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Prof. Kugel has accepted to answer some of the questions that I received on the prior conversation about revelation. Do not expect a third round. So if you are qualified and want to continue the conversation, then contact me about a guest post or email me a draft.

Prof. Kugel reiterates his approach to the challenge of modern biblical scholarship and again asserts that Orthodox Jews need not be afraid of it.  He also formulates a theory of prophecy, with content somewhat similar the medieval commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed; a prophecy that is above our comprehension and above the historical details. (This is my take, he avoids the medieval language.) The goal of revelation was to teach the people of Israel the service of God in their daily lives. This is the religion of mitzvot.

In Kugel’s reply, he compares the human apprehension of divine revelation to the human faculty of sight, specifically, our perception of colors, whereby different wavelengths of light reflected off of objects are turned into different colors inside our brains. “The wavelengths are indeed ‘out there,’” he writes, “but the color happens inside our brains.” So too with divine speech: it indeed starts “out there,” but it acquires the form it ultimately has inside the human brain. (AB- think of medieval theories of the agent intellect for prophecy.)

In saying this, Kugel does not address directly the matter of the Documentary Hypothesis or the presence of doublets, repetition, and other apparently human elements in the text, as do other scholars. For example, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer holds that the Torah exhibits different aspects (behinot) corresponding to the different “sources” in the Documentary Hypothesis, but these are all part of a single, divinely authored text and no proof of human intervention. Prof. David Halivni holds that the Torah is a Divine text, but that it became earthly and then was tragically broken and needed to be restored in the time of Ezra, so that the final product does indeed show signs of historical wear and tear and the presence of different voices. In contrast,  Kugel does not try to accommodate the historical reconstructions and multiple authors of the Documentary Hypothesis the way Breuer and Halivni do.

Kugel writes in a style both captivating and convincing, but expresses surprise that his Orthodox readership did not understand that his book How to Read the Bible was not intended specifically for them. He did not expect an  Orthodox audience who are too rationalistic for his Jewish approach and preferred the critical approach once they heard about it. They found Second Temple stories and Midrash too fanciful. He remarks: “I don’t see how they can be Orthodox if they can’t accept the traditional Jewish approach.” He may have misunderstood how some of his Orthodox readers sought to keep literature and psychology free of doubtful material  or how insular they were raised. The audience to whom he wishes to teach modern criticism once they can tell the difference “between Torah and Pentateuch” may be much smaller than he thinks.

Kugel does not answer why there are so many doublets, contradictions, tensions, etc. in the Tanakh, since he believes that the critical approach is completely incompatible with the traditional Jewish approach.

At this point, it may be need to bring into the Jewish discussion through selctive adaptation ideas from theologians who emphasize a second nativity or reading the Bible as part of a community’s exegesis such as Paul Ricoeur, George Lindbeck, Hans Frei or Cardinal Ratzinger. One can only push Biblisists so far, and no further, for philosophic formulation

Commenters please do not comment without having read the books. Also skeptics: your affirmation that you “Aint buying it” does not add to the discussion.

Dear Alan:

I’ve been somewhat overwhelmed by all the email generated by our motza’ei Shabbat conversation. I’m grateful for your invitation to expand on it a bit here (though I’m pretty sure I won’t get to answering all the questions raised). But I should also mention that I hope to have a little book coming out soon that addresses a lot of these issues. It’s Part II of a book I wrote some years ago called On Being a Jew, which took the form of a dialogue between a young man just discovering Judaism and a more knowledgeable, older fellow, who leads him through a series of basic issues and concepts. I had always intended to have that book followed by a Part II: it begins four years later, the younger guy having spent the intervening time in yeshiva in Israel. Now he has a different set of questions, some of them the same as, or at least related to, the questions raised in our earlier conversation and those subsequently sent in to your website. So, if I don’t get to everything in this writing, let me put in a plug for Part II, which is called The Kingly Sanctuary.I should have it out in some form pretty soon, and as soon as I know when, I plan to announce it on my website, jameskugel.com.

Now, here are some answers to questions:

1) Why did Kugel bother writing a whole book about modern biblical scholarship if he thinks it’s irreconcilable with traditional Jewish belief?

I think a lot of your correspondents don’t realize that How to Read the Bible was not written primarily for Orthodox Jews, in fact, not for Jews at all. The book was aimed at any educated reader interested in the Bible, which includes an awful lot of Christians, plus some Muslims, Buddhists, etc. as well as people with no connection to any particular religion.

What I wanted to show to all these readers was the great gap between the Bible as it was generally understood by both Jews and Christians in earlier times and the Bible as it is understood today by modern biblical scholars. So that’s what I did, contrasting the two approaches in chapter after chapter. The point of this, apart from teaching about both ancient biblical interpretation and the basics of modern scholarship, was to raise an important question: hasn’t this whole modern approach seriously undermined the role that Scripture used to play in Judaism and Christianity?

Most Orthodox Jews don’t have any troubling answering “yes” to that question (in fact, some of them would answer, that’s why we don’t want to hear about it).  But lots of other people found my question very disturbing, or else it just made them mad—among them, not surprisingly, many of my colleagues, people who teach modern scholarship in universities and Christian seminaries. Some of them wrote pretty negative reviews: “Kugel overstates the case, the Bible is alive and well,” “Modern scholarship only enhances our knowledge, which can’t be bad,” etc. etc. Actually, not all of these reviews were written by Christians; at least one of the nastier ones came from a Jewish Bible professor eager to denounce my book as too “Orthodox” in its whole approach.

So I ended up alienating people on my right (Orthodox Jews who somehow concluded that I was endorsing the modern approach) and people on my left (who attacked me for not endorsing the modern approach). You might say that this is the true mark of success, proof that I hit it just right. But actually, in terms of what I set out to do, I would have to judge the book a failure. I may be wrong, but I think a lot of my Christian colleagues read one or two of the “too Orthodox” reviews and never even bothered to look at the book or consider its argument, while a lot of Orthodox Jews looked at the table of contents and dismissed it for exactly the opposite reason.

2) Isn’t Kugel being inconsistent? On the one hand, he says that modern scholarship is irreconcilable with tradition Jewish beliefs, and on the other he says Orthodox Jews who don’t want to know about it are “hiding their heads in the sand.” Which is it?

Actually, I don’t find these two things to be contradictory. As I explained last time (no need to repeat here) modern scholars and traditional Judaism don’t even agree on what the “text” is: the former take it to be strictly the words on the page, the latter to include the whole Oral Torah (torah she-be’al peh). This is no minor disagreement: it represents two completely opposed notions of how to read the Bible. But precisely for that reason, I don’t believe Orthodox Jews need to hide from modern scholarship: its Pentateuch and our Torah exist on two different planes. Of course, I know that there are people who nevertheless feel quite threatened by the whole approach of modern scholars; I’ve always said I’d never compel anyone to study this material. But for me, in any case, I really wanted to know about it, and I think there are a lot of Orthodox Jews like me. So to them I would say: if you truly understand the difference between “Pentateuch” and “Torah,” then go ahead. (But maybe, for some people, it should be like studying the Zohar: age forty and up.)

3)Why doesn’t Kugel say anything about medieval parshanut and medieval ideas about Torah—Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashbam, the Rambam, Ramban, etc.?

The story of the rise of medieval parshanut has been told many times and the various contributory factors are well known: the entrance of Greek philosophical ideas into the Arabic-speaking world and their impact on Jewish biblical interpreters from Se’adya on; the fierce Islamic critique of Judaism; the rise of Karaism; the development of Hebrew grammars and Hebrew lexicography; and yet others. All these things combined to cast traditional Jewish exegesis into doubt, indeed, to make Jewish Scripture itself look silly. That’s where the whole movement of medieval parshanut started, and who could blame its brilliant practitioners?

But these are different times now. We now know full well where the approach of the pashtanim ultimately leads, and you can’t start down that path today without going all the way; the search for peshat didn’t end in the Middle Ages. So if it’s peshat you’re after, then eventually you have to consider not just what Rashbam wrote in the twelfth century, but what is known now about the historical circumstances in which this or that text was uttered, since this will certainly illuminate the peshat. You’ll also have to concern yourself with the archaeology of the ancient Near East and what it has revealed about biblical history, as well as with all the ancient Near Eastern writings that parallel biblical passages and what these may teach us about peshat—what, for example, ancient Mesopotamian law may show about the straightforward meaning of this or that legal passage (as well as the implications of the Mesopotamian law codes’ historical priority to the biblical texts in question).

You’ll also have to consider questions of the authorship of various books and parts of books (since you really can’t talk about peshat and ignore all that scholars have concluded about the chronology and the unity of different biblical books and passages). Eventually, you’ll have to start looking at the Big Questions—the origins and nature of Israel’s God as reflected in Ugaritic epic; the whole of Israelite cultic practices, i.e. sacrifices and holy days and tum’ah and tahorah, in the light of Mesopotamian cultic worship; likewise, the origin of the people of Israel as currently understood by scholars and the impact of this understanding on the peshat meaning of the Bible’s account of same—in short, you can’t start down the road of peshat and stop once you get to the eighteenth or nineteenth century because it becomes inconvenient after that. So I’m altogether a follower of Hazal  (the rabbinic sages of the opening centuries of the common era) and the approach to Torah that they championed. That is the true theological significance of the doctrine of the torah she-be’al peh.

4)What does Kugel really think went on at Mount Sinai? How much of the Torah as we have it—if anything!—was actually given to Moses? If he accepts the idea of scholars that the Torah was put in its final form in the Persian period, does this not contradict the plain historical statement that Moses was given the Torah at Sinai?

I tried last time to address the significance of the Torah’s own narrative of mattan Torah by contrasting the theme of Torah min ha-Shamayim with Torah mi-Sinai. With regard to the latter, I alluded to what is said in Sifrei Bemidbar (Beshallah 112), “Anyone who said, ‘The whole Torah was spoken by the Holy One, except that this one thing/word Moshe said on his own (mippi ‘atzmo amaro)’—this is what is meant by ‘He has spurned the word of the Lord’ [Num 15:31].” In other words, Hazal insisted that Moshe was strictly the conduit for God’s words; in their view, he himself had no role in establishing its contents.

As for Mount Sinai, it was so significant to them that no one today has any idea where the real Mount Sinai is. (The place that tour-guides take you to, called in Arabic Jebl Musa, is simply someone’s wild guess of where Sinai might have been. The only ancient Jew I know of to have expressed an opinion on the mountain’s location said it was “in Arabia,” which would put it considerably to the east of the Sinai peninsula.) Actually, it seems that Jews lost sight of Sinai’s geographic location fairly early in biblical times. What was significant in the Sinai narrative was the fact that the Torah came from God; it is not, as others would have it, a “human reaction to the ineffable.” But equally important is the fact that it was given into human hands.

I can certainly imagine a holy book of some other people claiming (somewhat Platonically) that its words are but a pale reflection of the true text, which remains in heaven. That’s not Judaism. So, if one considers these two central principles of the Torah’s own narrative—that the Torah came from God and that the Torah was given over to human beings—then Torah mi-Sinai will itself be seen to embody what I said is the crucial teaching, Torah min ha-Shamayim.

But perhaps I should repeat here something that the older fellow in my forthcoming Kingly Sanctuary says (which is not too different from I have been saying for quite a while): The whole purpose of the Torah is to teach ‘avodat ha-Shem. In fact, the Kingly Sanctuary’s protagonist (“Albert Abbadi”) goes on to describe the Torah as “Volume One of a multi-volume work entitled How to Serve God”; it is followed by other volumes, the Mishnah and Tosefta and the tannaitic midrashim and the Talmud and the medieval codes and so forth. This is certainly not to equate all of these, but to assert that they all constitute a single trajectory. That trajectory began with the Torah, and its divine origin is no insignificant circumstance. But believing in Torah min ha-Shamayim does not imply that the Torah is the last word (otherwise, why do we have these other books?). Rather, it is the first word, and its literal text never was equated with the whole Torah.

Indeed, as I also tried to say as clearly as I could last time, a central doctrine of Judaism is that what starts in heaven is eventually handed off to human beings. That’s the meaning of lo ba-shamayim hi, “It’s no longer in heaven.” Somewhere, at some point in this trajectory, it comes down to earth and human beings take over. Considered from this standpoint, I don’t think much is theoretically at stake in where that line is drawn; it has to be drawn somewhere. I’ve heard people say that every word of the Babylonian Talmud was divinely inspired, and every word of Rashi’s perush to it was divinely inspired, and the Shulhan Arukh was divinely inspired, and all the teshuvot of R. Moshe Feinstein ztz”l were divinely inspired, and so forth. I think this is to miss the whole idea of this divine-to-human handoff, which is so central to Judaism.

5) How can the Torah come from God if it contains elementary mistakes in physics or biology or history?

If we really understood what it means for God to speak to human beings, we would know just how much of a part the human mind plays in the process. But we don’t. Let me mention, by way of analogy, something about our own faculty of sight. Neuroscientists know full well that the objects that we see with our eyes really have no color. Nothing is blue or red or whatever. Rather, what happens is that light (from the sun or an electric bulb or whatever) is reflected off objects in different wavelengths. These wavelengths in and of themselves might be altogether insignificant, but long, long ago, brains developed the capacity to sort them into colors in a process that starts, in humans, with those wavelength-sensitive “cones” in our retina. But that’s only the beginning of a long journey, which moves next to the optic nerve and from there to the optic chiasm, at the base of the hypothalamus; there the information from both eyes is combined and eventually passed on to something else called the LGN (lateral geniculate nucleus), which in humans is a six-layered sensory relay nucleus that further processes and sorts the information until it is forwarded to the visual cortex, way at the back of the brain above the cerebellum. (The visual cortex is actually the largest system in our brain and the one responsible for ultimately making sense of all the input deriving from the previous stages.) What does this mean? It means that there is nothing essential, nothing inherent in the object viewed, to connect it to the color that we perceive. The wavelengths are indeed “out there,” but the color happens inside our brains. Someone could take a computer and program it to assign quite different colors to various wavelengths and so produce a very different picture of what is seen. (This is somewhat similar to what scholars have done with some previously unreadable parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, causing the black letters of the scroll to emerge from the parchment on which they were written, despite the fact that, to our eyes, both the letters and the parchment are indistinguishably black.) The nimshal is this (and its implications go even beyond the matter of divine speech): we simply don’t know the beginning of the process we call prophecy, i.e., God speaking to a human being. All we know is what comes out the other end, after the intervention of a human brain.

