of its ubiquity to its Catholic institutional doctrinal enforcement. Philosophical discourse on moral agency hardened in the thirteenth century due to a church ban on the denial of free will. Perhaps, paradoxically, the revival movements of both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation exhibited further hardening of the doctrine in the return to and embrace of various Augustinianisms and neo-Augustinians across the range of camps and opinions. That the notion of free will captures and is shorthand for a particular Christological cosmology and salvation history is first evident in its origins: for the church father Augustine “practically invented the concept” of free will (Wetzel 2000, 127), comments James Wetzel, holder of the Augustinian Chair in the Thought of St. Augustine in the Philosophy Department at Villanova University, a university founded in 1842 by the Order of St. Augustine. In developing and articulating a clear notion of free will in the fourth century CE, Augustine was explicitly engaging in rendering the Christian salvation myth into the terms and language of a quasi-philosophical, quasi-rational, quasi- scientific theory that would replace the Greek classical naturalist account of the universe and of the place of the human person within nature. There was a moment of invention, of creating a clear and new conception of human nature from disparate strands. This is what the fourth-fifth-century theologian Augustine accomplished. The Augustinian conception of human nature took such hold on the imagination that subsequent wrestling with human nature in the Christian West, in both theology and philosophy, has largely been a footnote to Augustine. Augustine redefined what it means to be human, what it means to be moral, and what the human role in the cosmos is. Peter Brown, the great scholar of late antiquity and of Augustine, describes the overall transformation initiated and instituted by Augustine:

[Augustine] allowed the Platonic sense of the majesty of the cosmos to grow pale. Lost in the narrow and ever fascinating labyrinth of his preoccupation with the human will . . . Augustine turned his back on the mundus, on the magical beauty associated with the material universe in later Platonism. . . . Augustine would never look up at the stars and gaze at the world around him with the shudder of religious awe that fell upon Plotinus when he exclaimed . . . “All the place is holy” as Oedipus had exclaimed at Colonus, and as Jacob had done at Bethel. . . . Augustine Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 351

pointedly refused to share this enthusiasm. . . . Something was lost, in Western Christendom, by this trenchant and seemingly commonsensical judgement. (Brown 2000, 504)

Brown even laments that, “if Augustine was the ‘first modern man,’ then it is a ‘modernity’ bought at a heavy price,” for that price was the “dislodg[ing of] the self, somewhat abruptly and without regard to the consequences, from the embrace of a God-filled universe” (2000, 504). What got left behind was the classical Greek reverence for nature, the sense of the magnificence of a natural world in which the human person was at home and via which the glow of the divine could be glimpsed and some sparks of it captured through intellectual understanding. At the end of his biography of Augustine—a biography that has now become a classic—Brown proposes that Augustine produced a profound shift away from the culture of the ancient world: “Seen against the wider background of the classical philosophical tradition, Augustine’s magnificent preoccupation with the problem of the human person and his fascination with the working of the will represented a decisive change in emphasis” Brown further points out that Augustine has been called “‘the inventor of our modern notion of will,’” for Augustine deflected the locus of human striving for meaning and purpose away from the philosophic and scientific search for the human place in nature and the cosmos and toward a concern for the individual will. His achievement was a “shift from cosmos to will,” decisively, “a turn[ing] away from the cosmos,” Brown says. The notion of free will and the intensity of focus on it were, in a sense, shorthand for what Brown calls “the mighty displacement of an entire religious sensibility.” Moreover, “this displacement of attention from the cosmos to the saving work of God, through Christ, was the most hotly contested of [Augustine’s] many doctrines,” Brown points out. He concludes that Augustine’s “intervention proved decisive for the emergence of a distinctive notion of the individual in Western culture” (Brown 2000, 502–12). Augustine’s account of the human person reduced all internal mental operations—thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will. That was the basis of his new theory of moral psychology. Thus, it was Augustine who set in motion the trajectory of the freedom of the will as defining the human person. It was Augustine who set free will as the mark of the human, of what it means to be moral, and what the human role in the cosmos is. It was Augustine who identified free will as the basis for the possibility of taking moral responsibility. We are responsible, he argued, only for what we “freely” do or will. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift in 352 ravven worldview—in the conception of the human person and of the universe that human beings inhabit and, hence, in the conception of moral agency—putting the freedom of the will at the center of cosmos and of the human person and of his or her relation. The spiritual was redefined as voluntary, and God’s will was interpreted as the cosmic principle to which the human free will was obligated to come into conformity through obedience. Nature, as a consequence, was demoted as the locus of the divine-human relation and of the source of human self-understanding in the cosmos. It is this worldview that we in the West have inherited. All these presuppositions are still resonant in the notion of free will. The concept captures an entire particular Augustinian theological anthropology and cosmology. The Jewish concept of free choice is not the same as this notion of free will, although there has been a tendency to slur their boundaries. In the latter, the issue is how an all-powerful God can allow for some human agency independent of direct divine control. The standard account of free will, instead, revolves around the issue of the independence of human action from natural biology, nurture, and the current situation. The latter discussion revolves around the question of whether human beings are originators of their actions (at least to a substantial degree) or whether they are determined by the conjunction of myriad factors that make up the local and distal causal context, inner and outer. The Jewish concern also concerns Christian and Muslims: it is the question of how divine purpose and direction can allow for the human, of how divine power and human power are to be reconciled. In the free will problem, however, the matter at stake is the role of natural causal processes: Do natural causal explanation and laws apply to human action and, more generally, to the human mind or only to material processes and to animals, plants, and minerals but not to human action? For the mind to be “free,” in the sense of free will entails the claim that it is not fundamentally determined by all the biological and social, cultural, and situational contextual factors that apply. Those factors are influences but not determinative, for human beings have a freedom to act beyond them, beyond the natural and nurtural construction of the human person, beyond prediction, and, in principle, beyond full, rational explanation. That is the claim of free will. It is a denaturalizing, disembodying, and decontextualizing of human action. (Ravven 2013b, chapter 4) I will now introduce a contrast between Maimonides’ moral psychology and Kant’s in their respective interpretations of the Garden of Eden that will dramatically highlight the Latin Christian Augustinian presuppositions framing the Kantian conception of free will still dominant today with a Maimonidean naturalism. Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 353

Maimonidian versus Kantian Philosophical Anthropology

The contrast between the interpretations of the Garden of Eden of Maimonides and Kant could not be more stark or more telling. Nature, for Maimonides, represents the opening of the path to a system of rational explanation that can unlock the divine secrets of the universe and fulfill the human soul in the only way possible, through intellectual engagement. Following the tracks of nature is to follow the divine code, the only route to God’s mind available to human beings, the only path to loving communion with the divine and to the rapture of eternity. The ideal human posture is the loving embrace of nature and the discovery of the God-filled universe as one’s true home. It is a contemplative and empathic stance, a noninvasive, conceptual embrace. For Kant, in contrast, nature is confined to body; and reason, a uniquely human capacity, is the proof that human beings are above nature and can impose their will on the inchoateness of matter, in self and world. For Kant, Adam’s sin results in his acquiring reason, which enables him to free himself from nature. Reason provides Adam with four new capacities: first, freedom, the power to choose for oneself a way of life; second, a degree of control over sensual impulse, over the natural, bodily self; third, the expectation of a future; and, fourth, the uniquely human status of being an end, whereas all other creatures and things in nature are merely means to human ends. In “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Kant describes reason as the human “release from the womb of nature” (1963, 59). Adam’s disobedience is the first act of “freedom” from nature. For Kant, ethical life originates in and is initiated by an act of wresting and differentiating the human from the natural world. The escape from Eden (if we can call it that) sets the trajectory of history as a progressive distancing of the human from nature, internal and external, and the progressive harnessing of nature for human ends. The unique “dignity” of the human species is held to consist in just this God-like distancing and controlling posture, “power over” all: it is that power, the power of the will, over body and world that is designated as “freedom.” For Kant, the advent of the human marks the repudiation of the human beings as natural and within the natural world. It is the hope of completely willed mastery over natural impulses and natural processes. Adam learns that he can choose his actions and invent himself and control both himself and the world for ends he invents. Ethics is confining oneself to acting on this “dignity,” which asserts the human superiority to all natural being. Acting according to one’s human “dignity” should be humanity’s sole motive. It means subduing the natural self and seeing all other human beings as having equal 354 ravven status above nature. (Although women and “uncivilized peoples” have less reason, Kant says, they still are of equal moral status as rational and above the natural.) We can discern the Augustinian underpinnings of the assimilation of reason to will in the Kantian moral vision. Nevertheless, we note that the overt Augustinian theology of direct divine intervention has been eliminated from the Kantian picture. A theology that distributed free will between the human person and a personal God, thereby preserving some human limit and humility, was eliminated in a secularized modernity. The human person has now absorbed much of the divine side of free will—a position adumbrated in Descartes’ philosophy. Kantian obedience is self-legislation, not submission to divine legislation. Yet individual free will it remains.2 For Maimonides, in contrast with Kant, intellectual engagement could never amount to an overriding of nature. Human flourishing is the natural end of a rational animal and does not consist in the subduing of nature, thought of as external to the human, toward human ends. Instead, knowing is both the fulfillment of human nature and also the loving embrace of the natural world through understanding its underlying rational scientific basis, to the extent possible, as an expression of the divine, as the divine necessity, or, in Maimonides’ naturalizing theological language, as the divine “action.” So, it is through creation, for Maimonides, that we approach God, a creation of which we, body and mind, are a part. Nature is ripe with that divine possibility; and while, no doubt, we have unique access to some small region of the divine universe, nevertheless, the dignity of the divine creation is not uniquely our own. Hence, human beings, for Maimonides, are deeply embedded within nature as special expressions of nature and, as such, potentially privy to (some of) the workings of nature via the theoretical path of discovery and loving understanding. The human mind is as natural as the body, and theoretical reason enables

2 We also discover throughout the Kantian critical philosophy the notion of reason as will. Human universal subjectivity is an imposition on, and the human shaping of, nature (for example, in the contribution of the human intersubjective mental categories of causality and time as the prism through which the world is grasped) and an act of will, rather than reason thought of as the discovery of what’s already there. (We see a nod to Descartes’ voluntarist account of cognition in Kant’s theory here, too, of course.) The ubiquity of reason functioning as will in this way is, for Kant, a presupposition of our experiencing anything at all; human will, thus, replaces the divine will as constitutive of (the explanation of) nature in this secularized account. Kant picks up on the Cartesian legacy of created eternal truths but attributes them to the human knower: these are ideas of nature that God wills and could have created differently. God knows the world because of knowing the divine will—and so, too, humans being know the world because we see it through the categories we impose on it. Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 355 it to approach the underlying principles of nature synoptically. Standard moral virtues are not a human perfection in the Maimonidean conception but a sorry necessity of the difficult existential conditions of human life. Nevertheless, the social organizations and conventional virtues that further human practical well-being also ought to support all those who are capable of pursuing the true human natural divine goal: the pursuit of theoretical knowledge. This beatific vision of the philosopher-scientist fully engaged in the search for knowledge—with its accompanying intense joy and expansive love toward the divine expression discoverable in the natural universe—inspired not only Moses Maimonides but also Baruch Spinoza. He thought through the Maimonidean vision to try to explain in secular, quasi-scientific terms the moral psychology at its heart. Spinoza set himself to making a modern, rational, and philosophically compelling case for Maimonides’ understanding of the intellectual aim of human life and the transformation of moral motivation that it offered (Ravven 2013a and 2013b). This example of the contrast between Kant’s and Maimonides’ notions of the human person in God’s universe exposes a Maimonidean naturalism in philosophic outlook that is more compatible with science, and particularly the brain sciences, than the standard legacy of the Augustinian. It also helps us identify the supernaturalism at the heart of the seemingly rational notion of free will: free will turns on the claim that we originate our actions and that moral responsibility depends on some measure of origination. Origination, however, (whether it is held to entail a choice among alternatives or, more narrowly, a kind of self-starting) entails the claim that each of us has a significant degree of independence (or “freedom”) from history, context, culture, group, present situation, and even biology to enable us, uniquely as a species, to act beyond our nature, history, and context. It is the old Augustinian claim of the spiritual nature of the human person amounting to will, a will that has its origins and character beyond nature in a magical realm where the laws of nature (and nurture) need not apply. Will in God and human intervenes in nature and history from above and beyond them. This is theology, not science, and its introduction into philosophy creates a philosophical tradition beholden to religious dogma and subject to internal doctrinal limits. Nowhere more than in philosophical ethics, in the underlying moral psychology, has this been true and remains the case. The claim of free will is false not because it is foreign to us—after all, the classical Greek culture was as foreign to us as the Latin Christian. Nor is it false because its origins are in Christian theology. (That would be to commit the genetic fallacy.) Free will is false because it is rationally implausible (as Spinoza remarked in the Preface to the Ethics Part III, free will presupposes a 356 ravven magical, separate “kingdom within [the] kingdom” of nature) and, furthermore, the neurosciences and other brain sciences are exposing it to be empirically false. It only seems to be plausible because of our Western cultural familiarity with it. We Jewish philosophers are educated and live in a Christian culture and have assimilated the ways that that culture and its history pervade our discipline, philosophy, and even Jewish philosophy, especially post-Kantian Jewish philosophy. Yet our own rigorous and far less ideologically constrained and theologically beholden Jewish medieval philosophical tradition provides us with insights and alternative views that can be the starting points for enormously creative contributions to many narrowly conceived standard contemporary philosophical discussions. Creative Jewish philosophical engagement need not be either moribund or narrowly self-referential. We are sitting on an intellectual goldmine. We need to set our sights on discovering what we can glean from the great philosophic tradition that we have inherited, one that built upon the best of Greek classical philosophy largely without the need to compromise and then rationalize the compromise.

References

Augustine of Hippo. 1982. St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi Ad Literam). Translated and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, S.J. Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, edited by Johannes Quasten, Walter J. Burghardt, and Thomas Comerford Lawler 42. New York: Newman Press. ———. 1992. Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1998. The City of God against the Pagans. Edited and translated by R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Peter. 2000. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casebeer, William. 2005. Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Bradford Books. Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Kant, Immanuel. 1963. “Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” Translation by Emil Fackenheim. In On History: Immanuel Kant, edited by Lewis White Beck. Library of Liberal Arts 162. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Philosophy, Ethics, and Brain Sciences 357

Kent, Bonnie. 1995. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Maimonides, Moses. 1968. Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menn, Stephen. 1998. Augustine and Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgenbesser, Sidney, and James Walsh, eds. 1962. Free Will. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. O’Connor, Timothy. 2010. “Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato .stanford.edu/entries/freewill/. Oz, Amos, and Fania Oz-Salzberger. 2012. Jews and Words. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Panksepp, Jaak. 2004. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Series in Affective Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Ravven, Heidi M. 2001. “The Garden of Eden: Spinoza’s Maimonidean Account of the Genealogy of Morals and the Origin of Society.” Philosophy and Theology 13, no. 1: 3–51. ———. 2003a. “Review of Antonio Damasio: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.” Neuro-Psychoanalysis 5, no. 2: 218–31. ———. 2003b. “Spinoza’s Anticipation of Contemporary Affective Neuroscience.” Consciousness and Emotion: An Interdisciplinary Science and Philosophy Journal 4, no. 2: 257–90. ———. 2013a. “Maimonides’ Non-Kantian Moral Psychology: Maimonides and Kant on the Garden of Eden and the Genealogy of Morals.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20, no. 2: 199–216. ———. 2013b. The Self beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will. New York: The New Press. Wetzel, James. 2000. “Snares of Truth: Augustine on Free Will and Predestination.” In Augustine and His Critics, edited by Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 124–41. London: Routledge. chapter 17 God Accused Jewish Philosophy as Antitheodicy

Bruce Rosenstock

My father emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1939, not long after Kristallnacht. He grew up in a Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt with his younger brother, Berthold. My father, Georg, was five when he was taken into the orphanage. His brother was three. After completing Gymnasium in 1933, my father went to the only Jewish Teacher’s Seminary still operating in Nazi Germany (the same one that Walter Kaufmann attended at around the same time). After spending a couple of years teaching in a Jewish Day School, my father came to the United States and enrolled as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University. His brother chose to remain behind in Germany, becoming a Youth Aliyah Hachsharah training-camp director in Nazi-occupied Holland. In 1943, the Gestapo closed the camp and deported Berthold to Auschwitz. He died the following year. My father went on to receive rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1946, and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia in 1959. Neither his rabbinic nor his academic career was particularly successful, largely because of his penchant for fighting lost causes. In the summer before I went to college, my father asked me to join him in learning ancient Greek so that he could represent himself as a viable candidate for jobs in ancient philosophy. His attempt, although bravely undertaken, never bore fruit for him, but it left me with a desire to study Greek in college. My first job, after receiving my PhD in classics with a specialization in ancient philosophy from Princeton, was at Stanford. I spent most of my time at Stanford reading things that were off limits to me as a graduate student in a program where Saul Kripke and Richard Rorty were the leading lights. After encountering Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” I decided that I would never again return to my dissertation on the semantics of Greek mass terms as the background to Plato’s metaphysics. That decision, however liberating, spelled disaster for my chances of getting tenure at Stanford. Sometime in my fourth or fifth year there, I decided that I would seek rabbinic ordination after leaving Stanford. Although I never actually did undertake rabbinic training seriously, I managed to get a foundation for a turn from ancient philosophy to Jewish philosophy by studying Hebrew and sitting in on a quite a number of graduate seminars at Stanford, most memorably those offered by Amos Funkenstein.

There is one theme that connects my father’s legacy, my work in ancient philosophy, and my work in Jewish philosophy: justice. My father never tired of speaking of his brother’s commitment to resisting evil in the teeth of Nazi occupation. My published work on Plato deals with philosophy’s relation to the polis as it is embodied in Plato’s figuration of Socrates. At stake is this question: what is justice? And in my study of Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt, and Stanley Cavell (Rosenstock 2010), the theme of justice is preeminent: how can philosophy provide a vision of a nonviolent, democratic polity? The question of justice has frequently been posed within the framework of two opposed cities, Athens and Jerusalem. I am not drawn to making sweeping generalizations, perhaps because of my training in the Anglo- American analytical philosophical tradition at Princeton. But I do believe that there is truth in the idea that Athens and Jerusalem represent two different conceptions of justice. One of my teachers at Princeton, Gregory Vlastos, insisted that the Socratic dictum it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, despite its revolutionary break with the Greek notion that justice consisted of “helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies,” nonetheless reflects what Vlastos called a “failure of love” (Vlastos 1957–58, 511). The Socratic dictum is, at least in Plato’s defense of it in the Gorgias, argued from the assumption that justice is what benefits the individual; the Bible’s conception of justice responds to the suffering of the victim of injustice. While Vlastos saw Jesus as the loving counterexample to Socrates, I would go back to the Hebrew Bible, in particular to the Sabbath commandment, to clarify the difference between the Greek and Jewish conceptions of justice. And, of course, I would also go back to the book of Job, the Bible’s most sustained reflection about justice. I would not deny that love is related to the biblical conception of justice, but, if we examine the book of Job, it is not love that is its animating spirit but outrage over the injustice of innocent suffering. There is a temptation to see love as an answer to this outrage; Fyodor Dostoyevski has Alyosha mumble something to this effect after he hears Ivan’s argument that even one second of innocent suffering is an unanswerable rebuke against the goodness of God. Vlastos is right when he says that, for Socrates, “If men’s souls are to be saved, they must be saved his way. When he sees that they cannot be, he watches them go down the road to perdition with regret but without anguish” (ibid.). But the fact that, as Vlastos says, “Jesus wept for Jerusalem” does not really amount to an advance over Socrates, who only “warns Athens, scolds, condemns it” (ibid.). The real advance is not to weep over those who “go down the road to perdition” but to refuse to accept the justice of their perdition. Does perdition redeem the suffering of the victims 360 Rosenstock of injustice? To think that perdition balances the scales of justice is to accept the bribe of theodicy. It is a betrayal of biblical justice. I hope one day to return to a book project I started several years ago but have put on hold. The book would trace the history of the critique of theodical thinking. It would study the assault on the conception of justice underlying theodicy, beginning with the Hebrew Bible’s Sabbath commandment and the book of Job. I will take the story of this assault forward to Immanuel Kant’s extraordinary essay on the book of Job, “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” (Kant 1996, 19–38) and I will conclude with perhaps the most imaginative of all reflections on the nature of divine justice, the science fiction trilogy Valis by Philip K. Dick (2009). Of course, the antitheodical essay by Immanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering” (2006, 78–87), will inform my discussion of the assault on theodicy in the twentieth century, as will also Stanley Cavell’s stunningly brilliant antitheodical exegesis of Samuel Becket’s Endgame in his essay “Ending the Waiting Game” (2002, 115–62). I am unwilling to make a grandiose claim about the significance of the assault on theodicy for twenty- first-century Jewish philosophy, but I do believe that the temptations of theodicy remain powerful today. These temptations lead to justifications for the instrumentalization of evil in the service of some higher good, as if that good could remain unsullied by the evil that served it. The temptation of theodicy can also lead to a Manichean bifurcation of good and evil and the dangerous attempt to construct counter-communities withdrawn from the “fallen” world. In both cases—the instrumentalization of evil, the immunization of the self against evil—justice has been reduced to judgment. The German word Urteil (judgment) captures the force of division into two sides or parts (Teilen) that judgment entails. In judgment, good is, or is imagined to be, radically (Ur-) divided from evil. The result is that the world, impure as it is, is consigned to perdition. The concept of justice that comes to the fore in the assaults on theodicy that my book would study situates justice as an ongoing process within the world of unjust suffering. This does not mean, of course, that justice accepts the world of unjust suffering. The good will, as Kant teaches, is—for mortals, at least—a turning away of the will from its propensity to radical evil, which is, for Kant, the free choice of the will to abandon the hope that it can, in fact, turn toward the good. The good will and the evil will are, in their root, the same. This root, Kant says in Religion with the Bounds of Reason Alone, is “a first ground (to us inscrutable) for the adoption of good or evil” (Kant 1996, 71). The good will cannot divide itself from radical evil without dividing itself from its ties to the living world. Because we the living can only hope for (and, in hope, work toward) divine justice, we are always tempted to abandon hope and declare our work at an end. Theodicy succumbs to the temptation to abandon God Accused 361 hope because it seeks to turn hope for divine justice into the demonstrated certainty that justice already exists. That is why theodicy, arising from the failure of hope to sustain itself in the face of unredeemed suffering, is a defense not so much of God as of Hell. In what space remains to me, I want to sketch a few key moments in the assault on theodicy that I see as central to the tradition of thinking about justice that emerges from the Hebrew Bible. Violence against the other is prohibited, in the biblical tradition, because God is revealed as the unique being (the Holy One) who redeems a group of humans from slavery to Pharaoh. Redemption is a historic process rather than a concern of the individual soul, and it requires collective action. The Deuteronomic Sabbath command (5:14–15) sanctifies the seventh day as both a memorial to and repetition of the redemption of the slave. In my first foray into biblical studies over twenty years ago, I argued that the Sabbath commandment in the so-called Book of the Covenant (Exodus 23:12) ended with a play on words (va’yinafesh ben-amatcha v’haggar; “so that the son of the bondwoman and the stranger may refresh themselves”) that points back to the narrative in chapter 21 of Genesis that tells of the expulsion of the Ishmael (referred to only as ben-amah, the son of the bondwoman) and Hagar (Rosenstock 1992). Preceded by two verses in which God warns Israel against afflicting the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor because “I will hear [eshma] their cry” (Exodus 22:23, 22:27), the Book of the Covenant reinforces the link between the Sabbath law (and, indeed, the rest of the law code) and the story of Ishmael (“and God heard the voice of the lad”). The Sabbath commandment in the Book of the Covenant, therefore, explains the Israelite sanctification of the seventh day as the reparation of the injustice perpetrated on Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael, and on his mother, Hagar. The Deuteronomic Sabbath commandment is written from out of the experience of slavery’s injustice; the Book of the Covenant’s Sabbath commandment is written from out of the experience of the perpetrator’s responsibility to make reparation for the infliction of injustice. What separates the Greek and the biblical conceptions of justice is not only that the first emphasizes the benefit of justice to the individual while the second stresses the redemption of the other from injustice and the need of the perpetrator to offer reparation to her victim. There is also a chasm between the temporality of these two versions of justice. In the Greek version, the perpetration of injustice unbalances the soul and leads to its punishment, the loss of the soul’s self-mastery, the loss of what the Greeks called sophrosyne. We may aptly take Plato’s analysis of the dissolution of the unjust soul (and its counterpart, the unjust city) in the final books of the Republic as the classic expression of the temporal unfolding of injustice as the ever-intensifying immiseration of 362 Rosenstock the soul. Plato insists that there is an inexorable logic to injustice that links the perpetration of injustice to its punishment. In addition to the philosophical demonstration of the growing immiseration of the increasingly unbalanced soul from the timocrat to the tyrant, Plato offers a concluding myth in the Republic, the myth of Er, in which he displays the nature of the soul’s purgative punishment in the afterlife. Plato assigns unending torment to only the most egregious perpetrators of injustice. The thousand-year cycle of purgation restores the soul to its original condition. Thus, the soul’s immiseration in this life is carried forward as its re-education in the afterlife. The soul’s suffering from injustice is thus balanced by its restoration to a condition that enables it to live a just (and, therefore, happy) existence. Although the soul unbalances itself and, consequently, the cosmos itself through its acts of injustice, there is a reciprocal restoration of the balance and maintenance of cosmic justice with every act. No injustice goes unpunished, and no punishment is unjustified, since, in the end, it leads the soul (except for the few who commit the most heinous crimes) to happiness. Plato’s version of the punishment of injustice and the restoration of the unjust soul to justice lies behind Origen’s conception of the ultimate restoratio ad integrum of the individual and the cosmos. Origen rejects the idea of eternal damnation as incompatible with God’s perfect justice. Origen, good Platonist that he was, could not countenance the eternal immiseration of the soul. Cosmic justice, or divine justice, must restore all things to a perfect balance. Injustice would be punished, and the suffering of the unjust soul would be transformed into blessedness. But Plato (and Origen) does not share the Bible’s temporality of justice. We have seen that the Sabbath commandments in Deuteronomy and the Book of the Covenant create a recurrent enactment of justice as redemption and reparation. There is no progressive education of the unjust soul through punishment, nor is there an instantaneous immiseration of the soul in every act of injustice that it commits. Because the focus in the Bible is not on the perpetrator of injustice but on its victim, there is no conception of suffering as the justified punishment of the perpetrator or of punishment as compensating for the suffering of the victim. The suffering of the victim is not redemptive, nor is the punishment of the perpetrator reparative. Suffering never serves the end of justice; suffering is always an affront against justice. Suffering “cries out” to God; the just God will hear the cry, but He is impotent to justify the suffering. (It is interesting that the narrative of Ishmael’s expulsion in Genesis 21 seems to compensate him by making him the father of a great nation, but the Book of the Covenant still makes the Sabbath into an unending reparation for the wrong that God himself inflicted on Ishmael through the agency of Abraham.) This, then, is one lesson of the Sabbath: that no human temporality can redeem or repair an injustice once God Accused 363 perpetrated. The Sabbath, at least as it is represented in Deuteronomy and the Book of the Covenant, is a powerful “no!” to theodicy. In this respect, one could perhaps describe the book of Job as the trial of the Sabbath: is the meaning of the Sabbath destroyed because it does not lead to greater happiness in the rest of the week? Can one day of justice suffice against six of injustice? The Bible’s answer is simple: the Sabbath has nothing to do with theodicy. The Sabbath is all the justice the world will ever possess. Theodicy, to use my favorite Yiddish word pair, is merely vockedik; justice is yontovdik. So the human task is to keep the Sabbath. This keeping or guarding refuses to let the worldliness of the world have the last word. The world declares that the human is made to serve its ends (some would go as far as to say that we are only vehicles for the selfish gene), but the Sabbath was made for the human being. Keeping the Sabbath— remembering and enacting ongoing creation as an ever-renewed process of redemption from suffering—guards the human and creation from falling into the void of what Walter Benjamin, adopting the phrase from Henri Bergson, called “empty, homogeneous time.” Theodicy, a neologism coined by G. W. Leibniz, comes from two Greek words, theos and dike. The Greek word dike can mean “justice,” but Leibniz uses it in its more common Greek meaning, “court case” or “case for the defense.” As a Latin translation of theodicy, Leibniz offers “casus Dei,” which Moses Mendelssohn translated into German as “Sache Gottes,” the title for his version of Leibniz’s Theodicy. The Latin and German phrases clearly indicate that “theodicy” is meant to refer to “the defense case for God.” Why should there be a need to write a defense case for God? Clearly, part of the reason is that God refused to offer one for Himself. The book of Job is framed by a court scene. Satan, the accusing angel, brings a charge against Job: his justice is based only on the reward he has received for his just behavior. We might put it this way: Satan charges Job with being a Greek at heart. To be sure, Plato’s just philosopher in the Republic looks for no extrinsic reward for his justice. The philosopher is just because a balanced soul is a happy soul, in tune with God and the cosmos. But while Plato’s philosopher would value justice even if he were deprived of all extrinsic rewards, including the reputation of justice, he would not value justice if he did not see his justice writ large in the cosmos, that is, if he did not glimpse the Idea of Good suffusing the realms of Being and Becoming. But this is just what Job is expected to do: hold to justice even when it seems that God and the world are not just. Job holds to justice precisely when the cosmos seems out of joint. Biblical justice, like the Sabbath, is not of the world. It is not like Anaximander’s dike that immanently governs the order of coming-to-be and passing-away in the world. Biblical justice is a “no!” cried out against the world’s claims to embody justice; it is a cry to God for redemption 364 Rosenstock and reparation. God hears and makes justice visible not in vochedik time but in yontovdik time. So God does not offer a defense, an apologia, before Job. Satan has lost his case without God’s having to speak for Himself since Job never ceased to cling to justice. Job never ceased to cling to justice because he never ceased to cry for justice. Satan, representing the Greek view of justice, was bested not by an argument but by a just human being. To Plato’s great credit, he understood that all the arguments in the world in favor of justice could only dimly imitate the embodied instantiation of justice in one human being, Socrates. When Leibniz undertook to write his Theodicy and give God the defense case He seemed to lack, he did so because, for him, the Greek view of justice had so triumphed over the biblical view that it no longer made sense to speak about God’s justice as the response to the cry of the sufferer, whose “eternal sign” (ot l’olam) is the Sabbath. How could someone who believed that God sustained a “pre-established harmony” among monadic individuals have any faith in a justice for the suffering individual, a justice that was out of joint with this world? The eternal and the temporal did not meet on the Sabbath for Leibniz; time as a whole was for Leibniz nothing more than what Plato said it was: the moving image (in each monadic representation) of eternity. No philosophy could be more opposed to the biblical view of the Sabbath as the eternal sign of God’s justice than Leibniz’s. I feel compelled as a Jewish thinker to reaffirm Sabbath justice in opposition to all theodical thinking, all thinking that either draws a connection between suffering and guilt or that makes innocent suffering into a form of atonement for guilt or into an occasion for learning and self-improvement. The Sabbath commandment in Deuteronomy and the Book of the Covenant acknowledges the reality of unjust suffering but does not attempt to justify it. Enslavement to Pharaoh allowed the children of Israel to “know the life [nefesh] of the slave” (Exodus 23:9) and, therefore, enabled them to understand the importance of the Sabbath as a day on which the slave must be freed from her obligation to work. But the enslavement to Pharaoh is not thereby justified, as little as a slave’s Sabbath rest justifies six days of uncompensated work. To be sure, the Bible recognizes the legality of the institution of slavery, but the Sabbath commandment in Deuteronomy is a resounding denunciation of the justice of the hierarchy of master and slave. If a slaveholder believed that, by granting his slaves a day of rest, he justified keeping them in bondage, he would be desecrating the Sabbath. But to think theodically about the Sabbath is a deep temptation, as the book known as Jubilees attests. (For the authoritative English translation, see Charlesworth 1985, 2:35–142.) Jubilees is certainly one of the most audacious of all Jewish reflections on the meaning of the Sabbath. It was likely written sometime around the Maccabean uprising in the middle of the second century BCE. Jubilees presents God Accused 365 itself as a revelation given to Moses when he ascended Mt. Sinai. We learn that the Sabbath has always been celebrated by the angels who were brought into being on the first day of creation (Jubilees 2:2). The celebration of the Sabbath by humans is for Israel alone among the nations (2:31). Jubilees links the Sabbath to justice in a fundamental way, but it breaks decisively with the Bible’s understanding of Sabbath. It makes the Sabbath into a test that divides the just from the unjust. It lifts the elect into the realm of the angels and con- signs all others to destruction and death. The Sabbath in Jubilees has nothing to do with the justice of redemption from suffering or reparation for victims of injustice. It has become a way to separate the elect of Israel from the irrepa- rable injustice of the nations. Jubilees looks on injustice as if it were a polluting miasma that so thoroughly infects a nation as to leave no one innocent. To celebrate the Sabbath properly is to stand on the side of the obedient angels; not to celebrate the Sabbath is to stand on the side of the fallen angels (Jubilees 5:1ff). The key moment in the history of humanity is the Flood when the justice of God is enacted on the utterly corrupted flesh of humans and beasts through the sexual transgressions of the angels and the “daughters of men.” Only one man, Noah, is just and deserves to live (his wife and sons are saved through his merit). The great sin of the “mixed” generation among whom Noah lived was that humans and beasts alike “began to eat one another” (Jubilees 5:2). After the Flood, God commands Noah never to consume blood (the life of the animal), and the festival of Sabbaths (Shavuot) is enjoined on all humanity to remember this commandment. No nation, however, remembers this commandment, and only Abraham preserves the commandment. Only Israel—and really only an elect among them—refuses to consume living blood, keeping the Sabbath and the festival of Shavuot properly as it is ordained in Jubilees. The text offers a solar calendar of 364 days divided into fifty-two weeks, with each of the biblical holidays falling always on the same day of the week. (We know that the Qumran community followed this calendar since we are told in one scroll about an attack on them led by the high priest launched on Yom Kippur, something impossible if they held to the same calendar.) We possess in Jubilees an audacious reconstruction of the Bible in which the question of justice and the Sabbath is paramount. Written during a time of extraordinary persecution, it asks, Why does Israel suffer at the hands of the nations? It answers: Because Israel has confused the times of the festivals and desecrated the Sabbath. When will God’s justice be established? When Israel returns to the law of the Sabbath as it was handed down to the angels on the seventh day of Creation. What is the source of injustice? The corruption of reproduction, an essential ingredient in maintaining creation, into a source of illicit pleasure. It is quite likely that Jubilees emerges from a strict Sabbath-observing community identified as “Assidaioi” in Greek (likely transliterating “Hasidim” 366 Rosenstock in Hebrew) in the second book of Maccabees (see 7:9, 11, 22). They martyred themselves on the Sabbath rather than go out to battle against the Seleucid troops. They believed that abstention from both work and sex on the Sabbath was a way to imitate the pure, Sabbath-observing, sexless angels in heaven. Jubilees, although preserved in a nearly complete Ethiopic translation, was originally written in Hebrew, and fragments of this text were found among the hidden scrolls at Qumran. It is clear why this text would appeal to a community that believed an apocalyptical battle between angels of light and angels of darkness would soon bring history to a close. Martin Buber has eloquently described the difference between prophetic and apocalyptic understandings of history, and, while the two perhaps do not stand as radically opposed as he imagined, it is certainly the case that it is a distortion of the biblical tradition to read it as a blueprint for keeping oneself pure of all involvement with a fallen world condemned to perdition by God. To recover the biblical tradition that refuses to treat the Sabbath as a way to divide the just from the unjust in an apocalyptic Urteil, I am helped by the traditional liturgy for the Sabbath. In fact, it is not too far-fetched to view this liturgy as a deliberate rejection of the Sabbath thinking revealed in Jubilees. The Amidah of the Sabbath Maariv (evening) service refers to God’s blessing of the seventh day in Genesis 2:1–3 after the six days of Creation. In the Schachrit (morning) service, the Sabbath commandment Exodus 31:16–17 (“The children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath . . . as an everlasting covenant; it is an everlasting sign”) is quoted. In the Minchah (afternoon) service, the Amidah no longer quotes from the Torah but rather includes a reflection on the Sabbath as a day of rest (m’nuchah). The opening of the reflection invokes the oneness of God and of His name (“You are one and your name is one”), and, after seven occurrences of the word “rest,” the reflection circles back to the “your name”: “by their rest they shall sanctify your name.” If we recall that “to sanctify the name” can mean “to die as a martyr,” we are entitled to say that, for the rabbis, the Sabbath menuchah is not intended to have death as its highest expression. Finally, immediately after the Amidah has been repeated aloud, there are several verses from the Psalms that are said by the entire congregation, with the word “justice” (or “righteousness”) as the leitmotif, beginning with “Your justice [tzedakah] is an everlasting justice” and ending with “Your judgments are a great tehom [watery depth]; you, Lord, save [toshia] human and beast.” Franz Rozenzweig drew attention to the movement from Creation (Maariv) through Revelation (Schachrit) to Redemption (Minchah) as the fundamental structure of the Sabbath liturgy, making the day into an embodiment of the three interconnected moments of God’s relationship to the world, Israel, and humanity. The liturgy does not divide Israel from the nations but rather places God Accused 367

Israel squarely between two moments of universal significance for all human beings: Creation and Redemption. But there is more to be said about the final moment—the redemption of humanity—reflected in the Minchah Amidah and its concluding verses from the Psalms. The theme of “rest” (and the use of the verb of the same root) recalls the story of Noah, which is a story about the justice of God (“Noah was perfectly righteous in his generation”) in which God decrees destruction on all flesh “from human to beast” (Genesis 6:7). The destruction involves the opening of the springs of the “great watery depth” (Genesis 7:11), as well as the “windows of heaven.” The renewal of Creation after the flood is clearly invoked in the Sabbath Minchah Amidah when read in conjunction with the verses from the Psalms that are added after its repetition. The justice of God that will be consummated with the redemption of humanity—the peace and rest that depends on the acknowledgment of the oneness of God and His name—is visible in the covenant of the rainbow as an “eternal sign” that the workaday, profane life of the world (seedtime and harvest) “will not cease.” There has not been any moral progress since the first Creation, to be sure. God “repented” (Genesis 6:6) of his creation and sought to destroy it, but in the covenant of the rainbow he withdraws from his strict judgment and binds himself to the covenant, despite the fact that “the inclination of the heart of the human is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). God “speaks to his heart” (Genesis 8:21) declaring that He will never again curse the earth because of humanity. But there will be another “eternal sign,” a sign that life has a plane of existence beyond the cycle of ceaseless (shabbat-less) alternation. This sign is the Sabbath. The covenant with the world that gives it time (a sort of time of reprieve, what Jacob Taubes called Galgenfrist) does nothing, however, to answer the question of unjust suffering. The Sabbath is the consummation of (re-)Creation, the justice (of continuing redemption and reparation) beyond judgment (of destruction). The judgment (mishpat) of God would reduce the world to a watery chaos (tehom) at the sight of the violence (hamas) that fills it. Only God’s withdrawal from this judgment can stay the decree of destruction. Jubilees never lifts the decree of destruction from humanity. It promises salvation to a remnant who remains pure, untouched by the injustice around them. But the Bible stays the decree and offers time so that another justice can enter the world, the justice that responds to the cry of those who suffer, who are eaten alive by violence. Although the repetition of the Amidah includes the Kedushah in which the congregation identifies with the praise-singing seraphim, neither the Bible nor the rabbis place Israel’s celebration of the Sabbath in the context of an ongoing angelic celebration that keeps its distance from the world’s injustice. Apocalyptic judgment is fore- sworn. The Bible brings the Sabbath into the world so that those who suffer 368 Rosenstock may know that their cries are heard. Their cries are heard because we do not cease to cry for justice. Their cries are ours. I believe that a fundamental rethinking of what I am calling “Sabbath justice” needs to be informed first of all by a return to the biblical text and to whatever can help us uncover its antitheodical import, whether this involves contrasting it with a work like Jubilees or Plato’s Republic or whether it involves later rabbinic commentary, including, of course, Jewish liturgy. Let me now, in fact, turn to one more piece of liturgy, a piyyut from the Yom Kippur mar- tyrology service, that I believe can inform a reflection about the opposition to theodicy in the Jewish tradition. My reading of it is inspired by an only recently published early work of Gershom Scholem on the book of Jonah, “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice” (Scholem 1999). Scholem’s exegesis of the book of Jonah argues that divine justice is not revealed in judgment but rather in the suspension of the judgment. Jonah is sent on a mission to announce God’s judgment on Nineveh, but he balks at fulfilling his task because it seems to him that judgment should be swiftly enacted or, if it is announced beforehand, it should never be revoked. Scholem goes as far as to suggest that the world itself is held in existence through the suspension of a divine judgment that would annihilate the world because of its injustice. In the so-called Ten Martyrs piyyut of the Yom Kippur Musaf service, I would argue, we find a poetic expression of Scholem’s claim. In this piyyut, we are made privy to a dialogue between God and his angelic host concerning the justice of the suffering of ten martyred rabbis after the Roman suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt. The piyyut describes an accusation against God’s justice made by the seraphim as they witness the suffering of the first victim, Rabbi Yishmael: “Is this the Torah and is this its reward?” God responds: “If I hear another sound, I will transform the universe into tohu va’vohu, waste and void.” God’s response at first seems to be a threat intended to silence the seraphim: How dare you accuse me of injustice? But another reading, I would claim, is more consistent with the deep tension within Jewish tradition about the relation of God’s justice to the injustice of the created world. Rather than take God’s response to be a rebuke, I believe that God’s response reveals that the world’s continued existence depends on God’s withholding or suspension of his justice in its full, transcendent power. Divine justice, were it to be fully revealed, would annihilate the world. The injustice done to Rabbi Yishmael is not part of a “divine plan,” nor will his suffering be balanced by any reward he may find in the world to come. Like the book of Job, the piyyut articulates the irresolvable challenge posed to divine justice by the world’s injustice. Only their commitment to preserving creation (and not their fear of God) holds the seraphim back from repeating their accusation. The liturgical performance of the piyyut, God Accused 369 however, means that every Yom Kippur the Jews, assuming the voice of the seraphim, accuse God, every year the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, and every year creation is preserved by a reaffirmation, one might say, of Being rather than Nothing or, put differently, of Creation rather than Perdition. I can think of no sharper contrast between the community imagined in Jubilees who seeks to imitate the purity of the angels in obedience to the judgment of God than the community called into being by this piyyut. Justice is not done on earth, and it is our responsibility to awaken God and ourselves to the gap that no theodicy can fill. Martyrdom does not call on those who witness it to praise God but to accuse God. (This is why the most powerful and the most human moment in the New Testament is the cry of Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) Nor should it inspire expectations of reward (the Jubilees community invented the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead to answer this need), or of vengeance wreaked eternally upon the bodies of the perpetrators. The rabbis decreed that one must desecrate the Sabbath to save a life, including one’s own, because on the Sabbath one chooses life. Choosing life, I would argue, is to turn away from the temptation of radical evil, the abandonment of hope in the possibility of a future that is not under the judgment of fate, the dead hand of the past. I want to conclude with a reflection about the contrasting nature of philosophy’s task as it presented in the two texts from 1935, one claiming to return to the roots of the Greek tradition and the other to the roots of the biblical tradition: Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Oskar Goldberg’s Maimonides: Kritik der jüdischen Glaubenslehre (Maimonides: Critique of the Jewish Belief System) (Goldberg 1935). Goldberg is today little known, but his “Hebrew metaphysics” deserves renewed attention. His central claim is that Greek thought and Hebrew metaphysics differ fundamentally on the question of theodicy. Greek thought seeks to make the world’s injustice compatible with God’s perfection. Hebrew metaphysics affirms God as imperfect, as incapable of overcoming the world’s injustice without the assistance of humans. Goldberg argued that the fundamental question of the Hebrew Bible is “If God is all- powerful, why then did he create an imperfect world?” Goldberg goes on to explain: “The question why God has created an imperfect world order relates to something that is outside God and leads by right to the question of theodicy: why is the order of things unjust? Why does one man experience undeserved good and another, undeserved evil?” Because God is just and the world is not, God must himself enter into the world: “Because God has created an imperfect world order, on the grounds of justice, he can only permit this if he himself, as the guarantor of justice, enters into it” (55–56). Goldberg’s book answers Heidegger’s famous restatement of the basic question of metaphysics: “Why 370 Rosenstock are there beings rather than nothing?” in his 1935 lectures at the University of Freiburg (later published under the title An Introduction to Metaphysics) by saying, in effect, “There are beings rather than nothing because God’s entrance into the world has deferred the judgment upon the world that would be enacted in accordance with his justice.” Heidegger takes another approach, one that reinterprets the question of theodicy—why is there injustice?—as the Seinsfrage, the question of Being. He argues that the question about why there are beings rather than nothing opens humans to their historic task. He claims that beings are out of joint because the human has, in the modern period, failed to assume his true historic task, which is to take responsibility for the violence of Being: “In accordance with its history-disclosing essence, being- human is . . . the happening of that strangest being of all, in whom through violence, through acts of power [Gewalt-Tätigkeiten], the overpowering is made manifest and made to stand” (Heidegger 1961, 143). For Heidegger, justice is standing firm in the decision to enter the ranks of those who will enact the most strange and terrible [deinotaton] violence of Being. We are again in the eschatological realm of world-destroying judgment. Goldberg calls on the Jews to take responsibility for their historic task, which is precisely to forgo violence and assist God in bringing creation to completion through the unfolding of an immanent divinity who precisely withholds Himself from enacting His transcendent world-destroying power. Both Heidegger and Goldberg see history as poised on the brink of annihilation. Both see the great task of moment to rest with those humans whose deeds will be, as they both say, a new revelation. Heidegger, reverting to the Greek concept of dike (justice), calls his students to prepare themselves for the violent overthrow of the present order. Goldberg, relying on the biblical concept of justice, asks his Jewish readers to prepare themselves to “become prophets, ones who make it possible for miracles to occur” (1935, 74). Jewish philosophy, if it is to be true to its biblical roots, must have the courage to accuse God, even at the risk that the world might revert to tohu va’vohu. Jewish philosophy, like the congregation singing the piyyut in the martyrdology of Yom Kippur, stands in the midst of a world hanging in the balance and assumes the burden of crying like the prophets for justice against the midat ha’din of judgment. Then, maybe, the miracle will occur: hope is given to us for one more day.

