Monthly Archives: November 2024

What is the role of the ethical principles in the Talmud in creating modern Jewish thought? Gerald (Yaakov) Blidstein, a former Professor at Ben Gurion University thought that these principles sat uneasily into the Talmud with its former system of Jewish law, They seemed to operate as their own dimension separate than the legal discussions. Blidstein extended this into the medieval and modern eras showing the range of their usages was not clear. Yet, modern Jewish religious thinkers make use of them regularly, rabbis of all denomination, cite that “all humans are in the image of God,” “that one should be holy” “to respect human dignity” or establishing “God’s kingship.” One sees these principles quotes often by Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Jonathan Sacks, as well as many other leaders.

Daniel H. Weiss has provided us with a serious insightful discussion of the use of these principles in four pillars of Modern Jewish Philosophy:  Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin in his book Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence (CambridgeUP:2023).

Daniel H. Weiss is Polonsky-Coexist Professor, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He holds an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He has co-edited several interesting volumes including Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology (with Agata Bielik-Robson; De Gruyter, 2021); Scripture and Violence (with Julia Snyder; Routledge, 2021); Interpreting Interreligious Relations with Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies (with Gorazd Andrejč; Brill, 2019); and Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives (with Robbie Duschinsky and Simone Schnall; Routledge, 2016). Weiss is actively involved in the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.

Weiss frames the book as a discussion of Jewish political theology, a current trends in the academic study of religion, asking what political views are generated by and though theological ideas. Many of these discussions focus on the secular Jewish thinkers of Leo Struass, Hannah Arendt in their contrasts with Carl Schmidt, or the redemptive elements in Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Ernst Bloch.

However, Weiss takes us back to four thinkers whom he shows, made considerable use of classical rabbinic thought. They each used Rabbinic ideas and maxims to answer the questions of modern Jewish political life. He also stressed that this allowed them to bypass the problematic medieval texts. Others have noted that they created an ideal conception of Judaism, but Weiss grounds their thought in rabbinic ideas.

All four of them sought to enter the modern world as Jewish citizens, downplaying elements in the tradition that seemed to indicate otherwise. Much of the prior scholarship treated them as liberal or even as creating a Protestant form of Judaism as a religion. (A critique that would apply as well to Rabbis Hirsch and Sacks). Instead, Weiss presents them as sharp critics of the state and state violence, preferring the rabbinic ideals of the dignity of each person. In addition, Weiss has grounded these thinkers in the rabbinic maxims, even a thinker as Walter Benjamin comes out a deeply Jewish thinker. Weiss shows how the concept of being a nation in exile, without the messiah, allowed them to foreclose discussions of rabbinic concepts of political theology since Jews are only a political entity in the messianic age.

Weiss most original point is to show that they considered the religious consideration of the political state as “foreign worship.” From a religious perspective, there should be no King, or president, or ruling body but God. There can be secular political leaders but do not confuse that with religion. Political theology is like the halakhic category of shituf, by which Jews tolerated Christian views of Jesus, permitted for the gentiles but not for Jews.  And for Cohen, political theology should not even be allowed for gentiles. This line of analysis shows the ground that created the anarchistic and pacifistic thought of Martin Buber, Aharon Shmuel Tamares, and Avraham Yehudah Chein.

After reading this book, I am left with a sense of disorientation because todays rhetoric declines these ideas leaving me in confusion of how we got here. Currently, we have Jewish thinkers, theologians, and rabbis expound a highly politicized view of Judaism. Many today, even declare that our fallen unredeemed world is already somehow politically messianic. Along with a return to a legal approach of medieval texts. One recent popular book on Jewish views of war even went so far as to deny that Cohen, Buber, or Tameres are Jewish views. This book, by contrast, permits a window on other conceptions of Jewish political theology, one in which the Rabbinic maxims prevail

1)  How do the modern thinkers relate to medieval Jewish tradition?

The modern German-Jewish thinkers that I examine are notably influenced by modern tendencies to return to classical rabbinic texts, often in ways that bypass certain (although not all) medieval traditions. 

In various ways, the new social-political situation of Jews in modernity may have had more sociological commonalities with the situation of rabbinic Jews in late antiquity than with the situation of Jews in the medieval period.  For instance, while medieval Jewish communities, and rabbinic authorities within them, often held more coercive power over members of their own community, rabbinic Jews in late antiquity appear not to have operated with a coercive communal structure, so that the role of rabbis appears more to have been one of voluntary adjudication.  Following the political shifts of modernity, and the departure from the previous medieval structures, Jews were once again put in a position of a more voluntary relation to religious tradition, in social-political terms.

