Category Archives: Uncategorized

Way back in 1997 Jerome Gellman gave a lecture at YU on his then recent book on mysticism and religious experience. The subject of the talk was on the concept of the truth claims of mystical experiences of oneness and noetic insight. But when the questions started, he received questions about from the students about their conversations with God during prayer. I was surprised that for many of them kavvanah was about their daily conversation with God about their daily problems. They had developed a type of experience of God that was unlike prior Hasidut. There is a brand new book by a known scholar T. M. Luhrmann, who tries to explain this phenomena in her new book, “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.”

Luhrmann’s book was recently reviewed in the New Yorker. The article summarizes Luhrmann’s conclusions in her popular work. (for her technical papers- see below.) Talking to God is trained habitual activity and that one must learn to trust the experience. Americans who converse with God view god in very personal terms, not the majesty, awe or judgment of traditional accounts. The lack of probability logic among contemporary believers is widespread in Orthodox circles. Luhrman avoids pathological terminology for the phrase “sensory overloads.”

The United States, as we know, is a very religious country, but the figures still have the power to amaze. Since 1996, according to Gallup polls, between thirty-five and forty-seven per cent of Americans have described themselves as “evangelical” or “born again”; two-thirds mostly or wholly believe that angels and devils are at work in the world.

How do you find this God? First, you train yourself to recognize the evidence of his operation in your life. One Vineyard parishioner, Augusta, described feeling “goosebumps and just warm all over and just very peaceful, and I know that he’s there.” Or if a thought pops into your head that’s not the kind of thought you normally have, and, above all, if it strangely matches something else in your recent experience, that is likely to be God speaking..”

In the second step, worshippers, when they recognize that God is with them, must learn to treat him like an intimate. This injunction, probably more than anything else in Luhrmann’s book, will puzzle readers who were raised in other religious traditions. The Vineyarders have no interest in God as a figure of majesty, or of judgment. They wear shorts and sneakers to church on Sunday.
This casualness carries over to conversations with God. The Vineyarders asked him “for admission to specific colleges, for the healing of specific illness—even, it is true, for specific red convertible cars.” Some Vineyard women had a regular “date night” with Jesus. They would serve a special dinner, set a place for him at the table, chat with him. He guided the Vineyarders every minute of the day.
So the third step is to “develop your heart”—that is, to cultivate the emotions that are appropriate to receiving God’s unconditional love. There are exercises for this, notably, what Luhrmann calls “crying in the presence of God.”

Above all, the congregants cried when they were “prayed over” by their fellows. At the end of the service, if they had troubles, they went over to the “prayer team” standing against a side wall, and the team huddled around them, touched them, and prayed over them, “asking God to make them feel safe, loved, and protected—wrapped in his arms, soothed by his embrace, washed by his forgiveness.” If, under such ministrations, you didn’t cry, this was something you had to explain.

From chapter to chapter, you can’t quite figure out how Luhrmann feels about the Vineyarders’ spiritual project. Occasionally, she allows herself sarcastic remarks—for some of the congregants, she says, the product of prayer is a state of “feel-good blurries”—and she describes some scenes with unmistakably comic intent. At one point, she and another church member, Elaine, go to a Vineyard-sponsored conference called “The Art of Hearing God.” Luhrmann writes, “The leader explained to us that scientists had discovered that if you slow down the sounds a cricket makes, you will find that the cricket is actually singing the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus to Handel’s Messiah. Elaine thought that this was really neat and repeated it to our house group without a trace of irony.” Luhrmann says that Elaine was “almost wantonly uninterested in probabilistic logic.”

The Vineyarders seem to have no theology—they never try to reconcile reason with faith, nor do they try to account for the existence of evil in a world that is, presumably, ruled by a good God. Their solution to suffering, Luhrmann says, is to ignore it. One of her interviewees was crushed by the sudden death of a friend. Her pastor brought this up in the Sunday service. Luhrmann summarizes his response: “That’s the way it is. ‘Creation is beautiful, but it is not safe.’ He called everyday reality ‘broken.’ ‘God is doing something about it. There’s a fix in progress. It will be okay.’ What should you do? Get to know God. ‘Learn to hang out with him now.’”

Not surprisingly, Luhrmann compares the Vineyarders’ beliefs to children’s thought processes. She discusses their views in relation to D. W. Winnicott’s theories about transitional objects. For some evangelicals, she says, God is not unlike a stuffed Snoopy.

She repeatedly reminds us that the majority of them are educated people. One is a medical student, one an economist, a few are lawyers.

Luhrmann warns us against calling the evangelicals’ visions and voices “hallucinations”; that is a psychiatric and, hence, pathologizing term. In her vocabulary, such events are “sensory overrides”—sensory perceptions that override material evidence. She cites evidence that between ten and fifteen per cent of the general population has had such experiences.

She says that the Vineyarders know that their “faith practice”—their date nights with God, their asking him for a red convertible—is, in some measure, playacting. At the same time, they see it as a way of encountering God. She later adds, “The playfulness and paradox of this new religiosity does for Christians what postmodernism, with its doubt-filled, self-aware, playful intellectual style, did for intellectuals. It allows them to waver between the metaphorical and the literal.”

Luhrmann places great emphasis on the hours that they put in, and I think that is not only because this is important to them but because she expects that it will be important to the reader’s view of them. Americans respect hard work. Read the Rest Here.

An Anglican blog with more than a touch of anthropological knowledge responded to the New Yorker article by giving the more technical aspects of why we have sensory overrides, absorption, meditation. Her scientific article is here- download it.

In the 2011 Annual Review of Anthropology, Luhrmann published a primer on sensory overrides or hallucinations. She begins by asking why hallucinations occur: What is happening in the mind? Although there is no firm consensus, most agree that hallucinations are tied to perception and what is known as “reality monitoring.” This perspective views the mind not as a passive recipient of direct stimuli (the Hume-like model), but as an active agent which filters, interprets, and constructs experience from stimuli (the Kant-like model).
…hallucination-like experiences occur not because there is necessarily something wrong with one’s mind, but because one interprets something imagined in the mind as being real in the world. The most plausible mechanism here is that we constantly experience perceptual “breaks,” which we repair below the level of our awareness, either by filling in a perceptual break from its surrounding perceptual field or by interpreting the break with prior knowledge (e.g., the way being told that strange sounds are English can change the way one hears them). Hallucinations probably occur in the process of repair, and the cause is likely more often perceptual bias than perceptual deficit.

Knowing this, Luhrmann identifies three patterns of hallucinations that appear in all societies. The first and most pervasive is Sensory Override, in which people “experience a sensation in the absence of a source to be sensed.” The paradigmatic example is the hearing of a voice even though no one is present or no one has spoken. Although the hearing of non-existent voices is common across cultures and has been attributed to all manner of spirits, gods, ghosts, and other imaginaries, in the US it is often reported by charismatic Christians who believe God is talking. Luhrmann’s research links this experience to an attentional state which dampens external stimuli and amplifies internal arousal:

Absorption is the capacity to become focused on the mind’s object — what humans imagine or see around them — and to allow that focus to increase while diminishing attention to the myriad of everyday distractions that accompany the management of normal life. It is the mental capacity common to trance, hypnosis, dissociation, and much other spiritual experience in which the individual becomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations.