References

Cavell, Stanley. 2002. Must We Mean What We Say? Updated ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. God Accused 371

Charlesworth, James H., ed. 1985. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. Dick, Philip K. 2009. Valis and Later Novels. Edited by Jonathan Lethem. New York: Library of America. Goldberg, Oskar. 1935. Maimonides: Kritik der jüdischen Glaubenslehre. Wien: Verlag Dr. Heinrich Glanz. Heidegger, Martin. 1961. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Religion and Rational Theology. Translated by Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, Immanuel. 2006. Entre Nous. Translated by Michael B. Smith. London: Continuum. Rosenstock, Bruce. 1992. “The Sabbath Commandment in the Book of the Covenant.” Conservative Judaism 44: 37–49. ———. 2010. Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond. New York: Fordham University Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1999. “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice.” Translated by Eric J. Schwab. Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2: 353–61. Vlastos, Gregory. 1957–58. “The Paradox of Socrates.” Queens Quarterly 64: 496–516. Reprinted in Vlastos 1971, 9–21. ———, ed. 1971. The Philosophy of Socrates. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. chapter 18 Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier

Tamar Ross

My initial foray into the field of Jewish thought was propelled by motives that might now be regarded as belonging to another age. I had no vision of entering academia professionally, nor, for that matter, did I attach any grand career plans to my studies. I had just arrived to Israel as a teen-age immigrant. As such, I was hoping to enrich my Jewish background by taking courses in that area regarding which the Hebrew University of Jerusalem most prided itself— that is, Jewish studies—and was indeed recognized as its world leader. After dabbling in Hebrew literature and in Jewish history for my first degree, I finally settled into the area of Jewish philosophy and mysticism for my MA and PhD, in part because of my Orthodox religious background and interests. At that time (circa 1956), opportunities open to women for advanced study of traditional Jewish sources were extremely limited. Had I been a male, I most likely would have opted for a few years in a yeshiva to develop my Talmudic skills. But as things then stood, I was very grateful for this entrée into academia. As my studies progressed, I even came to feel that exposure to the philological, textual, and historical tools of Wissneschaft des Judentums (that is, the so-called scientific study of Judaism) that then reigned in Hebrew University granted me an unforeseen advantage. As opposed to the concentration on isolated texts that typifies traditional study, I was now being provided with a panoramic view of the entire range of Jewish thought. In this respect, I felt a sense of one-upmanship over my yeshiva contemporaries who, beyond their exposure to a limited group of texts that were regarded as the classics of Jewish thought, usually had less awareness of the particular context of any individual contribution or its relative standing within the whole. However, my interest in Jewish thought was not motivated merely by a wish to master this body of thought for its own sake. Driving my engagement with the intellectual baggage of Jewish tradition was also a spiritual quest, a desire to reinforce identification with a theological legacy to which I was committed by both birth and upbringing. To make it my own, I felt the need to somehow translate its tenets and render them intelligible in more universal terms, as defined by the acknowledged certainties of a broader philosophical

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_�2� Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 373 and scientific milieu in which I was equally immersed. Admittedly, even as a novice, I was aware of potential clashes between internal and external views of religious doctrine. Nevertheless, my basic trust in both led to a conviction that the two could somehow be reconciled in a manner that would be mutually enriching. In retrospect, it is likely that my choice, many years later, to devote my doctoral thesis (Ross 1986b) to the educational philosophy of several disciples of the Musar movement (founded by R. Yisrael Salanter in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century) was at least partially a product of this wish to create a bridge between academia and my Jewish identity. As Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, one of the more recent representatives of the movement, put it, the entire point of the Musar movement was a declaration of war against Western intellectualism and its foolish belief that abstract thought is the key to internalizing wisdom (Wolbe 1963, 31). In the view of the Musar teachers, the most desirable type of knowledge is that which merges somehow with one’s essential being, unlike “dry reason” and “cold logic” that occupy no place in the heart. Thus, it might be claimed that my very attempt to examine the teachings of this movement via application of the same scientific tools that Musar rejected in principle was an inherent paradox. Surely, the Musar teachers themselves would have treated the effort to translate their prioritizing of emotional knowledge into the theoretical language of academia with a great measure of skepticism, if not scorn. Yet a strong factor attracting me to this movement, in its antirationalist aspects at least, was the challenge of confronting an educational approach that embraced a fundamentalist view of truth, demanding that the believer subju- gate his will a priori to its demands, while dismissing all contrary insights stemming from independent human reason, natural morality, or life experience as deceptive fabrications of the evil urge.

Despite this interest in bridging potential gaps between my spiritual and intellectual identity by personally engaging with the classics of Jewish thought (Wohlgelernter 1958), my academic activity was initially also very much affected by the approach of historical positivism characterizing Jewish scholarly research at the time I began my studies. By historical positivism, I refer to the understanding that the aim of Jewish studies is to reconstruct an objective replica of the past, completely detached from the subjective standpoint of the scholar in question. Towering over the Department of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University at that time was the charismatic figure of Professor Gershom 374 Ross

Scholem, who was the representative par excellence of this understanding. Admittedly, Scholem struggled hard to perfect the methods of historical research and could not be accused of the academic naïveté that characterized some of the staunchest supporters of this school of thought or of blindness as to the impact of the scholar’s prior values, expectations, and standards on his work. Nevertheless, it is well known that his scholarly career began as a polemic against nineteenth-century Wissenschft des Jundentums because he believed that this school of research had failed dismally in its task of scientific objectivity. And, indeed, Scholem’s approach of historical positivism, which sought to map out Jewish thought in the form of “major trends” and schools and to understand its essence and development in light of disinterested, unbi- ased historical and philological sleuthing, dominated those years. The pride of this approach, which could be categorized as Jewish intellectual history, was its pretension to freedom from personal biases or ideological interests. In a broader sense, however, this historicism was related to more general notions of truth as grounded in ultimate, indubitable, or self-certifying propositions and of truth seeking as the attempt to capture existing, predefined verities in the physical or metaphysical world by reaching down to the firm and stable foundations on which they rested. The corroboration of particular truth-claims, be they scientific historical, philosophical, or theological, was, therefore, to be conducted on some neutral territory “out there” and to be judged only in terms of their correspondence to these foundations. My identification with this historicist approach and its faith in the power of disinterested scholarship supported placing any existential stakes I might have in the objects of my study on a back burner in the interests of intellectual honesty. The main purpose of my research, as then conceived, was to reconstruct the classical sources of Jewish thought in terms of their original authorial intent, without overmuch consideration of their contemporary import. More significantly, however, this understanding of the relationship between truth and reality spilled over to my religious views as well. Rather than glorification of unquestioning obedience to religious dogma and reconstruction of the religious personality in its light, I understood that the confrontation of my Orthodox beliefs with more universally accepted propositions mandated sub- jecting them to the same exacting standards of neutrality and reason posed by scientific research. Given this foundationalist orientation (that is, the notion that the “edifice” of all human knowledge must inevitably emerge from the staunchly solid and universal foundations of reason), my disenchantment with the Musar preference for binding the intellect to a predetermined and unsophisticated vision of truth was more or less a foregone conclusion. Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 375

As a matter of fact, foundationalism was and still is the general approach assumed by most of my coreligionists (particularly those engaged in the natural sciences), to the extent that they are exposed to rival truth-claims. These proponents of the approach known as Torah u-madda generally understand both Torah and science as vying in the same ballpark, in the attempt to capture objective reality. Thus, they conclude, each discipline’s truth should be tested and measured by the same standards. In the event of ostensible clashes, one rendition must be correct and the other not. Thus, the method most commonly employed by defenders of the faith in responding to conflicts between traditionalist descriptions of reality and those of science is that of the apologist, appropriating the rationalist tools of science itself to demonstrate the inadequacy of the scientific conclusion. Conflicts that cannot be resolved in this manner are eliminated by distinguishing somehow between the content of religious statements and their literary form of expression. This involves adopting metaphoric, allegoric, or symbolic understandings of problematic religious propositions to align them more closely with the conclusions of science. Alternatively, the limitations of the scientific conclusion are demonstrated by pointing to the contingent nature of some of the assumptions to which it is bound. Thus, the rival claims of science and religion may be integrated and synthesized in a manner that resolves the apparent contradiction between them. In the tradition of Jewish thought, I found much support for the Torah u-madda position. Beyond polemic attempts on the part of religiously committed scholars to debunk scientific infallibility on its own terms, which began with challenges of the Enlightenment period and continue to the present day, Moses Maimonides and his well-known stance that whenever a passage in the Torah is contradicted by conclusive evidence one should set aside the literal meaning and understand the Torah passage allegorically appeared to be a notable groundbreaker in this regard (Maimonides 1963, II:25). The same could be said for the mystical tradition and its opposition to taking the meaning of biblical texts at face value (Zohar III, 149b). This too opened the floodgate to much interpretive freedom. Nevertheless, my exposure as a student of Jewish thought to the broader vistas of the social sciences and the humanities (history, archeology, comparative religion, literary criticism, and the like) raised a host of questions undermining a positivist view of religious truth-claims from another, qualitatively different, perspective. After partaking of the forbidden fruit of that Tree of Knowledge, relying on a combination of localized solutions to individual problems seemed woefully inadequate to the task of responding to an ever-growing list of difficulties surrounding traditional accounts of the 376 Ross literary genesis of the Torah; anachronisms, inaccuracies, and contradictions in its view of reality, science and history; implausible descriptions of miraculous events; time- and culture-bound limitations in its theological and moral perceptions. The motley collection of patches applied in piecemeal fashion to various holes riddling the religious narrative began to lose their persuasive power when such flaws could be resolved so much more elegantly by one simple naturalistic explanation that left God and metaphysics out of the picture. Without consciously abandoning the Torah u-madda approach, I found myself increasingly drawn to reflections of a more philosophical nature, regarding the relationship between knowledge, truth, and reality. In retrospect I understand that this may have already been prompted by an intuitive sense that the solution somehow lay there.

III

One of the first schools of thought that drew my attention in this regard was the double-truth theory promoted by the Averroists in medieval times. These Islamic thinkers and their Christian and Jewish counterparts sought to divide between the function and intended audience of scientific and religious statements. While the first were understood as precise descriptions of reality addressed to the intellectual elite, the latter were taken to refer to political truths designed for the masses, in order to ensure the orderly running of society. Another variation on this concept was the perspectivist view of the fifteenth-century Maharal, who posited the simultaneous existence of two universal orders: the physical and the metaphysical. Rather than understanding miracles as an abrogation of the fixed laws of nature, this bifurcated notion of truth allowed him to explain them as resulting simply from the perceptual ability of the virtuous to rise above the limited vision of the natural order and to live in accordance with the added dimension of possibilities that always exists on the higher, metaphysical plane (Ross 1986a). Despite the ingenuity of these theories, however, they too—like the allegorical and symbolical readings of the rationalists and the mystics—had limited value in providing a comprehensive explanation for the vast variety of humanlike imprints undermining the authority of a tradition grounded on its claims to divine origin. Far more compelling in this regard was the thought of the twentieth-century mystic Rabbi A. I. Kook. Although Rabbi Kook is best known to the wider public because of the political views attributed to him (not always with justice) regarding Jewish nationalism, messianism, the Jewish state, and the obligation Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 377 of establishing Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel even by force, I was first drawn to his writings for other reasons. Initially, his letters and personal diaries captured my heart because they appeared to me as the reflections of a unique and saintly individual, possessed of an intense inner life venturing into uncharted spiritual territory. I was struck by the evidence he offered that even a person in our day, one who walked through the same Jerusalem streets that I did and was still remembered by people that I knew, was capable of witnessing dimensions of experience beyond the common and the everyday that were reminiscent of the prophets of old. But beyond the fascination of his personal qualities and the poetry of his soul, the originality, audacity, and sweep of Rabbi Kook’s intellectual world was dazzling. Here was a traditional eastern European rabbi totally immersed (and with an encyclopedic knowledge of) all major and minor classical Jewish sources, yet highly aware and attentive to contemporary currents in the world at large. This led him to develop some remarkably startling and unconventional views. Rabbi Kook’s works are not absent of apologetic impulses. Yet alongside these, he was not shy of confessing to antinomistic urges or of discovering true value in heretical tendencies and in attitudes and opinions developed independently via sources external to the religious system and of seeking to incorporate their benefits into his religious worldview. As a result, I found in his writings kernels of thought that, when combined in systematic fashion, could provide the basis for a theological approach that, unlike Torah u-madda, would be capable of acknowledging the more radical challenges of scientific scholarship with full intellectual integrity yet preserve the authority of Jewish tradition intact. As I continued to delve into Rabbi Kook’s spiritual world, struggling to deci- pher his unique, cryptic terminology and to unravel his learned multilayered allusions, it gradually dawned on me that the primary key to his unusual openness was his view of the relationship between knowledge and reality and its mystical roots (Ross 1982a, 1982b). Classical Kabbalah had already appropriated the Neoplatonic notion of creation as a series of worlds emanating in linear fashion from the infinite One. While this model avoided the paradoxical concept of creation ex nihilo, it did not explain how there could be room for anything other than God, whose absolute unity fills all. The sixteenth-century mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria attempted to resolve this dilemma by developing the daring notion of tzimtzum, according to which the act of divine emanation— like every creative endeavor—was preceded by an act of withdrawal, thereby forming an empty space that would allow for finite existence. This concept, however, raised new theological difficulties, such as the impossibility of applying attributing of time and change to infinity. Such difficulties prompted some 378 Ross of Luria’s disciples to interpret the doctrine of tzimtzum allegorically, suggesting that creation is merely a perceptual illusion. Despite the esoteric nature of Luria’s teachings and their interpretation, their practical import has been taken in many directions, cognitive, moral, and spiritual, and has had indirect impact on various schools of Jewish thought in modern times. Some varieties of Hasidism envisioned the ultimate religious ideal as breaking the veil of illusion, nullifying the false consciousness of separate existence, and merging with the undifferentiated One. Their Mitnaggedic opponents preferred to relegate such an acosmic and pantheistic understanding to the background of one’s religious consciousness. This mandated living life generally in accordance with the commonsense view while seeking direct connection with ultimate reality solely through the study of Torah and observance of His mitzvot. Rabbi Kook, by contrast, appeared to draw inspiration from both. On the one hand, he did not suffice with living the world of appearances; on the other hand, he did not set his sights on merging with God to a point verging on self-annihilation. Rather, he viewed the human ideal as repro- ducing a facsimile of divine existence in worldly terms by developing the urge to perfection to an infinite degree. By not denying the unique quality of each distinctive particle of creation but assuring its continued vitality by connect- ing it to the whole, this dynamic concept of unity supersedes that of static divine perfection from a human perspective, in that it allows for the exercise of free will and infinite growth. A by-product of this lofty view of human existence and creation at large is the manner in which Rabbi Kook understood the world of ideas. Truth is not the reflection of a static, rock-bottom reality that we must discover. It is constantly developing, in reaction to the ever-fluctuating network of relationships that we create with our surroundings. The more comprehensive its vision, obliterating the need for either-or choices between sharply defined options that are mutually exclusive, the more faithfully does our human formulation of truth reflect that all-inclusive unity that characterizes the reality that we term “God.” The measure of truth’s success is not, however, the degree of its correspondence to a “God’s-eye” view of “what is” (not the least of reasons for this being that, from God’s “point of view,” there is no room for distinguishing between subject and object or knowledge and existence), but rather its ability to cohere with all that surrounds it. It functions as a pragmatic tool, constructing a model of reality that helps us advance on the road to perfection as conceived in human terms, shifting and changing in accordance with the situation of the individual or society at large. Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 379

Exposure to this modern offshoot of classical Kabbalah was a watershed experience for me. After digesting its epistemological implications, the allegorical interpretation of the doctrine of tzimtzum struck me as remarkably reminiscent of what Emmanuel Kant termed his “Copernican revolution” in the theory of knowledge (while noting that these ideas indeed arose in Jewish circles in a nearly parallel time frame). The allegorical interpreters, like Kant, distinguished between the noumenal and phenomenal reality, identifying these instead as mitzido (God’s relationship to the world from His point of view) and mitzidenu (our understanding of God’s relationship to the world from our point of view), postulating, in addition, an ultimate reality wherein even the word God loses its meaning entirely, as God and the world are indistinguishable and beyond definition. Indeed, Rabbi Kook refers explicitly to Kant in this context, contending “we did not need Kant to reveal this secret to us—that all human cognitions are relative and subjective” (Kook 1985a, 44). However, Rabbi Kook distinguishes between what he regards as the Jewish view and Kantian agnos- ticism. Kant, as a descendant of pagans, still retains an idolatrous conception of God standing over and above the world. For this reason, he cannot assume with certainty any correlation between perceptions mediated through the fil- ters of human reason and the noumenal reality beyond. This is in contrast to the people of Israel, whose God is “the Source of all Sources,” enabling them to understand that even limited and subjective perceptions mitzidenu constitute some form of revelation (ibid.). Applying this relativist view of truth and falsehood to questions of the relationship between academic scholarship and the internal view of tradition, it was obvious that Rabbi Kook could not dismiss the challenges that reason or scholarly research might pose to established religious doctrine. This is not to deny that he expresses extreme aversion to the biblical critics of his day, attributing to them anti-Semitic motives. Occasionally, he also appeals to Torah u-madda-like arguments in rebutting the conclusions of science, enlist- ing nonliteral interpretations, notions of divine accommodation, or a latter- day version of the double-truth theory, similar to that of the late Professor Yeshayah Leibowitz, who sought to distinguish between statements of fact that are verified empirically and moral claims that are justified existentially. Thus, for example, when Rabbi Kook argues that “the Torah’s primary motive is not to tell us simple facts and events of the past” but rather to transmit their “inner meaning” (that is, their moral and spiritual significance; Kook 1985a, 163–64). But overshadowing these arguments is a fourth and more distinctive approach, 380 Ross which focuses less on the specific basis and content of any particular truth- claim than on its function. Preempting anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s observation that religious dogmas and symbols are both models of and models for human behavior (Geertz 1973), Rabbi Kook understands that religious truth-claims do not merely represent but also create spiritual attitudes and sensibilities that respond to an inbuilt yearning of all created beings for the divine. Following on his view of the Jewish God as an all-pervasive presence, he assumes that even the heretical challenges of science and reason to religious doctrine must also have their place in this cosmic thrust, identifying their main significance not in what they assert but rather in what they come to deny. On surface, their highlighting of deficiencies in our contemporary religious understanding is destructive, but—given the universal urge to perfection—this negative function ultimately serves as trigger to a more refined conception of our previously established pointers to the divine. Thus, Rabbi Kook concludes that the Torah can coexist with any scientific theory because—likes God Himself—it knows no bounds and is given to infinite meaning. Nevertheless, the particular challenges that we encounter at any given moment are not a matter of chance but rather a reflection of our current spiritual state and a reaction to its particular needs. Extrapolating from these ideas, I found Rabbi Kook’s understanding of the relationship between reality, truth, and religious dogma fertile ground for developing a view of Jewish tradition that I believed would allow me to approach academic scholarship honestly without compromising my traditional allegiances. The impetus for working out this view out more explicitly in writing was a by-product of the dramatic developments in the situation of Orthodox Jewish women that have occurred in recent years. The growing demand to rectify disparities between women’s subordinate halakhic status and their de facto standing in general society led me to divert my focus from the general clash between insider and outsider approaches to Jewish sources to specific issues arising from the confrontation between Jewish tradition and the feminist critique. Despite the blatant conflict between modern notions of justice and equality and the codified time-honored practices that such disparities reflected, the gravest challenge that feminism posed to Orthodoxy—as I saw it—was not the hot-button halakhic issues emerging on a practical level, Even on a more theological plane, what concerned me most was not the more common feminist complaint that, in promoting specifically male thought structures and paradigms, monotheism does injustice to religion and women, depriving humanity at large of women’s unique insights and spiritual concerns. Quite apart from questions of divine morality or the relatively minor representation of women’s Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 381 perspectives in the biblical account of God, history, and the world, the aspect that I found most troubling in the feminist critique was the more profound challenge that it appeared to pose to the central understanding upon which the authority of Jewish tradition has been based for millennia—that is, the very notion of divine revelation itself. To the extent that the biblical mind-set, its picture of reality, and its commitment to a hierarchical view of gender and a hegemonic social order reflect a stereotypically male point of view, its entire set of assumptions appears traceable to palpably “ungodly” forces in history, inevitably casting doubt on its divine character. If the feminist critique now compels us to acknowledge the traces of a pervasive male bias in the Torah so implicit and subtle that innocent readers may not even be aware of its existence, can we continue to regard this document as divine? Is it really describing God and the world in words that God has revealed to us, or might these words be merely the projection of our own wishes or social systems onto the cosmos—in a religious language that is socially shaped and culture bound? Can a document that so thoroughly represents partiality of any sort truly stem from God?

In my personal and professional life, I have encountered ambivalent reactions to the work of theologians and their intellectual acrobatics. One observer has wryly suggested that theologians are philosophers who seek to convince themselves that they are really believers. Another describes them as believers who strangle their faith to death with a thousand philosophical qualifications. But my favorite is the oft-quoted adage of Ludwig Wittgenstein that likens the honest religious thinker to a tightrope walker: “He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it” (Wittgenstein 1980, 76). Taking Wittgenstein’s tightrope analogy one step further, one could say that my theological effort to salvage belief in a divine Torah was conducted on two levels. At the first level, the allegorical interpretation of tzimtzum at large, and Rabbi Kook’s pragmatic view of religious truth-claims in particular, already provided me with an external “metatheological” safety net that might protect the seeming content of my beliefs against potential allegations of total incred- ibility. Even before grappling with the nitty-gritty of the religious assertions themselves, the ironic view of truth metzidenu promoted by these latter-day Lurianic mystics now appeared as a convenient escape hatch that freed me of the need to defend problematic religious doctrine empirically, encouraging 382 Ross me instead to assess it in accordance with its function in the religious way of life. Admittedly, Rabbi Kook does at times attempt to resolve apparent clashes between current scientific theory and biblical accounts of creation by asserting the necessity for metaphor and allegory when describing profound metaphysical processes. Even with regard to later historical information, there is every indication that he personally tended to grant the biblical accounts great credence, believing that even those who were initially prepared to accept the Torah way of life merely because of the good results that it produced would eventually become convinced of their factual accuracy as well (Kook 1985a, 48–49). Nevertheless, his surprisingly cavalier attitude in determining what should be taken as myth and what as hard fact (“whatever the healthy intuition of nation will decide”; Kook 1985a, 119) indicates that his willingness in principle to promote religious practice even when based on result-oriented motives was not simply a prudential move on his part or a matter of educational tactics. Downplaying the propositional aspect of religious doctrine (a move that bears a family resemblance, at least, not only to the earlier pragmatism of William James but even to the more recent “linguistic turn” developed by neopragmatists responding to the philosophical insights of Wittgenstein himself) does not mean to imply that doctrines do not play an important role in the religious life—only that they are misunderstood when read as propositions containing empirical information. Such an attitude supports the recognition that the ultimate significance of ritual declarations of faith in the eighth of Maimonides’ thirteen principles of religious belief (Maimonides 1961) does not rest with its creedal content (that is, a description of the precise mechanics of the Torah’s transmission) but rather in some more elusive element that it carries. In Rabbi Kook’s eyes, it is this “inner core,” rather than its verbal articulation, that is the true object of faith. (Kook 1985b, 25) Advancing to a second, more substantive level of theological discourse, however, judging religious doctrine merely pragmatically, as the cultural instrument of religious practice, appeared to me excessively reductionist. Admittedly, because there is some overlap between our rational and our spiritual selves, most believers will find it impossible to muzzle their intellects and profess faith in what their common sense and everyday experience renders incoherent or even absurd. Although belief in the divinity of the Torah is not a hypothesis that can be tested and assessed according to external criteria of adequacy, barring all use of reason or critical judgment in assessing the propositional meaning of Torah from heaven must, to some extent, hamper its effectiveness even on the result-producing level. Nevertheless, from the internal viewpoint of the religious believer, one would be hard put to deny that the primary task of religion, beyond its more regulative and down-to-earth functions, Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 383 is to provide us with a window to some universally felt mysterious boundary condition of human experience that eludes and exceeds rational comprehension. If this is so, belief in Torah from heaven surely cannot retain its meaning and force without recourse to any metaphysical claims. Hence, it would seem that maintaining the authority of Jewish tradition mandates developing a religious narrative bearing some appeal to transcendence mitzideinu, while simultaneously allowing us to face the deeper issues raised by the feminist critique that even nonliteral readings and other modernist techniques fail to resolve. In responding to this theological requisite, I paradoxically found that it was precisely the appeal to softer, more “feminine” conceptions of God and His relationship to the world (Ross 2005) that allowed me freely to acknowledge and, to a certain extent, even make peace with the very male bias that lies at the heart of the problem. By focusing on those strands in Jewish tradition that abandon the male propensity for binary distinctions, I was able to construct an understanding of divine revelation that breaks down the sharp dichotomy between natural and supernatural, finite and infinite, so that relating to the Torah as a divine document need not entail untenable notions regarding the nature of God and His methods of communication or denial of the limitations of human involvement and of historical process. This task was facilitated by appropriating three additional assumptions implicit in this blurring of boundaries, which—instead of purporting to distinguish between a fixed, objective meaning on the part of God versus subjective human understanding—provided the religious vocabulary for a more subtle definition of the relationship between divine intent and its interpretation. The first assumption I drew on was that, if the Torah is to bear a message for all generations, its revelation must be a cumulative process: a dynamic unfolding that reveals its ultimate significance only through time. The second assumption is that God’s message is not expressed through the reverberation of vocal chords (neither His nor those of a “created voice” as some medieval commentators suggested to avoid the problem of anthropomorphic visions of God), but rather through the rabbinical interpretation of the texts, which may or may not be accompanied by an evolution in human understanding, and through the mouthpiece of history. History, particularly what happens to the Jewish people—the ideas and forms they accept as well as the process of determining those they reject—is essentially another form of ongoing revelation, a surrogate prophecy. The third assumption (supported by contemporary hermeneutic theory) is that, although successive hearings of God’s Torah sometimes appear to contradict His original message, that message is never replaced. The original Sinaitic revelation always remains as the primary cultural-linguistic filter through which these new deviations are heard and understood. 384 Ross

Applying this concept of cumulative revelation to the problem at hand, I suggested that even the phenomenon of feminism—to the extent that it takes hold and informs the life of the halakhically committed, and that the community’s authoritative bodies manage to find what they believe to be genuine support for this emerging worldview in a new reading of Torah—might be regarded by traditionalists as another vehicle for the transmission of God’s word. Such an understanding does not involve devaluing or supplanting the previous norms of patriarchy. On a formal level, these are never displaced. The sanctified formulations of the canonic texts continue to serve as the absolute, rock-bottom parameters of Jewish belief and practice, despite the fact that subsequent revelations may totally transform their original import. By the same token, our current brush with the profound challenges of historical criticism might be similarly regarded as a further expression of the divine will and—to apply Rabbi Kook’s optimistic view—a clear indication that we have outgrown more primitive forms of spirituality and are ready for a new, more sublime stage. Appreciating the inevitable influence of context on meaning leads us to exchange the limited theistic view of God standing over and above the world and controlling it externally for a more substantive and intimate connection between the two. Such an understanding allows even the religiously committed now to understand that the Torah can be totally human, without denying that it is also totally divine at one and the same time.

An additional spin to which I have taken this more fluid view of the relationship between text and interpretation relates to recent work that I have done in the realm of Jewish law. The deep sociological and ideological changes marking modern times have intensified the need of halakhic adherents to address the difficulties of a legal system that, due to a variety of political factors (for example, the rise of secularism and the gradual decentralization of religious authority) has lost much of innovative power. Halakhic decisors still retain, in theory, considerable leeway for legal circumvention and interpretive ingenuity. Nonetheless, the sharply fundamentalist turn that Orthodox Judaism has taken since the nineteenth century in response to the shift from traditionalism to modernity has served as a strong deterrent of change. This stalemate has led some religious leaders in the more liberal camp of modern Orthodoxy to seek an interpretive policy that more adequately addresses their concerns, one that accepts the notion of halakhic immutability yet is still capable of acknowledging or even celebrating some measure of interpretive liberty. Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 385

Advocates of such a hermeneutic model have typically refused to allow for the possibility that rabbinic legal exegesis reflects anything other than a straightforward unpacking and explication of what was implicit in the rulings of their predecessors and certainly does not veer from their original divine intent, which is one and the same for all time. This approach bears some affinity to the Anglo-American school of legal positivism, in the sense that it does not invest the ultimate authority of the law in the person of the judge and his or her subjective assessments of law’s outcome in practice but attributes it rather to the proper application of a closed and static system of rules, conceptual categories, and/or values implicit in the codified sources. Law’s content is determined only with reference to the mode of thinking and precedents shaped by these given criteria. Its overall function is reactive, referring only to already existent standards and formulating its norms within their bounds. The solution to stagnation, according to this approach, lies in carefully distinguishing between hard-core bona fide halakhic questions and the more amor- phic issues of public policy. Only issues belonging to the latter category allow for interpretive latitude and discretionary judgment because—as opposed to “pure” halakha—they refer to contingent truths that are subject to passing influence and change. Such a two-tiered view of halakha obviously holds great appeal for modern Orthodoxy. If one area of halakha remains transcendent, impervious to outside influence and personal bias, the believer can view halakhic practice as more than a self-serving activity responding to human needs. If, at the same time, another area of the law is pliable and given to context-bound considerations, this allows the halakhic community much greater freedom of movement than a rigid ultra-Orthodox ideology that limits all prospective change to questions of practical application. But despite the obvious attraction of this approach, I found that closer examination of how it works in practice yields a more ambiguous picture. Here too, critical examination of halakhic rulings dealing with women’s issues was instrumental in disabusing me of the positivist notion that one may clearly distinguish between one area of halakha that is objective, immutable, and impervious to surrounding influences and another that is elastic and responds more equivocally to shifting social concerns (Ross 2004, chapter 5). Subversive readings of the explanations and rationales for such rulings indicate that—contrary to the self-understanding of halakhic decisors themselves—various considerations of a highly subjective nature often claim their fair share in determining where halakha ends and public policy begins, and the manner in which questions of precedent and original intent related are interpreted and applied even with regard to questions that are classified by all as “hard-core” halakha. 386 Ross

As in the case of revelation, the implausibility of any legal activity that is oblivious to its cultural setting and to the preconceptions and expectations of its intended audience has led me to explore more recent conceptualizations of legal process, ones that seek to take the unpredictable influence of shifting context and grass roots initiative into greater account, without relinquishing the ability of such halakhic discourse to claim some attunement with God’s word. While rejecting Rabbi Kook’s essentialist formulations of an inherent connection between the Jewish people and God’s will, I found myself prepared to view this statement as mythic expression of the conviction that, if the interaction between formal considerations of text and precedent and demands arising from the field prompt traditional halakhic understandings of truth and justice to evolve in a new way that becomes reified in practice, this is fair indication that there is something of spiritual significance to be derived from this development.

VII

When first developing my ideas concerning revelation and halakhic process, I was surprised to find several people asking me whether I was a postmodernist. The truth was that, until that point, I had little experience of the term and hardly knew what it meant. But upon further investigation, I came to the conclusion that, like my Torah u-madda predecessors, I am a product of my times, unwittingly absorbing the emerging spirit of nonfoundationalism and applying it to my understanding of Jewish tradition, just as scholars more resistant to current winds of change continue to appropriate the foundational assumptions of historical positivism to theirs. Framed in this way, my personal quest for an Orthodox response to the challenges of reason and academic scholarship and the forms that it took were not incidental. Its theological dimensions were a natural outgrowth of some of the more generally deconstructive aspects of postmodern thought (for example, recognition of the situated nature of all knowledge, appreciation of the limitations of language as objective representation, rejection of exclusivist claims to truth) overtaking Western culture. My reliance on Rabbi Kook and the particular form that this reliance took was also no accident. Despite the decidedly traditional roots of his multilayered epistemology, my particular bias led me to discern in various elements of his thought (for example, a panentheistic worldview supporting conflation of the natural and the supernatural and a preference for the dissolution of binary distinctions at large, understanding of religious language as generative rather Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 387 than descriptive, recognition of the validity of multiple truths and reliance on community and collective consensus as their final arbiter) a prescient anticipation of the dilemmas that postmodernism raised, and—in striking congru- ence with various features of postmonotheistic feminist theology (Ross 2004, 115; Ross 2005)—promising potential for overcoming some of its more negative effects. Set in this more general context, the stakes in mining the legacy of Jewish tradition for a viable theology extend considerably beyond the parochial interests of modern Orthodoxy. On an immediate level directly associated with the concerns of this volume, moderating between the naïve objectivism of historical positivism, and the excesses of a more free-flowing vision of truth according to which “anything goes,” is a rising issue in academia. While the positivists tend to view scholarship as the analysis of texts, rather than as the solving of problems or the answering of questions other than those that concern their historical or literary genesis, over the years the effects of postmodernism have been gradually seeping in, generating perceptible changes in both the style and the subject matter of Jewish scholarly research. This trend can be dis- cerned even in the course titles listed in university catalogues. Instead of suf- ficing with the name of an author or a particular work and studiously avoiding any reference to issues of philosophical relevance, the titles now being offered by departments of Jewish thought refer more often to topics, opening the door to more speculative discussion of the possible “meaning” of the material to be studied and its translation into contemporary terms. The lack of criteria for determining why one conclusion should be privileged over another or how precisely they may be set off against each other to arrive at some reasonably common ground is a conundrum for which there is no easy solution. Without recourse to a transcendent vantage point, such questions can only be resolved from within. While the pragmatic test of judging truth-claims in accordance with their cultural fruits is problematic (who will be the judges, and will they all agree?), Rabbi Kook’s criterion of inclusiveness (the relative ability of any particular truth to acknowledge and assimilate the lessons of others) is food for thought. The appeal of this approach is reflected not only in the increasing receptivity of religious institutions of learning to the methods of academia. It is also corroborated by the interdisciplinary directions favored by current scholarship, alongside increasing personalization and interest in subjective, first-person accounts. Over and above the narrow concerns of Jewish scholarship, the dangers of relativism, and loss of criteria for a shared culture are burning issues that currently plague the Jewish community at large. Particularly in Israel, with its 388 Ross concentration of so many widely diverse populations, the urge of each sub- community to seek symbolic barriers that will serve to distinguish its character from the rest, and release it from the inevitably homogenizing effects of globalization, is especially acute. For this reason, a worldview that encourages epistemological modesty and interaction with opinions and ways of life that differ from one’s own, yet avoids the hollowness of a pragmatism devoid of all metaphysical claims, holds undeniable attraction. Given these considerations, an epistemology that grants ontological standing and intrinsic value to the imperfect vocabulary of foundationalism from within a mystic discourse predicated on nonfoundationalist assumptions might offer a valuable paradigm for cultural cohesion in a postmodern age. In calling for the constant refinement of our limited perspectives through interaction with others, and attributing to this continued process of creativity the key to achieving confluence between our limited perceptions and an infinite reality transcending all lack, the polarity between the certainty of religion and the skepticism of secularism breaks down. Certainly, in my own work on feminism, I have found that my very openness to deconstruction of the classic dictation metaphor of revelation and the notion of halakhic neutrality evokes empathetic interest even on the part of self-professed secularists in the viability of more nuanced theological paradigms. The wish for rapprochement between religion and secularism is evident in many more obvious phenomena of Israeli life that chip away at the supposedly clear distinction between cultural Judaism and a way of life nurtured by emphatically metaphysical assumptions. Believers questioning the sustainability of a culture that relates to Torah and mitzvoth merely as folkways ignore the many intermediary positions possible between a religion still in the throes of positivism and a more fluid understanding of what religious truth-claims might signify. Aside from appeal to the nondescriptive functions of religious language, such variations also hinge on notions of God that veer from a strongly theistic image to naturalistic abstractions. Revealing that Jewish thought can relate positively to both these conceptions is an important step toward preserving its vitality for the variegated groups existentially bound by its legacy. I believe that the epistemological challenge posed by postmodernism and the struggle between the neopragmatists and those who strive to preserve the basis for some form of metaphysical claim will continue to occupy the attention of Jewish philosophers of the twenty-first century in one form or another. The most critical question will be whether a religious tradition bereft of all claims to transcendence can maintain the passion and fervor necessary for its continued existence. Those who believe, as I do, that some metaphysical Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 389 claim—however tenuous—is necessary will continue to search for a satisfactory model. Because the epistemological challenge of postmodernity transcends the tenets of any specific religion, practitioners of Jewish philosophy would do well to view these distinctively Jewish efforts from a more universal perspective. Joining forces with theologians of other religions and listening carefully to their insights will not only sharpen the contours of our own internal discussion. It might also reveal the potential contribution that Jewish tradition in particular can offer Western culture at large, in acknowledging the folly of overly rigid definitions of doctrine and encouraging a return to the premodern function of religion as providing a valuable universe of discourse and a compelling way of life.

References

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 87–125. New York: Basic Books. Kook, Abraham Isaac. 1985a. Iggrot Ha-reiyah. Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook. ———. 1985b. Orot ha-Emunah. Brooklyn, NY: Lanagsam Associates. Maimonides, Moses. 1961. Hakdamot Le-Perush Ha-Mishnah. Edited by Mordekhai Dov Rabinowitz. Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook. ———. 1963. Guide of the Perplexed. Edited by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ross, Tamar. 1982a. “The Concept of G‑d in the Thought of Harav Kook” (Heb.), Part I. Daat 8 (Winter): 109–28. ———. 1982b. “The Concept of G‑d in the Thought of Harav Kook” (Heb.), Part II. Daat 9 (Summer): 39–70. ———. 1986a. “The Miracle as Added Dimension in the Writings of Maharal of Prague” (Heb.). Daat 17 (Summer): 81–96. ———. 1986b. “Moral Philosophy in the Writings of Rabbi Salanter’s Disciples in the Musar Movement” (Heb.). PhD diss., Hebrew University. ———. 1997. “The Cognitive Value of Religious Truth Claims: Rabbi A. I. Kook and Postmodernism.” In Hazon Nahum: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Norman Lamm, 479– 527. New York. Yeshiva University Press. ———. 2004. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England. ———. 2005. “Feminist Aspects in the Theology of R. Kook” (Heb.). In Derekh ha- Ruach: A Volume Honoring Eliezer Shweid, edited by Aviezer Ravitsky and Yehoyada Amir, 717–52. Jerusalem: Hebrew University. 390 Ross

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wohlgelernter [Ross], Tamar. 1958. “Between Faith and Criticism” (Heb.). Deot 6 (Summer): 24–25. Wolbe, Shlomo. 1973. Kuntres hadrakha lelimud musar. Jerusalem: Bet Ha-Musar al shem Lehman. chapter 19 Toward a New Jewish Philosophy From Metaphysics to Praxis

Avi Sagi

Christian philosophers have always been aware of contemporary philosophical attainments and have incorporated the nonreligious philosophical discourse into their work. Aware of their membership in a philosophical community that operates with a universal language of discourse, they understand that their religious position must be substantiated vis-à-vis and within this language. Indeed, Christian philosophy has often developed approaches that later became mainstream philosophical innovations, with thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, among others, contributing to the universal philosophical discourse in ways that can hardly be exaggerated. By contrast, Jewish philosophy tends to proceed slowly, without necessarily keeping pace with contemporary philosophical thought and often in confrontation with an obsolete philosophical tradition. Only exceptionally does Jewish philosophy blend in with the philosophy of its time, with Moses Maimonides, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig representing some unusual instances of such a trend. Thinkers whose work has broken new philosophical ground are even more infrequent, the exception that proves the rule. Jewish philosophy is mostly archaic. These general determinations are not meant to detract from the importance of Jewish philosophy. Jewish philosophy is an internal phenomenon, one of the ways that Jewish culture talks to itself. It therefore follows its own internal rhythm and not necessarily that of universal philosophy. The deep problem of Jewish philosophy is a different one: if functioning as an internal Jewish phenomenon, it should have served to mirror, analyze, and present a conscious critical reflection of Jews about their Judaism. It should also have merged with the other modes through which Jews have expressed Jewish existence: the prayer book, halakhic literature, responsa literature, Hebrew literature, and so forth. But Jewish philosophy has also kept its own autonomous pace in its connection with concrete Jewish life. In the classic era, it did not merge with other modes through which Jews expressed their Jewish existence and was almost entirely oblivious to the implications of concrete halakhic practice for theoretical reflection and consciousness. Most thinkers placed theology rather than

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004279629_�2� 392 sagi halakhic practice at the center of their speculative concern, even though it was Halakhah rather than philosophical speculation that shaped the lives of Jews. Jewish philosophy often reflected an avant garde, marginal stance that subverted the accepted and the consensual. Rather than decoding Jewish existence, it set up a different model for it. Judah Halevi in The Kuzari and Rabbi Judah Loew (Maharal) are exceptional examples of thinkers who took practice as their starting point. Jewish philosophy was usually a form of subversive thought that transcended the realm of concrete Jewish life. It developed a model of pure Judaism hardly related to the actual lives of Jews, an imagined world beyond the actual one, which remained alienated and estranged. This tension between Jewish philosophy and concrete Jewish life intensified in the modern period, when Jews experienced deep crises at many levels. The autonomous social structure of the Jewish people collapsed, and Jews became part of the broader civil community. This upheaval in the social structure was tied to a deep existential change in Jewish life: secularization became a legitimate phenomenon, and the affirmation of Jewish existence was no longer self- evident. Jewish identity became a crucial issue and, in its context, so did the relationship between past and present. The question was not only whether to affirm Jewish existence but the meaning of this existence and how to bring it forth in life. These issues were intensely pursued in the Hebrew literature then experiencing a renaissance. Writers such as Mordechai Zeev Feuerberg, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Joseph Chayim Brenner, Hayyim Nachman Bialik, and Shaul Tchernichovsky, conveyed their thoughts and their passionate excitement with these issues in poetry and prose, and the new genre of essay writing became a central tool for the discussion of these matters. As in the premodern era, however, in the modern period too Jewish philosophy stood far away, alienated from the Jewish life voyage. Most Jewish philosophers chose to enclose themselves within their theoretical, metaphysical, or theological fields, answering yesterday’s questions with theories detached from real Jewish life. The enchantment of God and of metaphysics retained their hold on Jewish philosophy, drawing further away from concrete Jewish life. The new Jewish philosophy hardly acknowledges the centrality of the “death of God” phenomenon. Even as wise a thinker as Martin Buber held that the “death of God” poses a challenge to human beings, who must ask themselves what is their share in God’s death; they, as it were, should find God anew within themselves. But is God’s revival through the subject’s conversion or transformation the only possibility of explaining the “death of God”? Perhaps “God died” because he became irrelevant to human life and stopped being a player in the concrete life space of human beings? Might this be a better description of the Jewish Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 393 experience? And if so, what philosophical reflection has been suggested along its lines? Only a Jewish philosophy that has renounced concrete life could have revived God as Buber suggested. The “death of God” is indeed a challenge to anyone dealing with the meaning of Jewish existence in the present and with its connection to a past where God had been alive. This challenge, however, need not be met through a banal recovery of what is dead. Ahad Ha-Am addressed the problem of the present-past connection and, as opposed to the philosophers’ banality, offered a complex and brilliant solution, stating that the past can be interpreted in more than one way: for believers, the past embodies the presence of God, and for nonbelievers, it embodies the creative cultural power of the Jewish people. Rather than relying on metaphysics, he reframed the question in cultural-social terms: is there a construct that is common to both the theological-religious and the secular approaches in Judaism? Ahad Ha-Am suggested dealing with this question by examining, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s terms, the family resemblance among all the thinkers who affirm the past, regardless of whether this past’s meaning is transcendent or, as a human creation, immanent. Ahad Ha-Am was not considered part of the Jewish philosophical canon, but the very fact that he is one of the few exceptional figures contending with existential questions is a serious critique of the course chosen by Jewish philosophy. If philosophy is an attempt to offer a critical reflective account of actual human life, Jewish philosophy has not fulfilled its task. It has shaped a field of discourse estranged from the real lives of Jews and has thereby lost its power to contribute to the self-awareness of Jews in the past and in the present. It is almost tempting to say that Jewish philosophy is alive and well in academia but dead in actual human life. Alienation is indeed an essential component of philosophical thought, since philosophy thinks about existence and turns it into an abstract object. But this general determination cannot solve the special problematic of Jewish philosophy because, if Jewish philosophy tends to be so far removed from the actual lives of Jews, how is it Jewish? Jewish philosophy would find it offensive to say that it is Jewish only because of its thinkers’ ethnicity. If the Judaism of the philosophy is manifest in the way it relates to one or another Jewish text, the question is what texts does it actually relate to. Has Jewish philosophy reserved a place for these texts within the web of life, or has it perhaps isolated them and created an imagined world of Jewish texts entirely divorced from the lives of Jews? As in the past, so in the present— Jewish thinkers create a closed realm involving them and the Jewish texts that interest them, which are not necessarily connected to actual Jewish existence. Jewish philosophy is constituted by playing down the value of actual Jewish life. It shuts itself up within a closed space and creates an imagined world that 394 sagi blurs or represses its connections with what is outside it, a kind of pure realm unrelated to reality and to texts that are part of this reality. A Jewish philosophy distant from the Jews’ experiences, practices, and contemporary modes of expression will be at most speculation, a game that can hardly be taken too seriously since it ignores the fundamental question that all human beings ask themselves: what is the meaning of my life as a concrete being living here and now in a cultural Jewish context? Furthermore, a metaphysical or theological Jewish philosophy does not contend properly with the challenges posed by post-Kantian and post-Hegelian thought. According to these approaches, which consolidated in the course of the twentieth century, theological or metaphysical determinations (unless they are a series of meaningless statements as logical positivism had assumed) have immanent meaning. Statements about God, about revelation, and so forth, express human judgment and have no ontological meaning transcending the borders of human knowledge. Even without endorsing Ludwig Feuerbach’s determination that theology is anthropology, one cannot ignore the problematic of determinations pretending to formulate statements about what is beyond human knowledge. But this problematic is almost entirely absent from Jewish philosophy, even that of the twentieth century, which chose to disregard philosophical discourse and immure itself within the borders of another discourse. It continues the classic pattern of Jewish philosophy by standing on the margins of, or outside, philosophical discourse. The classic version of Jewish philosophy, particularly as studied at universities, is obsolete. More precisely, Jewish philosophy has only seldom been contemporary and must choose a different course. In this essay, I wish to present an alternative Jewish philosophy. Its starting point is Jewish life rather than some imagined speculative theory. By its very nature, it is fragmentary, dynamic, and definitely not essentialist. It does not expose “Judaism” as an exohistorical and exocultural phenomenon, without a real social context. It is meant to be a critical reflection about a Jewish existence that includes practices, texts, ethos, and myths that present diverse worldviews. Jewish existence is a living culture that operates through complex attachments to the past and openness to the future. This culture creates different styles of life and different answers to the meaning of Jewish existence in the world. The real historical manifestation of Judaism is pluralistic, and various and contradictory worlds are included in the family of Jewish existence. Philosophy cannot deny this reality without being alienated. Instead of a thematic philosophy that tries to determine the nature of “Judaism,” we must create a philosophy that allows for a Jewish field of discourse that is open, dynamic, fragmentary, and changing according to the changes that affect Judaism itself. Jewish philosophy is Jewish philosophical “doing,” rather than the customary historical philological research of academia. Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 395

