Monthly Archives: September 2016

In 1964, Bob Dylan sang Times are a Changing reflecting the growing tide of youth wanting a different world than that of their elders. Five years later in 1969, Theodore Roszak published his classic work The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition explaining how the younger generation was a counterculture to excepted values. Roszak found common ground between political radicals, hippie dropouts and the Beatles by aptly linking Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman. In all of them, Roszak found a rejection of what he calls the technocracy–the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society.” This revolt was credited with reaching into the very meaning of life, sanity, reality, and cultural values.  Roszak was more a participant writing a manifesto than an abstract scholar, his work introduced a kaleidoscope of what was being read on many college campuses while at the same time offer a compelling vision of the entire movement for his readers.

Smadar Cherlow recently published Who Moved My Judaism: Judaism Post-Modernism, and Contemporary Spirituality [Hebrew] (Resling, 2016) showing the growing tide of change in the Religious Zionist community, comparing it to the American counter-culture. The book offers guidance for navigating these new trends, and like Roszak it is part reporting and part advocacy.

She herself recounts in interviews how she attended Gush Emunim rallies in the 1970’s and over time under the influence of Rabbi Menachem Froman and Rabbi Shagar came to her new position as advocate for a new religiosity. In short, the world of Gush Emunim, especially the Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook worldview broke down. She calls this breakdown post-modernism because of the loss of the grand narrative and she sees it replaced by a new spirituality.

The chapters of the book originate as independent talks given at Religious Zionist conferences and public forums. Cherlow acknowledges her dual role of academic observer of these trends and participant formulating an ideology,

Cherlow’s prior book presented Rav Abraham Isaac Kook as a mystic in touch with God who thought he had prophecy and a mission from God.  In the debate around her thesis, including a critic by Rav Yoel Bin-Nun. She declared that she gives more deference to personal experience over philosophy and thought, personally and in her reading of texts.

The vision of this book concerns the current prominent Hesder yeshivot in which the students spend at least half of the day studying Kabbalah, Hasidut, Jewish thought, midrash, meditation and prayer, academic books in Jewish studies and Western thought helpful to understand God and religion such as Plato and Spinoza Afternoon study time could be entirely Tania, Rav Nachman, and Lurianic Writings. Night time study can be Jewish Sufism, Feldenkrais, Franz Rosenzweig, and poetry writing. They can display their copies of Buddhist works next to their copies of Maimonides and have ponytails, dress in funky clothes, walk barefoot and plan their trips to India. These trends are not isolated phenomena in that even those attending the Yeshivot Ha-Kav, those strictly keeping to the Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook approach spend time visiting their friends and classmates in the spirituality yeshivot.

In order to make sense of this new phenomenon, I can recommend nothing better than the first chapter of Smadar Cherlow’s book. The chapter offers phantasmagorical and impressionist display of these new trends.  The chapter answers the basic questions that an observer would have on the new spirituality and it has extensive resources in the footnotes This chapter should serve as a basis for any further discussion because its strong intuitive weave from an insiders perspective of this new type of yeshiva.

In chapter one, Cherlow describes the importance of the beit midrash (study hall) as the crucial place of spiritual formation and religious life. Quoting Levinas, she claims that there is a level where we love Torah more than God, or at least our first commitment is to the life of the Beit Midrash, the life of the yeshiva.

But in the post-modern era there are no truth claims to this activity, or at least one cannot ask for truth claims or justifications; there is no grand narrative. Building on the Rabbinic homily of “we will do as prior to we will listen” becomes a greater commitment to observance and the life of Torah study than any justification or systematic theology.

Yet, we all seek personal meaning and experience as primary in our lives. Rav Shagar taught us to treat the study hall in a multi-perspective way of different styles of learning, bringing academic and contemporary topics as well as mysticism. The texts studied have changed, the purpose of learning has changed and the style has changed. (see my prior post on Rav Shagar  & Torah Study)

She writes that now we spend much of the day in the new Yeshivot studying Zohar, hasidut, song, midrash, philosophy, and poetry. We seek an embodied spirituality that includes sessions of body movement and Feldenkrais Method in order to repair impaired connections between the brain and body and so improve our psychological state. We also have sessions devoted marriage therapy especially to Imago Therapy created by Harville Hendrix in his 1988 book, Getting the Love You Want, A Guide for Couples.

The new yeshivot are built in a circle to show that we are a collective not a hierarchy. The learning is more dialogical and a conversation. It is therapeutic and transformative. These new yeshivot follow Martin Buber’s ideas of mutuality between participants seeking an I-thou relationship in all interactions.

They encourage free reading of Bible, Talmud and Midrash without any commentators. How does the text speak to you? What to you hear in the text? How do you apply it?

In both Breslov Hasidic texts and Izbitzer Hasidic texts, there are passages that said that there are new innovations in Torah every day. The goal in the new Yeshivot  is to hear them and write them. You have to have an intimate relationship with the text, an eros toward the text, so that it will speak to you. There are now  musar lectures in these yeshivot about the need to  get the text to speak to you. In turn, the lectures (shiurim) of the Rabbis are to be psychotherapeutic. They are to offer what people need psychologically, with a free play of language and ideas.

The new Beit midrash embraces mediation and new age practices. They eagerly read and follow the writings of the renewal rabbi, Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi and his followers. She praises Rabbi Dov Zinger who teaches meditative and spiritual practices to aid prayer in his Beit Midrash leHitchadshut. And she points out that the schools accept that the guys with have long hair, and pony tails, and earrings.

