Author Archives: Alan Brill

What happens when a professor of Jewish philosophy has to teach the historic survey of Jews in the modern era? They turn it into a semi-philosophic course by posing a philosophic question to examine as they move through the historical narrative. But do you publish the notes of your survey course?

Leora Batnitzky of Princeton University wrote How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to  Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011) covered the historical narrative of modernity and used the philosophic question of how Judaism became a religion in the modern Protestant sense of the word. For Batnitzky, Mendelssohn removed the coercive body politic from Judaism and she returned to that time bound definition throughout the book even when discussing Eastern European Jewry, Zionism or American Jewry. Jon Levenson reviews the success of the book. I have selected Levenson’s discussion of the political aspects of Graetz and of Reform social action.

Levenson uses the second half of the review to ponder some of the bigger questions. What does it mean to be modern?  It is surely not just the temporality of living in the 19^th or 20^th centuries. Levenson takes issue with Jacob Katz’s treating Orthodoxy as entirely modern because it is self –consciously orthodox. There is a level where the Catholic church and Orthodoxy are less innovations than Unitarian universals. So he is baffled that Batnitzky calls Hirsch “the most modern of modern Judaisms.” Levenson invites us to begin to think about how traditional thinkers set up part of their thought as authentic, traditional, organic, set up other parts as modern, and in the middle employ a wide range of hermenutical and cultural tools to divide their positions into many parts. For example, Levenson corrected Batnitzky in that Rav Soloveitchik’s thought is dialectical, religion is public, communal, and corporate even as faith is non-communicable, Protestant, and private. Read his section on Hirsch below and answer Ernesto Laclau’s question: Were we ever modern? Why do say that? Would Jose Casenova or Asad see modern religion as privatized?

What Are They?: Modernity and Jewish Self-understanding- Jon Levenson
Commonweal February 24, 2012

Even apart from the thoroughgoing traditionalists (about  whom more later), reactions to Reform came swiftly. Henrich Graetz (1817–91), the greatest Jewish historian of the time (and perhaps ever), believed that traditional law was essential to the identity and survival of the Jews. “Judaism is not a religion of the individual,” he wrote, “but of the community.  That actually means that Judaism, in the strict sense of the word, is not even a religion…but rather a constitution for a body politic.” It cannot therefore be reduced to an abstraction like monotheism or anything so vaporous as morality divorced from history and normative tradition. Indeed, it is the study of history that discloses the spiritual power of Judaism and the Jewish people and the deep continuities between ostensibly diverse periods. In Roman Catholicism, perhaps  an analogy to John Henry Newman, Graetz’s contemporary, would be in order. In Judaism, his continuity lies with what in Germany was called the Positive-Historical School and in America, Conservative Judaism, which has traditionally put great emphasis on history and peoplehood, less on the particularities of observance, and almost none on theology.

Unfortunately, Batnitzky’s use of the term “political” is sometimes problematic. One difficulty with it is that the liberal positions that descend from Mendelssohn are not without a political agenda of their own. In the case of American Reform Judaism, for example, theological liberalism has long correlated with an activist agenda in support of “progressive” causes; more recently,  it has correlated with advocacy of positions on issues like  abortion and homosexual behavior that are at odds with the classical rabbinic teachings. This is not apolitical. It may, rather, be hyperpolitical, for it allows a new sociopolitical vision to displace the traditional religious norm

Sometimes, when Batnitzky writes “political,” she seems to mean “communal” or “corporate.” Whatever one calls it, the frame within which she views the many modern Jewish thinkers she discusses necessarily constricts her vision and requires her to give short shrift to important dimensions of their thought.

At times, I found myself wondering whether Batnitzky’s framework has not led her to judgments that are too quick and too sweeping, as when she claims that Soloveitchik (1903–93), the towering figure in Modern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century, “implicitly affirms a Protestant idea that religion is private and individual.”

Beyond her difficulties with Soloveitchik, Batnitzky seems generally averse to the more traditional religious responses to emancipation and too eager to make the highly dubious claim that Orthodoxy is as much “a modern invention” as the other varieties of Judaism in modern times. Noting, for example, the successful effort of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), leader of the Orthodox community in Frankfurt, “to establish a separate community by seceding from the Jewish community recognized by the state,” she concludes that “Hirsch makes Judaism more like the Christianity of his time…relegating itself to private, confessional status”  and thus “leaves room…for a kind of religious pluralism,  despite his disdain for Jews who are not Orthodox.” But in Hirsch’s mind, the basis for the authentic Jewish community lies in something not private but public, not confessional but objectively historical—the revelation of the Torah and the normativity of its rabbinic interpretation. As he puts it, “the Law of God that Moses brought down to us…is also the only standard for testing a Jewish community to see whether it is truly Jewish.” This is as far from religious pluralism as one can get. That the adherents of the traditional law and theology in Hirsch’s time found themselves in a novel situation with the emergence of organized alternatives, can be readily granted, and so can the fact that some rather untraditional and historically inaccurate notes can be seen in his writing. But none of this justifies Batnitzky’s claim that “Hirsch’s Orthodoxy is…the most modern of modern Judaisms.”

For Batnitzky, the mere fact that a community exist in, and responds to, the modern world makes it “a modern invention” and even “modernity’s child.” Perhaps an analogy to Christianity can clarify the weakness in this way of seeing things. It is obvious that the Roman Catholic Church has changed dramatically over the centuries, especially in the past two. Modernity has clearly altered it—if not in its dogmatic core, then certainly in its apologetic strategies, institutional structures, and political relationships. But would it be reasonable to say that Roman Catholicism is therefore every bit as much a creature of modernity as, say, Unitarian Universalism? The historical reality in both the Christian and the Jewish cases calls for a subtler and more nuanced analysis, one that recognizes that modernization occurs across a spectrum and the past, to one degree or another, lives on in the present.

There is a new book on Maimonides that treats Maimonides’ Guide as a work whose intention is to show a reader a method of combining scripture and philosophy and purposefully leaving the questions open without an answer. The secret of the Guide is not philosophy to be kept from the scriptural masses or the secret of a specific answer, rather the open ended nature of the entire intellectual endeavor, even the interpretation of scripture is open ended. Maimonides takes the dialectic arguments of kalam and shows how to do it it better after reading the falasifa. Doing theology better means not to settle on simple answers. The new book does not focus on the metaphysical problem one at a time but takes in the entire project. I like the idea.

For example on the opinions of creation and prophecy, rather than debate the articles of Davidson, Kaplan, Harvey, Ivry, and Seeskin on how to line up the positions in  Guide part II, Davies says that Maimonides does not have an answer only a method. Davies accepts the article by Malino that Maimonides has no answer to creation because of the methodological limits and makes it a paradigm for the entire book. This is somewhat similar to the way Prof G Sermonetta presented the Guide commentary of the 13th century R. Yehudah Romano, as open ended interpretation. (Maybe, echoes of Albert the Great)

Davies also steers clear of Guttman’s Neoplatonic understanding of Maimonides on the Divine as well as the Aristotelianism of Davidison to read Maimonides as already pointing in Thomistic directions.  When  I get to teach using the volume, I will have a better sense of it.

Daniel Davies, Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, Oxford University Press, 2011, 215pp., $65.00 (hbk),

Reviewed byJohn Inglis, University of Dayton

Davies does this is to move the focus beyond single issues. For example, in order to offer a fuller picture of the Guide, Davies devotes chapters to issues regarding the eternity of creation, necessity, negative theology, divine existence, divine knowledge, and a cosmologically important vision of Ezekiel. This widening of the discussion marks a significant difference from other approaches, but Davies has another card up his sleeve. Extending recent work on dialectic, he shifts the locus of contradiction to contemporary tensions between common opinions, many rooted in scripture, rather than contradictions grounded in shielding philosophical demonstration.

Davies argues that Maimonides challenges readers to consider completing claims that lie outside of demonstration, frequently based on the Torah. On this reading, Maimonides constructs a dialectical presentation across different topics in order to prepare active readers “to test” various opinions themselves. Since these issues often involve opinions rooted in the Torah, the task is to become skilled at untangling apparent contradictions and this requires extensive philosophical training and dexterity.

A longstanding difference lies between those who see Maimonides’s Guide as a philosophical break from earlier exegetical works and those who do not. By locating the seventh type of contradiction in claims often based on scripture and not on philosophical demonstration, Davies avoids both poles of this dilemma.

On Davies’s interpretation, the Guide remains philosophically and religiously important, because physics and metaphysics can approximate the inner meaning of the Torah. On this reading, Maimonides counsels exegetes in the Guide of the Perplexed to go beyond the face value of scripture by using philosophy to understand that to which scripture alludes. For ordinary people who lack philosophical training, a more literal reading of the Law provides a guide for the practical life.

One important issue taken to involve contradiction is the question whether Maimonides sides with the Torah on the creation of the world in time, or with Plato’s view of matter being eternal. In the not so distant past, historians presented Maimonides as a critic of Plato’s view and as adhering to the scriptural account that the world began to exist in time. But Maimonides also praises Plato for arguing that only matter and not the world is eternal (Maimonides 1995, p. 115). Shifting the focus to Maimonides’s praise for Plato works against his support for the view of the Torah that God created the world with a beginning in time. Should we read Maimonides as building contradictions into his text in order to mislead the orthodox, or is something else going on here? Maimonides also appears at one point to side with Aristotle over the Torah. For example, Davies considers Jonathan Malino’s argument that a careful reading of Maimonides lends support to the view that he in fact agrees with Aristotle that the world itself is eternal (pp. 31-32).

Many scholars dispute which philosopher it is that Maimonides thought got it right, but this is not Davies’s project. Neither does he argue that Maimonides sides with every opinion rooted in the Torah. Instead, Davies proposes that Maimonides trains philosophical exegetes to mine truth hidden in the Torah.

In the central chapters of the book, Davies widens his scope to consider positive and negative attribution in order to clarify that negative attribution does not contradict divine knowledge of particulars (pp. 54-55).

Davies offers a careful account of Maimonides’s account of the bounded nature of individual things and the good that results (pp. 73-77). A thing exists to the degree that it is good, and it does not exist to the degree to which it lacks the fullness of the good. Maimonides denies that God is limited in this way. Since creaturely existence implies limitation, Maimonides argues it is not accurate to apply existence to the divine in any positive sense. It is more accurate to deny of the divine the limitations of creaturely existence. Therefore, through negation we can reason out ways in which the divine does not exist under limitation. In this sense, God does not exist as creatures do, the sort of view that led Julius Guttmann to deny that Maimonides affirms divine perfections in any positive sense (p. 56). Davies counters this interpretation with the claim that while Maimonides is concerned in his Guide to sketch limitations on human knowledge, he does not deny positive attributes of the divine.

Davies’s challenge is to work up an account of Maimonides’s view of the uncreated existence of the divine that does not involve negation (pp. 79-80).

From Maimonides’s perspective of what human beings can know, Guttmann might have a point after all. Davies notes this difficulty when stating that since our words for Maimonides are so completely bound up with the limitations of the created order, we can speak only with “absolute equivocation” about the perfections of the divine (p. 82). But this view of human understanding does not threaten Davies’s point that Maimonides affirms positive perfections in the divine including existence, even if he is unclear regarding what this amounts to. There need be no contradiction between a reliance on negative attribution in human understanding and affirming positive attributes of the divine. Davies’s contribution is to construct arguments for how this works for Maimonides, arguments that Maimonides alludes to and often does not spell out.

In his conclusion, Davies presents the Guide not as a work of philosophical contradictions calculated to hide truth from the uneducated, but as a work for religious and intellectual training. He argues that there is no gulf between religion and philosophy for Maimonides as they are “mutually complementary” to one another (p. 157). Read the rest here.

Are Jews a perpetual outsider, “other” or stranger? Are Jews rootless individuals or communal? We have an important new book exploring the theme of Jew as outsider in French Jewish and non-Jewish thought and a great review of that book by an expert on Sarte’s Zionism. There are other, less focused, reviews out there, but this one captures both the value and limits of Hammerschlag’s volume. I was going to post this last month and did not get to it.

Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought, University of Chicago Press, 2010, 298pp., $25.00 (pbk).

Reviewed by Jonathan Judaken, Rhodes College

Sarah Hammerschlag’s The Figural Jew offers an insightful new interpretation of how a cluster of postwar French thinkers (Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida) represented Jews and Judaism in their thought. To do so, she zeros in on the figure of the wandering Jew. Ahasverus, an icon of the medieval Christian imagination…
The Wandering Jew embodies the figure of the Jew as nomad, stranger, outsider: the uprooted. As such, Ahasverus represents the antithesis of the French nation. This is true for both the universalist Republican legacy of the enlightenment that emancipated Jews in the French Revolution and for the integral nationalist tradition that stems from Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras.

Hammerschlag seeks to explain how, over the course of postwar French thought, the trope of the wandering Jew, which once served as a quintessentially anti-Semitic icon, was revalorized. Here is her narrative in a nutshell: it began with Sartre’s celebration of an existentialist conception of Self as diasporic. Levinas buttressed this notion with a moral gloss. Blanchot gave Levinas a literary twist that emphasized the figurative elements of the trope. Derrida then gave full play to the self-conscious tropological deployment of the Jew.

For Hammerschlag, there are three key aims to following the trail of the wandering Jew in postwar French thought:
First, to show how Sartre and Levinas mined the resources of anti-Semitism and exploited them in order to define an ideal that could be differentiated from both nostalgic nationalism and the rhetoric of universalizing humanism. What is generated in the process is a figural Jew, an archetype for a new kind of difference in particularity whose function is to suggest that there is a positive moral valence to resisting the discourse of belonging that dominates both the universalist and the particularist versions of political identity (18, emphasis added).

The second aim is to show that in the self-referentiality that figurative discourse entails — that in pointing to Jews as figural — Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, along with their deconstructive ilk, avoid repeating the dynamics of exclusivity and anti-Semitism through their repetition of Jewish tropes. I will say more about this below.

Hammerschlag rightly praises the central strand of Sartre’s Réflexions, which argues that Jewishness is represented as an intensification of the existentialist’s choice. The Jew is rootless; he is a stranger; he is defined and determined by the gaze of the other. The existentialist hero embraces his circumstances and the freedom and responsibility that exist therein. He does not flee; he chooses and engages. The Jew, as the stranger, as a ‘type who has nothing, no homeland,’ has a function like Kafka’s hero (93).

To her detriment, however, Hammerschlag does not consider Sartre’s long and sustained defense of Zionism and Israel. From 1948 through to his final days, Sartre was an articulate defender of Zionism as a Jewish liberation movement. In one of many statements that make the same point again and again, he wrote:

I will never abandon this constantly threatened country [Israel] whose existence ought not to be put into question. . . . I know that my stance earns me the enmity of certain Arabs who cannot understand that one is able to be at the same time for Israel and for them (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Ce que Jean-Paul Sartre avait dit à ‘Tribune Juive'”).

Sartre laid the philosophical ground for this position in his Réflexions sur la questions juive, where he insisted that Zionism represented one form of Jewish authenticity. Wrote Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew:

he may also be led by his choice of authenticity to seek the creation of a Jewish nation [nation juive] possessing its own soil and autonomy; he may persuade himself that Jewish authenticity demands that the Jew [Juif] be sustained by a Jewish national community [communauté israélite].

Does not the stance that Sartre took on Israel and Zionism force us to question Hammerschlag’s reading of the figural Jew in his work?[1]

A similar complaint can be made about her interpretation of Levinas. Since what Levinas presents for Hammerschlag is “a philosophy of uprootedness” (119), she is critical of the ambivalence in Levinas’ own position on the State of Israel (see 161, for example). She is troubled as well by the legacy of some of his followers, like Benny Lévy, whose Judaism was defined by a return to orthodox forms of communal ritual observance (see 163, for example).

Lévy complained in his last work, Être juif, that Levinas had too often emphasized the universalist trace in his writings about Jews. Part of what attracted Lévy, the former leader of the French Maoists, to Levinas’s thought was his references to the authority of the Talmud and Halachah (Jewish Law) in his Jewish writings. Clearly entailed by this form of Judaism (in all its permutations) is communal observance: the daily ritual life of Jewish prayer, the shared study of Jewish texts, holy days, and adherence to the ceremonies of the Jewish life cycle.

To cite only one reference of countless in which Levinas calls for revivifying Jewish communal life, we can turn to his essay, “How is Judaism Possible?” In it, he surveys a set of communal institutions that can help revitalize the Jewish community, including new types of Jewish schools, youth movements, Jewish studies in the academy, yeshivot integrated into a Jewish higher-education system, and the State of Israel as a prod to Jewish community building:

The community needs truths that generate life. It needs a doctrinal and philosophical teaching that can be given on the level of cultivated minds. This teaching . . . can be created only by the community itself. It must be sustained, if need be provoked, at all events co-ordinated and unified. Pluralist tendencies do not exclude the unity of the institution in which they might be grouped (“How is Judaism Possible? in Difficult Liberty, 251).

How then do these twin issues of Sartre’s and Levinas’ defense of Israel and Zionism, coupled with Levinas’ advocacy of Jewish communal life sustained by rabbinic Judaism square with Hammerschlag’s rendition of the story of the figural Jew? Clearly Sartre and Levinas were both advocates of modes of Jewish communal life that do not always neatly tear apart the mythic and the figurative.

Glossing these incongruities, in the end, Hammerschlag hangs her hat on a specific deconstructive trajectory that her book rightly celebrates:

First appearing in Blanchot’s texts, and later developed in various directions by Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Georgio Agamben are visions of community that refuse both the universalizing and the particularizing options. What all these figures have inherited from Blanchot is a resistance to and suspicion of communal fusion, a suspicion, that is, of the modes of identification that bind people to a group, whether through territory, language, culture or ethnicity (263).

The risk is that her radically immanent readings, attentive to the deconstructive thrust of her argument, miss the contextual specifics that led Sartre and Levinas to make the claims in their work that augur against Hammerschlag’s reading of that work.

Indeed, without the broader context as an indicator of how writers understand the meaning of the word Juif, I remain unsure about how one disentangles the mythic from the figurative use of images of Jews and Judaism. Barrès clearly recognized that the Jew in his texts were “figural.” He was aware that “Jew” or “Jewish” could be deployed as an adjective that embodied a whole complex of forces. He said so. The texts of Shakespeare and Augustine and St. Paul suggest the same thing. So whether writers recycle myths about Jews and Judaism or creatively disrupt these figures of exclusion depends a great deal on not only what they said, but also how they said it, and crucially in what contextual frame.

What Hammerschlag misses, however, is the anomaly that perplexes some of those interpreters. What in the body of Sartre’s thought enabled him to both critique racial essentialism and reiterate anti-Semitic tropes of Jews and Judaism? How could the thinker whose core insight is “existence precedes essence” himself trot out essentialist stereotypes of Jews and Judaism?
[1] See Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual, Nebraska, 2006, chapters 4 and 8. Read the rest of the long Review Here.

The Research of Pawel Maciejko’s The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) set out in clear terms in the course of events that created the Frankest movement and sustained it into the nineteenth century. (My blog post on the book here.)

Frankism is a known part of Polish history when a group of Jews converted into Catholicism and entered the lower nobility (szlachta) and gained title and land. They accepted a spirituality that transcends any one religion. Maciejko claims that in the nineteenth century they became a “mutual aid society” lacking much of the original doctrinal elements. From this article, it seems that Jewish conversion to enter the nobility between 1764-1788 also included many non-Frankist Jews and they later intermarried with Frankist families. Conversion into the nobility allowed many wealthy Jews advantages for land ownership, having serfs, and legal securities.

Recently, however, I had a guest for a Shabbat meal who was a descendent of a Frankist family. He has had an Orthodox conversion years ago. This is not a common occurrence, so I asked a few questions. He recounts how his mother spoke often about kabbalah. As a young child, he asked his mother if they were Frankists, telling his mother that he asks because no other Catholic families discuss Kabbalah as their legacy. His mom repeatedly answered No! they were not. When he grew older, one day his mother turned around in the car and said that yes indeed! they were Frankists. My guest, however, notes the family’s gentry name on the aforementioned list of non-Frankist conversions.

My guest remembers that his mother spoke often about kabbalah- but it was actually a midrashic reading of Genesis emphasizing the magical qualities of the Garden of Eden, angels, and the original state of nature. For example, according to midrash fruit trees originally tasted like the fruit they produce. Everything created was originally holy. The most explicit Kabbalistic doctrine was that God had to contract (tzimzum) to make a place for human actions.

In general after the Romantic era, non-Jewish Polish gentry saw themselves in Biblical terms . And in his words: “Almost at every Polish home I know people would talk about the fact that Jewish nation is special and chosen – that comes from romantic vision that Polish nation is the Christ of the nations or like Jewish People because of it’s suffering and unique history.” For examples, think of Henry Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis

However, the telling sign of Jewish lineage in this case was the magical power of the Hebrew Language and greater emphasis on the Old Testament. The mother spoke of the holiness of the Jewish people and the Hebrew language, both extraordinary for a supposed Catholic family. She spoke less in the way of Poles as the chosen Israelites and more about a separate people.

They kept no Jewish ritual, except for some vague acknowledgment of Friday night. She kept a separate pot for warming milk and would not use meat pot but would put butter on meat.

Unlike the typical Polish devotion to the humanity of Christ and the sacred heart, in this family Jesus was portrayed as a religious Jew – practicing and teaching Judaism- and as part of the Rabbis. Jesus taught a doctrine of the need for each of us to rebel against organized religion.

There was a general concern for dreams and spirituality. Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish spiritual author, whom Jews consider to be of Frankist descent, was a family favorite.

The gentry had deep ambivalence and mood swings on the subject of Jews or those of Jewish heritage. My guest said:” In my family they were afraid to be connected with the Jewish People both in religious and in national sense. At this same time there was feeling that something is lost, a sense of disconnection and secrets.” Polish Romanticism with its mixture of facts and fiction, history and sensibility, and the Bible with mysticism had many Jewish elements real and imagined. The Romanticism simultaneously painted Poles in Biblical terms, acknowledged Jewish elements in blood and culture, had a romantic spirituality with “kabbalistic” elements, and also had an exclusion of real Jews. To be of actual Jewish lineage created a surreptitious sense of dislocation.

There was an emphasis on gentry etiquette rules in order to maintain honor and keep separate from the peasants.

During WWII, the Nazis shipped most members of the non-Jewish lower nobility and intellectuals to work camps and most of the older gentry families, along with those of Frankist lineage, were killed in Polish uprising in Warsaw. His grandfather was repeated checked the Nazi to see if he was circumcised, he wasn’t and had paper as gentry.

My guest did not know of any ethnographic studies on late twentieth century Frankists families the way there are studies about the Donmeh. The closest we have is Mateusz Miesus (1938). Polacy–Chrześcijanie pochodzenia żydowskiego, who pointed out as many Catholic Poles of Jewish origins in order to show that Jews are not a separate race.

For those looking for some Frankist tisch Torah,the entire work of over 400 pages translated is available here- Yakov Frank, (1978) Sayings of Yakov Frank. Harris Lenowitz (trans.).
For articles on conversion as a means to enter the gentry and not as the libertine interpretation of Gershom Scholem, see Abraham Duker, “Polish Frankism’s Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and from Jewishness to Polishness,” Jewish Social Studies 25 (1963): 288–301; Abraham Duker, “Frankism as a Movement of Polish-Jewish Synthesis,” in Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, ed. Béla Király (Boulder, Colo., 1975).

(siteowner- some of the non-historical details have been changed to preserve this person’s privacy.)