.6)Does Kugel accept a version of Halivni’s corrupted text theory? If that’s not his explanation for imperfections in the text, what is? Does he expect us to adopt the “solutions” suggested in the Book of Jubilees and the like?

I guess I’ve answered some of this in the above. And although I am a great admirer of Professor Halivni, I don’t think his idea of a corrupted text is the way to go. But I would like to say one thing in this connection. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as from the close textual analyses undertaken by scholars over the past century and more, that our biblical texts were not static. You give to someone, an ancient prophet or sage, a text of the words of God as transmitted to the prophet Isaiah or Jeremiah, and what does he do? He changes them. He moves this over there, he puts some material that came after the beginning of the book and makes it into the new beginning, he glosses and explains and elaborates. Sometimes he does this on a very large scale. We know from Qumran that there were two “editions” of the book of Jeremiah; one version, attested in the Old Greek translation of the Bible as well as in some Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, was about ten chapters shorter than our Masoretic version of Jeremiah (also attested on some Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts), and the chapters were arranged somewhat differently. It appears, though not irrefutably so, that the shorter version was expanded (rather than the longer version having been abbreviated).

With regard to all such changes—and there are a lot more—you want to ask that meddling scribe or sage or prophet: How dare you? Someone gives you divrei Elokim hayyim and you start switching things around and adding to them? How dare you?! And the answer is: he dare. And although changing the actual text ceased at a certain point, ancient biblical interpretation continued to accomplish precisely the same thing without changing a word. The endless refrain of those interpreters—people who otherwise had little in common with each other, Philo of Alexandria and ben Sira and the author of Jubilees and so forth—is always the same: “The text says X, but what it really means is Y.” In this sense, I think, there is a direct line leading from text alteration to biblical interpretation: they look like two completely different things, but viewed from a distance, their similarity is unmistakable. And this way of viewing sacred texts, in one form or another, has been there from the very start.

Do I expect people to accept the “solutions” found in Jubilees? I expect Orthodox Jews to accept, to champion, the solutions found in the writings of Hazal (although, as my earlier remark about Rashi versus Yalkut Shim’oni was intended to convey, midrashic collections generally present multiple solutions to the same textual problem, and these frequently contradict one another). Then why am I bothering with Jubilees? Because the earliest texts of Hazal were written down four hundred years after Jubilees. Jubilees and other writings from the same period thus afford us a glimpse of part of the Torah she-be‘al peh at an earlier stage (though I don’t mean to equate the two)—that’s how I got interested in pre-Hazal midrash in the first place. But quite apart from this, the reason I used Jubilees and other pre-Hazal sources in How to Read the Bible was that I did not want my Christian readers to think that midrash was strictly a Hazal-ic (that is, rabbinic) operation: it was there long before, and is as much a part of what Christianity inherited from earlier Judaism as the books of the Bible themselves.

Last week, I attended a wonderful symposium in Yarnton Manor, Oxford on “Orthodox Judaism and Theology in the 21st Century”. I thank Miri Freud B Kandel (Oxford) and Adam Ferziger (Bar Ilan University) for all their wonderful work organizing the delightful conference which included an intimate Shabbat for the participants. I will have several blog posts about the conference. The session in which I spoke “Orthodox Judaism and the Bible” consisted of Joshua Berman “Jeremy Bentham and the Modern Perception of Contradiction in Biblical Law,” Alan Brill, Orthodoxies confront Biblical Criticism: Must Orthodox be Orthodox?, Tamar Ross, Orthodoxy and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism, and James Kugel was the respondent to our papers. The core of Berman’s paper was already posted on this blog, and I will post mine in upcoming weeks, the core conclusion of which is that: Yes, one must be Orthodox and that Louis Jacobs was closer to Reform thinkers in his theology by the 1970’s.

In the response to our papers, Kugel stressed how should not preclude that God can actually talk and that we should not use Biblical criticism for theologies. The positions that Kugel explained during the weekend was not the same as the position that many ascribe to him. When Shabbat was over and the others were eating the melavah malka buffet, I sat down in another room with Kugel for a conversation about his opinions and to explain the Orthodox community to him. I recorded some of his points to which Kugel kindly responded with greater detail. The bold print is my echoes of what he said to which he replied in writing.

The Jewish approach, the Rabbinic approach,is one of Torah min Hashamyim as an ongoing process of explaining, reworking, and interpreting the text.

Dear Alan—thanks for all of this, and please excuse all my fussy diyyukim below.
Well, the Jewish approach is certainly Torah min ha-Shamayim, but saying it’s an “ongoing process” might mislead people. For me, Torah min ha-Shamayim is the belief that the Torah was given to Israel by G-d, period. I wouldn’t want to seem to say by this that the text of our Torah was given over a period of centuries or anything like that—just that it is all of divine origin.

I also said that no modern biblical critic that I know of has ever suggested that scholarship can prove or disprove the divine origin of the Torah: this is a matter of belief. The Torah consists of words, and there is no litmus test that can determine that this word came from G-d while that word was inserted by Moses (or someone else). Words are words are words. Even if someone could point to contradictions within the Torah, or apparently unnecessary repetitions, or signs of later editing or interpolation—none of this has any bearing on the Torah’s divine origin: after all, who makes up the rules of what a divine text can or cannot consist of? This may sound like an apologetic approach, but when you think about it, it’s just the simple truth: who are we to determine what or how G-d can put in His book, or how it can arrive in our hands?

The phrase “Torah mi-Sinai” is entirely different: it refers to a particular place, Mt. Sinai, and implies a particular time and person, Moshe at the time of Ma’amad Sinai. A modern scholar can certainly take issue with this doctrine (and lots of them do). I myself have never done so; never.

Frankly, I don’t believe that doing so is consistent with being a religious Jew. (Of course, I reported in my book about the whole development of the Documentary Hypothesis, and I know that some readers took this as an endorsement of it—but that’s because they misunderstood, or never got to, the basic argument of that book—on which see more below.) I would say, however, that Torah mi-Sinai and Torah min ha-Shamayim exist on two completely different planes and are not, therefore, of equal importance. Torah min ha-Shamayim is what counts. As Hazal said, anyone who says the whole Torah comes from G-d except for this one pasuk, which Moshe wrote on his own—such a person is a blasphemer who dishonors the Torah.

Jews do not study the text
I meant: “Jews do not study the biblical text alone, in isolation,” because for us the Torah is not, and never was, just the Torah’s own words on the page, but it was those words plus the interpretations and explanations of the Torah she-be’al peh that constituted the Torah’s true meaning.

I’d put it this way: I have said from time to time (somewhat whimsically) that it might have been better if, instead of printing Humash with Rashi, publishers had started out printing Humash with Yalkut Shim’oni, since, unlike Rashi’s commentary (which, for all sorts of laudable reasons, sought to eliminate any inconsistencies between one midrash and another and therefore made a specific kind of selection of various midrashim), Yalkut Shim’oni preserves that kind of tentative, and strikingly modest, character of midrash: “It could be this, but on the other hand, here’s another explanation.” What bothers me is that nowadays people learn Rashi as if it simply is what the text means; it is the Torah. Among other things, I don’t think this is good pedagogically. It works fine with third-graders. But by the time they get to high school, most of them know Hebrew pretty well, and they know that those Hebrew words in the pasuk don’t mean what Rashi says they mean. So how can Rashi be the Torah? At this point, the best of them develop a new interest in biology or social studies, because limmudei kodesh don’t seem to fit with their notion of the truth.

Kugel accepts Torah from Sinai through Moshe as a historic event but more important is that Torah from Heaven in the continuous reading of meaning in the text.

It’s what I said above about Torah min ha-Shamayim being the crucial matter. I could not, and would not want to, be part of a religion that claimed that Torah was a human creation, or that it is, as I’ve heard some people say, “a human reaction to the ineffable divine.” At the same time, though, I think it is a basic principle of Yahadut that what starts in heaven is inevitably given over to human beings. “Lo ba-shamayim hi” means “the Torah is no longer in Heaven.” It started out there, but then it was given to our sages to adjudicate.

Rather than cite the much-cited Oven of Akhnai story or any of the others, I’d mention a matter close to my own area of research, the calendar. There was this great calendar that some Jews used in Second Temple times: it worked automatically on the basis of the solar year—30-day months with an extra 5 or 6 days added to keep pace with the sun, hence no need for witnesses to go to Beit Yaazek and testify before the beit din that they had seen the new moon, no need to intercalate a whole month at irregular intervals,, and the hagim were never, as we say, “early this year” or “late this year,” because they were basically in sync with the sun. Was this calendar not a better representation of the passage of time than the calendar of Hazal? After all, it was G-d who set the sun in the sky and it was that solar year that had to be followed if Pesah was to occur in the spring and Sukkot in the fall; why play around with lunar months and all the difficulties they entailed? (If you read the words of the Torah alone, there is no indication that the months it speaks of are lunar months, dependent on sightings of the new moon.) But Hazal gloried in the idea that the sacred calendar was NOT automatic, that it required human beings as witnesses and a beit din to interrogate them (“Hakhazek ra’ita o khazeh—did it look like this, or did it look like that?”). And they made sure to stress the point by having us say the berakhah “mekaddesh yisrael ve-rashei hodashim” which means: You gave us the authority to determine the calendar, having us establish not only when each new month starts, but also when all the holy days within it occur, hence “mekaddesh yisrael ve-ha-zemenaim,” and even “mekaddesh yisrael ve-yom ha-kippurim.” This is a striking instance of the principle, “Lo ba-shamayim hi,” what starts in Heaven is given over to humans to interpret and apply.

Biblical scholarship and Biblical criticism is fundamentally a Protestant endeavor and antithetical to the Jewish approach.
Absolutely. The whole Protestant movement began with the rejection of interpretive traditions or anything like our Torah she-be’al peh: the only thing that mattered was the Bible’s own words, or, as they said, “Sola Scriptura,” by Scripture alone. That’s why biblical criticism began as, and still largely remains, a Protestant undertaking, still pursued for the most part in Protestant centers like Germany, Scandinavia, England, Holland, the U.S. and Canada—and, for various easily discerned reasons, in modern Israel as well.

The title “How to Read the Bible” as explained in my introduction was to show two radically different approaches to how to read the Bible.
True enough. But, by the way, I never wanted to call the book How to Read the Bible. That was the publisher’s idea. I wanted to call it: The Bible and its Interpreters. Most of my previous books had been published with university presses, which generally let you call your book what you want. But they don’t get your book into bookstores, so if you’re interested in reaching a wider public, you sometimes have to make a deal with the devil. So I accepted “How to Read the Bible.” (I originally thought I would make it, “How to Read the Bible: a Modern Dilemma,” but my publisher said: “Nobody want to buy a dilemma.”)

I’m sure some people were misled by this title (despite what I think I made clear in the preface). I know some people even thought—in spite of everything I wrote in the preface, the introduction, and the final chapter—that I was recommending that people adopt the conclusions of modern biblical scholars as the way to read the Bible. That was actually the opposite of my message. Don’t get me wrong: some of these modern scholars were nothing short of brilliant readers and thinkers. But they all approached the job of reading the Bible from the Protestant assumptions that I have described—which were quite at odds with the assumptions that had always accompanied the reading of the Bible in an earlier age.

It might have helped some readers to know something about the work I have done as a professor. I suppose that many of them just assumed that I have spent my life writing about, and contributing to, modern biblical criticism. Actually, almost all of my previous books and articles (starting in 1982) have been about ancient biblical interpretation, things in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the sefarim hitzonim (the book of Jubilees, Ben Sira, etc.). Among those books: Ancient Biblical Interpretation (1986), In Potiphar’s House (1990), The Bible As It Was (1997), Traditions of the Bible (1998), The Ladder of Jacob (2006), and A Walk Through Jubilees (2012). I’m sure that almost anyone who knew my previous research could not misconstrue the message of How to Read the Bible: it is all about the role of ancient biblical interpretation in determining the meaning of the biblical text, a role that had existed long before the elements of the Torah she-be-‘al-peh first began to be committed to writing at the end of the second century C.E.

Protestants are basically concerned with the text itself and all that modern scholars now know about the historical and other circumstances connected to it. Jews, by contrast, are concerned with the text as it has always been interpreted in the Torah she-be’al peh, which is often at odds with the literal meaning of the Torah’s own words.

AB– I wrote “He rejects Moshe Greenberg, Nahum Sarna, and anyone who attempts to create a Jewish version of Biblical criticism.”
Actually, I knew both these scholars and admired them. But I do think that they were chasing a phantom, a synthesis of traditional Judaism and biblical criticism. The very basis of such a synthesis is incompatible with Jewish tradition. This approach just assumed that biblical criticism was, or could be made to be, compatible with traditional Judaism: and the solution and integration was just around the corner. But somehow, it never materialized.

It never could because biblical criticism is concerned with the literal meaning of the Bible’s words on the page, divorced from Judaism’s age-old traditions of interpretation. That is to say, Jews and Protestants can’t even agree on what the text is. For Protestants, it’s the words on the page, sometimes supplemented with archaeological or historical data gleaned from excavations in the Middle East. These data are certainly interesting, in fact, fascinating—but they don’t have anything to do with Torah in the classical Jewish sense.

This critique also applies to Orthodox Bible scholars who think they can teach philological peshat and the Near East context as part of an overall Jewish approach. Creating derashot that mix midrash and Mesopotamian elements in the text is a kind of sha’atnez that must ultimately be unfaithful to either approach, and usually ends up censoring out of each anything that might call into question their combination. It’s just a kind feel-good operation. Lots of people like this feel-good stuff, including lots of Orthodox Jews.

