Jewish theology unbound james a. diamond - The newest ebook version is ready, download now to explor by Education Libraries

Excel Portable Genius Lisa A. Bucki

https://ebookmass.com/product/excel-portable-genius-lisa-a-bucki/

ebookmass.com

Developmental Psychopathology with DSM-5 Update 6th

Revised ed. Edition

https://ebookmass.com/product/developmental-psychopathology-withdsm-5-update-6th-revised-ed-edition/

ebookmass.com

Taxation Essentials of LLCs and Partnerships Ricketts

https://ebookmass.com/product/taxation-essentials-of-llcs-andpartnerships-ricketts/

ebookmass.com

Leisure in Later Life (Leisure Studies in a Global Era) 1st ed. 2021 Edition Tania Wiseman

https://ebookmass.com/product/leisure-in-later-life-leisure-studiesin-a-global-era-1st-ed-2021-edition-tania-wiseman/

ebookmass.com

Microsoft Office 365 & Outlook 2019 : comprehensive Corinne Hoisington

https://ebookmass.com/product/microsoftoffice-365-outlook-2019-comprehensive-corinne-hoisington/

ebookmass.com

Book of Viking Sagas - 4th Edition 2022 Collective

https://ebookmass.com/product/book-of-viking-sagas-4thedition-2022-collective/

ebookmass.com

Jewish Theology Unbound

James A. Diamond

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001

Title Pages

James A. Diamond

(p.i) Jewish Theology Unbound (p.ii)

(p.iii) Jewish Theology Unbound

(p.iv)

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First Edition published in 2018

Impression: 1

Page 1 of 2

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958595

ISBN 978–0–19–880569–4

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Access brought to you by:

Page 2 of 2

Jewish Theology Unbound

James A. Diamond

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001

Dedication

James A. Diamond (p.v) Dedicated to the collective spirit of the Oyneg Shabbes group:

“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground.”

(David Graber, age 19, August 3, 1942, Warsaw Ghetto) (p.vi)

Access brought to you by:

1 of 1

Jewish Theology Unbound

James A. Diamond

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001

(p.vii) Acknowledgments

James A. Diamond

This is a very different book from others I have published previously and one that I envision will appeal to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. My research has always meant much more to me than simply enhancing my scholarly credentials. That does not mean that I conduct such research with any less academic rigor, but only that the issues I examine and the thinkers I study are also existentially critical to me as a human being and as a Jew. Hopefully, then, this book will speak in turn to all who are invested both academically and existentially in matters of philosophy, ethics, and theology.

I approach the topics in this book, including the nature of the examined life, love, death, martyrdom, suffering, relationship with God, the Shoah, and Jewish homeland, via what is labeled in academic circles as constructive theology. As I looked over the near-finished product I realized that what I had constructed began with the centrality of questioning in Jewish theology and ended where all questioning breaks down. Construction led to deconstruction. Yet, in a time after the world’s most profound philosopher could also be a Nazi, a time when faith could no longer be placed in philosophical clarity, one thing became absolutely clear to me. It is that the spirit which animated the Oyneg Shabbes group in the Warsaw Ghetto to persevere in thinking, creating, writing, and recording, despite unfathomable physical and emotional deprivation, is the guarantor of Jewish, and indeed human, survival. That spirit is resurrected every time a novelist writes a short story for which he is condemned to a gulag, when a poem is composed knowing of the torture and forced labor that will ensue, and when diaries are kept by those awaiting execution for the capital crime of independent thought. I therefore dedicate this book to that collective spirit whose legacy of some 35,000 pages will forever commemorate it.

Page 1 of 3

Spirit, of course, cannot endure without embodied life. History has taught us of the particular existential precariousness related to Jews as a people. In its short life, the State of Israel has proven itself to be an essential guarantor of Jewish existence in all its dimensions. This book therefore extends beyond its initial ending in darkness to a vibrant Jewish future secured by a homeland that is, in the words of my late teacher Emil Fackenheim, so “astonishing that the more it is explained the deeper the astonishment becomes.” May our astonishment become ever deeper until history consummates in a world united by knowledge that fills it “like the waters that flow to the seas.”

Earlier versions and parts of some chapters originated in previous publications and I thank the publishers for permission to incorporate them into this book: Shalem Press, “Love’s Human Bondage: A Biblical Warning,” Azure: Ideas for (p.viii) the Jewish Nation 44 (Spring 2011), 41–60; “Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being Toward Death,” in Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: Personal Reflections, ed. Aaron Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 61–80; “The First Debate over Religious Martyrdom,” Jewish Review of Books 4/2 (2013), 37–9; —“The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe: Diverting God’s Gaze from a Utopian End to an Anguished Now” Modern Judaism 30:3 (2010) pp. 299–330 (Oxford University Press).

Thanks to Adina Gerver for her expert editorial skills and Karen Raith at Oxford University Press for her professional shepherding of the manuscript toward publication. It is an honor to be included in the prestigious Oxford catalog of scholarly works. Special thanks are due to the Templeton Foundation and the Herzl Institute for choosing me as a Herzl Institute/Templeton Foundation Fellow, and for their gracious support of my research as part of the Jewish Philosophical Theology project. It is a rare privilege to have been a member of the group of esteemed scholars who were my colleagues in the project, including Josh Amaru, James Arcadi, Craig Bartholomew, Melis Erdur, Lenn Goodman, Berel Dov Lerner, Alex Sztuden, Shmuel Trigano, Shira Weiss, Jacob L. Wright, and Joshua Weinstein. I am particularly indebted to Alan Mittleman for his invaluable suggestions throughout.

Engaging conversations over the years with Kenneth Seeskin, Menachem Kellner, Aaron Hughes, John Efron, Shaul Magid, Steven Kepnes, Gershon Greenberg, Kenneth Green, David Novak, Albert Friedberg, James Kugel, Irwin Diamond, and David Diamond left their mark. I thank them for those as well as their friendship. I want to particularly express my deep appreciation to Yoram Hazony for the opportunities to conduct our ongoing dialogue in Israel, whose very air breathes wisdom, and for inspiring me to pursue the kinds of inquiry and thinking that ultimately crystallized in the pages that follow. This book would never have materialized without his constant prodding, encouragement, and confidence in my work.

Page 2 of 3

Finally, if, as argued in this book, God’s sacred and ineffable name gives way for the sake of love and relationship, then divinity shines in the names of Florence, Shimon, Yonah, and Nina.