Updates:
I received an email about another similar case.
In addition, Pawel Maciejko commented “I know quite a few people from well known Frankist families in Poland. All of them were told by their parents about the FACT that they come from Frankist families. But I have never met anyone in whose family some specifically Frankist tenets or traditions were preserved. In other words, none of them knows anything of Frankism (or of Judaism, for that matter), unless they independently learned about it from academic publications. As for your guest, it is interesting what he says about his mother keeping a separate pot for milk. The late Avraham Duker has some great stuff about descendants of Jewish (not necessarily Frankist) converts in Poland preserving some vestiges of kashrut for dozens or even hundreds of years. Finally, as for the Polish nobility, what you are saying is generally true, but is not linked to Romanticism. Already in the late 16th century you have families of szlachta who trace their genealogies back to King David. You had ennoblements of Jewish converts long before the Frankists and you had Polish noble families acknowledging their link to the Jews.”

Last month, I posted an interview with Daniel Boyarin. To which, I received an email from Kellner shocked that I would interview a non-Zionist who supports enemies of Israel and whose rhetoric was putting his family in danger (see below). To which I answered, that Boyarin is currently the doktorvater of several of my most academically successful students. But, how about an interview for your many readers? He agreed.

Menachem Kellner, Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa, and Senior Fellow at Merkaz Shalem in Jerusalem, studied philosophy and Jewish philosophy at Washington University (St. Louis) in 1973. Kellner’s Ph.D. dissertation, written under the direction of the late Steven S. Schwarzschild, was on ” Civil Disobedience in Democracy: A Philosophical Justification.” He also studied at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, IL and at Yeshivat Merkaz Ha-Rav Kook in Jerusalem in the early 60’s.

Kellner’s works include Maimonides’ Confrontation With Mysticism. (London: 2006 Revised paperback edition: 2010.) Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought (Oxford 1986; Hebrew translation, Jerusalem, 1991), Maimonides on Human Perfection (Atlanta, 1990), Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People (Albany, 1992; Serbian translation, Belgrade, 2000), Maimonides on the “Decline of the Generations” and the Nature of Rabbinic Authority (Albany, 1996), Must A Jew Believe Anything? (London, 1999 — a Koret Jewish Book Award finalist; 2nd, expanded edition, 2006); the editor of Contemporary Jewish Ethics (New York, 1978), The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild (Albany, 1990).

Much of the debate around Kellner’s work focuses on his mistitled Must a Jew Believe Anything? It seems from the interview and the new Afterword that the goal of the book was to create greater acceptance of the non-orthodox by removing dogma from the equation. But I am not sure that the strategy worked. Kellner’s response to Daniel Statman in the Afterword shows that the book he wanted to write would have looked like this.

1. Commitment to the peoplehood of Israel (klal yisrael), strong enough to overlook differences.
2. A theory of non- Orthodox peoplehood to account for the traditional mesorati, the masses, and the populous. It would have looked to formulate a democratic Judaism like Rabbi Hirchenson or a view like Rav Amsalam.
3. A vision of peoplehood without ontic status or metaphysical difference, one that can connect with the Jewish past and future.
4. Keeping mizvot as the basis of peoplehood to follow God’s command, and produce a stable and structured society. Mizvot without preconditions of belief or authority. “If they were to forsake me, I should forgive them, for they may yet keep my Torah. For if they should forsake me but keep my Torah, the leaven that is in the Torah will bring them close to me.”
5. Kellner wants a Jewish peoplehood stronger than Torah, personal religious experience, or individual fulfillment. He would have to deflect the claims of those who do not put peoplehood before Torah or individual commitment such as Rav Soloveitchk, Levinas, Rav Nahman, or the Kotzker.
6. For Kellner, Modern Jewry is fractured due to challenge of modernity. The Orthodox leadership has been poor and allowed and encouraged the fracture.
7. Therefore, the use of the Mishnah of Sanhedrin to exclude those who don’t believe is unwise and self-destructive to Jewish peoplehood, even though our modern leaders used it. We should not use categories created to combat against Karaites and Sadducees today to combat Reform and Conservative Jews. We need to reject Rabbinic sectarian thinking.
8. Finally, he has to convince his readers that pluralism is wrong and relativistic. And that his standard is not patronizing to Reform, Conservative, Renewal, traditional, non-zionist, and other Jews who favor pluralism.

It seems that Kellner was motivated by points 1, 6, and 7— and that he thought that if he removed dogma then we have enough to substantiate 2, 4, 5, and 7. Statman pinned it down.

Menachem comments: To reply to these points would involve rewriting the book; it is easily available for people to read and judge for themselves.

If Kellner’s motivation was to stop exclusion of Reform and Conservative Jews, then he seems to have bypassed the actual texts that create the exclusions. All the documents were legal and not dogmatic: from the Hatam Sofer calling Reformers Karaites to Rav Moshe Feinstein calling them minim, halakhic sectarians to Rav Soloveitchik saying that they are outside the halakhic legal tradition.The Hazon Ish was speaking about their lacks of halakhic observance not their lack of dogma. In each case it is the halakhah that decides. If Kellner wanted to be inclusive, then say “God or Torah accepts the mizvot of all Jews.” In email correspondence with Kellner, he stated that all of these cases were motivated by dogma, it was the heresy of Reform or Conservative, not the halakhah. Since the halakhic authors all relied on the precedents against Sadducees and Karaites then they are about dogma. I double checked Rav Moshe for a start and read it as legal not dogmatic. For Kellner, since an ordinary Jew who drives to shul can get an aliyah but a Reform Rabbi cannot makes it about dogma.

My own personal opinion is to side with Saadyah and Bahye on the existence of Duties of the Heart and beyond that my views can be can be gleaned from my long questions such as numbers three, four, six, seven, eight and eleven. I also do find disputes over dogma in Judaism. A social historian may reduce them to politics, paedeia, purity, and power, but that would work just as well regarding Christian heresy hunting. And the leading copied book of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia was “the book of sales and acquisitions.” I would also recommend historic discussions of what was a sectarian such as Aharon Shemesh. Maimonides has kalam, falasifa, and sufi arguments about dogma which were blurred.

I do not find that belief and dogma were sufficiently defined. I could exclude most Christian texts. And all the followers of “dogmatists” such as Karl Rahner or even Avery Dulles would find the rigid definition foreign. Most academics who follow in the lines of Bourdieu, or Certeau follow Pascal’s statement as understood by Althusser: “kneel and pray, and then you will believe”. For Althusser, beliefs and ideas are the products of social practices, not the reverse. What is ultimately important for Althusser are not the subjective beliefs held in the “minds” of human individuals, but rather the material institutions, rituals, and discourses that produce these beliefs. More importantly, today I was reading a volume about the transition from Evangelicals to Emergents and the author stressed, seriously stressed, that it is invalid to ask “What do Evangelicals Believe? And that the only valid question is: :”What beliefs and practices are the focus of Evangelical interest, whether they agree or not.” Belief or not – you are still of the same discussion.

Finally, Kellner thinks that Boyarin has written himself out of the Jewish community by giving sympathy to the Palestinian cause and drawing an analogy in the loss of faith between the Holocaust and the Occupation. Much as some Christians said that their religion died at Auschwitz, Boyarin fears that “Judaism may be dying at Nablus.” Steven S. Schwarzschild, Kellner adviser was a liberal anti-Zionist of the Reform- ethical variety. However, Kellner rejects Boyarin for, in his words, going beyond mere anti-Zionism by twisting facts, supporting murders and those driven to destroy Israel, as well as his rejection of attacking Hamas. “Daniel Boyarin and the Herd of Independent Minds,” in Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor (eds.), The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006): 167-176.) and here are some online links of Kellner’s politics:
“Israel Reverses Gravity,”; “The War in Lebanon: A View from Haifa,”; “Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity” (Reply to Omar Barghouti, “Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?”); “Israel’s Gaza War: Five Asymmetries.”

1. Your dissertation was on ethics and human rights, what happened to that early interest and writings? Do you recognize the immense role your volume on Jewish ethics had in shifting the field to halakhic ethics?

My dissertation, completed in 1973, was on “Civil Disobedience in Democracy – A Philosophical Justification,” written under the direction of the late Steven S. Schwarzschild at Washington University in St Louis, MO (one of three major influences on my life, the other two being my father, Rabbi Abraham Kellner, z”l, u-tibbadel le-hayyim arukhim ve-tovim, my wife, Jolene S. Kellner). The book you mention, Contemporary Jewish Ethics, grew out of my interest in ethical matters (don’t forget, I am a child of the sixties), out of my teaching religious ethics at the University of Virginia and in consultation with my friend, David M L Olivestone, then editor of the Hebrew Publishing Company. I had no idea that the book had any role, let alone an “immense” one, in shifting the field to halakhic ethics, but I will be sure to tell my wife.

2. What motivated you to write Must a Jew Believe Anything?

Actually, to the best of my recollection, it was
(a) annoyance with the ads the Chief Rabbinate would put in newspapers here in Israel every year before the yamim noraim, warning people not to attend services in Conservative or Reform synagogues. It seemed to me then (and seems to me now) that the Rabbinate would prefer to see secular Israelis spend Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur at the beach or on picnics than in non-Orthodox synagogues.
(b) growing concern over the way in which Orthodoxy, by drawing ever sharper lines of demarcation, pushes Jews away from Torah instead of bringing them closer.
(c) a number of experiences made me realize that the “tinok she-nishba” solution, while well-meaning is deeply patronizing, as well as making very little sense in today’s world.

3. Solomon Schechter and others wrote that Judaism does indeed have theology and dogmas but we have no Council of Nicea for fixed dogma, no dogmatic works, and no inquisition or magisterium. But we do have doctrine. In your afterword, in replying to your critics, you seem to have the same position as Schechter but you label it as “We don’t have to believe rather than “we have dogmas without dogmatisim” Why?

Dogma is a device for determining who is “out”. I think that the demand of the hour is finding ways of keeping Jews “in”.

4. You Maimonides is not Ibn Sina and al Farabi. You seen not to use the intellectualist Neo-Platonism of the Guide of the Perplexed. And both Halevi and Maimonides are reliant on al-Ghazzali and ibn Sina. You seem to have a philosopher’s typology of rational and irrational, natural and supernatural, action or belief that does not correspond to the complexity of the historical data. Are you reading Maimonides thought through the dogmatic lenses of your early work in dogmas in the 14th and 15th century?

Look, you may be right, but you must admit that Rambam invites us to read him in that way. Let me rephrase that. I am writing a book in Hebrew right now, proving (to my complete satisfaction, and, I hope, the satisfaction of my readers) that for Rambam there is no metaphysical, ontological, upfront, innate, etc. difference between Jew and Gentile (as my friend Danny Lasker likes to say, the difference for Rambam is all in the software, not in the hardware). I have been publishing on this for many years; in this new book I address the issue through a very close reading the first, middle, and last halakhot of the Mishneh Torah. The first sentence of the book is: “Maimonides did not know that he was a universalist.” It is obviously the case that we ask questions of Rambam that he may not have asked himself, and we try to follow the implications of his thought to places he may have had no need or interest in getting to (for example: his “proto-feminism”). We are not living in the twelfth century.

5. Does everything boil down to “mymonides” and “yourmonides?”

Hardly; some interpretations make more sense that others, and some are simply ridiculous (for an example, see the discussion in Hakirah 11). I am quite taken with a method proposed by the philosopher Susan Haack (in the context of an argument against epistemological relativism); I see Maimonides’ writings as a kind of crossword puzzle. At any given point in filling out a crossword puzzle, a number of different solutions might satisfy any given hint. But that does not make all solutions equally reasonable. As Haack notes, “How reasonable a crossword entry is depends on how well it is supported by its clue and any already completed entries; how reasonable these other entries are, independent of the entry in question; and how much of the crossword has been completed.” Reading Maimonides as a particularist, for example, demands the revision of a great many already completed entries in the Maimonidean crossword.