It is also true that spiritual training may make sensory overrides more likely. Inner sense cultivation — and mental imagery cultivation, in particular — is at the heart of shamanism and is central to many spiritual traditions….[T]wo dominant forms of mental techniques in effect train the human mind to experience the supernatural: techniques that focus attention on the inner senses and those that train attention away from thought and sensation. Examples of the former include shamanism, Tibetan vision meditation, and the Ignatian spiritual exercises; examples of the latter are Zen meditation and Centering Prayer.- from here.

Her cultural observations are featured elsewhere in the science journalism. Americans are reticent to share their hallucinations, but other cultures are quite comfortable with it.

Elsewhere in the world, people openly discuss their hallucinatory experiences. In many non-Western cultures, such as Thailand’s Buddhist society, troubled minds are viewed as open to manipulation by ghosts and other forms of invisible, supernatural energy, Luhrmann says. In an upcoming issue of Religion and Society, Stanford anthropologist Julia Cassaniti and Luhrmann report that Thai college students and villagers often report having had waking nightmares, run-ins with ghosts and other supernatural encounters during periods of personal turmoil.- from here.

Finally, here is Luhrmann in her own voice on why Americans are turning to direct experience. It offers reassurance that their view is correct. This fits in well with the emotionalism and direct experience of the gap-year in Israel in its functional aspect to provide certainty through experience.

Millions and millions of Americans experience themselves as having a personal relationship with God that is as vivid and intimate as a child’s imaginary friend. They go for walks with God. They go on dates with God. Sometimes they set a place at the dinner table for God and sit down across from the place setting to talk things over with Him. Exactly how many Americans have so intimate a relationship is a little hard to determine, but that is the kind of relationship many evangelicals seek. Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” — more than 25 million copies sold — says that God should be your “best friend.” Dallas Willard, a beloved evangelical author, explains that God’s face-to-face conversations with Moses are the “normal human life God intended for us.” In 2008, the Pew Foundation found that more than a quarter of all Americans said that God had given them a direct revelation.

Why has this way of imagining God become so popular for modern Americans? It is not the first time that God has inflamed the American senses. Over the course of our history, there have been periods when people have sought to experience God intensely and immediately. Historians have called them “great awakenings.” No doubt these yearnings are fueled by different motivations at different times. In this era, the yearning may be fueled by secular doubt. No Christian in America is unaware that there are other Americans who are not Christian, and are not even believers; and that may be unsettling, for the knowledge raises the possibility that one’s own beliefs are hollow. The quest to experience God with personal immediacy may arise out of this climate of doubt, for a God you can feel and hear and talk to can dispel the anxiety raised by a neighbor’s skeptical look.- from here.

That 70’s Show
Over thirty years ago, I visited an acquaintance for an evening at Ohr Sameach in Jerusalem. He had in his room a book from the yeshiva’s library by David Hartman called Joy and Responsibility (1976). The book was published by Bnai –Brith in conjunction with the newly formed Mechon Hartman. At the time of publication Hartman was still involved in outreach and Shappels and Hamivtar were recent offshoots of his Mechon. Hartman rewrote the book a second time as Israelis and the Jewish Tradition (1990), by that point I was interested in Hasidism and Ohr Sameach would not stock his book since the update contained many new ideas on pluralism, revelation, and halakhah. The book has been rewritten a third time as From Defender to Critic: The Search for a New Jewish Self in which he softens many of his previous statements returning us to the 1970’s.

The new book is a quick read especially if you have read some of Hartman’s prior works. He opens up by reiterating that Christians need to learn to understand how halakhah is the essence of Judaism and that we find our religious joy in the law. Hartman asserts that properly understood, Jews should be attracted to the this-worldly, democratic, and rational world of the halakhah as presented by Maimonides and Rav Soloveitchik. Once again in this book, Hartman returns to his break with Lakewood of the 1960’s by seeking modern philosophy, psychology and science. (It would be worthwhile to compare Hartman to Rav Soloveitchik’s 1978 lecture to Mental Health Professionals for the similaritiies).

I never got around to writing my own opinion on his last work The God Who Hates Lies written in conjunction with Charlie Buckholtz, because I could not grasp it or pin it down. Buckholtz framed it as if Hartman followed Rackman’s pragmatism yet Hartman still loyally follows the method, if not content, of the existential abstractions of Rav Soloveitchik. Buckholtz makes Hartman sound like Heschel’s piety, and he leaves open details of stories that weakens it rather than strengthens it. For example, think of the story in the last book where Hartman declares that a kohen cannot marry his fiancé as unethical. We are left guessing if he constructed a leniency based on Rabbenu Tam (which is what he did as RCA member) or he jettisons halakhah before his ethical voice. I did, however, learn from the last book how many young rabbis in the field are still followers of Hartman.

This book is easy to form an opinion about its contents. In the book, Hartman basically tones down his prior radicalism and his questioning the system. It is a return to the 1970’s. This book could have been used for discussion in the nostalgic Edah organization, since defunct, because it is once again “the courage to be modern and orthodox.” Halakhah can assert itself against the 1950’s and be pluralistic, individualistic, and this-worldly.

The last chapter on universalism and particularism sums up my problem with the book. He discusses the particularism of his Lakewood background and calls for a more open view of gentiles. To which he proffers the solution of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Where are the books authored by your own Machon on the topic? Where are the 25 years of results from your annual interfaith conferences? The book is a return to the 1970’s. Hartman only uses and responds to Urbach, Scholem, and early Fackenheim. But your own institution has produced scholars who have changed the nature of the study Rabbinic thought, you have Idel on the staff, and you have encouraged your students to produce books on pluralism. Where is your own self-reflections on what you have created? All the new institutions in Israel follow your model for teaching halakhah with philosophic questions, did it work? Did you come up with anything beyond Hirsch?

The other chapters have ideas we have seen before. The book advocates a Hartman’s understanding of Soloveitchik’s approach to Halakhah as a basis for all movements and a commitment to a halakhic future of Judaism. The need to translate Torah into a language intelligible by those not part of the closed world of Torah; Torah cannot be just for the few. Even if most Jews do not accept the metaphysics and doctrines of Judaism because one is modern, one can still be part of the process. Instead of focusing on God, focus on our collective responsibility. Focus on Abraham who fought with God to save the people of Sodom, not just the submissive Abraham. Instead of focusing on revelation, focus on the responsibility of the halakhah Instead of Berkovits’ revelation as a paradox of God infinite given to the human finite, we have revelation as showing how finite and limited we are- therefore don’t look for absolutes. (He does not even cite his more strident A Living Covenant in this book.) And redemption is a this-worldly making Israel and the world better through halakhah.