I wrote “He rejects the approaches of Rosenzweig and Jacobs.”Kugel deleted it and explained:

I didn’t like it because it seemed too general. Rosenzweig was basically a trained philosopher, so rejecting his approach might mean almost anything (philosophers trying to make sense of Judaism, his ideas about Bible translation, etc.); Louis Jacobs… my sense so far is that it’s more a matter of his conclusions than his approach (I’m not sure there’s anything distinctive about his approach).

Kugel does not like Bible as literature.

I don’t like the “Bible as Literature” approach primarily because it’s another feel-good operation, designed to get us to appreciate what Norman Mailer once called (sarcastically) “the great novelist in the Lord.” We don’t honor Scripture above all other writings because it’s the most beautiful or artistic; that’s Islam. The Torah is our most sacred book, divrei Elokim hayyim; it’s not about literary excellence. What’s more, the “Bible as Literature” approach is often unconvincing: it finds great artistry where it wants and overlooks anything in the text that might counter this conclusion.

He accepts the entire text as Torah min Hashamayim and therefore rejects any approach that minimizes God’s role.

It is certainly not illogical to believe that God can communicate with human beings, as some have suggested: This is the whole idea of prophecy, and without it Judaism cannot be said to exist.

Do you limit God’s activity to only inspiration of the Biblical authors or a vague inspiration of God’s will?
As I’m sure you know,inspiration is a very tricky term for modern theologians, Jews and Christians as well: for some them, it isn”t something less than actual divine speech, so I”d rather leave that term out of the discussion entirely. But I’d be happy to reword what I wrote in blunter form and say: I believe that God does speak to man; this is the whole principle of prophecy, and without it Judaism cannot be said to exist.

His field is ancient interpretation of the text, not modern Biblical criticism. He is surprised that people think he is a Biblical critic or that he works in that field or made any contribution to that field. He has not. On the other hand, he thinks Orthodox Jews should learn to live with Biblical criticism the way they have learned to live with such things as Darwinian evolution or modern astrophysics.

I think it is best to deal with modern biblical scholarship not by hiding from it, but by understanding that its underpinnings are based on a conception of Scripture that is altogether alien to Judaism and, frankly, to everything other scholars and I have discovered about the very idea of Scripture as found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient texts.

If only Maimonides were alive, he certainly wouldn’t hide from Biblical criticism. [AB- The same way he showed everyone how not to be bothered by the eternality of the world or naturalistic Aristotelians.]

Yes!

He cannot account for the emblem he has become.

None of what I’ve said in the above is new: it’s all in the last chapter of How to Read the Bible, as well as in earlier works such as The Bible As It Was and In Potiphar’s House. Nor, frankly, have I said any of the above to find favor in the eyes of my critics, Teaneck or otherwise.

If they want a Bad Guy—well, I’m sorry if it has to be me; I don’t think anyone likes the idea of being disliked. On the other hand, the things I’ve said here, and in my book, are really pretty straightforward. If some people are of such a nature as to willfully distort what I’ve said above and in my books, well, I’m not sure I’d want to convert them into allies even if I could. Let them seek out the company of others, Orthodox Jews who would rather hide their heads in the sand than even acknowledge that modern biblical scholarship exists, or else the feel-good people who try to make everything work out by a selective reckoning with the evidence. In the end, I don’t think either of these approaches can succeed.

On the other hand, I do believe that in fifty or a hundred years, a lot of Orthodox Jews will wonder what all the shouting was about; modern biblical scholarship, like Darwinian evolution or astrophysics, will just have receded into the background. Who knows, maybe some will even understand what I have been saying about the difference between the very idea of Torah in Judaism and the quite different, Protestant conception of Scripture underlying the whole enterprise of modern biblical scholarship.

My Comments not vetted by Kugel
By the last quarter of this hour discussion, we had gathered a small group of listeners who started to participate in the last round of questions. In the discussion of Kugel’s being singled out, the listeners started to point out the lack of education in the community. How many in the community think the words of the Talmud were from Sinai, how they think there is direct causal reward for mizvah observance and observe Judaism out of fear, how they accept outreach arguments like the kuzari proof. How they approach Torah text with mechanical literalism, even when do the new approaches of Bible as literature. The discussion turned to how Orthodox pick up Kugel’s book and think that he is preaching the Enlightenment critiques of religion, which are certainly more readily available elsewhere than his book. The fact that Orthodox, even modern ones, read his book and hear about common academic ideas for a first time is not to be laid at his feet.

Kugel has little interest in addressing or correcting the low level readers of his book lacking a good humanities education. He did not realize that not just high school students but most of the community including leaders, authors, Bible teachers, and high school Jewish studies teachers lack his requisite erudition. He was more than shocked at the lack of basic exposure in the Orthodox community to historical thinking and critical studies. He will be publishing a sequel to his introductory work On Being a Jew where he will discuss Biblical criticism and Judaism but none of the content of this interview. He does not think it is needed and if it is,then it is not his audience.

This is not my final post about Kugel’s work. I still seek to process in my mind: his giving preference to Jubilees and Wisdom of Solomon over Rabbinics, his method of treating everything as eisegesis without problems to be solved, and his Spartan view of not seeing the poetics and values that can still be found within and in comparison to Mesopotamian texts. Most of all, I need to recheck his writings and see if they were as free of ambiguity as he claimed.
If you comment, please reread the rules for comments and remember the discussion is the contents and topic of the interview not outreach arguments or your opinion of academia.
(P.S-If you catch typos, just leave me a comment with corrections. This is my longest post ever, three times the size as my usual limit.)

This Wednesday, January 30, 2013– 7:30 p.m.
Jubilee Hall Auditorium, Seton Hall University,

We will host
Dr. Peter Schäfer, Princeton University

Two Powers in Heaven? The Emergence of Binitarian Ideas in Pre-Christian Judaism
(The title seems like a reply to Boyarin)
If you are an academic and want to join for dinner, then contact me off line.
I will also be selling my last two books for $43 and $49 respectively.

Peter Schäfer is currently the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, as well as the Director of Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies. Before this he served for 25 years as Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Institute of Judaism at the Free University of Berlin. He held positions as Visiting Professor at Oxford, Hebrew University and Yale University. In 1994, Dr. Schäfer was awarded the Leibniz Prize, the highest award for German scholars, and in 2006 he received the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award. Dr. Schäfer has published extensively about rabbinic literature and history, early Jewish mysticism, and Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. He edited the corpus of Hekhalot literature, the Talmud Yerushalmi and (with Sh. Shaked) magical texts from the Cairo Geniza. His most recent books are Jesus in the Talmud (2007), The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (2009, paperback 2011) and The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (2012).

For those in Teaneck who read this in the next two hours, Prof James Kugel will be the scholar in residence this Shabat Dec 28-29 at Davar- 1500 Sussex: Friday night at 4:20pm – talk #1 Regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls; Saturday morning talk #2 Joseph’s Change of Heart in pre-rabbinic midrash; Saturday afternoon at 4:00pm – talk # 3 Modern Biblical Scholarship and Traditional Judaism: a discussion. For those in Jerusalem, these will be a conference on Ultra-Orthodoxy- program below. If anyone want to blog it then let me know.

Conference on Ultra-Orthodoxy: Between Modernity and Post-Modernity
Monday-Tuesday, 31 December 2012-1 January 2013,
The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute– 43 Jabotinky Street, Jerusalem Tel.

Ultra-Orthodoxy emerged in European Jewish society as a reaction to modernity and was an outgrowth of the processes whereby Orthodox communities were consolidating in defense against the challenges of an open society. This led to innumerable struggles and divisiveness, to great successes but also to catastrophic failures bordering on total disintegration. These processes were contradictory and complex and they included intra-Jewish events, among them conflicts with modern Jewish movements, as well as external political events that had a decisive influence on the fate of the Jews. During the second half of the twentieth century these communities took root, enjoying enormous growth; their influence spread over the entire Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora.
It is apparent that, contrary to expectations, the postmodernist era gave added impetus to the influence of ultra-Orthodox communities despite the great variety and differences between them.

Monday, December 31, 2012
10:30 – 11:15
Opening Session
Menachem Friedman, The Unclear Distinction between Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy

11:30 – 13:00
Trends and Transformations
Chair: Yosef Salmon

David Sorotzkin, Jewish Orthodoxy in Early Modern Europe and the Formation of 19th-Century Ultra-Orthodoxy

Chaim I. Waxman, The Americanization of Ultra-Orthodox Jewry

Shlomo Tikochinski, The Haredi Community in Israel: Convention, Ethos and Myth

14:15 – 16:15
Theology, Halakhah and Custom
Chair: Arye Edrei

Levi Cooper, Commitment and Creativity: Custom in the Writing of Rabbi Hayim Elazar Shapira of Munkács

Iris Brown, Conservative Rhetoric, Liberal Practice: The Leadership of R. Zalman Leib Halberstam of Sanz-Klausenburg

Harel Gordin, The Shaping of Orthodoxy in Post-World War II America as Reflected in R. Moshe Feinstein’s Responsa

Nicham Ross, The Divine Response to Modernity: Why the Holocaust Occurred Precisely in the 20th Century

16:30 – 17:30
Anti-Zionism in Education and Diplomacy
Chair: Aviad Hacohen

Yair Halevy, The Extreme Section in “Neturei Karta” and its Alternative Diplomacy

Sima Zalcberg Block, Game Theory: Games as Socialization Agents among Youngsters in Groups of Radical Zealots

17:45 – 19:45
Polemics
Chair: Dafna Schreiber

Uriel Barak, Remarks on the Relationship between Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Harlap and the “Zealots of Jerusalem”

Adam Ferziger, Hungarian Separatist Orthodoxy and its Contested American Legacy

Gershon Greenberg, Alienated Forever: Neturei Karta and Agudat Yisrael Face the Historical Reality of the Holocaust (English)

Ido Harari, Tekhelet in Jerusalem: The Blue Thread in the Tzitzit between R. Akiva Yosef Schlesinger and R. Yeshaya Asher Zelig Margaliot

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

10:15 – 12:15
New Haredism
Chair:Haviva Pedaya
Nissim Leon, Haredi Modernization of the Traditional Prayer Book of Mizrachi Jewry
Shlomi Doron, The Ultra-Orthodox Repentance Movement: Between Modern and Post-Modern
Lee Cahaner & Haim Zicherman, From Individuals to a Group: Modern Ultra-Orthodox Middle Class
Batia Siebzehner, Ultra-Orthodoxy and Ethnicity: Reshaping the Community’s Boundaries in Mexico and Panama

12:30 – 14:00
From Orthodoxy to Ultra-Orthodoxy and Back
Chair: Yoram Bilu

Yaakov Ariel, The Counter-Culture and Ultra-Orthodoxy Unite: The Unexpected Rise of Neo-Hasidism

Samuel Heilman, How Modern Orthodoxy Inevitably Evolved into Haredi Orthodoxy
(English)

Gili Zivan, The Disengagement as a Catalyst for Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Developments

15:00 – 16:30
The Gender Challenge: Coping with Gender Issues
Chair: Rachel Elior

Nava Vasserman, The Abstinent Society: The Idea and Practice of Sexual
Abstinence in the Gur Hasidic Community

Yoel Finkelman, Men and Masculinity in Contemporary Haredi Media

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar, Saying without Saying: Ultra-Orthodox Women’s Discourse

16:45 – 18:45
Concluding Session: From Jerusalem to Bnei-Brak
Chair: Menachem Friedman

Marc Shapiro, R. Jacob Israel Kanievsky: The Steipler (English)

Yosef Salmon, The Maharil Diskin: The Beginnings of Ultra-Orthodoxy in the Land of Israel

Benjamin Brown, Bnei Brak and Jerusalem: The Lithuanian Haredi Community’s Leadership in the 1950s: Between the Chazon Ish and the Rabbi of Brisk

At this point, as I mentioned before, I am more than a year behind in posts. Last September (2011), I gave a talk at another university on how to formulate similarity and difference between Judaism and Christianity as not just same or different. When I got home, the Dvar Toah of the week was from Rav Hershel Schachter on Original Sin. I had payed attention to Rav Soloveitchik’s use of the term before but it seemed stranger in the current context. So I collected some sources and am just getting to it now. In Lonely Man of Faith and From There you Shall Seek he has allusions, however in The Emergence of Ethical Man the topic is presented fully.

Rabbi Soloveitchik has as one of his background premises that “If not for sin then experience of God would be without disappointment. Instead, life after the Fall is one of defeat, resignation, and struggle.

What was wrong with the choice to eat from the tree if it is referred to as good? He suggests that the concept of “good” can mean two very different qualities: good as an ethical quality and good in the esthetic sense. In the Fall, “[t]he ethical motif collided with the orgaistic esthetic one and was defeated.” In other words, to be fully human is to be able to choose between the esthetic and the ethical- and the wrong choice, sensuality “unhallowed by ethical appraisal” constitutes “sin.” While Christianity suggests that man is forever tainted by this sin, Soloveitchik sees them as the beginnings of man’s split personality. Man’s ethical side is his “prosecutor-judge” that seeks to correct his esthetic side.

In another place, however, Soloveitchik explains that, “The Biblical account of the original sin is the story of a man of faith who realizes suddenly that faith can be utilized for an acquisition of majesty and glory and who, instead of fostering a covenantal community, prefers to organize a political utilitarian community….The history of organized religion is replete with instances of desecration of the covenant.”

The Emergence of Ethical Man

The Emergence of Ethical Man is in many ways it is responding to and building upon the book The Divine Imperative by the Christian neo-orthodox thinker Emil Brunner. (see my Van Leer paper- here)

In this work, Rabbi Soloveitchik has a unique approach to sin, one not commonly seen in Judaism. Soloveitchik acknowledges the doctrine of Original Sin, and incorporates it at length into his philosophy of the nature of man. The Original Sin, is important not because it separates man from God (as it is in Christianity), but because it presents an alternate view of God, a demonic God-a gnostic reality.