6. Rabbinic texts are filled with theological material as read by Schechter, Heschel, and Idel, and the texts of Tanhuma, Pesikta, and Kallir are filled with theological statements. It seems that you are using a 20th century halakhic definition of the rabbis.

Of course there is theological MATERIAL in rabbinic literature ( how could there not be?), but there is no SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY in two sense of the term: (a) an attempt to get clear on the meaning of theological terms (such as “soul”; “free will”; “creation”; “reward and punishment”; “election”) and
(b) there is no attempt to put these (largely inchoate) ideas into any relationship with each other, thus allowing for out and out contradictions, which bother no one. In sum, theology is an answer to questions which did not trouble Hazal one bit.

7. You seem to accept the Buberian distinction between belief and trust and his rejection of dogma, even though you protest that you are not. You accept the rejection of the medieval tradition. I cannot find significant differences between your position and Buber except for the halakhah. Furthermore, you repeat your heavy dependence on Buber in the Irreconcilable Differences? volume, in that case distorting Christianity.

My understanding is that Buber’s distinction is too sharp: Christians also prize trust in God, and Jews do not adopt an “anything goes approach” in matters of belief. But, overall, he is right: emunah means “trust” more than it means “intellectual acquiescence”.

8. You seem heavily dependent on the historical premise that the pressures of modernity causes an intolerance, yet there are lots of 13-18 centuries debates and exclusions over dogma. There were two centuries of Maimonidean debates and then recurrences in 16th- 18th centuries in Poland and Italy. For example, the Gra excommunicated Hasidim because of theology and successfully kept them out of Lita!

It is simply not the case that there “are lots of 13-18 century debates and exclusions over dogma.” As I point out in my book on dogma, Rambam “published” his principles in roughly in 1168 and before 1391 there were next to no “debates and exclusions over dogma.” So, it is hardly surprising that I asked myself why this was the case. Ditto for the lack of “debates and exclusions over dogma” between 1492 and the beginning of the 19th century. As to the Gr”a, you know better than me, but was theology really the main issue between him and the Ba’al ha-Tanya?

9. Are there any orthodox leaders, writers, or thinkers who you follow or inspire you?

Rabbis Marc Angel, Yehudah Amital (z”l), Haim Amsalem, David Bigman, Yuval Cherlow, Edward M. Davis, Ronen Lubitch, Haim Navon, Jonathan Sacks and many others. I am sure that there are others and apologize to those whom I have inadvertently left out.

10. Why have you taken up the case against Torat Hamelekh?

Because:
(a) it is a disgusting book
(b) it adds insult to injury by implying that Rambam would agree with them
(c) it is dangerous, giving rabbinic imprimatur to murderous tendencies

11. It seems that you want your cake and to eat it too, you want to be a universalist but through particularistic texts. You avoid pluralism or non- Jewish texts about universalism for a Jewish universalism in which non-Jews will eventually see their universalism through Judaism. You seem to have a very particularistic universalism?

The following is not a direct answer to your question, but it is a good way to end anyway. It is the closing paragraph of an article of mine in a festschrift coming out in honor of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

While not giving up on the idea that revelation (be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim) teaches truth in some hard, exclusivist sense, putative addressees of revelation ought to be modest about how much of it they understand, and restrained in the claims they make on behalf of revelation and about adherents of other religions.

Admittedly, it may be easier for a Jew to advance this position than for a Christian or a Muslim. This is so for several reasons. First, until the Middle Ages, at least, Jews sought to understand how God instructs them to inject sanctity into their lives, and paid very little attention to the question of how God expects them to think. Given the notion that the Torah contains many level of meanings, and the profound differences among Jewish thinkers about the nature and content of those meanings, a stance of theological modesty ought to be easier for Jews to maintain than for adherents of more clearly theologically based religions.

Second, given the nature of Jewish-Gentile relations over the last two millennia, Jews had very little reason to look to Gentiles for spiritual enrichment. We, however, live in a different world, and I thank God for that.

Last, Jews, not thinking that one must be Jewish in order to achieve a share in the world to come, have traditionally paid little attention to the beliefs and practices of others. But, having left the ghetto and the mellah, we live in a world very different from that of our forbears and, looking around, discover admirable Gentiles from whom we can learn much. We are no longer alone.

The Lord of all the Universe is not too great to have revealed the Torah to us, but is certainly too great to be captured by our puny understanding of Torah. To claim otherwise is to be guilty of cosmic hubris, and to close ourselves off to the possibility of being enlarged by meetings with others who also seek God and whom God does not ignore.

This is continued from my perilous post on Aryeh Kaplan. I may combine both posts into one longer post for posterity.

When Rabbi Leonard Kaplan first showed up to the pulpit in Mason City Iowa, he gave a talk to the sisterhood on the process of his receiving ordination in Israel. I wonder how awkward this was, especially with the head of the sisterhood leading the opening prayer and despite his immense learning, his having to shepherd girl scouts and teach once a week Hebrew school.

Ordination of a “Rabbi in Israel” was the topic discussed by Rabbi Leonard Kaplan at the joint meeting of Adas Israel Sisterhood and Hadassah in the synagogue Thursday. Rabbi Kaplan received his theological training at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, New York and Mirrer Yeshiva in New York and in Jerusalem. He was ordained in Israel with ordination both at the seminary and by the Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel.

The Opening prayer was given by Mrs. L. IT. Wolf

The girl scout Sabbath was announced at the March services

A purim cantata.. . wil be presented Sunday evening. At 7:30 PM
Mrs. Kaplan was welcomed as a new member.

Rabbi Kaplan was quite active in interfaith events, our reader David Zinner already pointed to one of them. In a church interfaith meeting and potluck meal, which followed a vote by the Episcopalians allowing women to the vestry, Kaplan addressed them with a universal message. Each relgion speaks for God and we should not limit God to our own faith. Back to his mathematical model, knowing only one religion is flat and one dimensional, to truly know God we need the multi-dimensional view. All religions are one part of the infinite depth of God.

Mason City Globe Gazette – • January 17, 1966 – • Page 15
St. John’s Episcopal Church Sunday night became the first Episcopal Church in the state reported as electing two women to its vestry. Elected to the local congregation’s administrative body…

In the general annual meeting which followed a potluck meal, the group heard Rabbi Leonard M Kaplan of Adas Israel Synagogue say:

“ We often spend much effort in making a god out of our particular religion. Shouldn’t we spend just as much effort in making our religion a religion of God?” Rabbi Kaplan called for efforts to appreciate strange and often exotic religions, understanding that each one speaks for God and may even have a message for us.

For many of the world’s people, Rabbi Kaplan said, religion is the most important thing in their lives and understanding them calls for understanding their view of God.

“In a sense, every religion is an open eye upon God, giving us its own flat, one-dimensional view, He said. It is only the totality of them all that can give us a multidimensional view of the Divine and a panorama of infinite depth.…”

Rabbi Kaplan said that many scholars are finding they must study mankind as “a single gigantic organism… spread over the face of the earth.

“If it were God’s purpose in creating this creature that is mankind, to create a being that perceive the divine, then is it not logical that He should have given it many senses?”

“The eye does not hate the ear for not seeing. The ear does not despise the nose for not hearing. The many religions perceive God, each in a different way. But as long as they all look toward God, they are one.“

Here, in this article, he welcomes Sister Mary Josita and her Bible students to the synagogue and explains the Sefer Torah to them.
After explain the Shofar, he quips that the shofar ‘will probably not be the type to be blown by Gabriel at the second coming.” ” G a b r i el would never put the Beatles out of business.” He seems to have done quite a few wedding jointly with Reform and Conservative clergy- here and here. Among his activities, he took the time to write to Dear Abby about cherubs.

DEAR ‘ABBY: You are not likely to find any girl cherubs (or cherubim) since the Hebrew word “cherub” is a noun of masculine gender. According to the Hebrew grammar, a girl cherub would not be a cherub at all, but a “chewbah.” And the plural of “cherubah” is “cheruboth”— not “cherubim,”—which is the plural of “cherub^’
RABBI LEONARD M. KAPLAN , MASON CITY. IA.

It seems that he did not entirely switch to from Leonard to Aryeh in 72-73. As a Rabbinic consultant for the movie Yentl in 1980, he still used the name Leonard in the stories and byline.

“Rabbi Leonard Kaplan,” the writer reports, “enjoyed advising the cast on ritual and its meaning. He showed them how to sway and bend while they pray, explained what it means to study the Talmud and in general helped the cast understand the outlook of a religious Jew
Rabbi Kaplan was not upset by his association with a play which contains nudity as well as a woman dressed as a man ‘It is an abomination,'” he admitted, “‘But so what?

For those looking for a good introduction to Aryeh Kaplan during the years 73-83, when Kaplan lived and struggled in Kensington, I recommend Perle Besserman, Pilgrimage : adventures of a wandering Jew
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Perle describes her journeys to India and Israel interspersed with two in-depth visits to Aryeh Kaplan’s living room world. The underemployed Kaplan gave classes in his home on Shabbat and during the week on the deep inner meaning to reality to a variety of seekers including the variety of modern orthodox psychologists listed in the introduction to Jewish meditation, Jews on return from India, those who also hung around Reb Shlomo Carelbach and Reb Zalman, and those who just crashed on his couch. She called Kaplan’s teachings a form of karma yoga, a path of deeds and the deeds that you do cause a perfection of your soul. The book also contains a rare 1970’s interview with Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook. (h/t for Pilgrimage- R. Yosef Blau circa 1991).

Over at H-Judaica, there is a hunt for Aryeh Kaplan’s physics MA or any evidence to document his work in the field. They did turn up that the Memphis raised southerner went under his birth name Leonard M Kaplan to University of Maryland and had two co-authored articles in 1965 and 1966. Between 1965 and his burst into NCSY tracts and Chassidism in translation in 1973, he did many activities that are usually not discussed such as elementary school teacher in Louisville Kentucky, Conservative rabbi, and abstract artist. By 1965, he had already relinquished physics graduate school and was a rabbi in Mason City Iowa, a congregation that only had a late Friday night service. Here is a lost homily of his that was syndicated as part of a clergy column where he sees modern science including the synthesis of life in a test tube as pointing to God’s greatness. True scientists marvel at the secret of life.

•”Lift lift your eyes on high, and see: Who hath created these? He that bringeth on their host by number, He calleth them all by name (Isaiah 40:26)

Rabbi Leonard M. Kaplan
Adas Israel Synagogue
7th N.W. & Adams

From the day that man first appeared on this planet, he has looked on high at the stars and the world around him, and he has stood in awe before the great mystery of creation. He would try to reach up to the stars, and he would climb the highest mountain peaks, but still they would appear far away, blinking steadily in their continued silence, mocking the puny man who would presume to fathom their origin, their nature, and their destiny. But man was not easily discouraged. He continued to climb and probe the mystery of the stars, the riddle of the atom, and even the secret of life itself. Today, mankind finds himself on the threshold of creating life. By duplicating conditions of a primeval earth, scientists have already succeeded in bringing forth the most primitive form of pre – life. This has lead many psuedo-scientists of narrow mental gauge to proclaim that man no longer needs to believe in God, and that science has done away with all mystery and miracle.

But the true thinking scientist knows that the exact opposite is true — that science has enormously increased man’s sense of mystery, and that all of nature is nothing but a huge miracle.