In keeping with his pluralism, Hartman jettisons the sense of certainty that one associates with Orthodoxy. It is his claim that one may believe that halakhic Judaism is the best for oneself, but not necessarily the best for everyone. A healthy Orthodoxy, therefore, should be able to accept and legitimate the “dignified other” among the Jewish people. David Hartman thinks a reapproachment between religion and political liberalism is possible. And unlike his view of Lakewood in the 1960’s as stifling creativity and individuality, Hartman proclaims an individualistic Orthodoxy that works for the good of all Israel.

If we can assume that it is possible for individuals to agree on what they reject, without acknowledging what they affirm, we may be able to create a shared theology of the repudiation of idolatry, without demanding a clearly defined commitment to belief in God. The believer can share common aspirations with the atheist and the agnostic, if all three strive to reject idolatry. This striving can have great significance and far-ranging consequences if the idolatry that is combatted is luring, and constitutes a vital problem to be eradicated (1978, p. 147).

In a review of the 1990 version, Arnie Eisen, current chancellor of JTSA, notes that Hartman does not accept a Biblical Judaism without Rabbinics, nor does he allow Buber, Rosenzweig, or other liberal thinkers to speak for Judaism. Eisen does capture how Hartman rewrites tradition but preserves it content.

Hartman is not willing to say (in my words): “God commanded mizvot on Sinai, so they are binding on every Jew,” or to insist that Judaism offers the finest path to God and the good life, let alone the only path. But he can, and does, say something like this (my words again): “Judaism’s distinctive way of standing before God, fashioned by the rabbis, involves the communal performance of mizvot. Choosing to fulfill our part of the covenant as part of a community, therefore, provides as much intimacy with God and as much moral worth as human beings are privileged to know. Each Jew who chooses not to take on that way of standing before God, in Israel, where community is best accomplished, must give a satisfactory account of why not.”

On the topic of feminism, he footnotes his daughter but makes no use of her work. He argues that for our daughters we cannot return to our bubbis and grandmothers Torah. He uses as his example of a mistaken approach Rav Kook’s banning women from voting as the definitive halakhah. Where is the last forty years?

Hartman articulates the ethical dilemma better than others and acknowledges the difference between himself and the texts:

The problem with attempting to use internal mechanisms within the tradition to resolve moral quandaries is that the moral problematic is never named, much less explicitly critiqued, Engaging authentically with our most sacred book means acknowledging when it arouses our sense of injustice or compassion—and admitting that some of its injunctions may be flawed. ..the tradition cant save itself from itself.”

But for the answer of how to overcome this difference, the problem of difficult texts has been with us for decades and there are many answers. Even on this blog, last week we had Yehuda Gellman arguing, seemingly like Hartman, those immoral texts were divine concession to that era, while Fleishacker preserves the morality of revelation and sees the potholes as part of a system to be maintained even if reinterpreted.

Finally, the title of the book implies Hartman recently moved from defender to critic, rather than forty years ago. I mentioned the title to a friend, who said that this is the theme of forthcoming books. Many who became observant in the 1980’s and 1990’s have moved from defenders to critics after all the immoral behavior within the community, the conversion crisis, and the provincialism of the community. Hartman’s became a critic before the era of Rabbis Eliashiv or Yitzhak Shapira, before the community was used to seeing members arrested for fraud, and before the quest for doctrinal and legal purity started. Hartman’s title implied that he would deal with these issues. What are his answers to these new questions?

IF I have already read the books written at Mechon Hartman by Sagi, Halbertal, Lorberbaum, the Zohar brothers, Rosenak, Knohl, and Achitov, Can I return to the 1970’s questions? This book may be one of the clearest and least controversial presentations of Hartman’s opinions for those looking where to start. But it also highlights how the issues look different in todays papers or after reading the works produced by his own Mechon.

Addenda
Here is a 1991 interview from the Jerusalem Post in which Hartman distinguishes between the tolerant Orthodoxy of the 1930’s and the recent 1950’s immigrant from Europe who created a closed and frightened reaction.

You are an Orthodox rabbi, yet your practice of Orthodoxy is markedly more tolerant than the Orthodoxy to which we are accustomed. Did you have to struggle against the Orthodox milieu in which you were raised in order to attain this tolerance?

Not at all. There is a tolerant stream in Orthodox Judaism and I was raised in it.
Their closedness is rooted firstly in the most ghetto-bound, diversity-fearing streams of Eastern European Orthodoxy and secondly in a traumatized reaction to the genocide of World War II. This turning inward is very different from the pluralistic Orthodox milieu in which I myself was raised in Brooklyn in the ’30s and ’40s.
The climate in which I was raised was pious, but not in the slightest bit fanatical. Brownsville at that time was filled with all forms of Jews: Socialists, Communists, Bundists. There was no ghetto climate of dogmatism and rejection of those who disagreed with one’s views. It was a pluralistic community. We played basketball with Blacks and Italians on the streets. There was no “us and them.” One could learn from and respect everybody. This is the kind of Orthodoxy which is home to me.
– Right. We are talking about a far less fanatical and defensive kind of Orthodoxy. World War II made many Orthodox feel a zealous need to preserve a threatened way of life. There are also Orthodox Sephardim who maintain their tradition’s historic attitude of tolerance.

I have not yet responded to the many comments on my prior post about my chat with Rabbi Einhorn ranging from Yehudah’s question on authority to the debate of Neil & Micha on Musar. I will, but first several people have emailed me about some examples of his sermons. Thanks to the files at YUTorah we have examples and from his own Social Sermon Experiment we see that he constructs sermons from discrete parts- story, Torah and joke. They are all good sermonic material. Thoughts?

So from these Neo-Mitnaged sermons, what is the image of the gedolim?

1) I start with the story that the good rabbi quoted both when we met and in an email to illustrate the kind of Torah that he likes- juicy chaps. I mentioned that Rav Soloveitchik would not have considered this activity Torah study. Notice the quoting of the Haredi leader and the complete reversal and undercutting in the telling. The sermon illustrates the poaching and evasion found in popular religion that was discussed by Michel de Certeau- see my prior post on Certeau and Orthodoxy.

On occasion I have the challenging, yet rewarding, task of working with at-risk teens. In one pre-Pesach class I decided to present a possibly contentious interpretation of the Haggadah. I was curious to see how these students would react. The interpretation is that of the brilliant Rav Yoel Teitelbaum ZT”L, the Satmar Rov. The Satmar Rov was known for his sharp wit and tough talk. He raises the question of why we perform the yachatz (breaking the middle matzah) before beginning the maggid (recounting of the story of the Exodus) portion of the Haggadah. The Satmar Rov answers that in order to properly begin a holy endeavor we must first discard all that is bad from our midst. We must break off and cast aside the wicked, the apikores, those that tend to bring us down with their moral failings and lack of Jewish observance.