Cherlow asks: If we do all these things and follow Reb Zalmann then how is our approach not renewal or new age? She answers because we stay in the beit midrash, that it is the importance of the beit midrash and texts to ground us and give us context. We remain a beit midrash movement focused on learning Talmud and halakhah and the study is done under trained Rabbis. We are learning Talmudic texts but we can also pray on a topic or turn a text into a prayer.

She asks: Is it still Torah study?

Cherlow answers that the study method of Volozhin Lamdanut was a modernist project of rationality to make Torah study scientific and analytic, the goal was to make Torah methodical, rational and orderly. Now in the era of New age – Post-Modern world, we use different language and have different goals. Learning now is more an act of playfulness and a language game. Today Torah study is more similar to the multi-vocal subversive play of the Carnivalesque as presented by a Bakhtin, an open performance, speaking in different registries and different languages.   It is now the New Age as presented by the academic work by Paul Heelas who describes it as “an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices, and ways of life” which are put together in radically individual and democratic ways.

She says that one can see this change in Torah as is a change of era between modern and post-modern or if one does not accept a change of era then it is two different games with different completely different rules.

Is this major change progress or a regression?

Cherlow notes that for the world of Yeshivat Har Etzion and those it influenced, this is clearly a regression. Amnon Bazak wrote an article, or maybe a screed if you disagree, rejecting all these changes, their method and their results.  But Cherlow responds that this new method is transformational and gives greater meaning to Torah. We change Torah in different times. In this new method of learning Torah for our era, we are creating a transformative new self.

Chapter one has an important appendix on the importance of Rav Shagar for this new method.

In Smadar Cherlow’s encapsulation, Rabbi Joseph D. Soloveitchik taught his students not to look for meaning and Rav Shagar changed everything by telling his students to look for meaning.  This quest for meaning and religious experience may seem close to the Hasidic quest for God but Rav Shagar helped us realize that the actual historical phenomena and practices of Hasidism as well as the current Haredi Hasidic community is not a path for the religious Zionist world which embraces the world. This is a new Post-Modern & New Age theology not another form of Neo-Hasidism; Americans take note.

She tells the story of the early Hasidic master Zusha who never got to actually learn Gemara since the moment he started to read Tractate Berachot which open with the words “From when can we recite the Shema?”   he would immediately ask: ‘From When’  means that God makes requests on us. So he would then ponder: What does God want from us in life?  Cherlow answers that there is a fine line between too much focus on meaning and too little focus. We are coming to correct a lack of focus on meaning.

To find meaning we turn to the wider world and a wider grasp of the world. We try to talk less and experiment and pray more. Sometimes Feldenkrais, sometimes Rav Nachman, sometimes song, and other times current events. The goal is to foster a different relationship with students that is more open in order let them find their own path.

Rav Kook responded to modernity and now we respond to post-modernity.  Rav Kook’s idea of a new Torah of the land of Israel (Torat Eretz Yisrael)  for our time means to incorporate love, play , and imagination. She returns to this topic in Chapter 5 where she explains how we need to replace Rav Kook with Rav Nachman in our studies. And we need to be open in our approach, not judgmental.

All that was in chapter one. It may not reflect any one Yeshiva and it may not be an anthropological description of what you would see in these yeshivot, but it captures an ethos.

I will briefly look at the other chapters which are specific stand-alone papers.

Chapter 2 deals with prayer after modernity.  Modernity killed prayer but Postmodernity brought prayer back. Modern man was like Prometheus challenging God with his belief in his own powers, in response religion was about the divine sanction for human accomplishment and at the same time it sought to overcome alienation from God. In contrast, in the postmodern period we look to Rav Nachman to turn completely to God. We now have new forms of prayer, we have integrated meditation and we call out to God from the heart in our own words.

Chapter 3 deals with messianism. Zionism was a great messianic project. Now we no longer sense that God is controlling history or that we live in a messianic age. We now live in an age of the eclipse of God as described by Martin Buber and we have no grand history or theodicy after Auschwitz as taught by Emmanuel Levinas. We no longer have a national sense and national redemption as taught by of Rav Kook. Rather, we now seek a mystical self-liberation.

Yet, she acknowledges that some in the community still have a messianic sense. However, rather than continue the older messianism of Rav Kook, they seek a radical apocalyptic messianism in active quest of the end of time, seeking to bring the end through their own hands such as Rav Yitzhak Ginzburgh. For Cherlow, Ginsburgh’s fusion of Chabad messianism with settler messianism is extremely potent. They aspire to make Israel into a Jewish monarchy as a return to its ancient glory. Believers must commit themselves to act on behalf of the “wholeness of the land of Israel” and awaken mystical-messianic sparks by their actions. Those actions must include violence against the Amalekite enemy. Required actions also include “revenge” as a means to making the King Messiah live and hastening the coming of his kingdom.

Chapter 4 entitled “From Prometheus to Badulina charts the transition from modernist goal of changing the world to the new age idea of changing ourselves.

She says we now live in a new age of post modernism, post science, and post collective, quoting the aforementioned Paul Heelas on the New Age which she connects to Post-modernism. Rav Shagar offers us a new age of authenticity and individuality (Both of which are classic modernist tropes.)

We are given a glimpse here into Cherlow’s litany of books that are currently being read including Tal ben Shahar on happiness, James Redford, Celestial Prophecy on the change of human consciousness, Jack Kornfeld on creating an engaged and ethical Buddhist meditation practice, the Existentialism of Buber, and Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s paradign shift.