To flesh out an option of philosophical doing, I wish to trace my personal course toward a Jewish philosophy of this kind. In presenting my way “toward” a Jewish philosophy, I assume it must always be as open as life itself, always on the way to. In this sense, the story of my philosophical doing is only one example of a potentially different involvement with Jewish philosophy. In a deep sense, this philosophy is narrative since it is concretized in the modes through which it develops and unfolds in the course of life. But this narrativity is not merely autobiographical since being so would detract from its real value. It conveys a confrontation with actual Jewish existence. It is not absolute and does not set final concepts and solutions because Jewish existence is not absolute and sealed either. It is philosophy because it confronts existence through its theoretical conceptualization. It is Jewish because the existence that concerns this philosophy is Jewish existence. This existence, in its broadest sense and in its many manifestations, is the first datum that concerns philosophical reflection. From this perspective, the Jewish philosophical discourse that I propose rests on a combination of phenomenological assumptions and hermeneutic starting points. The discourse is phenomenological because it starts from a “datum,” that is, the real Jewish manifestation that includes texts, norms, beliefs, ethos, and so forth. It seeks to explicate and decode this datum. It is hermeneutic because it deals with the interpretation of the datum, and, because it is hermeneutic, it can dare to draw practical existential conclusions from it. Since turning into an adult, I have not been unduly bothered by metaphysical questions. The two worlds where I was educated and where I since feel at home—the world of Halakhah and the world of philosophy—have encouraged my distance from these questions. As a young man, I lived in a world of Torah and Halakhah. For many long years, I studied the Talmud and its commentators, the canonic halakhic literature, and the responsa literature. I found their awareness and sensitivity to real life extremely appealing. Their halakhic dynamism, the constant exchange between ideas and life, appeared as an enchanted realm to me. I saw this discourse as a model of the human attempt to establish a world of ideas at the very core of life. Hence, I was not especially interested in the classic Jewish philosophy that dealt with metaphysics and theology rather than with life, and definitely not with Jewish life. As a student of Torah, I learned that God is not a part of the human halakhic discourse. Even if the Torah is God’s work, it is not in heaven since it evolves through human action. I have never left the halakhic beit midrash, from my youth and until today. Bialik’s “worn-out” books were not at all worn out to me. They were and are a fascinating and powerful life story. But already at an early stage of my life, I came to realize the need to turn to philosophy both to explain the meaning of halakhic practice and to cope with human existential questions. I hoped that, 396 sagi at some stage of my theoretical training, I would be able to mediate in a nondogmatic fashion between the two schools that had become my home, relating respectfully to the actual life experience of Jews in the past and in the present. While continuing my Torah studies, therefore, I turned to the university. I began my academic studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel by studying Talmud and Jewish philosophy. I studied at the Department of Talmud because I wanted to deepen my understanding of the halakhic phenomenon. I was not happy with the Torah world’s conventional and widely accepted perception of halakhic discourse as synchronic, unfolding timelessly and nowhere, in some kind of purified limbo that ignores the real history of Halakhah. I was well aware of the large, too large, gap between the world of Torah in the yeshiva and the real world of Halakhah and became even more conscious of it when I moved to a Sephardic yeshiva where real Halakhah was at the center, though I found no answers about real halakhic history there either. I, therefore, hoped to find answers to this question in my Talmud studies at university, and I was not disappointed. I was fortunate to study with great Talmudic scholars, and I particularly remember my late teacher and mentor Prof. Yitzhak Gilat, who made the development of Halakhah his life work. Beside the dynamism of Halakhah, I was also interested in the conceptual system that had enabled Jewish tradition to contain a ceaselessly evolving reality and allow for halakhic change. I rejected Marxist explanations that assume causality between reality and culture. My assumption was that, factually and normatively, human beings are free agents who react differently to the same reality. I hoped to find answers to this question in my study of Jewish philosophy, but I soon understood that this would not be the main path for thinking about the Jewish experience of life and about the understanding of human existence. Jewish philosophy offered no answers to any of the big human questions: what is the meaning of life, what to do, and what to hope for. I sought other ways of including my experience as a human being and as a committed Jew, and I turned to philosophy. In the course of my philosophical training, I delved into both analytical and Continental philosophy. Analytical philosophy satisfied my passion for clear and sharp conceptual systems, and the fruits of this training came to the fore in a book I wrote with Daniel Statman (Sagi and Statman 1995). My sense, however, was that analytical philosophy provided a toolbox adequate to philosophical work but could not provide answers to the serious philosophical problems that troubled me. I therefore turned to modern philosophy, with particular emphasis on the phenomenological and existentialist schools that are part of the Continental philosophical discourse. My doctoral Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 397 dissertation focused on Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. I studied Danish and, for close to six years, read everything that Kierkegaard had written and everything that had been written about him. Retrospectively, I can say that the fundamental question that troubled me in Kierkegaard’s thought is extremely similar to the question that had troubled me when dealing with Halakhah: what is the relationship between religious commitment—indeed, any strong commitment—and real life? My extensive study of Kierkegaard’s thought exposed me to a dynamic, thriving philosophy that wavers between various approaches to the relationship between life and religion: from one basically assuming a conflict between religion and life up to one that views the very assumption of a conflict as a mistake and a sin. I traced the course of the various arguments that Kierkegaard relies on to substantiate these approaches and was then even more impressed by the fact that religious life itself is outlined as a constant fluctuation between them. My study of Kierkegaard was reflected in a book (Sagi 2000) and in many articles I published about him. After joining the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University (that until not long ago included both philosophy and Jewish philosophy) I decided, as a matter of principle, that, although my training and my initial academic publications had been in the field of Jewish philosophy, I would refrain from teaching in the Jewish philosophy track. I held then and still hold now that the academic curriculum epitomized the alienation I noted above between Jewish philosophy and Jewish existence in yet another important facet: Jewish philosophy is perceived as part of a historical philological discipline. Students of Jewish philosophy do not train to become philosophers, as do philosophy students. They are supposed to become historians of philosophy. They are forbidden to learn how to make independent philosophical claims. Indeed, they are forbidden to think about complex Jewish existence with philosophical tools. Jewish philosophy in academia would appear to be a continuation of the Wissenschaft des Judentums project, which was supposedly meant to give Judaism a decent burial. I refused to be the undertaker of Judaism or of Jewish philosophy. I therefore chose to teach only philosophy and to try and structure a different Jewish philosophy. My model was an outstanding philosopher, the late Eliezer Goldman, who was my teacher. Contrary to most of the scholars involved in the study of Jewish philosophy, he dealt with Judaism as a philosopher. His questions were philosophical questions and so were his answers, which he published in many articles that were collected in two books I edited together with Daniel Statman, who was also a Goldman disciple (Goldman 1996, 2009). 398 sagi

My desire to combine both up-to-date philosophical research and a concern with Jewish tradition and culture was realized when, in the early 1980s, I joined the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. It has been my honor to have contributed to the shaping of the discourse in this institution, which marked a shift in Jewish life. I cannot enter into a description of all its innovative projects, but what I consider the most important is the development of a culture of dialogue between the Jewish past and the Jewish present. In this dialogue, the past turns to the present posing challenges and questions, but the present too turns similarly to the past. This lively exchange turns Jewish tradition into what a tradition is meant to be: dynamic and evolving. As a tradition, it rests on the past, turns to it, and draws on it. But the past is reinterpreted in light of the cultural, normative horizons of the present. This fruitful dialogue, which includes many elements of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, represents to me the paradigm for a renewal of Jewish discourse, committed to the past but not buried under its weight. I have discussed this issue through a critical analysis of contemporary Jewish thinkers’ interpretations of the phenomenon of tradition (Sagi 2008). My critique reflects insights gained from my study of the sociology and the philosophy of culture as well as from my personal experience in the dynamic of tradition at the Hartman Institute. I joined the Hartman Institute even before finishing my dissertation, and I have no doubt that doing so shaped my later intellectual development in that I never abandoned my Jewish projects. At the Department of Philosophy of Bar-Ilan University, I continued my research on Continental and particularly existentialist philosophy, studies that were the foundation for my book on Camus (Sagi 2002) and, from a similar perspective, my book on Joseph Chayim Brenner (Sagi 2011a). Brenner, a central figure in modern Hebrew literature who confronted in his prose the question of Jewish Zionist existence in a post- traditional era, was an inspiration to the young pioneers’ generation. To my surprise, I found that Brenner’s insights had anticipated Camus’ thought by many years. Brenner’s literary oeuvre offers theses that confront questions of existence in the present without making religious or theological assumptions and out of a profound commitment to immanence. Equipped with the philosophical baggage I had acquired, I entered a number of Jewish fields of discourse to examine the connection between theory and actual life. The first realm that attracted me was a theoretical critique of the Jewish halakhic discourse on questions of identity. Parallel to a philosophical analysis of the identity discourse, I wrote together with my colleague and partner Zvi Zohar two books that deal with the question of Jewish identity from the perspective of halakhic tradition. One book Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 399

(Sagi and Zohar 2007) deals with the question of Jewish identity through an analysis of the criteria used to determine how Gentiles join Judaism. The other (Sagi and Zohar 2000) deals with the standing of the Sabbath transgressor within the Jewish identity circle or, more generally, with the standing of one involved in an essential deviation from the norms. The book on conversion considers entry into the circle of Jewish identity from the outside, whereas the other book deals with the standing of the Jew inside the Jewish circles of identity. We found that membership in the Jewish identity group is not founded on a dichotomous opposition between inside and outside. Instead, halakhic literature draws a complex picture of membership in several circles of identity. According to some sages, Sabbath transgressors belong to the ethnic identity circle but not to the religious identity circle, for as long as they persist in their defiance. Other sages argue that, in contemporary reality, transgressors may belong to the religious identity circle as well. Halakhic literature, then, paints a complex picture of Jewish identity. As is true of every identity discourse, the one on Jewish-halakhic identity is also constituted by two axes, one diachronic and one synchronic. Whereas the diachronic axis affirms the legacy of the past, the synchronic one affirms present reality and its values, and halakhic variations in the definition of Jewish identity emerge through the balance between them. The attitude of halakhic literature to the Sabbath transgressor deviating from the norm epitomizes the tension between the two axes, and identity is precisely the intersection point between them. In my studies, I have dealt at length with the relationships between these components of identity and developed a model that suits not only halakhic tradition but also the work of Ahad Ha-Am (Sagi 2006). Given that my interest focuses on philosophical questions related to existence, both the book on conversion and the book on circles of identity are marked by a shift from the speculative and metaphysical to the practical. Obviously, these books could not have been written without resorting to philosophical and sociological theories of identity, and insights from these theories provided the tools we used for posing questions to the halakhic texts and analyzing the answers that we found in them. The writing of these books, like much of my work, has often been accompanied by hermeneutic awareness. Since the 1990s, hermeneutics has come to play an increasingly central role in my intellectual life, as could be expected since philosophical hermeneutics developed largely in the context of Continental philosophy through such thinkers as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and others. Moreover, in the early 1990s, I founded a pioneering graduate program of hermeneutics 400 sagi and cultural studies at Bar-Ilan University. What singles out this from other similar programs is its emphasis on the study of hermeneutics and its openness to the various currents of cultural criticism. On the one hand, the program trains students in the French school of cultural criticism, scrutinizing works by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others. On the other, it trains students on the alternatives to this discourse, be it by delv- ing into Wittgensteinian, Continental, and analytical philosophy or by exploring sociological and anthropological avenues. The many years I have spent directing and teaching in the program have also led me, as a researcher, to an increasing recognition of the significance of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, which seeks to explain and comprehend, is neither speculative nor metaphysical. It approaches existence as a text meriting understanding and interpretation. Hermeneutic awareness leads to deeper questions about the place of the interpreting subject and about the role of the subject vis-à-vis the text or the interpreted existence. My background in phenomenology which, in Edmund Husserl’s terms, wished to return to “the things themselves,” protected me from a tendency to make metaphysical assumptions and compelled me to follow “the datum”—the text or the human experience. Hermeneutic awareness, on the other hand, prevented me from falling into the trap of innocence, which assumes that the interpreter only exposes what is already in the text. The complex relationship between the text (regardless of whether it is a written text or the world as text) and the interpreter, who is influenced by the text or by the past and turns to it anew with insights gained from his or her synchronic world, enabled me to find new paths in Jewish thought as well. The distinctive product of this hermeneutic awareness came to the fore in one of my recent books, soon to appear in English (Sagi 2011b). In this book, I asked myself this question: what is the meaning of prayer as a human phenomenon? I tried to deal with the matter without making a priori assumptions, such as the existence of God. Not only believers in a God pray but also members of religions whose faith does not include a God (such as Buddhists) and secular individuals. Yehuda Amihai explicitly formulates the primal character of prayer as unconditioned by God in the title of his poem “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay” (Amihai 2000, 17). In my book, I attempt to trace a comprehensive outline of different views in Hebrew literature on the primal character of prayer. Relying on a phenomenological approach and after exhausting the description of prayer’s primal nature in its various modes, I try to offer an explication of the idea that the characterization of the human being as a praying entity is unconditioned by the object of the prayer. Prayer as an act of the subject is not necessarily conditioned by a positive response to the question of whether the prayer has an addressee. Prayer is an ontological characteristic of the individual and does not derive from any kind of Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 401 metaphysics or theology. The believer addresses the prayer to God, and the nonbeliever does not necessarily address anyone in particular; but, through their prayers, both epitomize humans as beings who transcend their factual givenness. We confront our lives, judge them, criticize them, bless them, or expect them to improve. Philosophers since G. W. F. Hegel, and even more so since Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean-Paul Sartre, have characterized human beings as entities that transcend their givenness. The uniqueness of prayer is that this transcendence is concretized in a specific language, which is accompanied by distinct physical gestures. Human beings as corporeal entities are praying entities. This characterization denotes the religious character of human life. This religiosity, instead of manifesting itself in a religion or in adherence to a religious establishment, conveys the human passion for transcendence. Not every person is a praying entity, but the ontological characterization of human existence as self-transcendence is possible. I have always been interested in this transcendence, which is why I was drawn to the thought of Camus and Brenner, who turned transcendence into a thematic question. For a long time, I thought this approach resembled that of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who also set up a model of self-transcendence but ultimately imprisoned humans within a closed, unreflective, and uncritical system. The study of the borders of commitment, or of the dual commitment of humans in general and Jews in particular, is indeed founded on the consciousness of self-transcendence, given that assuming or merely affirming a commitment is a decision. This act places the person outside his or her life as an evaluating judge, affirming it or denying it. What are the borders of Jewish commitment? What it does and does not allow has been a persistent concern for me, and I have held that an analysis of the halakhic world as a realm of commitment and responsibility will enable us to grasp the meaning of these terms. After writing Religion and Morality (Sagi and Statman 1995), my focus shifted to questions about the relationship between religion and morality in Jewish tradition. In Religion and Morality, my coauthor and I argued that the thesis of divine command morality is not only indefensible but also incomprehensible. Moreover, we also rejected the claim of a practical or theoretical antithesis between religion and morality that, as noted, was the gist of Leibowitz’s position. What are the explicit and implicit assumptions of Jewish tradition? Does it recognize the autonomy of morality? Does it enable dual loyalties, to God’s command and to morality? Are these at all dual loyalties, or is a religious commitment necessarily moral? To examine this question, I followed my usual course and focused on the actual datum. Without ignoring the broader Jewish 402 sagi heritage beyond Halakhah, I held that the discussion should focus on the halakhic discourse that, until two hundred years ago, had been the mainstream course of Jewish tradition. In the course of studying these questions, I published a series of studies that were later compiled in one comprehensive volume in Hebrew (Sagi 1998; some of the chapters in this book have appeared as English articles). This work showed that Jewish tradition, particularly halakhic tradition, accepts the independence and unconditioned value of morality, as manifest in the obviousness of natural law within this tradition and its continued attempt to mediate between religious and moral demands. Halakhic commitment, therefore, did not lead to an exclusivist view stating that commitment to Halakhah precludes all other loyalties. A person committed to Halakhah cannot escape these dual loyalties, which reflect the human-divine partnership in the shaping of the norm. The divine party comes forth in the Torah command and the human party in the interpretation of this command, which attests to the recognition of human autonomy. The human being complying with the Torah obeys God as the legislator, while the human being complying with human reason obeys God as the Creator of “man in his image.” The analysis of halakhic literature from a philosophical perspective enabled me to become a partner in the development of a new field—the philosophy of Halakhah. This discipline fully conveys the shift from theory and metaphysics to practice since it deals with a practical normative system and examines its underlying assumptions. I approached halakhic practice with hermeneutic and phenomenological tools, out of a conscious interpretive stance. One product of this endeavor (Sagi 2007) focuses on the persistent phenomenon of halakhic dispute as summed up in the Talmudic saying “These and these are the words of the living God.” Do disputes point to a pursuit of halakhic monism, with halakhic discourse serving merely as a means, or is this a pluralistic worldview that acknowledges a multiplicity of halakhic options, all independently valuable? My analysis of halakhic literature disclosed the halakhists’ implicit worldviews and enabled me to identify halakhic pluralism as confined to the halakhic system, incapable of serving as a basis for broader pluralistic or tolerant views. Halakhic pluralism is often confused with a liberal stance, a tension that occupied me in this work as well as others (such as Sagi 2009), where I sought a more nuanced view of the demand for and the limitations of pluralism in the halakhic world. Questions of pluralism and the meaning of committing to a single set of beliefs and norms in a pluralistic world have been among my fundamental philosophical interests in recent years. These questions are crucially important, not only from a general philosophical perspective but also from a Jewish Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 403 one. Commitment is at present a fundamental issue of Jewish existence. The Jewish people comprise a broad range of groups and cultures, and reflecting about them is impossible with the legacy of classic Jewish philosophy. Since it has never contended with such a complex reality, this philosophy does not offer an updated and sophisticated conceptual framework enabling a measured and balanced discussion of these questions. If Jewish philosophy persists in this course, it will perish or, at best, will become a branch of Jewish history. To make the necessary shift from metaphysics and theory to practice, Jewish philosophy must abandon two of its traditional assumptions: it must acknowledge its dependence on the parameters of philosophical discourse, and it must establish itself as a philosophy rather than as a historical-philological discipline. This move will open it up to new questions and allow it to suggest new answers. As a result, Jewish philosophers will actually train as philosophers, capable of raising claims rather than limiting themselves to the study of texts. This philosophy will be Jewish because it will deal with problems of Jewish existence. The upheavals the Jewish people have experienced in recent history compel philosophical account. The questions are many. In the political realm—what turns the many Jewish individuals and collectives into one people, are these different Jewish collectives indeed manifestations of one people, and, if so, what are the characteristics of this people? The relationship between the Jewish people in Israel and Jewish collectives outside it is an important dimension of these issues. In the ethical realm, we face questions such as whether there is room for a special ethical relationship between Jews, and whether this connection is normatively preferable to other civil ties. At the existential level, the question of Jewish identity remains open and has not even been properly formulated because the religious discourse has taken over. Finally, Jewish philosophy must definitely contend anew with the status of religion in Jewish existence, without presumptions and in an open and skeptical exchange. Jewish philosophy must renounce its metaphysical pretension because there are no grounds for it, given that, by definition, metaphysics cannot be particularistic. It must also renounce its epistemological pretension and endorse Richard Rorty’s shift “from epistemology to hermeneutics” (1980, 313ff.). Only such a shift will ensure the concern of Jewish philosophy with Jewish existence and with the cultural legacy of the Jewish people. The texts of Jewish philosophy are part of this legacy, but so are other texts: Hebrew literature, rabbinic literature, and so forth. These texts need not be granted special status in a future Jewish philosophy, which is meant to express the fusion of horizons, in Gadamer’s terms, between the past and history on 404 sagi the one hand and the philosopher living in the present on the other. Although people engaged in this pursuit will have to be at home in Jewish culture, Jewish philosophy will not be confined to those trained only in the study of Jewish philosophy as currently taught at universities. A Jewish philosophy of this kind is particularistic and situational in that it conveys the specific reflection of Jewish philosophers about Jewish matters in their place and time. Should it pretend to be united and universal, it will reach an essentialist abyss. Beyond the serious problems of essentialism as a philosophical stance, accepting it as a starting assumption of Jewish philosophy is particularly problematic because essentialism is fundamentally ahistorical, acultural and asocial. Jewish essentialism will uproot the meaning of the term Jewish from this potential philosophy because Judaism denotes a historical phenomenon unfolding at a given place and time rather than a metaphysical one. Jewish philosophy can conceptualize the specific experience of individual thinkers about their Jewish world and, therefore, will inevitably be modest. We cannot think a historical phenomenon through a metaphysical conceptual framework. The narrative and hermeneutic character of this philosophy that I emphasized above is not a random characterization. The combination of a specific life experience and a conceptual framework must be expressed in the final product—the philosophical discourse as such. Jewish philosophers must be deeply embedded in their place and their culture so that their philosophy is, in a deep sense, the story of their own lives. Like every story, the philosophical story too comes together through a conceptual construct and a conceptual system. The difference between a nonphilosophical and a philosophical story is in the level of critical and conscious conceptualization. Philosophical discourse too is a product of what Kierkegaard called “the subjective thinker,” drawing further and further away from the concrete in favor of its becoming a theoretical object. I have traced a preliminary outline of this philosophy together with a brief description of my work to clarify that this goal is attainable: we can think Jewish existence in the present by resorting to the past. More precisely, thinking existence while ignoring the past is not possible, and reliance on texts from our historical legacy is, therefore, vital. The difference between the historian or the philologist and the Jewish hermeneutic philosopher, however, is that the historian’s concern is the past and the philosopher’s concern is the connection between the past and the questions of the present. The reflection of the Jewish philosopher simultaneously covers past and present realms. The past grants philosophers the weight of the legacy, while the present releases them from it and directs them to the here and now. This tension is meant to create Jewish Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 405 philosophies rather than Jewish philosophy. These philosophies are Jewish in a dual sense: they affirm Jewish existence in a primary sense, and they are committed to address the broad cultural heritage. But they are not identical, also in a dual sense: they do not necessarily interpret the past in the same way, and they are not meant to offer an essentialist “Jewish” stance on the question of the present. Their family resemblance will be anchored in a complex association with both the diachronic and the synchronic axes. Gone is the time of Jewish philosophy as a religious philosophy and of a Jewish philosophy unfolding in a closed archaic limbo because Jewish existence itself has opened up to the world and evolves between these two time axes. According to this framework, Jewish philosophies compel Jewish philosophers to confront at least three practical questions: the problem of pluralism, the problem of commitment, and the problem of the connection between the various Jewish philosophies and their continuity. Philosophical pluralism is compelled by the assumption that Jewish philosophy is meant to follow in the footsteps of a diversified and changing Jewish experience. The fact that philosophy is an attempt to offer a personal interpretation of a particular cultural and social reality prevents it from developing the pretension of philosophical monism. Were any Jewish philosophy to endorse a monistic view, it would create a system entirely detached from concrete Jewish reality. Philosophical pluralism is forced to confront real pluralism, given that the Jewish phenomenon as a historical-real occurrence includes nonpluralistic attitudes and dispositions as well. How, then, can a philosophy that is by nature pluralistic contain such positions? But to claim that a philosophy that is pluralistic by nature cannot contend with such a reality is just as implausible as assuming that a pluralistic culture and society cannot contend with the presence of nonpluralistic islands within it. We might assume that the answers to some questions will be found at the practical rather than at the theoretical level; day-to-day life, on practical grounds, ultimately creates a kind of implicit pluralism. This, however, is a weak response because it should mark the end of the theoretical analysis rather than its beginning. Hence, we should consider how Jewish philosophy contends with the problem of pluralism in a dual sense: practical pluralism and philosophical pluralism. The second problem that arises from the complexity of Jewish reality is the problem of commitment: given that Jewish existence is concretized in many and contradictory ways, what is the meaning of Jewish commitment? Is it exclusive to a specific historical cultural manifestation? An exclusivist position assumes that a commitment to x assumes denying any commitment to y. But if Jewish commitment is exclusive, it is irrelevant: if the term Judaism points to a family resemblance between different manifestations, it cannot possibly 406 sagi be exclusive. Dismissing options of Jewish existence cannot be a necessary condition of Jewish commitment. This approach brings back the metaphysical discourse that assumes some positions are true and others false. Adopting this concept of commitment assumes it will constantly be questioned because every truth-claim is contingent and compelled to assume the possibility of its refutation. Truth-claims lack the status of necessary logical claims. The assumption that Jewish commitment rests on truth-claims thus leads to an absurd result: given that a truth-claim rests on its justification, it could be refuted. When a committed Jew is exclusivist, this very commitment is what enables the negation of his or her world. And yet, by its very nature, commitment is neither contingent nor hypothetical. The commitment of parents to their children, for instance, is not contingent on justification or on truth- claims but on a kind of special relationship. We must, therefore, rethink the concept of Jewish commitment as a relationship between the committed and their Judaism. This is a particularistic relationship—a specific person committed to a specific Judaism. Although this commitment cannot negate others, the question is whether we can have a concept of commitment including varieties of Jewishness that are not necessarily commensurable and compatible. This problem requires us to address the complex relationship between different forms of Jewishness, including that between a Judaism assuming a defined and specific divine command, such as the Orthodox approach, and one assuming a world without God stating that Jewish norms and the Jewish ethos are a human creation. I have discussed these issues in several of my works, with an emphasis on the question of commitment (Sagi 2009, 2012a and b). My position, however, opens up the discussion rather than summing it up. The first two questions—the problem of pluralism and the problem of commitment—lead to the last one, which is a kind of seismograph for the answers given to the previous questions: the continuity between the various philosophies. This problem arises because a future Jewish philosophy is individual, narrative, and dynamic. Indeed, we may plausibly assume that continuity is not necessarily found in the philosophical contents but in three other components. The first is the commitment to the philosopher’s Jewish situation as evident in the conscious and critical affirmation of his or her Jewish existence. Jewish existence is a factual, primary datum, and our commitment constitutes an affirmation of, in Heidegger’s terms, our “thrownness” into it. Jews find themselves within a Jewish factuality that is forced on them, just as the physical, cultural, and historical data into which they are born are forced on them. Though this coercion is internal, often, as Sartre noted, it is established through the gaze of the other. This factuality is neither beyond human existence in general nor Jewish existence in particular. It is existence itself, even if Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 407

“the ‘whence’ and the ‘wither’ remain in darkness” (Heidegger 1962, 173). We can refuse it by constantly transcending it, but we cannot eliminate it entirely. Indeed, most Jews make this choice only ex post facto. The second component points to the philosophical questions that Jewish philosophers pose following their commitment to the Jewish situation. A reality as complex as Jewish existence raises many questions, some of which were considered in this essay, and the Jewish philosopher addresses this challenge by formulating them clearly and discussing them critically. Third, this commitment requires addressing Jewish tradition in its broadest sense, that is, the textual and nontextual cultural legacy borne by Jewish culture. A Jewish metaphilosophy will point to similarities and connections between Jewish philosophies, but a metaphilosophy must always look beyond and ask whether a particular Jewish philosophy is indeed keeping track with actual Jewish experience. The philosophical discourse I have outlined here could be said to be a shift not only from theory to practice but also from a modernist standpoint, which assumes certainty and truth, to a postmodern one. We are living in a postmodern world, when postmodernism is a surname for various approaches sharing a renunciation of an essentialist, metaphysical stance, beyond history and culture. It is almost tempting to say that contemporary Jewish existence cannot but be postmodern. Even a Jew whose Jewish stance relies on a metaphysical and theological position cannot disregard the problematic of Jewish metaphysics, given the diversity and complexity of historical Judaism as well as the incommensurability and incompatibility of different Judaisms. Ignoring these circumstances means creating a philosophy that leaves no room for real Jewish life. At the same time, a Jewish philosophical discourse leaving no room for metaphysical attitudes conveying a specific Jewish life experience is just as implausible. Metaphysics, then, must be incorporated into the cultural context but will have to be immanent and certainly modest, without universal pretensions. It will no longer be “Judaism” but one more Judaism in the spectrum of Jewish modes of existence. A great deal of work will be required from all future Jewish philosophers, particularly a concerted effort to include beliefs and approaches that they do not necessarily consider acceptable in the context of their lives. A future Jewish philosophy will be unable to handle these questions through relativism or skepticism, which deaden Jewish commitment. Neither of these approaches will be able to encompass the pathos and the dedication that have always been integral to the structuring of Jewish life. Jewish philosophy must join the philosophical enterprise addressing weighty questions about the meaning of multicultural existence, including all its 408 sagi concomitant problems. Claims to possession of a magic key to all the questions of Jewish existence are pretentious. Jewish existence, like existence in general, is partly submerged in darkness, in myth, and in realms of life that philosophical explication cannot penetrate without leading to their downfall. This is the nature of life: not all its components can be theoretically conceptualized. Love cannot be exhausted in a discourse about love, the anxiety experience will not be exhausted through a discourse about anxiety, and so forth. And yet, a great deal of work still awaits in the illuminated realms where philosophy may be useful. The condition, in Husserl’s terms, is to bracket and avoid judgment of all metaphysical, theological, or metahistorical assumptions, not only as a methodological starting point but as a philosophical stance. These assumptions must be part of the narrative rather than its a priori foundations. When I contemplate Jewish philosophical writing, I find too few attempts of philosophical doing in these fruitful directions. That is why we are now only on the way toward a possible Jewish philosophy.1

References

Amihai, Yehuda. 2000. Open Closed Open. New York: Harcourt. Goldman, Eliezer. 1996. Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present (Heb.). Edited by Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. ———. 2009. Judaism without Illusion (Heb.). Edited by Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman. Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Rorty, Richard. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sagi, Avi. 1998. Judaism: Between Religion and Morality (Heb.). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. ———. 2000. Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self. Translated by Batya Stein. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2002. Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd. Translated by Batya Stein. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. ———. 2006. The Jewish-Israeli Voyage: Culture and Identity (Heb.). Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute. ———. 2007. The Open Canon. Translated by Batya Stein. London: Continuum.

1 This article was translated by Batya Stein. As usual, I am grateful for her critique and her comments, which made a significant contribution to this paper. Toward a New Jewish Philosophy 409

———. 2008. Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought. Translated by Batya Stein. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2009. Jewish Religion after Theology. Translated by Batya Stein. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. ———. 2011a. To Be a Jew: Joseph Chayim Brenner as a Jewish Existentialist. Translated by Batya Stein. London: Continuum. ———. 2011b. Prayer after the Death of God: A Phenomenological Study of Hebrew Literature (Heb.). Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. ———. 2012a. Facing Others and Otherness: The Ethics of Inner Retreat (Heb.). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. ———. 2012b. Halakhic Commitment between Closure and Openness (Heb.). Ramat- Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. Sagi, Avi, and Daniel Statman. 1995. Religion and Morality. Translated by Batya Stein. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sagi, Avi, and Zvi Zohar. 2000. Circles of Jewish Identity: A Study of Halakhic Literature (Heb.). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. ———. 2007. Transforming Identity: The Ritual Transition from Gentile to Jew: Structure and Meaning. London: Continuum. chapter 20 A Plea for Transcendence

Kenneth Seeskin

In Raphael’s famous painting The School of Athens, Plato points up while Aristotle points down. Though one would normally hesitate to characterize whole philosophic systems by a simple gesture like pointing, Raphael’s depiction is certainly on the right track. We all know that Plato subscribed to a theory of forms. Aristotle did too but differed from Plato in one important respect: the form or essence of a thing cannot be separate from that of which it is the essence. In other words, Plato was wrong to think that the form human being existed in a separate, timeless realm that could only be apprehended by the intellect. While there is a form of human being that all members of the species share, it has no existence apart from the individual people who embody it. So Raphael is right to depict Plato as the spokesman for transcendence and Aristotle as the spokesman for immanence. He is also right to suggest that much of the history of philosophy revolves around this difference. If he had lived in the nineteenth century, he could just as easily have depicted Immanuel Kant pointing upward and G. W. F. Hegel pointing downward. My approach to Jewish philosophy has always been to see it as the natural ally of Platonism. Before getting to substantive issues, let me say a few words about my intellectual development. I grew up in a Reform Jewish environment in the suburbs of Chicago. Although neither of my parents could read a word of Hebrew, they were actively involved in synagogue life and lectured their children almost daily on the need to study and excel academically. Their involvement with synagogue life obviously had its effect because one child (my older brother) became a synagogue president, one (my younger sister) became a teacher in a Jewish day school, and one (me) went on to write books on Jewish philosophy. Shortly after my Bar Mitzvah in 1960, my parents moved to Skokie, Illinois, which at that time was practically a Jewish ghetto. Although the public high school I attended fielded one of the worst football teams on record, it was noteworthy for two things: (1) shutting down on the high holidays, and (2) producing Nobel Prize winners. The academic experience I had there was the most challenging I had anywhere and made college and graduate school seems like holidays. It was also there that I met my wife and several friends that I have remained in contact with all my life.

I entered Northwestern University in the fall of 1965 and fell in love with philosophy from the first day of class. In fact, I remember treating my copy of Plato: Collected Dialogues with the care and reverence one would normally show to a siddur. In those days, Northwestern’s Philosophy Department was a hotbed of phenomenology and existentialism, both of which I adopted as a kind of secular religion—with one exception: Martin Heidegger. To this day, I refuse to read Being and Time or to admit, what is perfectly obvious, that he had a decisive impact on philosophers I do read. I do not mention this as a point of pride but merely to say that, if you cannot read a philosopher with an open mind, it is better not to read the person at all. In any event, by the time I reached graduate school at Yale, I had grown tired of phenomenology and existentialism and wrote my dissertation on Plato. When I entered the academic profession, I was in for a rude wakening. My graduate training at Yale prepared me to know a lot about a wide range of periods and traditions. Unfortunately, journals were not buying articles of the sort I had been trained to write. This was especially true in ancient philosophy, where, it seemed to me, the dominant trend was to make Plato acceptable to modern analytic philosophers. I rebelled against this trend but paid a price for doing so. My first publications in Jewish philosophy were two short pieces on the Holocaust. Like much of the literature on this subject, they were not very subtle and contained a large measure of overheated rhetoric. Despite my early naïveté, I still think the Holocaust raises questions philosophers have to address, and I have been writing on it off and on for the past thirty years. Perhaps my biggest break came with the founding of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy. This group, organized by Norbert Samuelson, met once a year around a central theme. Here I could pretend I was sitting at the feet of Marvin Fox, Seymour Feldman, David Bleich, Steven Schwarzschild, and Eugene Borowitz. Of all of them, Schwarzschild had the biggest impact on me. I entered Jewish philosophy peddling a modified version of existentialism. At a meeting of the American Academy of Religion, I read a paper arguing for such a position, only to have Schwarzschild rise and proclaim it “asinine.” Shocked and humiliated, I asked him if he would be willing to talk this over—expecting to receive an apology. He answered yes, and we chatted until the wee hours of the morning. It was during that discussion that the proverbial light bulb went on in my head and everything seemed to fall into place: Plato, Moses Maimonides, Emmanuel Kant, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. So while Schwarzschild was never my teacher in a formal sense, he was the driving force behind everything I have done since and the position I am about to articulate. Looking back over my publications, the 412 Seeskin title of Searching for a Distant God (Seeskin 2000) was chosen to complement Schwarzschild’s The Pursuit of the Ideal (1990). Since then I have published three books in Jewish philosophy (Seeskin, 2001, 2006, 2012), all of which address themes put forth in abbreviated fashion in Searching.

1 Monotheism and Its Implications

The rationale for linking Judaism and Platonism rests on the first two commandments, which ask us to worship a God who cannot be seen and forbid us from making a sensible representation of that God. Without a metaphysics on which these commandments are based, the Torah does not tell us why we should obey them. Is it that God is not the sort of thing that can be seen, that something terrible will happen to us if we try to see God, or that, like kings in the ancient world, God wants to remain hidden from the people? By the same token, is the prohibition against making images of God based on the idea that all representations of divinity are futile or that this God does not want to be worshipped in the way that other gods are? Passages can be adduced to support either interpretation, which indicates that, no matter how far back you go, Jewish tradition does not speak with a single voice.1 Although it is often said that monotheism is Judaism’s greatest contribution to world culture, it may be that the central insight behind monotheism did not become explicit until Deutero-Isaiah, who asks, “To Whom will you liken me that I should be compared?” (40:25). This question goes hand in hand with the view articulated earlier in the same chapter: that all the nations of the earth are as nothing before God. To this we may add that the sun, the moon, the stars, natural forces like thunder and lightning, wine, money, sexual attraction—in fact, anything one can think of—are as nothing as well. Following Hermann Cohen (1995, 44), I take this to mean that the central insight of monotheism is not that God is singular—one as opposed to twelve—but that God is unique in the sense of being incomparable to anything else. This means that it is impossible to characterize God with the same categories we use to characterize other things. In the starkest terms, there is God and everything else—Creator and creation—and the difference between them is absolute. By “absolute,” I mean that God is not the strongest, wisest, most benevolent thing in the universe but something above and beyond the universe and completely unlike it.

1 For passages that imply that God can be seen, see Exodus 24:10, Isaiah 6:1, Ezekiel 1:26–28. For a corrective, see Deuteronomy 4:12 and Exodus 20:19, 33:20. A Plea for Transcendence 413

In the world of mythology, the line separating the divine and the human is porous: gods take on human characteristics and humans take on divine. In the world of monotheism, it is otherwise: there is light and darkness, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human. To cross or confuse them is to threaten the foundation on which the world is based. That is why Exodus 19 warns the people not to try to look at God and the priests to consecrate themselves lest God break out against them and destroy them, a sentiment that is repeated at Exodus 33, when God tells Moses that no mortal can see the face of God and live. The implication of uniqueness is that it is misleading to think of God as sitting atop a metaphysical hierarchy in the way that a king sits atop a political one or a lion sits atop a zoological one. The problem with all hierarchies is that they assume what might be called a “one-size-fits-all” view of reality; in other words, they assume we can begin with a single set of categories and rank all of existence in terms of them. On this view, there is power, life, and intelligence. While we possess such qualities in a diminished or derivative form, God possess them in preeminent form. As I see it, monotheism stands or falls on the claim that the “one-size-fits-all” view of reality is false. To continue with the metaphor, a monotheistic God does not fit any size at all. Students of the history of philosophy will see at once that in the way I have characterized it, monotheism leads directly to the via negativa. One way to think of the via negativa is as a check on the human tendency to mundanize God by describing him as a teacher, ruler, lover, or companion—or, more abstractly, as something whose perfection can be measured and compared with other things. This means that a lifetime of study will not get us to a treasure trove of information about God but to something that stubbornly resists our attempt to understand it. In the words of Maimonides,

Glory then to Him who is such that when the intellects contemplate His essence, their apprehension turns into incapacity; and when they contemplate the proceeding of His actions from His will, their knowledge turns into ignorance; and when the tongues aspire to magnify Him by means of attributive qualifications, all eloquence turns into weariness and incapacity! (Guide 1.58, 137)

So understood, the effort to know God is not like that involved in discovering a new particle or developing a new process. In the latter cases, knowledge advances when concepts are revised and theories are extended. Maimonides’ contention is that, rather than conceptual revision, the effort to know God culminates in the recognition of something to which no concept or category will ever be adequate. 414 Seeskin

Simply put, God is unconditioned in the sense that whatever description we use to understand God will fall short of what we are attempting to describe. As Levinas (1996, 54) explains it, the idea of the infinite is exceptional in that its object (ideatum) completely surpasses the idea itself so that the idea aims at what it cannot embrace. This leads to the conclusion that “[t]he Infinite affects thought by devastating it” (ibid., 138), which is to say that all attempts at coming to terms with the infinite are bound to fail. Unfortunately, the infinite, in the sense in which Levinas uses that term, is not easy to live with. On the one hand, there are those who argue that an unknowable God is tantamount to no God at all. How can you pray to something you cannot understand? The usual response is to say that, if we are going to maintain anything like a credible concept of religion, we will have to maintain that God is adequately described by terms like strongest, wisest, and best or that God has emotions similar to ours or that it is legitimate to think of God as a teacher, ruler, lover, or companion. On the other hand, there are those who argue that, while reason cannot grasp the nature of God, there are extra- rational means of access that can. Although different in their outlook, these responses are actually two sides of the same coin insofar as the goal of each is to condition the unconditioned. To repeat, Jewish tradition does not speak with a single voice. Whole repu- tations have been established and whole movements launched by trying to soften the devastation that Levinas speaks of. One does not have to look very far in rabbinic theology or significant portions of the theology of our own day to see attempts to introduce some notion of immanence into Judaism. These attempts always leave me puzzled. If you want a religion that introduces immanence without having to apologize for it, why not adopt Christianity? I mean this in all sincerity. Rather than resorting to esoteric doctrines to make its point or trying to base a whole theology on an ambiguous concept like the shekinah, Christianity not only welcomes immanence but celebrates it. Thus John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is nothing but Christianity’s way of saying that God is more than an abstraction residing in a world of other abstractions. To be sure, Christology creates its own set of problems, and Christian philosophy has had no shortage of attempts to resolve them. Whatever one may think of these attempts, Christianity tells us in no uncertain terms that transcendence alone is insufficient. I see my role as saying that transcendence alone is sufficient. To the question “How can you pray to a God you cannot understand?” I turn the question around: “How can you pray to a God you can understand?” A God I can understand would be a God who can be defined, categorized, predicted, and explained, a God who is superior to me but not fundamentally different from A Plea for Transcendence 415 me. If the categories at my disposal are adequate to describe God, then the categories at my disposal are ultimate in the sense that nothing lies beyond them. This I refuse to admit. The categories at my disposal can point me in the direction of God and make me feel that I am in the presence of God. All of this is compatible with saying that there is a point at which they cease to function. I am, therefore, a student who takes his inspiration from a group of thinkers that includes Bachya, Maimonides, Cohen, Levinas, and Schwarzschild—thinkers who, to use Schwarzschild’s term, all tried to resist “the lure of immanence” (1990, 61). That it has an allure is undeniable. That one runs a risk in saying no to it is also undeniable. Along these lines, Levinas (1990, 15) argues that holding out for strict monotheism runs the risk of atheism. That is why, for many people, a God who is completely transcendent will seem like no God at all. But with Levinas, I assert that it is a risk Judaism has to take.

2 From Creator to Creation

The battle for transcendence and against immanence does not just deal with God but with the created order as well. To the degree that the line separating the divine from everything else can be penetrated, ordinary objects like build- ings, articles of clothing, names, numbers, artifacts, and incantations become endowed with supernatural powers and assume that status of intermediaries. According to Menachem Kellner, one of Maimonides’ most important contributions to Jewish thought was to oppose this approach and return all such objects to the their status as ordinary. To use Kellner’s term (2006, viii), Maimonides goal was to disenchant the world. Disenchantment here means that Maimonides sought to deny that there is an essential or ontological difference between those things designated as holy and those things designated as profane. As Kellner describes it, radioactivity existed before Hans Geiger discovered a way to measure it. By the same token, many people have said that holy places, persons, nations, or artifacts possess a special quality that cannot be detected by natural means but that gives them a status that other things lack. To those in the know, these things possess special powers and confer those powers on the people who come in contact with them. According to what many regard as the traditional view, the Messiah will be such a person, the Temple Mount is such a place, and the Jewish people are such a nation. But we do not have to stop there: Hebrew is such a language, seven is such a number, the Ark of the Covenant was such an artifact, and a Torah scroll is such a book. 416 Seeskin

To my way of thinking, this is just mythology by a different name. To take the most controversial example first, there is no biological trait that renders the Jewish people closer to God than anyone else. While they may have been the first people to discover the truth of monotheism, or to make it central to their worldview, Maimonides maintains they are as susceptible to idolatry as anyone else. The same is true for the Land of Israel and its holy sites. They are important because of the events that took place there and should be protected for exactly that reason. But there is no special property that distinguishes the soil of Israel or the location of the Temple Mount from any other place on earth. Contrary to what Judah Halevi maintained, there is no reason to suppose that people who reside in the land will enjoy insights that others lack. Moses, the greatest prophet who ever lived, never set foot there. Maimonides did but left shortly afterward. Whether we refer to Maimonides’ view as nominalistic or naturalistic is immaterial; the important point is that, for him, holiness is something that is conferred upon things for historical or institutional reasons, not a property they possess in their own right. This is important because historical or institutional reasons are always contingent: if circumstances had been different, different times, places, or artifacts might have been selected. To use another of Kellner’s examples, if the Navajo Indians had been the first people to discover the truth of monotheism, then, according to a nominalistic account, the Torah would have been written in Navajo, the Temple would have been built in the American Southwest, and the artifacts used in the Temple would have established places in Navajo culture. This is all a consequence of holding that everything is as nothing before God. Along these lines, Levinas (1990, 14–15) argues that Judaism categorically rejects ecstasy or enthusiasm as legitimate ways of experiencing the sacred. Humans are called on to worship God, but there is no respect in which God comes to possess people, places, or things. As Cohen put it (1995, 71), God never reveals himself in something but always to someone. God, in other words, reveals himself to a moral agent with free will. Such an agent may need reminders, symbols, a sacred literature, or sacred festivals to be motivated to seek God, but, in Judaism, there is no way in which these things can be infused with God; at bottom, they too are as nothing. I wish that all the leading lights of Jewish tradition were able to see this and refused to compromise, but such is not the case. If Kellner (2006, 287) is right, and here he follows in the footsteps of Heinrich Graetz, Gershom Scholem, and Moshe Idel, Maimonides’ attempt to demythologize Judaism was a failure and paved the way for the rise of mysticism. One need hardly demonstrate the popularity of mysticism in today’s world, both inside and A Plea for Transcendence 417 outside the academy. Whether mysticism inevitably leads to mythology I leave to others to adjudicate. My role is to say that, while Maimonides may have failed to turn the tide, the war has not been lost. It is still possible to push back against the claim that Judaism must make its peace with mythology in order to survive. From my perspective, the opposite is true: its survival—and, more importantly, its integrity—depends on the rejection of mythology. The line separating the divine from the human must be continually reinforced, lest God be mundanized or humans divinized. At Genesis 3, not only does God not allow humans to come too close, but he sets up cherubim and a flaming sword to prevent a return to Eden. In theory, Judaism should be perfectly compatible with science and philosophy. By offering us a disenchanted world, it opens the way for science to explore the natural world without impediment. The only thing it asks is that science too not try to foist on us a “one-size-fits-all” view of reality according to which nature is all there is. But, here as elsewhere, what is true in theory and what is true in practice are often at odds. I recall talking to a book publisher many years ago who advised me never to put Judaism and philosophy together in a book title because if I did, no one would buy the book. It is to this often- strained relation that I now turn.

3 Platonism and Its Implications

The best place to begin the discussion of secular philosophy is with the person I have identified as Judaism’s natural ally: Plato. Maimonides’ knowledge of Plato was meager at best. Although he seems to have some acquaintance with the Timaeus, most of his references to Plato in the Guide are not to Plato’s own words but to Aristotle’s account of what Plato said. Still, it is hard to read the introduction to the Guide, in particular the suggestion that we live in a dark night where only a few flashes of insight can be seen, without thinking of the Allegory of the Cave. And it is equally hard to read his constant denigration of the senses and the distorting impact of bodily impulses without thinking of the Phaedo. To take a further step, Maimonides’ account of the inadequacy of language to characterize the ultimate reality seems to repeat similar sentiments in Plato’s Seventh Letter and the Enneads of Plotinus.2 So, whether he was versed in Platonic philosophy or not, Maimonides’ thought puts him well within the Platonic tradition.

2 Compare Guide 1.58–59 with Seventh Letter 341c–d as well as Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.4. For further discussion of this comparison, see Seeskin 2002. 418 Seeskin

The chief insight behind that philosophy is a fundamental division between that aspect of reality that can be experienced with the senses and that which can only be grasped by the mind. Plato’s theology is a notoriously difficult subject, and it may well be that he was unfamiliar with monotheism as we know it. But I am hardly the first person to point out that Plato’s view of reality goes hand in hand with Judaism’s abhorrence to representing God in material form. By its very nature, Judaism demands that one trust a mode of awareness other than sensory input. More specifically, it asks not only that we trust such a mode of awareness but also that we worship a being who can only be approached by making use of it. In the First Critique (A311/B367), Kant expressed this sentiment by saying that, while reason is concerned with things to which experience is subordinate, it presents us with things that are never themselves objects of experience. A Platonic idea, then, is not something that is borrowed from or abstracted from the senses but something that surpasses them. As Kant puts it (A313/B370), Platonic ideas should be understood as archetypes rather than keys to possible experience. This leads Kant to say (A318/B375) that the main thrust of Platonic philosophy is a “spiritual flight” from the sensible world. This is another way of saying that the sensible world is not the be all and end all of existence. From the fact that an idea has not been realized in experience, it does not follow that the idea is illegitimate. In its most simple form, the one explained to introductory students, Plato’s spiritual flight allows us to realize that, just because no one has ever drawn a perfect circle, we should not conclude that perfect circularity is fictitious. But it does not take great insight to see that the application of this principle is much wider. Just because no existing government has ever achieved perfect justice, it does not follow that we should discard justice as a moral aspiration. The next step is to apply this principle to religion. Just because the Messiah has not yet come, it does not follow that we should give up all hope for a Messiah and stop working to prepare the way for such an outcome. Finally, just because we cannot form a mental image of God, it does not follow that belief in God is an illusion. I do not see how Judaism can stand without this principle, and that is why I think it should affirm transcendence first, last, and always. There is, of course, a price to pay for doing so. Without a visual image of divinity on which people can focus, we saw that Judaism runs the risk of looking to some like a form of atheism. With 613 commandments and centuries of legal commentary, it runs the risk that people will become so focused on the details of ritual that they will forget about God altogether. Without a Messiah who has already come, it also runs the risk of having to deal with a long list of false claimants and having people abandon hope that the true one will ever arrive. A Plea for Transcendence 419

The question is whether it should weaken its commitment to a transcendent God or stay fully committed to it. Needless to say, I opt for the latter. That is not to say that religion can be apprehended with mathematical certainty. Such a thing is neither possible nor desirable. Religion asks for choice and commitment in a way that mathematics never could. It is to say, however, that, like mathematics, Judaism should not measure success or failure on the basis of empirical factors. Not only does this rule out counting heads, it also rules out demanding empirical confirmation of its central ideas. We can see this not only in theological terms but in moral ones as well. Consider human dignity, a necessary idea for all forms of morality. What should we say about this idea in cases like the Nazi death camps, where it was systematically denied to a whole group of people? In a postmodern environment, it is not uncommon to hear that atrocities like the death camps or the Gulag or the killing fields of Pol Pot give the lie to the Enlightenment’s faith in rationality. Recall Elie Wiesel’s famous remark that at Auschwitz “not only man died, but also the idea of man.” (1968, 190.) Wiesel’s remark raises the question of whether the idea of humanity is the sort of thing that can die or whether it encapsulates an eternal truth whose validity may be ignored but can never be disproved. According to Emil Fackenheim,

It is true that that Kant’s belief in humanity could at no time be verified. However, not until the advent of the Holocaust world was this belief refuted, for here the reality that is object of the belief was itself systematically annihilated. The awful legacy for philosophy is that the annihilation of human personality robs the Idea of Humanity of its indispensable basis. And thus it could come to pass that Kant’s categorical imperative, with its heart and soul destroyed, was invoked by its most dedicated enemies [Eichmann]. (Fackenheim 1982, 273; italics in original)

In fairness to Fackenheim, these remarks are one side of a dialectical dilemma. By the end of To Mend the World, he does find someone who was able to stand up for the idea of human dignity even amid the death and filth of Auschwitz. But the assumption behind his position is clear: moral ideas need a basis in reality, that is, some form of instantiation, in order to be legitimate. It is that assumption I dispute. All moral ideas put us under an obligation to work toward their realization. This is as true for human dignity as it is for a just society or a messianic kingdom. Kant’s point is that failure to realize them has nothing to do with their validity. The reason for this is that their purpose is not to tell us how people act but how they should act. So far from undermining the idea of human dignity, the fact that someone is denied it shows exactly how 420 Seeskin important the idea is. Suppose that we agree that the idea of human dignity has been refuted. On what basis will we condemn the perpetrators of such horrors? The alternative is to say that nothing can refute the idea of human dignity because nothing we do to a person can relieve us of the obligation to treat her as an end in herself. It can hardly be denied that, like the idea of a just society or a messianic kingdom, our understanding of human dignity has evolved over time. Nor can it be denied that there are circumstances in which reasonable people can disagree over what our obligation to respect humanity entails. I submit, however, that we must deny that tyrannical governments or psychopathic killers can change the shape of morality by destroying our sense of right and wrong. Again, I wish every Jewish thinker could see this. From the time of Cain and Abel, history contains innumerable examples of cruelty and injustice. But no set of historical circumstances should get us to abandon the conviction that things do not have to be that way. As Levinas tells us, “Not to submit the Law of justice to the implacable course of events, to denounce them if necessary as countersense [contre-sens] or madness, is to be a Jew” (1990, 227).