Access brought to you by:

Page 3 of 3

Jewish Theology Unbound

James A. Diamond

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001

Introduction

Plotting and Subplotting Jewish Philosophical Theology

James A. Diamond

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805694.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

The Introduction provides an outline and summary of the separate chapters in the book and the overarching goals of the book. The first is to shatter the stereotype of Judaism as a religion of law absent of any theology. The second is to actually forge a Jewish philosophical theological discourse that spans a continuum of Jewish texts, thinkers, and exegetes from the Bible, to the classical rabbis, to the medieval commentators (parshanim), to Hasidism, to modern secular philosophy. All the issues in the book are explored from a decidedly Jewish stance, both existentially and intellectually. That entails both bringing God into the quest and reading my own particular religious tradition’s foundational scriptures as they examine life from their various perspectives. There is a particular subplot that courses its way through all the chapters. It is the promotion of freedom—in both acts and thought—encouraged by the Jewish God.

Keywords: freedom,Judaism,autobiography,chapter summary,philosophical theology

In this book, I examine a series of issues central to the enduring human quest for the “examined life.” The unexamined life is so anathema to the human condition that Plato famously condemned it as “not worth living.”1 These issues include love, death, freedom, evil, and the nature of the questions that spur us to contemplate them. Despite the universal stake in these questions for all of humanity, I ask them from a decidedly Jewish stance, both existentially and intellectually. That entails both bringing God into the quest and reading my own

Page 1 of 11

particular religious tradition’s foundational scriptures as they examine life from their various perspectives. While the Hebrew Bible and its subsequent rabbinic, legal, theological, philosophical, and mystical interpretations contribute substantively to the examination conducted in this book, they are not my only concern.

This book’s secondary goal is to banish a stereotype and cliché about Judaism that caricatures it as a religion of law and obedience, devoid of faith and theology. That caricature, though slowly being whittled away, persists to this day. Ironically, one of the most prominent advocates of this view is Yeshayahu Liebowitz, a renowned Jewish thinker of the twentieth century, whose philosophy denuded Judaism of virtually every single aspect one would traditionally consider theological. He basically reduces all such theological discourse to the brute act of obedience to divine will, which, in Judaism’s case, is halakhic conduct.2

(p.2) The cliché dates back to the apostle Paul’s declaration, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law.”3 It may very well be the case that Paul has been misinterpreted.4 However, the Church has perpetuated this misconception since its early binary presentation of Judaism as austerely legalistic, opposed to its own spirituality, faith, and love.5 What I hope will emerge from this book, taken as a whole, is not just a theoretical repudiation of this calumny but a concrete demonstration, through close readings of canonical Jewish texts, of a robust, philosophically informed, practical Jewish theology, which both complements and underpins its legal framework.

Autobiographical Sketch

Brief autobiographical revelations from my own personal intellectual trajectory offers some insight into how and why I wrote this book, which seems to be so at odds with all my previous scholarly studies. There was a certain beauty, charm, and comfort to the intellectual naivety that suffused the Orthodox familial, educational, and social milieu of my formative years. The Jewish foundational texts of 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 that immunized itself from any “outside” influences, be they historical, cultural, or intellectual. There was no sense of linear time or “periods” such as ancient, medieval, and modern, since all these texts were timeless, floating, and protective, recalling the primordial “wind of God” over the pre-eternal waters that preceded creation.

Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1903–93), himself a scion of a lineage considered royalty in the rabbinic yeshivah world of the last two centuries, offers one of the most poignant descriptions of this pristine rabbinic mindset. He lovingly recollects what he had absorbed from both his father, Moshe (1879–1941), and grandfather Ḥayyim of Brisk (1853–1918), the founder of the modern, yet (p.3)

Page 2 of 11 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

ahistorical, analytic approach to rabbinic texts known as the “Brisker method.” What 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, 1137–1205] is at my right, Rabbenu Tam [a French Tosafist, 1100–71] is at my left, Rashi [the most prominent biblical and talmudic exegete, 1040–1105] leads the discussion, Rabbenu Tam casts doubt, Rambam codifies, and Ra’avad [Abraham ben David of Posquières, 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 convene in one historical gathering.6

Transmission and reception are the warp and woof of the Torah continuum, with each receiver becoming a transmitter in turn, and each engaged in dialogue that traverses all historical, cultural, and social boundaries. 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 scholarly world conduct our own research.

What was once conceived of, during the incipient period of my thinking Jewishly in the world of the yeshivah, as a monolithic continuum of voices engaging each other on common ground in “one historical gathering,” later 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 at the University of Toronto by Emil Fackenheim, one of the world’s most eminent Hegel scholars, who also became the most profound thinker to struggle philosophically and theologically with the Holocaust.

Fackenheim’s work can be considered in a sense an act of resistance. First, it pushed back against Jewish Wissenschaft’s own initial impulse to surrender to Hegel’s relegation of Judaism to mere anachronism. Second, it was a frontal assault on Kant’s recommendation for Judaism’s euthanasia, by broadening the philosophical horizon enough to bridge the divide between Jewish thought and philosophy. Despite its simple veneer, his consideration of midrashic discourse as a profound medium of sophisticated theology opened the door to a central focus of my own scholarship and contemplation of what precisely constitutes a Jewish way of doing philosophy. In this book, I intend on taking (p.4) Fackenheim’s

Page 3 of 11 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

assertion about midrash very seriously: “for all its deceptively simple story form, [it] is profound and sophisticated theology.”7

In doing so, there is a need to retrieve some of the yeshivah naivety of my youth as it relates to a unified midrashic ingenuity spanning different historical periods and cutting across what have become separate “disciplines” within the academic field of Jewish Studies. Whether halakhist/lawyer, philosopher, biblical exegete, or mystic, the canonical thinkers I consider instrumental to 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 the rigid disciplines of law, rabbinics, philosophy, and mysticism are more permeable than they appear. This connective midrashic thread weaves them all into an intertextual discourse that can be authentically defined as “Jewish.” The literary forms that can best accommodate its fragmentary and contradictory expression are parable, story, and metaphor, which, Fackenheim claims, become normative for the contemporary Jewish theologian. Midrash, he protests, is a mode of Jewish thought largely ignored by philosophy. The combination of a Christian bias that equates Judaism with the Old Testament and a supersessionism that replaces the Old with the New Testament, leads to all kinds of distorted conceptions of Judaism.