Before the serpent, Adam and Eve perceived God correctly as the cosmic Creator, and worked alongside Him in the Garden of Eden with His direction and guidance. With the serpent, doubt is cast upon God’s actions and motives, making God demonic. Rabbi Soloveitchik writes, “The experience of God, according to the serpent, is demonic, uncanny, weird. Man should not fear God but should shudder or feel horror before Him…God is not the friend but the fiend…if man wants to gain freedom, he must rebel against Him and throw off His yoke.”

This mistaken view is an unforgivably primitive view of God. It denies the divine attributes and makes God less than the creator of the universe. This is the importance of Original Sin. (Generally, the Divine attribute for Soloveitchik are taken to be creativity, freedom, and self-transformation.)

For Soloveitchik, this sin did not corrupt man or make him into an unplanned part of creation. Rather, it divided him. “The paradoxical tragedy did not consist in a metaphysical metamorphosis…sin did not corrupt man but split him.”
Therefore, Judaism is not in the business of saving man from sin, but correcting that gap. But there is a continuously present gap to be corrected.

“When man frees himself from such natural [moral] bonds, he loses contact with his God” Citing pre-Vatican II opinion, he writes: “Christianity has been bent upon a transcendental adventure, namely, to free man from his bondage to the flesh and raise him to a spiritual level. Judaism, in contrast, proclaims the goodness of the whole of man, of the natural”. “Christianity viewed instinct as corrupt and sinful; man’s divine essence asserts itself in his spirit, which is always in a state of war with the flesh. Judaism rehabilitates the flesh…attaching the quality of divine image to the biological forces in man”

Emil Brunner in his Divine Imperative describes the distinct separation between man and God brought on by Original Sin. “Sin has caused a cleavage in human life which runs right through all that is human.” Brunner also thinks this sin pits man against God, where “God is only an alien Power, which forces him from the outside.” Soloveitchik and Brunner agree that there was a perversion of God’s divine attributes with Original Sin, and that what is completely holy is now perceived to be unholy by those who rebel against Him.

Even though the ability to be in communion with God as we were created has changed, our nature and desire to do so have not. We are still designed to worship, and will do so, “either God or an idol.” Sin has become a burden for all of mankind, since for Brunner, it is present in our very being, and is perpetuated daily when we create a false God in our lives instead of worshiping Him.

Man was created in the image of God and with the express purpose of being in community with God. “The distinctive character of man, in contrast to the rest of creation, is based upon the fact that he is designed for freedom-in-God, for a personal existence which is distinct from God, and yet dependent upon Him.” Original Sin not only forced us out of this community, but removed the very basis of our existence.

Soloveitchik acknowledges the difference of approach to the nature of man in relation to sin between Christianity and Judaism in his book. He writes:

Historical sin, punishment and reward are original Jewish ideas. Just as the natural individual is responsible for his own deeds, the group bears responsibility for the sins of the past. This is not to be equated with hereditary sin. The latter, as developed by Christian thinkers, is a metaphysical, objective quality, inherent in human natural existence. Historical sin signifies a historical category, which asserts itself in historical continuity. The individual is not guilty of sins perpetuated by past generations. The historical group is responsible for historical errors and sins committed by the fathers, because the latter repeat their existence in their descendants.

Sin still corrupts man’s nature according to Soloveitchik, because the current generation shares the memory and therefore the responsibility of the wrongs from the past generations. In Christianity, sin is a change in human nature, one that is internalized in all of us. In Judaism, it is a repeated action, one in which all man partakes- similar to Buber or Frued.

Sin not only affects the relationship of man to God, but man to the natural world around him. Both Brunner and Soloveitchik see man playing a critical role in God’s created world. Both Brunner and Soloveitchik outright reject the popular thought that man is nothing more than just an animal. Rather, we have a Divine imperative to live a life of dignity and majesty. “God has not created us as angels, but as human beings of flesh and blood, human beings who can only manage to live their life in a human way by means of marriage and the family, civilization and culture, by means of the State and the system of law.”

This is done with more of an eschatological mindset than Judaism professes, as Brunner states this work is to be done to further the New Kingdom that God will bring.

Rabbi Soloveitchik sees man more in continuity with the current natural world around him. Man is a part of creation, and therefore intended to be a part of it. However, man is also separate from the rest of nature, because God specifically charges him to be a co-participant in the world He has created, and imprints Tzelem Elokim, the divine presence on him. As both part of creation but also separate, man is to strive to imitate God, both as a creator and as a participant in creation. Regardless of the sinful situation, this is still the goal of all man.

Brunner and Soloveitchik approach the topic of ethics differently because they see the role of man in creation differently. For Soloveitchik, man is free to do what he wants, and needs to actualize this ability. The Jewish ethical man is one who strives to co-participate with God in the divine. While Original Sin did derail this mandate, there are still mechanisms in place to return man to God, namely the covenant made through Abraham and completed in Moses. In Abraham, God chose one man to be His friend. This relationship involved Abraham leaving his family and society in order for God to create a bond that did not and could not exist in the world. Abraham accepted this friendship with God, because he is then engaging in his own freedom to be a part of the ethical covenant God is creating.

From context, it is clear that in the original lecture, Soloveitchik used the word kerygmatic and not charismatic. Abraham and Moses teaching ethical norms is an act of kerygma not charisma.

This covenant is fulfilled in the work and life of Moses. Moses introduces a new role of agent, representing man to God and God to man. Through Moses, God is able to provide redemption for His people, bringing them out of Egypt and establishing His Law with a people. God provides the ethical norms that He started through creation and provides the means to have man participate once again in this plan.

Brunner’s Christian approach has a much stronger focus on the impact of sin. Man is enslaved to sin, and is in need of a special grace. This grace is offered through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. For Brunner, the completion of God’s plan is not seen in the covenant of Moses, but Christ.

Being “good” means imitating God, a thought both Brunner and Soloveitchik can agree to.

The Christian ethical man is therefore concerned with his conduct here in the world, because they are the physical actions of God. For him, the whole of ethics is concerned with God’s action in and through man. The Jewish ethical man is concerned with his conduct here in the world, because they are autonomous application of the ethical norms know through the actions of God

Evaluation

Both faiths share the Biblical language of missing the mark (het), transgression (averah), guilt (asham), and debt (hove). Both religions have all four but Judaism emphasizes the former two over the latter. Judaism also use rebellion (mered) in its narrative and liturgy. And Jews use direct courtroom imagery. In almost all cases, Jews avoided the language of Original Sin.

Linward Urban in his History of Christian Theology lists several components of a Western doctrine of sin.

1. God’s Creation is perfect but humans in that they are not perfect have imperfections
2. Adam sinned for all humanity.
3. After the sin human nature could no longer see the truth.
4. Therefore we have bruised and damaged nature- we are perverted and distorted.
5. All humans have guilt that has to be removed.

In general, traditional Jewish thought accepted 1-3 but rejected 4-5. Thinkers as diverse as Hasdai Crescas, Eliezer Berkovits, Leo Baeck and Paul Ricouer repeat the truism that Judaism does not have original sin.
Many Kabbalists also accept #4.
The midrash that we all have guilt from the Original Sin and Mt. Sinai removes our lustful fallen nature is a lone Rabbbinic opinion that works with #5.
Rabbi Solovetichik makes a point of accepting #4 and has an interesting version of #5 where the human condition repeats itself and has a covenantal method of removing the sin. Historical repetition replaces heredity.

Rav Schachter’s version

I was taken that Rav Schachter maintains the language of original sin used by his teacher. Yet, he says it does not play a major role. The function of discussing sin is to teach us that we make mistakes through desire or social pressure. The opening also seems to imply we make mistakes because we are not truly conversant with Torah. Gone is the human struggle with defeat, resignation, and futility before the cosmos.

This version lack the fallen nature of humanity taught by Rabbi Soloveitchik. More importantly, Rabbi Schachter advocates illumination through laws of the Torah in place of Rav Soloveitchik’s philosophic Imitatio Dei (On this point, see the classic but still timely article of Lawrence Kaplan, “Revisionism and the Rav”)This version has no mistaken views of God, no dichotomy in human nature, and no unredeemed human anthropology. This version also lack Rav Soloveitchik’s condemnation of the utilitarian and social approach to life.

Many issues in this world are very unclear just like in the middle of dark night; there are mitzvos that people think are really aveiros and there are aveiros that people consider to be mitzvos (see the hakdama of Mesilas Yesharim). Without illumination granted by Hashem through the laws of the Torah, we will remain “in the dark”. Rosh Hashonah for Adam ha’rishon was his day of kabbolas haTorah.

According to the tradition recorded in the midrash, Adam ha’rishon sinned on that very same first day that he was created. He was judged and punished on the same day and Hashem notified him that just as I have judged you on this day, so too will I judge your descendants in all future generations on this day.

The story of the “original sin” does not really play a significant role in Jewish theology. It was recorded in the Torah, however, to teach us certain aspects about sin that are relevant to all of us today.

The reason Adam and Chava could not control themselves and sinned by eating from the eitz ha’daas is because the fruit seemed so delicious and appealing..

When Hashem confronted Adam ha’rishon and told him that he would be punished for having sinned, He says… Chava coaxed her husband to eat along with her from the forbidden fruit by crying in front of him. Very often we sin because we give in to social pressure.

On Rosh Ha’shonah and all year long we should take to heart the details of the original sin and realize that it simply does not make sense to violate the mitzvot of the Torah.
Read the Rest Here

Zev Elelf published a fine article in the recent issue of Tradition (available at JID- here) AMERICAN ORTHODOXY’S LUKEWARM EMBRACE OF THE HIRSCHIAN LEGACY, 1850-1939. The article shows that American Orthodoxy did not see their linage as traceable to Rabbi Hirsch. I have been telling my classes that for years. Rather, we find they trace themselves to Maimonides, Spanish-Portuguese and Italian Jewry, later they traced themselves to Rabbi Reines. The article did a great job of showing that they did not look to Hirsch, but did not actively engage the multitude of authors. Specifically, the article had a presentism about who was Orthodox. Therefore it mentioned only briefly, Eminent Israelites of the nineteenth century : a series of biographical sketches (c1879). by Henry Morais.

Sabato Morais was one of the founders of JTSA of Italian birth and rabbi at the Spanish-Portuguese Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. His son Henry wrote the treatise on eminent Israelites. Half a century ago, there was a debate in the scholarly literature about whether the early figures involved int he foundation of the OU was proto-Conservative or proto-modern Orthodox, as well as a debate what the word Conservative – capital C, meant in 1898. Moshe Davis treated Sabato Morais as proto-Conservative and Charles Liebman treated him as proto-Modern orthodox. Kohut may have used the word the way we use it today to refer to something between Reform and Orthodoxy, but Henry Morais (Sabato’s son) use the word to refer to Hirsch.
Neither of the scholars looked at his Eminent Israelites of the Nineteenth Century.In Morais’ volume Zechariah Frankel is called the Hakham, the author, and scholar, but the only person called Conservative in the entire volume is Rabbi S. R. Hirsch, who is given a more heroic image than the others. So it seems that is what he meant by the term and it shows what he aspired to do in the US. The entire book is free for download, below is from page 138.

SAMSON RAPHAEL HIRSCH.
Conspicuous, not solely as one of the acknowledged champions of Conservative Judaism, but as a profound theologian, and an active worker in Hebrew literature, is the venerable Rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch. Many years have seen this divine faithfully labor in the sacred trust confided to his guardianship. The lasting services he has rendered the Jewish community are significantly illustrated by schools and educational institutions that foster and disseminate religious knowledge. But an honest and uncompromising adherence to the principles of Judaism he believes in, and a dauntless defense thereof, entitle the Rabbi to the highest commendation.

On Dec. 4th, Jewish Ideas Daily ran an article with the thesis that there has been a turning of the tide in which “Torah Judaism today retains more of its youth than at any time since the Haskalah.” In principle, that is true, it is a good thing, and it made the headlines in 1990. However, the article got me seriously upset. The article stressed that we, the younger generation, are now self-conscious of being more committed than our parents. But who are the members of the younger generation in today’s society? When one is already a grandmother, then one needs to write from the perspective of the parent, not as the child. Having taught the author’s children and knowing their classmates, writing about the baby-boomers as today’s children rang hollow, sanctimonious, and hiding one’s head in the sand. Many of the Millenials are now self-conscious of being less committed than their parents. I cranked out the letter below in an hour the evening of the article. JID declined to run an edited response, so here it is.

The letter is a summary of my post-orthodoxy thinking on this blog from three years ago. The observation rings true more today when even pulpit rabbis have acknowledged the problem, kiruv workers acknowledge their decline in numbers, youth organizations are acknowledging that they are not connecting and the daily scandals in the community are driving people from Orthodoxy.
The solutions will not come from assigning blame. The question: is what does the younger leadership need to do to change things?
The letter is only referring to the United States and to those raised in the modern Orthodox world. It is not referring to Israel and it is not referring to the attrition rate among Yeshivish and Haredi.

Dear Diana (if I may),

It has been almost twenty years since we last met, when I was your sons’ Jewish studies day school teacher. Since then, I have kept up with many of their classmates, both in person and online and I have come to cherish these relationships because they are with many of the best and the brightest that the community has produced. Because of this long standing relationship, many of my former students have kept me abreast of their treif banquets, of their non-Jewish significant others, of their finding that their creative work is more interesting than keeping the Sabbath, and of their publishing parties held on Jewish holidays. Many of them are self-conscious that they are less committed than their parents; this is not a rare occurrence but it is, however, part of a widespread trend that I had labeled on my blog three years ago as “post-Orthodoxy.” I have been meaning to write about this phenomenon in a public venue for some time but I have never gotten around to actually doing it. However, your post today struck a chord worthy of response based on its blindness to the classmates of your own children.