When astronomers explore galaxies billions of light years away, they find that they are made of the same matter as the stuff beneath our feet. Only one kind of matter is found to exi st throughout the entire universe. Yet, this unique material has one exceptional property — it can support life, and under proper conditions, it can even give rise to life. The fact that inert matter carries the potential of life cannot be considered a mere random accident. It can be nothing less than the work of a purposeful Creator. How then can we imagine something as simple as the electron carrying within itself the potential of the human brain, had not humanity been anticipated by the Designer of all creation? Even the Bible does not tell us that God created life, but rather that He said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures.” (Genesis 1:24). God created matter — the dust of the earth — with the potential of al! life. If scientists are successful in creating true life, our belief in God should be all the stronger, for who else but an omniscient- God could have created the elementary particles of matter with all the inherent potentialities of the human spirit? The handwriting of God is clear — not on the wall — but in the very heart of nature.
RABBI LEONARD M. KAPLAN

Here we have a JTA bulitein about Kaplan in his role as rabbi of Ohav Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Albany where he also serves as as Jewish student adviser at SUNY at Albany. He is working to provide kosher food and is involved in outreach. Notice in the language of the announcement the language of the 1960’s “free university” and “eschews formal leadership.” Aryeh Kaplan’s describes his classes as follows: “Many college students turn to drugs and the Eastern religions searching for a mystic and deeply spiritual experience,” the prospectus said. “Most of these are not at all aware of Judaism’s great mystic and spiritual tradition. Especially relevant to this quest is Hassidism, which stands unique as the world’s only popular mystic movement.” Three years later, he starts publishing his Hasidism as popular mysticism and having everything that Eastern mysticism contains.

Project to Rediscover Jewish Values Launched by Students at State University of N.Y.
ALBANY, N.Y., Jul. 6 (JTA) –
A group of students at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA) is planning to launch a “Jewish Rediscovery Project” on the campus next fall. Its motivation is “a common desire to rediscover Jewish values relevant to current problems and to act upon such problems as a Jewish group,” according to a prospectus released here. The youngsters are working with Rabbi Leonard M. Kaplan of Congregation Obav Sholom, the Jewish religious advisor at SUNYA. They estimate the Jewish student population at 2,370 or 19.5 percent of the 12,125 total, and the Jewish faculty at 200 members, 9.2 percent of the total. According to Rabbi Kaplan, Jewish student activists are already largely responsible for the creation of the first full Judaica department in the entire New York State University system, which will open in September under the chairmanship of Prof. Jerome Eckstein. They are also responsible for a Free University of Judaica, offering courses that would not normally come under the Judaica Department; a kosher food plan provided by the University, and a special Passover food plan administered by the University, Rabbi Kaplan reported.

“The Jewish Rediscovery Project” is the tentative name for a series of programs expected to attract large numbers of students who find traditional Jewish organizational hierarchies and programs repellant and irrelevant to their interests and their intellectual and spiritual needs. The series eschews formal leadership structure in favor of what the students call sub-cooperatives without chairman and officers, in which leadership is expected to rise spontaneously according to the project’s needs. The student most responsible for the program, according to Rabbi Kaplan, is Tobi Goldstein a sophomore. The prospectus calls for four sub-cooperatives–a Study Cooperative, an Information Cooperative, an Action Cooperative and a Religion Cooperative. In the latter, students will explore Hassidism as an avenue to mystical experience. “Many college students turn to drugs and the Eastern religions searching for a mystic and deeply spiritual experience,” the prospectus said. “Most of these are not at all aware of Judaism’s great mystic and spiritual tradition. Especially relevant to this quest is Hassidism, which stands unique as the world’s only popular mystic movement.”

To be Continued in the next post here- Lost Aryeh Kaplan Part II

We owe Rabbi David Etengoff a thank you for recently placing many of the public lectures of Rav Soloveitchik online in cleaned-up mp3 format.

On the list was one public discourse that I had not heard or read called “5122 KNESSETH TISROEL – DIALOGUE 04/25/78.” It was a real winner. It was a discussion with Orthodox mental health professionals and it discussed several hot topics including the meaning of Lonely Man of Faith, Israeli politics, abortion, homosexuality, Chabad, BT’s, and the role of the social worker.

More importantly, it shows how people related to Rav Soloveitchik and his replies to inquiries. Especially in the last 15 minutes of the tape one can see (1) how Rav Soloveitchik gave his students great latitude to solve problems themselves, (2) how he trusted professionals, (3) how did not think that everything needed halakhic or rabbinic answers (4) and how he took his answers to be his own personal formulation, not some binding or definitive understanding. The tape also show Rav Soloveitchik in several moods from impatient to jovial and it especially showed how Rav Soloveitchik dealt with ideas and not with the bottom line.

If you have never heard a full shiur from Rav Soloveitchik or have not heard one in many years or even if you have forgotten why people where once upset about the current revisionism of the Rav, then please listen to this lecture (or at least the last 15 minutes). It has good audio quality. This lecture will remind you why people were attracted to Rav Soloveitchik. I do not intend to mediate your direct encounter with his shiur, and that is why this one is such a good choice.

The setting is 1978, Annie is the wholesome smash hit on Broadway and Billy Joel’s The Stranger is on the pop radio stations. Picture the younger professionals wearing big tortoise-shell eyeglass frames and long side-burns. Deeply colored sweaters and sports jackets were in style that year, colors like wine, cranberry, and olive- on the tape you will hear people referred to by their clothes color. The Rav himself tended to wear light colored sports jackets to events like this.

It was a decade after his Lonely Man of Faith lecture done originally as a mental health lecture and less than a year after a follow-up lecture in Boston 1977 covering much of the same material. The setting this time is NY and the gathering is of Orthodox mental health professionals, mainly MSW’s and psychologists including Paul Kahn, Rivka Danzig, Lester Kaufman, Carmi Schwartz, and Rabbi Avrach, the Director of Community Services Division. In the 1970’s, psychology, therapy, and existential therapy reigned supreme. The Yeshivish answer was still to ban majoring in psychology. It also produced books like Avraham Amsel’s Rational Irational Man – Torah Psychology (1976), which denigrated psychology as not the Torah’s way since the emotions need to be suppressed into a rational and volitional life. Several people in the room whom I did not mention, were graduates of Chaim Berlin or Torah ve Daas who a few years earlier switched from suits to turtlenecks and under the influence of the early 1970’s discovered the humanistic path of psychology based on not repressing emotions; gestalt, transaction, and existential therapies replaced repression. People were reading Erik Erikson, Irwin Yalom, R. D. Laing, and Fritz Perls. The Bob Newhart show about therapy had just ended its six year run that month. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the seeming only Rosh Yeshiva to field the new questions was Rav Soloveitchik. At the same time notice how philosophic and abstract were his answers.

A mere decade later Rabbi Twerski will make the liberalism of self-esteem humanistic psychology and twelve step as a seminal start of the new Yeshivish self-help books and in contrast some of YU’s graduates will start reading the more conservative works by authors like Dobson. There is a switch to asking what causes the individual to be deviant, rather than creating a role for the individual.Now, thirty years later every Rosh Yeshiva and pulpit rabbi is an expert on psychology and social work without the need for professional trained guidance. But in 1978, the burning question is how do we balance the individualism and lack of repression in therapy with commitment to the group, the halakhah community. In the discussion, notice the lack of a role for evil inclination, or any mussar advice to restrain or repress oneself.

When you listen to the tape notice how often Rav Soloveitchik says “ I created” “personal experience” and “my formulation.” Also notice his joke that he took tranquilizers and they didn’t help him as much as Talmud study helped him.

He discusses the Jewish commitment to the Israel. His politics is old time Likkud. We did indeed dislocate the Arabs but that does not matter. We were the ones who started the trouble in Hebron- why did we did it? Because Israel and our connection to it is our insanity. We are willing to go against the whole world. We are willing to defy common sense because of our connection. Defiance and redemptive go together.

In this discussion, he uses the word mesorah to refer to the continuity of the Jewish people and to the chain of scholars of the mesorah. He does not use it as a body of knowledge or a specific teaching. The Mesorah community extends from Avraham to messiah and offers a sense of calming sense of eternity that transcends the individual. Being part of the mesorah offers a deeper reality that unites past and future. We are joined as part of a covenantal community of every Jew who was in the past and those who have yet to appear. Respect for the elders and our antecendents and a commitment for educating future generations.(similar to LMF)

The Rav says that only when his parents died did he find the malakh hamaves confronting him “My Cartesian awareness included a sense of my parents.”

Can we help a homosexual alleviate guilt? “I am not a social worker.” But the goal is not to tell him “sin and be happy.” People have freedom and people can change. There is no need to reject any case. We believe people have the ability to do teshuvah. Don’t encourage sin but there is always hope. But, you may not encourage homosexual practices. (Notice what the discussion looked like before the culture wars- neither condemnation not acceptance, just what is the social worker’s responsibility? Notice how Rav Soloveithcik is mainly concerned with what the observant therapist should do and does not make big statements about society or public policy.)

Can one go against respecting one’s parents kibud av ve am as part of the process of therapy. He answers that the goal is to follow the right way but process may be far from it. So temporary violation is OK as part of a bigger process.

What about college women who are sexually active but not using birth control, therapist cannot pasken birth control questions but it may lead to an abortion? Answer- You are not responsible for events in the future.
What about people having an abortion- it is forbidden but what you should do? Answer- Abortion is completely prohibited as murder, we just do not consider it libel for punishment… What to do? I don’t know.

How do we apply these guidelines when the social worker is orthodox and client is not religious.
Rav Soloveitchik- “It is up to the social worker – I cannot advice – it is hard.” This is the Rav Soloveitchik that many remember who left applications in the hands of professionals.

He praises Chabad and its success because they temporarily display tolerance. They show understanding and lend a helping hand.
One cannot condemn client right away. And to earn respect means professional respect as a skilled and understanding professional. (not respect for sticking to one’s opinions.)

He tells the story of certain girl who became a BT but was not ready for taryag mizvot, all the mizvot. First she went to a known gadol –rosh yeshiva, who said it was an all or nothing package either keep Shabbos or else. She wet to another rabbi who said accept one mizvah with the complete letter of the law. She did and eventually became completely observant. (What lesson do you think his listeners drew from the story?)

In the last five minutes, the Rav was asked “is that [the Rav’s approach in LMF] the only method or the [definitive] halakhic method? Is this the necessary approach toward Keneset Yisrael or is there another method?

The Rav answers that his loneliness is his creative experience and his binding himself to the group cures his loneliness. Being part of the group of keneset yisrael is not his creative time. Rather, his individual loneliness which is an “Awareness of self- not mere introversion or introspection.” But, “Community man is not creative. We have a dialectic back and forth. (Notice he did not consider his approach definitive.)

Certain times I don’t want to give or teach. They say I am a good teacher. A good teacher forms a community in his class. Not technical teaching but to discuss and debate problems – and sometimes they are right and I admit it. One needs to be sincere and consistent. Sometimes the students know as much as I do and I have nothing to teach so I retreat. The need to give is called hesed- to teach is a very volatile activity. (Notice that he defines his teaching an shiur not as offering fixed answers but as discussion and debate. Also notice how impatient Rav Solovetichik was in giving over his prepared précis of LMF, and how relaxed he is in fielding questions.)

Final words on being a social worker. “There is no difference between a social worker or a rabbi concerning their duties as a Jew In fact, a social worker can accomplish more. A social worker is perceived as neutral and objective- and can be more effective.

As a closing comment, the moderator said “Rav Soloveitchik does fancy footwork- he wants idea and we want to drag him down.” (Notice they did not see the Rav as practical guidance or halakhah, rather as ideas and big guidelines. This led to each listener interpreting it for themselves. Unless someone violated the guideline in a major way, they were not reigned in).

[I only listened to the tape once, so if I made any mistakes they were inadvertent, and I will be glad to change what I wrote.] If you cannot find time to listen to the entire tape then just listen to the last 15 minutes to get a taste of his personality.

In the past I linked to Prof. M.G Piety’s blog on Kierkegaard and her coverage of the controversy over Kierkegaard’s antisemitism and it got picked up by JID. So, I assumed that people would keep track of her translation work without my prompting, but it seems from her self-posted hit count numbers that other have not linked to her. But she keeps posting good material. She has recently started translating the preface to Peter Tudvad’s book and his discovery of the Nazi use of Kierkegaard. Here are some selections.