4 Philosophy as an Academic Discipline

Although standout figures in the history of philosophy have tried to deal with the unconditioned, academic philosophy also has found it hard to live with. For those in the positivist tradition, the whole point of philosophy is to free us from our attachment to such things by getting us to be more scientific. But the issue I want to discuss here goes much deeper than a particular school of thought and asks about the status of academic philosophy as a discipline. For much of its history, philosophers did not have academic appointments, and the discipline they practiced understood itself as the subject that looks at all of reality rather than just a part. For Aristotle, for example, physics looks at being as movable, mathematics at being as quantifiable, and first philosophy or metaphysics at being just insofar as it is. While the focus of philosophy shifted from metaphysics to epistemology under René Descartes, the idea that philosophy occupied a preeminent place among the sciences and sought to tell us how everything fit together was still common. Beginning with Kant, philosophy became an academic subject and faced the problem that it was becoming increasingly difficult to say how everything fit together without exposing one’s ignorance. For a thinker of genius like Kant, it was still possible for one person to devise a system of thought that covered everything from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to aesthetics to philosophy A Plea for Transcendence 421 of mathematics to philosophy of history. Perhaps it was possible for Hegel too. But eventually human knowledge became so diverse that philosophers had to pick and choose which aspects of experience they would investigate and which they would ignore. What came to be known as analytic philosophy staked out its claim to metaphysics and epistemology and adopted a method that borrowed from mathematics and the physical sciences. While Edmund Husserl, who began his career as a mathematician, also staked out a claim to epistemology, what came to be known as Continental philosophy received its inspiration from softer subjects like history, literature, anthropology, and cognitive psychology. In the 1980s, Richard Rorty argued that there is no single method or set of problems that connects academic philosophy to the greats of the past or even to others in the academy marching under the same banner. In Rorty’s eyes (1982, 211–30), even analytic philosophy, a movement known for exceedingly high standards of clarity, is held together more by stylistic and sociological factors than by a common subject matter. Comparing Edmund Husserl with Jacques Derrida or Jean-Paul Sartre with Michel Foucault, one might easily come to the same conclusion about Continental philosophy. All this is troubling for a discipline that once claimed, and in some quarters still claims, preeminence. In what does its preeminence consist? No one outside philosophy turns to it to find out what does and does not make sense. Nor does anyone take seriously the idea that one discipline can adopt a perspective that integrates all others into a tightly woven system of thought. What, then, is a philosopher supposed to study? A mathematician, political scientist, or historian who asked a similar question about her subject would be regarded as a fool. But, in philosophy, the question is perfectly valid. If mathematicians, political scientists, and historians are promoted for achieving new and better results, on what criteria should we promote philosophers? Although some still cling to a “results” view of the subject, Rorty is right to say that one generation’s result often turns out to be another generation’s dogma. So we promote philosophers in the same way we promote artists or literary critics: by seeing if there are other artists or literary critics who take a person’s work seriously. In this environment, a young person seeking a career in academic philosophy is well advised to select a specific area of study, identify with an existing school of thought, and make appropriate contributions to a body of technical literature—exactly what I did not do. Today’s philosophy is the humanistic equivalent of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” It is hardly surprising, then, that whether one operates in the sphere of analytic or Continental philosophy, it has been a long time since we had a paradigm shift—in fact, 422 Seeskin more than a century. This means that the “victories” won by either analytic or Continental philosophy have gotten smaller as greater care is expended on ever-narrower sets of problems. When the victories were large, many people wondered why someone would study the history of philosophy given that so much was happening on the current scene. Today, the history of philosophy is held in much higher esteem than it was fifty years ago, and—what once seemed unthinkable—analytic philosophers have even taken to reading Hegel and Heidegger. No one can say where this will end, if it ends anywhere. What we can say is that academic philosophy has grown inhospitable to someone trying to offer a global vision of the world. This is especially true for the idea of uniqueness, especially if one of the hallmarks of uniqueness is that it devastates thought. Along these lines, Levinas argued that it is not by chance that the history of Western philosophy has been “a destruction of transcendence” (1996, 130). Although undoubtedly an overstatement, this comment is right to the extent that it implies that philosophy is inherently suspicious of anything that calls thought itself into question. This does not mean that philosophy has always turned its back on God; it has not. But, to stay with Levinas, philosophy has often conceived of God as the sum total of all perfections or, as one might say, the entity par excellence. We have seen that transcendence requires more: in Platonic terms, something beyond being or beyond the reach of our categories. This is not something we can shed light on by clarifying our terms or giving greater scrutiny to our inferences. Rather than clarity, what this asks for is a spiritual awakening that expresses itself in the awe and humility of which Maimonides spoke. It is not, therefore, a result that can be given a name and used to erect a conceptual edifice. On the contrary, it is a perspective from which the erection of a conceptual edifice of any type is problematic. To some, this will seem like skepticism, and in many respects, it is. But from the standpoint of Judaism, it is just another way of affirming Isaiah’s original insight.

5 Jewish Philosophy as an Academic Discipline

As a subdivision of philosophy, Jewish philosophy is subject to the same constrains that characterize the discipline as a whole. The main difference is that, while the history of philosophy has gained newly found respect over the past several decades, in Jewish philosophy, it was and still is the dominant mode of inquiry. From the time of Descartes, secular philosophy has always had people who prided themselves on starting from their inquiry ex nihilo. While such attempts may strike us as naïve, they bespoke a boldness that often comes A Plea for Transcendence 423 with genius. It is from the likes of René Descartes, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Edmund Husserl that major paradigm shifts occurred. But as I once argued in an article surveying the status of Jewish philosophy (Seeskin 1991), starting ex nihilo is not a possible move for someone in this field. No matter what one argues, there are always sacred texts, shared memories, and collected wisdom to be taken account of. That is what makes it Jewish. Still, there is a difference between arguing for a position that respects the tradition and advancing an interpretation of what someone else has said. Though both are needed, the balance in Jewish philosophy is too heavily skewed toward the latter. In A History of Jewish Philosophy published in 1916, Isaac Husik maintained that Jewish philosophy is a medieval phenomenon. In this day and age, he claimed, philosophy has become a purely secular subject so that the job of identifying a specifically Jewish content is no longer possible: we have Jews and philosophers, but no Jewish philosophers as such. Though Husik’s opinion, written several years before the publication of Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1972) and two generations before the rise of Jewish studies programs in North America, is obviously an exaggeration, one would be surprised how many people, including Jewish studies professionals, still hold to it. If you want to study Jewish philosophy, you read the classics of the medieval period. After that, we get theology, intellectual history, modern Jewish thought, or something else but not “Jewish philosophy” in the true sense of the term. As to why Jewish civilization did not produce anything worthy of the name philosophy after 1492, I confess complete bewilderment. Not only is this attitude wrong, in my opinion, it is dangerous because it reinforces the prejudice that Jewish thought is of interest only to other Jews and has nothing to contribute to world culture. Even if one were to look at Jewish philosophy more broadly than Husik did, one would still see the heavy hand of historicism. There are the Maimonides hasidim, the Spinoza hasidim, the Rozenzweig hasidim, and the Levinas hasidim. Beyond that, there is the whole group that does mysticism. Throw in a book or two on Holocaust theology, and you have a pretty accurate picture of what is going on today. There are more people engaged in Jewish philosophy than there were thirty years ago, and, in many areas, the standards for what counts as acceptable work have become more rigorous. It is also encouraging to see that a field once dominated by men now has women in prominent positions as well. But like much philosophy, the field is in desperate need of original voices. Unfortunately, there is no way to ensure that original voices will be heard. I entered Jewish philosophy at a time when rationality was under attack from numerous quarters: mystics, radical feminists, postmodernists, and, of course, 424 Seeskin those who think that the only thing Jews should be talking about is halakha. As I saw it, the problem was that many of them had distorted views of rationality. According to them, reason is assertive, dogmatic, impersonal, intolerant, and contemptuous of anything that has to do with feeling or emotion. Thus, the whole idea of constructing a religion of reason is misguided. Who wants to run through proofs for the existence of God for the umpteenth time? Who wants to split hairs on how to understand a technical vocabulary? Did the events of the twentieth century not show that people are guided by things other than reason? In one respect, the critics were right. Much of academic philosophy is assertive, dogmatic, impersonal, and intolerant. Go to a philosophy conference and you will see an adversarial environment in which people have been trained to refute each other. Early in my career, I began to ask whether things had to be that way. Yes, there is a dogmatic side to Plato, Maimonides, Kant, and others who are grouped under the “rationalist” heading. But there is also a side that is tentative, suggestive, probing, and liberating. At its best, reason is a gentle force that works by persuasion and respects opposing points of view. It is not surprising, then, that, while each of these thinkers defends reason, each also offers a critique explaining what it can and cannot do. Consider Maimonides. Although he claims to have demonstrated the existence of a nonmaterial God, when it comes to creation, prophecy, providence, or anything related to human behavior, he is clear that demonstration will not work so that all one can do is follow “conjecture and supposition,” discussing a range of opinions and trying to construct the best possible alternative (Guide 3, “Introduction,” 416). In fact, much of the Guide is an attempt to show that what the philosophic tradition has taken as knowledge is questionable even if one remains within the confines established by the philosophers themselves. There are repeated warnings about the limits of human knowledge and a frank admission that the project on which he is embarked is fraught with risk: “Know that whenever one of the perfect wishes to mention, either orally or in writing, something he understands of these secrets [the true meaning of obscure passages in the Torah], he is unable to explain with complete clarity and coherence even the portion that he has apprehended” (Guide 1, “Introduction,” 8). To be sure, this is not the Maimonides one reads about in textbooks, but it is the Maimonides that I set out to defend—and the Plato and the Kant. When Kant said he was limiting knowledge to make room for faith, the reason is that, in his eyes, faith asks us to accept things for which no demonstration can be given. If one believes in God, it is not because undeniable premises force one to do so but because one has decided to do so. At bottom, faith is not an inference or an obligation but a choice. As such, it is incompatible with dogmatism. A Plea for Transcendence 425

In fact, Kant’s purpose in writing the Critique of Pure Reason was to end what he considered the pretensions of reason or, to say the same thing, its dogmatic employment. As a scholar, my goal is to get people to see beyond what one might call Wikipedia rationalism. This means trying to get them to come to terms with what these people are saying and illuminating the vision they share. One might say, then, that I was enamored of “the vision thing” when I got started. To this day, I look for it in young thinkers and am disappointed when it seems to be absent.

6 Into the Future

I have never had much confidence in those who try to predict the future. In most cases, what they come up with is either an extrapolation from current trends or something suggesting an apocalypse. Neither is persuasive. Although I see nothing on the horizon to suggest that academic philosophy will produce a genius who awakens the discipline from its doldrums, I doubt that anyone in science could have predicted the upheavals associated with Galileo, Newton, or Einstein—or that anyone in philosophy could have predicted Descartes, Hume, or Kant. So perhaps Hegel is right in to say that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Looking at philosophy since Kant, one can say that it was divided on an important question: should it examine the necessary preconditions of experience or describe experience as it is actually lived? There are risks with either strategy. Consider Jewish philosophy. If all it does is examine the preconditions of experience, it runs the risk of becoming too conceptual and ignoring the personal or contingent dimension of love, prayer, or redemption. On the other hand, if all it does is examine experience as actually lived, it runs the risk of ignoring the theoretical commitments that make experience intelligible. As Kant told us in the Critique of Pure Reason, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” The question is what one sees as the greater risk: emptiness or blindness. For most of the twentieth century, Jewish philosophers saw emptiness as the greater risk and reacted against what they considered the excesses of absolute idealism. Husserl, a Jew who converted to Christianity, may have expressed the rallying cry of this group with his famous remark “Back to things themselves.” In any case, the people I have in mind are Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. Broadly speaking, they were part of a movement that sought to break through the realm of ideas and encounter things themselves in all their 426 Seeskin concreteness and specificity. Whatever their differences, they agreed that neither God nor the self nor one’s fellow human being can be understood merely as an instance of a general concept. In this way, attention moved from the necessary and universal to the personal and contingent. The question is whether it has moved too far. My goal here is not to make a prediction but to ask whether the pendulum is likely to shift from things themselves back to ideas. This does not mean we have to ignore the lessons of Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas but that we will come to see that the personal dimension of religion is not the be all and end all. In practical terms, I am asking whether the current obsession with “spirituality” will give way to a more theoretical approach to religion—not only the study of religion but also the practice. Whatever happens to philosophy, I feel confident in saying that the dispute over immanence and transcendence is eternal so that there will always be a need for people to defend the latter. To return to Raphael’s painting, if there are people pointing downward, there will always be a need for someone to point upward. In whatever form they take, and from whatever tradition they originate, these people will be my allies.

References

Cohen, Hermann. 1995. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated with introduction by Simon Kaplan. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Fackenheim, Emil. 1982. To Mend the World. New York: Schocken Books. Husik, Isaac. 1916. A History of Jewish Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Kellner, Menachem. 2006. Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism. Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Difficult Freedom. Translated by Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1996. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Barnasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Maimonides, Moses. 1963. Guide of the Perplexed. Edited by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwarzschild, Steven S. 1990. The Pursuit of the Ideal. Edited by Menachem Kellner. Albany: State University of New York Press. A Plea for Transcendence 427

Seeskin, Kenneth. 1991. “Jewish Philosophy in the 1980’s.” Modern Judaism 11, no. 1: 157–72. ———. 2000. Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. “Sanctity and Silence: The Religious Significance of Maimonides’ Negative Theology.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76, no. 1: 7–24. ———. 2006. Maimonides on the Origin of the World. New York: Cambridge University Press. ——— 2012. Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wiesel, Elie. 1968. Legends of Our Time. New York: Schocken Books. chapter 21 The Preciousness of Being Human Jewish Philosophy and the Challenge of Technology

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

1 My Intellectual Trajectory

My path to Jewish philosophy began in Kibbutz Afikim, Israel.1 Founded in 1926, this kibbutz was the official “home” of the Labor movement and the car- rier of the nationalist agenda of the nascent State of Israel. The kibbutz was a unique experiment in communal living whose culture did not negate traditional Judaism but rather transformed it into a new Hebraic, modernist, nationalist, and secular idiom. For example, the Sabbath was meaningfully observed, even though there was no reference to God’s creation of the universe and God’s redemption of Israel from Egypt, the main themes of traditional Sabbath ritual. In the kibbutz, we also celebrated the three pilgrimage festivals—Sukkot, Pessach, and Shavuot—through elaborate performances that highlighted their ancient agricultural roots, albeit it reframed and reinterpreted by Socialist Zionism. The worldview that undergirded the Hebraic, secularized Jewish culture of the kibbutz was articulated by Aharon David Gordon’s “religion of labor,” which fused Kabbalah, Hasidism, and European (especially Russian) philosophy (Schweid 1970; Strassberg-Dayan 1995; Shapira 1996). Gordon viewed humans as creatures of nature but warned that humans are in constant danger of losing contact with nature because of technology. For Gordon, the regeneration of humanity and the regeneration of the Jewish people could come only through the return to nature and the development of a new understanding of labor as the source of genuine joy and creativity. Through physical, productive labor, so Gordon believed, humanity would become a partner of God in the process of creation. Thus, the redemption of the Jews would be attained not through Torah study and observance of the commandments but through manual labor. Gordon’s “religion of labor” was not an abstract concept or an empty slogan but a way of life internalized

1 Hebrew readers are very familiar with story of Kibbutz Afikim, since it was memorialized in the best-selling novel by Assaf Inbari (2009). For a documentary history of the kibbutz, see Ofir 1986.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_023 Preciousness of Being Human 429 through daily practices designed to cultivate certain character traits and social behavior. A strong historical awareness permeated Zionism: as much as Zionism rejected the immediate exilic past, it attempted to recover the remote biblical past to create the new “muscular Jew” of the future (Almog 1987). My education, especially in the regional high school Beit Yerach, privileged the study of history. Although the Jewish past was framed in secular terms, it did not ignore the religious dimensions of the Jewish cultural past. We were introduced to rabbinic texts as part of Jewish history in antiquity, and the study of modern Jewish history included our introduction to religious movements such as the Musar movement and Hasidism. Finding Hasidism intellectually intriguing, I wrote my high school honors thesis on a Hasidic text—Torah Or by Rabbi Isaac of Radville—which I deciphered with the help of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. This was my first intellectual encounter with Judaism as a religious system and with the symbolic world of Kabbalah. Put differently, I came to Jewish philosophy from the study of the Jewish mystical tradition, and the relationship between these two intellectual strands has remained a continuous interest of my academic career. After my army service, I enrolled in the Hebrew University and majored in Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah (later to be called Jewish thought) and in Hebrew literature (which covered also rabbinic literature, but not the Talmud). These two departments were part of the Institute of Jewish Studies (Machon le-madaei ha-yahadut), whose methodology and conventions were governed by the historicist conventions of Wissenschaft des Judentums. The Jewish intellectual past was studied for its own sake, presumably to recover the past as it truly was. In truth, of course, the story was more complex. When Hebrew University was founded in 1925, Judah Magnes, its first chancellor, spoke of it as “a holy place, a sanctuary in which to learn and teach, without fear or hatred, all that Judaism has made and created from the time of the Bible” (Myers 1998, 92). Conflating the Judaic and scientific discourses, Magnes proclaimed, “[W]e exult in the idea of pure science; and there is no place in the world with a location as suitable for Torah as Jerusalem” (ibid.). This equation of science and Torah forged a new bond with an ancestral national tradition and the homeland, on the one hand, and assured the highest standards of objective research, on the other hand. Thus, the Hebrew University was to exemplify the classic Jewish liturgical refrain “from Zion will go forth Torah” (ki-mitzyon tetze Torah), which was most compatible with the sense of spiritual elitism and social responsibility, characteristic of my kibbutz upbringing. This is why I did not perceive a tension between the academic study of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah and my secular upbringing in the kibbutz. Rather, I studied the 430 Tirosh-Samuelson

Jewish religious texts as part of my national culture, while resisting any suggestion that my academic work should lead to observance of Judaism. Only after I settled in the United States did I realize what Jewish life actually entailed. Marriage to an American Jew brought me to the United States in the late 1970s, and there I was confronted with different Jewish life and a different approach to Jewish studies and Jewish philosophy. In the United States, I encountered liberal forms of Judaism, about which I knew nothing. Acquainted first with Reform Judaism and later with Conservative Judaism, I became aware of the difference between the academic study of Jewish religious texts and the experiencing of Judaism as a way of life with particular rituals at home and in the synagogue. Eventually, I would become quite comfortable with Jewish traditional customs, but they remained a learned activity, not unlike an acquired foreign language. As I became familiar with Jewish diversity in the United States, I regretted the failure of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism to take root in Israel. Today, the rift between secular and religious Jews in Israel is deeper than ever before, threatening the well-being of Israeli society and the Jewish people. In terms of religious pluralism, Israel failed to copy the American model. In the late 1970s, finding academic employment in the United States was not difficult because there were plenty of Jewish studies programs in that country’s public and private universities. The growth of Jewish studies reflected the increasing pride of being a Jew in the United States (inspired in part by Israel’s swift victory in 1967) as well as the changes in American higher education, which allowed for new academic disciplines such as women’s studies and black studies. Women and African-Americans not only demanded inclusion, but they also challenged the dominant narrative and its theoretical underpinning rooted in the Enlightenment. The intellectual justification for these claims came from the postmodernist critique that problematized the Enlightenment’s ideal of objectivity, its view of the autonomous Self, and the naïve belief in human rationality. Jewish studies directly benefited from these developments, but where could one teach Jewish philosophy? Philosophy departments in American universities were (and still are) dominated by analytic philosophers for whom Jewish philosophy was either irrelevant or invalid, even though leading analytic philosophers were Jews!2 There were two other possible homes for Jewish philosophy: departments of history and departments of religious studies. Both options were available at Columbia University, where I taught in the Department of History during the 1980s. Under the influence of Yosef Hayim

2 Until recently, I did not know, for example, that A. J. Ayer, the leading analytic philosopher in England, was Jewish and that he was a close personal friend of the chief rabbi of England, Louis Jacobs. I thank Elliot Dorff for that information. Preciousness of Being Human 431

Yerushalmi, I developed my own approach to Jewish intellectual history, which meant studying Jewish philosophy in relationship to other forms of Jewish literary creativity (that is, halakha, Kabbalah, literature, and folklore) and in light of the intellectual strands that dominated majority culture, be it pagan, Christian, or Muslim. I paid attention not only to interrelationship of texts, authors, and ideas but also to social institutions, to the traffic of ideas between Jews and non-Jews, to the social institutions that anchored Jewish intellectual activities, and to the conventions or habits of mind in a given era. I illustrated this approach in my books (Tirosh-Rothschild 1991; Tirosh-Samuelson 2003); the first focused on one thinker as a case study for larger cultural processes, and the second traced the development of one theme across time. As exercises in intellectual history, these studies exemplified what Shmuel Trigano (in this volume) calls “Judaic Humanities.” Unlike Columbia University, courses in Jewish philosophy were often taught in departments of religious studies, where “Judaism” was studied comparatively along other world religions. In the late 1980s, I moved from Columbia to Emory University, and there I was challenged (especially by David Blumenthal) to think about Jewish philosophy quite differently: Jewish philosophy was not simply the study of the Jewish intellectual past but a constructive theological project that made truth-claims about God, the world, and humanity. As interpreter of religious texts, however, I could not pretend to be a disinterested observer but had to acknowledge my own sociocultural location, prejudices, and blind spots. In the late 1980s, I became familiar with postmodern theories, which greatly problematized the modernist stance I had taken for granted at the Hebrew University. I now had to engage Jewish philosophy personally, theologically, and existentially, and that meant first and foremost acknowledging the fact that I am a woman, or more precisely a Jewish woman. I started to wrestle with the implications of feminism, feminist philosophy, and Jewish feminism to the study of Jewish philosophy (Tirosh-Rothschild 1994) and came to the conclusion that the category of gender is relevant to philosophical analysis and that Jewish philosophers (both women and men) must take feminist philosophy seriously. When the response to feminist philosophy was slow to come, I convened a conference and then published an edited volume (Tirosh- Samuelson 2004) that demonstrated how the discipline of Jewish philosophy could be transformed by women and gender studies. More recently, I summarized the achievements of the past three decades (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012a), but I must concede that the impact of feminism on Jewish philosophy has remained rather limited. Feminism has made me pay attention to the life of women and to the claims about women’s nature. One such claim was that women are connected to 432 Tirosh-Samuelson nature and that there is a causal connection between the marginalization and exploitation of women in Western society and the denigration of nature that has brought about the current ecological crisis. These notions constitute ecofeminism (namely, the feminist critique of environmentalism), although ecofeminism has several variants (Warren 1996, 1997). As I became familiar with different strands of ecofeminism, I also evaluated them from the perspective of Judaism: some strands (especially, social and socialist ecofeminism) are very compatible with Jewish approaches, whereas others (especially “earth-based spirituality”) are much more problematic from the perspective of traditional Judaism (Tirosh-Samuelson 2005b). My engagement with ecofeminism was part of my larger involvement with the academic discourse of “religion and ecology,” also known as “religion and nature” or “religious environmentalism.” Although I am not an environmental activist, I became involved in this discourse, most likely because of my kibbutz upbringing that inculcated in me a deep love of nature. Environmental philosophy has made very limited inroads into Jewish philosophy, even though a Jewish environmental movement exists. It emerged in the 1970s to rebuff the charge that the Bible (and the Judeo-Christian tradition more generally) has contributed directly to the ecological crisis because it sanctioned the human mastery of nature. As Jewish theologians, educators, and environmental activists responded to these accusations, they also began to examine the Jewish tradition from an environmental perspective and even reinterpret Judaism in light of environmental values and sensibilities. In an edited volume and various essays (Tirosh-Samuelson 2002, 2005a, 2006, 2012c), I showed that the conceptualization of nature has been central to Jewish religious and philosophic self-understanding, expressing the development of Jewish culture over time. Within the context of reflections on nature, Jewish thinkers have sorted out their understanding of the origin of the world, the dialectics of divine transcendence and immanence, and the ethics that bind humans to God’s creation. As in the case of feminism, to develop a Jewish environmental philosophy requires one to participate in a larger intellectual conversation and to spell out the distinctive Jewish contribution to it. Such engagement also bridges the gap between scholarship, faith, and activism, making philosophy inseparable from life (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012b). I am not too sanguine about the ability of Jewish environmental movement to transform the ethos of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, but I have no doubt that academic discipline of Jewish philosophy will benefit greatly if Jewish philosophers enter into discourse of religion and ecology. “Ecology” refers not only to the worldview that sees all living and nonliving things as integral parts of the biospherical web, so that, to understand their makeup, it is Preciousness of Being Human 433 necessary to consider relations between parts—and not just the part themselves but also to the science of ecology that studies the interactions among organisms and their environment. Does the science of ecology posit a challenge to Jewish philosophy? If so, how should Jewish philosophy address it? To answer these questions, it is necessary to become familiar with the field of science and religion, a distinctive academic conversation in which very few Jews are involved and Judaism is underrepresented (Clayton and Simpson 2006; Haag et al. 2012). I share Norbert Samuelson’s argument that, if Judaism claims to be true, it could not ignore contemporary science, since today science is the arbiter of truth. Rather, the beliefs of Judaism should be rethought, reinterpreted, and restated in light of contemporary science (Samuelson 1994, 2002, 2009). Conversely, contemporary science should pay attention to Jewish ways of formulating philosophical and scientific problems and overcome the naïve and misleading perception that science and religion are necessarily in conflict with each other. The science and religion discourse is yet another area that offers enormous potential for expanding and deepening Jewish philosophy in the twenty-first century (Tirosh-Samuelson and Cohen 2012). The chapter below, however, focuses not on science per se but on technoscience, the challenges it poses to humanity, and the way Jewish philosophy has responded to these challenges so far.

2 When Humans and Humanism Become Obsolete

Zionism was a modern social and political movement rooted in the ideals of European humanism, especially its nineteenth-century rationalist variant. Accordingly, human beings were the apex of the animal kingdom, the only animal endowed with mental and cognitive skills that enable them to grasp the laws that govern nature and to express these laws accurately either mathematically or conceptually. Moreover, as a social animal, the human being alone has a will (whether free or partially conditioned) that allows the species to create social institutions to the sake of improving the human condition. Improving the quality of human life was what “progress,” the governing ideal of nineteenth-century rationalism was all about, and Zionism applied the ideology of progress to Jewish collective existence. The socialist version of the ideology of progress as implemented in kibbutz life meant that the betterment of human life is not limited to providing the material needs of humans (for example, food, shelter, and clothing) but includes as well the elimination of inequality and injustice by creating the classless society that lives communal life in which each member (at least in theory) “gives according to his/her ability and receives 434 Tirosh-Samuelson according to his/her needs,” according to the famous slogan we learned by heart. The main obstacles to the accomplishment of these ideals, of course, were the inborn (that is, biological) selfish tendencies of human beings, collectively and vaguely referred to as “human nature.” For that very reason, human nature had to be improved or even transformed through social engineering, namely, the establishment of social institutions and a communal life that would make human beings less self-centered, less greedy, less materialis- tic, but more altruistic, more collaborative, and more concerned about the public good. The ideal kibbutznik was to be not only a new, “muscular Jew” but also a new person who is able to overcome the limitations of human nature. In retrospect, such optimistic humanism might seem naïve, if not totally misconceived. Yet controversies about the meaning of “human nature,” the validity of humanism, and the future of humanity rage today more than ever before. Why? Because today, new scientific advances and the emergence of new technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, genomics, robotics, information and communication technology, and applied cognitive science have given rise to a new situation in which the human has become a design project. Today, humans are able not only to transform their external environment, as technology has always done, but, through genetic engineering, they can now transform their own biological makeup and even engineer future generations. This capacity goes under many names, such as “directed evolution,” “enhancement evolution,” “designer evolution,” or “radical evolution”; and its goal is to replace chance with choice (Buchanan et al. 2000; Garreau 2004; Harris 2007; Young 2006). Those who celebrate this technological trajectory call themselves posthumanists or transhumanists, and they envision transcending human biological existence by means of technology.3 Posthumanism is the telos of the process that will bring about the obsolescence of the human species and the program of human enhancement that will function as “a transitional stage standing between our animal heritage and our posthuman future” (More 2004). The posthuman future, according to Max More, a leading transhumanist, will be attained through “genetic engineering, life-extending biosciences, intelligence intensifiers, smarter interfaces to swifter computers, neural-computer integration, world-wide data networks, virtual reality, intelligent agents, swift electronic communication, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, neural networks, artificial life, off-planet migration, and molecular nanotechnology” (ibid.). Put differently, transhumanism is the gradual transition from (biological)

3 For extensive analyses of transhumanism, see Tirosh-Samuelson 2011 and 2012d, as well as Tirosh-Samuelson and Mossman 2012 and the bibliography cited there. Preciousness of Being Human 435 humanism to (mechanical) posthumanism. Since human biological embodiment is regarded as a burden and a curse, the planned disappearance of the embodied human is viewed as a blessing that constitutes the hope for humanity. Whether human enhancement expands liberal values or harms them is hotly debated today (Hansell and Grassie 2011) in the context of human enhancement. Francis Fukuyama, for example, called transhumanism “the most dangerous idea” of our time (2004, 42), and his critique (2002) has been endorsed by many social theorists, philosophers, and ethicists (for example, Kass 2002; Mehlman 2009 and 2012; Parens 2006; Sandel 2007). But regardless of the penetrating critique, it is reasonable to assume that biotechnology will continue to shape many aspects of human life during the twenty-first century, as humans will seek to enhance themselves in terms of physical performance, appearance, cognition, mood, creative abilities, military effectiveness, reproduction, and life expectancy (Mehlman 2009, 6–34). Therefore, I regard the ideology of transhumanism and its hope to bring about a posthuman future to be the most important challenge to Jewish philosophy in the twenty-first century. What is most disturbing to me is not the desire of humans to improve the human condition by means of technology, but rather the notion that biological humans will inevitably become extinct, first replaced by enhanced humans and eventually by superintelligent machines. The futuristic vision in which humans become obsolete undermines the core belief of the Jewish religious tradition, which asserts the creation of humans in the image of God, no less than it challenges the assumptions of secular Zionism, which glorified the ability of humans to determine their own destiny. Needless to say, in a world devoid of humans, there will be no Jews, not Judaism, no Jewish philosophers, and no Jewish philosophy. I maintain that Jewish philosophers must speak up against the planned obsolescence of humanity and show that this futuristic scenario is not only undesirable but also pernicious. Precisely because Jews have been the victims of planned collective extermination made possible by modern technology, Jews should be more concerned about these futuristic visions. The assault on human biological existence comes from two distinct intellectual communities: technoscientific enthusiasts who attempt to engineer better human beings who will eventually be replaced by superintelligent machines; and literary theorists, cultural critics, and artists who imagine the breakdown of boundaries between humans and nonhumans. The assault on human biological existence reflects the crisis of Western culture in the mid- twentieth century and the explosion of technoscience during the second half of the twentieth century. After two world wars, the industrialization of death in the Holocaust, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, and the global 436 Tirosh-Samuelson ecological crisis, the “heroic vision of science” (Appleby et al. 1994, 29), which invested science and technology with salvific powers, was proven to be a harmful illusion. The awareness that a new theorizing was necessary gave rise to cybernetics movement that searched for “a new theoretical model for biological, mechanical, and communicational processes that removed the human and Homo sapiens from any particularly privileged position in relation to matters, meaning, information and cognition” (Wolfe 2010, xii). The term posthumanism was meant to help imagine a “postbiological” “post-Darwinian” stage of human development that will include not only genetics but “all the para- phernalia of cultural and technological existence” (Pepperrell 2003, 171). Since it was launched in the mid-twentieth century, cybernetics has evolved into other disciplines and research interests that have shaped contemporary culture and daily life (such as computer science, electrical engineering, system engineering, and biofeedback), but its scientific status and philosophical significance are still contested. As a science, cybernetics is still in its infancy: it applies to automation technology, and its general theory employs concepts such as information, game theory, homeostasis, planning predictions, autom- ata, and learning machines. Identifying the philosophical significance of cybernetics is even more difficult. According to Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Martin Heidegger saw cybernetics as the “apotheosis of metaphysical humanism” (2011, 231), but in truth cybernetics represents a crucial moment in the demystification and, indeed, deconstruction of humanism. As Dupuy puts it, “[C]ybernetics consisted of a decisive step in the rise of antihumanism” (ibid., 228), by which he means (following Hannah Arendt) the “rebellion against human existence.” If to be human means to experience freedom and mortality, the convergence of biology and technology hailed by the cybernetics movement challenged both, requiring a new theorizing of the meaning of being human. The significance of the convergence of biology and technology for humanity is precisely what is at stake. Cybernetics has deeply shaped contemporary culture. Engineers of artificial intelligence and robotics specialists (for example, Kurzweil 1999, 2005; Minsky 1986, 2006; Moravec 1988, 1999) plan to bring about the new, posthuman phase in which superintelligent machines will supersede the humans that have created them. The transformation from humans to decision-making, superintelligent machines will be gradual. For a period of time, humans and robots will coexist, as they already do today; then humans will upload their minds (the most salient aspect of their personalities according to these engineers) into supercomputers that will serve the material needs of humanity. Eventually, the machines “will tire of caring for humanity and will decide to spread throughout the universe in the interest of the discovering all the secrets of the cosmos” Preciousness of Being Human 437

(Geraci 2008, 5). The posthuman “Mechanical Age” will come about after an irreversible turning point, the “Singularity,” commences as a result of exponential, accelerated process of technological progress. Singularity is “a point of the graph of progress where explosive growth occurs in a blink of an eye” when machines “become sufficiently smart to start teaching themselves” (ibid.). When this happens, the world will irrevocably shift from the biological to the mechanical, and the Mechanical Age will inaugurate the New Kingdom, the Virtual Kingdom. When Robo sapiens will replace Homo sapiens, the superintelligent machines will convert the entire universe into an “extended thinking entity” (Moravec 1988, 116). As the Age of Robots will be supplanted by the Age of Mind, machines will create space for a “subtler world” (Moravec 1999, 163) in which computations alone remain. In the Virtual Kingdom, the “Mind Fire” will render earthly life meaningless, ultimately swallowed by cyberspace (ibid., 167). This is the ultimate telos of the transformation and transfiguration of the human to the posthuman. In these futuristic scenarios, we are now living in a “transhuman age.” The term transhumanism was coined by Julian Huxley,4 an ardent supporter of eugenics,5 to capture the “new system of ideas appropriate to man’s new situation” (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012d, 59). By the “new situation,” Huxley referred to the scientific understanding of human evolution that emerged out of developments in ecology, genetics, paleontology, geographical distribution, embryology, systematics, and comparative anatomy. Huxley’s visions inspired contemporary transhumanism, which “affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical and psychological capacities (Bostrom, n.d., 5). Transhumanists call for the overcoming of human biological limitations through diverse techniques that include stem- cell therapies, gene manipulation, selection of embryos, drugs, mechanical enhancements, genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, antiaging therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information-management tools, memory-

4 Huxley at first used other terms—“evolutionary humanism” and “scientific humanism”—to convey the vision that he promoted as “religious without revelation” (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012d, 56–64). 5 Interestingly, Julian Huxley’s brother, Aldous Huxley, the author of the dystopia Brave New World, correctly appreciated the power of technology, which he characterized as the most profoundly important sociological factor of modern times and understood the negative impact of technicization of every aspect of human life. Our society today is much closer to the Aldous Huxley’s dystopia than to Julian Huxley’s utopia. 438 Tirosh-Samuelson enhancing drugs, wearable computers, and cognitive techniques. These technologies will augment human mental and physical capacities; combat diseases; exercise control over desires, moods, and mental states; slow down the process of aging; and, above all, radically extend life by continually postpon- ing death. Although the World Transhumanist Association still numbers only a few thousand people, transhumanist ideas have proliferated in the culture in movies, fiction, and videogames (Geraci 2012). In contrast to technoscientific posthumanism (and transhumanism), which perpetuate the rationalism of the Enlightenment project, literary theorists and cultural critics endorse postmodern sensibilities when they preach the “end of man,” namely, the end of certain conception of humanity that has prevailed in the Enlightenment project. The philosophical critique of humanism is directed against “the long-held belief in the infallibility of human power and the arrogant belief in our superiority and uniqueness” (Pepperell 2003, 100), the very belief that postmodern thinkers consider not only morally pernicious but also the cause of the crisis of humanity. In 1977, the theorist Ihab Hassan used the term posthumanism in his call for the philosophical need to overcome the arro- gance of the human species and the philosophical errors and harmful social consequences of humanism. Postmodern thinkers (be they deconstructionists, feminists, postcolonialists, queer theorists, or environmental thinkers) charged that humanism was repressive for women, minorities, occupied and oppressed social groups, and even animals (Badmington 2000, 2003) and called for rethinking the boundaries of Homo sapiens, namely, the boundaries between humans and “nonhumans,” be they animals, machines, aliens, or monsters. This form of “antihumanism” has problematized the core difference between humans and nonhumans: the human body (Halberstam and Livingston 1995). For cultural posthumanists, humans should see themselves not only part of the evolutionary history but also as animals who are inherently “a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are fundamentally ‘non-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (Wolfe 2010, xxv). In these postmodern literary theories and fictional narratives, the human body is viewed as the “interface between mind and experience . . . and is narrated as a site of exploitation and transfiguration, through which the interface with an electronically-based postmodern experience is inscribed” (Bukatman 2000, 98). The breakdown of boundaries between humans and machines and humans and other animals has reached its most sophisticated expression in the cyborg discourse and biopunk that have become increasingly popular. Hailed by the feminist theorist Donna Haraway in the “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991 [1985]), the figure of the cyborg signifies the breakdown of boundaries between nature and culture, organic and Preciousness of Being Human 439 inorganic, human and animals, and a new understanding of human embodiment. The cyborg discourse has inspired other cultural forms such as films, science fiction, performance and installation art, and the horror genre, all of which defamiliarize the human body, depict it so as to inspire revulsion, or disengage the body from its biological nature by dissolving it into electronic space and cybernetics existence. Along with the demolition of the human body, cultural posthumanists envision the end of the biological link between sex and reproduction, the disappearance of the family, and the emergence of “post-familial bodies.” In short, regardless of the differences between technoscientific posthumanism (and transhumanism) and cultural posthumanism (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012e), the end result is the same: the demise of the biological human and the emergence of the mechanical or cybernetic posthuman.

3 Jewish Philosophy Faces Technology

Why Technology Matters With one notable exception (Samuelson and Tirosh-Samuelson 2012),6 transhumanism and/or posthumanism have not received the attention of Jewish philosophers. Moreover, Jewish philosophy (both as a constructive endeavor and an academic discipline) has not generated interest in technology as a distinct branch of philosophy.7 This is problematic since, historically, Jewish philosophy has always reflected the culture in which it functions. Contemporary culture, we all know, is saturated with technology: our daily life, personal relations, use of space, leisure activities, sense of self, health, and even our dying are all dependent on and shaped by tools, appliances, devices, gadgets, machines, and instruments. Technology is ubiquitous and universal, crossing national, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and local boundaries, although technology also enables communities to express themselves in distinctive local ways (Nye 2006). To ignore the centrality of technology in today’s culture means to doom Jewish philosophy to irrelevance. Furthermore, as computer scientists and engineers of artificial intelligence Jews (for example, Ray Kurzweil) are at

6 The essay compares and contrasts the utopian aspirations of transhumanism to that of traditional Judaism and Zionism, paying special attention to the role of technology in Zionist ideology. 7 Put differently, as an academic discipline, Jewish philosophy has not generated philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde, Alfred Borgmann, Andrew Feenberg, Hubert Dreyfus, or Carl Mitcham who made technology the center of their philosophizing. 440 Tirosh-Samuelson the forefront of the technological revolution, and, in Israel, technology is rightly regarded as necessary for the survival of the state (Pessig 2008). The marginality of technology in Jewish philosophy is unfortunate, but it is also fully understandable because technology is still regarded as a very specialized and somewhat marginal area of philosophizing, by comparison to metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. In the tradition of analytic philosophy, it is taken for granted that technology benefits human progress and that it simply needs to be allied with science to fulfill its promise. Technology receives more attention in Continental philosophy (that is, post-Romantic and post-Hegelian philosophy in France and Germany), especially from thinkers associated with existentialism and phenomenology such as Karl Jaspers, (1951 [1934]), Jacques Ellul (1964 [1954]), and José Ortega y Gasset (1972). The most sustained theorizing of technology was articulated by Martin Heidegger (1977a, 1977b) who analyzed how concrete artifacts (for example, bridges, windmills) play a role in the relationship between human beings and the world. Heidegger was concerned not just with technological objects that function instrumentally, that is, as means for ends, but with the essence (Wesen) of technology, which is not technological at all. According to Heidegger, because entities become reality through and only through the relationship that humans have with them, entities “emerge out of concealment into unconcealment.” For Heidegger, the essence of technology is, therefore, not a noun but a verb; it is “the way of being that holds sway in modern technology” (Verbeek 2005 54). Things (or technology in general) reveal “the concealed.”8 Heidegger pondered not simply what it means to live “in the midst” of technological existence but also how it is possible to open up a “free” relationship with technology (Scharf and Dusek 2003, 247–51). Heidegger’s philosophy has dominated Continental philosophy in the twentieth century and also made deep impact on Jewish philosophy, since, prior to 1933, Heidegger had many Jewish students (Wolin 2001; Fleischacker 2008). Yet Heidegger’s philosophy of technology (in contrast to his philosophy of language) received very limited attention from Jewish philosophers. Three Jewish students of Heidegger who did reflect extensively on technology—Hannah Arendt (Heidegger’s lover), her first husband, Gunther Anders (aka Stern), and her life-long friend, Hans Jonas—became most influential in twentieth- century philosophy but either occupy marginal status in Jewish philosophy

8 Since Heidegger assigned the same status of unconcealment to words, we may do well to reflect on the similarities and differences between words and things in his philosophy. For conflicting interpretations of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, compare Ihde (1979), Borgmann (1984), Dreyfus (1992), and Feenberg (1999). Preciousness of Being Human 441

(Arendt and Jonas) or were totally ignored by the discipline (Anders). Technology remained outside the purview of Jewish philosophy precisely because technology is about objects and not about words, because technology pertains to the interaction between humanity and nature, and because technology is human made rather than divinely revealed. This is not to say that Jewish jurists, theologians, and ethicists have totally ignored contemporary technology or that they have utterly failed to reflect on technology from a Jewish perspective. Let me discuss three main types of Jewish reflections on modern technology, especially biotechnology and medical technology.

Halakha of Biotechnology The most detailed engagement with contemporary biotechnology comes from Orthodox jurists for obvious reasons: since halakha is believed to govern all aspects of life, technology cannot remain outside the scope of halakha. Thus, Orthodox jurists (for example, J. David Bleich, Fred Rosner, and Abraham Steinberg) evaluate each and every new technology in terms of its permissibility within the principles and reasoning of Jewish law. This discourse is very informed about recent technological advancements, especially in medicine, but its tenor is legal rather than philosophical. To the extent that it offers a theory of technology, it is derived from appealing to sacred texts, biblical, Talmudic, and post-Talmudic. J. David Bleich (1998, 2002), for example, has discussed a wide range of biomedical procedures including artificial insemina- tion, genetic screening, genetic engineering, and cloning. In discussing the permissibility of genetic engineering, Bleich comes closest to offering a general theory of technology when he avers, “Man has been given license to apply his intellect, ingenuity and physical prowess in developing the world in which he has been placed subject only to limitations imposed by the laws of the Torah, including the general admonition not to do harm for others, as well as by the constraints imposed by good sense and considerations of prudence” (Bleich 2002, 130). According to Orthodox reasoning, the world God created is good but not perfect so that “God left it for human beings to complete the world” (Rosenfeld 1972, cited in Wahrman 2002, 71). On the basis of this principle, Orthodox halakhists generally maintain that human beings “are permitted to interfere in nature,” indeed they are “obligated to interfere, obligated to improve the world” (Steinberg, 1999, cited in Wahrman, 2002, 72). I do not know whether Orthodox jurists regard the transhumanist project to be an “improvement of the world,” but they have endorsed genetic engineering, which is the heart of the human enhancement project. Furthermore, because Orthodox thinkers adjudicate the permissibility of technology within the framework of halakha, they can entertain even the most far-fetched, 442 Tirosh-Samuelson hypothetical, futuristic scenario. For example, what should be the religious status of robots or superintelligent machines? Should a robot be counted in a minyan? Do the commandments of the Jewish tradition obligate a robot? These questions are not as silly as they seem since robots today are deliberately built to simulate human characteristics. As the boundary between humans and robots begins to crumble, it is reasonable to assume that, in due course, we will have halakha for robots: that is, artificial intelligence will be considered halakhically. Should this discourse become philosophically rigorous, it could open interesting philosophical discussions about determinism, freedom of the will, intentionality, subjectivity, desire, and responsibility. The Jewish tradition has already envisioned interplay between humans and a human-made creation. I refer, of course, to the motif of the golem, the humanoid created to serve his human master that, at the end, had to be destroyed because he rebelled again the human master. The golem motif has had a fascinating history in the Jewish mystical tradition (Idel 1990) as well is modern Jewish literature (Sherwin 1985), and it has inspired popular culture through science fiction, television shows, comics, and video games. Contemporary technoscience imagination has appropriated the golem motif by using it as an analogy to technoscience. Like the golem, technoscience is “a little daft” and should be understood as a “human endeavour rather than a superhuman feat” (Collins and Pinch 2002, 3). Interestingly, whereas non- Jewish scholars of science and technology appropriated the golem motif to highlight the limitations of science and technology, the Jewish theologian Byron Sherwin has used the golem motif to articulate a rigorous theological defense of biotechnology (Sherwin 2004), which he justified by appeal to the principle that humans are God’s partners (Sherwin 1990). Byron’s defense of biotechnology, however, belongs not to biohalakha but to the discourse of Jewish bioethics.