The moment I shared this thought, I could see the blood of my students reddening. But it was the insight of one student, who we shall call David, that shook my perspective of the Passover Seder. David tends to come off as irreverent, lost, and at times depressed. But at this moment he had reached a level of clarity seldom seen by anyone. He turned to me and with blazing passion in his eyes, he said “I disagree! We do not cast away this broken matzah. In fact, we hide it, protect it, and when the time is right – at the highlight of our Seder – Tzafun, the emergence of the Afikomen, we bring that “discarded” one front and center.” We may need an occasional “time out”, but we are never out of love’s reach.
And together we fell to weeping.
— from here.

2) This one is good for Passover but more importantly it is a great lead in for a sermon with the content taken from Rabbi David Wolpe. The Belzer teaches us that we find God in sickness, we find God when we take care of the poor, and we find God when we gather with the family around the table. I would suggest looking at Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters? on the importance of turning to God in health crisis, family, and in social action.

R. Yissachar Dov of Belze suggests a beautiful interpretation. The Gemara in Shabbos 12b says that when we go to visit a sick person, one is able to pray in Aramaic because the Divine Presence is above his or her head and therefore the petitioner does not need a ministering angel to bring the prayer to G-d. The Medrash (Vayikrah Rabbah 34) states – that when a poor person stands at the door, the Divine Presence is there as well. When we say “All those who are hungry come and eat” – Hashem is standing there! G-d is with us at the Seder.— from here

3) Here is a sermon that would serve as a good introduction to Tony Robbins and motivational books. Musar teaches that we need our ego to reach higher levels. And we use our own ego to determine how we help the neighbor. It is musar without the puritanical side, without visualizing how you will burn in gehenna, and without the continuation of the homily on the need to generally break your ego. We have this-worldly growth of ego and community work- the opposite of the original.

Rav Eliyahu Dessler, in a collection of magnificent and creative essays and original letters, asks “why did G-d have to create our Ego so strong?” R. Dessler boldly argues that it is primarily because of our ego that we are able to reach levels of spirituality otherwise unattainable. Our unquenchable thirst for greatness and godliness pushes us beyond our apparent limits. However, left unchecked this ego may go too far. Left unchecked, we may deify ourselves. What keeps us in balance? “Veahavta Leracha Kamocha”, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Meaning, use your ego to first ascertain what we would want for ourselves and in that we can figure out what it is that we must do for our neighbor.— from here

4) Here are selections from a long sermon that combines Bob Dylan with R. Yisrael Salanter and have Rav Dessler. The first thing to note is how Dylan’s religion, who treats his Judaism as ethnicity and follows an Evangelical Christianity, is equated with Orthodoxy. Gabriel’s trumpet of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 is labeled as classic musar. Dylan’s Christian songs License to Kill,” and “Blind Willie McTell,” is linked to the depravity of man and the Vilna Gaon demand for constant progress. The Gra learned day and night without concern for food, family, money, or sleep and in this sermon we have popular American Calvinism.
Rabbi Salanter is presented as about self-improvement without the specifics of the approach in which our imaginations and emotions lead us astray. Rav Dessler is compared to Dylan’s Idiot Wind.

Bob Dylan – The Zemanim they Are a Changin’
The world of Bob Dylan’s songs bring to life a dynamic array of characters, themes, and melodies. But the one constant throughout Bob Dylan’s career, is G-d. While in real life (outside of the printed lyric that is) Bob Dylan’s commitment and connection to Judaism is in some ways mysterious, mercurial, and marginal, as far as his feelings go, Bob Dylan is a religiously inclined individual. He is a man that shows a face interested in the mystical underpinnings of Judaism. He is a man that emerges with ideas that often run congruous to basic Jewish philosophies. He is a man whose yearnings hover surprisingly close to mainstream Orthodox Judaism.

In the 19th Century, Rabbi Yisroel Lipkin, better known as Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, fathered the Mussar movement. This brought a strong and overt focus on ethical development to Judaism. This also meant that one’s flaws were to be highlighted in order to find room for improvement. Maimonides, in his Mishnah Torah, already preempted the overt style of Mussar by noting that the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah was the instrument by which we tell each other – “wake up you sleepers from your slumber.” In the song “Sugar Baby” off of the Love and Theft album, Bob Dylan gives us spiritual council – “Look up, look up – seek your Maker – ‘fore Gabriel blows his horn.” This is classic Mussar – reproach in its most raw form.

One of the most philosophically challenging issues in Jewish philosophy is the issue of Divine Providence, or G-d’s interaction with humans in their present state. Many of our great sages have debated the level and intensity of Divine intervention. Rav Eliyahu Dessler has argued that hashgacha pratis (Divine guidance) can be broken into two components – that which is evident by the external eye and that which is evident by the internal eye. The external eye seems to tell us that this world is controlled by G-d in every sense. Every move we make, every animal that grazes, every flower that wilts is controlled by G-d. Our internal eye lets us feel that we still have some control, G-d lets some things just be. Rav Dessler further develops the reasoning as to why both perspectives are necessary. Bob Dylan is also stranded between this tension of the internal eye and external eye. This duality is clear in several of his songs. Bob Dylan’s apocalyptical “Masters of War” portrays a demagogue that is physically capable and free to cause havoc upon the world. Still, Dylan realizes the eventual “judgment” awaiting the tyrant as he faces a time of reckoning before G-d. “Idiot Wind,” which is a play on the Talmudic concept of a “ruach shuts,” also works within the balance of this fine line between apparent Divine Determinism and Free Will.

What prolific Jewish author can fairly leave out some treatise on personality traits – or what we call Middos? Bob Dylan spends a considerable amount of time weeding out the traits that distance us from both humankind and our Creator. In the haunting “License to Kill,” Dylan preaches – “Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled.” This loaded line has dual meaning; it is both an ode to the Vilna Gaon’s statement of stagnancy – “if you are not going up up you are going down down,” and it is a reference to self pride, Gayva, if you will. Dylan’s distaste for depravity continues in his classic “Blind Willie McTell,” – “well, G-d is in heaven And we all want what’s his but power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.”

Read the rest here

Samuel Fleischacker, Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. Fleischacker recived his Ph.D. Yale 1989 and works in moral and political philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. His publications include the award winning On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton, 2003), credited as a major work showing that the Adam Smith of the 20th century economists is not that of Adam Smith himself (1st chapter as pdf) and A Short History of Distributive Justice (Harvard, 2004). Recently, he published Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford, 2011) on revelation in general, but from a Jewish perspective. (For those who want to start with the interesting interview-scroll down.)

In his new book, Samuel Fleischacker defends what the Enlightenment called ‘revealed religion’: religions that regard a certain text or oral teaching as sacred, as wholly authoritative over one’s life. At the same time, he maintains that revealed religions stand in danger of corruption or fanaticism unless they are combined with secular scientific practices and a secular morality.

Divine Teaching and the Way of the World argue that the cognitive and moral practices of a society, meaning ethics and science, serve as “way of the world” (his translation of the Hebrew “derech eretz,”) and his motto for the book is “Beautiful is the study of Torah with derech eretz. The ways of the world (derech eretz) allow human beings to work together regardless of their religious differences.

But according to Fleischacker secular ethics and science breaks down when it comes to the question of what we live for, and it is this that revealed religions can illumine. Fleischacker suggests that secular conceptions of why life is worth living are often poorly grounded.