The Subplot: Freedom from God

For the purposes of guiding the reader through this book, I have chosen one particular subplot that courses its way through all the chapters. It is the promotion of freedom—in both acts and thought—encouraged by the Jewish God.8 I speak of the God encountered by the biblical patriarchs, by the Israelites, and then by their descendants, Jews, through word and text since God’s originating revelatory appearances recorded in the Hebrew Bible. In this also lies a repudiation of a major corollary of that contrapuntal dualism between Christian and Pharisaic theology that views the latter as a religion of ritual and normative enslavement fuelled by technical casuistry, and the (p.5) former as one of freedom in faith.9 For example, a standard text for many years on Christian theology and its contrast to Judaism by a leading twentieth-century New Testament scholar asserted Christianity’s superiority over Judaism, since “personal freedom, resting on moral conviction, takes the place of all the mass of casuistic soul fettering commandments.”10

No less an intellectual giant than Georg Wilhelm Hegel granted this same distorted view philosophical sophistication and legitimation. He considered Judaism to be shot through with a “thoroughgoing passivity” informed by a master/slave relationship between God and the Jewish people and secured by legalisms in whose “firm bond there is no freedom.”11 Immanuel Kant, another formidable philosopher, identified Jewish law with the coercion of heteronomy he opposed, going as far as to explicitly adopt the Pauline antinomy between the bondage of Jewish law and the freedom of grace.12 Not only does this reflect a

Page 4 of 11

biased vulgarization of Jewish theology, but, as this book will show, there is a strain in Jewish thought that endorses a freedom, especially when grounded in moral conviction, that is so paramount that it overrides divine will and the explicit word of God itself! In a sense, what this book traces through its various foci is one—and I stress only one, being fully cognizant of others—strong dimension of Jewish theology that paradoxically grants, even demands, freedom from God. The title of this book, Jewish Theology Unbound, captures a fierce opposition to these theological and philosophical corruptions of Judaism. Jewish “unbounded” theology conveys a sense of vitality and creativity that is anything but passive, slavish, and legalistic. At the same time, a goal of the book is to unbind Jewish theology from the long-standing, largely anti-Judaism-driven tradition that has reified it in those terms it deems inimical to the human spirit.

That subplot of freedom from God begins in the first chapter, which pivots on the way the classical rabbis understood the biblical assertion “it is not in heaven” (Deut. 30:12). The rabbis turn God’s own word back on itself, interpreting it as moderating the force of a Torah emanating from “heaven” that imposes itself unilaterally on human beings below. For all intents and (p.6) purposes the Torah no longer originates in heaven, but flows upstream, so to speak, from the earth, propelled by the interpretive genius of human beings.

The second chapter begins to investigate the catalyst for all philosophical investigation: the question. It considers questions addressed by God to human beings and vice versa as pristine moments of philosophical inquiry. The chapter is bracketed by God’s first question to Adam (“Where are you?” from Gen. 3:9) at its beginning and by God’s question of Job (“Where were you?” from Job 38:4) at its end. Both questions stimulate human beings to initiate their own independent philosophical inquiry into how they situate themselves in the world ethically, spiritually, and teleologically. Thus, human thought is inaugurated with a divine mandate to autonomously pursue an examined life. These questions emphasize the self-determining quest upon which humankind must embark, rather than a slavish unquestioned fealty to a supreme despot-like Being. Revelation through God’s two questions prompts individual responses fraught with the risk and responsibility that accompany all human choices. As Martin Buber asserted, “To endure revelation is to endure this moment full of possible decisions, to respond to and to be responsible for every moment.”13

In order to better appreciate the nature of the divine source of the selfdetermining quest outlined in the second chapter, the third chapter explores the name of God as revealed to Moses: “I will be who I will be” (Exod. 3:14). Who, precisely, is this transcendent Being who addresses such questions to humankind and conducts dialogue with it? In this chapter, I challenge the philosophical abstractions of divine perfection and immutability, advocated most prominently by medieval Jewish rationalists. On the contrary, the biblical and rabbinic God is a kind of work in progress, ever in flux and evolving in tandem

Page 5 of 11

with God’s creations. That God is the One who “will be,” rather than the One who “is,” and is wholly inconsistent with the Greek static God of pure Being. Thus, rabbinic theology recovers for us the biblical God, the relational God, the becoming God, the God who allows others to become, and becomes Himself in turn, along with their becoming. I use the term “becoming” to convey the kind of evolving God captured by the seemingly tautological use of the verb “to be” in God’s introduction to Moses as “I will be who I will be.” God’s liberation of the Israelites from Egypt is consequent to the kinds of liberating “becomings” Moses initiates prior to any knowledge of the Israelite God. National freedom can only materialize through one like Moses who has already taken three steps in responding decisively to the suffering of others, while at the same time, liberating himself from the hold of the pagan culture that nurtured and created him in the mold of an ideology he autonomously grew to reject. Only then is he privileged to encounter a God (p.7) who acknowledges Himself as “becoming.” That name identifies the God who questions and is questioned in turn, whom we first encounter in the second chapter. Thus, it is this very freedom from God that promotes autonomy, which enables authentic encounters with the God envisioned by this name.

Since no Jewish theology can be constructed out of the Hebrew Bible alone, Chapter4shows how rabbinic Judaism adopts and adapts this notion of the divine name. In the rabbis’ hands, that name reflects an existence of becoming and overcoming. As is their wont, the classical rabbis don’t just leave the name bearing abstract connotations but also normatively shape it with concrete halakhic contours. In doing so, rabbinic legislative freedom emerges in a striking —indeed, what appears to be blasphemous—appropriation of the divine name. That name, so sacral that it is virtually beyond the ken of all human beings, can be utilized for the sake of cultivating human relationships, that is, for the thoroughly mundane. The theoretical philosophical theology developed in the third chapter assumes a concrete expression in law, or halakhah, the bread and butter of post-biblical Judaism, as explained in this fourth chapter. This halakhic “demotion” of the divine name is a premier instance of the radical formulations of rabbinic legislative authority that extends its parameters well beyond that of the divine Lawgiver. Dispensing with the taboos associated with the divine name for the sake of cultivating human relationships is a normative expression of our subplot, freedom from God.