To be sure, not all readers today would necessarily perceive or focus on these classical rabbinic dynamics in the same way, particular if some readers tend to read classical rabbinic texts through the lens of post-classical/medieval Jewish tradition.

A prominent example of alignment with classical rabbinic thought can be seen in the case of Moses Mendelssohn. Even where Mendelssohn departs in certain ways from some streams of medieval Jewish thought, he remains in closer continuity with the classical rabbinic literature.  In his own account of Jewish sources, he sees himself as affirming the revelatory status of the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, and he associates the latter specifically with the texts of classical rabbinic literature. For Mendelssohn, God revealed various commandments at Sinai, and these were then passed down in both written and oral forms, and classical rabbinic literature represents the compilation of these revealed traditions.  By contrast, for Mendelssohn, post-classical Jewish writers lack that type of revelatory status, and so their ideas and halakhic rulings are more open to subsequent human questioning and criticism.  (In this way, Mendelssohn has notable theological similarities with subsequent neo-Orthodox thinkers such as Samson Raphael Hirsch.)

2) What was Mendelssohn’s response to the question of “How can Jews be citizens of the modern state if they have to follow the Mosaic law and Mosaic view of state?”

Various Christians in the late eighteenth century thought that Mosaic law required Jews to do things like executing people who broke the Sabbath, based on passages like Exodus 35:2.  They were therefore concerned that Jews could not be proper citizens in a modern state.  In response, German-Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn explained to Christian audiences that Jews in their own day were not actually authorized by God to enact such commandments of coercive punishment.  Mendelssohn drew on classical rabbinic thought and medieval Jewish traditions and argued that those violent-sounding commandments could only be carried out if God’s authorizing presence was available in the Temple – but the Temple had been destroyed in 70 CE.

Mendelssohn thought that halakhah did limit Jews from certain forms of social interaction with non-Jews – for instance, eating in non-kosher homes or restaurants. Mendelssohn argued that those specific restrictions did not prevent Jews from being good citizens and cultural participants overall, however. He also suggested that a properly free and tolerant society would not require Jews to violate their halakhic commitments in order to be citizens.

3) How is Mendelssohn’s stance not a Protestant approach to religion?

Mendelssohn has often been described by scholars recasting Judaism as a religion in a modern Protestant sense, as something conceptually removed from political and national dimensions. But that’s not accurate. Mendelssohn understood Judaism as retaining those features. Mendelssohn thought of the political or national dimensions of Torah – such as capital and corporal punishments, warfare, or animal sacrifices in a central Temple – as having been temporarily suspended, not eliminated or abrogated.  These components of the Torah law continue to play a prominent role in the overall framework of Jewish thought, liturgy and daily Torah study, even though they should not presently be enacted by human institutions, prior to the future messianic redemption.

For Mendelssohn, Jews were a “nation in exile.”  This did not mean, however, that they were “a state within a state.” Mendelssohn thought Jews could and should be full citizens of modern nation-states, whether British, German, American, etc., while still being Jews. As a nation in exile, their relation to state structures would be different from non-Jewish citizens, however.

Specifically, Israel’s ‘own’ Torah-based structures of war and capital punishment have been suspended, and Mendelssohn’s account indicates that Jews cannot straightforwardly participate in military or execution-based forms of bloodshed under the auspices of ‘other’ (non-Jewish) political regimes.  Thus, Jews’ separation from both Jewish and non-Jewish forms of political bloodshed mark Jews out as having a special ‘priestly people’ status in the pre-messianic era, a status which also has a ‘prophetic’ dimension in calling attention to the ways in which political bloodshed stands in tension with a commitment to direct service of God.

4) How is it that Hermann Cohen is not an advocate of the constitutional state, as some assume, but rather critiques all cohesive States, as part of an active counter-politics?

Hermann Cohen’s earlier writings praise the modern “constitutional state” for helping bring about equality of all citizens under the law, and eliminating various forms of prejudice and hierarchy that characterized premodern states. His last work, however, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919), takes a different approach. He says that the First World War led him to a fundamentally different view of the state, since the bloodshed and destruction of the war had been brought about by competition between modern nation-states.  He still found the concept of the state appealing in principle, but now argued that one must also be more attuned to how states actually functioned in practice.  He thought that the behavior of nation-states in the world around him called into question the very idea of the state – that is, whether the idea of the state actually has a rational basis or justification.