Today, we believe in fantasy, the irrational, expecting an apocalyptic appearance of the messiah, traveling to Uman, or seeking personal liberation. Crucial to this chapter is a little book from 1999 called Badolina by Gabi Nitzan which caught the sensibilities of a generation in Israel. Nitzan, once one of Israel’s most promising young journalists who then dropped out and moved to India

Badolina is the story of a kingdom without laws, without politics, without marriage and without wars. Every resident of Badulina can be the next king. And everyone is brought up on the belief that there are only two ways to live in this world: as a king or as a victim. By projecting their best thoughts and fantasies outward, Badolina’s residents can use mind over matter and transform reality. The national motto of Badolina – “Better be well and happy than sick and miserable.” So people choose to be happy.

The story line follows a visit to Israel by the king and queen of Badolina, who try to teach Israelis to stop seeing themselves as victims and begin taking responsibility for their lives. If you crave a gourmet meal while wandering in the desert, wish and it will happen; if you want peace in the Middle East, let go of your fears and allow your optimism to create it.

She says that not all of this is good illuminating it by quoting various critics: the critique of neo-liberal consumer capitalism from the Israeli author Gadi Taub (2002), the  critique of the American 1970’s from the classic work by Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) and the critique of contemporary spirituality Jeremy R Carrette, Selling Spirituality (2004).

She compares all of this to the American 1960’s Age of Aquarius. But is it similar to Roszak description of the counterculture?

We see a problematic pattern here among Israeli authors on New Age and Post-Modernism. Whereas we in the United States do not consider the spirituality of the 30’s 60’s 70’s, 80’s. 90’s and 00’s as all the same proto -new age and proto-post modernism, most Israeli authors have a clean before and after, the nation building collective modernism of Zionism and Rav Kook’s Religious Zionism transformed into a new age post modernism of individualism.

But, no educated American would consider Buber, Kafka, Freud, or pop-psych as postmodernism. In addition, we in the United States do not associate spiritual optimistic anti-scientific new age thinking with our age of globalization and media technology.

In fact, British- American culture threw off the world of post-Hegelian idealism before WWI with William James, Franz Boas, James Joyce and Virginia Wolff. It then had many decades of modernism.  In contrast, Religious Zionist culture labels the 19^th century modernism including the 20^th century rationalists but they place all 20^th century romantics and Existentialists with the post-modernists.

And as I have noted elsewhere, many Israelis consider everything 1960-2016 as New Age based on the abstractions in Paul Heelas The New Age Movement. The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (1996) which characterized the New Age movement as “an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices, and ways of life” which can be identified as a singular phenomenon through their use of “the same (or very similar) lingua franca to do with the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed”. For an academic treatment of New Age in Israel with a sensitivity to sociological method and local concerns, one should see the dissertation and articles of Marianna Ruah-Midbar.

Concerning Post-Modernism, for Cherlow it seems to hinge on Lyotatd’s saying the grand narrative has broken, which in their case means the Rav Kook narrative broke. But they certainly do not accept in any way the death of self, the construction of reality, or the turn to text over self. Nor would one confuse Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard with anything New Age. One of the work’s most egregious misunderstandings of the book is thinking that Foucault would only consider political authors like Rabbi Y. Ginzburgh as concerned with power, when in fact his critique is that everything ever written including this book is about power.

In the 1960’s, the American counter culture as described by Roszak was about running from centaurs to safety, the best minds were being driven mad by the establishment and studied “Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah….”; they sought out alternative realities in India, Jerusalem, and Naropa.

Here in these new yeshivot, we do not have a fleeing mad from a perceived dying civilization, they love the yeshiva and they love learning. Rather, They are a turn to plurality and individualism after idealism. No one is taking over a campus and demanding change of the teachers.

This was a slow change, done over 25 years, led by the students and friends of Rav Shagar and Rav Froman, who since the 1980’s slowly changed yeshivot. The students of the two illustrious Rabbis are already mature teachers in their own right. Even institutions such as Migdal Oz, the woman’s program associated with Yeshivat Har Etzion brings in many of these authors, thinkers, and speakers in order to expose the students to the new trends.

Popular American outreach and pulpit rabbis can teach motivational literature, pop psych , New Age, and Evangelical ideas as eternal Torah,  and still be conservative religiously. Here too, they are still in the study hall (beit midrash). Besides, even a local Orthodox synagogue here in NJ has started weekly Feldenkrais, in lieu of the more traditional zumba classes.

Currently, there is a new generations of yeshiva teachers who grew up entirely in this system. They are now giving their own yeshiva lectures and training a new generation. I await to see what they produce.

In the Pulitzer prize winning book God: A Biography (1996) by Jack Miles, he presents the different personalities of God depicted in the Bible ranging from the God who walks in the garden to the God who makes promises of universal redemption.  Miles’ work went beyond images of God to actually discuss God’s biography, His nature, motivation and changes over time. But what if we carried the discussion further into the Rabbinic period? What would be a biography of God in Midrash?

To answer these questions, we can now turn to the important new book by Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (University of Penn Press, 2016). Weiss is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School and has rabbinic ordination from RIETS. The book Pious Irreverence is a wonderful addition to works on Rabbinic thought, both thoughtful and well thought through study showing the biography of God in Midrashic literature from the early Midrash of the tannaim to the late midrash of the Tanhuma, from a perfect deity with whom one cannot protest to one who is close to humans, accepts protest from those wronged, and acknowledges mistakes. Throughout the book, Weiss adeptly compares the rabbinic material to the contemporary Christian works.  His answers in the interview below are one of the best of anyone I have interviewed in terms of clarity and fullness of answer to the questions.