According to an in depth review at NDPR by Yeudah Gellman:

One of Fleischacker’s main theses is that these [morals and science] must be in place before a commitment to a text as revelatory. They must, that is, come to religion already equipped with entrenched secular morality and science. Religion cannot make claims against either.

Next, Fleischacker argues that religion provides something that secularism fails to offer successfully — a telos for the moral life, that which makes living the moral life and life itself meaningful and worthwhile. He rejects as an adequate telos for life knowledge, pleasure, self-flourishing, projectivism (that we ourselves bestow value on our life), and Kantian accounts of worth.

A revelatory text will emphasize moral values beyond what standard morality does, for example, increased concern for widows and orphans. A revelatory text provides telic direction with the category of the “holy,” demanding personal transformation and not only prescribed actions. To say a revelation is “true” for Fleischacker, therefore, is not to refer to its historical reliability or its sound moral teachings. (p. 67) Rather, it is to express trust in one’s telic expectations of it. The text satisfies one’s “telic yearnings.” (p. 308) When a text strikes a person as revelatory, he then has reason to believe in God, for belief in God as the source of the revelation can give the best metaphysical account of the telic truth existing in the text.

Why does he believe the Torah is the word of God? Because it satisfies his “telic yearnings,” the story “rings true” to him ethically.
Since the morality of a text must precede judging it a revelation, Fleischacker knows he must contend with what he calls the Torah’s moral “pockmarks,” Torah passages he deems morally reprehensible. He notes such passages as the Temple ritual of the accused wife, the command to destroy the people of Amalek, and the command to kill a rebellious son, what he calls a “notorious text.”
Here, Fleischacker provides the most intriguing argument in the book. (pp. 327ff.) The moral pockmarks, he says, are an advantage to a revealed text. The moral pockmarks in the Torah protect a Jew from the haughtiness of believing that with the Torah he possesses absolute, perfect truth. Instead, the Jew learns religious humility and tolerance of others. Indeed, the presence of pockmarks calls the Jew to moral and religious responsibility in the task of reinterpretation and furthering progress in the religious life…
Fleischacker focuses especially on systematic problems in Torah legislation, and most especially on what he judges to be sexist, xenophobic, or vengeful passages. His solution is to undertake a reinterpretation of all such passages to bring them into line with secular morality: “If Maimonides can find a non-anthropomorphic God in the Torah, we should have no trouble finding a non-sexist God there as well.” (p. 385) Here Fleischacker refers to Maimonides’ extended argument against an anthropomorphic God in The Guide for the Perplexed. Fleischacker believes that Maimonides’ cleansing of anthropomorphism from the Torah was far more difficult than would be cleansing the Torah from what he takes to be sexist, as well as xenophobic and vengeful passages.

The extensive reinterpretations Fleischacker envisions would cause massive changes in Jewish Law (for example, the nature of Jewish marriage) and thus in the “path” that Fleischacker is supposed to have identified at the start as worthy of his telic expectations.
Fleischacker calls it a “child’s view” to accept a text as revelation on the grounds that it could not have been authored by a human being. (p. 302) He goes on to reason as follows: “If a text or speech really was such that no human being could possibly have composed it, no human being would be able to understand it either (or, therefore, recognize its truth).”

Fleischacker altogether makes too much of an empirical claim that religious believers perceive morality as preceding revelation. Believers will give many reasons for why they take a text as a revelation, including that they sense God or the Holy Spirit speaking to them through this text, that this truth has been handed down through tradition, or that the person who wrote it was not intellectually capable of creating it on his own.

Fleischacker tells the reader that the Orthodox Jewish community has worked quite hard to minimize sexist aspects of the Torah. This is grossly overstated. Only a small segment of that community has attempted to ameliorate the problems for women in Jewish law, and that within a narrow scope of application. Much of Orthodox Judaism has resisted changes or has been indifferent to the possibility of changes in their religious practice

The central idea of the book… deserves to be seriously reckoned as a warranted way of coming to believe in revelation and in God…. Fleischacker’s book should become an object of careful discussion serving for progress in philosophy of religion.

1. Why did you write the book?
I’ve long felt I needed to explain to myself why I continue to be committed to observant Judaism (in my teens and early twenties, I gave myself reasons for this but have rarely since checked to see whether I still find them cogent). I figured that the answers I came up with might be of use to other similarly-situated religious believers. As the Orthodox Jewish world has become more and more conservative, moreover, aligning itself increasingly with the Christian right and its rejection of secular science and morality, I’ve also felt more alienated from it, and worried that an atavistic, thoughtless, and dangerous form of our religion may soon take it over utterly, if liberal voices don’t speak up.

2. What do you think of all the recent “new atheist” books?
I confess I’ve only glanced at them, not read them through. Most seem quite silly to me – with the same sort of shallow understanding of religion that they (rightly) accuse fundamentalists of having of science. Dennett is something of an exception: he’s an antagonist who needs to be reckoned with seriously. The whole debate over theism vs. atheism seems to me not a central Jewish concern: our issues have more to do with the status of sacred texts (my main concern in the book).

3. What is the role of philosophy in your Orthodoxy?
I think philosophy can be helpful to clarifying what we believe – and in particular to making sure that we bear always in mind that God must be a *moral* God, and that that rules out understanding Him as commanding blatantly immoral actions. (That philosophy clarifies the nature of God seems to me also clearly Maimonides’ main concern.) I don’t think philosophy can *ground* our fundamental beliefs.
I should add, though, that I’m not sure I really am an “Orthodox” Jew – I prefer saying “halachic Jew” or just that I am shomer shabbat.

4. What if an Orthodox skeptic objected to your work and say that the position that you label as childish belief is what orthodoxy is about and your philosophic belief is not Orthodox?
I would urge such a skeptic to read the Rambam (and all his followers, and Hirsch and Soloveitchik; and the Ramban and Sfas Emes, for that matter) – what I criticize as “childish” religion is very much what they too all avoid and try to wean us from. But what I call “the child’s view of revelation” is also something that I think has a legitimate place in any religious person’s life. One simply needs to balance it against the understanding that there is no revelation without interpretation: that the process of interpretation is something that God Himself must want us to engage in. This is actually a very Jewish view, and the chapter of my book that elaborates it (“Receiving Revelation,” in Part IV) is not coincidentally the chapter that uses the most Jewish sources.

5.How can you bracket out history and theology from a defense of revelation and Torah at Sinai? Don’t you need to show why it is reasonable to believe in God, and the historicity of the events at Sinai?” By definition does it not need a historic truth claim?