In this last book, Cohen called for Jews to enact a form of communal differentiation from the state. They should still live within modern states, and seek to engage with, critique, and improve unjust practices and institutions in society as a whole.  But the Jewish Community should also function as an additional basis of identification, centered around service of the unique God as “Lord of all the Earth.”  Jewish communal life would be structured around Jewish law/halakhah in non-coercive ways, which Cohen contrasts with the coercive legal structures of modern states, with their systems of punishment for violations of the law. Cohen traced, in interesting ways, his ideas about the Community (Gemeinde; qahal) as an alternate political structure back to the prophet Ezekiel.

5) How does Rosenzweig reflect Talmudic values?

Particularly in his 1921 Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig emphasizes the importance of the living and embodied dimensions of each individual human being.  I show that his reasoning draws upon classical rabbinic notions of the image of God (tzelem elohim). 

In the classical rabbinic understanding,  each individual is the image of God not merely in relation to their soul or rational intellect; rather, it is the living, embodied individual – the living combination of body and soul – that constitutes the image of God.  For this reason, it is living individuals who are in a position to praise and serve God, through prayer, commandments, and good deeds, all of which require embodied action.  And, likewise, the death of an individual therefore constitutes a real loss in God’s eyes.  

Rosenzweig’s rabbinic approach generates a qualitatively different philosophical and theological anthropology, with significant ethical and political implications. If the embodied life of the individual has no substantive value in comparison to the state-structure, then it is easier to justify sacrificing the lives of individuals in war for the sake of upholding a state-structure.  This is particularly the case if the state is conceived of as having a more-than-finite status that outweighs the value of embodied individual life. 

By contrast, in the philosophical anthropology of Rosenzweig and classical rabbinic literature, sacrificing the lives of embodied individuals for an abstract political structure is less obviously justifiable.  Instead, such practices can come to appear more as a form of unjustified ‘human sacrifice,’ linked by Rosenzweig to a “pagan” conceptuality that stands in contrast to ‘the God of creation’ who values life.  

In some passages of the Star, Rosenzweig conveys these ideas through more abstract philosophical terms. Thus, he argues that dominant streams of Western philosophy conceive of the finite embodied individual as ultimately and metaphysically ‘nothing’, in comparison with the eternal and unchanging nature of the abstract ‘All’, Rosenzweig insists that the living individual is ‘not nothing.’  And, if the living individual is ‘not nothing,’ then the death of the individual represents a significant ‘something,’ and should not be dismissed.  Throughout his book, he alternates back and forth between the more abstract language of philosophical tradition and the language of Jewish religious tradition. 

6) How is Walter Benjamin rabbinic and not Pauline?

Walter Benjamin’s 1921 “Critique of Violence” sharply criticizes the notion of “Recht,” or “Law,” in the sense of a concrete political regime.  Various previous readers of Benjamin have linked his criticism to “Pauline” (or to “Sabbatean”) modes of thought.  Because Paul is commonly associated with a ‘negation of Jewish law,’ such readers have seen Benjamin as drawing upon Paul’s supposed criticism of Jewish law and extending it to a critique of systems of law more generally.    (Scholars of Paul now question whether Paul actually sought to negate Jewish law.)

Read more carefully, however, Benjamin does not appear to associate ‘Jewish law’ or ‘Mosaic law’ with the type of legal regimes that he criticizes.  Instead, through Benjamin’s extended discussions of Jewish tradition with Gershom Scholem, and also Benjamin’s own independent reading of texts dealing with classical rabbinic thought, I show that he treats Mosaic law positively, and that his critique of Recht actually functions similarly to classical rabbinic literature’s critical treatment of legal violence.  

I show that various classical rabbinic texts, while apparently affirming capital punishment, emphasize it can legitimately take place only when the Temple in Jerusalem is standing and its altar is operating.  However, since these texts were written at a time when that was not the case, their insistence on the need for the Temple functions as a sharp criticism of all forms of capital punishment that would take place in the absence of the Temple.  All such forms of capital punishment would lack a properly “divine” basis, and so would constitute unjustified forms of political violence, with dynamics similar to what Benjamin calls ‘mythic violence.’  There is therefore a notable connection between Benjamin’s critique and Mendelssohn’s rabbinically-based opposition to religious coercion.