Weiss’s work focusses on the later Midrashic Tanhuma-Yelamdanu literature, which is found in the various works called Tanhuma and in other works such as Numbers Rabbah, Deuteronomy Rabbah, and Pesikta Rabbati. These works offer a different Rabbinic voice on many issues than that other midrashim.

Tanḥuma-Yelammedenu texts generally commence with a halakhic proem that poses a simple question of Jewish law, often introduced with the phrase “Let our master teach us (רבנו ילמדנו) “(Yelammedenu). These teachings often cite Rabbi Tanhuma, a fourth-century sage, they are also designated as the Tanhuma midrashim.

Contemporary scholarship generally follows the form critical conclusions of Marc Bregman, who argues that the Tanhuma_Yelammedanu literature developed in several developmental strata. (1) An early 5^th century Palestine stratum that contains a large amount of Galilean Aramaic as well as Greek and Latin loan words, and is roughly contemporaneous with the Jerusalem Talmud and the classical midrashim such as Leviticus Rabbah and Genesis Rabbah. (2) A 6^th-7^th century stratum from the end of Byzantine rule in Palestine. Unlike the early stratum, it avoids Galilean Aramaic wherever possible, replacing it with Hebrew. (3) A stratum added after the Islamic conquest, which eliminated much of the Greek and Latin loan words. TY texts of this period consist of the standard edition of Midrash Tanḥuma (probably redacted in Babylonia), and the Buber edition of Midrash Tanḥuma (probably redacted in Europe).

Another repository of these traditions Numbers Rabbah, has been extensively studied by Hananel Mack  who dates the work to the early medieval era in Provence contemporaneous with the germination of Kabbalistic Midrash. Tanhuma literature also marks the beginning of the rabbinic “rewritten Bible” genre that finds its apogee in the 8^th century Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer. Weiss clearly goes beyond these concerns of form and history in order to carving out a separate space for the unique images and theology of the Tanhuma-Yelammedanu literature.

The early days of this blog circa 2009-2010, when my posts were short 200 words observations of life and liturgy, had many posts on Jewish theology of the era of 600-1000 CE. I did this partially because much of the holiday liturgy, the avodah of Yom Kippur, and the piyyutim of Kallir are part of this era, partially because of the rich alternative theology these texts offer to many current views, and partially because much of this theology is proto-Zohar.  If one cannot discuss the strata of the book Tanhuma, then one cannot begin to discuss the formation of the Zohar.

Weiss shows that God in the Tanhuma-Yelammedanu literature becomes humanized and shares a life of Torah with Jews. God even goes into exile with the Jewish people, and needs redemption by Israel and through history. God recognizes that His past act or decision does not comport with the moral ideal and makes a concession of his fault; God is able to concede and thereby acknowledge faults and mistakes. In the book, Weiss astutely connects the ability to argue with God with the Greek philosophic concept of parrhesia, the task to speak out openly and frankly, as presented by Foucault.

As a surprise results, Weiss shows that the early Christian God, despite the Incarnation, is less “human” and more incorporeal and perfect than the humanized rabbinic God who imitates the life of His people.

The humanized Rabbinic God fills multiple roles within society at once. Thus, God is the metaphorical slave owner, king, father, mother, judge, husband, wife, friend, and sibling. Unlike Hellenistic religions that posit a system of “polytheistic anthropomorphism,” where each god assumes a distinct role within society, in Rabbinic thought the various persona of God are all attached to a single God, a “monotheistic anthropomorphism.” Rabbinic texts depict a polymorphous God: for example, appearing to Israel as a “warrior doing battle” at the Red Sea and an “old man full of mercy” at Sinai, this corpus makes these depictions even more human and diverse.

Weiss acknowledges that the original theological problem which bothered him was that of God’s justice and arguing with God in 20^th century thought. The theology of arguing with God was widespread in late 20^th Century Post-Holocaust Judaism, which often celebrates arguments with God.  This contemporary concern led Weiss back to the roots of this concept in Tanhuma. After all his research, in the interview below Weiss distances the Tanhuma from the 20^th century version.  In the Tanhuma those who argued with God felt close to a humanized God who lives among them and thought the arguments were part of the Biblical tradition, while the 20^th versions feel themselves distant from God, and feel that they live in a fractured world alienated from God.  Personally, I think that some elements of the 20^th century versions have more elements common to the hatred of God, the misotheism of the pagan critics of the Jewish God than a continuity of the Tanhuma.

Weiss’ work is deeply indebted to the rich theology of Michael Fishbane, his doctoral adviser, who moved from his earlier decades of historical studies in Bible and Midrash to his recent articulation of explicit theological concerns. (See our interview with Fishbane here.) Specifically, Weiss himself oscillates between both sides of Fishbane’s long career. The opening of the book frames the topic within the 20^th century post-holocaust theological topic of arguing with God, then Weiss spends the majority of the book on the historic-literary topic of arguing with God in prior rabbinic writings, and from there broadens out into the rhetorical analysis and theology of God in the Tanhuma-Yelammedanu literature. The moral concern becomes historic and literary then returns as theology.  The book could easily be complemented by another work focused on a philosophic-theological analysis of the humanized God in comparison to other conceptions of God.

If we look to earlier theological approaches, we find that Abraham Joshua Heschel already cited and developed some of this material, calling God “a most moved mover”. Heschel wrote theological works advocating this humanized God, or at least that Rabbi Akiva’s approach would view God this way. Heschel used many of these Tanhuma-Yelammedanu texts to argue that the Jewish approach to God is a God of pathos, but Heschel was more than reluctant to argue with God or assign fault to God, even after the Holocaust. Heschel was also not interested in differentiating separating out different historical periods.