Jewish Bioethics Jewish bioethics is a hybrid discourse that combines legal reasoning, exegesis, theology, and philosophy. Several Jewish ethicists—Elliot Dorff (2003 [1998]), Noam Zohar (1997, 2006); Dena S. Davis and Laurie Zoloth (1999), Aaron Mackler (2000), David Novak (2007) and Laurie Zoloth (2012)—have dealt with biotechnology, paying attention to the implication of the new genetics for the beginning and end of life issues, as well as to issues concerning human dignity and quality of human life. Yet, in the most recent Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality, the editors were “not able to address” “biotechnologies, synthetic biology, neuroenhancers, brain imagining, cloning, genomics, and the whole realm of neuroethics” (Dorff and Crane 2013, 5), the very Preciousness of Being Human 443 core of the transhumanist agenda. The volume does include three chapters on the dominant topics of Jewish bioethics such as birth control, abortion, infertility, stem-cell research, and genetic testing, and one chapter on genetics, topics about which have generated discussion by Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform ethicists. Dorff’s earlier work on biotechnology (2003 [1998]) represents the discourse of Jewish bioethics in which law and theology intersect: legal matters are decided on theological grounds and theological principles have legal appli- cations. Since “positive law and morality are one undifferentiated web” (ibid., 80), moral concerns are also legal concerns and vice versa. The “undifferentiated web” that Dorff presents consists of very diverse sources, including the Bible, rabbinic sources, Jewish philosophy and theology, Western philosophy, American legal tradition, contemporary bioethics discourse, and even his own practical experience as a rabbi, teacher, and counselor. Out of these panoply of sources, Dorff teases out the general principles that guide his ruling on biotechnology and related issues: the body belongs to God; human worth stems from being created in the image of God; the human being is an integrated whole; the body is morally neutral and potentially good; Jews have a mandate and duty to bear children; community must balance its medical and nonmedi- cal needs and services; and Jews must sanctify God’s name. Dorff applies these principles to disputed technologies ranging from reproductive-assisted technologies through genetic screening, counseling, and testing to gene therapy and genetic engineering. In so doing, he articulates not only Jewish bioethics but a full-fledged Jewish theology of technology. Jewish bioethics employs a variety of methodologies (for example, narratives, exempla, systematic theology, moral maxims, and legal rulings) to debate contested issues, and it thrives on debate and disagreement. While all Jewish ethicists speak in the name of “Judaism” when they claim to determine the permissibility or desirability of a given technology, they fail to reach consensus because at stake are more foundational theological questions: Which sources have the authority of divine revelation? How should these sources be interpreted? How do theoretical considerations apply to specific cases? These and other hermeneutical questions, which deeply divide contemporary Jews, indicate that Jewish bioethics is not just about the legality or ethical merit of this or that technology, but rather about the meaning of being human in relationship to God and in relationship to the world. A more abstract discourse is still needed to frame the status of technology per se, and that discourse must be philosophic as well as scientific. Such discourse will include reflections on human embodiment, human mortality, the relationship between humans and the natural world, the evolutionary development of the human species, and 444 Tirosh-Samuelson the interplay of evolution and culture, along with other topics that emerge from contemporary biology, anthropology, and technoscience. Put differently, to theorize technology, we need a philosophical anthropology and a philosophy of nature (or philosophy of biology) to underlie ethics and morality.

Jewish Philosophy of Technology Two Jewish thinkers, who were exact contemporaries, stand out as theorizers of technology: Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Hans Jonas. They are not usually discussed in tandem because they fall on two different sides of the religious- secular divide in modern and contemporary Jewish experience. Soloveitchik reasoned about technology as a philosophical theologian, an exegete, and a jurist, whereas Jonas refused to take revelation as a point of departure for his philosophical reflections. Jonas reflected on technology as a secular philosopher and a Zionist. Yet, in terms of modern technology, their views were remarkably similar: both understood its power and centrality in shaping the modern condition, and both counseled caution and humility (Tirosh- Samuelson 2009). However, whereas Soloveitchik elevated the religious status of science and technology by showing how they exemplify creation in the image of God, Jonas elevated nature by endowing organic life with moral meaning that puts limits on human-made technology. By discussing them in tandem, we can appreciate how reflections on technology demonstrate the complexity of “Jewish philosophy” and how theorizing technology helps to expand the boundaries of Jewish philosophy. Soloveitchik offered religious justification for technology, on the one hand, as well as a religious critique of modern technological thoughtless reliance on technology. His point of departure is the biblical notion of creation in the “image of God,” which he interprets dialectically. According to Soloveitchik, the human being mirrors two conflicting divine attributes: majesty and humility. Both attributes are sources of human dignity but in opposing ways: whereas the majesty of God leads humans to “rule, to be king, to be victorious” (1978, 33), resulting in scientific knowledge, the dominion of nature, and the curing of diseases, humility is the divine attribute of “withdrawal and retreat” that facilitates love relations and the creation of faith communities. Science and technology are rooted in the human imitation of God, but they express only one dimension of human uniqueness and dignity. In the modern era, human beings mistakenly reduce dignity solely to that realm of human activity, forget- ting the other divine attribute: humility. Taking his inspiration from the Lurianic notion of divine self-withdrawal (tzimtzum), Soloveithick holds that God is not only a victorious ruler but also the Creator who was able to impose Preciousness of Being Human 445 a limit on Himself to make room for non-divine reality. God’s self-withdrawal “requires man to withdraw.” As Soloveitchik saw it, the problem of the modern person is not the existence of a tension between majesty and humility but the refusal to accept that both constitute the meaning of being human. This denial makes it impossible for the modern person to “retreat humbly” and enter personal relationships with God and with other humans that constitute a faith community. Soloveitchik developed his critique of technological stance in his influential “The Lonely Man of Faith” (1965), where he offered a typology of two foundational orientations, captured by the two biblical narratives of creation. The first orientation (“Adam the first”) “sees the world as an object to be mastered” and derives dignity from science and technology that make possible overcoming vulnerability to nature. Desiring to overcome helplessness, human beings interact with each other on a utilitarian, functional basis mastering the external world, overcoming poverty, hunger, and other natural limitations. The technological “Adam the first” senses his humanity and dignity through the unleashing of energy and power, but his posture has little to do with awareness of God; it reflects instead the awareness of the human as being part of the cosmos. By contrast, the orientation (“Adam the second”) leads humans to experience the world not as a reality to be controlled “but a reality to be experienced with a sense of wonderment, puzzlement, and surprise” (Hartman 2001, 107). From this perspective, human dignity is derived not from mastery and control of nature but from “the quest for purpose, meaning, and relationship” which the human finds in the encounter with another person, a Thou, through friendship, passion, and love. The dignity of “Adam the second” is, thus, derived from personal relationship with God and with other humans, beginning with the relationship with the woman. Soloveitchik’s critiqued the loss of human ability to truly imitate Humilitas Dei, a point that is sometimes glossed over in the current Orthodox support for biotechnology. Without the ability to imitate God’s humility, modern humans are unable to make room for meaningful interpersonal relations, as much as they are not able to “to withdraw from rationalistic position” in order freely to assume the burden of divine laws. Modern humans have undermined that creative dialectics, resulting in spiritual impoverishment. In his commentary on Genesis 1–3 published posthumously under the title The Emergence of the Ethical Man (2005), Soloveitchik elaborated his philosophical anthropology by explaining how humans are unique biological entities because they are capable of making ethical choices and receiving divine commands. The ethical capacity enables human to enter dialogical relationship 446 Tirosh-Samuelson signified in the biblical narrative in the relationship between man and woman. Soloveitchik discusses the rise of ethical consciousness that makes a human being not just “man-nature” but also “man personality,” enabling the human to “a partner with the Almighty in the act of creation” (Soloveitchik 1983, 81). Whether that typology still holds given contemporary knowledge of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience requires further discussion. Be this as it may, for Soloveitchik, the true partnership between humans and God is to be found not just in the repair of the world but in the constant self-creation of the human personality. To truly imitate God, involves not only curing diseases and healing the sick but also self-creation through the interpersonal relationship and the ability to acknowledge defeat and repent one’s wrong doing (Peli 1997). In the process of repentance (teshuvah) and the seeking of atonement (kap- parah) humans find true creativity, discover purpose and significance, and overcome their sense of loneliness. Thus, while Soloveitchik sees the human scientific endeavor as divinely sanctioned, human control and improvement of the physical environment do not exhaust the meaning of being human. The true human self-creation is to be found not in enhancement of human biological traits through genetic engineering, as transhumanists ask us to endorse, but in the internal, existential process in which the biological creature becomes an ethical personality that receives divine commands and enters a covenantal relationship with God. As David Hartman articulates the point, “[W]hen a person creates himself, [he] ceases to be a mere species man, and becomes a man of God” (Hartman, 2001, 85). Soloveitchik’s reflections come close to Jewish philosophical theology of technology, but they lack the level of abstractness characteristic of philosophy. Only Hans Jonas has generated systematic philosophy of technology (1966, 1979, 1980 [1974], 1984, 1996), and his reflections are directly linked to his experience as a Jew, a Zionist, and a scholar of gnosticism and of Jewish mysticism (Wiese 2007; Tirosh-Samuelson 2008). Jonas’s Jewishness and his approach to the Jewish religious tradition are best defined as “secular religiosity” (Margolin 2008), a posture shared as well by A. D. Gordon who was similarly critical of modern technology, although he died long before modern technology unleashed its most destructive powers. Like Gordon, who understood modern technology as a source of the human alienation from nature and preached the return to nature as the path to the regeneration of humanity, Jonas saw in modern technology disturbing nihilistic tendencies that had to be critiqued and addressed by a philosophy of nature that protects its inherent moral worth. For both Gordon and Jonas, nature is a source of human vitality and meaning, rather than dead matter to be used for human progress. And similar to Preciousness of Being Human 447

Soloveitchik, Jonas’s critique of modern technology makes use of the biblical creation narratives and the kabbalistic doctrine of divine self-withdrawal (tzimtzum), although Jonas treats these sources as an academic scholar rather than as observant Jew. Jonas’s experience in World War II as a Jewish soldier in the British army, made him particularly sensitive to the horrors that technology inflicted on humanity in general and on Jews in particular. He correctly understood the novelty of modern technology and its profound transformation of the human condition (Jonas 1979, 1980 [1974]). In the premodern world, the human condition was believed to be inherent to the very nature of things; the human good was determinable on that basis, and human action and responsibility were narrowly circumscribed (Jonas 1984, 1). This has changed radically in the modern world as a result of modern technology, since human action can radically alter nature, including the nature of humans. While nature has never been immune to human intrusion into it, modern biotechnology has made it possible to expand the human life span, control human behavior, and manipulate the genome, all of which raises questions about what is normatively human while putting human nature itself at stake (ibid., 18–21). Jonas correctly grasped the power of modern technology to set in motion a causal chain that has a profound effect on objects and peoples in very remote places and in future epochs and understood that these changes are irreversible. If mistakes are made, correcting them is very difficult—in many cases, impossible. Therefore, modern technology, especially biotechnology, changed the moral situation and undermined the entire framework of human action. Jonas also explained and critiqued the utopian spirit of modern technology and its glorification of “progress.” This utopian impulse is behind the promises of technology to cure the “mistakes” of nature or overcome its shortcomings. In his prescient insight, he understood the novelty of modern technology that has turned the human being into an object of technology. As Jonas put it, “Homo faber [man the maker] is now turning on himself and gets ready to make over the maker of all the rest” (1984, 18). The modern dynamics of progress and the material emphasis on making and fabricating culminate in the remaking of the maker that characterizes modern technology, according to Jonas. Modern technology, including biomedicine, keeps moving forward incessantly, threatening the very source of the technological project, the human. Since humans now have the power to alter or destroy humanity itself, Jonas argues vocifer- ously that the very existence of humanity as created by God is itself a value. Our genetic engineering means that we are now able to create other humans, not in the image of God but in our own image. This is the hubris against which Jonas 448 Tirosh-Samuelson spoke with prophetic passion, although he, unlike the biblical prophets, insisted on the hiddenness of God and on God’s inability to prevent human self-destruction. Jonas correctly grasped that modern technology is more than a mere instrument for human purposes. It forces human beings into a dialectical situation: our attempt to bring the external world under our power ends with the power of technology to destroy or radically refashion the very subject whose power it is. In the premodern world, technology remained ethically neutral because it had no power fundamentally to alter or destroy nature. The goal of human life was not techne but theoria (that is, contemplation), which was not ethically neutral since its object was the attainment of the highest good. To act against the good was, therefore, to act in contradiction to knowledge. But, in the modern world, the contemplation of things is not considered the goal of humanity; the chosen goal is having power over things. In the modern world, as Jonas explains, “techne in the form of modern technology has turned into an infinite forward-thrust of the race, its most significant enterprise, in whose permanent, self-transcending advance to ever greater things the vocation of man tends to be see, and whose success of maximal control over things and himself appears as the consummation of his destiny. Thus the triumph of homo faber over his external object means also his triumph in the internal constitution of homo sapiens, of whom he used to be a subsidiary part” (Jonas 1980 [1974], 11). Thus, modern technology lost its ethical neutrality and is no longer innocent. Even the pursuit of knowledge has changed because it too has been reduced to technology; knowledge is no longer about the good and is now used for good or evil. Modern “experts”—namely, scientists—do not have the capacity to determine the proper and improper uses of their knowledge. We cannot turn to science to determine what is morally good. The only way to address this conundrum is to change the way we understand the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Jonas, therefore, offers a new philosophy of nature that recognizes the intrinsic moral value of the natural world and our responsibility toward the natural world. The natural world is not just inert material stuff that we are free to do with as we please; rather, it has an inherent moral significance. Applying Kantian principles and distinctions to nature, Jonas insists that nature should be treated as an end and not merely as a means. Jonas’s philosophy of nature was the basis of his environmental thinking, and he is correctly regarded as the “father” of the Green movement in Europe. Because he understood the capacity to refashion human life through genetic, biochemical, and neurological interventions, Jonas was the first to caution humanity to exercise a “heuristics of fear” vis-à-vis technology (1996, 111). Jonas saw himself as a champion of organic life, precisely because he personally Preciousness of Being Human 449 experienced the vast devastation of life. For Jonas, organic life is itself “an ontological revolution in the history of matter,” a radical change in matter’s mode of being. He gave a phenomenological account of organic, including humanly organic, life. Beginning with the most basic phenomenon of metabolism, Jonas interprets all organic life and individual organisms in nondualistic terms. His concern was to overcome the radical split between nature and ethics, between the “is” and “ought,” characteristic of modern science and philosophy. How could this be achieved? By endowing all forms of life with intrinsic moral worth and by insisting that life itself and the material world necessary for its being command ultimate respect, allegiance, and, finally, moral commitment. Jonas’s conception of responsibility cannot be analyzed here, but we should note his remarkable insistence on responsibility toward future generations that will ensure the future of humanity. Such an ethics develops a conception of humanity not as it is but as it is yet to be realized. For Jonas, the very existence of humanity is an objective good that imposes an obligation on the human will that, through technology, has power over this objective good. His statement “there is an unconditional duty for mankind to exist,” (Jonas 1984, 37) is more compelling now than ever before, given the threat to the extinction of humanity not only by nuclear war but by self-destructive impulses of transhumanism and posthumanism. For Jonas, the source of the duty is an “ought” that stands above both ourselves and future human beings. That “ought” is the “duty to be truly human” (ibid., 42), and it captures the “ontological imperative” of humanity that derives from the idea of Man, an idea “telling us why there should be men [and it] tells us also how they should be” (emphasis in the original; ibid., 43). Responding to the horrors of the Holocaust, Jonas insisted that the existence of humanity is an imperative: humanity ought to be. This notion, therefore, sets a limit on human technological quest and its quest for control over necessity or its insatiable desire to improve of human nature. More than any other Jewish philosopher, Jonas reflected philosophically on specific biotechnologies such as assisted reproductive technologies, germ-line engineering, cloning, and radical life extension. Though Jonas remained very marginal in the discipline of Jewish philosophy, he had many admirers and followers among non-Jews. His most influential Jewish student is Leon Kass, the past chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Kass has consistently insisted that we pay close attention to the social and cultural implications of the new biotechnology, engaging it philosophically and ethically, rather than blindly celebrating its promising posthuman potential (Kass 2002, 10). Kass asks that we address foundational questions: What kind of human beings do we wish to be? What kind of society do we wish to live in? What ideals, norms, and standards should guide us into 450 Tirosh-Samuelson the future? Though Kass’s thinking about biotechnology is partially inspired by the Jewish tradition, especially his reading of the Bible (Kass 2003), it is instructive that his cautionary stance toward biotechnology is not shared by other Jewish bioethicists, as noted above. Following Jonas’s arguments on behalf of the “virtues of mortality,” Kass rejects the tendency to bring about “more life, longer life, new life,” by means of technology (2002, 258) and instead speaks about human dignity from within the ancient tradition of virtue ethics, especially its Aristotelian formulation. The debate between Kass and other Jewish bioethicists goes to the heart of the contemporary situation in which humans face the danger of becoming obsolete by human-made devices that are supposed to correct biology’s “imperfections.” Whether one endorses biotechnology or takes a more critical and cautionary stance toward it, it is clear that theorizing technology is essential for the future of philosophy in the twenty- first century.

4 Conclusion

Technology frames human life in the twenty-first century and requires the attention of Jewish philosophy. How we go about it indicates where we stand in the spectrum of contemporary Jewish life. Do we understand our Jewishness in religious or secular terms? Do we define ourselves as Jews by birth, ethnicity, culture, or religious affiliation? Where do we locate ourselves in terms of the Jewish religious pluralism? How do we approach Jewish texts and how those texts shape our cultural identity? The answers to these and other related questions will shape how we understand the task of Jewish philosophy and how we philosophize. Given my own intellectual trajectory, it is understandable why I resonate most with Jonas. His insistence on the preciousness of human biology, “secular religiosity,” a scholarly approach to Jewish texts, interest in philosophy and Kabbalah, Zionism, immigrant experience, interest in science and religion, environmentalist sensibility, and cautionary stance toward technology all speak to me very personally, although I did not meet Jonas in person. More than any other Jewish thinker, Jonas identified the powerful forces that will govern the twenty-first century as technology becomes increasingly more pervasive, sophisticated, and intrusive. Jonas’s legacy (Tirosh-Samuelson and Wiese 2008) paves the way to a systematic Jewish theorizing of technology and of nature that defends the preciousness of being human. Technology is a human-made product, but it is neither innocent nor neutral. Technology drives culture just as much as it is an expression of culture. Jewish philosophy for the twenty-first century should not ignore technology, Preciousness of Being Human 451 and the engagement with technology will broaden the scope of Jewish philosophy, transform its style, and accentuate its inherent interdisicplinarity. To theorize technology, or more broadly technoscience, one must go beyond bioethics and beyond biohalakha and become informed about science and technology studies, more conversant with the sciences (the natural sciences, the life sciences, neuroscience, and applied cognitive science), and more involved in the discourse of science and religion. When this work is undertaken, Jewish philosophers will realize that the futuristic visions of transhumanism and posthumanism are not mere fantasies but powerful cultural programs that shape the quality of our life today and the destiny of future generations. As much as the categories of gender and environmentalism have broadened the scope of Jewish philosophy by introducing new questions, reflections on technology will pose new questions: What does it mean to be a human in the age of technology? How do the newest developments shape social interaction among people? Should technological advances be regulated and, if so, by whom? What will be the guiding principles of technological regulations? What are the most pressing moral and ethical questions brought about by new technologies? Where can we find answers to these questions? Does humanity undergo a revolution in its self-image? If so, do philosophy and religion offer a framing for such a revolution? As Jewish philosophy makes technology more central to its concerns, it will become more pertinent to contemporary culture; conversely, contemporary debates about technology will take a different direction when the Jewish perspective is considered. But understanding the promise and peril of technology compels Jewish philosophy to pay more attention to the natural world, articulate Jewish environmental philosophy, and even inquire about the gender dimension of modern technology, since engineering was culturally defined as masculine and women have been “excluded from technical education” (Nye 2006, 15). In short, reflections on technology can invigorate Jewish philosophy as much as they link the various strands of my intellectual trajectory: intellectual history, environmentalism, bioethics, and gender.

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Shmuel Trigano

Every one of us has the good or ill fortune to undergo a founding experience; its impact can haunt us throughout our lives, or we can sublimate it in creation.1 For me, this experience was certainly that dreadful moment when my world came to an end,2 when the French state abandoned in 1962 what was constitutionally French departments and a population of one million French citizens under the threat of massacre by the Arab nationalists (which, indeed, occurred in Oran and for 120,000 Arabs, the back troops of the French army). In the delayed pain of the uprooting, it dawned on me, in the following years, that Judaism was a condition of existence that the idea of exile revealed in its true dimension, the quest for an absent presence. After completion of my secondary school studies in Paris, this search led me to Israel where I discovered that the absence could be curled up within the presence, that the exile could reach its apogee in the heart of the return to Zion and the rebirth of Israel. The eternal Israel, the Israel for which I yearned, was absent even within the decor of the messianic era. In the magnetization of these two poles, my writing was born, spurred by the need to find the presence in the absence and to penetrate its enigma. While the uprooting that had plunged me into the spiral of exile had opened me up to the metaphysical and philosophical examination of absence, presence, retreat, and return, the hope of the return, for its part, opened me up to a political, historical, and sociological examination. I had to understand this strange feeling that had taken hold of me in Israel: that the Israelis were absent to themselves as Jews, at the very height of their concrete presence on the scene of the resurrection of the eternal Israel, in the wake of the exile. Only much later was I able to name this state of affairs in the terms of “normality” and “normalization,” a project with origins older than Zionism, going back to the period of the emancipation and the “regeneration” of the Jews. Two major directions of my writing thus developed: a metaphysical and philosophical part and a political and historical, sociohistorical, part, as if

1 This essay was translated from French by Stephanie Nakache. 2 We left Algeria in the space of two days with two suitcases as our sole possession.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_024 In Search of Eternal Israel 459 it were necessary to think and reconstitute on one hand the consistency of the broken being and on the other the continuity of an interrupted history. The title of my first book, Le récit de la disparue, essai sur l’identité juive (2001c [1977]), expounded this intellectual program: what has “disappeared” is Israel in humanity, femininity in masculinity, Jewishness among the Jews, Sephardiness in Ashkenaziness, and, finally, God, whose name, YHVH, is made up with the verb “to be,” in the being, original source of the exile.

The Absent Presence

This first book represents for me the matrix of my entire work, like the reshit of the account of the creation in Genesis, all the more so since it fully develops the notion of reshit, the retreat of the Being in which existence takes place. All the themes that I have treated subsequently are contained in it, femininity and masculinity, creature-Creator, present and future, language and Hebrew, Israel and the nations, all mustered to confront the enigma of the presence and the absence. The book is built on the metaphor induced from the Hebrew word rahamim, which designates the divine “mercy,” compassion, Jacob’s cardinal virtue. Yet it has a very potent metaphorical power of transfer of meaning: the word is formed on a root rehem, which means the “matrix,” “womb,” and this leads to an understanding of the rahamim as the relationship of a womb to the embryo that it bears, which is called in Hebrew Ubar, that which “passes or “is passed,” a verb on the basis of which the word Ivri, the “Hebrew,” is formed. I saw there an expression of the act of the creation of the world, olam in Hebrew, namely, absence, disappearance, neelam. If initially God is the Being (Havayah), the entire being, the place of humanity can only be in God’s retreat, which is the act of creation whose sign is the shabbat, the “cessation,” when the sixth day starts the history of humanity. The enigma of the absent presence has greatly inspired my works, and the discovery of Hebrew temporality has provided a solution to it. Exclusive attention was paid to this concern in a short work, Le Temps de l’exil, published much later (2005 [2001]). This is the kind of work that is written after a long progression, after reaching a height where it is possible to turn and see and understand in retrospect the progress that has been made. The work deals with the temporality of a consciousness that perceives the world through the exile. In Hebrew grammar, there is no present. The verb “to be” on whose root (HVH) God’s name (YHVH) is formed is not conjugated in the present, as if the only thing of which we were sure was the “past,” since the only time remaining, the future, is but heralded. The past is called avar, a position of passage, in 460 Trigano short, similar to an ubar/embryo borne by the womb that has withdrawn (the retreated presence) with a view to a future, atid, namely, the birth of the child, namely, its advent to the present of the presence, beyond the future.

The Separation

This metaphor of birth led to the idea that any presence (that is, the child to be born) implies a separation, motivated by love, another way of naming the retreat or absence as a “disappearance.” This theme assumed increasing importance in the later books, even resulting in a book with the meaningful title La séparation d’amour: une éthique d’alliance (1998). The separation for me is not abandonment but the vehicle of the covenant. It does not produce a lack but an excess, an abundance of being: the appearance of the other as partner of the covenant. The separation occurs, above all, with the self, with a narcissistic projection of self on the face of the other, obstacle to the encounter, but which is also its medium term, the obligatory passage. Accordingly, I have greatly expounded on the Hebrew expression “to break a covenant” (in Hebrew, likhrot brit), to mean “to make a covenant.” An entire relationship with the world and with existence is contained in this notion whose general contours I have sketched in this book, examining all its expressions. In separation, it is as if the subject were breaking his own reflection in his partner in which he looks at himself to be able to recognize the other. It is as if the narcissistic stage must be unavoidably posed in order to be “broken” and passed so that he reveals the being opposite him hidden by his own self-importance. Two biblical examples can well illustrate this: Eve whom Adam can name or discover only after being suspended from himself in the “torpor” (Genesis 2:21) in which he is immersed to see her and hear her name. Or Abraham who, at Mount Moriah, had to go as far as lifting the knife over Isaac and thus sacrificing his son on the altar of his own image of father in order finally to free him and see his son stand up beside him, separate from him, restored in his own name (Genesis 22). The place of Man and of the creature is always “at the side of”: “there is a place by Me” (Exodus 33:21). To enter into the covenant, one must learn to live with this empty space of self in which the other appears, and this is also a metaphor of the progression with the God of Israel to the absent presence, under the prohibition of representation. In Search of Eternal Israel 461

The Place of Contemporary Israel

Contemporary Israel helped me understand the existential scope and political and historic relevance of this question of the presence (in the absence). It is there that the eternal Israel is awaited on the scene of history. In the search today for the emergence of the face of the eternal Israel, all eyes turn toward the Israeli experience. Historically speaking, we have entered into an era that marks in many respects the end of a long period of history that had begun after the first exile to Babylon (586 BCE). Indeed, exile is the criterion that structured the Jewish conception of history in this period. The birth of a sovereign Jewish state constitutes a tremendous event of a scope unprecedented since the Davidic mon- archy. During the Second Temple period (538 BCE–70 CE), Jews indeed had political power, but the power was never completely sovereign and never the power that Jews had in the First Temple period, which equaled the power of a modern nation-state. Sovereignty is, thus, the antithesis of the Galut, even if it emerges from outside it, and this is a decisive feature. It is in this sense that all the most important questions are posed in Israel. Another development also indicates the crossing of a historic threshold: the demographic phenomenon. Three-quarters of Jewish children born today are born in Israel, as the Israeli demographer Sergio della Pergola assesses. In the coming years, without fanfare, very possibly the majority of the Jewish people will be in Israel. Basically, this is understandable since the center of gravity of Jewish existence is shifting to its most powerful point. Everything points to this evolution. The majority of Jewish people today live in the ten megapolises of the democratic Western countries. Except for the American center, Jews have practically disappeared from the other continents, except for some vestiges here or there. We are undoubtedly on the way to seeing Jews concentrated in Zion. From France, the main Jewish concentration in Europe, we can experience this perspective since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This “epochal” development is accompanied by a worldwide historic mutation. In all likelihood, the democratic West, from the United States to Europe, has entered into a phase of economic, political, cultural, and spiritual decline, a result of its own “deconstruction” and its abdication in face of the “emerging” powers (Asia, the Arab world, Latin America). I published a book, La nouvelle idéologie dominante: le post-modernisme (2012a), where I analyze this evolution in the terms of a global crisis of the democratic regime. The flow of Jews back to Israel also reflects this eclipse, as in the past when the center of gravity of Jewish life shifted according to the rise and fall of the civilizations on 462 Trigano the scene of history, with each new dominant power welcoming the potential immigration of a new Jewish community.

The Question of Jewish Modernity

The enigma of the Jewish absence in my subsequent research refocused on the question of sovereignty, of the sovereign subject as an actor of history, the very framework of the Israeli experience. “Normalization” dooms the eternal Israel to exile in the current Jewish experience. By the term “eternal Israel,” I mean the persistence of the spiritual and metaphysical being enshrined in the founding Sinai community. Eternal Israel is, thus, larger than any historical form of Judaism through its numerous mutations in the course of time. How can the latter be embodied and carried out in the former, at the time when the hope of the resurrection of the body of Israel seems to be occurring? To answer this question, I first had to survey the nature and history of Jewish modernity in its two aspects, the Emancipation (namely, the granting of individual citizenship) and the autoemancipation (namely, political Zionism, the building of a collective citizenship). The question of the origins of Jewish modernity is central in this respect. My PhD thesis in sociology (later to be published as La demeure oubliée, genèse religieuse du politique [1999a (1984)]) showed that it was not a simple imitation of the Western Enlightenment but that it sprang from the mutations of medieval Jewish society. There I developed an anthropological approach of the school of Jewish philosophy, an ideological peak emerging from the iceberg of the mutation of Jewish society. Once modernity had taken root, with all its dysfunctions, in the Jewish history of the depths, it became possible again for me—this was the condition for it—to assume its heritage within an internal logic of Jewishness and to come to grips with this heritage, both progressive and harmful, in order to imagine ways of going beyond this age in continuity. In this work, I defined Jewish modernity as the disappearance of Jewish history in the history of the Jews. I believe that I developed in this work a new way of considering both Jewish philosophy and modernity and that I made a further contribution to the theory of the origins of European modernity. In contrast to Julius Gutmann, who was committed to the logic of Wissenschaft des Judentums and whose Die Philosophie des Judentums (1933) and attempted to show through the study of Jewish philosophy the very example of the possible symbiosis of Judaism and of the dominant thought in each age, I endeavor to see in the project of Jewish philosophy since Philo of Alexandria an avenue of Jewish history that, through In Search of Eternal Israel 463 the shift of its doctrines, paved the way to European modernity. The medieval philosophical controversy about Moses Maimonides is relevant in this respect, but not because it opposes the Enlightenment philosophers to the obscuran- tists, since the stake of the conflict concerns the very historicity of Jewish society and its political stature. The debated question of the nature of the biblical text (mitsvot or aggadah) was a question on the nature of Jewish existence: a people in history and politics or a denomination and perhaps a wisdom. There is a clear trajectory that goes from Philo and Saadiah Gaon through Maimonides to Baruch Spinoza and then to Moses Mendelssohn, who, in my opinion, is the last Jewish philosopher. In my understanding of Jewish philosophy, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emanuel Levinas are beyond the scope of Jewish philosophy, contrary to conventional views that recognize in them the epitome of “Jewish philosophy” (Trigano 2001b). Indeed, if the characteristic of Jewish philosophy is to give an account of Jewishness, perceived as a “particularism,” according to the standards of a “universalism” that lies on Greek philosophical standards, these thinkers are not concerned by such a project. They are neglecting the concern for a political philosophy of the Jewish people. In my view, the history of Jewish philosophy is a series of historic mutations, relays, and phases (which includes, among others, the Marrano return to Judaism that internalizes a logic external to Judaism in the Jewish condition). The anthropological perspective on the philosophical texts was implemented for the first time by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont. He sought to identify the different stages of the rise of modernity in traditional society as they show through in the philosophical texts in which entire ages recognized themselves. Maimonides’ apophatic doctrine was a turning point in this evolution. It introduced the dialectic in the old doctrines of the anthropomorphisms that involved mediation between God and his creation, destined to maintain the conception of His unity (the Philonian Logos, Saadiah Gaon’s Kavod Nivra) that does not accept intervention in contingency. The most radical Maimonideans were at the origin of a historic shift of the Maimonidean doctrine that alle- gorized to nothingness all the structures and contents of Judaism. The issue concerned the status of traditional society, its concreteness and its political dimension, which are called into question in the name of a purist conception of God. The symbolic hollowing out of these realities formed the empty space in which modern reason could develop and political autonomy could be implemented by force of circumstance. The disappearance of Jewish politics (“The State of Moses”) as an instance of Jewish thought and reality, led by Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, was also well suited to the founding of 464 Trigano democracy and modernity. One only needs to see how he is treated by the Mendelssohn of Jerusalem, as a vague, time-honored, and unconsidered poetic figure, then how he disappears purely and simply in Cohen and Rosenzweig, and becomes very marginal in Levinas, while all the efforts of the classical Jewish philosophers had converged toward his conservation, even though, in minor (and specific) mode, and toward his legitimization, with respect to the empire of their days, of the “universal.” Jewish philosophers have never disregarded the service of Jewish particularity, even if they have reduced the specific nature of Israel to a particularism, a questionable hypothesis because what is the universal if not the dominant power and thought of an age?

The Jew, the Man, and the Citizen

This is where the second dimension of my investigation of Jewish modernity comes, more philosophical-political and sociohistorical. My analysis of the political status of the Jews, in particular, in the literature of the French Revolution in favor of their Emancipation, in La République et les Juifs après Copernic (1982) demonstrated that the modern Jew entered society only anon- ymously and individually. The question of the relationship between “Man” and “Jew” is the crux of the debate about the emancipation. “They are men like us; they are this before they are Jews,” wrote abbé Grégoire,3 when he argued in favor of granting emancipation to Jews. This seems a fine statement at first glance but discloses a disturbing vision: the Jew is dissociated in principle from the Man (there could be, there were, Jews who were not considered as men since they were only “Jews”). If the Jew is emancipated, it is because he is a man and not because he is a Jew and not as a Jew, a quality that must disappear because, in the eyes of the emancipators, Jewishness is a product of European persecution and constitutes a corruption of humanity.4 Of this the emancipators are certain (cf. Trigano 1990), by way of a specious syllogism that could be summarized as follows:

3 “Motion en faveur des Juifs,” in La Révolution française et l’émancipation des Juifs, vol. 7, L’Assemblée Nationale Constituante. Motions, Discours et Rapports. La Législation nouvelle, 1789–1791 (Paris: Editions d’histoire sociale [E.D.H.I.S.], 1968), 108. 4 We should note that only Jewish men were legally emancipated. All women, including Jewish women, had to wait in France until 1944 to receive full civil rights. In this essay, the term “man” refers to humanity at large rather than exclusively to men. In Search of Eternal Israel 465

1. The Jew is a man; 2. All men are not Jews; 3. The Jew is only a man.

In this neutralization of the Jewish figure, Europe accused and blamed itself.5 It corrupted men who because of it became Jews. Thus, it defined the Jew by the generality: that is, it put an end to him by recognizing him and made of him an artificial condition of which society is the cause to the point that his specific nature must disappear in the man and the citizen that he became. Jews became citizens only on the express and very clear condition that they renounced the Jewish people, their collective existence and their cultural and historic identity. This did not stop the Jewish people, whose existence does not depend on a decree (whether of destruction or of emancipation) or on a decision (even of the Jews) from continuing to exist, now abandoned to the political jungle of the nation-states. This jungle took the form first of anti-Semitism, then later of the Shoah, the terminal point of modernity and, in particular, of the Emancipation.

The Laboratory of French Judaism

L’idéal démocratique à l’épreuve de la Shoah (Trigano 1999b) was a theoretical outcome of this analysis that was the source of many books, in particular, on contemporary French Jewry since World War II, which represents, to my mind, a kind of laboratory of the evolution of the model of Jewish modernity. France was the quintessence of political centralism and of the Republican abstraction of modern politics so that the destiny of the Jews acted there like a chemical agent of reality. In the second version of this history and contrary to the original political and ideological presuppositions, French Jewry following Vichy and the Holocaust (which had made them a foreign people within the citizen nation, doomed to destruction at the same time as all the Jews of Europe) reconstituted in France a collective identity (although proactive), which assumed social (schools, centers, political representation) (cf. Trigano 1985) but also intellectual and philosophical dimensions. A new Jewish identity then appeared that referred to the notion of “community” and that was

5 I maintain that the American Jews were never “emancipated.” They came directly from medieval Europe (the part of Europe where the nation-state was not constituted) to enjoy the citizenship of a State which had no past and was from the beginning federal. 466 Trigano accompanied by an intellectual movement that later was defined by Levinas as the “French School of Jewish Thought” and that, indeed, constituted a completely new collective experience of thought. Without doubt, it owed its existence to its German predecessors, but its crossing with the French intellectual culture made it an original model. I endeavored to make an ideal type out of it.6 It was built on a community life of which its main players were a part, and it constituted a collective enterprise (initially the School of Young Jewish Leadership in Orsay, then the annual French Jewish Intellectuals Conference, which had become a very important institution). Since I developed intellectually (although barely) in this community environment, from which I was distant and far too young to take an active part, I consider that my intellectual progress has followed this path (which is ultimately that of the Jewish community of Algeria also), although I have always distanced myself from its philosophical idealism. This “school” no longer exists today, if only because the founding generation has disappeared, having settled for the most part in Israel (except for Levinas) and because the community on which it was based does not really exist anymore in wake of a series of internal ruptures (the greatest being secular-religious) and, above all, from the beginning of the 1980s (see Trigano 1982) from the renewed surrounding hostility to a collective condition of Jewish identity. I analyzed this, stage by stage, each one highlighted by a book (Trigano 1996, 2003, 2006a) until reaching the conclusion that its history had ended—in any case, for this social and symbolic configuration—in light of the new anti-Semitism that appeared in the first decade of the twenty-first century but whose warning signs were already to be found from the beginning of the 1980s.

Challenging of the Collective Destiny

These two analyses, sociohistorical and political, develop the idea that the Jewish people were doomed to destruction in the era of the Emancipation, which was a historical impasse for its very existence. While it could constitute progress for the anonymous individual in the Jew, the Jew did not survive the collective torment of the Holocaust. The delegitimization of the State of Israel in the years 2001–14 shows that the Jewish collective destiny is still not recognized in modern politics and is always on the brink of the abyss. I developed this analysis in L’Idéal (1999b). With the Holocaust, the Jewish collec-

6 See Pardés 23 (1997), special issue, “L’Ecole de pensée juive de Paris,” in particular Trigano 1997. In Search of Eternal Israel 467 tive destiny that was precluded by the Emancipation returned massively and catastrophically on the scene of history. The individual citizens of Jewish origin were exterminated en masse as a proscribed people in the heart of Europe. This event is not inconsistent. It certainly constitutes a paroxysmal crisis but indicates a structural failing of the philosophy of Man and Citizen rights that leaves no room for the dimension of collective identity and the destiny of the real man beyond the legal and constitutional fiction of the citizen, important as regards equality but which does not assume the duties of any human, and in particular political, collectivity. Nationalism and the nation, like totalitarianism, are, in fact, the resurgence of this repressed failure that episodically submerges the “Community of Citizens” that the democratic nation aspires to be. However, this compelling resurgence reveals another dimension implicit in a thought and a regime that chose immanence and radically rejected transcendence: that of the persistence of an immanent transcendence, of a form of wild religiosity that can engender a sacrificial ethos controlling the relationship to the nation, what the ethos (and not the ethics) of democracy was until the Holocaust. It became after World War II an ethos based on victimhood. More than civil and political religions (studied in greater depth in my book on the sociological theory of religion: Trigano 2004b [2001]), modernity is inseparable from a religiosity centered on Man, as a generic and impersonal being, the ultimate form of the sacred that Émile Durkheim called “the secular sacred” and that saw the return of “the religious” without religion within democratic immanence. Transcendence has not disappeared from political modernity, but it has become savage. The philosophy of Man and Citizen rights has shown its weakness in the assuming of collective identity in a democratic regime, which is absolutely inseparable from any social existence. Yet individualism is the paradoxical foundation of the citizens’ nation. In Europe, the Spring of Nations in 1848 saw the appearance not only of the identity-related nation in the form of nationalism but also, forty years after the Emancipation, a new form of hatred of the Jews: anti-Semitism. The autoemancipation is the result of this evolution for the Jews themselves. Collective identity returned to the citizenship to guarantee the texture of democratic society, which was, thus, inseparable from what was no longer exactly the democratic nation but the nation-state.

The Turn of the Twenty-First Century

The global analysis of the disorder of Western modernity is developed in L’idéal (1999b), where the bias characteristic of human rights ideology is 468 Trigano analyzed with all its problems, Jewish and non-Jewish, leading to the analysis of this wild religiosity that immanentist modernity reconstituted at its pro- foundest levels. These questions are weighty because they challenge modernity and democracy but do not always provide ready-made answers. Naturally, this does not mean a regression to the obsolete world of traditional society. The rights of the individual are already irreversible achievements. Nor is it a question of being antimodern. Does it perhaps mean being postmodern without being postmodernist, an option that bears within it corruptions worse than those of modernity? For, as we see today, modernity with its postmodernist variant bears within it catastrophes for the Jewish people, and these are perhaps not yet over, Heaven forbid: Israel still faces the threat of total destruction, and this begins and is prepared with Israel’s delegitimization in the postmodernist ideology, the dominant ideology in our age (Trigano 2012b), whose importance must be recognized within the elite of the Jewish world, in particular in Israel, although postmodernism is inseparable from the appearance of the “New Antisemitism.” The premonition of this possibility haunted my work of the early twenty- first century when we saw the specter of abandonment of the Jews reappear in Europe. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, I extensively studied this juncture, defined as “the new anti-Semitism.” In L’ébranlement d’Israël, philosophie de l’histoire juive (Trigano 2001a), I tried to understand how the new circumstances of the twenty-first century threatened the very foundation of the renewal of Israel and how the strategy of political Zionism was threatened by an international hostile situation, forcing on the Jewish world a vital strategic turning point. I see there the beginnings of modernity’s swan song. The “normalization” that, unfortunately, encumbered the Zionist project (while at the same time constituting its motivation) has failed: even in the form of a nation-state, the Jews are challenged by postmodernism. However, through this very experience of Zionism, we can understand how the problem faced by Jewish individuals throughout two centuries was related not only to their specific Jewish character but was also the result of a general problem in political modernity in its democratic form. In 2001 and 2002, in France, we were abandoned by the state. Four hundred and fifty anti-Semitic attacks were perpetrated, and the government, the media, and the Jewish institutions swept them under the carpet. I created the Observatoire du monde juif in 2001 to prove the facts and published the first list of attacks to inform public opinion. Later we learned that the Socialist government had imposed silence to maintain civil “order.” This experience In Search of Eternal Israel 469 vividly reminded us of the state’s abandonment both in Algeria in 1962 and in the 1940s in the Vichy government in France. We are experiencing it again today with the abdication of the West before the deadly Iranian threat.

Questioning of Jewish Morality

Likewise, there is perhaps an abandonment of the Jews by the Jews in the nihilist anti-Zionism of certain Diaspora and Israeli movements. All of Jewish ethics must be reviewed in the light of the experience of sovereignty because it seems that Jews as yet fall short of its moral and intellectual requirements, especially the need to assume the collective and, thus, the political condition in Jewish existence. In this respect, I feel myself at odds with the heritage of Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Levinas: their morality does not correspond to the experience of the state and was also a total failure in the experience of democratic Jewish individualism, which bears some of the responsibility for the destruction of the Jews (see Trigano 2004). Perhaps it was even a rationalization of the Diaspora weakness and abdication, wrapped obviously in the simple garb of a purely declaratory altruism. When pitted against reality, in the field of history and politics, Jewish morality can prove itself. It is easy for the irresponsible Diaspora today, without any strategy for the future of the Jewish people, to play the Wise Men on the Mountain. This is a discourse that certainly amuses the real enemies of the Jewish people who constantly plan its destruction. Only when the Jews are able to name the enemy—that they did not choose—instead of fleeing from him will the effort to raise themselves to sovereignty commence.

Epistemology

It is there that the question of state and sovereignty is posed, both at the metaphysical and at the political and philosophical level. These questions were, in fact, at the origin of my intellectual adventure from the outset, when I enrolled at the University of Jerusalem to study Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and political science. I wanted to know what a Jewish state is. My disappointment goes without saying, because I never heard anything about the state in philosophy or anything Jewish in political science during my studies. It was then that I realized the stagnation of epistemology in academic Jewish studies, from which the question of the philosophical meaning was banished to the benefit of the 470 Trigano

“philological and historical” method (Wissenschaft) and based on the emancipated heritage of the denial of the historicity and politicity of a Jewish people. My experience at Hebrew University showed me that there is not yet an institution that restores to Judaism its status of civilization, of culture, of thought that is not limited to Jewish particularism but that has the courage to place themselves at the universal level, as a concept, to the point of covering the universe, the cosmos. Here Jewish studies could be the framework of the general disciplines, not as dogmas and preconceived truths but as intellectual matrix. There is a universal in Jewish thought that is not that of Greece. As part of Jewish studies, a new discipline should also be created, Jewish thought but also a political sociology and anthropology of the Jewish people, a historic sociology of Judaism—all projects that I have endeavored to launch to restore Judaism’s status of civilization. There cannot be great Jewish studies without an ambitious Jewish thought that is sovereign in its world. Yet today these studies sink into the dull routine of an encyclopedism without worldview or theoretic ambition, other than “deconstruction,” namely, self-destruction. This institution, yet to be created, will be neither university nor yeshiva but another type of place of knowledge for completely different knowledge. Beyond the postmodernist turn of Jewish studies that has distinguished itself in recent years as a factor of decline, it is a vision of a postmodern horizon (thus, post- Wissenschaft) that will pave the way for us. We could define this new epistemological perspective as “Judaïc humanities.”

Hebrew Political Philosophy

From this viewpoint, my book Philosophie de la Loi: l’origine de la politique dans la Tora (Trigano 1991) represents a culmination in my own evolution. My plan with this book was not to summarize Jewish political ideas but to produce a book of Jewish thought springing from the source and rediscovering the elements (in the almost physical sense) of Jewish thought in order to reflect from them on the Jewish relationship to politics. I wished to write a book of constructive, innovative thought. There is as yet no political theory of Judaism as such anywhere, even if the late Daniel Elazar’s enterprise opened a path in this domain.7 One of the first subtitles of this book, not retained by the

7 And later, Yoram Hazony’s Shalem Center and around Michael Walzer in the United States. From the 1980s, I have been a member of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs founded by the late Daniel Elazar. In Search of Eternal Israel 471 editor, “A New Theological-political Treatise,” illustrates the intention well. This approach may be surprising because such enterprises have not been seen in the field of Jewish thought. It is based on a method that delves deep into the Hebrew language to find a unique philosophical logic, endeavoring to transmit it in contemporary language and drawing principally from the biblical text rather than the Talmud or the halakha to show its anthropological and philosophical foundations on which all the forms of Jewish thought were constructed subsequently.8 In short, the object is to understand how the genius of Judaism builds its world, builds the world and within it collective existence. We can thus see there a historical political anthropology. But we can also see metaphysics because the biblical text is treated as if it were speaking to us today and on the assumption of its perfect systemic consistency (an affirmation that I demonstrated twenty years later in my most important book—in my eyes—Le judaïsme et l’esprit du monde [2011a]). We are facing here not a doctrine but a thought whose basic categories are original and fully meet the Greek conceptual requirement. It is in this way that the biblical text must be considered, as a universal thought, conceiving the universe and the cosmos, a still-living soul, bearing within it future creations. This is the condition of the rebirth of the eternal Israel. I am aware of the revolutionary nature of this statement, because nowhere is the Bible seen in this way.9 It disappears generally behind the screen of Talmudic and rabbinic commentaries. Rabbinism has banned today the legitimacy of creative interpretation. This is what has led it to its contemporary sclerosis. Nothing constructive and inventive for the Jewish people or for God comes out of the world of the yeshivot! Their model of limud considers study (of the Talmud) as a sacramental ritual that is in itself saving and not as a way toward the building of the City of Jerusalem, Mahane Israel, in this world. Nor does anything come out of the university if not the encyclopedic study of the corpse of Judaism (Moritz Steinschneider’s “decent burial” of Judaism, as Gershon Scholem exactly judged it). There is not yet a place where Jewish thought can redeploy itself at the level of sovereignty, of the reconquest of the Jewish subject for which political Zionism only cleared the way. We must find the same courage and the same authority as that of the medieval Sephardic Jewish commentators and thinkers to continue the history of Jewish thought. The Jewish subject adduces a thought; it is the condition of any thought.