Benjamin’s critique of Recht can thus be understood as taking the classical rabbinic Torah-law approach to political violence and translating it into a rational-philosophical critique of political violence more generally.

7) What is the rabbinic dimension of Modern German Jewish Thought?

I focus especially on the ideas of the image of God (tzelem elohim) and its relation to the prohibition of bloodshed; God’s kingship or sovereignty (malkhut shamayim); and on the types of commandments that can or cannot be enacted at a time when the Temple is not standing and God’s directly authorizing presence is not available.  In classical rabbinic texts, these topics are not gathered together in any single place – for instance, there is no tractate tzelem elohim in the Talmud, and no tractate malkhut shamayim.

However, I draw upon contemporary scholarship on classical rabbinic texts that highlights a notable conceptual consistency with regard to these particular topics across the various collections of classical rabbinic literature.    Thus, for instance, while various medieval Jewish thinkers treat the ‘image of God’ as being the rational intellect, the texts of classical rabbinic literature consistently present ‘image of God’ in highly embodied terms, as a dynamic combination of body and soul.  (See, for example, Yair Lorberbaum’s In God’s Image: Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism.)

This understanding of the image of God leads to significant philosophical, ethical, and political consequences. On the one hand, the classical rabbinic notion of ‘the image of God’ as the embodied human being, means that to kill another person is to cause, as it were, direct harm to God. This idea plays a key role in the modern thinkers’ conceptions, since this puts sharper limits on what one human being can legitimately do to another in the pursuit of political goals. 

This also gives the modern Jewish thinkers a leverage point for critiquing philosophical notions of the human being and human politics  that are based on non-embodied notions of the image of God. The latter philosophical ideas make it easier to justify causing the physical death of innocent people, so long as one can claim that one is not doing so intentionally. 

One sees this discourse today in many discussions of just war ethics. By contrast, drawing upon the rabbinic approaches can provide the basis for an alternative philosophical approach to such issues.  The rabbinic understanding also functions to challenge modes of thought in which the individual can legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collective. 

Likewise, the classical rabbinic affirmation that every human being is the image of God plays a key role for these thinkers.  While there exist common human tendencies to functionally treat people outside one’s own group as more legitimately killable than those within one’s own group, the classical rabbinic texts’ conception of tzelem elohim presents the killing of any human being, from any group, as an equally prohibited desecration of God’s image. 

8) What are the political implications of avodah zarah (foreign worship)?

Translating “avodah zarah” simply as “idolatry” can mask the political dimensions of the classical rabbinic understanding.  Instead, we should translate it as “foreign service,” that is, the idea of serving anyone apart from the God of Israel. We can then note the ways in which “service” (avodah) can have both religious dimensions, in the sense of service in worship, as well as political dimensions, as a servant/slave serves a master. 

In the rabbinic understanding, Israel’s calling to serve God alone means that they are restricted in their ability to engage in acts of worship in relation to cult images, but it also means that Israel’s commitment to God as king or sovereign puts limits on how they can legitimately relate to human claimants to sovereignty.  In classical rabbinic literature, there are various texts in which the Roman emperor’s asserted sovereignty is presented as standing in tension with God’s true sovereignty.  

In this conceptual framework, as reworked by Mendelssohn, Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin, only one’s actual sovereign can legitimately command you to carry out acts of violence.  To carry out commands of violence issued by any other human being or institution is to enact a relation of service to that claimant, in a way that stands in tension with one’s duty to serve God alone. 

Thus, in the classical rabbinic presentation of Israel’s duties in a time when the Temple is destroyed, Israelites should in general obey the laws of different human sovereigns, but not if these human laws require one to violate the core prohibitions of bloodshed, idolatry, or sexual immorality.  In this regard, carrying out orders to kill issued by any human being or institution would impinge on the halakhic prohibitions against unauthorized bloodshed, as well as against foreign worship, by treating anyone other than God as authorized to issue such sovereign commands to you. 

9) For Mendelssohn, how is it “No king but God”?

Mendelssohn delves deeply into the theme of God’s kingship.  Mendelssohn holds that human sovereignty or kingship can be legitimate in God’s eyes, but that it also constitutes a mediated form of relation to God, with the king in the role of the mediator. 