Once the primacy of human relationship is established by this extraordinary desacralization of the divine name it would be remiss to ignore the primacy of the human relationship with God. The love of God is a fundamental tenet of Jewish theology and a demand of Jewish law. Chapter5therefore argues that freedom lies at the very core of that love. The exercise of autonomy with respect to God requires a sense of self that can never be totally negated or submerged by love of others. Because virtually all biblical accounts of love between human beings in all its variations end disastrously (I include the Song of Songs in that

Page 6 of 11

assessment), the Bible seems to be saying that this is the risk inherent in all interpersonal relationships when love is left unchecked and is left to run the limits of its own unrestrained power. I will argue that the Bible advocates an embracing love of God precisely so that we do not lose our humanity and selfhood, but, in fact, recover it. Love of God becomes a check on the danger posed by human love, the danger of the merging of the self into the object of love.

A love of God, however, that is all-consuming, limitless, and boundless poses its own dangers. The realization of those dangers is manifest daily in our current volatile times, where the expressed love of God becomes so intense and overpowering as to override the love of life, leading people to sacrifice their own lives and, even more heinously, to take the lives of others. Therefore, Chapters6 and7delve into a Jewish philosophical theology of death and (p.8) martyrdom. What these chapters prescribe is an antidote to that danger by once again demonstrating that God is sanctified, without exception, when life is preserved rather than forfeited for God’s sake. The rare circumstances that halakhically call for martyrdom are exceptions that prove the rule. God, as a telos of human thought and life, sacrifices His own needs and demands for the sake of humankind. Therefore, commandments that threaten the integrity of human life or that could result in death always give way to the priority of life. Indeed, these two chapters argue that those rare occasions that appear to require martyrdom, or dying for God, when examined closely, are actually instances of dying for others and for community. They involve an ethical, rather than “religious,” sacrifice so that others can continue to fulfill their lives. They are dispensations for a type of martyrdom that loves life by preserving it for others so they in turn may have the freedom to pursue examined and thus ethical lives. Chapter7thus proposes a Jewish theology of anti-martyrdom. In doing so, it further extends that connective thread of freedom from God in its transformation of martyrdom, from an act of self-negation normally considered one of complete surrender to God, to one of self-affirmation in the service of one’s fellow human beings.

Chapter8argues that even those aspects of biblical and rabbinic theology that are most mythic and seem anathema to a contemporary scientifically informed sensibility are philosophically instructive. In this case, I chose to focus specifically on angels because their role, as I read it, meshes with the philosophical thread of the book: angelic encounters spur moments of epistemological and ethical clarity, which serve as a companion to the independent questioning that the second chapter proposes the Bible promotes as a mode of philosophical inquiry. In some way, angelic encounters connect to the original divine seeings at creation indicated by the near daily “And God saw it was good” and culminating in the final “And God saw all that he had made that it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). God’s repeated overviews of creation disclose an immutable reality, both of things as they exist in themselves and of their interconnectedness. That overall interconnectedness often eludes human

Page 7 of 11

consciousness because of its limited purview. Through the medium of angelic intrusions, human beings gain a glimpse of that which transcends the narrow human interests informed by expediency and utility. These angelic encounters inspire those choices by which human beings become and sublimely express their humanity beyond the purely utilitarian dimension of existence. Once again, the focus is not upwards toward God but downward toward humanity, prompting human beings to perfect their own humanity which entails moving beyond the strictly material plane of reality. Angels appear in human form precisely because their teachings concern the nature of political, social, and ethical relationships between human beings, and are not about how to traverse the bridge between the divine realm and the human realm. Angelic encounters stir human beings to achieve authenticity by exercising the freedom their humanity demands.

(p.9) The ninth chapter pursues the issue of freedom more deeply by confronting the moral and philosophical problems posed by the institution of slavery. How can Jewish philosophical theology deal with that which is most inimical to human freedom, and yet is sanctioned, albeit regulated, by the Bible? Here, the way that the rabbinic tradition approached this problem from a concrete halakhic perspective is both methodologically and substantively progressive and instructive. Rabbinic exegesis is suffused with a hermeneutical freedom that is the flip side of the political freedom that God and Moses originally accomplished for Israel through the Exodus. The freedom in which Israel’s national identity was forged was extended to an intellectual freedom that ensured its survival as a spiritual/cultural/ethnic/juristic community even beyond the loss of its political and cultic center and its physical dispersal and fragmentation two millennia ago. That rabbinic freedom is exemplified by how interpretive ingenuity subjected the biblical parameters of slavery to a far stricter regulatory regime in favor of the slave. It thus edged slavery closer and closer to its own eradication. That same interpretive process climaxed in Maimonides’ own innovative philosophically theological formulation which opened the door as early as the Middle Ages toward slavery’s ultimate abolition. In rabbinic hands, slavery actually becomes a cipher for freedom.

Finally, all Jewish thought since the Shoah labors in its shadow, and therefore must confront its radical evil in some way. This must be done even if only to admit that Jewish philosophical theology might ultimately break down in the face of such a devastating assault on its very foundations. In the tenth chapter, I close the philosophically theological circle with which I commenced in probing God’s first question of humanity—“Where are you?”—and end with same question now directed back at God by humankind. In posing that question, and after a lifetime of struggle with it, I place Emil Fackenheim and the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe in dialogue. These are the two thinkers who I believe confront it in the most profound and courageous ways. Both viewed the Shoah as unique in the material and sacred history of Jewish suffering. Fackenheim did so as a Reform rabbinic refugee who escaped its genocidal grip to become a professional philosopher. R.

Page 8 of 11

Kalonymous Kalman Shapira realized the same after years of sermonizing as a Hasidic Rebbe in the very heart of madness and deprivation in the Warsaw Ghetto. Their theological responses reignite the moral conviction pioneered by Moses, which was so intense as to jolt God out of an eclipse, or a hiddenness, or simply apathy. Fackenheim acknowledges that without the Rebbe’s desperate appeals to rouse a seemingly oblivious God to live up to both God’s specific promise as a guardian of Israel and to God’s universal role as Creator, Fackenheim could never have completed his own project. That project is one that culminates in the sacralization of life as an actual halakhic prescription to survive as Jews and not to despair of God.

I conclude with a philosophical theology of survival that pivots on the ultimate expression of freedom, but this time nationally, in the State of Israel. (p.10) Central to that survival is the liberation and the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty and independence since the mid-twentieth century.