Arthur Marmorstein’s studies of rabbinic thought argued for the importance of Divine immanence, but argued that the tannaim had to defend the existence of an ethically infallible God to counter the Marcionite heresy that viewed the Hebrew Bible’s God as ruthless and unjust. Ephraim Urbach preferred a rational view of God and rereads much of this material to fit his preconceived ideas of a rational and ethical transcendent God.

Most dissertations turned into a book spend many pages reviewing the prior literature, Weiss’ book is so rich and full that he does not feel the need for this convention. Yet, as I read Weiss’ book, I kept thinking that I would have wanted it twenty pages longer through the inclusion of three pages in each chapter summarizing what past luminaries in the study of Rabbinic thought wrote so as to highlight his own innovations as well as making the book a better teaching tool.

In sum, Pious Irreverence Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism is a pioneering work presenting a excellent historic-literary exposition of the theology of Tanhuma-Yelammdenu and will greatly contribute to discussions of Jewish thought. Jack Miles actually adds Midrash and Maimonides to his syllabus for his course based on his book: God: A Biography. The exposition of Midrashic material collected in this book would significantly enhance his course and our our courses.

I now await someone to devote books to other topics in the remarkable Tanhuma-Yelammedanu literature such as mitzvot and ritual, the body and asceticism, the exile of God, as well as the proto-kabbalistic elements.

1. Why did you choose this topic?
   

I have been interested in the topic of protesting God for many years. In my twenties, Torah stories about God troubled me. In the holiest of Jewish texts, God is at times portrayed as a hateful, wrathful and unethical character. I had many sleepless nights wondering: how could God kill almost every human life in Noah’s generation? How could God demand that the Israelites annihilate every person – including women and children –of the seven indigenous nations living in the Land of Israel? How could God declare in the Ten Commandments that He would punish children for the sins of the parents? In short, how could I worship such a God? I could not raise these types of questions at Yeshiva University because, there, criticizing God was deemed an act of heresy.  I subsequently studied Midrash (late antique Jewish interpretation of the Torah) at the University of Chicago and was amazed at the audacity of the rabbis from late antiquity.

In roughly one hundred and fifty instances, the pious rabbis irreverently challenged God. I finally felt comforted; I was not alone.   The ancient rabbis were also struggling with what they read in the Torah, and many of them legitimized — and sometimes even celebrated — the act of theological protest. When encountering these daring rabbinic texts and recognizing the paucity of scholarship on this material, I knew that I had found the topic of my first book.

2. What is the innovation of the book?

Pious Irreverence is the first academic book to comprehensively treat the topic of protesting God and it opposition in ancient Judaism.

The book traces and explains, for the first time, the emergence of anti-protest traditions in both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. I argue that rabbinic and early Christian anti-protestors adopted different ways to explain how heroic biblical protestors such as Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job launched their protests of God with seeming impunity.

Second, the book isolates the emergence of pro-protest Jewish traditions in the third-century, and offers explanations as to why a similar pro-protest position never surfaces in early Christianity. The six and seventh-century rabbinic Midrashim called “Tanhuma-Yelammedenu” radicalize earlier pro-protest traditions, and then I offer historical, cultural, and literary reasons to account for this intensification.

Third, and most controversially, Pious Irreverence argues that many of these rabbinic protests — particularly in Tanhuma-Yelammedenu texts –rely on the theological premise that God is not morally perfect and, thus, God’s goodness does not necessarily need to be defended in the face of biblical accounts of unethical divine action.

3. Why did you choose to work in the Tanhuma literature?

I began studying Midrash — book by book in historical sequence. During this time, I encountered pre-Tanhuma rabbinic teachings in Genesis Rabbah and Lamentations Rabbah that were theologically bold, but none of them compared to the daring encounters between biblical characters and God portrayed in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu (TY) Midrashim. In these texts, the theme of theological protest takes center stage, and God is said, at times, to admit His moral failures. I quickly realized that nothing had been written on the distinctive theological features of Tanhuma Midrash, as scholars had focuses exclusively on questions of Tanhuma form rather than content.

I rely on the findings of Prof Marc Bregman who dates the majority of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu material to the sixth or seventh century CE, allowing me to successfully highlight the distinctiveness of the Tanhuma Midrashim by comparing them to earlier pre-Tanhuma texts.

4. Is God morally perfect?
   

Late Antique Christian theology (second to fifth century CE) reflects a high degree of cultural integration between early Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy. As a result, in early Christian thought, God (the Father) is not only conceived of as unchanging and incorporeal, but also as morally perfect. Any biblical text to the contrary must be reinterpreted. And, although the tannaim (early rabbis ca. second-century CE) were not culturally integrated in Greco-Roman philosophy, they too were also adamant that God is infallible and morally perfect. As a result, both groups declared that it would be entirely absurd — and sinful — to argue with God.

The bold notion that God is fallible and not morally-perfect — and therefore protesting God might be legitimate — surfaces in amoraic literature (fifth century CE), and appears most starkly in post-amoraic rabbinic literature (sixth-seventh century CE). In these latter texts, we read of biblical heroes teaching or counseling God to adopt a more ethical approach to governing the world. Strikingly, God accedes to these moral critiques and challenges, declaring that the contentious encounter has caused Him to adopt a new moral position. In these midrashim, God’s apparent capitulation is transformative and substantial, expressing an essential change in God’s moral compass. They reflect an ongoing and fundamental change in God’s attitude toward His governance of the world, rather than a one-time concessional act of divine mercy as we have in the Hebrew Bible or earlier rabbinic texts.