I ran across a couple of articles on Søren Kierkegaard from the beginning of the 1940s while doing research for a book about a Danish nurse in the German Red Cross during the Second World War. To stumble on article on Kierkegaard was in itself not surprising. What was surprising was that they were in National Socialisten [the National Socialist] and Jul i Norden [Jul in the North], two strongly anti-Semitic publications associated with the Nazi party in Scandinavia.

“Søren Kierkegaard is without question the greatest genius the Danish nation has produced” began one of the articles. Moreover, continues the author, “his writings contain the best instructions for the liberation of the Danish people from the spirit of Judaism which has come increasingly to dominate Denmark and which he saw himself as called by providence to fight. One could thus to this extent be justified in asserting that Søren Kierkegaard was the first Danish National Socialist.”

The author would not have been able to support such a claim, even if he had done extensive research, given that Kierkegaard was vehemently opposed to every form of both nationalism and socialism. On the other hand, there is something to the claim that Kierkegaard wanted to free the Danish people–or preferably all of Christendom–from “the Jewish spirit” which he, like the Nazis, viewed as materialistic, and which he increasingly portrayed as essentially in opposition to Christianity.

I realized to my own shame, after reading these two articles, that I had also been all too willing to ignore, or to explain away, Kierkegaard’s anti-Semitism. I thus wrote an article on this topic for the magazine of Jewish culture, Guldberg. I cited Kierkegaard’s references, just as had Geill, to a Jewish editor as a “Jøde Dreng” [Jew-boy] and to “en trællesindet Jøde øvende Herskermagt” [a servile Jew exercising power] as well as his observation concerning this same editor and the distribution of his paper that “only a Jew could be fitted for this most equivocal of all tyrannies, even more equivocal than that of a usurer (to which the Jew, however, is best suited).”
He says first that ‘Kierkegaard’s references to the Jews were much harsher than those of other intellectuals of the period, but then that it is believed that he identified himself with Jews whom he thought were fundamentally unhappy.” He observes later that Kierkegaard emphasized “Judaism was the enemy of Christianity, but most of what he objected to in Judaism was precisely what he criticized contemporary Christianity for.”

Once again, the reader is instructed to appreciate that despite Kierkegaard’s apparent anti-Semitism, he was not anti-Semitic in that his overarching purpose was an attack on the Christianity of his day rather an attack on Judaism, and it is in this light that one must understand his possible identification of himself with Jews as an unhappy people.

So far as I know, no one until now has answered these questions, despite the fact that a Danish scholar touched on aspects of the reciprocal relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Kierkegaard’s authorship in 1999. Read the Rest Here.

I just discovered that the Soncino Talmud has been reformatted by Reuven Brauner as a usable pdf, available here. h/t- On the Main Line.

I took a few moments to look at several of the pages and the introduction by Chief Rabbi Hertz caught my eye. He treats the Talmud as a record of the discussions fo the Rabbis that captured everything they said, good and bad, learned and unlearned, noble and degrading. He is willing to say about parts of the Talmud: “some of the customs depicted or obiter dicta reported, are repugnant to Western taste need not be denied. “ And he concludes that the legends, discussions, science, and folkways “consists of mere individual utterances that possess no general and binding authority.”

Hertz’s approach to the Talmud is similar to that of Shadal who in his letters deals with difficult Talmudic texts by declaring that they are just person opinion. WE lack an article on Western European Orthodox rabbinical attitudes to the Talmud. From Shadal to Steinsaltz; they tended to share Hertz view. In contrast, in Eastern Europe every line of the Talmud was sacrosanct. The Mahara”tz Chayes dealt with the folklore, demons, and unwisdom by declaring that it was not to be taken literally, rather it contained hidden didactic messages. It had to be allegory or hyperbole. But Hertz does not look for allegory and treats these texts in a straight forward manner as objectionable personal opinion and therefore rejects them

But the Gemara is more than a mere commentary. In it are sedulously gathered, without any reference to their connection with the Mishnah, whatever utterances had for centuries dropped from the lips of the Masters; whatever Tradition preserved concerning them or their actions; whatever bears directly, or even distantly, upon the great subjects of religion, life, and conduct. In addition, therefore, to legal discussions and enactments on every aspect of Jewish duty, whether it be ceremonial, civic, or moral, it contains homiletical exegesis of Scripture; moral maxims, popular proverbs, prayers, parables, fables, tales; accounts of manners and customs, Jewish and non-Jewish; facts and fancies of science by the learned; Jewish and heathen folklore, and all the wisdom and unwisdom of the unlearned. This vast and complex material occurs throughout the Gemara, as the name of an author, a casual quotation from Scripture, or some other accident in thought or style started a new association in ideas.

HALACHAH AND HAGGADAH
The Talmud itself classifies its component elements either as Halachah or Haggadah. Emanuel Deutsch describes the one as emanating from the brain, the other from the heart; the one prose, the other poetry; the one carrying with it all those mental faculties that manifest themselves in arguing, investigating, comparing, developing: the other springing from the realms of fancy, of imagination, feeling, humour:

Beautiful old stories,
Tales of angels, fairy legends,
Stilly histories of martyrs,
Festal songs and words of wisdom;
Hyperboles, most quaint it may be,
Yet replete with strength and fire
And faith-how they gleam,
And glow and glitter!
as Heine has it.

We have dogmatical Haggadah, treating of God’s attributes and providence, creation, revelation, Messianic times, and the Hereafter. The historical Haggadah brings traditions and legends concerning the heroes and events in national or universal history, from Adam to Alexander of Macedon, Titus and Hadrian. It is legend pure and simple. Its aim is not so much to give the facts concerning the righteous and unrighteous makers of history, as the moral that may be pointed from the tales that adorn their honour or dishonour.

That some of the folklore element in the Haggadah, some of the customs depicted or obiter dicta reported, are repugnant to Western taste need not be denied. ‘The greatest fault to be found with those who wrote down such passages. says Schechter, ‘is that they did not observe the wise rule of Dr Johnson who said to Boswell on a certain occasion, “Let us get serious, for there conies a fool”. And the fools unfortunately did come, in the shape of certain Jewish commentators and Christian controversialists, who took as serious things which were only the expression of a momentary impulse. or represented the opinion of sonic isolated individual, or were meant simply as a piece of humorous by-play, calculated to enliven the interest of a languid audience.’ In spite of the fact that the Haggadah contains parables of infinite beauty and enshrines sayings of eternal worth, it must be remembered that the Haggadah consists of mere individual utterances that possess no general and binding authority.
2 December 1934
Read the Rest Here.

Many of my readers tell me that they like when I only post one good long post rather than many short ones because they don’t have time for many short posts. Some readers have told me that they flag the posts that they like for later with programs such as read-it-later or they forward it to their e-readers. It worked for me this past season because I spent much of the last three months editing my manuscript and then the proofs. However, I am still weighing how much I should post short notes and clippings.

I still have many un-posted pieces since July. The Oliver Roy post took me half a year to get to it.

Those academics and clergy that want an interview about your books or a guest post, then please let me know. I would be glad to oblige qualified people. Please don’t be shy. Everyone has enjoyed the process.

From the analytics available:
My readership is in the places that one would expect: Boston, Baltimore, Evanston, SF, D.C., LA, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland, Hartford and Atlanta. I have a strong and consistent readership with an IP # in Council Bluffs, IA. If you are from that area and a regular reader, then can you please tell me what Jewish or Christian groups are my readers in IA? I have regular readers in Dallas-Plano, a town that I have not visited the Jewish community and don’t have any personal friends there. Also a solid contingent in Omaha.

I have more readers with Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan IP addresses than Jerusalem.

According to the analytics, my readership for the first two years was mainly people with graduate degrees and good incomes. In the late Fall, I have gained a demographic without degrees. Hmm.

I gained many new readers with the Carr interview. Welcome.

I just got this week a Samsung Tablet- if anyone knows any good apps to download tell me.

I lost the most readers, feed readers, and subscribers with my review of two works of scholarship on Hasidic Tales. I am surprised that about that. Of all the things that I covered, that Hasidic Tales are not real was a breaking point!?

If you are planning on buying my next book Judaism and World Religions , it will be printed in about 4-5 weeks and officially published mid-March. The price will drop greatly for the pre-publication version, but you have price-guarantee from Amazon.

David M. Carr is one of the top scholars of the redaction of the Pentateuch in the world. We can debate if he is in the top five or the top ten, but he is at the top of the field. I was at a social gathering where I heard, over the din of small talk, a conversation at the other end of the room about the state of Biblical studies. Specifically, I heard Professor Carr say that the old documentary hypothesis has given way to new theories. David generously agreed to a blog interview to explain the current state of scholarship to my reader. When I told Rabbi Dr Joshua Berman about the blog interview he emailed: “Wow, David is the best, he is the real thing.”

David M. Carr Ph.D. is professor at Union Theological Seminary in NY. He received his degree in Religion from Claremont Graduate University in 1988. Before coming to Union in August 1999, Dr. Carr served as full professor of Old Testament at Methodist Theological School in Ohio from 1988-1999.

Professor Carr’s book-length publications include From D to Q: A Study of Early Jewish Interpretations of Solomon’s Dream at Gibeon (Scholars Press, 1991); Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches (Westminster, 1996); The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality and the Bible (Oxford, 2003); Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Western Scripture and Literature (Oxford, 2005); In October 2011 his most recent book appeared: The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2011).

The reason for this interview is because if the religious community wants to respond to Biblical criticism, then it should know what it is talking about. It has to stop create homiletics about repetitions and thinking that it answers anything at all. Part of the importance of Prof. Carr is that he thinks we don’t know enough to say much with certainty about the original Mesopotamian origins of the Torah. We cannot separate it into documents and we cannot do etymological origins of texts. Carr uncovers specific evidence that the Hebrew Bible contains texts dating across Israelite history, even the early pre-exilic period (10th-9th centuries).His method is to use parallel documents, many of them works edited only in the last 40 years such as the Ugaritic texts at Ebla & Ras Shamra. Please create a religious response that includes Sinai and can work with the principles of faith, but first know the field.

As a believer, liberal Protestants only need a revelation from heaven or a Divine source, but they don’t need it to be from Sinai or Sinai as the defining moment.

David Carr’s prior book Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) stressed that the ancient world did not think of authors and readers the way most of us do. Instead of reading a text silently, one memorized and placed on the heart the classic scriptures. Scribal authors then drew on this memorized knowledge in creating new texts. Carr compares the Bible and its transmission to scribal guilds and writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ugarit, and Greece. Of his many significant observations, the following appear to encapsulate his thought: (1) Students copied texts not only to learn scribal skills but also to become educated and inculturated with the values of the society. (2) Orality and writing were not in tension, but were complementary ways of teaching the culture and recalling the literary traditions. Written texts were shaped for the goal of oral performance, if only by reflex. (3) Literacy was not the ability to read or write, but the ability to master core literature, and that made one part of the social elite. (4) Students sometimes learned texts so archaic that they seemed nonsensical, but that process taught them obedience to their society. (5) Scribes might copy a text before them, but often they generated texts by memory and hence with creativity, like a musician performing a well-known work. Thus, there was no one “original text” for literary works because minor memory variations always existed. (6) Because the Gilgamesh Epic and the Enuma Elish were used to educate students early in the curriculum, they came to be known throughout the ancient world. Thus, biblical narratives reflect the influence of these works because Israelite scribes learned to write with them. (7) In the postexilic era, scribal training increasingly became part of the priestly domain, so that selected texts reflected priestly values. These texts would evolve into the Hebrew Scriptures. (8) The Bible ultimately is an educational-inculturation corpus, not a library of texts.

Here is some praise for his works here.

For my readers looking for a reading list or summary of the state of the field, the blog Hesed we ‘Emet posted his doctoral comprehensive reading list and also posted his summaries of the reading in long and short versions. From his notes you can see the importance of Carr’s work. (One can also see how Kugel and his approach does not play a role- see prior blog post.)