At the end of this Introduction, I pose some questions for the reader to consider while reading the various chapters concerning the very nature of the exercise I will engage in over the course of this book. Have I joined the medieval rationalists conducting an exercise in philosophical allegory? Have I read the Bible anachronistically, superimposing foreign literary and philosophical categories on an ancient text that cannot tolerate them? Can the Masoretic text be read at all in seamlessly holistic ways, ignoring the findings of higher and lower criticism that question the very assumption of a single, coherent text that often underlies my readings? Whatever the answers to these questions, I can personally attest to the power of texts such as the Bible and classical rabbinic sources to stimulate, inspire, and generate serious, philosophically informed theology by way of interpretation. In a sense, perhaps, what I have done is analogous to an archaic form of philosophy, the way it was practiced for the first two millennia of its history, when philosophy was articulated and advanced in exegetical terms. Pierre Hadot’s description of philosophical discourse during that period is an equally apt description of my engagement with the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition, where the search for truth is “confounded with the search for the meaning of ‘authentic’ text; that is of those texts considered authoritative. Truth was contained within these texts; it was the property of their authors, as it was also the property of those groups who recognized the authority of these authors and who were consequently the ‘heirs’ of this original truth.”14 The challenge posed by this book is for contemporary philosophy and theology to retrieve a semblance of that original search.

In sum, I here embark on the practice of Jewish philosophical theology, rather than its historical or sociological investigation. It is a practice I can only undertake through a confluence of my biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and legal training, as well as existential conditioning. Looking toward the future without a deep “midrashic” engagement with my Jewish textual and experiential past

Page 9 of 11

would be myopically non-Jewish. As such, I set out now to forge a—and I stress a —Jewish philosophical theological discourse that spans a continuum of Jewish texts, thinkers, and exegetes from the Bible, to the classical rabbis, to the medieval commentators (parshanim), to Hasidism, to modern secular philosophy, and, ultimately, to the Warsaw Ghetto. In the spirit of R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik’s own experience noted previously, the result is a story that emerges from an encounter with some of the “teacher/friends” I have made at various junctures of my lifelong engagement with Jewish thought.

Notes:

(1) Apology, 38a.

(

2) His own “theology” leads to the conclusion that there is absolutely no cognitive content to Jewish faith and ultimately, “[f]or Judaism, faith is nothing but its system of Mitsvot.” Needless to say, the underlying thrust of this book is diametrically opposed to this radical reductionism. SeeLiebowitz’s Judaism, Human Values, and the State of Israel, trans. and ed. Eliezer Goldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 38.

(3) Galatians 3:13.

(

4) The literature on this topic is vast, but, for one specific example, seeDaniel Boyarin’s “defense” of Paul on this score in A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).However, this academic work reads as “too little, too late” in light of the lived experiences of actual Jews through the past two millennia who have suffered the brunt of Pauline theology as filtered through centuries of adversos judaeos literature espoused by leading Church fathers such as Tertullian and Chrysostom.

(5) The literature here is, again, vast, but for our purposes E. P. Sanders offers a concise overview of the “legalistic” view of Judaism as “the most common item on Christian lists of the supposed faults of Judaism.” In his “Jesus, Ancient Judaism, and Modern Christianity: The Quest Continues,” in Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust, ed. Paula Frederiksen and Adele Reinhartz (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 31–55, at 48.

(6)Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, “But from Thence shall you Seek,” (Heb.) Hadarom 47 (1978), 1–83,at 64–5. Translation is mine.

(7) Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 15.

(8) I write “Jewish God” intentionally, because I do not subscribe to the vapid refrain that “we all serve the same God.” We do not. Not only are there serious differences in conceptions of God between the three western monotheisms,

Page 10 of 11

there are the same within Jewish thought itself. Maimonides’ rationally constructed God and Nahmanides’ kabbalistically constructed God are so different that it is no exaggeration to state that they served two different Gods. But that subject is for another book. See, for example, chapter3of my own Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

(9) For just one small, but powerful, example, see another of Paul’s antinomies between Judaism and the new Israel’s allegiance to Christ: “the letter kills, the spirit vivifies” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

(10)Wilhelm Bousset, Jesus, trans. Janet Trevelyan (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), 138.

(11) Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Vol. II, Determinate Religion, ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 685.For a developed analysis of Hegel’s depiction of Judaism as enslavement, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 35–41.Most importantly for my rejoinder in this book, Hegel claims that Jewish society is held together by “external coercion” rather than “identification with a larger ethical community,” at 39.

(12) Religion within the Limits of Reason alone, trans. T. M. Greene and H. Hoyt (New York: Harper & Bros., 1960), 57.

(13) “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” in The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1963), 239–50at 244.

(14) Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 73.

Page 11 of 11

Jewish Theology Unbound

James A. Diamond

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001

Unbinding Jewish Philosophical Theology

James A. Diamond

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805694.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

The voluminous corpus of the rabbinic genre known as midrash and aggadah involves not just law (halakhah), but also a prolific repository of unrefined philosophical theology. The aggadic and midrashic style encompasses narrative, allegory, and a deeply intimate exegetical engagement with every syllable of the biblical text. It may not correspond neatly to the kinds of systematic treatises, largely identified with the Christian tradition, through which theology is traditionally delivered. The philosophy and theology that inhere in the midrashic genre are, at the very least, of equal profundity and complexity. One needs only to be attuned to its manner and style of communication, consisting of an unrelenting intricate weave of ciphers and cross-references to its biblical antecedents, to hear a literal barrage of philosophical theology.