He further asserts that via the special revelation at Sinai, Israel in particular was called by God to serve God directly as their sovereign, without any intermediary figures.  By contrast, because the other nations of the world were not issued this special command to serve God directly, they are more free to install human kings and sovereigns.  Mendelssohn’s approach draws upon various aspects of biblical and rabbinic literature, including the striking statement in 1 Samuel 8 that, when the Israelites ask for a human king, God views this as the Israelites having “rejected Me from being king over them.”  Thus, for Mendelssohn, the Israelites’ special calling before God demands that they maintain a separation from all structures of human sovereignty.

In order to account for the greater leeway given to other nations, Mendelssohn draws upon the idea of shittuf.  This is the idea that certain forms of mediated worship or service may be prohibited to Israelites, but permissible to other nations of the world.  While this notion is more often associated with assertions that religious worship of an intermediary, such as Jesus, can be legitimate for other nations but not for Israel, Mendelssohn applies it to the idea that certain forms of political service and state-sanctioned violence can be legitimate for other nations but not for Israel. 

Mendelssohn’s approach enables him to affirm a different and distinctive political stance for Jews in his modern context, without having to criticize the legitimacy of non-Jewish institutions of human sovereignty and warfare.  That is to say, even if would be forbidden for Jews to participate in such practices, this does not mean that it is illegitimate for non-Jews to do so. However, with regard to warfare, he also asserts that non-Jews are bound by Noahide prohibitions against wars of aggression.

Interestingly, the views of the four modern thinkers differ from one another in relation to this question of God’s sovereignty.  Rosenzweig is similar to Mendelssohn, in that he views it as legitimate for Christians, but not for Jews, to participate in the “pagan” political structures of human sovereignty and the state.  By contrast, Cohen and Benjamin view humanly-grounded forms of sovereignty as problematic for human beings per se, on a more general rational-philosophical level.  These two thinkers are therefore more inclined towards ideas of “no king but God” as directly relevant for all people.

10) How, and why, do you critique the Mennonite pacifist John Howard Yoder’s understanding of rabbinic Judaism?

Yoder argues for an understanding of rabbinic Judaism that largely aligns it with a pacifist orientation, paralleling his own Mennonite version of theological pacifism. Engaging with Yoder’s analysis can illuminate key elements of classical rabbinic theopolitics.  However, my account of rabbinic conceptuality differs in crucial ways from a pacifist construal. 

The classical rabbinic texts do not display an in-principle rejection of political violence such as war and capital punishment. Instead, they assert that those elements do in principle retain their  status as part of God’s revealed Torah, but that their legitimate enactment requires direct divine authorization from God, in a form that they hold to be not currently accessible.  So, even though the classical rabbinic thinkers did not see themselves as divinely authorized to enact such violence in the wake of the Temple’s destruction and the loss of authoritative prophecy, and likewise did not treat political violence on merely human grounds as legitimate, the overall dynamics of their thought still incorporated political violence in key ways. 

A principled pacifist approach tends to reject violence not only in practice but also in conceptuality, leading to important differences in ethical, theological, and political dynamics. By contrast, an approach like that found in classical rabbinic texts, precisely by affirming the possibility of divine commands to violence, is able to sustain a strong critique of those forms of political violence that are carried out on the basis of human will and desires. 

This understanding of rabbinic tradition as opposing humanly-based political violence, but not theoretically negating all violence, enables us to better understand modern Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Aharon Shmuel Tamares, and Avraham Yehudah Chein, who formulated sustained and consistent critiques of political violence and warfare without adopting a typical ‘pacifist’ ideology.  (Interestingly, the thought of Avraham Yitzhak Kook, as analyzed by scholars such as Elie Holzer, can also be seen as falling into this category of a practical rejection of political violence on the part of Israel, without theoretically rejecting the possibility of past divine commands to violence.)

In addition, classical rabbinic texts portray the use of force to stop a rodef (an individual who is about to murder or rape another) as an act that does not require direct divine authorization.  Thus, while violence in service of political goals or institutions is suspended, this window for physical force in relation to the rodef differentiates the rabbinic approach from pacifism per se, which is often understood (in scholarship and in everyday discourse) as the principled rejection of all forms of physical violence.

Finally, classical rabbinic texts envision Israel’s divinely authorized institutions returning in the messianic future, but they do not appear to envision Israelites themselves re-engaging in capital punishment or war. Instead, the messianic future is conceived of as a time of peace, when “nation will not lift up sword against nation,” and is linked in various rabbinic texts to the uprooting of the yetzer hara, the human inclination to evil.  Thus, in this sense, the classical rabbinic position appears to be: Israel’s institutions of legal violence will not be restored until a time when they are no longer needed.