1) What is the innovation of your new book on the Bible? Why is memory important?

A starting point would be that I look to documented examples of scribal revision for models of how scribes preserved or revised texts. And one main thing I find is that even scribes reproducing a virtually identical copy of a given section of text would make the kinds of changes to texts– I call them “memory variants”– that people who have memorized texts do: they would substitute a synonym of a word for another, add or subtract minor grammatical particles, switch from one phrase to a syntactic equivalent. Apparently such scribes often did not visually copy texts they were citing or reproducing, but had memorized them and wrote them out from memory.

This fluid transmission of texts means that many criteria that scholars thought they could use for linguistic dating of texts or source identification are not as firm as we once thought.

Other things these documented examples of transmission teach us are the tendency of scribes to pollute the evidence through harmonizing texts with each other, their tendency to make small additions to texts that would be undetectable without manuscript documentation of different stages, and the way scribe/authors would only preserve parts of texts that they were otherwise appropriating large portions of. Observations like this don’t mean that we can’t continue to make plausible hypotheses about the growth of biblical texts, but it means that we now need to evaluate the evidence in biblical texts differently than we once did.

2) What is the role of historical dating of texts in your approach? And what tools do you use to date a Biblical text (parallels to other texts, Hebrew philology, and archeology)?

My main approach is to start by looking at the characteristics or “profile” of texts that we have good reason to think come from a given period. For example, can we build a profile of texts that seem to date from the Persian period as a way of potentially dating yet more texts to that period. To some extent, that may include linguistic criteria (“philological”) that scholars have used for dating texts to the Persian period before, such as significantly Aramaized Hebrew. But we must remember that the presence of Aramaic characteristics is not necessarily a sufficient criterion for dating a text to the Persian period since scribes easily could accidentally add Aramaic elements to older texts in the process of transmitting them fluidly, often by way of memory. Other important characteristics of many Persian period texts (especially later in the Persian period) are links to Priestly traditions/the temple and the project of rebuilding Jerusalem in general.

3) What historical documents and parallels need to be mastered to date Biblical texts?

I hear you asking about primary text resources, and the first thing I’d urge is immersing oneself in documented examples of scribal revision of ancient texts. I sometimes think that it would be very productive for an advanced graduate student to spend a solid year doing nothing but precisely comparing and analyzing the parallel sections of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, also looking at the major divergences between the 4QSama manuscript and MT/Chronicles/LXX, comparing the Septuagint edition of Jeremiah with Masoretic Jeremiah, looking at the different versions of the Qumran community rule, analyzing the relationship between 3 Esdras and Ezra-Nehemiah, etc. And that’s only looking at Hebrew and Greek resources! Adding non-biblical resources, especially different editions of Mesopotamian materials adds a whole additional and often informative dimension. The more one does this, the more one gets a gut-level sense of how texts grew. And you get a lot more humility about what we do if you constantly ask the question, “would I have been able to reconstruct this growth if I didn’t have these manuscripts in front of me?”

As for non-biblical, Ancient Near Eastern “parallels,” I’d recommend the helpful overview in Kenton Sparks’ book, Ancient Texts for the Study of the Bible: A Guide to the Background Literature (Hendrickson, 2005). It gives a survey of many of the most important texts, brief discussion of them, and some good bibliography.

It takes a lot more than such primary text work, of course, to make sense of all this information. I do believe that hundreds of years of academic, historical research on the Bible has much to teach us. For example, scholars have come up with some interesting and important ideas about how to date some texts to the time of Babylonian exile even though we know very little specific about that period. The challenge is to sort the more helpful ideas from the less helpful ones. I’ve tried to do that some in my recent book on The Formation of the Hebrew Bible, but I’ll be the first to admit that my synthesis has its own strengths and weaknesses.

4) How does your new book lay to rest the older hypothesis?

I don’t think it possible to lay any hypothesis permanently to rest, since hypotheses raised so far all link to different sorts of evidence in the text. That said, some of the terminological criteria most beloved by traditional source critics, e.g. variation in divine designation (YHWH versus Elohim) or terms for maidservant (‘amah versus shiphah) vary a significant amount in manuscripts that we have, let alone the centuries of textual transmission before our existing manuscripts. I still think there is strong enough evidence for distinguishing Priestly and non-Priestly traditions from one another. And I think there likely are very early chunks of material in the Bible, including parts of the Pentateuch. But the case for early, intertwined “J” and “E” sources (within the non-Priestly strand of the Pentateuch) is largely built on sand rather than rock. It pales in comparison to the case for the distinction between Priestly and non-Priestly strands in the Pentateuch.

5) What are your thoughts on American Jewish scholars or scholars in Israel? Why do the Jewish scholars seem to defend the documentary hypothesis more than non-Jewish scholars?

I don’t put a lot of stock in judging the motivations of scholars. We all have reasons, whether conscious or unconscious, for advocating certain hypotheses. That said, I sometimes wonder whether the revival of the source hypothesis among some scholars has been a scientific way of responding to a perceived drift toward widespread late dating of virtually the entire Pentateuch. And I actually share reservations about a push to see virtually the whole Pentateuch as Persian period or later. I think there are very early chunks of material in the Pentateuch, including legal and Priestly texts. I just have a lot more skepticism about being able to identify extended “J” and “E” sources and believe ever more profoundly in the need for what I call “methodological modesty” as we attempt to identify the earliest portions of the Bible (including the Pentateuch).

6) (Questions 6 from Joshua Berman) In a text with multiple layers of editing and redaction – so that there will be a so-called Deuteronomistic core to a text with, say, a priestly level of editing. The inconsistencies are resolved, according to this theory, by attributing the discordant elements to different levels of redaction. It is often asked, why then does the editor of the later level retain the material that does not square with his agenda? The standard answer that is given is that old material attains a certain status, and can only be tampered with but not removed. Do you have another approach?

I do think we need to think through our models for textual growth, especially when we are positing multiple layers which often conflict with another. How often, I wonder, could scribal groups pass a given authoritative text back and forth, each adding to a version of the text previously revised by an opposing group? I don’t know. But I do know that many (not all!) of our documented cases of scribal revision of texts involve only one or a few layers of revision, and often these layers seem to have been done by scribes with the same or a similar theological/ideological orientation.

7) (Questions 7 from Joshua Berman) To what degree can we speak of “authors” in the ancient world? More pointedly, when we see “fractures” (a Carr term) in a text could it be that we need to give more credence to the agent responsible for piecing things together as a creative agent, much as we see with the Gilgamesh epic?

I do think that ancient scribes were highly creative, even as they drew on and somewhat precisely preserved (with memory variants) earlier traditions. In this sense we can think of scribes as “authors,” albeit authors who constantly built on older oral and oral-written traditions. It was only toward the later ends of the transmission process, as scribes increasingly copied certain texts more precisely (such as the Pentateuch within the proto-Masoretic tradition) that at least some scribes just conserved and did not innovate.

8) You write that we can’t theorize from the armchair anymore about how biblical texts came to be. We need to have empirical models about how literary traditions grew in the ancient Near East. How does that inform your work and how does that contrast with prior scholars?

To some extent we still need to theorize from armchairs. I just think that we should learn as much as we can from documented (“empirical”) examples before we do so. And the more we learn from such documented examples, the more we realize the limits of our armchair theorization. We still can do it, but we will only achieve repeatable results that have some plausibility for others outside our ‘school’ if we gather a lot more data for our models than many of us are in the habit of doing.

9) How is JED + P different from JEPD? What’s the practical difference? Is the work scholars do on the basis of this theory going to be more productive than the work currently done using the older theory? How?

The main debate, as I see it, is between two models for the development of non-P materials: one that distinguishes between D, J and E, and one that distinguishes between D and other non-P materials but does not recognize early J and E sources. Usually the latter model (the one without J and E) invokes other models to explain the features used by older source critics to argue for J and E. In my view, these alternative models do a better job of explaining the evidence. But we all need a bit more humility in our claims of certainty for our hypotheses, especially hypotheses about the earliest stages of the development of the Pentateuch. In that sense, maybe the ultimate result of adopting such additional “methodological modesty” might feel frustratingly less productive!

10 ) How should the average person know who to trust if the field changes so often? What would you tell the simple reader who with their uneducated eyes thinks that scholars are just stating their personal opinions? How is it a scientific field?

This is a fair question. My first answer to stress those aspects of biblical scholarship that have proven to have a long shelf-life because they are built on such strong evidence, such as the distinction between exilic/post-exilic material in the book of Isaiah from a core of pre-exilic material in that book or the previously mentioned distinction between Priestly and non-Priestly strands of the Pentateuch (along with a fair amount of harmonization of each with the other). Though these distinctions have shifted some, they have held in their basic form for around two hundred years. That’s good! My hope is that the kinds of cautions and considerations I raise in my book would help us develop other broad theories about the growth of the Bible that would approach that kind of repeatability/longevity.

11) Do you have any thoughts on revelation? or the separation of history from theology?

One of the many things I appreciate about the Hebrew Bible is the way it depicts God as working through all kinds of human characters (e.g. Jacob, Joseph, King David, etc.), even some characters with base or even evil motives. As Joseph tells his brothers when they are cowering before him in Egypt afraid of his revenge for selling him into slavery, “what you planned as evil toward me, God planned as good” (Gen 50:20; see also 45:7-8). Scribes and the interpreters who shaped and sanctified the Bible may have had all kinds of motives and procedures, but God could–and I believe did–work through them in any case. And in my tradition (Christian-Quaker, originally brought up Methodist), we just pray that God likewise will work through us now as we continue to try to interpret the biblical tradition in a life-giving way. There are no textual guarantees, whether in the origination or ancient revision of the sacred text or in contemporary interpretation. We always are dependent on God making the best of our often mixed motives.

12)One of the reviews of your previous book notes that you have little to say about the attribution of the text to Moses and its sanctity as a product of Sinai. Can you say anything about the topic?

As a scholar, I’m interested in investigating the history of these beliefs about the Pentateuch. For example, we first start seeing the idea that Moses wrote the entire Pentateuch in the late Second Temple period, and that idea has its own background in the dynamics of that time. In this respect, I follow the great Jewish scholar Elias Bickerman, who suggests that Jews of that time countered Greek education centered on Homer and his epics with the idea that their Moses had written the whole Torah, a text which Hellenistic-period Jews argued was even earlier and better than the Greek classics.

I understand that others have other beliefs about these issues, but for me it is most important to recognize and stress to my students how the biblical text has come to be a medium of inspiration of Jewish and Christian communities over the centuries. I am constantly impressed and amazed at the ongoing power of these texts to speak to diverse contexts over millenia. That, for me, is what is profoundly powerful about them. In my opinion, attachment to specific authorial theories or assertions of historical accuracy often distracts from the task of seeing how one might responsibly interpret the text today.

13) If a religious scholar said that his goal was to date the core of the Pentateuch to the 13th century BCE to be contemporaneous with the Jewish dating of Moses, what advice would you give?

None of us comes to any such task without presuppositions, but I would have serious doubts about scholarship on dating that started out with the goal to date a biblical text to a particular period, whether the thirteen century BCE or the 2nd century BCE. By now in twenty + years of work, I have found myself changing my mind about dating and other issues based on the evidence before me, often in major ways. For me that is part of what distinguishes an evangelist for a particular perspective from a historian or “thinker” (which I aim to be). It is a curiosity about certain questions that powers a drive to find out more. Sometimes one is led by the evidence to conclusions that might seem odd or surprising to one’s colleagues. I’m ready at this point in my career to risk following such leads and seeing where they take me, and I learn much from the many others who do the same.

© Alan Brill 2012.

Here is a little Chanukah fun- a freylekhn Khannike.

Daniel Boyarin is currently one of the most renowned academic Talmudists and sits in the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley.

Boyarin’s Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, (1990) opens with a contextualization as an Orthodox Jew and his Sparks of the Logos: Essays in Midrashic Hermeneutics, (2003) has on the back cover a claim of correcting modern Orthodox culture. I had not been able to figure out what he meant since then. I did not want to be in suspense any longer, so, I decided to ask him a few questions.