Keywords: Torah,Talmud,philosophical theology,midrash,rabbinic,Hebrew Bible

Much of my scholarly career has been taken up with studies of seminal Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, or members of what has been labeled the rationalist school of Judaism. Their singular focus on what is popularly known as the “First Commandment” of Exodus 20:2, is restricted to the first half of the verse, the undefined and indefinable God of “I the Lord am your God” as opposed to the second half of the verse, which describes the historical, providential, and relational God “who took you out of Egypt.” Thus, they constructed an abstract deity, a God who “is” rather than a God who “does” or “becomes.” The God who “is” corresponds to a rationalist paradigm of “perfection,” which voids God of attributes, absents God from history, and, because God is immutable, renders God immune to affectation. That perfection

rules out any kind of relationship with human beings, leaving God solely as an object of intellectual contemplation. That definition could only persist by ignoring the God of history, as described in the second half of the verse: “Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”1

If God is defined as the Aristotelian, self-contained (and thus self-absorbed), “thought thinking itself,” then imitatio dei, the premier mandate of a religious life and of a Jewish life of modeling one’s conduct on God’s, needs to be reconsidered. That mandate would then consist solely in cultivating the intellect according to this conception—this would amount to a somewhat impoverished, solipsistic, spiritual life constricted to one dimension of human existence. Commandments, or mitzvoth, the staple of Jewish life, are thereby reduced to a practical, pragmatic framework, which psychologically and socially placates and “settles the mind,” within which that solitary contemplative activity will be achieved.2 Abraham is God’s quintessential lover, not because of any practical devotion, service in the form of fulfillment of mitzvoth, or the establishment of an intimate relationship based on the reciprocity and mutuality in which any authentic love must be anchored. (p.12) Rather, Abraham is the paradigmatic Maimonidean lover because of his single-minded, obsessive infatuation with knowledge that leads to God as the ultimate object of knowledge.3 Yet, Abraham’s beloved remains an object and his love goes unrequited except for the benefits that are self-accrued consequent to the perfection of his intellect.

Great Jewish thinkers, and theological genres outside of the Maimonidean rationalist school of Judaism, reflect very different sensibilities such as halakhah/ aggadah (the classical rabbis), poetry (Judah Halevi), or kabbalah (Moses Nahmanides). They all emphasized the second half of the verse in which all the relational biblical images of God as king, father, and spouse are anchored. This anchoring of God in history with God’s interventions on Israel’s behalf, is consistent with the overarching presentation of Judaism’s formative canon, including the Hebrew Bible, its rabbinic overlay in the classical rabbinic “scriptures” of Talmud and Midrash, and the further mystical overlay of the Zohar. It is this model of God that crucially informs the critical issues investigated in this book.

Every attempt at constructing a uniquely Jewish theology must begin with the final Masoretic recension of the Hebrew Bible, which itself reflects many centuries of editorial tinkering throughout the biblical period and undergoes further revision in its very canonization and final “publication.” Every aspect of biblical thought, be it legal, theological, historical, narratological, poetic, or otherwise, must thus be layered with its radical rabbinic transformation fueled by catastrophe, absence, exile, and the challenges of competing nascent theologies reflected in the Mishnah and Talmud in the early centuries of the Common Era. The slightly later development of the rabbinic academy, or beit midrash, as Judaism’s new, portable, intellectual and spiritual center of gravity

Page 2 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

resumes the layering. Despite its lack of formal philosophical treatises or dialogues in the classical sense, rabbinic Judaism produced a vast compendium of disparate ideas on every facet of human and divine life, as well as the relationship between the two, ranging from questions of politics, ethics, epistemology, and ontology to metaphysics. That enterprise, as well as the process of debate itself, ensured Jews’ and Judaism’s integrity and survival both existentially and philosophically. The Middle Ages of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries further enriched Jewish philosophical theology. Particularly dominated by Maimonidean rationalism and Nahmanidean mysticism, it equipped Judaism with the philosophical and spiritual means to address the challenges posed by their respective intellectual environs.

Much of the philosophical distortion and the draining of Judaism from any theology flows from misconceiving Sinai, the radically formative, revelatory, event of Jewish history, as an imposition of positive law that crushed all (p.13) human freedom and suppressed human participation. As Fackenheim points out, revelation is more of a hybrid of “human freedom and Divine grace.”4 In fact, a prominent rabbinic rereading of the Torah’s unvowelized text grounds the entire law in the concept of freedom. 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 ḥarut (incised), but rather ḥerut (freedom).”5 What originated in the divine realm becomes humanized through interpretation, the freedom of which is exquisitely conveyed by this very intentional “misreading.” Once again, Fackenheim captures this complexity of revelation that preserves both freedom and restraint by provoking a “double astonishment,” where the first “which is terror at a Presence, at once divine and commanding, turns into a second astonishment, which is joy, at a Grace which restores and exalts human freedom by its commanding Presence.”6 The Jewish God’s presence at first paralyzes with its overwhelming numinous majesty, and so the result is an incision (ḥarut), freezing its addressees in the restraints of its fixed inscription. However, that paralysis is quickly overcome by the invitation to its addressees to participate in the unfolding of that revelation, by cultivating their hermeneutical freedom (ḥerut), mirrored in the revocalization of the same word.

In line with this rabbinic freedom, the single factor 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 original 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.7 A divine voice emanating from beyond endorses one legislative opinion over another in an argument concerning an arcane and intricate detail of purity and impurity. It is precisely on an issue relating to an ethereal realm, which apparently transcends human reason, that

Page 3 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

one would have especially thought the divine preference to be a welcome arbiter. However, that preference is overruled by the democratic principle of majority rule, a fundamental mechanism for resolving human decision-making. Locating majority rule in the original commanding voice of God as transmitted in the Bible further compounds the force of the human usurpation of the divine voice in debating the meaning of that very Voice. It is itself sanctioned by an interpretation of the original divine word as recorded in the Bible that is far from unambiguous in its (p.14) meaning! This represents the ultimate Talmudic paradigm of human freedom, where human interpretation of God’s word trumps God’s own interpretive preferences, and perhaps God’s own original word itself.

This “not in heaven” rule became so sacrosanct as to warrant the death penalty for any prophetic citation of God in the context of post-biblical debates in order to substantiate one legal position over another.8 Otherwise, reason and thought would be stifled, for how could one respond to the immediate 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. Law-school and practicing law prior to entering the academy also taught me that halakhah and secular legal systems share more jurisprudential principles than my adolescent yeshivah training would have had me believe. Once the letters on the Tablets lost their ability to be heard in the face of mass rejection via the golden calf at the foot of Sinai, they flew off, leaving Moses holding an unbearable dead weight that came crashing down.9 So equity and judicious reasoning must always temper any system based on positive law, lest the system simply deteriorate into dead-letter law.