8 In a more philosophical approach than did Émile Benveniste in his 1973 work, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press). 9 Except perhaps the French school of Jewish thought or today the new project of Yoram Hazony’s Herzl Center in Jerusalem. 472 Trigano

The Jewish Polity

In what way does the question of sovereignty in the case of Judaism10 open onto metaphysics? It is here that, for me, absence and presence came together; the Jewish subject is filled with a structural absence, that of the God creator who retreated to make room for man. We have to remember that God’s name as “Being” (exactly “Will-being,” Y-HVH) so that speaking of “God” is also speaking of all existence. This absence differs from the absence to oneself, to that induced by the (emancipated) regeneration and (Zionist) normalization. At the heart of the Hebrew being, there is a strangeness, an absence that is not an empty space but a place left vacant. It refers to God. With Judaism, we live in a universe that God deserted on the eve of the sixth day, when He created man. The Shabbat, thus, inaugurates the time of humanity, so that man will complete his creation, being in the image of a creator. The Shabbat that symbolizes this transfer of power gave birth, in the very narrative of the Genesis, to one of the basic ideas in Judaism, the tzimtzum, that supposes that God retreated to leave room for man, leaving man in the empty space of His absence, close to a confusion where he is nonetheless enjoined to “choose life!” This theme is examined in many different ways in Jewish thought throughout history. I cannot but note its centrality in postwar Jewish thought in France and in a sense quite different from the idea of the eclipse of God, dear to Martin Buber in relation to this period. I understand the importance that this concept had for me because it conjugates the present in the absence. The notion of retreat, which I prefer to that of contraction by which tzimtzum is generally translated, is a dialectic notion that made it possible to come to terms with the disappearance of the Jewish world in its two dependencies, in Europe with the Holocaust and in the Arab Muslim world. In fact, at its origins, this great idea developed expo- nentially in the wake of the exile from Spain. However, it is independent of the situation of exile, of the Golah, the political exile that I distinguish from the Galut, the metaphysical exile, the exile of the being that is inseparable from Judaism and that is not destined to end, for as long as we are in this world. God said: “I will be.” In Philosophie de la Loi (1991), I endeavored to determine the way in which the biblical universe constructed politics. This is not evident or clear. I am not speaking here of the ideological and political obstacles that make it impossible to see politics at work in the Bible because politics there is not an instance

10 The term “Judaism” here refers to a global and dialectical system containing a system of values and representations as well as habits and behavior. I explore the methodology of this definition in my Trigano 2011a. In Search of Eternal Israel 473 in itself but is spread throughout reality. Seeking the foundation of politics— because in every polity there is a foundation—I did not find it at first because, in Jewish thought, the beginning is elided: it is around this absence, in an empty space that the polity is built, this empty space that we find with the installation of the Ohel Moed in the middle of the camp in the desert (Numbers 1) and in which the most important element is the room that nobody enters, the Holy of Holies. In this sense, the question of politics opens a door to the presence and God, the metaphysical. In biblical politics, you cannot grasp the world, Olam/the absent/the lost; it escapes you, and this controls the nature of the mastery and the power in the polity and globally in nature. If God is the king of the tribal confederation, He is not there de facto. These principles encourage political forms that all endeavor to avoid the closing and confining, the entirety, to leave always a corner of the world unfinished, pledge of the infinite and of the passing of the finite, but which is also the door open to adversity (and it is because this device is already there that adversity does not destroy the Jewish polity when it is reversed in the illusion of the total achievement).

The Empty Space at the Center

The purpose of all Hebrew politics is to maintain the empty space at the heart of the polity, a device that I define as the “Levitical function.” This is designed, through a series of divestitures, gifts, dispossessions, to maintain a vacant place, a relinquishment in the collective life. The Levite tribe in its biblical status, dispossessed of territory, embodies this function. The Levitical charter of society (sacrifices, offerings, tithes, redemption of the firstborn son, sabbatical year, jubilees, and such) is a catalog of the way to make an empty space in what is full, a condition of existence in the Promised Land. It is not by chance that the Levitical tribe is charged with worship and with teaching. Part of the architecture of the Jewish people, this function provides structure for the political community. It establishes the politics, but the Levitical tribe does not assume the power. In short, the transcendence establishes the politics, but the politics goes beyond the religious. This function is at work in all Hebrew politics. We understand that the collective identity does not express itself as identical (to itself) but as open to the divine radical otherness, the transcendence that structures it. Biblical thought, thus, invented all kinds of circumventions of the identity, setting the city on several levels of existence: Beit Israel, Am Israel, Adat Bnei Israel, Kahal Israel. These are “doorways” into the collective being of Israel where there is always room for completion and there is no finalization. The book undertakes to detect the anthropological and political 474 Trigano frameworks of this conception of the world that are at the source of all creative Jewish political philosophy. The Torah does not suggest any particular political regime even if guidelines are set. The question of politics remains open. The State of Israel was born in the modern era, and, if the main challenge for Judaism is to be able to confront this new reality, then the most pressing task of Jewish thought in our time is to open a completely new field for it: a political philosophy. With this book, I feel that I have helped to show that it is possible, but, for this, it is necessary to maintain the idea that the eternal Israel is still alive and that Jewish thought can still bear the contemporary world, face it, deal with clearing the way for it. The rebirth of a Jewish political philosophy (that assumes the dimension of transcendence) must not only provide answers to the challenges posed to Judaism by the experience of the state. It must also meet the challenges posed by the failures of the philosophy of human and civil rights, failures that have ensnared Jews for the last two centuries.

The Strangeness

The conceptualization of strangeness or, specifically, transcendence ultimately assumed an important role in my thought. The concept is multidimensional: it has social, political, and metaphysical implications. Anthropologically, I saw there a function that structures all aspects of the Jewish edifice, under the term of “Levitical function,” a reference to the biblical status of the Levitical tribe, taken out from any establishment on earth to act as a common denomina- tor, on the basis of a series of symbolic and economic devices. The purpose of this function is to produce a hollowing out, an absence in order to constitute an abundance, a meeting place of the people. Paradoxically, this role was played later by the exile, but the Levitical constitution is above all a method of installation in the Promised Land: without total implanting or autochthonous lure. Abraham is resident but always a stranger. The Israelites are continuously told to remember that they are strangers. The Levitical breaking of the “normality” of the existence of Israel has above all a morphological impact, bringing about a shift, a deviation in its being that places the heterogeneous inside the homogenous. This heterogeneity can be considered in a purely formal way, but it is also another name of transcendence. This means that we can see there a characteristic of the Jewish collectivity, “the Jewish people,” what I analyzed systematically in Politique du peuple juif (Trigano 2013) a collective identity at the tense crossroads of transcendence and immanence, a combination perfectly summarized in the Maamad Har Sinai: divine revelation to an entire people. The strangeness—transcendence or heterogeneity—is placed In Search of Eternal Israel 475 within the being together, as the mainstay of its architecture. “I make this covenant . . . not with you alone but both with those who are standing here with us today before YHVH your God and with those who are not with us today” (Deuteronomy 29:14). We can also see in the strangeness a way of conceiving God, in the position of stranger in the people, absent in His presence, like the Ohel Moed, which none could enter, located at the center of the tribe’s camp. From this perspective, and starting from La Demeure Oubliée, another way of approaching the discourse on God, with the famous question of the “anthropomorphisms,” has been developed in my works, directly connected with the analysis of La sépa- ration d’amour, and whose beginnings are to be found in a paper delivered at the symposium at the Shalem Center Institute of Advanced Studies, “YHVH spoke to Moses, saying . . .,” on the vision and hearing of Moses at Sinai and, thus, on the status in the reality of the tiblical text and of the discourse on God. This perception draws in its wake also the question of the presuppositions of my philosophical method, based on a placing in a perspective (mise en abyme) of the concepts formed in the Hebrew language.

A Global Vision

Le judaïsme et l’esprit du monde (2011a) constitutes a culmination in my progression. It is a book in the same vein as the Récit de la disparue (2001c [1977]), as Philosophie de la Loi (1991), the result of seven years of work and the outcome of a long process of maturing. Its size (1,056 pages) gives an idea of the scope of consolidation and summarizing of all the perspectives opened by my works. I did not plan to write it. The idea emerged while I was researching the astonishing phenomenon that Isaiah Berlin defined as the “Non-Jewish Jews.” I had initiated this exploration in relation to the Paulian discourse in L’é(xc)lu, entre Juifs et chrétiens (2002) in an effort to understand what in Judaism could give rise to such a development. I discovered there what appeared to me as the architectural key of Judaism, as symbolic, institutional, existential, and historic edifice. This led me to conceive the aspiration of developing this model, which I defined as “Judaism,” conceived as a dual system—of ideas and of values (“the ethics”) and behaviors (“the ethos”), a dual system integrating the possible disparities or contradictions into a systemic, formally rational consistency. This is another step in the development of the concept of strangeness in my studies, which helps me construct Judaism as a social and historic fact whose specific nature is due to its dual structural dimension (dual Torah, aggadah- halakha, the two kingdoms of Israel and of Judah, Israel and the Levites, the 476 Trigano exile and the Land of Israel, Israel and the non-Jewish Jews, and so forth). The object of the book is both to penetrate the secret of how this model functions, to see it at work in the biblical text, in particular in the founding concept of creation, as shaped by Genesis, and to show and illustrate all its manifestations: religion-ethics; society, politics, collective identity; psychology and behavior; history. This book, therefore, is made up of four “books.” It is a kind of mapping of the Jewish being, of Judaism. It can be approached in two ways: externally, like an anthropological model, a Weberian ideal type, or internally as a metaphysical vision of the transcendental being of Israel. I have been favored by such a vision, a source of a deep intellectual joy and an absolute confidence, impervious to the vicissitudes of the existence and the reality of the Jewish people. The fourth book offers a new approach to the two other monotheisms and the mutation of this model that they implement, so that their history is also the external history of the Jewish people.

The Commitment in the City

The progression, briefly summarized here, did not remain at the purely individual and intellectual level. It was accompanied by many undertakings in the life of the city and the community. It was in the heartbreaking observation of the gap between the powerful conviction of the relevance of the eternal Israel (which I had experienced myself, after my uprooting and which was reinforced by the real Israel, with the State of Israel) and its absence in the same arena, that I drew the forces for my many undertakings. It was necessary to, at the least, affirm this presence, to illustrate it in words, writing, public interventions, to tackle not only the problems posed specifically to the Jews but also the problems of our time, with which Israel is also confronted as state and thought. Abraham’s Hineni had to take shape in real life. The field of this undertaking was the life of the Jewish community, of Israel, and, more broadly, the public domain. I launched and assumed the responsibility for many collective enterprises: the creation of two journals, Pardès, a Jewish studies journal11 created in 1985 with Prof. Annie Kriegel and designed to accompany the renewal of Jewish studies in France from a new perspective (of meaning and social sciences); and Controverses, a journal12 of political ideas whose objective was to analyze the new ideological configuration of the first decade of the twenty-first century, accompanying the hatred of the Jews;

11 http://www.inpress.fr/f/index.php?sp=coll&collection_id=173, accessed Jan. 19, 2014. 12 http://www.controverses.fr/, accessed Jan. 19, 2014. In Search of Eternal Israel 477 the founding of the center of studies on anti-Semitism, the Observatoire du monde juif ;13 intensive journalistic activity, hundreds of articles, lectures, and conferences I organized; opinion movements such as “Gesher,” an initiative designed to go beyond the polarization of religious and secular Jews; “Raison gardée,” which affirms a position contrary to that of JStreet; and many position papers on Israel. However, the most important undertaking was the creation of the College of Jewish Studies of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1986.14 The idea was to create a place where Jewish thought could be illustrated in its dialogue with contemporary thought with the aim of finding the relevance of Jewish meaning. This institution proposed each year annual seminars and four to five conferences, frequently international. Scores of intellectuals, academics, and rabbis of all the large Jewish centers in the world have participated in its activities and all the conferences have been published in Pardès. This experience is today finished. I created in October 2013 a “Popular University of Judaism,” the aim of which is to blend the study of Judaism with the study of our present Jewish condition, to read our texts with a contemporary “anxiety” and questioning. Activities are planned in France and in Israel. My intellectual journey was not always an individual intellectual experience either. I have edited very many anthologies and special issues of maga- zines. The most important works concern Jewish history. The four volumes of La société juive à travers l’histoire (1992–93) contain in 2,800 pages contributions from sixty international scholars. Le monde sépharade (2006b) in two volumes and 2,000 pages represents the work of some forty historians. Certainly, these books derive from the logic that began with La demeure Oubliée (1999a [1984]) and that led me to the philosophy of history and to the epistemology of Jewish history. The account of this history was broken, even unknown. It had to be reconstructed, and its relevance had to be shown sociologically and anthropologically. It was to this end that I was able to obtain the trust of very many historians for laying the foundations of this rebuilding of the Jewish writing of Jewish history. La société juive is a vibrant illustration that, beyond the ages, the continents, the periods, there is a set of common structures that constitute the structural model of a Jewish people and attest to its existence despite the dispersion. Yet today, on the verge of professional retirement, when I look back at this intense activity, I feel that I have merely staved off my need for action; I think that the true theater of action is in the State of Israel where the most

13 http://obs.monde.juif.free.fr/, accessed Jan. 19, 2014. 14 http://www.aiu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= 38&Itemid=67, accessed Jan. 19, 2014. 478 Trigano

formidable challenge for Jewish continuity and the relevance of Judaism is posed today. Notwithstanding, I am well aware that what I have thought and done was possible only in France where I wrote, published, and made public my analyses, and this would never have been possible in Israel for ideological reasons proper to the intellectual elites. This is the tragedy. But was it not already anticipated with the Talmudic notion of the Shekhina dwelling “west- ward” (Shekhina bamaarav, Baba Batra 25a)?

Endings and Beginning Anew

I feel that I am living the end of a second Jewish community, after Algeria. French Jewry has little time left as a significant identity in a world where there is a State of Israel, given the unfavorable evolution of French society in the European Union and internal developments in the Jewish world. More globally, the very framework of the exercise of a Jewish thought seems today devi- talized by the development of the status of writing and thought in the digital society, but also by the place taken by the rabbinical authority and the weak- ening of the speculative intellect in the Jewish world, which undermine the profile and the authority of the Jewish intellectual. The French Jewish heritage is no longer a stakeholder in an Anglo-Saxon Jewish world where the French language is no longer known. I sense a difficult situation, still on the horizon but undetected by the Jews, in the same way that they do not resolutely fight their enemies but hide behind a narcissistic moralism. I am aware of all this, but I have also learned and know that the eternal Israel is a dimension of being that nothing will ever erase. Barukh shemahzir shekhinato leTsion!

References

Guttmann, Julius. 1933. Die Philosophie des Judentums. München: E. Reinhardt. ―――. 1964. Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. Translated by David W. Silverman. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Trigano, Shmuel. 1982. La République et les Juifs après Copernic. Paris: Les Presses d’Aujourd’hui. ―――. 1985. “From Individual to Collectivity: The Rebirth of the Jewish Nation in France.” In The Jews in Modern France, edited by Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein, 245–81. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. In Search of Eternal Israel 479

―――. 1990. “The French Revolution and the Jews.” Modern Judaism 10, no. 2: 171–90. ―――. 1991. Philosophie de la Loi: l’origine de la politique dans la Tora. Paris: Le Cerf. See Trigano 2011b for English translation. ―――, ed. 1992–93. La société juive à travers l’histoire. 4 vols. Paris: Libraririe Arthème Fayard. ―――. 1996. Un exil sans retour: lettres à un Juif égaré. Paris: Stock. ―――. 1997. “Qu’est-ce que l’École juive de Paris.” Pardès 23, special issue, “L’Ecole de pensée juive de Paris,” edited by Shmuel Trigano: 27–41. ―――. 1998. La séparation d’amour: une éthique d’alliance. Paris: Arléa. ―――. 1999a [1984]. La demeure oubliée, genèse religieuse du politique. Paris: Gallimard. ―――. 1999b. L’idéal démocratique à l’épreuve de la Shoah. Paris: Odile Jacob. See Trigano 2009a (English) and b (Hebrew) for translations. ―――. 2001a. L’ebranlement d’Israël: philosophie de l’histoire juive. Paris: Le Seuil. ―――. 2001b. “Levinas and the Project of Jewish Philosophy” [“Levinas et le projet de la philosophie juive” (1998)]. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Jewish Studies Quarterly 8, no. 3: 279–307. ―――. 2001c [1977]. Le récit de la disparue, essai sur l’identité juive. Paris: Gallimard. ―――. 2002. L’é(xc)lu, entre Juifs et chrétiens. Paris: Denoël. ―――. 2003. La démission de la République: Juifs et musulmans en France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ―――. 2004a. “La “nationalité juive” dans le judaïsme transcendental de Hermann Cohen.” In Filosofia e critica della filosofia nel pensiero hebraico, edited by P. Amodio, G. Giannini, and G. Lissa, 57–82. Napoli: Gianni Editore. ―――. 2004b [2001]. Qu’est-ce que la religion? Paris: Flammarion. ―――. 2005 [2001]. Le Temps de l’exil. Paris: Payot. See Trigano 2010 for Italian translation. ―――. 2006a. L’avenir des Juifs de France. Paris: Grasset. ―――, ed. 2006b. Le monde sépharade. 2 vols. Paris: Le Seuil. ―――. 2007. Il terremoto di Israele. Translated into Italian by Anna Lissa. Napoli: Guida Judaica. ―――. 2009a. The Democratic Ideal: The Unthought in Political Modernity. Translated by Gila Walker. New York: State University of New York Press. ―――. 2009b. Haideal hademokrati bemivhan hashoah. Translated by Avner Lahav. Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion Institute, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press. ―――. 2010. Il Tempo D’ell’essilio. Translated by Donatella Di Cesare. Firenze: Giuntina. ―――. 2011a. Le judaïsme et l’esprit du monde. Paris: Grasset. ―――. 2011b. Philosophy of the Law: The Political in the Torah. Translated by Gila Walker. Jerusalem: Shalem Press. 480 Trigano

―――. 2012a. La nouvelle idéologie dominante: le post-modernisme. Paris: Hermann- Philosophie. ―――. 2012b. L’idéologie dominante de notre temps: le post-modernisme. Paris: Editions Hermann. ―――. 2013. Politique du peuple juif: les Juifs, Israël et le monde. Paris: François Bourin.

For a complete list of Shmuel Trigano’s works, go to http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr. chapter 23 Skepticism and the Philosopher’s Keeping Faith

Elliot R. Wolfson

Durch die Skepsis untergraben wir die Tradition, durch die Consequenzen der Skepsis treiben wir die versteckte Wahrheit aus ihrer Höhle und fin- den vielleicht, daß die Tradition Recht hatte, obwohl sie auf thönernen Füßen stand. Ein Hegelianer also würde etwa sagen, daß wir die Wahrheit durch die Negation der Negation zu ermitteln suchten. Friedrich Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Werke, 3:342

Let me begin by posing the question that has preoccupied my thinking these many decades: what does it mean to speak of Jewish philosophy?1 From one perspective, the answer is so obvious that it does not even merit asking the question: Jewish philosophy is the attempt to address the major tenets of Judaism from the different disciplines included under the rubric of philosophy. By this benchmark, the label suits me well. I have spent a lifetime dedicated to mastering both Jewish texts and philosophical literature out of the conviction that the particularity of the former can serve indexically as a marker of the universality propounded by the latter. The amalgamation of these two corpora has complicated the polarization of the universal and the particular customarily

1 An earlier attempt to engage this question can be found in the coauthored “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy” in Hughes and Wolfson 2010, 1–16. For a penetrating and thoughtful reassessment of this topic, see now Hughes 2014. The author’s summation of his argument is worthy of citation: “The purpose of Jewish philosophy . . . is not to reify terms such as particularism and universalism, but to show their artificiality, their investment in ideology, and their ultimate instability. The rethinking I am calling for is one that sees Jewish philosophy reflect upon displacement, upon exile, and upon—in the contemporary period—what Jewish sovereignty means in the land of Israel. This reflection cannot be about protectionism, about xenophobia, about neat lines (or, quite literally, walls) separating differences that have become transubstantiated as ontologies. Beyond universalism and particularism resides a commitment to plurality and equality as opposed to homogeneity, either on the grand (universal) or small (particular) scale. . . . Only by engaging such issues is it possible, I submit, to rethink Jewish philosophy in ways that move beyond the particular/universal impasse. Such an engagement has become the pressing task of Jewish philosophy at the present moment” (124–25).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004279629_025 482 Wolfson marked as Athens and Jerusalem. By pondering philosophy in relationship to my Jewishness and my Jewishness in relationship to philosophy, I have come to appreciate that the commensurability of the universal must be reckoned by the incommensurability of the particular and the incommensurability of the particular by the commensurability of the universal. Lest there be any misun- derstanding, let me note that, in my estimation, particularity is not simply the concrete instantiation of universality, nor is universality simply the abstract idealization of particularity. Resisting a dialectical resolution that would yield the universalization of the particular in the particularization of the universal, I am committed to the proposition that the indeterminacy of the particular is always in the process of being determined by the determinacy of the universal, just as the determinacy of the universal is always in the process of being undetermined by the indeterminacy of the particular. Hence, I have sought to elicit and to assess—at times quite critically—the inimitable truths about Judaism from immersion in its textual details, rather than by providing systematic and totalizing generalizations based on the presumed existence of metaphysical absolutes or ontological essences. Reading the texts of Judaism through the philosophical prism has alerted me to the fact that the answer to my initial question regarding the nature of Jewish philosophy is far from obvious; indeed, it is a question that stubbornly refuses to be settled. The deeper I delve into these texts, the more troublesome they become. In the search to resolve the one issue regarding the contours of Jewish philosophy, a host of other difficulties are brought to light: must the canon of this discipline be limited to Jews who write about Judaism in a philosophical vein, or is it possible to include Jews who contemplate philosophical issues from broader perspectives? Even more daringly, can this canon include non-Jewish philosophers, and not simply scholars of Jewish philosophy but constructive thinkers in their own right? If the discipline is to break through the straightjacket of identity politics, the latter option would be preferable. However, solving one problem invariably leads to another: would inclusion of non-Jews require of them to think Jewishly even if they are not focused on specifically Jewish matters? More fundamentally, can a path of thought be so demarcated? What does it mean to think Jewishly? Are there patterns of cogi- tation or principles of logic that may be described as distinctively Jewish to the exclusion of all other ethnocultural groupings?

Beyond the Hybridity Jew/Greek

Eschewing the possibility of delineating an essence of Jewish philosophy, I nonetheless affirm that the raison d’être of this undertaking at any historical Skepticism and Keeping Faith 483 interval is shaped by the bifocal vision alluded to above, to envisage the philosophical through the lens of Judaism and to envisage Judaism through the lens of the philosophical. In this manner, we avoid a simplistic binary that creates a rift between the universal and the particular. My own personal stance is in accord with Emmanuel Levinas, who insisted that the “absolutely universal,” which constitutes the essence of spiritual life, “can be served in purity only through the particularity of each people, a particularity named enrootedness” (Levinas 1990, 136).2 The unique contribution of Judaism—when interpreted through the rabbinic corpus—is the consciousness of a “universalist singularity,” a universalism expressed in the principle underlying Moses Mendelssohn’s explanation of Israel’s desire for emancipation, “To be with the nations is also to be for the nations” (Levinas 1994, 144). From Levinas’s perspective, there is no conflict between the universal and the particular; indeed, the one can be realized only through the guise of the other. When devoted to their religious predilection, Jews give witness to the fact that universal significance must always be measured from the standpoint of a singularity that refrains from reducing the other to the same by collapsing the difference of identity in the identity of difference. One can surely detect the Levinasian influence in Jacques Derrida’s articulation of the “universal exception” or the “rule of the exception,” tout autre est tout autre, which “signifies that every other is singular, that ‘every’ is a singularity, which also means that every is each one, a proposition that seals the contract between universality and the exception of singularity” (Derrida 1995, 87). The sameness of the universal is exemplified by the differential of the exception. This is the implication of the tautology that every other (tout autre) is altogether other (tout autre); that is to say, every other is other even to itself insofar as the irreducible nature of the other is such that it cannot be classified under any rule except as an exception to that rule. What is universally shared is the uniqueness of the individual that cannot be shared universally. This holds the key to understanding the critical relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. Moving beyond this binary, and even beyond James Joyce’s hybrid Jewgreek/Greekjew notoriously appropriated by Derrida at the conclusion of “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” (Derrida 1978, 153),3 I would submit that one must occupy the space of the between, wherein, as Derrida himself puts it elsewhere, the “architecture” is “neither Greek nor Judaic” (Derrida 2008, 116), a space that must be prior to the

2 Many scholars have weighed in on the question of the relationship between philosophy and Judaism in Levinas’s thought. Compare Trigano 2001 and other references cited in Wolfson 2014, 428–29, n. 9. 3 For a more extended discussion, see Wolfson 2014, 161–66. 484 Wolfson division of Jew and Greek. Embracing this Derridean view, I have advocated in my writing and teaching for a Jewish philosophical thinking that belongs neither to the Jew nor to the Greek, a mode of thinking that resists reduction to either one of these demarcations. It goes without saying that, historically, Hebraism and Hellenism were clearly not pure typological classifications, as the boundaries separating the indigenous and the alien were always fluid and subject to disruption and modification. But beyond the matter of factual accuracy, I would argue that conceptually as well the schism must be subverted by the adoption of a more porous delineation of outside and inside. The sincerity of the reluctance to bifurcate Athens and Jerusalem cannot be doubted, and yet, we are left to mull over the viability of particularizing philosophy in this fashion. Is it any more reasonable to speak of a philosophy that is essentially Jewish than it is to speak of a Jewish mathematics or a Jewish physics? Naturally, if by “philosophy” we mean the conceptual articulation of the beliefs that inform the ritualistic actions of a given sociological constellation, then my query is both trivial and easily answered. We can safely assume that, by this yardstick, there is Jewish philosophy—just as there is Muslim philosophy, Christian philosophy, Hindu philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, Taoist philosophy, and so on—and its paramount concern would be to offer an ideological justification for the endurance of the Jews within the universal scheme of humanity. We might even go as far as to say that the Jew occupies a privileged position as the symbol of the proverbial other whose identity preserves the space of difference or, in Levinasian terms, the ethnos that stands as witness to the alterity that defies the subordination of the ethical to the ontological and the consequent violence of a politics predicated on the presumed conflation of the rational and the real. But if the matter of philosophy is not so constricted, we are justified to ask again about the conceptual legitimacy of delimiting philosophy by a specific religious tradition. Is it not the case that the various subjects included under the taxonomy of philosophy—logic, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics—defy any and every culturally restricted discrimination?

Striking Thinking at Its Roots

My own thinking has been especially inspired by the desire to forge an alliance between the spirit of Jewish philosophy and skepticism, that is, to survey the panorama of the former through the speculum of the latter. In accord with the editorial objectives of this volume, in the remainder of this essay I will offer some reflections on my personal engagement with this matter, not, however, Skepticism and Keeping Faith 485 by recounting more specific autobiographical details but by performing philosophical exegesis written in the poetic idiom that is the signature of my writing style. More often than not, this is the way my story is told. I consider myself predominantly a dialogical thinker, inasmuch as I explicate the textual voice of others in order to give intonation to my own. Needless to say, in the long and variegated history of philosophical speculation, the term skepticism has assumed a variety of meanings.4 At the outset, therefore, it is necessary to be explicit about how it has shaped my pathway. In its most formidable sense, skepticism is the anxiety that ensues from the fact that it is entirely possible that we do not know what we think we know either about the external world or the nature of other minds (McManus 2004a, 1),5 as René Descartes famously argued in the first of the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) in his insistence that, from a sentient perspective, we cannot ascertain the “sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep” (Descartes 1999, 2:13).6 The potentially maddening consequence of this inability to differentiate between dream and wakefulness should be obvious. What is noteworthy is that even the self-validating cogito of the “I think, therefore, I am,” which Descartes did not subject to doubt (Descartes 1999, 1:127), encompasses a diaphaneity so transparent that the distinction between sanity and lunacy is effaced. Finely attuned to the ramification of both the nonhyperbolic banality of natural doubt and the hyperbolic audacity of metaphysical doubt, Derrida noted that, with respect to the cogito, the “impenetrable point of certainty,” the “zero point at which determined meaning and nonmeaning come together in their common origin” (Derrida 1978, 56), there is no need to shelter the mind “from an emprisoned madness, for it is attained and ascertained within madness itself. It is valid even if I am mad—a supreme self-confidence that seems to require neither the exclusion nor the circumventing of madness” (ibid., 55; emphasis in original).7 Epistemically, the self-confidence in the mind’s ability to ground its own existence masks an equally intractable lack of confidence in the mind’s capacity to affirm the existence of the world apart from the cogito ergo sum. Analogously, in the preface

4 The scholarly literature on skepticism is considerable. For a useful overview, see Conant 2004. 5 Compare the discussion on philosophical skepticism and everyday life in Stroud 1984, 39–82, and the analysis of the criteria for knowledge and skepticism in Cavell 1999b, 37–48. For discussion of Cavell’s position, see Putnam 2012, 552–64. 6 See Stroud 1984, 1–38. On Cartesian skepticism and the dream phenomenon, see sources cited in Wolfson 2011, 324 n. 80. 7 See the analysis of this passage in Naas 2003, 60–61. 486 Wolfson to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant acknowledged the “scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof” (Kant 1998, 121). In his more extensive refutation of idealism, Kant responds to this scandal by insisting that the “inner experience” of the cogito is “possible only under the presupposition of outer experience” (ibid., 326), whence he elicits the following theorem: “The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me” (ibid., 327). It is beyond the concerns of this chapter to explore in more detail Kant’s argument that the persistence in perception of spatially exterior objects is dependent on the temporally determined consciousness of one’s own existence, an insight that had a wide-ranging impact on subsequent philosophical reflections on the nature of time, especially in the phenomenological tradition. It is worthy to note, however, that, in his explication of Kant’s remark concerning the scandal of philosophy in section 43 of Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger observed that, even though the internal experience of the “definiteness of time” (Zeitbestimmtheit) presupposes the existence of something persisting as an object of space, it is, nevertheless, the case that time carries the “burden of the proof,” since it provides the “foundation for leaping” into that which is outside the subject (Heidegger 1993, 203–4; 2010a, 196).8 The preference accorded to time over space has had an immense bearing on my own musings on temporality, but what is most relevant to our discussion is Heidegger’s further observation that the very quest for a proof of things existing outside the self indicates that Kant did not escape the Cartesian dilemma and hence the starting point of his inquiry is the “ontic priority” that he accords to the “inner experience” of the “isolated subject” (Heidegger 1993, 204; Heidegger 2010a, 196). Moreover, from Heidegger’s vantage point, the scandal

8 After citing Kant’s words and clarifying his use of the term “existence” (Dasein), Heidegger (1993, 203–4; 2010a, 196) notes, “The proof for the ‘existence of things outside me’ is supported by the fact that change and persistence belong equiprimordially to the nature of time. My presence [Vorhandensein], that is, the presence given in the inner sense of a manifold of representations, is change that is present. But the definiteness of time [Zeitbestimmtheit] presupposes something present which persists. . . . The experience of the being-in-time of representations [Erfahrung des In-der-Zeit-seins von Vorstellung] equiprimordially posits changing things ‘in me’ and persisting things ‘outside of me.’ . . . For only ‘in me’ is ‘time’ experienced, and time carries the burden of the proof. It provides the foundation for leaping into the ‘outside of me’ in the course of the proof.” See Merleau-Ponty 2012, 432–33. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 487 of philosophy does not consist of the fact that a definitive response to the skeptic’s doubt is lacking but rather “in the fact that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.” The demand to advance such proofs grows “out of an ontologically insufficient way of positing what it is from which, independently and ‘outside’ of which, a ‘world’ is to be proven as objectively present.” A proper understanding of Dasein does not need proof of an external world, inasmuch as the human is constituted as a being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt- sein), and, as such, “Dasein defies such proofs, because it always already is in its being what the later proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it” (Heidegger 1993, 205; 2010a, 197; emphasis in original). Heidegger’s critique of the Cartesian and Kantian presentations of the ide- alist perspective opens the path to an even deeper dimension of skepticism that is not dependent on the pseudoepistemic problem generated by the falla- cious ontological dichotomy of an exterior that is not determined vis-à-vis an interior and an interior that is not determined vis-à-vis an exterior. Skepticism, on this score, is a not a grappling with the possible existence of things outside the mind, but it is rather the ongoing quest to uncover the unreasonable in every postulate of reason, the task of interrogation whose roots may be sought in the ancient Pyrrhonian incredulity about the philosophical endeavor in general. David Hume well expressed the repercussion of the skeptical position when he noted in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) that “all knowledge degenerates into probability, and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question” (Hume 1978, 180). No scientific knowledge can spark confidence in the veracity of what the mind has discovered, even as it is reasonable to assume that there is a gradual amplifica- tion of certainty as the likelihood of a given stance increases. Skepticism, so conceived, leads logically to the suspension regarding the cogency of logic and the possibility of apprehending truth, or, in Hume’s notable formulation, “all our reasoning concerning causes and effects are deriv’d from nothing but cus- tom,” and, consequently, “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (ibid., 183; emphasis in original). If taken to the limit, the deferral of judgment undercuts all belief and opinion, yielding the self-contradictory proposition that there is no truth, a statement that can be true only if it is false and false only if it is true. Here it is apposite to recall the contrast made by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations, first published in 1900 and then in a second, revised edition in 1913, between the popular and philosophical senses of skepticism: the latter is applied to theories that “try to limit human knowledge considerably and on principle, and especially if they remove from the sphere of possible 488 Wolfson knowledge wide fields of real being, or such especially precious sciences as metaphysics, natural science, or ethics as a rational discipline” (Husserl 2000, 137).9 The skeptical posture implies that the “logical or noetic conditions for the possibility of any theory are false. . . . The concept of such scepticism applies to the ancient forms of scepticism with theses such as: There is no truth, no knowledge, no justification of knowledge etc. . . . That it is of the essence of a sceptical theory to be nonsensical, is at once plain from its definition” (ibid., 136–37; emphasis in original). Philosophical skepticism, which Husserl further divides into epistemological and metaphysical, is to be contrasted with the more commonplace expression of suspicion. The denial of truth on the part of the philosopher is not merely a “question of arguments and proofs,” but it entails “logical and noetic absurdity” (Husserl 2000, 137; emphasis in original). The nature of that absurdity is outlined in more detail in Husserl’s lecture course on logic and the theory of knowledge given at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1906/07:

It is characteristic of all skeptical theories that they are absurd in their own distinctive way, namely, inasmuch as the content of their theses and theories denies precisely what in the absence of which their theories themselves, and as such, would lose any meaning. The extreme skepticism of someone like Gorgias says that there is no truth. Precisely in saying that, though, he is presupposing, as does anyone making an affirmation, and in doing so, that there is a truth, namely, the one that he is uttering and defending there. (Husserl 2008, 145–46)

To say that there is no truth involves a rescinding of the “absolute validity” of the law of contradiction, for the truth of the statement depends on its being false, and this leaves one “stuck in skeptical absurdity” (ibid., 146). I will have the opportunity to return to Husserl below, but suffice it at this juncture to note that, from his thought, we may educe the maxim that epistemological skepticism is essential to the philosophical vocation, since it “causes the most

9 In a similar vein, Wittgenstein proffered a distinction between ordinary and philosophical doubt: the former always relates to concrete circumstances, for example, a doctor inquiring if a particular person under anesthesia feels pain when he or she groans, whereas the latter is expressive of an uncertainty regarding the theoretical as opposed to the practical possibility of knowing anything at all. See Wittgenstein 1990, 34, and analysis in McGinn 2004, 249–50. For a criticism of the coherence of the skeptic’s entertaining the possibility of the nonexistence of the world, see Putnam 2012, 547–50. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 489 thoroughgoing shaking of all opinions and knowledge” and, consequently, “strikes thinking at its roots” (ibid., 177). To strike thinking at its roots is the philosophical mission in its most radical articulation—radical in the twofold sense of rudimentary and far reaching. The skeptic thus can effectuate the double duty of uprooting by taking hold of the root. Eliciting a similar conclusion from the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell observed,

Disappointment over the failure (or limitation) of knowledge has, after all, been as deep a motivation to the philosophical study of knowledge as wonder at the success of knowledge has been. In Wittgenstein’s work, as in skepticism, the human disappointment with human knowledge seems to take over the whole subject. While at the same time this work seems to give the impression, and often seems to assert, that nothing at all is wrong with the human capacity for knowledge, that there is no cause for disappointment . . . To me this fluctuation reads as a continuous effort at balance. . . . it seems an expression of that struggle of despair and hope that I can understand as a motivation to philosophical writing. (Cavell 1999b, 44)

According to Cavell’s reading, Wittgenstein’s thought—particularly in the Philosophical Investigations—is a response to skepticism that does not deny the veracity of skepticism. Recasting the significance of philosophical skepticism in light of the problematizing of knowledge culled from Shakespearean tragedy, Cavell characterized the skeptic pejoratively “as craving the emptiness of language, as ridding himself of the responsibilities of meaning, and as being drawn to annihilate externality or otherness . . . as seeking to escape the conditions of humanity” (Cavell 1999a, 237). Meticulously recapitulating Cavell’s analysis of the skeptic as someone who seeks to escape from the responsibility of language and, by extension, from the responsibility toward the other, Hilary Putnam writes, “The challenge of skepticism, insofar as it is an intellectual challenge at all . . . lies in the fact that the skeptic threatens our conceptual system from inside. The reason skepticism is of genuine intellectual interest—interest to the nonskeptic—is not unlike the reason that the logical paradoxes are of genuine intellectual interest: paradoxes force us to rethink and reformulate our commitments” (Putnam 2012, 525; emphasis in original). Since the paradoxes do not convincingly show that knowledge is impossible, they need not be accepted by either the skeptic or the nonskeptic. It seems to me, however, that this argument is flawed inasmuch as it places the burden of logical proof on the shoulders of someone who does not accept the legitimacy of extracting 490 Wolfson proof on the basis of deductive logic. We are left, then, with the inevitable conclusion that the constant probing for knowledge commences and culminates in the denial of the possibility of knowledge. Cavell refers to this inexorability as the “truth of skepticism” or the “moral of skepticism,” which implies that “the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing” (Cavell 199b, 241). What appears from one end of the spectrum to be absurdity is dis- cerned from the other end to be the epitome of lucidity. What we can know with certainty is the certainty of our uncertainty. To the best of my recollection, the discipline of Jewish philosophy, whether in the medieval or in the modern periods, has never been examined from this vantage point. To be sure, there have been historical studies that have touched on the role of skepticism—and perhaps even more noticeably on the related themes of doubt and heresy—in the thought of particular Jewish philosophers,10 but I am not aware of any study that attempts to think constructively about the enterprise of Jewish philosophy per se as a way of articulating a fundamental distrust in the power of reason to ascertain positive knowledge about the nature of being. There are examples of thinkers who viewed the faculty of reason with apprehension and even some who made rational demonstration sub- servient to prophetic revelation as the primary means to establish the ultimate metaphysical truth—Judah Halevi comes to mind—but, even in such cases, it is the commitment to reason that allows one to apprehend the limitation of reason. Hence, the presumption that there is a viable epistemological calculus of truth that is not a matter of contingency—the very thing the skeptic must deny11—is not called into question. Prima facie, this is somewhat surprising given the fact that skepticism, in the more radical sense, has been a crucial part of philosophy since antiquity. Moreover, we can fathom an affinity between the skeptical propensity of Greek philosophy—or at least one major trajectory thereof—to cast doubt on every statement of belief and the Talmudic penchant to inspect every legalistic or folkloristic pronouncement through a process of incessant inquiry. Indeed, rabbinically speaking, authority is tied as much to the scrutinizing of beliefs as it is to their transmission. We might have expected that skepticism would have played a larger role in the conceptualization of the field of Jewish philosophy. And yet, if we dig a bit deeper beneath the surface, the lack of interest in examining Jewish philoso-

10 For instance, see Popkin 2003, 239–53. 11 Goodman 1983, 820: “For the Skeptics the issue was not the primacy of relativity (as perhaps in Protagoras) but rather the use of relativity to illustrate the absence of a criterion of truth.” Skepticism and Keeping Faith 491 phy from this perspective is not astounding in the least. After all, so much of what is presented under this rubric is, at best, an apologetic effort to consider philosophically the presuppositions of Judaism—whether construed theologically, psychologically, socioculturally, or anthropologically—and, at worst, a rational defense of the ethnic particularity that anchors the identity of the peoplehood of Israel and justifies its ontic autonomy and continual existence in the historical plane. The goal I have set for myself in my work is to think about the juxtaposition of “Jewish” and “philosophy” by deliberating on the aspect of philosophy that subjects every philosophical statement to critique, that is, the dimension of philosophy that deploys rational argumentation to render reason itself irrational.