Diana, you are correct that people started returning to religion in the late 1970’s, creating a triumphalist bubble shared by the Christian Religious Right and Orthodox Jews, but historians are now busy documenting a religious recession. Those who reached college as the millennium approached found themselves less committed than those before them. There is a post-Orthodox moment similar to the post-Evangelical moment in that younger Centrist Jews are leaving the community.

In terms of their public writings, they state that they are leaving because they find the religious community anti-intellectualism, narrow or excessively partisan political views, lack of theological depth or even any credible apologetics, almost no engagement in art, media, and society, slavery to materialism and consumerism, provincialism, insensitivity toward women and homosexuals, and the moral failure of prominent leaders.

The members of Generation Y, the Millennials, are the most liberal generation alive and their immediate seniors, those from Generation X, are the most conservative. More importantly, since the 1730s, every thirty to thirty-five years, American culture has dramatically shifted from liberal to conservative and back again. Paradoxically, the deep acculturation of American Orthodoxy into the American religious landscape has allowed the restoration of its plausibility structure for the baby boomers.

The Great Return to religion is winding down. For example, many of those who were raised as Evangelical in the recent Great Awakening of Religion are not returning to the Evangelical Faith of their parents. Statistics of those leaving Evangelicals vary in the press from 25%-75%. Those who were raised in an intense Evangelical faith don’t naturally blend back into the more mainline, liberal Churches. They are specifically former-Evangelicals who have adapted liberal position. Jewish Orthodoxy is also witnessing similar phenomena. We also have a large number of people who are former Orthodox, who do not believe in what they were taught and are adopting more liberal positions. This doesn’t mean, however, that they are comfortable with liberal Judaism.

Consider the education that your children received at one of the most open and intellectual day schools. They were presented with the educational lessons of the validity of all cultures and the necessity for a pluralistic world-view. Yet, they found that view clashes with an increasingly parochial Modern Orthodoxy. They were taught to value intellectualism, yet they observe that the community triumphs sentimentality and emotionalism. They attended a school with one of the highest acceptance rates to the Ivys of any prep-school in the nation, and then had to integrate in a community fearful of any knowledge beyond mid-brow.

It is hard to get statistics of a live phenomenon with no external signs. We know that after the 1960s and 1970s, there were 45 % less Orthodox Jews. Even now, it is hard to tell when someone is out of the community–some declare they are out at 22, others at 32, and others at 42. We will look back in 2025 and not only see the losses but also how many of those who leave orthodoxy join mainline forms of liberal Judaism and how many create some new limbo approach. Think of it in the same way as the decline of the Northeast Conservative congregations was only shown in 2000, even though one sensed it already in 1985. One local rabbi known for freely speaking his mind regardless of reality claimed that in 2010, the attrition rate was only 15% and then, in 2012 spuriously intimated that it was 50%. Every local rabbi has addressed from the pulpit this changing reality as of vital concern. But we will only know the numbers in hindsight.

As a side point, I must address those ideologues who observe the phenomena and think that these younger graduates are a new liberal part of Orthodoxy. Rather, many of them are simply eroding; some of them eat swine on Shabbos, others intermarry, some preserved their mizvot in a renewal setting. Many have just given up and do not care. They are those that are open about their lack of observance and there are many others who like Torah and observance but do not like the community’s provincialism.

Some have given up religion entirely and want to be left alone from it all. Others are sowing wild oats while some have become renewal or liberal. There are groups who practice egalitarian halakhic and some are just feeling boxed in. And yet, despite the various approaches, others still choose to return to more of a 1950’s Orthodox approach. Much of this is non-ideological, having more to do with carving out a space different than their parents. Much of it can be attributed to new careers, taking up new places of residence, staying single longer, texting or bicycling on Shabbat, or discovering the wider world.

For some, it is just a matter of being tone deaf to religion. I know one family where the eldest son is a rabbi and the younger sons are committed science minded engineers. Their observance level and affiliation will be more subject to where their careers take them than any ideology. Personally, I have attended weddings of several children from the same family in which older siblings had a mechitza on the dance floor and then attended their younger siblings’ weddings in which there was mixed dancing.

For those who stay observant, there is even a new sociological term, “deconversion,” for those who sense this loss of their childhood faith or for those who find their religious lives wanting. This group has hope for a solution, for a new plausibility structure, or at least a new community. If I wanted, I could collect the Facebook answers to “Religious Views” to show that something is amiss. I now of plenty of examples of those who were raised Orthodox who now define themselves in all sorts of convoluted ways such as: “Observant,” “post-modern orthodox”, “It’s complicated”, “halakhic freethinker”, “alternafrum” “at home in the halakhic discourse”, “there is no place devoid of Him eyn od milvao” “of orthodox culture” and even there has been the return of “Conservadox.” Many of those raised Orthodox who are still observant are not comfortable with the label.

To return to the classmates of your children, as they are self-conscious of their de-conversion, One of them wrote me that she perceived that she and her peers to be living in an era of new globalization and that their generation would “clash with traditional institutions in a way that was more vibrant and also destructive.” She saw the placid suburban community of the day-school and home as restrictive and an unsafe place of abuse. “There were few people who saw that a transition period was coming up for Modern Orthodoxy and with that a big identity crisis for all of us. I guess that our generation happened to come into adulthood just as these old definitions were dying out, or at least I would hope so.” Diana, The pain in this letter contrasts with the safety you felt in Orthodoxy.

I personally do not have solutions; I am more of a Facebook friend.

Yes, “Torah Judaism today retains more of its youth than at any time since the Haskalah.” American Orthodoxy is no longer the province of immigrants and the elderly. The State of Israel played a role as did the rebuilding of a Torah Jewry after the War combined with the post-1967 turn to Jewish pride. But now, it is the more prosaic ups and downs of religious recession and revival, generational conflicts, plausibility structures broken and repaired. For Baby Boomers, “in America after 1966, Jewish tradition has felt like something worth their commitment.” But for those who came of age at the millennium there are still many reasons to drift away.

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Before Artscroll, the major producer of Judaica in English was from very British Soncino Press and their offshoots. I just read an essay by the editor of the Soncino Bible Abraham Cohen, “The Message of the Bible.” It give us a nice contrast to both the recent more historical-critical volumes as well as to the less urbane Orthodox Judaica.

David Ruderman, the historian of Early Modern Jewry, states that British Jews had as “their unarticulated ideal was that of upper class gentility.” British Jewry did not retain the study of Hebrew unlike elsewhere. They undertook massive translation projects. Most British Jews knew their Judaism only through English translations- and it was couched in English non-Hebraic terms- hence their religious attitudes and behaviors came to resemble their English Protestants and their language sounded like the King James Bible. When discussing Jewish theology, Jews drew on Christian arguments for answering atheists and deists; They used Locke, and Newton, not Mendelssohn or Hirsch.

Abraham Cohen (1887-1957) was the editor of the Soncino Books of the Bible and participated in the Soncino translation of the Talmud and Midrash. He attended Cambridge and Manchester then earned a Ph.D. from the University of London. His Sieff Lectures on Preaching at Jews’ College were published as a wonderful handbook of guidance in preparing and delivering a sermon. He wrote popular scholarly works as Everyman’s Talmud and The Soncino Chumash. He was the rabbi of the Minhag Anglia Birmingham Hebrew congregation, an Orthodox synagogue. The essay is wonderful for showing how he understood the Bible, how he responded to Biblical criticism, and how he accepted Edwardian natural theology. Marc Saperstein has a nice article available online on WWI sermons contrasting Cohen’s Anglican Orthodoxy, which stressed God’s sovereignty and mastery over human history with the Liberal Rabbi Israel Mattuck who was agnostic and more Unitarian in his call to look to man for salvation and how modern people do not look to God.

Notice his serious clerical collar.

The essay is part of an anthology called The Jewish Heritage Ephraim Levine (1955) The volume is a home companion to introduce Judaism with chapters on the Bible, Jewish ceremony, Rabbinics, Philosophy, Ethics, Codes, and the Land of Israel.

The essay opens with a broad introduction that the Bible is a library of books, heterogeneous, and not speaking one word. The Biblical authors wrote based on their expectations for the times and current events, as well as based on their personal circumstances. What holds all these books together is their “unity of principle” in teaching “the revelation of God’s will as the controlling force in the life of man and laws for the government of the Israelite community.” The Bible provides individual and collective testimonies to the saving power of God. The book blends religion and morality with history

Cohen compares the Bible to a symphony in that simple melodies recur with variations and expositions. The simple message is the relationship of God and man, the purpose of the book is to reveal God to man, which is the meaning of the phrase that man is made in the likeness of God. The existence of God and his revelation are an axiom. Genesis teaches an “exulted view of man” in which in each man there is a spirit which is divine in origin and subject to the will of God.” Cohen writes of the Garden of Eden that “this allegory framed in language understandable by the primitive mind” Ultimately, the book teaches that “God’s desire is that man should be happy”

The Bible shows in many places the need for revelation, for example in the book of Job it says “can thou find out the deep things of God.” The Bible teaches a limitation of human intellect and inadequacy of reason for understanding the mysteries of the universe and human living.

Cohen follows the natural theology of the early twentieth century. The message of scripture does not depend for its vitality” on belief in doctrines but “upon its claim to be the communication of God to man.” This revelation was made through four media, nature, direct utterance, indirect intimation, and human experience.”

The first category: From the natural phenomena who know of God’s eternity, wisdom, infinite power, and mercy.
The second category: “To Moses, as well as to Israel, revelation assumed this direct form and in this respect he was an exception…the corpus of religious and ethical teaching and social legislation which he was instrumental in delivering to Israel from God is known as Torah…” Prophets were not just preachers rather “they had consciousness that they were the spokesmen of God.”
The third category, God was deduced from contemporary events. The Biblical figures saw their destiny.
The forth category is direct human experience where we sense God.

Cohen rejects the nineteenth century Protestant Biblical criticism which denigrated Judaism as a tribal legalistic, and priestly religion that was rejected by the prophets. He rejects the critics who claim that there was evolution from the primitive Judaism to the developed prophets.

Cohen shows that the Bible has both tribalism and universalism without an evolution from the former to the latter. Al the world blessed and Israel as Gods firstborn. The Bible was produced by one people but speaks to all men. He shows that one cannot use the divine name to separate the Pentateuch into authors. Cohen also shows that there are not two voices in the Bible one in favor of priest cult and one against.

Cohen concludes that the Bible is formulated in ethical and not doctrinal terms, It teaches ethical monotheism, and to do the right and just. Does it have any message for today? To teach: Dignity and value of every human being, overcome wealth inequality, enduring peace.

This theological view of the Bible does not fit any of our contemporary Jewish denominations. Cohen’s Jewish statement that “the revelation of God’s will as the controlling force in the life of man… The Bible provides individual and collective testimonies to the saving power of God.” is not far from the Anglican-Catholic definition that “the authentic record of God’s revelation to man and is a revelation valid for all men and all time. In the Bible we have God’s revelation of Himself, His saving activity, and moral demands.”

Cohen’s theological vision is not much different from that of Christina Hayes of Yale in her new introduction to the Hebrew Bible, see here for summary

Louis Jacobs published his critical questioning of the Bible, his questioning of Biblical morals, and questioning of revelation just two years later. Any thoughts on how far Cohen’s natural theology was from Jacobs’s analytic criticism?

Starting in 1969, Rabbi A.J. Rosenberg produced the Judaica Press Hebrew-English Prophets and Holy Writings which mainly replaced the Soncino series. The Soncino edition itself was redone by Rosenberg who removed the References to non-Jewish authors.

As a side point, Cohen was active in interfaith work and in 1933 gave the first speech from a Church pulpit in Birmingham.

“Rev Abraham Cohen gave many memorable and powerful speeches on behalf of the Jewish community. His arguments were remarkable not just for their passionate defiance of Hitler’s Nazi regime, but also for their critique of the roots of prejudice, which he attacked as the universal enemy of the ‘oneness of the human family’.
The setting on this occasion, Carr’s Lane Church, was highly symbolic. It was the first time that a Jewish preacher had been allowed to talk at the Christian pulpit. The crisis in Germany had re-opened the dialogue between Jewish and Christian faiths to establish a socially progressive message of mutual religious support.
Meanwhile, the significance of Cohen’s appearence at Carr’s Lane is further heightened when we remember that the same church was at the forefront of Birmingham’s nineteenth century campaigns against slavery, when J.A. James, a close friend of Joseph Sturge, was minister of Carr’s Lane.

This month Eliyahu Stern published his book The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Yale University Press). Stern has an appointment at Yale. Stern received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2008. From 2009-2010 he was a fellow at University of Oxford. He may be first YU graduate in Jewish Studies to break the glass ceiling of the ivys for his first position. (Yerushalmi was long gone from his YU upbringing by the time he was appointed.)

Stern’s emphasis on religion as an operative factor in socio- intellectual history was already shown in his op-ed on Jewish peoplehood.

What is needed instead is a return to the original Jewish model, where peoplehood was embraced as an outcome of a shared destiny and values, where group attachment was the powerful end result of an engagement with a compelling tradition and spiritual practice. As the past fifty years have demonstrated, peoplehood without the spiritual, ethical, or religious infrastructure of Judaism will not survive.

For those who do not know very much about the Vilna Gaon, here are the basics on the GRA at My Jewish Learning. The wiki is unfortunately filled with folktales and misinformation. A decade ago Immanuel Etkes wrote The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image (University of California Press, 2002), which spends much of its time evaluating who the Gaon was as a person and to refuting many of the folktales and false images of the popular press. For example, Etkes rejects the claim by modern historians that Eliyahu was a harbinger of the Haskalah which become axiomatic among modern historians. As a third book on the Gaon, you shoudd look at Arie Morgenstern, The Gaon of Vilna and His Messianic Vision (August, 2012)on the messianism of the Gaon and his students.