The theological significance of this aggadic narrative’s resolution in God’s “smile” at having been overruled by human subjects, and God’s startling deferment to human will by declaring, “My children have triumphed over Me,” are often ignored in teaching this tale. Each element of this divine submission to human will also radically recalibrate what has long been taken as the legacy of medieval rationalism of a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and ultimately unknowable God. God reacts, defers, experiences defeat, demonstrates emotion, and projects himself as a parent, a being that descends from his throne of universalist governance to a far narrower personal relationship with one group of subjects. The rabbinic narrative returns us to the pristine personal God of the Hebrew Bible who intervenes in history, relates, affects and in turn is affected, elects one nation as a favorite, and, most importantly, evolves in tandem with God’s creation and creatures, as will become more evident in the chapter on divine names.

God’s “smile” conjures all the attributes rationalism attempted to erase in its quest for divine perfection. This smiling deity bears no resemblance to the deity constructed by proponents of negative theology. That God is the philosophically perfect abstraction denuded of any characteristic that could be shared in

common with human beings. That God can only evoke a theology of deep silence captured by the verse “For You, silence is praise” (Ps. 65:1). (p.15) Such a muted theology, that squelches any meaningful ways of talking about God for the establishment of a covenantal community, is preempted by a positive rabbinic theology that creates a common space where God and humanity can intersect. A “between” emerges that is sorely lacking in the negations of rationalist philosophical theology. The consideration of God’s subjects as “children” retrieves the palpable sense of relationship with humans and, in particular, the nation of Israel as God’s “first born,” so poignantly professed as a motivating factor in God’s plea for Israel’s liberation in Exodus. The sense of joy that God experiences and God’s capitulation to human will reflects a divine maturation that is contingent on human action. Austere rational notions of perfection and immutability are exchanged for a vital, fluctuating God who is aided by human beings in the attainment of new cognitions and ever-developing states of selfawareness. The Talmudic “not in heaven” passage in fact picks up on the reciprocal relationship between God and human beings that reserves so much space for human freedom that is overt and latent in the biblical text. This notion of relationship between the divine and the human undergirds the connective thread I trace through all the chapters, and that winds its way through the topics discussed throughout this book.

Though the classical rabbis reread the Torah, often daringly and boldly, there is always an anchor in the Hebrew Bible that supports or generates a particular reading. While the anchor is mostly assumed to be textual (anomalies, contradictions, repetitions, syntax, or grammatical difficulties), this book argues that there is also a philosophical/theological anchor. In other words, a reading may be audacious but also might end up consistent with the overarching biblical conceptions of such fundamental notions as God, humanity, law, and justice. Such theological consistency also extends to key threats to the continuing viability of religion posed by scientific advancement as well as the prevalence of evil and innocent suffering. This is especially pressing in light of the rapid scientific progress of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and ironically in its converse direction, the moral regress reflected in its conflicts, wars, misery, and genocides. For Jews this has become all the more pressing since the consummate devastation of European Jewry experienced immediately prior to the establishment of the State of Israel.

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 that Hebrew phrase is also “misread” as “did not cease.”10 Though God is granted restricted entry into the Jewish house of study, God’s word continues (p.16) to be heard in the human interpretive freedom exercised within its walls. The spirit of Sinaitic orality and textuality is perpetuated in the ongoing engagement with its jagged edges,

Page 5 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

inconsistencies, lacunae, and generally its “surface irregularities.”11 All these textual anomalies pose lush opportunities, rather than problems, for the advancement of Jewish thought.

How appropriate, then, is the first commandment, or rather preamble cited earlier, 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 the God of the preamble to the Ten Utterances consist of any of those attributes commonly associated with the rationalist monotheistic deity of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. God is the liberator, the “one who took you out of Egypt” (Exod. 20:2), the one who is incensed by oppression and the human treatment of others as means rather than ends. Despite later medieval debates over whether this introductory preface constitutes a formal command or not, 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 hermeneutic freedom the rabbis appropriated for themselves is a continuing manifestation of the supreme religious mandate of imitatio dei.

The primary boundary that demarcates thought as “Jewish” is its gaze back even as it looks forward, its engagement with the scriptures of the Jewish canon. What transforms a work such as Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed from a philosophical treatise into Jewish philosophical theology is the ever-present verse, midrash, or halakhah that confronts the reader at every turn, and its obsessive concern with biblical language as well as Jewish law. That textual Jewishness is compounded by the living Judaism of the Guide’s intended audience that is plagued with the uniquely Jewish angst generated by a potentially lethal clash between “knowledge of the true sciences” and belief in “matters pertaining to the Law.”12 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,13 then in the overarching goal to relieve the “heartache and great perplexity” suffered by the religiously devout intellectual,14 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.”15

(p.17) The obstacles to the project of Jewish theology can be illustrated via the beginnings of two epochal influences in the history of the development of Judaism. The first is the ancient classical rabbinic canon of the Mishnah and Talmud, the most massive textual repository of ancient thought by far, numbering some 2,711 folios, and towering quantitatively over the biblical canon.16 The Mishnah begins with a tannaitic legal question regarding the parameters of a particular liturgical obligation: “From when can one recite the

Page 6 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

Shema in the evening?” to which the response is “From the time the priests enter to eat their terumah until the end of the first watch.”17 Thus, the canonical corpus of rabbinic Judaism launches immediately into law, indeed the minutiae of law, without any theological prologue at all regarding the biblical proof-text for the law, the nature of the divine promulgator of that law, or indeed what the rationale is for the law. The conception of Judaism as law-obsessed and oblivious to theology may arise from the very first Mishnah. However, this conception is almost immediately shattered by the ensuing folios that include, among many others, amoraic and tannaitic theological discussions of the divine daily schedule, the place and meaning of human and divine suffering, prayer, human ability to impact the divine, the unique relationship between the divine and Israel, and a reconstruction of King David’s biographic profile that itself reflects the theological and philosophical hermeneutics of reading prophetic texts. I cannot conceive of anything more exquisitely theological than the question posed of what biblical passages God’s phylacteries contain!18

Yet, even without resorting to the subsequent record of centuries of rabbinic reflections, surely this opening question assumes a myriad of theological underpinnings. Those include the nature of spiritual temporality, memory, reenactment, establishment of a temporal unit in accord with biblical order of creation, and prayer. There is also the absorbing memory of a destroyed cultic center, and the relationship between a Jew and God forged by liturgical recitation of a specific biblical passage. Here we have a paradigmatic halakhic case of what David Novak, calling them precept and concept, has argued reflects both law and theology. The precept that regulates conduct is precise, while the concept is less so. There is no such thing as a Jewish law that does not have an integral theological component. Though I may disagree with the theological implications drawn by Novak, another of my revered teachers I have been privileged to study under, his conclusion is apropos the general thrust of this book: “this is the greatness, I believe, of the theological method of the Aggadah. It attempts to apprehend the incomprehensible with the only (p.18) appropriate means for such an endeavour, the imagination, which draws its vitality from the equally incomprehensible recesses of the unconscious.”19