5)     How do you build upon the work of Moshe Halbertal?

Moshe Halbertal in his Interpretive Revolutions in the Making: Values as Factors in the Halakhic Midrashim (Hebrew) argues that many second- and third-century sages consciously drew on their (own) ethical values as a guide when interpreting, or better put, reinterpreting Torah law. Through this process, they neutralized morally problematic divine decrees. The rabbis assumed that God – the author of biblical law – is perfectly moral and righteous, therefore, every Biblical law must reflect a sound moral position.  According to Halbertal, these rabbis believed that human moral intuition, with the help of other Torah texts, could access that perfect divine morality. Thus, the rabbis did not see themselves as imposing their own values upon biblical law, but rather imposing the perfect moral values of a just and moral God who authored the Torah laws.

Halbertal’s work focuses on exegetical laws, while my work treats exegetical narratives. This shift of genre, from law to narrative, is necessary as the legal material does not fully open up the depth of the rabbinic ethical and interpretive universe.

Aggadah, presents a different type of rabbinic response. Instead of defending God’s actions or laws (as Halbertal’s rabbis do), other sages — particularly in the late rabbinic period — challenge problematic divine actions and laws by placing an ethical critique of God into the mouth of biblical characters. Rather than assuming a morally perfect God and, because of it, embarking on a charitable reinterpretation, this alternate midrashic approach questions the very assumption that God conforms to the ethical ideal. This radical ancient Jewish approach is reflected not in rabbinic law, but in a number of rabbinic retellings of biblical stories where the rabbis generate a protest to express their discomfort with a divine action. Although not always solving the moral-theological dilemma, it allows the rabbis to freely voice their frustrations, ambivalences and uncertainties.

6)      How are the Rabbis both in favor and against protest?

The idea of debating God was itself a matter of debate in the rabbinic period.

The early rabbis (also known as “the tannaim”), Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eleazer chief among them, explicitly prohibited Jews from critiquing or challenging God. These voices emphasize the absurdity of challenging a morally perfect deity or, alternatively, decry the disrespect shown to the Creator with such a defiant act.

By contrast, some rabbis beginning in the post-tannaitic period validated or even encouraged arguing with God. Their support, however, is generally not explicit. They do not use their own voices to express their views. Rather, they place complaints and accusations against God into the mouths of biblical figures in their literary elaborations on the biblical narrative. Later rabbinic works contain over one hundred and fifty such instances (especially in the Tanhuma Midrashim). In the majority of these instances, the rabbis do not portray God admonishing the challenger. Indeed, at times God even welcomes the challenge, implying that these late rabbis sanction such daring confrontations.

We also have a third, mediating, rabbinic position: some types of challenges to God are permitted, others prohibited. For example, one sage distinguishes between different tones of the challenge: Was the challenge articulated as a question, suggestion, or accusation? Other rabbis distinguish between different topics of the protest: Was the protest waged for the sake of the protester herself or a third party? And, finally, some rabbis distinguish between the religious standing of the protestor: does he or she have a privileged and close relationship with God, akin to a family member or friend, or not?

7)      What is the role of court room scenes, prayers and parables in these protests?

The rabbis often use lawsuits, prayers, or parables to frame their exegetical protests. These literary contexts accomplish two things. First, it intensifies the challenge. Labeling the protest as a “prayer” or a “legal defense” legitimates the daring speech, thereby granting greater flexibility and leeway for the challenger to radicalize his formulations. Parables, too, as David Stern has argued, have the rhetorical force of heightening the complaint as they draw on real-life imagery. Conversely, these literary framings and contexts also provide religious shelter for the irreverent content. Prayers are conceived as pious acts; courtroom procedures grant litigants greater freedom to offer up their best defense. And parables provide sufficient textual distancing when their sharpest critiques only appear in the mashal (the fictional referent) proper.

8)      How do the rabbis respond the critiques of the Biblical God by anti-Biblical Christians and pagans?

“Heretical” Christian groups, such as the Marcionites and select Gnostics – as well as pagan intellectuals, waged attacks against the Old Testament and the Old Testament God in the first centuries of the Common Era. Specifically, the second-century Christian dualist Marcion of Sinope (85–160 ce) and his followers critiqued the God of the Hebrew Bible for His anger, hubris, a penchant for war. Some Gnostics, like the authors of Testimony of Truth, The Secret Book According to John and the Revelation of Adam, similarly sought to denigrate the Old Testament God by highlighting His injustices, such as punishing children for the sins of the parents. In these works, God is described as a “malicious envier,” or “Saklas” (Satan). Other Gnostics, more moderately, such as Ptolemy in his Letter to Flora, describe the God of the Hebrew Bible as “imperfect” for commanding an imperfect law. Around the same time, the pagan Platonist Celsus, criticized the Hebrew Bible for its all-too-human and childish depiction of God, and for God’s arrogance, God’s problematic decision to imbue humanity with the Evil Inclination, and God’s “arbitrary destruction of the world.” In the third and fourth centuries, similar critiques were leveled against the Old Testament God from the pagan philosopher Porphyry (234–305), the pagan Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363), and from the Manicheans, a neo-Gnostic group with whom Augustine spent so much ink refuting in his commentary to Genesis.