Stern approach is to ask the big question of where the Gaon fits into the broader narrative of history. He shows why the Gaon’s approach to text creates a certain type of society; one turned to book knowledge over community. Stern also wants to show why that is modern in its breakdown of the community and rejection of prior understandings. To understand Stern argument, the reader may need to catch up on the last 90 years of social theory and reach the writings of Ulrich Beck. (This blog dealt with one of his books here and here; also see our discussion of Oliver Roy.) Older Jewish Studies followed Karl Manheim’s 1929 discussion of ideology as the force that holds society together and Max Weber’s assumption that tradition breaks down into rationality, liberalism and routine. If it did not, then it was a throwback to the pre-modern. For Ulrich Beck, the breakdown led to a negotiation of how the individual accepts the new institutions. For those who want to catch up, see this great short summary of Beck.

Finally, I get the pleasure that this book started as a seminar paper for my graduate class on the Vilna Gaon.

1) What’s your theory of modernity and how does it relate to Elijah of Vilna?

When I first started writing I thought about modernity as a movement, as something based on ideas such as individualism, democracy, and civil rights. Most Jewish histories have been written from the perspective of seeing modernity as one movement that started with Mendelssohn and ended with Reform, Emancipation and Acculturation. The problem with that perspective is that it ultimately ends up excluding, opposing or misinterpreting large swaths of western life and contemporary Jewry. American Jews never went through a process of emancipation, and ultra-Orthodoxy has remerged as force in Jewish life.

In my book I argue that it is more productive to see modernity as a condition that transformed all groups and institutions in Europe from the mid eighteenth century onward. My theory of modernity is based on the rise of the State, the division of public and private spheres, and the privatization of religion.

Elijah is often depicted as an anti-modernist, yet he remains one of the most celebrated figures in the modern Jewish experience.

Most scholars who write about Elijah usually focus on the few words he wrote in his lifetime about the Hasidic movement. His position vis-à-vis the Hasidim is radically anti-democratic, anti-individual, and anti-modern in both senses of the term (modernity as a movement or as a condition). Elijah failed to stem the tide of Hasidism because he thought he could use pre-modern structures (the coercive mechanism afforded by the kehilah) to prevent the growth of the movement. As I argue at-length in my book there is nothing remotely democratic or modern about Elijah’s excommunications of Vilna Hasidim.

However, I also found that Elijah was wildly successful in promoting the ritualization of study as the locus of religious life. The reason why his legacy of study succeeded but his opposition to Hasidism failed was precisely because of the rise of the State and the privatization of religious expressions. The privatization of religion allowed for the emergence of Hasidism, Reform Judaism and the Yeshiva movement. All these movements were created out of the breakdown of corporate structures and the privatization of religion. Its not that one group is “modern” and the other is “anti-modern” all of them exist in the rubric of privatization and have been shaped and crafted by the management and boundaries separating public and private spheres.
(AB- I find many of the undereducated hockers force everything into modern or anti modern rather than understanding how both sides are mediating a contemporary situation.)

I am indebted to ideas put forth by social theorists Urlich Beck, Jose Casanova and Jürgen Habermas. Specifically, Beck reveals that Western liberal life is threatened not by from outside groups or remnants of pre-modern belief systems, but rather from internal structural risks that are built into the Secular-liberal State. I argue that instead of seeing religious radicalism as standing in opposition to modern western life or a throw back to a different age, it is in large measure the result of the privatization of religion built into the liberal State. Casanova has shown it is a fallacy that religious privatization necessarily creates a liberal society. In fact, often times the more private faith is the more segregated it remains and the more anti-pluralistic and dogmatic it becomes. On the other hand, sometimes the more engagement with a broader public it has, the more it adopts universal ideals to promote its message.

2) How did the Gaon rupture the traditional canons of Jewish learning?

Elijah’s glosses (Biur) to Joseph Karo’s definitive code of Jewish law, Shulchan Arukh, encouraged nineteenth-century Jews to move away from a code-based learning culture. Elijah’s Biur brought Yeshiva students to focus their studies on the Talmud—a text known for being open-ended and not directly giving legal conclusions. The Talmud replaced legal code as the central text studied in the nineteenth-century modern Yeshiva founded in Volozhin. This paradigm shift—from code to commentary came alongside a lager social shift in Jewish life from kehilah to yeshiva (from a corporate governing structure to an educational and persuasive institution as the center of religious life). These shifts restructured the hierarchy of authority in rabbinic Judaism.

3) What is unique in his approach to Talmud and halakhah?

To understand the significance of Elijah’s approach to the Talmud it is productive to remember that late medieval and early modern eastern European Jewish identity was in large measure shaped by local customs and practices. Though early modern Jews were literate, texts played a very minor role in the way they understood their lives and even in the adjudication of law -custom reigned supreme.

Elijah emphasized the importance of Talmudic texts over codes or responsa. In so doing he undermined the lynchpin keeping legal rulings in line with folk and popular behavior, namely the notion that legal rulings should build on the positions articulated by the last interpreter (hilchata ke-batrai). This legal principle ensured that rulings issued by rabbinic authorities always favored the last adjudicator thereby creating a parallel legal track that matched the organic transformation of customs. Elijah’s commentary to Karo’s code (where his legal writings appear) overrode medieval authorities and nearly totally disregarded rabbinic rulings issued after the mid-seventeenth century. Elijah himself stated that he did not want to practically apply his approach because “the Heavens were not prepared.”

The truth of the matter was that neither were eastern European Jews prepared to adopt his rulings. While the masses celebrated his genius and intellectuals adopted his ethos of study, it would only be in the United States and in the Holy Land that Elijah’s positions would ever be legally implemented among the Ultra-Orthodox.

4) Is it legitimate to situate the Gaon with modernist protestant theologians as you do in your book?

What I try to show in my book is that Elijah, Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, and G.W Leibniz were working with an overlapping set of kabbalistic and philosophical texts, ideas, and questions that pervaded eighteenth-century European intellectual life. Still, there is no point in comparisons without some payoff. I argue that Elijah’s emendation project answers some very important questions regarding the relationship between critique and philosophical Idealism. Yet, it is doubtful that Elijah read Leibniz’s work. He also never cites any non-Jewish philosophical text.

5) What was his relationship to Mendelssohn’s Torah Commentary, the Biur?

Directly? None. But it seems his student Zalman (Hayyim of Volozhin’s brother) found parts of it to be compelling. Also his son Abraham was in touch with Shlomo Dubno Mendelssohn’s co-editor of the Biur. More interesting is comparing Mendelssohn’s Biur and Elijah’s commentary to Aderet Eliyahu. It seems that in many respects Elijah exegetical approach was far more radical than Mendelssohn’s.

6) If kabbalah is so important for his thought then how come you did not give it more emphasis?

As you (Alan Brill) have shown the Gaon used both kabbalah and philosophy interchangeably, mixing Aristotelian concepts with mystical and kabbalistic terms and structures. In general, I try to write in a way that is accessible for those untrained in mystical and even philosophic literature. I think its important that scholars do the dirty work in the footnotes and present a clean and accessible book that can be read by people from multiple fields and with various levels of knowledge.

7) If he was not read, then aren’t you overstating his influence?

He was read in different ways by all elites in nineteenth-century eastern European Jewry.
Shmuel Verses’ work on the 19th century maskilic reception of Elijah highlights the extent to which every major debate in maskilic circles involved Elijah’s legacy. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the third Lubavitch rebbe, cites him dozens of times in his responsa “Tzemach Tzedek.” Every major student of Hayyim of Volozhin’s claims that their learning method was based on what they gleaned from Elijah’s critique of Karo’s code.

But my argument goes well beyond the elites who read his works. It’s also about pictures and middle-brow hagiographies that circulated throughout eastern Europe. The Gaon is well known because his face decorated Jewish homes across Lita. The Gaon was the most popular picture in 19th century eastern European Jewish life. The original picture (from which most others were copied) has him writing in one hand and holding a book in the other, with a caption that claims him to be a master of the seven sciences. Simply put, it was the image of his “genius” and the idea of intellectual achievement as a means toward upward social mobility that has made him so revered among the masses.
One of the most popular nineteenth-century Yiddish sayings that parents would tell their children was “Vil-nor Goen” (playing on the Yiddish vocalization of the Gaon’s name); “if you will it, you too can become a Gaon [genius]” like Elijah.

8) When a reviewer ignorant of the topic such as on JID reviews the book, what are some of the mistakes he makes?

I wrote my book for both professional scholars (Academics and Rabbis) as well as, what we might today call, Amacha, the “every day Joe,” who is interested in Jewish history. We need to encourage more “every day joe’s” to take Judaism intellectually seriously. It’s a credit to people like Lawrence Grossman that they are passionate about Jewish learning and that they are interested in Jewish subjects. In his leisure reading he seems to have come to the strange conclusion that Elijah did not influence Lithuanian Jewry. While I don’t expect him to read in the original Hayyim of Volozhin, David Tevle, Ya’akov of Karlin, Moshe Katzenlenbogen, Yehuda Epstein, all of whom quote Gra extensively and talk about how influential the Biur was in Volozhin itself, still he should have read my footnotes, or at-least Chapter Five before writing a review.

I am sure he tried his best, but he probably was on unfamiliar terrain and just got terribly lost. The book is still nearly a month away from its official publication date and serious scholars, academics, and rabbis have yet to read it (those who have read it have given it very positive reviews). I am greatly looking forward to a large-scale serious conversation about the place of the Gaon in our understanding of contemporary Jewry and modern western life and thought. When that begins I will be glad to respond.

9) What is the topic of your next book?

My next work will elucidate the lively religious landscape of Russian Jewry in the nineteenth-century. Specifically, it explores the relationship between Jewish Nationalism and Hasidism, Mitnagdim and the Enlightenment. I hope to explore the way Jewish Nationalism emerged not simply as a response to anti-Semitism but on the Achilles heel of these various nineteenth-century eastern European Jewish religious movements.

10) Where do you see American modern Orthodoxy today?

As I see it the issues and challenges in front of the community have radically shifted from confronting the intellectual challenges to economic challenges. Economic sustainability has become incredibly pressing. Simply put, one rarely meets poor Modern Orthodox Jews. Living a Modern Orthodox life (private schools, Shabbat, sushi, stylish clothing, shul membership and camps, homes in costly Tri-state suburbs) requires a family to earn over 200,000 per year. You cant run a religious movement that requires everyone to be rich. The Haredim have a slightly different relationship to materiality, allowing the movement to grow even with serious economic hardships. Modern Orthodoxy needs to rethink its lifestyle model and material values so that it can appeal to all economic sectors of Jewish society.

I have not posted on the weekly parasha sheets of Rabbi Morgenstern for two years already. The older posts are here on Rabbbi Morgenstein and meditation and here on his view of Komarno.  I was motivated this week by something that was quoted from the Hebrew version. Rabbi Morgenstern has been producing almost 40-60 pages a week of Chasidus and sending them out each week by email.  At the end of every 800-1000 pages he hits print and offers the book for sale.

(To subscribe- write here to his assistant tc7@neto.bezeqint.net, don’t write to me to sign you up).

This week we once againsee a little new age, a little modern meditation, and some Buddhism-lite language to transform Chasidus into Haredi Neo-Hasidism. In this version, submission to higher wellsprings becomes cultivation of the self. We have a [mis]use of the 1991 book The Holographic Universe. We have one of his recurring themes of fiery prayer as the religious goal. We have weekly meditations  this week a Sabbath meditation and the start of next week’s  Hanukah mediation on the infinite light. He reiterates that zaddikim are the infinite light of God. Hokhmah here is a loss of self and to be nullified before all Jewish souls. Finally, we have an Izbitz, seeing everything as God’s will and that we should strive to be like Shimon who can see God’s will in all materialism. The Hebrew has some stories on the importance of drinking and on the process of reading kvitlach.

Each of the worlds exists in a kind of holographic state, where each level encompasses a unified sub-set of all of the worlds. [This is also true of the sefiros.] It is precisely through contemplating the downward-motion of the formation of the worlds at each level that the tzaddikim rise from level to level, from below to above, along the “ladder” that rises at Beis El, Hashem’s house of prayer.

Rebbe Nachman taught that the light of hisbodedus—fiery personal prayer before Hashem—is the highest of all forms of Divine service. In the earlier works, its light is knows as the light of yechidah, which is [the uppermost soul-element that experiences] true attachment with its Creator. In order to draw down this great light, one must meditate upon the fact that everything in the universe is a manifestation of G-dliness.

the tzaddikim made a practice of doing hisbodedus just before Shabbos in an effort to grasp the incoming light of the Shabbos, which is an aspect of Hashem’s infinite light. This is why those who do not develop the proper spiritual vessels prior to Shabbos fail to feel the light of Shabbos. Instead of experiencing the delight of Shabbos, they enter Shabbos in a state of attachment to Shabbtai [the influence of the planet Saturn]—a state characterized by anxiety and melancholy.

In order to connect with the infinite light, one must first contemplate the blackness of the [burning] wick, which symbolizes the tzimtzum. This means that he must first lead his mind through a series of successive constrictions [in order to focus on a particular point]. The light of the menorah that symbolizes the infinite light that existed before creation and the process of its spiraling down into and through the evolving vessels of creation is associated with Yosef. The verse says, “I am Yosef…”

The tzaddik [symbolized by Yosef, the paradigm of the tzaddik] contemplates on the fact that he is a part of the infinite “I” of Hashem. Although this contemplation occasionally manifests itself in what appear to be grandiose statements on the part of the tzaddik, one must understand that there is no personal vanity in what the tzaddikim say.

When a person approaches the state of selflessness, he prepares the “airspace” that will be able to receive the light that has until then merely encircled him from without.

The level of Chochmah, which is the avodah of self-nullification attained by contemplating Hashem’s greatness. Chochmah is “the force of nothing,” of losing the sense of self. Although many people can speak beautifully on the subject of bitul, few are those who actually live in such a state, who know it experientially. A person who is truly nullified before Hashem can be recognized by the extent of bitul he evidences before his fellow Jews. Every single Jew is a “piece of G-d from above,” and if a person cannot submit before another Jew it is a sure sign that he is not nullified before Hashem either.