The very last mishnah in this first tractate of Berakhot also ends with a norm, or halakhah, that is deeply rooted in an overarching theological precept that allows the use of the divine name in the common greeting, or the exploitation of the most sacred for the most mundane. There will be much more to be said about this when discussing God’s names in Chapter3, but suffice it for this discussion to emphasize that the mishnaic structure itself is redolent with theological meaning. The tractate begins with a focus on a prayer that, in biblical and rabbinic theology, is an all-encompassing embrace of its principal tenets. It constitutes the supreme speech-act expression of bowing to divine authority as monarch, of the love of God, of submission to God’s legislative jurisdiction by accepting God’s commands, and of ensuring the perpetuation of the Torah’s

Page 7 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020

teachings by transmitting them to the next generation. The tractate then concludes by redirecting the focus from God to human beings, prioritizing the latter over the former and thus concretizing horizontal (between human beings, or ben adam l’ḥavero) over vertical (between human beings and God, or ben adam l’maqom) relationships, one of the overarching principles of Jewish law. Long before the introduction of the kabbalistic concept of God self-limiting to allow for the world’s existence (ṣimṣum), this classical rabbinic tractate already presents, in its very structure, the radical theology of divine sacrifice for the sake of human flourishing.

The second beginning that poses an apparent obstacle to the project of Jewish philosophical theology occurs in the medieval period. It is the startling opening question of the most widely read biblical commentator in the Jewish tradition. Rashi’s Torah commentary is perhaps the most formative influence, since the Middle Ages, on the way Jews read the Hebrew Bible. It asks why the Torah does not start with the very first mitzvah that appears in Exodus rather than with the account of the creation and all that follows in the book of Genesis.20 The assumption underlying the question is that the Torah is a legal compendium, and as such, ought to dispense with history and narrative, getting right to the business of law. Narratives, even one establishing God as Creator, are superfluous to a book concerned with conduct and norms. Often overlooked is that Rashi’s answer deepens this assumption, rather than vitiating it. Rashi answers his own question thus: God’s ownership of the world through his creation needs to be established in order to justify Israel’s later colonization of a land that is already occupied by an indigenous population. If the Bible is conceived as law, then the narratives must be read legally.

(p.19) The creation narrative does not contribute any theology regarding the nature of God, but rather provides the juristic framework within which to read other narratives. In this case, it presents the contractual legitimacy for a grant of land. The legal rationale is that the inhabitants of Canaan are not expelled, but evicted as tenants for breach of lease terms. The Israelites therefore do not colonize, but assume a new tenancy at the pleasure of the divine landlord. One could argue, then, that Rashi sees no value in theology except insofar as it has normative ramifications. He would have the Torah begin where the Talmud begins, with the prescriptive. Yet, Rashi’s question and answer do in fact reflect an underlying theology. Primarily, Rashi seems to conceive of a God that is not just a lawgiver but also in perpetual relationship with His creation, affected by and responding to the human drama within it. Rashi’s conception of God also entails a covenantal relationship with a particular people and a particular spatial location, both of which can be shattered by normative transgression.

But, even if one were to reject the argument that Rashi’s position belies a rabbinic stereotype and is, in fact, rife with theological underpinnings, that would not be the end of the argument. To accept his perspective on the Torah

would be to privilege one view over that of other eminent Jewish medieval thinkers who consider the non-legal theological parts of the Torah, such as creation, as forming the very heart of the Torah’s project. Nahmanides, for example, Rashi’s equal in rabbinic competence, responds to Rashi’s question in his first comment on the Torah with an emphatic evaluation of Genesis as “the root of all belief” (shoresh ha’emunah), so fundamental that without it one would be left “without any Torah at all.”21 Simply put, for Nahmanides, there is no Torah if it is not embedded in theology. As for Maimonides, one need not defer to his esoteric philosophical treatise, the Guide of the Perplexed, to determine how critical the creation account is for his view of Torah and Judaism. Early in his legal code, a compendium of law ostensibly accessible to the wider general public for consultation, he explicitly rates the rabbinic legal tradition with its Talmudic debates and conclusions (“the give and take of Abaye and Rava,” havayot d’Abaye v’Rava) as inferior to the study of the accounts of creation and Ezekiel’s chariot vision.22 Since he identifies the latter two accounts with physics and metaphysics, the two disciplines that constituted the realm of philosophy in his day, Maimonides explicitly describes the pursuit of philosophical theology as the ultimate aim of human life. Although this is universally true for all of humanity, what is particularly Jewish about it is that Maimonides actually codifies this view as a normative hierarchy of values in a legal code that is binding on Jews alone. In fact, Maimonides “ritualizes” this hierarchy of values by codifying a daily schedule of intellectual (p.20) pursuit or Torah study. As one matures progressively in intellectual sophistication and mastery of foundational texts, one reaches a point where all of one’s time must be consumed by philosophy.23 Since the ultimate aim of this curriculum is God, there is no pursuit besides this final phase of Torah study that could more appropriately be termed philosophical theology.

The classical rabbis of the first centuries of the Common Era appropriated for themselves extensive liberty in interpreting God’s revelatory word as expressed in the Hebrew Bible. The interpretative process they initiated was, and is, a liberation from the imposing Voice of revelation, paradoxically carving out an independent space for human freedom while, at the same time, constituting a supreme mode of fealty to, and worshipping of, God. God’s original involvement with Israel as a nation in the book of Exodus is as a political liberator. God’s subsequent appearance as a regent lawgiver at Sinai is also prefaced by His selfidentification as a liberator. Once the direct lines of communication between human beings and God were considered to have ceased, rabbinic theology drew heavily on this originating sense of both political and juristic freedom. The classical rabbis declared the end of the prophetic period, after which prophecy could no longer channel the divine Word and revelation was no longer possible as a means of accessing, and then asserting, divine Will and thought. Judaism since then charts its own path by listening to the reverberations of that original divine revelation and by transforming interpretation into a supreme religious

Page 9 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020