The rabbis responded to these types of ethical critiques of the biblical God in one of three ways. 1) They could ignore the specific moral problem and simply prohibit Jews from expressing critiques towards God. The logic here is that any admission or hint of divine error or injustice would only bolster the audacious charges of the “heretics”. This position, championed by Rabbi Akiva, adamantly re-affirmed that God is morally perfect.  2) They could consciously reinterpret the problematic biblical verse(s) so as to align the Torah with moral sensibilities. Moshe Halbertal highlighted this rabbinic response.3) The rabbis could place challenges or critiques of God into the mouth of a biblical character — when they retell the biblical story — to express their own struggles, ambivalences, and discomforts with morally troubling divine acts.

Indeed, this response provides a literary safe space for the sages to express their frustrations with God who, at times, acts capriciously, arbitrarily, and without due mercy. This act of ventriloquism does not solve the moral problem, but it does provide a cathartic outlet for the sages to work through their theological-moral anxieties. In fact, many of the specific moral critiques launched by Marcion, Celsus, and Porphyry reappear with striking similarity in late midrashic texts. This third response occupies center stage in my book.

9)  How is God humanized in Rabbinic Literature?

In Scripture, YHWH is conceived as having humanlike limbs and organs such as arms, eyes, and legs, and humanlike emotions such as love, anger, regret, and jealousy. Rabbinic literature expands the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic field by having God assume humanlike roles.

In the Hebrew Bible, God only saves or punishes Israel. Rabbi Akiva and other sages, by contrast, also imagine God, the shekhinah, to be “in exile” with His people and also, until the redemptive moment, in physical bondage with them. As the Israelites experience suffering, so does the rabbinic God. Similarly, post-tannaitic sages imagine God as lamenting uncontrollably over Israel’s exile and the Temple’s destruction. Here, the rabbis anchor this striking divine image by reading Scripture counterintuitively and decontextually, transforming the crying figure of a human prophet, such as Jeremiah, or a personified figure, such as Zion, into God.

Other examples of rabbinic humanization include God laughing, dancing with sages, studying and teaching Torah in the house of study, observing halakhah, engaging in matchmaking, and spending His free time playing with mythic sea-monsters. We also have dozens of midrashic texts detailing God’s physical features, such as His clothing and crown. God even rides a horse and kisses the walls of the Temple and His most beloved human followers.

What function did this anthropomorphic intensification serve the rabbis? It would be fair to conjecture that, in the context of Judaism in late antiquity, where Jews had neither the Temple nor political power, the rabbis were driven to emphasize the intimate bond that God continues to have with Israel. To humanize God was to make God “disarmingly familiar” (a term taken from David Stern), to feel His closeness, and to impress upon Israel that, appearances to the contrary, God had not abandoned them. Put simply, by intensifying and radicalizing the anthropomorphic biblical imagery, the rabbis effectively minimized the divide between God and humanity. God was, indeed, one of them.

This increased intimacy between God and humanity provided fertile theological grounds for the rabbis to support and generate protests against God. For in this context, protest would not disrupt or disrespect the human-divine hierarchical structure.

As a central expression of this hierarchical flattening, many midrashim depict God as Israel’s “brother” or “friend.” In these relational analogies, the vertical hierarchy between God and humanity is downplayed, and the horizontal relationship between God and humanity is accentuated. And, as Moshe Halbertal has demonstrated, the rabbinic God at times assumes a weaker position in the human-divine imagery. Halbertal notes: “The singular contribution that the midrash makes to textual anthropomorphic theology is through the depiction of social spaces in which the accepted biblical authority relationships are reversed and in which God takes the place expected of man. God is the slave, the student, the judged, the wife, and the one who is redeemed from suffering.”

Conversely, humans assume, at times, the more powerful role of husband, parent, creditor, judge, and master. In these moments, the sages boldly invert the traditional and standard biblical analogy between God and humanity in which God assumes the superior position in the relational hierarchy.

Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that critiques of God in late rabbinic culture were not deemed, at least by many, as an act of irreverence or as a threat to Jewish piety and worship. If anything, the very production of these confrontations might function as a method by which the rabbis demonstrate and reconfirm God’s unique intimacy with Israel and its treasured leaders.

10)  What is the doctrine of divine concession to His own mistakes?

Late rabbinic literature tends to be more open to the bold notion that God makes mistakes. In many Tanhuma-Yelammedenu texts, while God is portrayed as fundamentally good and just, He does not always make the correct ethical choice.

To be sure, the authors of these late midrashim do not proclaim the imperfection of God as a maxim or normative teaching (e.g., “Rabbi X says: God sometimes does not judge or act appropriately”). Such a blatant statement would be too radical and subversive for any pious Jew to make. Yet this theological assumption—of divine moral imperfection—could be accessed by analyzing how some late sages depict God in their numerous retellings of select biblical narratives. More specifically, the notion that God is morally imperfect at times can be assumed when late midrashim have God regret a decision or when they have God concede an ethical critique leveled by a biblical hero. In both these instances—whether unprovoked regret or a provoked concession, God recognizes that His past act or decision does not comport with the moral ideal. It is thus within exegetical narratives—rather than doctrinal maxims—that we can unearth the living theology of the late rabbis. In these texts, the humanization of God reaches its most extreme expression: God is human-like with regard to His moral character. As human beings regret and err, so does God.

In late rabbinic tradition, conceptions of God are presented in narrative form and show the interpretive imagination of their authors. Indeed, the living theological voice of the rabbis emerges more through rewritten biblical narratives than through normative or propositional formulations. While these unsystematic theologies are significant, they likely were not constructed for the purposes of theology. Other pedagogical, textual, cultural, or literary dimensions and pressures might have fueled the production of these remarkable narratives, such as the wish to communicate divine love, humility, and intimacy; the need to solve scriptural problems; the development of literary forms; or the desire to produce dramatic and entertaining narratives for the synagogue crowds.