Boyarin’s Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) has changed the discourse in the scholarship of the first centuries of Jewish Christian divide and his forthcoming The Jewish Gospels (2012) will create waves of discussion. These works are part of a vast discussion in America, Europe, and Israel. I find myself discussion this aspect of his work wherever I go. The scholarship informs religious discourse.

Boyarin’s work in Border Lines has served the role of shaking up habitual ways of working and thinking in the Jewish-Christian default line. But his views on Orthodoxy and especially the role of gender and politics do not have the same effect. The end of his answer in question 2 reflects my hesitations about his influence from the periphery of Berkeley on the dominant Orthodox hegemonic discourse of NY and Jerusalem.

1) You wrote in Intertextuality “I believe in and am comfortable … with the discourse of Orthodox Judaism” Can you explain some of your belief? Is Orthodoxy just a discourse without rabbinic power?

For me, discourse means precisely speech with power, so the discourse of Orthodox Judaism means precisely rabbinic power. In matters of halakha, whenever a question arises, I consult our mara deatra.. I have never been attracted to notions of deliberate halakhic change but have always thought that the slow evolutionary processes by which certain social changes take place within the structure of halakha has maintained a richness, groundedness, and sense of deep connection between what we do and what we have been commanded to do. In this sense, I am most comfortable, as I have said, with the discourse of orthodoxy.

But, for us, discourse also means speech per se, language, the text and thus Talmud Torah I’m not sure I would have survived in a culture/religion for which study was not central. For me, study is the most significant aspect of my liturgical life, as well. Perhaps the most important thing I would want to say about myself in this context to express again my deep love for the Talmud (all of classical rabbinic literature, to be sure, but especially the Bavli). One of the things that moves me most about study of the past is speaking with the dead, as Stephen Greenblatt once put it. The Talmud affords such a rich opportunity to speak with the dead owing precisely to its jumble of halakha, aggada, and even more than that that it’s like stepping into an ancient bazaar and being present with the folks living then, but these are our folks, our fathers and mothers, with whom we are speaking.

2) In Sparks of the Logos you seek “a rabbinic Judaism that would not manifest some of the deleterious social ideologies and practices that modern Orthodox Judaism generally does” What are those ideologies and practices?

I’m trying (or rather I was; I’ve given up a bit) to imagine an orthodoxy that would be free of the ethnocentrism and even racism that characterizes so much of contemporary orthodox language and political practice and one that would be as radically committed to economic justice for all as the Rabbis themselves. I don’t want to get into a political discussion here but, for me, as hinted below, Zionism does not seem like a traditional or historically orthodox solution to the problems of the Jews (although I will grant that it may have been necessary in some sense as well). The vulgarization and chauvinism that are so characteristic of so much of orthodox speech and practice today are hardly “Torah true” לפי עניות דעתי, and I think most orthodox leaders before the war saw it that way too.

I don’t want to be critical of others so much as to represent what I would have hoped for in my life (much more than I achieved), namely to demonstrate a practice of Torah and of Mitsvos that would authentically enable my own radical political commitments to social, economic, and ethnic solidarity and equality without making me marginalize myself within the orthodox community to which I felt so committed at the time. I feel that I have failed in several ways to live out this, perhaps naïve, original commitment, that I am neither as radical, nor as orthodox, in the end, as I had hoped to be. On the other hand, I am less certain than you are that Carnal Israel, at least, has had as little effect on understandings of gender within the traditional Orthodox community as you think and, perhaps, Unheroic Conduct, as well.

3) In several places you have offered a radical orthodoxy by going back the roots. Could there be a yeshiva or seminary of your radical orthodoxy?

A yeshiva or rabbinical seminary would look just like any other one but, on my lights, we would be looking to redirect some of the conversations that take place between us and our Torah about justice, not picking and choosing (otherwise it wouldn’t be orthodox in any sense) but emphasizing perhaps elements that are less emphasized today and soft-pedaling others; this would be more in line, I feel, with the ethical practices of Hazal themselves. While I find that Hazal not infrequently reflect, naturally, their own times and political conditions, there is always a striving for the highest of ethical standards, not only the bounds of the halakha, to fairness to other people, that sometimes seems to get lost among some modern orthodox interpreters of Yiddishkayt. To me, the radicality, the rootedness would be in the constant attention to the question: What does G-d want from me, from us, right now?

4) You offer Bertha Pappenheim the committed Orthodox feminist as a model for an alternative Orthodoxy, but her writings and actions produced a vehement reaction from Orthodoxy. Isn’t she by definition the opposite side of the border since the rabbis rejected her? (Most historians treat her as Anna O. who became an outspoken feminist but treat her Orthodoxy as beside the point or despite her work.)

Rabbi Shlomo Nobel and the Alexanderer Rebbe both supported her enthusiastically. I rest my case. I have written explicitly on the ways that I find that her orthodoxy was neither beside the point or despite her work. Some rabbis of the time, most of them were (with good reason) terrified at the negative attention that her work might bring to “The Jews,” through her exposure of the practices of some Jews who were capturing Jewish girls for foreign brothels. These two great rabbis from very different walks of life understood that the elimination of this horrific practice and other gross injustices perpetrated in Jewish life of the time against girls and women was obligatory and could not wait for “permission” from the anti-Semites, ימח שמם.

Pappenheim’s “orthodoxy” was, in large part, defined—and this is against the views of most other scholars who were hostile to it—by her understanding that these practices were absolutely against the Torah and not in cahoots with it חס ושלום. This insight on her part and the fact that it was supported by such eminences—and, of course, I am closer to Rabbi Nobel זצ”ל in my own style of life than to the Rebbe זצ”ל—provided me with a model of a commitment to radical social change while hewing closely, as close as my own יצר would let me, to learning and practicing the Torah. It gets harder and harder over the decades.

5) Do you have any favorite Orthodox thinker of the last 150 years?

The Satmerer Rebbe, זצ”ל. I am deeply resonant with the view of the Satmar Rav that the oath “not to arise as a wall” לא לעלות בחומה meant that Jews were not to seek temporal sovereignty until the Messiah comes.

6) You tell the story that in 1985 when you taught a summer course at YU’s BRGS you opened the first class announcing that “here you can mention that Torah is from Sinai.” What did this mean?

Without going into theology, I meant that we read the text both as a unity (which does not mean that it does not incorporate much tension) and also as written not only for its time but for all time in some profound and challenging sense. Some of the other teachers were so invested in being critical and scholarly that they were somehow (from my humble perspective) missing the point somewhat which is to learn Torah in a scholarly way and not to dismantle it for historicistic purposes. My teacher, Prof. Lieberman ז”ל said once that study in the university and study in the Yeshiva were the same thing.

7) Do you incorporate any Christian practice into your Judaism?

I don’t incorporate any Christian practice into my Judaism although I do study early Christian texts with a great deal of enthusiasm and pleasure at one direction that some Jews went in. And I don’t think the Gospels in themselves represent any departure from traditional Judaism, at any rate, no more than that of some Lubavitcher Hasidim. They represent one more historical grasp by some Jews at a Messiah. According to my interpretation of the Gospels, Jesus is never portrayed as abrogating the Torah, kashrut or the Sabbath at all.

Here is some date from two just released demographics. The first is an Avi Chai report by Marvin Schick who shows that there has only been a modest downturn in day school enrollment despite the economic downturn. One less Centrist school and very small increase – less than population growth. A very small downturn in Modem Orthodox  schools. And the biggest change in Solomon Schecters.

Dr. Marvin Schick has collected and provided enrollment data for schools outside the yeshiva world and Chassidic sectors.

The second new data points come from The North American Jewish Data Bank has released their latest estimates of the U.S. Jewish population (6,588,000). The full report is here. One item that struck my eye is actual data on the economic downturn as it applies to Baltimore Jews. It does not sound good. A smaller note of the survey is that they found the least antisemitism in Palm Beach and Middlesex county, NJ.

Of respondents in Baltimore, 10% reported that, economically, they are well off; 10% have extra money; 47% are comfortable; 30% are just managing to make ends meet; and 3% cannot make ends meet. The 67% who are well off, have extra money, or are comfortable compares to 80% three  years ago. 12% of households earn an annual household income
below 200% of the Federal poverty levels, and 43% of respondents reported a negative
impact of the recent economic downturn

Professor Ronald Dworkin, the leading legal theoritician of our time, (New York University) gave three lectures last week, first at NYU and then at the University of Bern, Switzerland on his new book on religion. His thesis is that without God, we still “have an innate, inescapable responsibility to make something valuable of their lives and that the natural universe is gloriously, mysteriously wonderful.” Einstein himself still used the word God as a Spinoza-based metaphor similar to his contemporaries. The first lecture seems a return to early twentieth thought of John Dewey and William Ernest Hocking but with out the need for the word God anymore.  Dewey (1859–1952),took a functional approach to religion in that it provided a humanistic social collective. God is the “unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and to action.”  Hocking (1873–1966)  in his The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912),  stressed the idea of religion as a quest for righteousness by cosmic demand, and as the finding of meaning in human experience.  His third lecture is the innovation in the application of this universal morality to global issues and international court cases.

1. Einstein’s Worship
2. Faith and Physics
3. Religion without God

See the three lecture videos here.
Further information here.
For the Full text of the NYU talks as a pdf – here
Abstract:
“For most people religion means a belief in a god. But Albert Einstein said that he was both an atheist and a deeply religious man. Millions of ordinary people seem to have the same thought: they say that though they don’t believe in a god they do believe in something “bigger than us.” In these lectures I argue that these claims are not linguistic contradictions, as they are often taken to be, but fundamental insights into what a religion really is.

A religious attitude involves moral and cosmic convictions beyond simply a belief in god: that people have an innate, inescapable responsibility to make something valuable of their lives and that the natural universe is gloriously, mysteriously wonderful. Religious people accept such convictions as matters of faith rather than evidence and as personality-defining creeds that play a pervasive role in their lives.

In these lectures I argue that a belief in god is not only not essential to the religious attitude but is actually irrelevant to that attitude. The existence or non-existence of a god does not even bear on the question of people’s intrinsic ethical responsibility or their glorification of the universe. I do not argue either for or against the existence of a god, but only that a god’s existence can make no difference to the truth of religious values. If a god exists, perhaps he can send people to Heaven or Hell. But he cannot create right answers to moral questions or instill the universe with a glory it would not otherwise have.

How, then, can we defend a religious attitude if we cannot rely on a god? In the first lecture I offer a godless argument that moral and ethical values are objectively real: They do not depend on god, but neither are they just subjective or relative to cultures. They are objective and universal. In the second lecture I concentrate on Einstein’s own religion: his bewitchment by the universe. What kind of beauty might the vast universe be thought to hold – what analogy to more familiar sources of beauty is most suggestive? I propose that the beauty basic physicists really hope to find is the beauty of a powerful, profound mathematical proof. Godly religions insist that though god explains everything his own existence need not be explained because he necessarily exists. Religious atheists like Einstein have, I believe, a parallel faith: that when a unifying theory of everything is found it will be not only simple but, in the way of mathematics, inevitable. They dream of a new kind of necessity: cosmic necessity.

In the third lecture, I consider the moral and political consequences of fully recognizing godless religion. Constitutions and international treaties across the world declare a right to religious freedom. We must understand this to protect godless as well as godly religions, and this important extension requires complex adjustments in human rights practice. It requires a difficult but indispensible distinction between personal questions about the nature and value of human life, which people must be allowed to decide for themselves, and questions of justice that a community must answer collectively. I end the three lectures by examining, in that light, a variety of controversial topics: state-supported religion, harmful religious rituals, homosexuality, abortion, and the banning of crucifixes, headscarves, burkas or minarets in public places.”

The abstract and information was taken from  Political Theory – Habermas and Rawls