No, I think historic claims can be entirely bracketed from our understanding of Torah as divine – even from what we mean by “Torah from Sinai.” The main point is that the Torah is *authoritative* and that doesn’t need a historic warrant (once again, I’d pull in the Rambam in support of this claim).
Unlike Gelman, I have doubts about whether we have, independently of revelation, a clear, coherent conception of God. My reasons for this are roughly Wittgensteinian: I don’t think the ordinary use of words like “powerful” and “good” allow readily for formations like “all-powerful” and “all-good.” As regards goodness, I’m not even sure our ordinary uses of the term are coherent — a central line of argument in the book raises questions about whether we have a firm grip on what “goodness” means, independently of revelation. If revelation teaches us what makes our lives worth living, as I claim it does, then it teaches us what we mean by “the good” as well, or how we are most likely to find out. But if that is right, then we presumably learn what “God” properly means — if we are theists — from revelation.

6. “How can you bracket out the non-moral “historical pockmarks” of the Torah? How do you respond to Gellman’s suggestion that we read them as tacked on to God’s true words by flawed human authors?”
I don’t bracket out historic pockmarks: I think God wants us to retain our history as we move into the future, and the pockmarks are a way of ensuring that we always do that. We just need to interpret them carefully.
Gellman’s insistence that the revelation is immoral as it stands seems to want to take us back on the well-worn path trodden by liberal Protestants and Reform Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to which real revelation comes to us though autonomous reason or personal experience, and our supposedly sacred texts are inadequate attempts by our ancestors to express that revelation. This path leads one quickly to abandon the notion of a revealed text. If we are going to see our texts as the paths to the highest good, it is essential that we submit in humility to them, and seek a way out of the moral difficulties they pose from within them, rather than writing out bits as “tacked on.”
I argue that while believers tend to point first to the moral content of their revelations, what in fact is most important about those revelations is not something moral: it is a vision of the highest good that complements morality. But visions of this sort pervade a sacred text, rather than being located in particular verses, and are clarified and extended over time by a communal tradition of interpretation. So they can be used to downplay or revise verses that conflict with our way-of-the-world morality — and are so used, in every religious tradition with which I am acquainted.

7. What is your understanding of truth?
I don’t *define* truth, strictly speaking, but stress its use, ordinarily, in contexts in which we urge others to put trust in a statement or speaker. The Torah then is “true” in the sense that it is trustworthy (a trustworthy guide to life).

8. If, according to your book, we need to start with an ethical approach before approaching Torah, then what use is Torah in fighting the immoral world we live in?
What leads people to immorality is not *ignorance* of what is right but selfishness, self-deception, arrogance, and ideologies that feed these evil human drives. The Torah can very much help us struggle against these tendencies in its fierce opposition to idolatry – ultimately, self-worship (projecting your own drives and desires as absolute goods – gods – in place of the one true God) – and many ways of urging us instead to cultivate benevolence and humility (anavah: the great trait of Moshe; we should also remember that the rabbis compare anger to idolatry). The huge mistake we often make, the great yetzer hara that tempts religious people as much as anything, is projecting the evils of our world only outward, on non-Jews or insufficiently religious or loyal Jews, instead of seeing them in everyone, including Orthodox Jews, and working above all on restraining them in ourselves.

9. How would you respond to a frum skeptic that repeats the arguments of Hume, Hobbes and the new atheists, without having any knowledge of philosophy.
Our tradition values knowledge extremely highly: being an am ha-aretz is famously worse than being an epikoros. To anyone who prides himself on his skepticism without having bothered to get to know the religions he’s dismissing, the only answer can be: go and learn.
Far and away the single best recent book on theism and revelation, in my opinion, is Robert Adams’ FINITE AND INFINITE GOODS; I used it a lot. Adams is a Christian philosopher, however (albeit very knowledgeable about Judaism).

10. Can we use Maimonides today?
I think Maimonides *is* dated – his argument for God especially so – and in crucial ways my book opposes his views rather than supporting them (above all, I think the central mental faculty for religious commitment is the imagination, not the understanding: which has a host of consequences that make for a much less austere, more humanistic conception of religion, and a more important role for ritual than he has). But he sets a wonderful model of how one can work to re-interpret basic Jewish texts and ideas in the light of the best philosophy and science of one’s day. Philosophy and science have however changed radically since the 12th century, so a true Maimonidean today should be interpreting our texts and ideas in a very different light. In particular, it’s a mistake – I think – to use any arguments for God other than Kant’s moral one.

11. Do you see the Orthodox community as ethical? If not, does this impact your philosophy?
I see *parts* of the Orthodox community as ethical: certain Orthodox people – rabbis as well as laypeople – have indeed been important moral role models for me. But we have a great and growing problem with deeply immoral attitudes toward non-Jews, which shows up sometimes in contemptuous and inhumane treatment of non-Jewish workers at Orthodox establishments in the US, and – more dramatically and pervasively – in an the unbelievably brutal and unjust treatment that large parts of the Orthodox community in Israel have been inflicting on Palestinians: the greatest crime, I think, that Jews have committed as a community in the past two millennia of our history. As I watch this get worse and worse, with few leading figures speaking out even tepidly against it, I feel my ability to maintain a commitment to halacha becoming extremely strained.

12. What do you think of the relationship of Judaism or Torah to distributive justice? What seems mandated? What is a new idea that can or cannot be applied to Talmudic law? There is a full summary of Fleischacker’s work on distributive justice in this review.

I think that, like members of all other religious traditions, we Jews have learned have from the secular world on this. What I tried to show in my book on distributive justice is that it took people who were moving away from all religious traditions to make clear to all of us that we have a duty to get rid of poverty altogether, if possible, not just to give charity and certainly not to give charity just to members of our own communities. But the Jewish tradition – by giving poor people an enforceable right to certain kinds of tzedakah – came closer to anticipating modern notions of distributive justice than pre-modern Christianity did.
I also think the very powerful idea, which we are about to celebrate, that we need to treat the oppressed and miserable with decency and justice because we were once oppressed ourselves provides a great basis for imagining ourselves into the shoes of the poor rather than dismissing them with the complacent platitudes that come readily to the lips of people who are themselves comfortable (“they drink”; “they don’t take care of their children”; “they have low IQs”).

Fleischacker will be responding to Gellman this Wed at the Pacific APA. Here on the East coast, I would like a 50 page article summarizing for classroom use the almost 600 pages of the book.

And your eyes shall see your teacher, Isaiah 30:20

Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn, mara d’atra of the West Side Institutional Synagogue, and I have been in email correspondence for over a year and a half and we were never able to fix a time to meet. So, before he leaves town to his new pulpit and before I have deadlines for the next book we found time to meet.  He chose the place to meet, the swank lounge at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel overlooking Central Park.

In the background to our meeting was my monitoring his high-profile synagogue events that use popular culture, his lecturing on pop-psych, and his general trendiness in his programming. He offers a model of a popular culture Orthodox Rabbi to contrast with the Evangelical Orthodox Rabbi or Oprah Orthodox rabbi.  His model is so popular and useful that the OU has given him his own group, program, and website called Wings to work with synagogues training and retraining personal and clergy into the new approaches. The OU website describes Einhorn  as a musician, “as having developed a critically “Simcha Seminar,” authored multiple books, released a CD and grown his shul by more than 70% in the past four years. On his blog, Rabbi Einhorn shares his thoughts and his research on how to be productive and imbue everything you touch with success.”