As the character of God would have been treated with utmost seriousness, these depictions of the divine should not be regarded as mere literary conceits but as reflecting a bold religious sensibility. The authors of these aggadot would not have sacrificed their foundational religious commitments—their conceptions of God—on the altar of literary form, rhetorical drama, or exegetical cohesiveness.

11)   How are you indebted to Michael Fishbane’s work?

If I may, let me begin to answer this question with a personal note: At Yeshiva University’s seminary (RIETS), I studied rabbinics with great minds, but their dogmatic inflexibility and circumscribed methodology — focusing exclusively on Jewish law and relying solely on the anti-historical Brisker approach – ultimately left me spiritually and intellectually unfulfilled. Prof. Michael Fishbane, my PhD advisor, opened up new vistas of Torah scholarship: the recognition that Judaism has evolved over time – in content and form; the central place of Jewish myth and mythmaking in our sacred literature; and, most importantly, how Judaism is fundamentally an interpretive tradition – that is, everything is grounded in a reading, or re-reading, of the Hebrew Bible. There is no doubt that Fishbane’s influence pervades much of Pious Irreverence, probably more than I am even aware.

Fishbane sought to break Maimonides’ philosophical hold on rabbinic theology. Reading talmudic and midrashic texts without the guiding hand of Maimonides, he has shown that many rabbis of old conceived of God as an changing, mythical, and corporeal deity who is a player in the world’s events rather than merely its determiner. In these moments of divine transformation, God not only affects humans via His decisions but, like the mythic gods of antiquity, God is also deeply affected by the actions of humans. Fishbane has shown that the rabbinic God is not an unchanging, transcendent, and omnipotent being like the God of Maimonides, but a highly protean and vulnerable God who seeks and yearns for acts of human righteousness to solidify His power.

12)      Why did confrontation become a legitimate way to approach God in Judaism, but not in Christianity?

Johann Baptist Metz (1928–), a German Catholic theologian, places the blame squarely on Augustine of Hippo (354–430). According to Metz, Marcion’s penchant critiques of the creator-God drove Augustine to adopt a theology that exonerated the creator-God from all human suffering. Augustine accomplished this, for Metz, with his theology of original sin. By attributing world suffering to humanity’s inherent sinfulness, Augustine “silenced” the “theodicy question” and subsequently “anaesthetized” the “eschatological questioning of God.” No guilt whatsoever could be placed on God, as “guilty humanity alone” ought to be viewed as “responsible for this history of suffering.” Departing from Augustine, Metz expresses hope that the Christian community could return to embrace the aggressive prayers of Israel as found in Job, the Psalms, and Lamentations.

In addition, three factors ought to be considered when reflecting on this Jewish-Christian divide. First, at the core of Christian theology is the image of Christ suffering on the cross. Here, divine suffering is not merely one theological dictum out of many, as in early rabbinic literature, but an image that stands at the center of Christian thought. Accordingly, the motif of challenging God in response to human suffering would naturally seem strange and out of place. Indeed, for many Christian thinkers, experiencing pain is not a theological problem but an experiential ideal.

Second, the rabbinic openness to challenging God is fueled and nurtured by their humanization of God. For many sages, not only does God have body, but God is also morally imperfect and bound by Jewish law. By contrast, in early Christian thought, the humanization of God is, counterintuitively, less intense. The Christian God, of course, becomes incarnate in human flesh, however, the Christian God, in most respects, is less “human” than the rabbinic God. Specifically, in patristic thought, God the Father is incorporeal, morally perfect and, as lawmaker, not bound by any laws. These theological contrasts, I would argue, are a direct result of the different degrees of cultural integration with Greco-Roman philosophy. One could argue that, contra the early Church, the rabbinic rejection of philosophy ultimately paved the way for the rabbinic endorsement of theological protest.

Third, it would not be an overgeneralization to state that, throughout the generations, Jews have suffered at the hands of their enemies more than Christians have (notwithstanding early Christian persecution under the Roman Empire). As a consequence, Jewish powerlessness and victimization naturally played a role in igniting the flames of the protest motif within the Jewish tradition. In addition, as a people with no political power, Jews could more easily critique power.

13)   How is the approach of the Tanhuma literature different than the 20th century ideas of arguing with God?

Three key differences:

1. The authors of Tanhuma Midrashim who challenge God do not do so in their own name. Rather, after “discovering” textual support within the words of Torah itself, they place critiques of God into the mouths of biblical heroes. Twentieth-century protest theologians, by contrast, typically protest God directly and explicitly.
2. In the Tanhuma confrontational texts, God responds to the critiques because the encounter occurs in “biblical” prophetic times (according to the rabbis). God can thus be portrayed as responding and conceding error. By contrast, twentieth-centuries protest theologians, such as David Blumenthal and Elie Wiesel, are not privy to the divine response.
3. In the Tanhuma confrontational texts, the authors are driven by an ethically problematic divine action or command within the Torah narrative. By contrast, twentieth-century theologians are typically driven to protest by the reality of a fractured world and the traumatic events happening in their own day, most prominently the Holocaust.

14)   What is your next project?

I am writing a book on the Jewish (and Christian) reception of the famous – and morally problematic – maxim in the Ten Commandments that “God visits the sins of the parents onto the children…until the fourth generation.” [Exodus 20:5] This doctrine has posed an obvious moral dilemma: Why should one person suffer for the sins committed by another? Are children not independent from their parents? Does this method of divine providence correspond with a loving, fair and just deity?