Skepticism and the Fidelity of Doubt

Philosophy, in the broadest sense, can be defined as reflective thinking, the thinking that thinks about thinking, the thinking that constantly interrogates the premises of thinking. Rather than having an identifiable object, the datum of philosophy, first and foremost, is the act of philosophizing itself. I accept Jürgen Habermas’s surmise that, even though philosophy “poses questions directed toward the universal,” it “has no advantage over the sciences, and it certainly does not possess the infallibility of a privileged access to truth” (Habermas 1992, 14). Nonetheless, I would counter that philosophy is still to be distinguished from all other scientific investigation, whether empirical or speculative, inasmuch as it is the metadiscipline, the discipline that critically evaluates the hypotheses of the other disciplines and thus assumes the role of the unifying intellectual force that will account for the complex interplay of sameness and difference. The words of Stephen Mulhall well capture my own approach:

While my genealogical myth is designed to capture the sense in which philosophy can be said to be rightly and intelligibly interested in everything, in all that is, it may also thereby create the impression that the philosopher must be occupying a position above or beyond all that is. . . . But philosophy does and must occupy a position within the domain that it aspires to take in as if from the outside. Just as philosophy’s claim to be the university department that uniquely aspires to acknowledge the articulated unity of the university as a whole must cohere with the fact that it is also just one more department within that articulated unity, so philosophy’s claim to be the singular point within the culture at which its 492 Wolfson

articulated unity is acknowledged must cohere with the fact that it is simultaneously one node in that culture. It follows that philosophy’s various ways of putting the deliverances of other intellectual disciplines in question can themselves be put in question from the perspectives afforded by those disciplines. (Mulhall 2013, 32)

Habermas himself concedes that there is one role in which philosophy does “step out of the system of the sciences, in order to answer unavoidable questions by enlightening the lifeworld about itself as whole. For, in the midst of certainties, the lifeworld is opaque” (1992, 16; emphasis in original). The illuminating of this lifeworld, I propose, is a facet of the hermeneutical self-reflexivity that is part and parcel of the skeptical foundation of philosophy. Proper attunement to this condition renders the dichotomization of the interpreta- tive and the experiential inadequate. In thinking about thinking, the act of interpretation is itself the very experience that is being interpreted. The circularity of the venture is such that one cannot ruminate about philosophy without being implicated in the very practice that is the object of the rumination. Furthermore, the salient feature of that practice is the critical appraisal of the conjectures that undergird that practice. It follows that the plight of any philosophical construct is that it must be continually deconstructed and hence, at every turn, it must effectively unsay what it has previously said. What I am here enunciating should not be confused with the gesture of apophasis; that is, I am not proffering that every philosophical affirmation is literally a speaking-away of what is spoken, an ineffable truth of which we cannot speak except by speaking-not, which technically should be distinguished from not speaking, the lack of any verbal utterance. My point rather is that philosophy, if true to its calling, entails a relentless clarification of its own language; there is no word that is not subject to further elucidation, and, in this sense, every utterance erases itself in the moment of its being uttered. The unremit- ting verbalization of doubt is indicative of the silence that precedes and suc- ceeds every act of philosophical reasoning, the silence, to invoke Derrida once more, that “bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge. . . . Like nonmeaning, silence is the work’s limit and profound resource” (Derrida, 1978, 54; emphasis in original). The obdurate questioning of the skeptic is indicative of the epistemological perspectivism championed by Friedrich Nietzsche, which is predicated on the collapse of the metaphysical distinction between truth and illusion, reality and appearance. As Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, first published in 1882 and a second revised edition in 1887, to comprehend fully the consciousness of appearance (Nietzsche 2001, 63)—a consciousness in which the very Skepticism and Keeping Faith 493 consciousness of appearance disappears insofar as there is no noumenal thing- in-itself that exists apart from the phenomenon12—is to discern the age-old wisdom that what we imagine to be real is naught but a dream and that enlightenment consists of waking from the dream that we are dreaming that we are waking from the dream.13 Nietzsche’s articulation of this gnosis is worth citing in full:

I suddenly awoke in the middle of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish—as the sleepwalker has to go on dreaming in order to avoid falling down. What is “appearance” to me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence—what could I say about any essence except name the predicates of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could put on an unknown x and probably also take off x! To me, appearance is the active and living itself, which goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that here there is appearance and a will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing else—that among all these dreamers, even I, the “knower,” am dancing my dance;14 that the one who comes to know is a means of

12 Nietzsche 2003, 154, and compare the analysis in Wolfson 2014, 48–49. 13 Wolfson 2011, 274. See ibid., 43–45, where I discuss some aspects of Nietzsche’s view on dreams. The hypothesis of my book is corroborated by the following statement of Fichte 1987, 63–64: “There is no being. . . . There are images: they are all that exists . . . images which do not represent anything, without meaning and purpose. I myself am one of these images. . . . All reality is transformed into a fabulous dream, without there being any life the dream is about, without there being a mind which dreams; a dream which hangs together in a dream of itself. Intuition is the dream; thought (the source of all being and all reality which I imagine, of my being, my power, my purposes), thought is the dream of this dream” (emphasis in original). See also the comment of Wittgenstein in Engelmann 1967, 7: “Our life is like a dream. But in our better hours we wake up just enough to realize that we are dreaming. Most of the time, though, we are fast asleep” (emphasis in original). The passages of Fichte and Wittgenstein are cited by Laycock 2001, 9. 14 On the thematic connection between philosophy and dance, see Nietzsche 2001, 246: “Maybe we philosophers are all in a bad position regarding knowledge these days; science is growing, and the most scholarly of us are close to discovering that they know too little. But it would be even worse if things were different—if we knew too much; our task is and remains above all not to mistake ourselves for someone else. We are different from scholars, although we are inevitably also, among other things, scholarly. We have different needs, grow differently; have a different digestion: we need more; we also need less. There is no formula for how much a spirit needs for its nourishment; but if it has a taste for independence, for quick coming and going, for wandering, perhaps for adventures of which only the swiftest are capable, it would rather live free with little food than unfree 494 Wolfson

prolonging the earthly dance and thus is one of the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge may be the highest means to sustain the universality of dreaming, the mutual comprehension of all dreamers, and thereby also the duration of the dream. (Nietzsche 2001, 63–64; emphasis in original)

The skeptic, who is on a par with the dreamer awoken in the middle of the dream to the discrimination that life itself is a dream about life (Nietzsche 2001, 71),15 is keenly mindful of the fact that there is no reality that can appear but through the guise of image, no unmasking of the face but through the dis- similitude of the mask. Insofar as this is the case, it follows that the scrutiny executed by the skeptic is potentially endless: there is no naked truth to be divulged, only the semblance of truth unveiled in the veil of truth.16 To the extent that the unveiling takes place through an act of misgiving, we can attri-

and stuffed. It is not fat but the greatest possible suppleness and strength that a good dancer wants from his nourishment—and I wouldn’t know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his ‘service of God’” (emphasis in original). In light of this description of philosophy, we understand why Nietzsche identified Zarathustra, the prophet of the new dawn of humanity, as a dancer, who could believe only in a God who dances (Nietzsche 2006, 29) and who speaks parables of the highest things through dance (ibid., 87). See ibid., 4, 79, 83–85, 132, 169, 175, 186, 196, 223, 239, 260–61. 15 Compare Nietzsche 2001, 146: “Dreaming.—Either one does not dream, or does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one’s waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly” (emphasis in original). 16 On the link between skepticism and the veil of truth, see the curious aphorism in Nietzsche 2001, 72: “Sceptics.—I am afraid that old women in their most secret heart of hearts are more sceptical than all men: they believe the superficiality of existence to be its essence, and all virtue and depth to them is merely a veil over this ‘truth,’ the very desirable veil over a pudendum—in other words, a matter of decency and shame, and no more!” (emphasis in original). My view resonates with the following observation of Atlan 1993, 396: “One form of truth always kills, and must therefore be itself silenced; this is naked truth, stripped bare, in the name of the Good and out of hatred for falsehood, to be sure, like a Greek statue in the light of day, frozen, removed from its spatial context (the temple where it was erected) and temporal context (the evolutionary process which led to its existence). The veil of modesty that conceals this statue is language, with the poly- semic and creative richness that can explain or suggest what it means behind what it says, who it is or could be behind what it appears to be—in brief, that animates it and gives it life: at the risk of falsehood and error, of course, if one believes that the garment is not a garment. . . . The garment, here, discloses more than nakedness can, because the latter merely reveals, once and for all, a reality that can only refer back to itself, whereas the former triggers the very process of unveiling” (emphasis in original). Skepticism and Keeping Faith 495 bute an “affirmative tendency” to skepticism in the shaping of philosophical faith.17 The groundlessness occasioned by the denunciation of the grounding of truth must itself be grounded.18 This is the intent of Denis Diderot’s famous remark, “What has never been put in question has not been demonstrated. . . . Scepticism is thus the first step towards truth” (Diderot 1916, 45). Assessing Diderot’s observation, Hans Blumenberg remarked that it “distinguished itself precisely by the fact that it is not appropriate to skepticism in general, certainly not in its ancient form. For this ancient Skepticism is not a way into philosophy but rather a way out of it” (Blumenberg 1983, 271). Could one not credibly argue, however, that the way out itself is but another way in, that the extreme postponement of belief is itself the consummate belief, the indubitable belief in the inability to believe? As I noted above, the dogmatic denial of the capacity to attain truth is itself a truth, albeit an incongruous truth, since its veracity depends on its falsity and its falsity on its veracity. Blumenberg alludes to this very paradox by giving the title “Skepticism Contains a Residue of Trust in the Cosmos” to his chapter (ibid., 269–77). Drawing the connection between the transcendental character of truth affirmed by adherents to Platonic orthodoxy and the demythologizing of this prospect by those who accepted the skeptic reversal, Blumenberg writes,

That such probability can be, not misleading appearance, but rather a reflection of the true, and thus sufficient for man’s action and for his

17 Such a position has been advanced by Köhne 2003 and Hüppauf 1998. 18 As Habermas 1992, 15, succinctly expresses the point: “Skepticism, too, has its grounds.” See ibid., 29, where Habermas delineates ancient materialism and skepticism, late-medieval nominalism, and modern empiricism as “antimetaphysical countermovements” that “remain within the horizon of possible thought set by metaphysics itself.” And compare Merleau-Ponty 2012, 309: “Rationalism and skepticism sustain themselves upon the actual life of consciousness that they both hypocritically imply, without which they could be neither thought nor even lived, and in which one cannot say that everything has a sense or that everything is non-sense, but merely that there is sense” (emphasis in original). From Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, both dogmatism and skepticism with regard to absolute knowledge are overcome in the phenomenological assumptions that being is defined as “what appears to us” and that consciousness is a “universal fact.” Hence, when I think a thought, that thought not only appears to me to be true, but it functions as a truth with which all other truths that I experience must be harmonized, even though I am well aware of the fact that it may not be unconditionally true (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 418–19). For a critique of Pyrrhonian skepticism on the basis of its making use of the very faith in the world that it seeks to unsettle, see Merleau-Ponty 1968, 5–7, and 95–97, where he outlines the mode of interrogation about the nature of being that is appropriate to our perceptual faith in the existence of the world. 496 Wolfson

happiness—therein lies the whole of Platonism with its relation of correspondence between Ideas and appearances, between what really exists and its images. All the contradictions in which Academic Skepticism became entangled, and had to become entangled, are due to its Platonic residues, although this fact is linguistically disguised by its opposition to the Stoa. Thus it is, for example, in the attempt to prove that the characteristics of a cataleptic idea could also belong to false ideas. This argument involves the Skeptic in a burden of proof whose definition is self-contradictory because it presupposes the very distinction between true and false whose possibility it is supposed to be refuting. (Blumenberg 1983, 272–73)

Blumenberg perceptively articulated the contradictory nature that is inherent to the skeptical orientation: the necessity of true knowledge is a deduction that must be upheld in order to be discarded. The “residual dogmatism” of the skepticism that was taught in the academy consisted

in the dependence of human self-reassurance on the single “truth” that truth is inaccessible. Thus the radicalization of Skepticism by its application to its own dogmatic employment is not primarily motivated by logical/systematic consistency or by epistemological resignation but rather by the precedence of existential fulfillment over every other human interest. . . . The fundamental question that is supposed to be the theme of every skepticism, the question whether something really is the way it appears to us, is itself the “original sin” of theory from which Skepticism promises to deliver us. (Blumenberg 1983, 274–75)

The promise notwithstanding, the logic inherent to the skeptical disavowal precludes the possibility of being delivered irrevocably from the epistemic inquisitiveness regarding the spurious presence of what is apparent but not real versus the veritable absence of what is not apparent but real. Even the Pyrrhonian skeptic, who brings “the cognitive process to a standstill in his epoché, in that he neutralizes the value goal of truth by denying the dependence of happiness upon it,” must still remain “attentive to the truth that becomes evident from itself. In this understanding of truth, there still lives the inheritance of the hypothetical initial situation of Greek thought, in which truth was thought of as that which prevails of its own accord, even if from now on it is reserved for an as yet unknown experience” (ibid., 274).19

19 For discussion of the dialectic of destruction and affirmation in Blumenberg’s skepticism, see Geulen 2012, 11–20. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 497

The ancient skeptical claim, attested in the celebrated words attributed to Socrates in Plato’s Republic 354b, “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing,” can be considered an articulation of the unassailable axiom of philosophical reasoning that truth must always be manifest in the concealment of truth. To know the truth of this untruth is to appreciate the untruth of the truth that all we can know is that we do not know. Along similar lines, in the Apology 23b, Socrates is declared the wisest of human beings because he “recognizes that he is in truth of no account in respect to wisdom.” In the Meno 80c, Plato applies to Socrates the state of aporein, “befuddlement,” which corresponds to the view attributed to Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus 155d that philosophy begins in an act of “wondering,” thaumazein, an idea echoed as well in Aristotle’s Metaphysics 982b, which has had an enduring impact on Western thought. Even more pertinently, in book 3 of the Metaphysics, 995a, Aristotle introduced the word aporia to mark the perplexity to which discursive analysis inevitably leads, an epistemological knot that paradoxically both impels and impedes the process of thinking. Particularly relevant to my argument is the explication of this concept on the part of Alexander of Aphrodisias in his commentary on the Metaphysics:

If the discovery and establishment of the objects of the inquiry depends on the solution of the points of aporia, and it is not possible for people to untie a knot unless they first know it, i.e. how it has been tied . . . and if the aporia of thought is the knot in the matters under inquiry . . . it is necessary first of all to face the aporia concerning the matters under inquiry, the matters that are to be proven—given that discovery comes from solving the points of aporia, and only those who know how the aporia has developed can solve the points of aporia. (Alexander of Aphrodisias 1992, 89)

We may deduce that aporia, which etymologically means “without-passage,” connotes the quandary of thought, the movement that is concomitantly lack of movement, motion at an impasse. Paradoxically, to untie the knot of not- knowing, one must know the knot, but, in knowing the knot, one persists in being bound by the very knot from which one seeks to be unbound. In this regard, as G. W. F. Hegel argued in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the “thoroughgoing skepticism” (sich vollbringender Skeptizismus) is “directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness” and is thus the criterion that “renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions . . . with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is filled and hampered, so that it is, in 498 Wolfson fact, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake” (Hegel 1977, 50; emphasis in original). Skepticism is the negativity that makes the positivity of truth possible, but this negativity is a “determinate nothingness” or a “determinate negation” rather than a “pure nothingness,” that is, a nothingness “of that from which it results,” a nothingness that has content and thus facilitates the “transition . . . through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself” (ibid., 51; emphasis in original). Hegel goes as far as to say that skepticism “is the realization of that of which Stoicism was only the Notion, and it is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is. This is in itself the negative and must exhibit itself as such.” Through skepticism, therefore, “the wholly unessential and non-independent character of this ‘other’ becomes explicit for consciousness; the [abstract] thought becomes the concrete thinking which annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness, and the negativity of free self-consciousness comes to know itself in the many and varied forms of life as real negativity” (ibid., 123; emphasis in original). Through the skeptical confrontation with the identity of non- identity, “consciousness truly experiences itself as internally contradictory. From this experience emerges a new form of consciousness which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart. . . . This new form is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self- liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and self- perverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature of itself” (ibid., 126; emphasis in original). Translating Hegel’s dense language into a sim- pler idiom, we can speak of skepticism as the “driving force of philosophical activity,” inasmuch as it “represents the negation of any determined thing in the dialectical movement of the mind or spirit” (Popkin and Neto 2007, 19).20 Even if we are not prepared to affirm Hegel’s dialectic, we still acknowledge the plausibility of his allegation that skepticism endures as the inessential other essential to philosophy’s essence, the incertitude of the relative that engenders the absolute certitude that fidelity to the ideal of thinking must, in the final analysis, comport itself as the repudiation of that ideal. In my estimation, Hegel’s insights reverberate in Nietzsche’s entry in his notebooks from summer-autumn 1873:

But how is skepticism possible? It appears to be the truly ascetic standpoint of the cognizant being. For it does not believe in belief and thereby

20 For a detailed study of this topic, see Forster 1989, and the recent attempt to think constructively about the Hegelian art of negation in Hass 2014. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 499

destroys everything that benefits from belief. (Nietzsche 1995, 191; emphasis in original)

Skepticism “corresponds to asceticism with regard to truth,” insofar as the skeptic, on the one hand, denies the “eudaemonistic demand” of truthfulness, “the foundation of all compacts and the prerequisite for the survival of the human race,” and, on the other hand, acknowledges that “the supreme welfare of human beings lies rather in illusions” (ibid., 190; emphasis in original). As Nietzsche remarked in The Gay Science, “every great degree of caution in infer- ring, every sceptical disposition, is a great danger to life. No living being would be preserved had not the opposite disposition—to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err and make things up rather than wait, to agree rather than deny, to pass judgement rather than be just—been bred to become extraordi- narily strong” (Nietzsche 2001, 112). The truth of the skeptic, at best, is a forbidden truth (verbotenen Wahrheit), that is, “a truth whose function is to conceal and disguise precisely the eudaemonistic lie” (Nietzsche 1995, 190). Inasmuch as the purpose of the truth of skepticism is to hide the truth that there is no truth—a falsehood that is eudaemonistic since the well-being of humankind depends on it21—the skeptic shares something fundamental with the artist, who “speaks the truth quite generally in the form of lies” (ibid., 189).22 Yet, as Nietzsche astutely notes, although skepticism suspects the very possibility of believing in the efficacy of belief, it cannot rid itself of belief in logic:

The most extreme position is hence the abandoning of logic, the credo quia absurdum est, doubts about reason and its negation. . . . No one can

21 Compare Nietzsche 1995, 42: “Against Kant we still can object, even if we accept all his propositions, that it is still possible that the world is as it appears to us. On a personal level, moreover, this entire position is useless. No one can live in this skepticism. We must get beyond this skepticism, we must forget it! How many things in this world must we not forget! Art, the ideal structure, temperament. Our salvation does not lie in knowing, but in creating! Our greatness lies in the supreme semblance, in the noblest fervency. If the universe is no concern of ours, then at least we demand the right to despise it” (emphasis in original). The way beyond the skeptical doubt regarding the capacity to know truth in the world is the artistic ability to create the world, even if this means the extreme of despising it. 22 On the link between skepticism and the aesthetic, see Nietzsche 1995, 41: “We do not know the true nature of one single causality. Absolute skepticism: necessity of art and illusion.” On deception and poiesis, see Nietzsche 2001, 144: “Poet and liar.—The poet sees in the liar a foster brother (Milchbruder) whose milk he has drunk up; that is why the latter has remained stunted and miserable and has not even got as far as having a good conscience” (emphasis in original). 500 Wolfson

live with these doubts, just as they cannot live in pure asceticism. Whereby it is proven that belief in logic and belief as such are necessary for life, and hence that the realm of thought is eudaemonistic. But then is when the demand for lies arises. . . . Skepticism turns against the forbidden truths. Then the foundation for pure truth in itself is lacking, the drive for truth is merely a disguised eudaemonistic drive. (Nietzsche 1995, 191–92; emphasis in original)

The “sense of truth” to which Nietzsche himself must consent cannot be sev- ered from the form of skepticism that calls for experimentation. Queries that do not partake of this spirit to experiment lack the courage suitable to truthfulness (Nietzsche 2001, 62). The thinker is thus described as one who “sees his own actions as experiments and questions, as seeking explanations of something: to him, success and failure are primarily answers” (ibid., 57; emphasis in original). I would counter that what has always mattered to me as a thinker are questions, not answers. Only with respect to the latter can we can speak of success and failure; in the domain of thought, the primacy of the question cannot be gauged by these artificial measures. In this matter, I am influenced equally by the Heideggerian notion that questioning is essential to the path of thinking—to be underway (unterwegs) on the path one must “become involved in questions that seek what no inventiveness can find” (Heidegger 1968, 8; 2002b, 10), for only the question, properly speaking, is thought provoking (Bedenklichste), since it is the gift (Gabe) that gives food for thought (Heidegger 1968, 17; 2002b, 19)—and the well-documented Jewish penchant for the question. Commenting on this stereotype, Scholem wrote in one of his early essays, “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice” (1919), “The question is an unending cycle; the symbol of this infinitude, in which the possibility of an empirical end is given, is the rhetorical question. This (‘Jewish’) question can be justly characterized as medial; it knows no answer, which means its answer must in essence be another question; in the innermost basis of Judaism the concept of an answer does not exist” (Scholem 1999, 356). Here it is germane to recall the words of Husserl in the Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: “With the establishing of epistemological problems, authentic philosophy begins. Crossing the threshold into theory of knowledge and trading its ground, the ground of that skepticism, we are, therefore, beginners in true philosophy” (2008, 176). Husserl approvingly cites the saying of Johann Friedrich Herbart that every beginner in philosophy is a skeptic. Reiterating this theme in one of the lectures delivered in 1907 at Göttingen, and later published as The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl observed that the “skeptical mood” is necessarily begotten by the “critical reflection about Skepticism and Keeping Faith 501 cognition,” and hence it “takes place on the natural level of thought,” even prior to the “scientific critique of cognition” (1973, 20).23 As Husserl perceptively noted in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book (1913), all “genuine skepticism” is marked by the paradox that “it implicitly presupposes as conditions of the possibility of its validity precisely what it denies in its theses.” One cannot doubt the “cognitive signifi- cation” of reflection without asserting its countersense, insofar as the declaration of doubt presupposes the very act of reflection that is doubted (Husserl 1998, 185–86). Jean-Paul Sartre reached a similar conclusion regarding the confluence of belief and disbelief in his description of the unity of the immediate and the mediate in the non-thetic self-consciousness that is the translucency at the origin of all knowing:

To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe. Thus to believe is not to believe any longer because that is only to believe . . . Thus belief is a being which questions its own being, which can realize itself only in its destruction, which can manifest itself to itself only by denying itself. It is a being for which to be is to appear and to appear is to deny itself. To believe is not-to-believe. . . . In this sense consciousness is perpetually escaping itself, belief becomes non-belief, the immediate becomes mediation, the absolute becomes relative, and the relative becomes absolute. . . . Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes. (Sartre 1956, 69)

Philosophy and the Homelessness of Being at Home

The insight of Husserl is expanded by Heidegger in his approach to thinking that highlights the nexus between freedom and skepticism.24 Explicating in his “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” (1942–43) the aforementioned description of the presentation of phenomenal knowledge as a “thorough skepticism,” Heidegger remarked that the original meaning of skepsis “signifies the seeing [Sehen], watching [Zusehen], inspecting [Besehen], that oversees [nachsieht] what and how beings are as beings. Skepsis understood like this follows the being of beings with its eyes open. . . . Thinkers are intrinsically skeptics about

23 See analysis in Ströker 1993, 49–50. 24 I have taken the liberty to rework parts of the section “Philosophical Skepticism and the Aporia of Reason” in Wolfson 2014, 102–6. 502 Wolfson beings because of the skepsis into being” (Heidegger 2002a, 114; 2003, 152).25 In uncovering the appearance of appearance, the truth of the untruth of phenomenal knowledge is manifest as an essential component of the mind’s advance toward absolute knowledge: “Skepsis drops into consciousness, which develops into skepticism, which in the appearance of phenomena produces and transforms one shape of consciousness into the other. Consciousness is consciousness in the mode of thoroughgoing skepticism [Das Bewußtsein ist des Bewußtsein in der Weise des sich vollbringenden Skeptizismus]” (Heidegger 2002a, 115; 2003, 152–53). The very history of consciousness is marked by the dual movement of skepticism as the negation that unfailingly casts doubt on what is posited by reason on the basis of appearance and then itself becomes undone by the affirmation that renders the doubt dubious. Skepticism is not to be regarded simply as “an attitude of the isolated human subject” resolved to pore over everything auton- omously, never relying on another’s authority, but it is rather the more elemental and universal responsibility of thought to look over “the whole scope of phenomenal knowledge” in the form of the “extension” (Erweiterung) of the ego cogito into “the reality of absolute knowledge,” an augmentation of consciousness that “requires the antecedent skepsis into the breadth of the self- appearing unconditional subjectivity [Sicherscheinens der unbedingten Subjektität]” (Heidegger 2002a, 115; 2003,153–54). That Heidegger remained faithful to this view—even though he rejected the larger Hegelian framework—is confirmed in his remark, “For us, then, the essence of the undoubtable can very well be doubtful [Das Wesen des Unbezweifelbaren kann somit für uns sehr wohl zweifelhaft sein].” From the principle that the essence of the undoubtable can be doubted we can infer that the only thing that cannot be doubted is that everything can be doubted, a conviction that Heidegger clev- erly tropes as the sense we feel when “we are not at home in our habitat [wir in unserer Behasung nicht zuhause sind]” (Heidegger 1995, 45; 2010b, 29).26 What are we to make of this curious locution, to feel not at home in one’s own habitat? Surely, such a sentiment is disconcerting, perhaps the quintessence of disquiet, to be homeless in the abode that one identifies as home. Contrary to the conventional view, exile does not signify the nomadic wandering away from one’s permanent place but rather the displacement that one feels in the very place in which one is embedded. The philosopher above all is

25 My analysis of this passage has benefited from the discussion in Wyschogrod 1998, 123– 24, 143. See also Macomber 1967, 178–84. 26 On skepticism, transcendental philosophy, and Heidegger’s analysis of truth as disclosed- ness, see Dahlstrom 1994, 407–23. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 503 inured to this resolute homelessness, for philosophy is the mode of thinking that displays the inherent quality of lacking an inherent quality, the feeling of the uncanny, in German unheimlich, literally, unhomely, which can be experienced only when one is at home.27 In the Introduction to Metaphysics, first published in 1953 but based on the lecture course offered at the University of Freiburg in the summer semester of 1935, Heidegger engages in a detailed exposition of the sense of the uncanny as it pertains to the comportment of being human, inspired by the opening verses of the first choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone, “Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing / uncannier than man bestirs itself, rising up beyond him,” which he renders as Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch / über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt (Heidegger 1983, 155; 2000, 156). The leitmotif of the poem—or what Heidegger refers to as its “individual saying” (einzelnen Sagen)—is captured in the assertion that the human being is to deinotaton, “the uncanniest of the uncanny” (das Umheimlichste des Unheimlichen). The Greek word deinon displays an “uncanny ambiguity.” On the one hand, it denotes “the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the

27 Regarding this theme, see Moran 2010. See also the analysis of the images of alienation, the constitution of home, and the liminal experience of appropriation in Steinbock 1995, 178–235; and compare O’Donoghue 2011, 21–55; Capobianco 2010, 52–69; and Masschelein 2011, 139–42. Consider the distinction between “homeland” and “fatherland” made by Heidegger in the seminar “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State” (1933–1934) in Heidegger 2013, 55–56: “Homeland expresses itself in rootedness in the soil and being bound to the earth. . . . The homeland becomes the way of Being of a people only when the homeland becomes expansive, when it interacts with the outside—when it becomes a state. For this reason, peoples or their subgroups who do not step out beyond their connection to the homeland into their authentic way of Being— into the state—are in constant danger of losing their peoplehood and perishing. . . . In summary, then, we can say that the space of a people, the soil of a people, reaches as far as members of this people have found a homeland and have rooted in the soil; and that the space of the state, the territory, finds its borders by interacting, by working out into the wider expanse.” See the analysis of this text in Žižek 2012, 880–81, reprinted in Heidegger 2013, 152–54. In the aforementioned passage from the seminar protocols, Heidegger weighs in on the status of nomads, using particularly disparaging words about “Semitic nomads” to whom the nature of the “German space” will never be revealed. See the analysis of this text in Gordon, “Heidegger in Purgatory,” included in Heidegger 2013, 85–107, esp. 96–98. Let me note, finally, that I am in agreement with the claim of Lacoue- Labarthe 2002 that, after resigning from the rectorship in 1934, Heidegger seems to have shifted from a purely political sense of “the homeland” and of “the German” to a theological-poetic sense. 504 Wolfson overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself” (Heidegger 1983, 158–59; 2000, 159–60). On the other hand, it “means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence—and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein” (Heidegger 1983, 159; 2000, 160). The import of the uncanny turns on the etymological connection that Heidegger draws between the violent (das Gewaltige), the overwhelming (das Überwältigende), and the sway (das Walten). The first sense, the overwhelming that is occasioned by the sway, applies to beings as a whole, but it pertains especially to human beings, “inasmuch as it remains exposed to this overwhelming sway, because it essentially belongs to Being” (Heidegger 1983, 159; 2000, 160). This essential belonging entails that the human being is prone to— indeed, carries forth as its destiny—violence-doing (Gewalt-tätigkeit). Heidegger emphasizes that this should not be construed in the ordinary sense of perpetrating violent acts against another. Humanity is to be understood as violence-doing “solely in the sense that from the ground up . . . it uses violence against the overwhelming.” The human being is thus designated the “uncanniest,” to deinotaton, that is, the “most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming.” For reasons that should be conspicuous, Heidegger added a parenthetical comment in the 1953 edition to clarify his intentions regarding the violence-doing: “It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into an openness [Er versammelt das Waltende und läßt es in eine Offenbarkeit ein]” (Heidegger 1983, 159; 2000, 160). The decisive aspect of being human is thus linked to the quality of being uncanny, the essence determined as deinon, which is understood as “that which throws one out of the ‘canny,’ that is, the homely, the accustomed, the usual, the unendangered. The unhomely does not allow us to be at home” (Heidegger 1983, 160; 2000, 161). This is the intimation of the aforecited statement of Heidegger that “we are not at home in our habitat.” In the 1955 essay “On the Question of Being,” Heidegger commented that Nietzsche depicted nihilism as “this most uncanny of all guests [dieses unheimlichsten aller Gäste]” because “as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such. This is why it is of no avail to show it to the door, because it has long since been roaming around invisibly inside the house” (Heidegger 1996, 387; 1998, 292). For Nietzsche, as Heidegger ironically understood, the homeless are entrusted with the “secret wisdom” (geheime Weisheit) and “gay science” (gaya scienza) that prevent them from espousing a cultural chauvinism bordering on racist nationalism: Skepticism and Keeping Faith 505

With all this, can we really be at home in an age that loves to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and most righteous age the sun has ever seen? . . . We who are homeless are too diverse and racially mixed in our descent, as “modern men,” and consequently we are not inclined to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and obscenity that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and indecent among the people of “historical sense”. (Nietzsche 2001, 241–42)

It lies beyond the scope of this study to inquire into the subject of homelessness and the ideal of the homeland—with its ethno-linguistic and spatial factors—in more detail. I assume, however, that the reader will understand the relevance of these themes in evaluating Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism and his attitude to German racism, a topic that has commanded much scholarly attention. From my limited discussion, it can be concluded that the violence to which Heidegger alludes as the essence of being human does not consist of acts of aggression against another person but rather resisting the overwhelming that results in one being cast from the sense of being ensconced securely at home. Hitting a comparable note, Theodor Adorno glossed another statement of Nietzsche, “it is part of my good fortune not to be a home-owner” (Nietzsche 2001, 147), with the following ethical directive: “Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Adorno 1978, 39). The horrific destruction and appalling evil that civi- lized nations experienced in the twentieth century must jolt one from harbor- ing a sense of refuge that comes with being at home. The moral response in a decidedly immoral universe is to cultivate a domestic alienation, not to be home in one’s home. This very sentiment is the nihilistic underpinning of philosophy, a sense of estrangement fostered by the familiar, or in the articulation of Novalis, the sense of “homesickness” that results in “the urge to be everywhere at home” (Novalis 1997, 135; emphasis in original), belonging by not- belonging, as Derrida articulated the point: “Philosophy has a way of being at home with itself [chez elle] that consists in not being at home with itself, whence this double bind with respect to the philosophical” (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 55). In a dialogue with Françoise Armengaud centered around the particular question of Jewish philosophy, Levinas conveyed a similar theme:

Philosophical discourse will appear as a way of speaking addressed to completely open minds who require totally explicit ideas, a discourse in 506 Wolfson

which all that is normally taken for granted is said. . . . But one day it is discovered that philosophy is also multiple, and that its truth is hidden, has levels and goes progressively deeper, that its texts contradict one another and that the systems are fraught with internal contradictions. (Levinas 1994, 168–69)

One might be inclined to view the mandate of the philosopher to render the truth coherently and overtly, a mode that would seemingly clash with a religious sensibility based on scriptural truth, which tends to be expressed in an implicit manner that demands ongoing interpretation and lacks a sense of harmony and uniformity. A more circumspect approach, however, recognizes that the truth of philosophy is hidden and multivocal in nature, and that it, too, requires an unrelenting examination of itself through which the inconsistencies reveal that any system is beleaguered by incongruities. “To philosophize,” writes Levinas, “is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary. Knowledge is a critique, as a tracing back to what precedes freedom, can arise only in a being that has an origin prior to its origin [une origine en deça de son origine]—that is created” (Levinas 1961, 57; 1969, 84–85). The movement proper to the “essence of knowing” is not grasping an object but being able to question it, to penetrate beneath the suppositions of its own ontic facticity. From the ethical perspective, this “knowing whose essence is critique cannot be reduced to objective cognition [la connaissance objective]; it leads to the Other. To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom” (Levinas 1961, 58; 1969, 85). In my case, too, philosophy represents the persistent effort to sabotage itself by challenging its own inferences and thereby thinking what cannot be thought, that is, the Heideggerian unthought, which is not a thought that in the future will be entertained but rather that which perseveres in the face of the other as what can never be adequately thought except as what remains to be thought, the untruth that pervades all truth. Translated hermeneutically, the unthought is the potential to bring forth new meaning unremittingly in the curvature of time.28 The full force of Heidegger’s sense of the unthought, which has illumined my own trail, can be appreciated if it is contrasted with the following comment in the preface to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Thus the aim

28 With respect to the matter of the unthought, there is kinship between Heidegger and Levinas. See Heidegger 1968, 76–77; 2002b, 82–83. See also Heidegger 1992a, 16; 1992b, 12–13; and 1992c, 71; 1997, 105. Compare Wolfson 2012, 29–43, esp. 33–36; 2014, 94, 99, 105, 241. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 507 of this book is to draw the limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thought: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (that is, we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)” (Wittgenstein 1974, 3). In the end, Wittgenstein cannot avoid the paradox of imposing on the human mind the directive to think what cannot be thought, but the latter is positioned on the other side of thinking, whereas for both Heidegger and Levinas, the unthought is not the limit of what is thinkable, that is, the unthinkable that can never be thought, but the enigma that lies at the center of whatever is thought, the primal mystery of thinking the being that can be thought only as what is yet to be thought, the es gibt for Heidegger and the il y a for Levinas. Just as the eye cannot fall within the visual field but nevertheless determines its bounds, so the unthought circumscribes the parameters of all that is potentially capable of being thought. A critical distinction between Levinas and Heidegger is that, for the former, the aporetic nature of philosophical knowledge is the anarchic basis for ethics. As Levinas put it in Totality and Infinity, “The essence of reason consists not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling him in question and in inviting him to do justice [L’essence de la raison ne consiste pas à assurer à l’homme un fondement et des pouvoirs, mais à le mettre en question et à l’inviter à la justice]” (Levinas 1961, 60–61; 1969, 88). Returning to this theme in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas writes, “It is by the approach, the one-for-the-other of saying [l’un-pour-l’autre du Dire], related by the said [le Dit], that the said remains an insurmountable equivocation, where meaning refuses simultaneity, does not enter being, does not compose a whole. The approach, or saying, is a relationship with what is not understood in the together. . . . A subversion of essence, it overflows the theme it states, the ‘all together,’ the ‘everything included’ of the said. Language is already skepticism” (Levinas 1974, 216; 1991, 170). To specify language as the bearer of skepticism is to call into question the pairing of being and language that has informed Western philosophy from its pre-Socratic beginnings, epitomized in the statement of Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. . . . What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think” (Wittgenstein 1974, 149–51; emphasis in original). Wittgenstein well understood that the inability to disentangle the triangulation of speech, thought, and worldliness leads inevitably to the unsayable but evidently manifest truth conveyed by the solipsist: “In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself [nur lässt es sich nicht sagen, sondern es zeigt sich]. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I 508 Wolfson understand) means the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein 1974, 150–51; emphasis in original).29 Although neither Heidegger nor Levinas would have assented to the solip- sistic emphasis of Wittgenstein’s argument and to the clear-cut distinction between the saying and the showing of truth, they share with him the inability to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of the nature of being and the privileging of language implied in the contention that the limits of the world are determined by the limits of language, which are determined by the limits of thinking. Both, however, problematize the matter of the semiotic circle—the limits of the world are determined by the limits of semiosis to the extent that the structure of reality is mirrored in the structure of the language that gives shape to that reality; hence, the signs through which we interpret the world are the very signs through which the world is configured30—by viewing the purpose of language as bringing to the fore the unsaid of the saying at the core of every said and thereby disclosing the invisible that makes all phenomena visible by eluding visibility.31 Language, therefore, is not principally a form of communication of what we know to be indubitably true but rather the socially conditioned means by which we approximate meaning for the sake of facilitating intersubjective commerce and exchange. Reversing what common sense might dictate, it is more accurate to say, “I am heard by the other and hence I speak” rather than “I speak and hence I am heard by the other.” Hearing precedes speaking since I cannot speak unless I anticipate someone listening. However, this does not guarantee that my words will be understood. On the contrary, I can only be assured of the fact that every utterance will leave as much unspoken as will have been spoken. The philosopher is obligated to expound the verbal gesticulation even as he or she knows that the true meaning cannot be ascertained. The categorical denial of finding the truth is exactly

29 See McManus 2004b, 143–47, and the comparative analysis of Philipse 2013. Philipse con- centrates on the shared view of Heidegger and Wittgenstein that the skeptical problem of the external world is not a meaningful philosophical question and hence there is dissolution or destruction of the problem rather than resolution. I do not disagree with Philipse, but I have focused on another facet of skepticism that has had a more profound impact on these two thinkers. 30 Compare the analysis of this conceptual problem in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce offered by Habermas 1992, 105–6. 31 For a discussion of unsaying and the originary saying in Heidegger and Levinas, see Wyschogrod 2006, 497–99. My own approach narrows the gap that Wyschogrod places between the two with regard to this matter. See the extended discussion in Wolfson 2014, 123–35. On the role of language and Levinas’s account of the saying, see also Schrijvers 2011, 105–35. Skepticism and Keeping Faith 509 what justifies and inspires the indefinite continuation of the search. Skepticism, accordingly, is the wellspring of philosophical curiosity. It is within this line of thinking that I situate my own approach to Jewish philosophy, an intellectual project that is not simply an attempt to array Jewish matters in philosophical jargon, to translate Judaism into a Greek philosophical language, but to investigate those matters in the way that is applicable to the skeptical sensibility, to unsettle our habitual assumptions and to expose the shortcomings of our routine beliefs, to suffer the uncanny by making the familiar strange rather than domesticating the strange by making it familiar. As Hélène Cixous aptly put it in her reflections on Freud, “the Unheimliche refers to no more profound secret than itself: every pursuit produces its own cancellation” (Cixous 1976, 547). The toil of thinking is neither to affirm nor to deny but to endorse a sense of indifference to the indifference that results from the awareness that the search for truth has no telos, that the chase is justified by a process and not by an end, the provision that promotes the possibility of pragmatic decisions based on the relative utility of knowledge as opposed to the relative futility of ignorance. The philosopher is valorized to the extent that he or she performs this displacement and disorientation. The capacity to think, therefore, rests on the ability to dissect each and every one of our presumptions. Human freedom consists precisely of this ability to question and to doubt. And this brings me back to the passage of Nietzsche that served as the epigraph of this study: skepticism destabilizes the tradition by driving the hidden truth out of the cave, but, in so doing, we discover that perhaps the tradition was right, even if standing on an unsound foundation. The dialectical nature of skepticism is underscored by the reference to the Hegelian view that we seek to determine the truth through the negation of negation (Nietzsche 1935, 342).32 Skepticism is here ingeniously portrayed as accomplishing its opposite: by driving truth from its state of hiddenness and captivity in the cave—an obvious inversion of the Platonic metaphor according to which truth is to be sought not outside the cave by the soul that has escaped therefrom but inside the cave or, according to the terminology Nietzsche utilized elsewhere, in the “deeper cave,” the cave within the cave, which is the “abyss behind every ground” (Nietzsche 2002, 173)33—the tradition is reinforced even as it is

32 The passage is cited in Blumenberg 2010, 27–28. Blumenberg, op. cit., 28 n. 52, expands on the thematic connection between this Nietzschean passage and Heidegger’s depiction of truth as the unhidden being torn from the hidden, which was first noted by Ralfs 1956, 534. 33 See Wolfson 2011, 31. 510 Wolfson undermined.34 To suspend belief one must, at the very least, be committed to belief in the suspension of belief. Jewish philosophy, as I see it, would be immeasurably enriched if its protagonists were to inhabit this deeper cave, the spot wherein absolute positivity and absolute negativity converge. This topo- graphical emplacement would secure that the most noble implementation of the philosophical occupation is to affirm tradition through the double negative, the negation of negation, which results in the withdrawal of the with- drawing, the unconcealment that is the concealment of the concealing. Only in eradicating the truth can the truth be shown to be true.

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Index

abortion 160, 161 “Atheistic Theology” (Rosenzweig) 194 absent presence 458, 459–460, 472 Auerbach, Erich 20 absurdity and skeptical theories 488–490 Augustine actuality 57–58 love 177–178, 184, 185 Adler, Rachel 49, 308–309, 314 moral agency 349–353 Adorno, Theodor 164, 505 secular society 182 aesthetics sinful nature of humans 177 German-Jewish philosophy and 50 views on Jews/Judaism 180–181, 183 “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history Augustine and the Jews (Fredriksen) 180–181 in 130–131 authenticity local manifestation 58 community and 303n3, 304 modern Jewish-American 52–53 dialogue as path to 296–297 responsibility to truth and 112–113 autonomy versus heteronomy 110 skepticism and 499n22 Averroists 376 as synthetic with religion 56 Avicenna 105 Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp) 347 Agamben, Giorgio 47 Babylonian rabbis 47–48, 49 agent-neutral reasons 282, 282n14 Bar-Ilan University 126 aggadah 83 Baron, Salo 24, 130 Ahad Ha-Am 393 Barth, Karl 173, 187, 190n4 Albert, Hans 14 Batnitzky, Leora 179, 212n5, 251, 335 Alexander of Aphrodisias 497 Beer, Sam 109 alienation 76 Being and Time (Heidegger) 486 Alston, William 91–93, 95, 96 beit midrash, excluding God from 63–64 alterity and identity 230, 231, 235–236 belief as questions 501 Altmann, Alexander 27–28 belief-forming practices “American Religion, the,” 55–56 doxastic 92–93 Amihai, Yehuda 400–401 grounding in religious practices 94 analytic philosophy 2–3, 103, 396, 421, 440 rationality of 96 Anderson, Benedict 139 time and changing 95 Angels in America part 2 (Kushner) 49 Benjamin, Jessica 302, 312, 313, 315 Anidjar, Gil 148–149 Benjamin, Walter 35, 46, 47, 363 Anscombe, Elizabeth 273–275 Berger, Peter 210, 243 antihumanism, cybernetics as 436 Bergman, Hugo 26 antitheology of Judaism 82–83, 86–88 Berlin, Isaiah 11, 15–16, 475 aporia 497 Bernasconi, Robert 156n1 Arama, Isaac 71 Berührung 28 Arendt, Hannah 13–14, 23, 46, 184–185 Biale, David 24n12 Aristotelian pure rationality 144 Biemann, Asher D. x, 11–41 Aristotle 108, 263, 410, 497 Bildung, cultural exchange as 16–17 Aron, Lewis 313 biotechnology arts. See aesthetics bioethics 442–443 atheism cybernetics movement 436–437 of Neoplatonists 105 cyborg discourse 438–439 transcendence and 415, 418 Halakha of 441–442 in Western philosophy 304 humans as design project 434–435 518 Index

Jewish philosophical response 444–450 postmodernism and 213 as reflection of crisis of twentieth century as producer of unknowing 224 Western culture 435–436 Protestant Reformation and 214–217 Bleich, J. David 441 rationality and 216 Bloch, Marc 25 of religious fundamentalism 210, 211 blood community 145–147 repentance and 219, 221–222 Bloom, Harold 55 verification of 215 Blumenberg, Hans 495–496 choseness 140–141, 148, 233 Blumenthal, David 3 Christianity Borchardt, Rudolf 32, 36 grace 338–339 boundaries immanence 414 to distinguish between communities 139 as incomplete 335 fluidity of 133, 136, 148 influence on Jewish philosophy translation as crossing 235 200–201, 336–337, 340 Bourdieu, Pierre 139 influence on philosophy 336–337, 340, Boyarin, Daniel 49 348 Braiterman, Zachary J. x, 42–60 Jewish views of 172–174, 175, 184, 186 Brenner, Joseph Chayim 398 Jews/Judaism as viewed by 180–181, Brettler, Marc Zvi 175 183 Brown, Peter 350–351 Judaism needed as adversary 181, Buber, Martin 183–184 dialogue as path toward authenticity love 177–178, 184, 185 296–297 moral agency 348, 349–353 God’s transcendence 307 moral skepticism 510n34 interreligious dialogue 238 nothingness of reason 190–191 Jewish people as eternal 23 philosophy 391 memory as retrieval and renewal 16 polities with non-Christians messianism 47 Christians in 179–180 relationships Jews in 158–159 authenticity and 304 secularism in 157, 182, 208 divine-human 291, 305 Protestant Reformation 214–217 I-Eternal Thou 278, 279, 281 scholasticism 198 I-It 285–286 sin 177, 196–197 I-Thou 287 See also interreligious dialogue revelation and meaning of life 305, 313 City of God, The (Augustine) 178, 179, 181, Rosenzweig and 192 182, 183 sentimentality and men of the collective Cixous, Hélène 509 45 Cohen, Hermann thinker as historian 13 concepts as works of culture 34–35 unanticipated responses of humans 314 influence on Levinas 166n10 “Builders, The” (Rosenzweig) 192 Judaism and humanities 28–30 Burckhardt, Jacob 19 messianism 47 moral law in Christianity 172 Caramenico, Greg 114 rationality in texts 256 Cassirer, Ernst 12, 18, 30–35 return and rebirth 19–20 Cavell, Stanley 489, 490 revelation and free will 416 certainty uniqueness of God 412 compromise and 219–220 Cohen, Jeremy 180 hovering lights and 224–225 Cohen, Richard A. 163n7 Index 519 collective destiny 466–467 humans as partners of God in College of Jewish Studies of the Alliance manual labor 428–429 Israélite Universelle 477 science and technology 441, 442, Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body 444, 445–446 (Goodman and Caramenico) 114 Shabbat and 472 communitarianism versus individuality models 377–378 109–110 philosophic schools on 105 community/communities repentance as act of 19 augmentation of freedom and 107 synthetic interpretation 105–106 authenticity and 303n3, 304 Creation and Evolution (L. Goodman) 114 of blood 145–147 creativity and community 303n3 centrality of life with others in 270, Crescas, Hasdai 119–120 298–299, 304, 311 crises conscious 36 as history’s repentance 19 creativity and 303n3 of humanism 162, 163–164 feminism and women’s subordinate role mode of post-Holocaust Jewish in 309 philosophy 45–46 human agency and 270 posthumanist/transhumanist response identity 243, 465–466, 473–475 435–436 as Jewish philosophy focus 303 of rationality 92 in Judaism 13, 306 critical rationality 14 majority effect on minority 172 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 58, 425, 486 redemption and 361 Croce, Benedetto 22 religious language and 310 cultural exchange as Bildung 16–17 as social constructs 139 cybernetics movement 436–437, 442 versus societies 110 “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway) 438–439 as source of morality 273, 275 “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” Damasio, Antonio 346, 347 (Kant) 353 Dan, Joseph 125 conscious community 36 dance and philosophy 493n14 consciousness and skepticism 502 Darwell, Stephen 282–291, 284n14, 284n16, consciousness of appearance 492–494 284n18, 285nn20–21 conservatism 36 Darwinism and human dignity 262 constructive philosophy 3 death Continental philosophy 103 authenticity of life and 70 core of 421 extracting meaning from Holocaust 65 Jewish metaphilosophy and 136 in Hebrew Bible Levinas and 156 examples of yearning for 66, 70–74 reorientation by Heidegger and Jonas of Sarah 77–79 46 as theme of Ecclesiastes 69, 69n6 technology in 440 human power over 69 contradiction, law of 108–109 humility and 69, 71 converts 13–14, 17 murder and 70n10, 71 Coser, Lewis 21n11, 21–22 as only unifier 69 Crane, Jonathan K. 442–443 sacrifice of others for God 76 creation for sake of God 74–75 America as 58 for the sake of the other 70, 70n9, biblical narratives 67, 445 71–72 by genetic engineering 447–448 Socrates 66 520 Index deinon 503, 504 heresy and 223–225 Deleuze, Gilles 56, 57–58 as idolatry 215–216 deontological ethics 109 overcoming 223 derash versus peshat 93–94 verbalization and silence 492 Derrida, Jacques 483–484, 485 See also skepticism Descartes, René 106, 261, 420, 485 doxastic practices 92–93 determinism versus freedom 106 dreams 493n13, 493–494, 494n15 dialogue Dubnow, Simon 32 as path toward authenticity 296–297 Dumont, Louis 463 See also interreligious dialogue Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 436 “Dialogue” (Buber) 45, 279 Diamond, James A. x, 61–80 Ecclesiastes 69, 69n6 Diaspora ecofeminism 431–432 Augustinian justification 183–184 ecology 432–433 as Levitical function 474 education quest for absent presence 458 excluding God from beit midrash 63–64 rebuilding of communities in Levinas on Jewish 158, 162, 164, 165–167, 128–129 239–240 state of Israel and 469 philosophy of 162 while at home 502–503 Eisen, Robert 141 Diderot, Denis 495 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 23 difference Elazar, Daniel 470 as familiar 18 Elijah 70–74, 75–76 feminism and respect for 300 eliminativism 257 flattened by oughts and shoulds 134 Elisha 72, 73 historical understanding 17 Elliott, Anthony 313 interreligious dialogue and 237 Emergence of the Ethical Man, The intolerance of medieval Jewish (Soloveitchik) 445–446 philosophy to 142 Emergency Politics (Honig) 167 morality and 255 empiricism and religion 419 oneness and connectedness of humans enchanted stream, religion as 325–329, 236 335 superiority of Judaism 144–145, 146–147, Engendering Judaism (Adler) 49, 309 149 Enlightenment Difficult Freedom (Levinas) 165, 239 Holocaust as failure of 157 disenchantment of world 415–417 human spirit 30–31 dissent 21, 23 Levinas on 157, 158, 164–165 distance as condition for hermeneutic reason and religion 190–191 productivity 17–18 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” (Hume) 282n13 (Prichard) 285n21 environmental philosophy 432–433 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer 306 epistemological skepticism 488–489 Dorff, Elliot N. 442–443 Epistle to the Romans (Barth) 187, 190n4 double-truth theory 376 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, doubt An (Locke) 86 as crisis of human existence 219–220 essence and form 410 distinction between ordinary and essentialism 404 philosophical 488n9 eternal Israel 462 fidelity of 491–501 eternity, Jewish claim to 145, 146 Index 521 ethical subjectivity, as answer to crisis of basic Jewish principles and 299 humanism 162 commitment to justice 308 ethics ecofeminism 431–432 as beginning with acquisition of Halakhic rulings and two-tiered view of rationality 353 Halakha 385 concerns of normative 260 Hebrew Bible male bias 309–310, 311, conflict of history with 28 380–381, 383 Halakha and 260 impact on Jewish philosophy 431 human superiority over animals justice and 299–300, 308, 310 and 353–354 language and 310–311 as Jewish philosophical focus 303–304, Levinas and 160–161 304n4 nation-state and 161 law and 274–275 philosophical concerns 308–311, the other and 278 314–315 polarity between deontological and Talmud and 49 teleological 109 technology and 451 unique to humans 445–446 as vehicle for transmission of God’s See also moral agency word 384 evolution 114 Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt exegesis (Honig) 46 changes over time 95 Feuerbach, Ludwig 394 in JPT 92, 93 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 493n13 exile. See Diaspora First Critique (Kant) 418 existence first-person reasons 286 history as validator 27 Fisher, Cass x, 81–100 proof of 485–487, 486n8 Flax, Jane 301–302, 312 self-transcendence and 401 Fleischacker, Samuel 290–291 time and 486, 486n8 flow of life 1 externalist epistemologies 91–92 forgiveness 337–340 form and essence 410 face, the formative function of Jewish theology 91 each encounter as particular 280–281 foundationalism 373, 374–375, 388 openness to 166, 166n9, 277 France 468–469, 478 revelation and 280 Frank, Daniel 256 as source of morality 278, 286 Frank, Erich 20 Fackenheim, Emil 62–63, 65, 267, 419 Fredriksen, Paula 180–181 Fairbairn, W. R. D. 312 freedom faith consists in ability to think 509 as certitude 215 versus determinism 106 as choice 424 easy, versus difficult 328 rationality and 486 interpretation and 63–64 religion as true object of 382 power over Nature as 353 Vacant Space of creation 223–224 through law 239 falsity and knowledge 189n3 Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion Apologetics (Rashkover) 173–174 in the Making of Consciousness, The freethinker, modeled on self-thinker 21 (Damasio) 346, 347 free will feminism God and 352, 354 Arendt and 46 as illusion 261 522 Index

neuroscience of 356 interpreting past with and without 393 obedience and 352 Jewish versus Christian path to 332 as rationally implausible 355–356 justice of 362–363, 368 responsibility and 164, 164n8, 349–350, knowledge of 351–352 as imperfect 369 revelation and 416 as impossible 85, 412–414 as root of good and evil 360–361 obedience and 198–200 as theological claim 349–350 as possible and impossible 85, urge to perfection 378 186–190, 189n3, 195, 198 Freud, Sigmund 312 qualities ascribed to, by humans 85, Fukuyama, Francis 435 143, 444–445 fundamentalism 210–211, 213 through natural world 353 Further Presentations from the System of tools for 383 Philosophy (Schelling) 196–197 as liberator 64 light as emanation from 323n1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg naming 89 belief-forming practices over time 95 perfection distance as condition for hermeneutic concept of unity and 378 productivity 17–18 of justice of 362–363 effective history engendered by intellec- rational reflection on 94–95 tual history 22 prohibition of images 412 prejudices’ role in understanding 87 rationality as image of 216 return to tradition 18–19 relationship with humans Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 492–494, 499 in biblical discourses 89–90 Geertz, Clifford 380 compassionate 71 Geiger, Abraham 17, 27 in Halakhic commitments 402 Geistesgeschichte 27, 30, 31–32, 34, 35 love 191–193, 278, 279 Geisteswissenschaft 28 manual labor 428–429 gender. See feminism meaningfulness of human existence genetic engineering 434, 441, 447–448 and 279 Ghazali, Abu Hamid al- 105 as partners in creation 441, 442, 444, “Ghetto and Emancipation” (Salo) 130 445–446 global Judaism 129 personal and communal 86 God power imbalance 68 all humans as chosen 233 revelation and 279 commands Shabbat and 472 morality and 64, 271–272 sanctification of, by humans choosing reasons to obey 284n18, 284–285 life 75 dance and 494n14 suffering as negation of 82 dying for 74–75, 76 as transcendent dimension 307, excluding from beit midrash 63–64 414–415 existence of transformation of the self and 305 “death of God” Vacant Space of creation and 223–224 phenomenon 392–393 voices of, in rabbinic literature 84 prayer and 400–401 as wholly other 186–190, 190n4 skepticism about 272–273 (God) After Auschwitz (Braiterman) 43 feminine conceptions of 383 God Interrupted (Lazier) 209n2 free will and 352, 354 Goldberg, Oskar 369–370 idea of, and religion 28–29 Goldman, Eliezer 397 Index 523 golem motif 442 Job 363–364 good/goodness Jonah 368 in Bible 66–67, 258 justice in 361, 363–366 choosing life as 74–75 male bias 309–310, 311, 380–381, 383 free will and 360–361 as multivocal text 84 instrumentalization of evil in service of reliance on non-Judaism to define 260 Judaism 135–136 as value not property 108–109 Ruth and obligation to the other 153 Goodman, Lenn Evan xi, 101–118, 196, sclerotic study of 471 196n11, 205 See also Torah Goodman, Madeleine 114 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department Gordon, A. D. 446 of Jewish Thought 123–126 Gordon, Aharon David 428–429 Heeb 329–330 grace, Christian theology of 338–339 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Graetz, Heinrich 23–24 community as source of morality 273 Greenstein, Micah 169 master-slave paradox 194 Gregory, Eric 177–180, 181, 184, 185–186 as missing link between Platonism and Guide of the Perplexed totalitarianism 14, 15 (Maimonides) 64–65, 84, 424 skepticism and truth 497–498 Guttmann, Julius 26 as spokesman for immanence 410 “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” Habermas, Jürgen 491, 492, 495n18 (Heidegger) 501–502 Hadot, Pierre 90–91 Heidegger, Martin Halakha cybernetics 436 basis 208 definiteness of time 486, 486n8 of biotechnology 441–442 homeland 503n27 definitions of Jewish identity 399 humans and the uncanny 503–504 elements in commitment to 402 inability to be at home 504 ethics and 260 limiting nature of language 508 as instrument of ethics 303–304 question of being 369–370 need to be tempered 63–64 rationality and proof of existence 487 Orthodox immutability 384–386 reorientation of Continental philosophy as two-tiered 385 46 Halakhic Man (Soloveitchik) 19, 325–326 role of questioning in thinking 500 Halbertal, Moshe 216n7 skepsis 501–502 Halevi, Judah 141–142, 249, 392, 416 technology 440, 440n8 Halivni, David Weiss 93–94 unthought 506, 507 Haraway, Donna 438–439 Herder, J. G. von 15, 23 Harris, Adrienne 313 heresy 223–225 Hartman, David 446 hermeneutics Harvey, Warren Zev xi, 119–132 in JPT 92, 93 Hassan, Ihab 438 significance of 400 Hazony, Yoram 107 as starting point of Jewish philosophy Hebrew Bible 87 death in Heschel, Abraham 237–238, 306 examples of yearning for 66, 70–74 heteronomy versus autonomy 110 of Sarah 77–79 historical positivism 373, 387 as theme of Ecclesiastes 69, 69n6 historicism good/goodness in 258 crisis of 269 524 Index