The Rebbe of Ishbitz that Levi’s refusal was a sign that he only wanted to make unifications at a simple and straightforward level; Shimon, on the other hand, sought to uplift all of the places that exist in a state of the obscuring of Hashem’s presence and rectify them. For this reason, Shimon will be revealed at the highest level in the ultimate future—in the aspect of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, on whose teachings the entire redemption depends. The name Shimon is a conjunction of the words —iniquity is eradicated.” In truth, it is not enough for a person to attach himself to the yichudim at the higher levels; he must be able to do so even when he feels that he has fallen into materialism.

The other reason that I decided to dedicate a post this week to Rabbi Morgenstern was because rumor has it that Rabbi Moshe Weinberger of Aish Kodesh in Woodmere is in negotiation to be the new mashgiah ruhani of YU. It may or may not come to fruition, but if it does it will give the guys the Neo-Hasidic emotionalism of their gap year programs. YU will then embody as its haskafa Rav Itamar Schwartz’ Belvavi Mishkan Evneh, kiruv Torah, Rav Moshe Wolfson, and Rabbi Morgenstern’s approach. Gone will be the intellectualism  of Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein.

Once upon a time, many years ago there was an era when a Israel yeshiva experience for those without day school background was unknown. It was the euphoria after the Six Day war and young Jews flocked into the city with backpacks and indeterminate plans. Rabbi Elephant of ITRI together with Rabbi David Hartman ran a program called Shapells College (its original name was the Shalom Hartman Institute) for such students. Rabbi Hartman broke off, even though he raised the money, because the program was too yeshivish. On the other hand, Rabbi Brovender left taking with him eight students to found Yeshivat Hamivtar after a kerfuffle from an article in the Shapells College Journal-Petach.

I looked at the article recently in the process of researching a different topic. Once I had a copy, I figured it might be an interesting post. The purpose of the article was to show that the concept of daas Torah is limited by looking to the lack of certainty even in prophecy. The article is framed about the quest for certainty in non-halakhic matters. If one is labeled a gadol, then can his opinions transform the uncertainty of philosophical speculation into quasi-halakhic categories? The article’ basic answer was that if we could not tell if a prophecy in the Bible was true, then we certainly accept the charismatic leaders of our time as certain.  The article in general has a rationalist tone, including referencing Eliezer Goldman’s article on prophecy as naturalistic. Below are a few selected paragraphs> Here is the entire article — Chaim Brovender_On the Determination of Non-Halakhic Reality (A Model from the Prophets)_Petach2_9-17

ON THE DETERMINATION OF NON-HALAKHIC REALITY (A MODEL FROM THE PROPHETS) Rabbi Chaim Brovender

An involvement with Torah reflects the attempt of a human being to live with truth. The recognition that man can act in accordance with God’s will and the desire to live accordingly is, in fact, man’s attempt to cleave to absolute truth. However, any attempt to maximalize one’s living in accordance with God’s will, must of necessity recognize and come to grips with an overwhelming contradiction. Torah does not seem to give man a method by which to recognize the “truth” in every case.

Even if we were to accept that all people who have “ideas of the Holy” also recognize that it must be a reality in some context, is it also true that the recognition of this reality implies a reduction of uncertainty in the mind of the beholder? If I recognize spirituality in a fellow human being, can I reduce my doubt about the determination of a non-halakhic question by simply accepting his determination? Does philosophical speculation, for example, become transformed into quasi-halakhic categories when that speculation is done by the spiritual personality?

Certainty is man’s quest but not his lot. Other than those matters where the Torah has determined a method for achieving a formal decision (halakha). any decision rests on man’s capacity to evaluate a particular situation. That man, as an individual, must enter into the decision making process is apparently a basic part of the notion of free choice. Not even God’s spiritual representative, the prophet, was able to effectively remove uncertainty.

A question of some significance arises as a result of our discussion. How is it that the spiritual person (prophet) can mislead. Clearly Hanania possesses spiritual credentials:·Otherwise, would Yirmiyahu heed his words?

In other words, prophetic achievement is not sufficient to guarantee that a person will be able to pass on the prophecy as received to the people of Israel. Since these qualities are variables in the particular prophet, they must be personal, and not prophetic qualities. A person who has greater amounts of these human qualities is the greater prophet. The false prophets were prophets. Their ability to relate to the spiritual directive was unique. However, their personal might was a variable, and at times determinedwhether they would be able to speak prophecy truthfully.

It is not my intention to prejudice the question of whether Maimonides felt that becoming a prophet was entirely in the hands of man or not. On this question refer to A. Goldman, “Prophecy & Choice” (Nevua U’bhirah)

It is possible to claim that there are no non-halakhic problems within Judaism. It is not my intention to debate this position but only to declare that I disagree. It is hard to imagine that Maimonides’ Pardes or that Nahmanides’ dictum, naval b’reshut ha’Tora are Halakhic categories.

In the recent volume Rav Shalom Banayikn  (2012) Rav Aharon Lichtenstein published an essay that he wrote in 1962 on criticism and the Bible. Rav Aharon considered publishing it in the 1970’s but was dissuaded.  In short, in the essay he rejects the historical and philological criticism of Biblical criticism.  But he strongly encourages aesthetic literary criticism that brings out the depth of the meaning of a  text. But even here the literary criticism should best be done without history, referencing allusions, or critical evaluation and judgments

He describes the opposing sides of Biblical critic and rebuttal as a choice of “revolting desecration and animated, if not angry, debate.” He offers the insights gained when we consider how Victorians confronted the pre-Wellhausen criticism of John William Parker’s Essays and Reviews or the Biblical writings of Bishop Colenso as based on the strength of their prior religious faith.

This essay was initially delivered as a public lecture at Stern College for Women during the spring of 1962. However, after a decade and a half of inertia, as some of my doubts waned, I once again considered publication. Hence, I sought further counsel and submitted the text to a prominent and qualified author for evaluation. The advice was appreciative but decisive: thumbs down.

“Criticism and kitvei ha-kodesh” — the conjunction hovers between anomaly and anathema. When we hear the term “criticism” employed with reference to Tanakh, we immediately and almost instinctively associate it with the school of so-called “higher” critics who, since Spinoza, and especially in the last century and a half, have attempted — through the persistent application of historical, philological, and archaeological scholarship — to undermine the sanctity and integrity of Scripture; who, tearing it to shreds, have sought to reduce it, has ve-shalom, to the status of purely human writings. As such, to benei Torah, the term is both an alarm bell and an abomination. It conjures up memories of the onslaughts of Milman or Wellhausen, on the one  hand, of the stirring rebuttals of Rav Chaim Heller or Professor Cassuto, on the other; of revolting desecration and animated, if not angry, debate.

I feel no overriding and urgent interest in grappling with a topic which, while unquestionably important, tends to be treated at the level of apologetics. Under contemporary conditions, certainly, one’s stand vis-à-vis Biblical criticism is most likely a function of that religious faith rather than vice-versa.

Many Victorians who were troubled or overwhelmed by Essays and Reviews or Bishop Colenso succumbed because their religious faith had previously been sapped as its experiential roots had withered for reasons which had no link to philological or theological discourse.

Hence, confrontation with Biblical criticism today, while still a formidable challenge to some, should probably focus less upon the heresy proper and more upon the cardinal concerns at the heart of our spiritual life — the intensity and range of religious experience, the depth and scope of Torah knowledge, the internalization of our bond to the Ribbono Shel Olam and His will.

The focus of the essay and its clear importance is as a clear mandate to master literary criticism for the appreciation of the Bible. The first reason is the Victorian role of aesthetics as cultivating our humanity into harmonious individuals. The second is the Thomistic revelation into nature; the world is filled with divine glory and beauty. I wish this later point had been expanded because we have few Jewish sources on beauty as a path to God. God’s beauty is not just in nature but also in Scripture. His third reason is that aesthetic criticism leads to understanding the deeper meaning of the verse.

Quite simply, I propose that we strive to apply literary criticism to kitvei ha-kodesh — that we master its categories, familiarize ourselves with its canons, and bring these to bear upon our reading, understanding, and appreciation of Tanakh.

In short, I propose, first, that we discover — or rather, rediscover — kitvei ha-kodesh as literature; and second, that in order to deepen our appreciation of them as such, we seek to approach them critically.

First, aesthetic experience per se, properly channeled, is spiritually desirable. It serves to sharpen our perception, to expand our horizons, to refine our sensibility and deepen our humanity — to make us richer and more harmonious individuals.

Secondly, the specific aesthetic aspect of kitvei ha-kodesh has its own significance. For it is no mere man-made ho kalos [logos ho kalos = the good word]. It is beauty as divine revelation, as a refection of the form in which the Ribbono Shel Olam chose to manifest His will to man. We are all familiar with the concept of dual revelation — that of prophecy and creation, respectively.

With respect to the latter, we assume as a matter of course that much of its impact is effected by cosmic beauty — by structural design and harmonious order, by majesty and grandeur fused with delicacy and grace. Whether in the panoply of the galaxies or the tenderness of the snail, it is clear to us that the message of divine glory told by the heavens is largely communicated by awe inspiring beauty.

Ought we, then, to dismiss with respect to Scripture what we so readily acknowledge with regard to nature? Hardly. And lest we wallow in doubts, the pasuk has resolved them unequivocally (Tehillim 29:4): קול ה׳ בכח קול ה׳ בהדר “The voice of the Lord” — the direct no less than the oblique — “is in power, the voice of the Lord is in magnificence.” Splendor and force were manifested not only in the fire and wasteland cited in subsequent verses, but, equally, in Torah given in flame-lit desert, and in prophecy or divine inspiration throughout the ages.

Let me go a step further, to the third reason. Power and beauty are not merely frosting on the cake of a pasuk’s meaning.  They are — in the more imaginative and emotional passages, certainly of the very fabric of that meaning.

Similar to the classics of New Criticism from the 1930’s such as Cleanth Brooks, Rav Aharon limits criticism to the meaning of the text and cautions that one should not evaluate works. To engage in evaluation he calls  “presumptuous folly and dangerous heresy.” Therefore he castigates Abravanel for evaluating the literary merit of prophetic works. Along the way he historicized Abravanel as based on Renaissance literature. As a student of the new criticism he affirms: “Whatever and however a pasuk or a sefer expresses is, ipso facto, what and how it should express.” And he explicitly advocates Helen Gardner as a paradigm for aesthetic criticism in which one elucidates the text without the need for investigating the allusions of the text whose source is outside the text. Rav Aharon singles out Nehama Leibowitz and Meir Weiss, for following this aesthetic approach. He acknowledges that much of this is not new for much of the community, but still needed “on the whole, for the Torah community at large.”

Application of criticism to kitvei ha-kodesh must, however, be tempered by an indispensable qualification. In popular parlance,“criticism” is primarily envisioned as a semi-juridical enterprise, focusing upon judgment and evaluation. Drama critics grade playwrights, music critics weigh the merits of sonatas, and book reviewers assess the worth of current novels. In our case, criticism in this sense is clearly inadmissible. Grading the “success” or “failure” of a psalm in Tehillim or a chapter in Amos is the interface of presumptuous folly and dangerous heresy.

You may recall, for instance, that Rav Yitzhak Abravanel found fault with the roughness and abruptness of much of Sefer Yirmiyahu, and accounted for it by the twin facts that the prophet had grown up in provincial surroundings and, as he himself demurred — “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak; for I am a youngling” (1:6) — he was young and relatively unschooled when called to prophesy. Of course, if the Abravanel, instead of positing mellifiuous and polished Renaissance literature as a standard, had been steeped in modern poetry — fraught with allusions and disjunction, rich in telescoped imagery, and frequently characterized by psychological rather than logical continuity — he would have understood Yirmiyahu much better. Be that as it may, however, his position is clearly untenable; and we assuredly affirm the strictures justly passed upon it by the Malbim (introduction to Yirmiyahu):

In critical discourse, they are no less the point of departure than the conclusion. We can no more judge them than the botanist can assign a report card to the hyacinth or the astronomer pronounce whether a galaxy moves as it “ought.” Excellence — just raising the issue sounds sacrilegious — is self-defined; we are dealing, after all, with divinely inspired writings.

Whatever and however a pasuk or a sefer expresses is, ipso facto, what and how it should express.

Helen Gardner has succinctly noted, “would be my symbol for the critic. Elucidation, or illumination, is the critic’s primary task as I conceive it.”

it is inevitable that we should respond to them differently. Not all Scriptural texts impact, primarily, upon the same aspect of our personality. Some, to refer to De Quincey’s familiar distinction, belong to the literature of knowledge, others to the literature of power. Some address our sense of duty, others our desire for truth, still others, our passion for beauty.

Of course, what I have been advocating is not, strictly speaking, novel. Some aspects are clearly to be found in Hazal, midrashim, and parshanim, early and late. Others have been developed, more recently, in Israel, in the stimulating work of committed scholar-critics such as Nehama Leibowitz and Meir Weiss, in line with their focus upon textual rather than historical issues. Nevertheless, on the whole, for the Torah community at large, the direction I have suggested entails a degree of reorientation — if not the introduction of wholly new elements, then, at least, a change of perspective and gestalt.

Finally for those who cherish Rav Aharon’s 1961 image about “serpentine psychology,” here we have an image of faith in which “its inner light, shall hold the dragons of quasi-heresy at bay.”

This post will continue our discussion of Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits and modern medicine from a prior post- here.