I came into the meeting expecting to talk about popular culture, sports, and entertainment and instead found myself discussing spiritual seeking and how to learn from the lives of the gedolim. I also was surprised to be hearing a spiritual autobiography in progress.

Einhorn describes the need for his age group, the younger gen x  and older gen y rabbis to seek the experiential.  They grew up with a strict halakhic diet and a rationalist worldview which did not sustain their cravings for religious experience that they were taught to value in Israel. They moved from ipad and MTV to a year in Israel where they acquired black hats, allegiance to rabbinic authority and complete submission to Torah. But they also developed a yearning for the spirituality they found in Rav Zilberstein with his ecstatic third meals in darkness or the tisch kabbalah of Rav Morgenstein or Rav Moshe Wolfson. They were not attracted to the slow study of classic Kabbalaistic texts rather the saintliness and supernaturalism. They loved the emotional devotionalism of zaddikim. The recently deceased  Steipler, Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky (d.1985) offered a role model of the aspirational goals of the Yeshiva experience.

Living in a post-lummdus age, Einhorn like the Torah that he learns and teaches to be the short sound bites. Great single paragraph “juicy chaps” as he calls them and he wants them to also have a practical difference. His seforim shelf includes: Rabbi Abba Mordechai Berman, Shiurei Iyun Hatalmud, Businessman Zvi Ryzman Ratz keTzvi, R. Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg, Mishmeres Chaim and R. Yoav Joshua Weingarten, Sefer Kaba de-kashyata.  His tastes are part a return to Polish Hasidic Torah and part contemporary Haredi. In haskafah, he likes Rav Dessler Miktav miEliyahu and Rav Schwatz’s  Bilvavi. Like a Polish Rabbi, he attempts to finish Shas once a year And unlike a Brisker approach, he returns Torah to its thick weave of unrelated questions and answers, satisfied with a cleaver answer.  Einhorn attended the non-hesder Ohr Yerushalayim and then YU, spending four years under Rav Schachter, but this method seems more reflective of his generation that was no longer satisfied with halakhah or the rationality of Hesder or Lumdus approaches.

His is a generation that did not know the lumdus of Rav Soloveitchik, the heart of Reb Shlomo Carlebach, or a regular Shabbos in Modzitz. Nor do they know the third meal in darkness from  the old-time world of Satmar, the Bobover rebbe or mussar.  Their character formation was in the beis medrash in gap-year programs in Israel and they returned  to the US – either YU or Ner Yisrael to complete their formation as a ben Torah. They continued college in the same natural, but sheltered, way that they achieved high school, as something that is done. But they are outside of high culture, and lack any rubric for philosophy, psychology, or religion. He represents a generation wide-eyed in search of its own spirituality.

Einhorn found his spirituality when he discovered the world of motivational management books and could not get enough of them. He devoured the books on how to improve one’s leadership, how to motivate those under you and how to push yourself to your potential.  An action centered gregarious form of self-fulfillment in the real world. He also read Rick Warren and the other motivational Evangelical but they were only part of the broader quest for tips and ideas for self-motivation.

Rabbi Einhorn is absolutely sold on Tony Robbins’s program for fire-walking to be transformed and to release the potential within. Not only has he undergone the fire-walking seminar, he encourages other Orthodox rabbis to do the same. Einhorn has also attended Landmark seminars (a derivative from Werner Erhard’s EST) and appreciates the importance of Neuro-Linguistic Programing for motivating others. (Be prepared for ever new emphasis on emotional manipulation in the Orthodox youth organizations.)

For Einhorn, these seminars show our potential to grow in our service to God and be like the gedolim. If we overcome our fears and hesitance we can be anything. The conversation in the cocktail lounge was entirely on the amazing heights of the gedolim and their worship of God; they lived up to the potential human in their service. Rarely was Torah mentioned, the focus was on avodah.  He rejoiced in telling me how he was using social media to get people to click on pictures of gedolim they liked. For Einhorn, even though the Gedolim are anti-modern anti-social, and certainly anti-social media, we use social media to spread a need to serve God the way the gedolim do. Gedolim don’t do facebook but they have the worship of God that we want. We shared a common interest in the need for exemplarily of saints as a necessity in the religious life.

I asked him: what is the avodah, the service of God that he seeks and preaches? He answered: Meaning in their everyday life.  I asked: Like Victor Frankl? Einhorn answered: “I want people to find meaning in life like Rabbi David Wolpe teaches.” He has met Wolpe and is especially proud that Wolbe has quoted him. Yet, he consistently puts Wolpe’s teaching in the mouth of the Gedolim because they are frum and offer an imaginary ideal of a humanistic way to serve God. Wolpe is not connected to the gedolim so his message has to be put in their mouth. Wolpe runs Friday night live as entertainment but achieves religious commitment,  Einhorn does the same.  Yet I ask: Why cant it be done in the name of Wolpe, admit you differ with him over theology and mizvot and that you have a deep ideological divide but your results match his and not that of Rav Eliyashiv?

What is avodah?  It deals with our deep issues, all of life is an avodah, not just the finding of mizvot in our day but the process of fully living.  God is in the heart and the currencies of the heart are inspiration, peak moments, life’s meanings and our personal relationship with God.

Einhorn repeated several times that his presentations of the gedolim, whether the Steipler or Rav Eliashiv is imaginary. They serve as aspirational foci but Einhorn bears no responsibility for the actual ascetic, stringent, and anti-social life of the gedolim.

The source for his daily examples of how to live life are from Rock stars, athlete,  celebrities, and other avatars of pop culture. They are the appropriate mussar  to reaches us where we are at. According to Einhorn, the rock stars are not the source for how to lead our daily lives, gedolim are. He uses lyrics, especially the ability to tap into deep wells of angst or hope, to point us in the direction of doing the things the gedolim do.Bono’s religious quest is ideal for sermons. Yet, it is important to note that many Evangelical leaders are weary of Bono, despite his religious quest, because he “still hasn’t found what he is looking for.” While Einhorn embraces the human journey of rock stars and his congregants.  The justification for pop culture is because it will bring us to the spiritual levels of the gedolim.

Prior ages focused on Hasidic tales and made them into Romantics, or popularists or Renewal   But Rav Nahman is dead and Besht is dead so one does not have to live with their sectarian nature of Hasidism. But here Rav Eliyashiv is equated with gregarious social marketing and manipulation. He told me a story of Rabbinic friend of his of the same age who found himself by traveling to Wyoming with only $150 and his ID. In order to get back home, his friend had to build resilience and the ability to open up to people by learning to work odd jobs and chat with common people. That is the way to grow and the gedolim stories, told by Einhorn, show that they did similar things.  Extrovert self-help and human potential is the image of the gedolim.

In his opinion, his approach is not cruise ship Orthodoxy or just entertainment because he sees lives touched. He seeks to actively change people lives as a rabbi, and people do change their lives and their observance and attain a meaningful life.