Jewish philosophy and 3, 8, 24, 248–249 human beings limits of 252–255 Enlightenment view of reason 31 philosophy and 14, 255–256 as entities that transcend their unqualified 17–18 givenness 401 historiography, models of Jewish 24, 24n12 ethical capacity of 445–446 history as fluctuating creatures 20 as ambiguous 183 knowledge of God components 266 as imperfect 369 conflict with ethics 28 as impossible 85, 412–414 as court of justice 183 as impossible and possible 186–190, crises as repentance of 19 189n3, 195, 198 as demystification 13 obedience and 198–200 dialogue and 179 qualities ascribed to, by humans event as text 18 85, 143, 444–445 ideas and 33–34 through natural world 353 inevitability of 15 tools for 383 Jewish philosophy 3 Nature and need for philosophy 251 as apex of animal kingdom 433 as ongoing revelation 383 intrinsic responsibility to 448–449 as in present 22 Kantian view 353–354, 354n2 shaping and being shaped by 33 Maimonidian view 353, 354–355 spirit of Judaism and 24 mastery over creation 67, 69, as toldot 35–37 353–354, 445 transcendence in 208 need to return to 428–429, 446 truth and 252 responsibility for 448–449 as validator of existence 27 search for place in 351 value of study 250–251 technology alienates from 446 History of Jewish Philosophy, A (Husik) 423 as necessary for humanities 29 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 20 need to overcome passions 106 Holocaust in posthumanism/transhumanism concern for self and 78–79 434–435, 438–439 extracting meaning from 65 relationship with God as failure of Enlightenment 157 all chosen by 233 human dignity during 419–420 in biblical discourses 89–90 Jewish collective destiny 466–467 compassionate 71 Jewish philosophy post- 45–46 manual labor 428–429 modernity and 465 meaningfulness of human existence preoccupation with 130, 324–325 and 279 prevention 164 partners in creation 441, 442, 444, Holocaust Memorial Social Action Site 445–446 (University of Denver) 330–331 personal and communal 86 Holy Fire, The (Shapira) 77 power imbalance 68 home-comers to Judaism 13–14, 17 revelation and 279, 281 homecoming versus myth of origin 19–20 Shabbat and 472 Honig, Bonnie 46, 167 relationship with others hope 258, 259 agency and connectedness 270 hovering lights 224–225 devotion 72 hubris, autonomy as 110 difference enables oneness and Hughes, Aaron W. xi, 1–10, 133–152 connectedness 236 Index 525

elements of, from Tree of intellectual history as incarnation 22 Knowledge 68–69, 69n4 Jewish concepts 27–28 need for 66–67 liminality of 29 See also face, the; other, the; self, the modernity and 20–21 as self-shaping, self-building as ownerless 33 process 231 repetitions of 33 sin and rebirth 20 timelessness of 11 sin as Augustinian focus 177 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and unanticipated responses of 314 to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First the uncanny and 503–504 Book (Husserl) 501 violence and 504, 505 identity Human Condition (Arendt) 13–14 alterity and the self 230, 231, 235–236 human dignity 261–262 circles of ethnic/religious 399 action-guiding principles 263–265 communal 243, 465–467, 473–475 during Holocaust 419–420 elements 230–232 morality and 263 formation 138–140, 141 sources of 444–445 Jewish philosophy and 329 humanism religious practices as category of social Levinas and crisis in 162, 163n7, 226, 233–235 163–164, 165–167 Ideologiekritik 14, 15 postmodern critique 438 ideology of equality 433–434 humanities 9, 29–30 idolatry 143, 215–216, 216n7, 222, 416 humanity/humankind, idea of 29, 30 I-Eternal Thou relations 278, 279, 281 Hume, David 105, 282n13, 487 I-It relations 285–286 humility Illeity 280, 281, 288 Augustinian 178, 181, 184, 185 images 46, 59, 216, 412, 493n13 death and 69, 71 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 139 as divine attribute in humans 444–445 immanence free will and 354 Aristotle as spokesman for 410 in interreligious dialogue 238 in Christianity 414 in polities 178–179 collapse of transcendence into 208–209 technology and 444 Hegel as spokesman for 410 Hurvitz, Yosef Yuzel 218–222 In Defense of Truth (L. Goodman) 114 Husik, Isaac 423 indeterminacy as end in itself 212 Husserl, Edmund 156, 400, 421, 487–488, individualism 109–110, 306 500–501 injustice 287, 346, 361–362, 365, 368–369 Huxley, Aldous 437n4 See also justice Huxley, Julian 437, 437n4 intellectual history Hyman, Arthur 119–120 affinity to modern human beings 20–21 as dialog between past and present 18 “I,” as identical to “You” 30 as history in despite of history 34 I and Thou (Buber) 304, 307 as incarnation of ideas 11, 22 ibn Adret, Solomon ben Abraham 249 institutions of time and 22–23 Idea of Phenomenology, The (Husserl) as integral part of Jewish thought 12 500–501 limits of intellectual integrity 15, 15n7 ideas national history as 24–25 absence of external standard to validate relationship of philosophy to 104 112 repetitions in 33 existence 11 intellectuals 21n11, 21–22 526 Index

Interim Judaism (Morgan) 268 Israeli, Isaac 323 internalist epistemologies 91–92 I-Thou relations 287, 305 interpretation See also face, the; other, the; self, the as continual process 241–246, 383–384 Iyyun 26 Orthodox immutability 384–386 with the other in mind 245–246 Jaeger, Werner 16n9 interreligious dialogue Jaspers, Karl 15 humility in 238 Jerusalem (Mendelssohn) 158–159, 172 Jewish philosophy as ground for Jewish Annotated New Testament, The 175 foundational differences 331–333 Jewish bioethics 442–444 Judaism and completeness of Jewish concepts 27–28 Christianity 335–336 Jewish history Judaism as the other 333–334 as history of “despites” 23 overview 330–331 as history of “despites” and “ands” 34–35 models of “lachrymose theory” of 130–131 Heschel 237–238 as religious and secular 429–430 Rosenzweig 235, 236 Jewish intellectual history Schmidt-Leukel 236–237 as academic discipline 124–125 need for adversarial relationship between characteristics 25 Judaism and Christianity 184–185 genealogy of 36 philosophy of shadowed light and historical positivism of Scholem 374 336–340 as integral part of Jewish thought 12 intersubjectivity 312–313, 314 kabbalah as paradigm 206 Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge as mediator 12, 17 (Husserl) 501 relationship to Jewish philosophy 155 Introduction to Metaphysics skepticism toward universalism 15 (Heidegger) 503 Jewish Messianism and the History of intuition and concepts 195–197 Philosophy (Kavka) 174 intuition as dream 493n13 Jewish metaphilosophy 136, 137 Invention of Jewish Identity, The (Hughes) Jewishness 135 emancipation and 464–465, 465n5, 467 Irigaray, Luce 300 fluidity of 140–141 Islamic kalam 105–106 identity formation 138–140, 141 Israel (people) 239–240, 346 need to deconstruct current notion of Israel (sovereign state) 136 as concern of Jewish philosophy 481n1 post-Holocaust victimhood 467 Diaspora and 469 Jewish philosophy as future center of Jewish life 461–462, as academic discipline 422–426 477–478 antiquarian 53 kibbutz culture 428–429 apologetic 206 “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history department taught in 121, 122–123, 130–131 124, 430–433 Levitical function and 474 intellectual history as integral part 12 philosophy and cultural cohesion 388 as internal phenomenon 391 postmodernism and 468 Levinas’s absence in canon 154–156, Rosenzweig’s conception of land and 156n1 146–147, 149 as narrative philosophy 2 See also Zionism Nature in 432–433 Index 527

not designated as philosophy 61 crises as necessary 19 as obsolete 423 defining 7, 122, 134, 344–345, 481 post-Holocaust crisis and development of European modernity polarization 45–46 462–464 as potentially totalitarian 148 as disseminator of proper worship 134, as reactive 205, 208, 212 143–144 relationship to Jewish thought 155 of encounter 311 relevance of 138, 394, 403–404 feminist 308–311, 314–315 scope of 5, 6–7, 302 German- skepticism in 490–491 aesthetics and 50 technology in 439, 439n7, 440–441, American-Jewish philosophy and 50 444–451 frame of 209n2 tradition of 256 overview of 43–49 training of students 397, 403 as relic 53 transhumanist challenge 435 renaissance of American-Jewish values 102–103 philosophy 212n5 Western philosophy and 64–65, as ground for interreligious dialogue 158–159, 167–169, 269 foundational differences 331–333 alienation from Jewish life 391–392, Judaism and completeness of 393–394, 402–404 Christianity 335–336 American- Judaism as the other 333–334 overview of 49–58 overview 330–331 renaissance 212n5 hermeneutics as starting point 87 spatial models for 57–58 historicity and 268 Arab question and 148–149 human agency in 270 assumptions made about 206 identity and 329 Christian philosophical methods medieval 120, 126–127, 142, 144 contrasted 391 Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis concerns 101–102 (Oppenheim) 300 Christian influence on 200–201, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life 336–337, 340, 349 (Putnam) 128 critique of discipline 157 Jewish studies programs 430 deconstruction of current notion of Jewish theology Jewishness 136 doxastic practices as foundation 92 historically 490–491 historical influences on 61 history and historicism 3, 249 JTP model 88–89 human being in community 303 language issues 84–85, 96–97, 310–311 ideological justification for endurance metaphysics claims and 88–89 of Jews 484 multiple functions 90–91 Jewish traditions 206 rabbinic philosophy of religion 95 divine perfection 94 rationality 256–258 language in 84–85 responsibility and ethics 303–304, plain-sense versus interpreted 304n4 meaning 93–94 state/sovereignty issues 469–470, theory and practice in 90 472–474, 481n1 realism in divine objectivity 186–190, understandings of religious 190n4 truth-claims 388 role in Judaism 82–83, 86–88 528 Index

as species of metaphysics 85 meaning of commitment to 399, Jewish tradition(s) 405–406 as concern of Jewish philosophy 206 moral obligations 162, 271–272 insularity and existence outside of as the other 81 historical time 144 patriarchal 309–310 morality in 402 practice as fundamental concern 88 patriarchal 309–310 quest for authentic 137 theodicy and 359–370 renewal in changing contexts 86 Job 72–73, 363–364 revealed truths absent 85 Jonas, Hans 46, 444, 446–449, 450 role of theology 82–83, 86–88 Jost, Isaac 24 the self as human-situated existence JTP model 88–96 270–271 jubilees 364–365, 367 as universal and particular 162, 166, “Judaic Humanities” (Trigano, Shmuel) 431 240–241 Judaism as useful for social progress 28 as act of protestation 23–24 See also interreligious dialogue as adversarial necessity for Christianity “Judaism and World Philosophy” (Altmann), 181, 183–184 27–28 Augustinian views on 180–181, 183 judaïsme et l’esprit du monde, Le (Trigano), centrality of community 13, 306 475–476 characteristics of Maimonides’s 142 justice core concepts 28, 500 assaulted by theodicy 359–361 defining 135–136, 472n10, 475 biblical 361, 362–366 dialogue with science 260–261 demanded by suffering 239 double-truth theory 376 face-to-face encounter enables 278 Kook and 379–380, 381–382 feminism and 299–300, 308, 310 role in 433 of God as perfect 362–363 Torah-u-madda approach 375, 379 Greek concepts 359, 364 divine command theory 271–272 love and 339–340, 359 Enlightenment losses 165 perdition as 359–360 ethnic/cultural 54–56 as redemption of the other from as historical phenomenon 404 injustice 316 history responsibility and 293, 420 development as religion 251–252 revealed in suspension of judgment in place of credo 249 368 pluralism 394 Sabbath and 361, 362–363, 364–368 spirit and 24, 251 tikkum olam as 297 Holocaust preoccupation of 130, justificatory function of Jewish theology 91 324–325 immanence in, as divine will 208 kabbalistic tradition intermingling of history and creation 377 transcendence 18 hovering lights 224–225 Jewish philosophy as disseminator of living language and 84 proper 134, 143–144 messianism 128 JTP model 88–96 as paradigm of Jewish thought 206 in larger culture 4 popularization 212 law and freedom in 239 Kafka, Franz 48, 56–57 links to Platonism 412, 418 Kahn, Victoria 217 Index 529

Kant, Immanuel obedience and 198–200 aesthetics and philosophy 58 qualities ascribed to, by humans 85, complete knowledge 195 143, 444–445 free will as root of good and thorough natural world 353 evil 360–361 tools for 383 hope 258–259 as instrument of advantage and human dignity 262 disparity 67–68 humans and natural world 353–354, limits of human 424 354n2 skepticism and 487–490 philosophy as academic subject and source of human 190 420–422 universal versus subjective 68 Platonic ideas as archetypes 418 Kohn, Hans 25 rational agency as source of Kook, Abraham Isaac 128, 376–377, morality 273 379–380, 381–382 rationality and faith 486 Kook, Zvi Yehuda 128 reality as relative and subjective 379 Kristeva, Julia 211 reason and dogmatism 425 Kugel, James 94 reason as will 354n2 Kuhn, Thomas 421 self-thinking 21 Kushner, Tony 49 source of human knowledge 190 as spokesman for transcendence 410 Labarthe, Philippe 503n27 as synthetic philosopher 107 LaCapra, Dominick 18 thinking and beginning 13 “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history Kaplan, Mordecai 210 130–131 Kasimov, Harold 238 land, Rosenzweig’s conception 146–147, Kass, Leon 449–450 149 Katz, Clair Elise xi, 152–171 language Kavka, Martin xi–xii, 172–204 as bearer of skepticism 507–508 Kazin, Alfred 54–56 clarification of philosophical 492 Kelley, Donald 22 gendered 310–311 Kellner, Menachem 415, 416 inadequacy of 417, 507–509 Kelsen, Hans 14n4 legitimacy and 310 Kierkegaard, Søren 296, 298, 397 living, of Judaism 83, 84, 85–86 Kimhi, David 73 problems in Jewish theological 96–97 Kingship of God (Buber) 47 in rabbinic theology 84–85 knowledge religious as polyphonic 89 absolute 502 of rights and responsibility for the other claims to infallible 176 163 degeneration into probability 487 unity and 236 disappointment with 489 law 239, 385 essence of 506 See also Halakha of essences 193–195 “Laws of Idolatry” (Maimonides) 216 falsity and 189n3 laws of nature 275 human, of God Lazarus, Moritz 25n12 as imperfect 369 Lazier, Benjamin 209n2 as impossible 85, 412–414 learned ignorance 224–225 as impossible and possible 186–190, legal positivism 385 189n3, 195, 198 Leibniz, G. W. 363–364 530 Index

Leibowitz, Yeshayahu 128, 379, 401 secularism in Christian society and 157 Lessing, G. E. 23, 236 shame 290 Levinas, Emmanuel suffering’s demands 239 atheism and monotheism 415 universalism through particularism background 44–45 483 claims against the subject 277, 280–281, the unthought 507 287, 288 use of Jewish sacred texts 153, 154 contradictions in truth 505–506 views on Christianity 172–173 as critic of critics 157–158 Levine, Amy-Jill 175 definition of humanism 163n7 Levitical function 474 on Enlightenment 157, 158, 164–165 liberalism, Jewish-American 45, 50–51, 55 essence of knowing 506 Liebman, Charles 306 experiencing the sacred 416 life the face choosing, over martyrdom 74–75 each encounter as death as part of authentic of life 70 particular 280–281 as goal of obedience 74 encounter enables justice 278 relationship of religion to 397 openness to 166, 166n9, 277 Likkutei MoHaRan (“Go to Pharaoh,” Nahman priority of the ethical and 289 of Bratslav) 222, 224 revelation and 280 “Little Fable, A” (Kafka) 48 as source of morality 278, 286 living language of Judaism 83, 84, 85–86 feminism and 160–161 Loewald, Hans 313 forgiveness 337 Logical Investigations (Husserl) 487–488 French School of Jewish Thought 466 “Lonely Man of Faith, The” (Soloveitchik) God 445 Jewish versus Christian path to 332 love judgment of 305 Augustinian 177, 178, 184, 185 as unknowable 414 dying for the other and 70, 70n9 human communal ties 270 in interreligious dialogue 337–340 influence of Rosenzweig on 154 justice and 339–340, 359 Jewish education 158, 162, 164, 165–167, new Augustinian 179 239–240 Love and Saint Augustine (Arendt) 184–185 in Jewish philosophy canon 154–156, Lovejoy, Arthur 11 156n1 Löwith, Karl 16, 183 justice 239, 278 “Lure of Immanence: The Crisis in limiting nature of language 508 Contemporary Religious Thought, The” mature living 327–328 (Schwarzschild) 208–209 the other Luria, Isaac 377–378, 444–445 caring for 263 Luther, Martin 192n6, 214–216, 223 dying for 70, 70n9 Lyons-Ruth, Karlen 313 meaning of life and 306, 313 obligation to 153 Magid, Shaul xii, 205–226 serving 263, 304–305 Magnes, Judah 429 as wholly other 291 Maharal 376, 392 as philosophizing thinker 240 Maimonides (Goldberg) 369–370 philosophy of shadowed light 327–328 Maimonides, Moses reason and repetition 31 attempt to demythologize relational normativity and 276–282 Judaism 415–416 responsibility and meaning of life 313 characteristics of Judaism 142 Index 531

characteristics of philosophy of 64–65 equivalence of Judaism and Christianity creation 105–106 172 development of modernity and 463 opposition to historicism 23 God Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 495n18 qualities ascribed to, by humans 143 messianic Zionism 128, 129 rationality as image of 216 messianism as unknowable 413 Babylonian rabbis 47–48 humans and natural world 353, deferral of living 128 354–355 as distraction 128 limits of human knowledge 413, 424 father/child relationship and 73–74 living language and 84 future study of 127–128 messianism as distraction 128 as historical relic 46–48 monotheism and idolatry 216 synthetic approach 111–112 Platonism and 417–420 metaidentity realization 231 polytheism 142–143 metaphysics revelation and rationality 198 claims of 85, 88–89 tyranny of philosophers 143–144 Jewish philosophy and 392, 393, 394, understanding Torah 109, 375 402, 403–404 universalism 141 Midrash, as connection between all Jewish universal versus subjective disciplines of thought 63 knowledge 68 Mitchell, Stephen 312, 313 Mannheim, Karl 22 Mittleman, Alan xii, 248–265 Markus, Robert A. 178 mitzidenu 379, 381, 383 Marmorstein, Arthur 94 mitzido 379 martyrdom 74–75, 75n25 modernity master-slave paradox 194 versus contemporaneity 42 Mathewes, Charles 177–180, 185–186 crisis and 19 “Matter of Discipline: Reading for Gender critique of revelation 322 in Jewish Philosophy, A” (Shapiro) Holocaust and 465 310–311 human beings as fluctuating meaning creatures 20 as human activity 313 intellectuals in 20–21 of life and revelation 305–306, 313 Jewish philosophy and 462–464 plain-sense versus interpreted, in rabbinic religion and 244, 325–326 Jewish theology 93–94 removal of God from free will 354 “Meaning and Sense” (Levinas) 279 savage transcendence in 467 Mechanical Age 437 tradition and 244 medieval Jewish philosophy 120, 126–127, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe) 142, 144 273–275 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) monotheism 485 atheism and 415 Medragat ha-Adam (the Levels of Man, Israelites as developing ethical 135 Hurvitz) 218, 219, 220–221 as natural human state 216 Meir, Ephraim xii, 229–247 uniqueness of God 412–414 memory 16, 18–19 Montaigne, Michel de 217–218 Mendelssohn, Moses Moore, G. E. 107–108 absences of revealed truths in Judaism moral agency 85 Christian theological presuppositions being Jew in Christian society 158–159 348, 349–353 532 Index

free will and 349–350 need to return to 428–429, 446 Spinoza’s explanation 348 responsibility to 448–449 morality search for place in 351 accountability for obligations 284, idea of humankind and 29 284nn17–18, 285n30, 286n16, 287 in Jewish philosophy 432–433, 444 differences and 255 morality and 275, 353–354, 448–449 human dignity and 263 technology and 438–439, 444, 446 in Jewish tradition 402 woman’s connection 431–432 legality in bioethics tied to 443 worth of all elements of 108 the ought 274–278, 291–292 Neoplatonism as reason for obedience 65 creation 105, 377 religion as antithetical to 401 on history of western philosophy 321–322 sources of 271–276 methods 322–323 community 273, 275 philosophy of shadowed light 323n1, face of the other 277–278 323–325 God 64 syncretism viewed as 144 Nature 275, 353–354, 448–449 Nettl, J. P. 21 terminology of 274–275 neuroscience universal binding authority of 285 free will 356 moral normativity 278 Spinoza and 346, 347, 348 moral of skepticism 489–490 thinking and 261 “Moral Scepticism in Christianity” See also posthumanism/transhumanism (Nietzsche) 510n34 Neusner, Jacob 251 More, Max 434 New Age religion 211, 212–213 Morgan, Michael L. xii, 18, 206, 266–295 “New and Unexpected Problems Facing mortality. See death 21st-century Jewish Philosophy” Moses, death of 75–77 (Harvey) 127 Mulhall, Stephen 491–492 new anti-Semitism 468–469 Mussar movement 218, 373 new Augustinianism 175–176, 178–179 mysticism 375 new piety 210, 211, 213 See also kabbalistic tradition New Thinking 1–2 myth, as vehicle of truth 113 “New Thinking, The” (Rosenzweig) 193 Nietzsche, Friedrich 492–494, 493n14, Nagel, Thomas 261, 282, 282n14 494n15, 494n16, 498–500, 499nn21–22, Nahman of Bratslav 222–225 504–505, 510n34 nakedness 67–68 Nirenberg, David 180 “Naming God” (Ricoeur) 89 Non-Jewish Jews 475 narrative philosophy, Jewish philosophy as 2 “No Religion is an Island” (Heschel) 238 national attributes 26 normal science 421 national history 24–25 normative ethics 260, 270–271 nationalism 25, 147, 467 noumenal reality 379 Nature Novak, David 192 Augustine and 351 causal processes 352 Oakeshott, Michael 256 human beings and obedience Kantian view 353–354, 354n2 divine love as motivation 191–193 Maimonidian view 353, 354–355 free will and 352 mastery over creation 67, 69, inability to know God and 189–190, 353–354, 445 198–200 Index 533

Kantian self-legislation 354 paideia 16n9, 16–17 life as goal of 74 Palestinian-Israel conflict 128, 129, 136, morality as reason for 65 148–149 without reasons 412 Panksepp, Jaak 347 objectivity, problem of 268–269 particularism obligations. See responsibility basis of Rosenzweig’s 145–146 O’Donovan, Oliver 181, 182 Jewishness and 140 “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice” Jewish philosophy maintains 133 (Scholem) 368, 500 Judaism and 3, 140, 186, 240–241 On Liberty (Luther) 192n6 nation-state and 161 “On the Question of Being” (Heidegger) 504 relationship to universalism 482–484 On The Trinity (Augustine) 178 past Oppenheim, Michael D. xiii, 296–318 interpreting/reinterpreting in light of organic life 448–449 present 398, 404–405 Origen 362 interpreting with and without God 393 origins 19–20, 25, 26 Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Orsi, Robert 108 Experience (Alston) 91–92 Orthodoxy 380–381, 384–386 perdition as justice 359–360 other, the peshat versus derash 93–94 continual encounter with 30 Pessin, Sarah xiii, 319–342 interpreting sacred texts and 245–246 phenomenal reality 379 Jew/Judaism as 81, 484 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 194, openness to face of 166, 166n9, 277 497–498 in Palestinian-Israeli conflict 148–149 philosophical anthropology 445–446 redemption of, from injustice 316 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) responsibility to and for 489 as claim 277 Philosophie de la Loi: l’origine de la politique dependency of 280–281 dans la Tora (Tirgano) 470–471, dying for 74–75 472–474 meaning of life 313 philosophy 300–301 rights and 163 as academic discipline 420–422, serving 263, 304–305 491–492 skepticism and escape from 489 analytic 2–3, 103, 396, 421, 440 revelation and face of 280 Christian influence on canons 336–337, in the self 230–232, 460 340, 348 the self as target of 277, 280–281, 287, constructive 3 288 Continental 103 transcendence as categorical 208 core of 421 as wholly other 291 Jewish metaphilosophy and 136 Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas and 156 (Levinas) 154, 160, 507 reorientation by Heidegger and ought, the Jonas 46 versus the is 108, 449 technology in 440 moral 274–278, 291–292 creativity in 102, 104 obligatory conduct and 285–286 dance and 493n14 theological 3 defining 101, 137, 155, 491–492 Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and destruction of transcendence 422 Morality (Dorff and Crane) 442–443 distinguishing from science 491–492 Oz, Amos 346 of education 162 534 Index

effect of divisions in 155–156 Hegel as missing link between environmental 432–433 totalitarianism and 14, 15 epistemological skepticism 488–489 links to Judaism 412, 417–420 freeing history from historicism reality 418 255–256 as synthesis 105 imagination and 43–44 transcendence 410, 422, 495 Jewish philosophy in 64–65, 158–159, pluralism 167–169, 269 dialogue and 243 Judaism and compatibility with larger equality of religions 236 culture 4 in Halakhic system 402 as movement from opinion to truth as history of Judaism 394 186 interreligious dialogue and 237 positivism 372, 374, 385, 387, 420 philosophical 405 as receptacle of historical experience political commitment 481n1 26 truth-claims and 254 relationship of intellectual history as will of God 238 to 104 political action. See tikkum olam shift from classical to Augustinian 351 polities skepticism as beginning of 498, Christian, with non-Christians 500–501, 508–509 Christians in 179–180 synthetic Jews in 158–159 concerns 107–115 secularism in 157, 182, 208 examples of 105–107 humility in 178–179 overview of 103–104 polytheism 142–143 theory and practice in ancient 90 Popper, Karl 14, 15 See also Augustine; Jewish philosophy; positivism 372, 374, 385, 387, 420 Neoplatonism; philosophy of post-Freudian psychoanalysis 312–315 shadowed light; Platonism posthumanism/transhumanism Philosophy and Law (Strauss) 197–198 bioethics 442–443 “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity” cybernetics movement 436–437 (Levinas) 277–278 cyborg discourse 438–439 “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” as end of biological embodiment of (Husserl) 156 humans 434–435 Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Hyman and Jewish philosophical response 444–450 Walsh) 120 as reflection of crisis of twentieth century Philosophy of Art (Schelling) 196–197 Western culture 435–436 philosophy of Halakha 402 techniques to achieve 434, 437–438 “Philosophy of History” (Herder) 23 postmodernism 407 philosophy of shadowed light critique of humanism 438 freedom from Holocaust and “wandering indeterminacy 212 Jew” studies 324–325 Israel/Zionism and 468 in Greek philosophy 323n1 Kook as anticipator 386–387 interreligious dialogue and 336–340 powerlessness and prophets 21n11 Levinas 327–328 “Pragmatism and Philosophy” (Rorty) 301 Soloveitchik 325–327, 328 prayer, character of 400–401 specificality 323–324 prejudices 87, 88 Pines, Shlomo 125 preservation, as incessant rebirth 20 Platonism Prichard, H. A. 285n21 Index 535 progress, glorification of 447 rebirth 20, 31 Prophetic Faith (Buber) 47 récit de la disparue, essai sur l’identité juive, protest 23–24, 33 Le (Tirgano) 459 Protestant Reformation 214–217 redemption psychoanalysis, post-Freudian 312–315 as historic process 361 Pufendorf Point 284n18 life of shadowed light and 328 Putnam, Hilary 128, 271, 314n10, 489 in modern simplistic approach of religion 326–327 race, blood community of Rosenzweig of the other from injustice 316 145–147 as possible to Jews in eternal present Radzik, Linda 168 145 rape ethics 160 rainbow sign 367 Rashkover, Randi xiii, 172–204, 311 revelation and 281 rationality/rationalism Sabbath liturgy 366–367 Aristotelian pure 144 through manual labor 428–429 cannot know God through 414 reflective thinking 491–492 certainty and 216 Reid, Thomas 91, 92 crisis of 92 relational model 287–288 Darwinian survival and 262 relational normativity 276–282, 291 Enlightenment 31, 190–191 relational psychoanalysis 312 essence of 507 relativism 254, 387 ethics and 353 relevance 138, 242 faith and 111, 486 Relevant 329–330 belief-forming practices 96 religion heresy 223 as antithetical to morality 401 idolatry 216 as cultural instrument 382 Judaism 252 as dialogical 233–235, 241–246 using to construct 424 empiricism and 419 free will and 355–356, 433 as enchanted stream 325–329, 335 as fulfillment of humans 353, 354–355 Enlightenment view of rationality and as image of God 216 190–191 in Jewish philosophy 256–258 equality of different 236 as method and praxis 14, 490 fundamentalism 210–211, 213 proof of existence and 485–487, 486n8 idea of God 28–29 repetition and 31 identity formation 139–140 versus revelation 110–111, 188–190, modernity and 244, 325–326 191n5, 192, 197, 198 plurality as will of God 238 using, to devalue rationality 263 primary task 382–383 as will 354n2 relationship to life 397 Ravven, Heidi M. xiii, 343–357 secularism and 243–244 realism, internal 271 skepticism and 510n34 reality as social formation 134 as dream 493n13 as synthetic with aesthetics 56 Platonic 418 transcendence as necessary for existence of redemption 326–327 of 388–389 as relative and subjective 379 true object of faith 382 of souls 114 using rationality to construct 424 Reason, Truth, and History (Putnam) 271 See also interreligious dialogue 536 Index

Religion and Morality (Sagi and Statman) face of the other and 280 401 feminist challenge to 380–381 “Religion for Adults, A” (Levinas) 328 free will and 416 religion of labor 428–429 God-human relationship 279 “Religion of Reason” (Cohen) 212 meaning of life and 305–306, 313 Religion of Reason out of the Sources of versus rationality 110–111, 188–190, Judaism (Cohen) 47 191n5, 192, 197, 198 Religion with the Bounds of Reason Alone redemption and 281 (Kant) 360 Rosenzweig’s critique of modernity’s religious practices critique of 322 as category of social identity 226 whirlwind’s role in 72–73 experiential meaning and 212 Revelation and Theopolitics (Rashkover) in new piety 210 173 versus rational laws 111 Ricoeur, Paul 84, 89–90, 91 renaissance and repetitions 31 rights, hierarchy of 108 repentance rights, responsibility to the other and as act of creation 19 language of 163 certainty and 219, 221–222 robots 436–437, 442 crises as history’s 19 romanticism 112 dimensions of 220 Rortian Judaism 258 as revolutionary 19 Rorty, Richard 301, 403, 421 repetition 31, 33 Rose, Gillian 19, 311 responsibility Rosenstock, Bruce xiii–xiv, 358–371 arts and, to truth 112–113 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen 20, 23, 305 free will and 164, 164n8, 349–350, Rosenzweig, Franz 1–2 351–352 Buber and 192 grace and 339 Christianity as incomplete 335 Jewish moral obligations 271–272 conception of land 146–147, 149 as Jewish philosophy focus 303–304 dialogical identity of 241 justice and 293, 420 God Nature 448–449 anthropomorphic metaphors to to and for the other describe 311 as claim 277 eternal presence of 98 dependency of 280–281 knowledge of 85–86, 186–190, 195 dying for 74–75 love and obedience 191–193 meaning of life 313 perfection 94–95 rights and 163 relationship with humans 86, 279, serving 263, 304–305 281, 305 tikkum olam 9 , 237, 297 on Hegel 122 return history and spirit of Judaism 24 dialogue between past and present 18 influence on Levinas 154 as introspection 19 insularity of Jews 144, 147 to origins as requirement of internalizing of the past 36 philosophy 26 interpretations of work of 83 to tradition 17, 18–19 interreligious dialogue 184, 235, 236 revelation Islam and 148–149 collective identity and 474–475 Jewish education 158 as cumulative process 383–384 Jewishness of Star 94 Index 537

Jewish philosophy’s scope 303 disenchantment of world and 417 knowledge of essences 193–195 distinguishing philosophy from life in community with others 298–299, 491–492 304 as exemplifying God’s creation 444, living language and 84 445–446 messianism 47 See also biotechnology; neuroscience particularism 141–142, 145–146 scientism 252–253 revelation second-person reasons 282n14, 282–283, critique of modernity’s critique of 284, 285n21, 285–287, 288–289 322 Second-person Standpoint, The (Darwell) 282 meaning of life and 305–306 secularism versus rationality 188–190, 191n5, in Christian society 157, 182, 208 192, 197 in dialogue with religion 243–244 redemption and 281 impersonal sacred 467 Sabbath liturgy structure 366–367 Jewish existence 392 similarities to Barth 173 of mid-twentieth century American spirit of history 33 Jewry 54–56 superiority of Judaism 144–145 secular monasticism 21 thought as reversal of perspective 17 secular society, Augustinian 182 Ross, Tamar xiv, 309–310, 372–390 Seeskin, Kenneth xiv, 410–427 Russell, Bertrand 2–3 self, the Ryle, Gilbert 91 alterity and identity 230, 231, 235–236 divine love and 278, 279 Saadiah Gaon 112 God and transformation of 305 Sabbath and justice 361, 362–363, 364–368 as intrinsically social 270, 298–299, Saeculum (Markus) 181–182 304, 311 Sagi, Avi xiv, 391–409 the other, continually encountering 30 salvation myth, Christian 350 the other as target of 277, 280–281, 287, Samuelson, Norbert 433 288 Sarah, death of 77–79 the other in 230–232, 460 Sartre, Jean-Paul 501 in Palestinian-Israeli conflict 148–149 Scheler, Max 19 repetition as foundation 31 Schelling, F. W. J. 13, 196–197, 197n12 as transcendent 233 Schmidt-Leukel, Perry 236–237 Self beyond Itself, The: An Alternative History Schmitt, Carl 45, 47 of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the scholasticism 198 Myth of Free Will (Ravven) 347 Scholem, Gershom 111–112, 128, 368, self-definition and renewal of Judaism 86 373–374, 500 self-difference 230–232, 235–236, 237 Schreiner, Susan 214 self-reflection and renewal of Judaism 86 Schwarzschild, Steven 208–209, 210, 304n4 self-sacrifice 70, 70n9, 71–72 Schweid, Eliezer 125, 303n3 self-thinking and freethinker 21 science self-transcendence as arbiter of truth 433 as characterization of human existence dialogue with Judaism 260–261 401 double-truth theory 376 idolatry and 216n7 Kook and 379–380, 381–382 process 230–232 role in 433 self-difference and 237 Torah-u-madda approach 375, 379 technology and 448 538 Index sense perception 92 martyrdom 75n25 separation, as vehicle of covenant 460 messianic Zionism 128 séparation d’amour: une éthique d’alliance, philosophy of shadowed light 325–327, La (Trigano) 460 328 shame 290 reality of redemption 326–327 Shape of Revelation, The (Braiterman) 43 repentance as act of creation 19 Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman 77–79 shaping and being shaped by history 33 Shapiro, Susan 310–311 technology 444–446 Sherwin, Byron 442 Sophie’s Choice (Stryon) 164n8 Shils, Edward 21n11 souls 114 Shoah. See Holocaust space, tightening of 48–49 sin Speaking/Writing of God (Oppenheim) 300, Augustinian 177, 178 311 compromise and 220–221 speciesism 260–261 human and alienation of divine speech thinking 1–2 196–197 Spinoza, Baruch rebirth follows recognition of 20 development of modernity Singer, Peter 260–261, 263 and 463–464 Singularity and Mechanical Age 437 free will as rationally skepsis 501–502 implausible 355–356 skepticism imaginations and truth 59 aestheticism and 499n22 knowledge of God 189, 189n3 as beginning of philosophy 498, monism 195–196, 196nn10–11 500–501, 508–509 moral agency 348 consciousness and 502 neuroscience and 346, 347, 348 defining 485–487, 486n8 as synthetic philosopher 106–107 escape from responsibility to the other St. Paul 45 489 Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig) 47, fidelity of doubt and 491–501 84, 86, 94, 144–147, 154, 193, 298–299, 303, as inherently contradictory 495n18, 304, 335, 336 495–497 Statman, Daniel 401 in Jewish philosophy 490–491 Stern, Daniel 312 knowledge and 487–490 Stern, Fritz 14n6 religion and 510n34 Stern, Robert 273 through language 507–508 Stewart-Williams, Steve 262, 263 toward universal claims 15 Stoicism 262, 498 truth and 489–490, 494n16, 494–495, Stout, Jeffrey 181, 184 497–498, 509–510 strangeness as transcendence 474–475 Skinner, Quentin 11 Strauss Leo social action 237, 297 deepening of the old 36 social engineering of humans 434 historicism 254 socialist ideology of equality 433–434 images and 46, 59 societies versus communities 110 influence of Protestant theology on Socrates 66, 359, 497 197–200 Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Boyarin) 49 knowledge of God 186–190 Soloveitchik, Chaim of Brisk 62 living tradition 17–18 Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov B. revelation versus rationality 188–190, childish versus mature living 327 197–199 engagement with predecessors 62 Stryon, William 164n8 Index 539 subjectivity temporal dimension 23 Freudian 312 time and 1–2, 23 intersubjectivity and 312–313 third-person reasons 286 on postmodern discourse 301–302 Thompson, Michael 287–288, 291 psychoanalytic portrayal 312 thought suffering 78, 239, 362 beginnings 13–14 suicide, as dying for the other 70–74, 78 components 266 superinstitution 257 as dream 493n13 synthetic philosophy genealogy 26–27 concerns 107–115 as receptacle of historical experience 26 examples of 105–107 as reversal of perspective 17 overview of 103–104 spatial models of 57 tikkum olam 9, 237, 297 targeted dependency 287 time Taubes, Jacob 21 actuality and virtuality combined in Taylor, Charles 269–270 57–58 technology belief-forming practices over 95 alienation of humans from Nature conservatism and 36 446 existence and 486, 486n8 centrality in contemporary culture history and 11 439–440, 450 role in philosophy 1–2 gender issues 451 role in thinking 1–2, 23 in Halakha 441–442 tightening tempo of 48–49 humility and 444 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava xv, 1–10, 311, in Jewish philosophy 439, 439n7, 428–457 440–441, 444–451 toldot 35–37 power of modern 447, 448 To Mend the World (Fackenheim) 419 Temps de l’exi, Le (Trigano) 459 Torah teshuvah 19–20, 31 allegory to understand 375, 382 Theodicy (Leibniz) 363–364 androcentrism of 309–310 theodicy and Jewish tradition 359–370 creation narratives 67, 445 theologians, definition of 381 death of Sarah 77–79 theological realism 186–190, 190n4 as divine document 382–383 theology humanized through as anthropology 394 interpretation 63–64 Jewish philosophy and 3 infinite meanings 380 philosophy versus 3 male bias 380–381, 383 as sanctioning religious identity obedience without reasons 412 formation 139 theme of 109 See also Jewish theology Tree of Knowledge 66–69 theology of the streets 108 Tree of Life 67, 69–70, 77 thick moral concepts 274, 275 Torah u-madda 374–375, 379 thinking totalitarianism 14, 15, 148 freedom consists in 509 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 153, 285n20, history and 13 305, 507 inability of most to engage in 142 “Toward a Renaissance of Jewish Learning” initiation and 13–14 (Rosenzweig) 158 philosophy as reflective 491–492 Tractates on the First Epistle of John role of questioning 500 (Augustine) 178 540 Index

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus revealed, absent in Judaism 85 (Wittgenstein) 506–507 science as arbiter 433 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza) self-contradictory proposition of 463–464 absence 487, 488, 495–497, 505–506 tradition skepticism and 489–490, 494n16, intellectuals’ relationship to 21n11 494–495, 497–498, 509–510 modernity and 244 transcendence and 495 prejudices and 87, 88 versus truth-claims 88, 96 remodeling 242 universalist assumption of one 141 as resumption 16 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 87 truth-claims of Jewish 96 truth-claims transcendence of analytic philosophy 2–3 atheism and 415, 418 in classical Jewish texts 91–92 as categorical other 208 corroborating 374 collapse into immanence 208–209 dialogue and 243 destruction of, by Western function of religious 380 philosophy 422 of Jewish tradition 96 God as dimension of 307, 414–415 justifiability and 187 human passion for 401 philosophy’s investment in 137 inability to know God and 186–190 relativism and 254 Kant as spokesman for 410 versus truth 88, 96 in modernity 467 tzimtzum 377–378, 444–445, 472 as necessary for existence of religion 388–389 uncanny, the 503–504 obedience and 189–190, 198–200 universal binding authority 285 Platonism 410, 422 universalism strangeness as 474–475 assumption of one truth 141 truth and 495 Judaism and 3, 166, 240–241 transhumanism. See posthumanism/ of medieval Jewish philosophers 142 transhumanism Paulian 45 translation, as crossing boundaries 235 relationship to particularism 482–484 Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume) 487 skepticism toward claims of 15 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad 66–69 university, as new church 21 Tree of Life 67, 69–70, 77 unthought, the 506–507 Trigano, Shmuel xv, 24n12, 431, 458–480 Urbach, Ephraim 94 truth arts and responsibility to 112–113 vacant Space of creation 223–224 bifurcated notions 376 veil of illusion 378 de-essentialized 216–217 via negativa 413 foundationalism and 373, 374 Vico, Giambattista 15n8, 15–16 history and 252 virtuality 57–58 imaginations and 59 Vlastos, Gregory 359 as inherently contradictory 495n18, voluntarist model 287 495–497 to Luther 215 Wallace, Jay 282n13, 287–288, 291 myth as vehicle 113 Walsh, James J. 120 permanence of 217–218, 268–269, 378 “wandering Jew” studies, freedom from in philosophy 137, 186 324–325 Index 541

Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe 77–79 on religious thinkers 381 Weber, Max 20 the unthought 506–507 Weiss, Joseph 222 Wolbe, Shlomo 373 Weltsch, Felix 26, 27 Wolfson, Elliot R. xv, 136, 481–515 Wetzel, James 350 women Wiedererkennung 18, 25–26, 34, 36 connection to Nature 431–432 Wiesel, Elie 419 gender complementarity 315 Williams, Bernard 275 relationships between 153 “Wish to Be a Red Indian, The” (Kafka) See also feminism 56–57 Wittgenstein, Ludwig “You,” as identical to “I” 30 belief-forming practices 92 human disappointment with knowledge Zionism 489 creation of new Muscular Jew 429 language games 96–97 messianic 128, 129 limiting nature of language 507–508 political and Rosenzweig 147 ordinary versus philosophical doubt postmodernism and 468 488n9 rationalism and 433 Zohar, Zvi 398–399