From a historian’s perspective Jacobovits was crucial for the dismissal and writing out of Judaism hundreds of years of deathbed rituals and preparations for a good death and easy passage to the afterlife. In the 1960’s the value of preserving human life in the ICU displaced asking about repentance and the angel of death. The biological concerns of preserving of life took precedent over the psychological, spiritual, and metaphysical. Philip Aries, a French historian, spent twenty years investigating the changing attitudes towards death in Western Civilization.  In the Middle Ages, the “dying well” ( ars moriendi) came to primacy as one came to terms with their ultimate demise. What was then important was how the dying faced death.  In the mid-20^th century, advances in medical technology, particularly the development of the respirator, meant that death could now be delayed and occurred in hospital following a ”great war against death.” A death in the ICU is a failure of medicine rather than a good death. Culturally, death is now culturally invisible.  The entire process of fighting death shows more belief and focus on medicine than on religious services and the afterlife. There is no culmination of a religious service with the kiss of death.

The social historian Elliot Horowitz describes an Italian controversy from 1556 in which a Jewish man died suddenly without having confessional performed as part of Jewish Last Rites and was thus refused burial. Those on the side of the deceased claimed that the movements of the man’s lips immediately preceding death should have constituted as a confession. Rabbi Tucazinsky’s Gesher Hachaim records that in 1947 Jerusalem they had a person shout confession every day in the hospital so that everyone can affirm a confession before dying.

The Talmud teaches that, “If one falls sick and his life is in danger, he is told: ‘Make confession, for all who are sentenced to death make confession.’”  In the Shulchan Aruch’s codification, based on the language in Mesechet Semachot, where it is ruled that the following text should be recited to the terminally ill: “Many have confessed but have not died; and many who have not confessed died. And, many who are walking outside in the marketplace confess. By the merit of your confession, you shall live. And all who confess have a place in the World-to-Come.” The Early Modern works on deathbed procedures, such as those by Rabbi Aharon Brachia Maavar Yabok, were still essentials for the early 20^th century despite numerous editions and translations.  These works build on Talmudic and Medieval conceptions and create full orders and regulations for the deathbed rituals. (They are also our binding source for the activities of the Chevra Kaddisha’s performance of Tahara on the deceased.) In contrast, Jakobovits states that the “predominantly “this-worldly” character of Judaism is reflected in the relative sparsely of its regulations on the inevitable passage of man from life to death.”

In the Jewish works of dying well, the goal, according to social historian Avriel Bar-Levav, was to preserve self-control, unlike our current ICU deaths. Typically, deathbeds required a confession of the dying before a minyan.  However, lacking such control Maavar Yabok (ch 19) states  that one who is on his deathbed, the confession is said on his behalf by an appointed messenger who will read the text in the patient’s presence whether he is conscious or not.  One gathers a quorum of ten men around the deathbed in order to pray.  The moment the soul decides to submit and leave the body is considered the “kiss of death;” this is different from biological death.  The prayer said by those standing around the dying person appears in the standard Hamadrikh and begins with verses calling for God’s mercies.  It includes the Priestly Benediction and the prayer for God’s angels and protective spirit is called upon.  It is important to note, however, that this prayer is said even if the one in one one’s deathbed (goses) is incontinent and cannot hear the prayers. The prayer, according to these authorities, has an effect on the soul and also on those who are reading it. Even Rabbi Yekutiel Greenwald’s 1951 work, Kol Bo Aveilut  assumes these practices and even asks questions such as if one has one rabbi for a last rite, do we send him to the bed of the sinner or the rabbi?

In contrast, Jakobovits assumes that only Christian religious literature has devoted much attention to the problem of ascertaining the exact moment of death. In Judaism, however, this problem has little or no purely religious significance, since there are no sacramental rites to be accorded to the dying prior to the soul’s final departure from the body. From the ritual point of view, the only practical distinction in Jewish Law between a live body and a dead body concerns the rules of defilement cuased by the dead body.Whereas originally there would be a process of dying that included the soul, now in Jakobovits’ view we are limited to the body.

In the full deathbed service, in works such as Maavar Yabok, there are important practices to perform for the dying person and for  family and friends which signale the transition between realms. Physical death occurs at the end of this ritual process and the ritual serves to help in demarcating the living from the dead. Even after the physical death, the process of the soul leaving the body is to take the full length of the seven day Shiva period.  In modern terms, it would mean that even after the clinical signs of death, there is still a transitional process in which the body is still considered spiritually alive for a period of time. Jakobovits does away with this transitional realm and limited the process to the modern clinical realm of the undertaker: “When the patient dies, his body generally passes from the attention of the physician into the care of the undertaker and the religious officials who attend to its interment.”

Jakobovits acknowledges that, “the earliest Rabbinic sources usually speak of death as the “going out of the soul,” they also concede the view that the association between body and soul is not altogether severed until three days after death.”  But he trusts in modern medicine’s designation of biological death and considers that doctors are able to ascertain death. This is in distinction to the position of Rabbi Moshe Isserles who “altogether denies our competence ‘nowadays’ to ascertain the exact moment of death.”

Jakobovits leaves us with an acceptance of the modern clinical definition of death. Originally, there was an unknown moment of death described in  deathbed rituals as the “Kiss of Death” which signifies was the social moment when we had previously assumed the person had died. Now, that moment is identified entirely with the physical death. Gone are discussions of afterlife or how sickness and death are part of the religious cycle of the community. But equally as important is that we have lost any discussion of the social declaration of death such as how do families and communities note the transition of a member from life to death? The days of death rituals assumed a period between life and death, a process of dying. From the perspective of ordinary cases of end of life , the issues of futility, refusal and withdrawal of care is paramount, while the definition of death is a much rarer concern. Aristotle designates four souls: mineral, plant, animal, and human. Platonists added a fifth: the spiritual. The plant soul is digestion, animal soul is reactive, and human soul is rational or thought processes. Much of the halakhic death debate concerns over the vegetable and animal souls, little is said about the human soul, and much of the traditional process of death is now viewed as a legal moment.

The new approach of medical death in the ICU and the halakhah created for it makes all death a failure of medicine. It turns dying into a moment not a process. The way we deal with the denial of death is to control it through medical definition. Philip Aries showed that there were many stages of dying from becoming sick to maggots on a decaying body, even physical decay was not the end. Once there was the death of the human, the animal and vegetable aspects of human life took until the end of shiva to be completed. The assumption was that the body as organism felt the pain of the grave and the maggots.  (For many others, the claim of the dying on his/her body continues until the resurrection of the dead. This position was still held by Rabbi Waldenberg but scoffed as superstition to those with medical models.)

The approach started by Rabbi Jakobovits was continued by almost all halakhic/Orthodox rabbis who deal with medical ethics. Their comments deal almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. The sociologist Peter Berger notes that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, to neglect death in the ICU death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed. The contemporary sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that in our era of `late’ modernity’, there are three changes: the experience of death has become increasingly privatized, there is an increased identification of the self with the body; and the shrinkage of the scope of the sacred. Is there a way to bring back the sacred in an age of hospital death?

This year the State of Israel issued a postage stamp for the Indian holiday of Diwali to celebrate twenty years of relations.  The stamp is part of a two stamp set comparing the Jewish festival of lights- Hanukah to the Indian festival of lights. Notice that the stamp actually says Diwali and explicitly compares it to Hanukah. In contrast, when Israel issues Christmas or Easter stamps they just say “seasons greetings” to avoid mentioning Christmas or Easter. and they certainly dont compare the Christian holidays to Jewish ones. Diwali is celebrated by everyone in India as a national holiday. The public aspects were also celebrated by India’s Jews as told in our blog interview with Avi Solomon. Diwali was first celebrated as a public holiday five years ago by the Israeli Diamond Exchange in appreciation of the Indian diamond community’s contribution in making Israel one of the major centres of world diamond trade.

From the Times of India

TEL AVIV: India and Israel have released a set of postal stamps depicting their respective festival of lights, Diwali and Hannukah, to commemorate 20 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The stamps were unveiled by secretary and director general of India Post, Manjula Prasher, India’s new envoy to Israel, Jaideep Sarkar, and chairman of Israel Postal Company, Sasi Shilo in presence of other officials from both sides.

Sarkar called upon to promote close people to people contact among the two countries to foster experience of mutual goodwill and friendship among them.

“In India we have a great respect for the Jewish faith, as we have for all other faiths. Today the release of the joint postal stamp not only celebrates a milestone in our diplomatic relations but also a common structural tradition, the festival of lights….both festivals celebrating the victory of good over evil”, Sarkar said addressing India enthusiasts gathered to attend the ceremony.

The Indian stamp shows a row of traditional earthen lamps, diyas, representing Diwali and the Israeli stamp features a menorah with the word “Zion” inscribed inside a Magen David star.

Hanukkah, like Deepavali, celebrates the triumph of good over evil and the victory of justice over injustice.

Emphasising on the deepening Indo-Israel ties, Shilo called upon the postal services of both the countries to also cooperate in order to meet the new challenges posed by technological advancements. “Issuing joint stamps symbolises the culture, cooperation and friendship shared between people and nation”, he said, touching upon the special bonding between Indians and Israelis.

These limited edition stamps have been designed by Indian artist, Alka Sharma, and Israeli artist, Ronen Goldberg. They will be available in Israel from today and released in India in about two weeks.

The menorah featured on the stamp was inspired by the wooden menorah used by the Jewish community in Bombay.

On Diwali:

Deepawali or Diwali is certainly the biggest and the brightest of all Hindu festivals. It’s the festival of lights (deep = light and avali = a row i.e., a row of lights) that’s marked by four days of celebration, which literally illumines the country with its brilliance, and dazzles all with its joy.

Each of the four days in the festival of Diwali is separated by a different tradition with its own tale, legend and myth to tell.

The first day of the festival Naraka Chaturdasi marks the vanquishing of the demon Naraka by Lord Krishna and his wife Satyabhama. Amavasya,  the second day of Deepawali, marks the worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth in her most benevolent mood, fulfilling the wishes of her devotees. Amavasya also tells the story of Lord Vishnu, who in his dwarf incarnation vanquished the tyrant Bali, and banished him to hell. Bali was allowed to return to earth once a year, to light millions of lamps to dispel the darkness and ignorance, and spread the radiance of love and wisdom. It is on the third day of Deepawali — Kartika Shudda Padyami that Bali steps out of hell and rules the earth according to the boon given by Lord Vishnu. The fourth day is referred to as Yama Dvitiya (also called Bhai Dooj) and on this day sisters invite their brothers to their homes.

The illumination of homes with lights and the skies with firecrackers is an expression of obeisance to the heavens for the attainment of health, wealth, knowledge, peace and prosperity.

The tradition of gambling on Diwali also has a legend behind it. It is believed that on this day, Goddess Parvati played dice with her husband Lord Shiva, and she decreed that whosoever gambled on Diwali night would prosper throughout the ensuing year

From Darkness Unto Light…- In each legend, myth and story of Deepawali lies the significance of the victory of good over evil; From darkness unto light — the light that empowers us to commit ourselves to good deeds, that which brings us closer to divinity.

While Diwali is popularly known as the “festival of lights”, the most significant spiritual meaning is “the awareness of the inner light”. Central to Hindu philosophy is the assertion that there is something beyond the physical body and mind which is pure, infinite, and eternal, called the Atman. The celebration of Diwali as the “victory of good over evil”, refers to the light of higher knowledge dispelling all ignorance, the ignorance that masks one’s true nature, not as the body, but as the unchanging, infinite, immanent and transcendent reality. With this awakening comes compassion and the awareness of the oneness of all things (higher knowledge). This brings anand (joy or peace). Just as we celebrate the birth of our physical being, Diwali is the celebration of this Inner Light.

While the story behind Diwali and the manner of celebration varies from region to region (festive fireworks, worship, lights, sharing of sweets), the essence is the same – to rejoice in the Inner Light (Atman) or the underlying Reality of all things (Brahman).

h/t Reb Yudel and Jewlicious

Any thoughts on the Diwali – Hanukah comparison?

In preparing for a class on the Jews in Italy, I found these texts published by Stefanie Siegmund, newly discovered and translated from the Florentine Jewish Community archives. In the first one, we have a regulation not to eat out on Shabbat and not to order gentile wine from outside the Ghetto for Shabbat use. The second text from several decades later bans eating in non-kosher restaurants no matter what they serve or whether tavern, pub, snack bar, restaurant, specialty shops, or breakfast room. One can only eat ices without company in these establishments.

In principle  this is not new. Cecil Roth, Roberto Bonfil, David Ruderman and Ariel Toaff are filled with medieval Italian Jews who gamble on Shabbat, drink gentile wine without qualm, frequent brothels, attend Carnival in mask, engage in mixed dancing- even teaching dance in the day schools, and engage in duels. But the seeming need to tell them not to eat at treif restaurants is new.

Professor Siegmund writes:

The demographic growth of cities, the presence of foreigners, the relatively improved safety of the streets, changing tastes and fashions, the availability of time for leisure and the necessity of travel for business – all these contributed to the success of hotels, pubs and taverns (and, later, coffee houses. The first ordinance (1609) concerned Jews who visited taverns on Sabbath and holy days, not mentioning the consumption of food and drink in the city’s establishments on other days. Sometime before 1622 there was a six month ban on Jews frequenting these establishments at all. Had the cultural practice changed in two decades, or should we see here the strengthening of a ghetto government that first attempted only to address the violation of the Sabbath and a decade later attempted to enforce kashrut?

“That on the Sabbath and festival days, it shall not be permitted to anyone to go to drink and eat at hosterie or grecaiuoli of any type or stripe whatsoever, nor to have wine brought in from outside the ghetto on the day of the Sabbath, under penalty of 1 scudo per occasion [of the transgression], as above.”

That for six months from the above said date, it shall be unlawful and in fact prohibited to go to eat or drink at osterie, bettole, grecaioli, alberghi, camere alocante and other similar places, in Florence just as for a mile outside, and this prohibition is made for every Jew of our holy congregation, of whatever status, sex and condition, of every age. Excluding from this penalty an [individual] who should wish to go to drink a glass of ices, but this is only conceded for going alone, without any company, and the [governors] reserve the right — if they should learn that someone is abusing and maligning the concession — to prohibit [it] and condemn [it] the same as stated. Source Here.