Yet, the real source of Einhorn’s teachings is the motivational literature, especially Tony Robbin’s Leadership Academy seminar, in which participants learn to “[c]reate an identity for them self as someone who can help ‘anyone’, no matter what his/her challenge may be. Participants walk barefoot over hot coals by the end of the first evening. The aim of the seminar, demonstrated in the firewalk, is to illustrate that the main quality shared by those who achieve greatness is the ability to take action called personal power.  The physical is ALWAYS rules by thought; nothing can happen on the physical plane until or unless it first happens in the thought plane; The power of focus will get you through even the most seemingly impossible obstacles. For, Robbin’s people pursue an imaginary someday of satisfaction^. And Einhorn offers the imaginary perfection of the gedolim. People can “transform” by simply declaring a new way of being instead of trying to change themselves in comparison to the past.

He recounted a curious side story when he was bombarded by 1000’s of calls and emails from the Hadar community when he was going to speak at a memorial for Meir Kahane. In general, people don’t protest cross denominational lines. Members of BJ or Anshei Chesed were not the ones to protest WSIS. This belies a sense that they share a common social group even if the two institutions are ideological poles apart.

Einhorn noted that the current major Orthodox educational institutions are not contributing to this quest for meaning and religious experience so students have no need to attend them.

As we ended our discussion, I mentioned that his approach may come under scrutiny in the upcoming years because structurally there is an inherent clash between Talmud Torah to produce gedolim and popular culture. He noted the warning and we parted.

I was busy traveling for an entire month. I gave many lectures over each extended weekend and then parachuted back into NJ to teach midweek. I met many readers of the blog whom I had never met.  I dont post about traveling before I go as not to let people know when the house is empty. I will have lots of new posts in the weeks to come.

My readership slows to a crawl the two days before Passover but usually jumps to a peak the day after the holiday- the posts will be posted accordingly.

Judaism and World Religions: Encountering Christianity, Islam, and Eastern Traditions-– Alan Brill

Officially published today- March 13, 2012      Amazon       Barnes & Noble  (I will have copies for sale at my home or office for $49)

“In this major new contribution, Brill builds upon his earlier path breaking work on Jewish views of other religions. With expertise in both comparative theology and in traditional Jewish texts—a rare combination indeed—he again demonstrates his impressive ability to tackle this vital topic. The work is methodologically sophisticated, as Brill critically engages with key thinkers on interreligious relations. It is also stunningly wide-ranging. He not only delves deeply into Jewish reflections on Christianity and Islam but assembles enlightening but little-known texts on Eastern religions as well. Thanks to Brill’s valuable work, scholars of Judaism and of religion are well-equipped to deal with a topic of great importance in the modern world.” — Adam Gregerman, Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, Baltimore, MD

“Alan Brill examines the attitudes found in Jewish classical literature and contemporary writings towards western and eastern religions. Brill understands various writers inherently express a wide range of views ranging from rejecting to welcoming. The perspective is designed to argue for a more inclusive and tolerant stance based on modern mind-sets and deeper understandings of Christianity and Islam and even Judaism itself. His wide knowledge of world religions from the perspectives of inside practitioners and outside academic scholars of religion allows him to present original and thought provoking arguments for greater religious recognition of the other.” — Herbert Basser, Queen’s School of Religion, Queen’s University, Kingston Canada

“In presenting the urgency, the possibility, but also the complexity of a Jewish engagement with other religious traditions, Brill works consistently with concrete texts and particular contexts.  Doing so, he not only speaks appropriately to Jews but challengingly to Christians.  By being uniquely Jewish, Brill’s book is a distinctive contribution to the general discussion on how to make religious sense out of religious diversity.”– Paul Knitter, Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions, and Culture, Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Alan Brill’s work is an encyclopedic contribution to the literature on religious pluralism. It is at once a guide to the spectrum of Jewish interpretations of other faiths, an insightful analysis of the contemporary interreligious landscape and a sampler of Brill’s own comparative thinking in regard to some major traditions. Through argument and by example, this book encourages a new depth of Jewish engagement in the theological discussion of diversity.– S. Mark Heim,  Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology, Andover Newton Theological School

Judaism and World Religions is essential for a Jewish theological understanding of the various issues in encounters with the other major religions. With passion and clarity, Brill argues that in today’s world of strong religious passions and intolerance, it is necessary to go beyond secular tolerance toward moderate religious positions. Brill outlines strategies for Jews who want to remain true to traditional sources while interacting with the diversity of the world’s religions.

This companion volume to Judaism and Other Religions provides the first extensive collection of traditional and academic Jewish approaches to the religions of the world. In the majority of volume, he presents an excellent survey of the possibilities contained in the texts useful for discussing Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism from a Jewish point for view.

Daniel Boyarin just published a new book The Jewish Gospels: the Story of the Jewish Christ, an attempt at a popularization of his thought. Boyarin professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley is influential on the current generation of scholars and is only now beginning to filter down to the clergy level. Boyarin has written on early Jewish–Christian relations and emphasizes that in the early centuries, there was no clear border between the two faiths. Both groups were figuring out their identity based on and in contrast to the other group. One of his earlier books, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, was part of the new wave of Pauline scholarship showing that Paul did not reject Judaism but he rather sought to create a universal religion for the gentiles.

In this new book, The Jewish Gospels: the Story of the Jewish Christ, he draws the conclusions of his prior work Border Lines and present them in clear layman’s term. The book was meant to be a popular summery of his ideas. In short, every idea in early Christianity is to be found in the variety of Judiasms of the first century. There were Jewish groups who built their Judaism on Daniel, on Isaiah, and the ideas of Qumran. The Pseudepigrapha was not just a funky alternative to our midrashic narratives, rather they were people’s lived version of Torah

Boyarin looks at the first and second centuries where you have some Jews focusing on the book of Daniel and expecting a mediator figure as redeemer, some even expecting the mediator to be the suffering servant. There was widespread bi-theism or binitarianism within Judaism where Jews perceived God as an unknown God and a lower logos of God. The ideas of a complex godhead (a God with two or three persons) have their origins in the Judaism of Jesus’ time and before him. Many, perhaps most, Jews were expecting a Redeemer who was an anthropomorphic divine being, known as the Son of Man.

Boyarin follows the scholarship on the historic Jesus and rejects the popular view that thinks that the Gospels speak of Jesus as abrogating and setting aside the Torah, Boyarin proposes that the Jesus of Mark defended the Torah, and that Jesus, himself, was portrayed as keeping the Sabbath and the kosher rules. Many hold it was the suffering and dying of Jesus that caused a break with traditional Judaism, Boyarin shows that the idea of a suffering Messiah was not foreign to Judaism even beyond the Jesus movement. Boyarin calls on Jews to stop vilifying Christian ideas about God as simply a collection of “unJewish,” perhaps pagan ideas; Jews should stop seeing Christian ideas as bizarre and see them as paths not taken.

Much of the fluid location of division centers on what Boyarin calls Jewish Binitarianism in which there is a lower entity below God that still bears many of the elements of God or is God’s manifestation on earth. Second Temple literature is replete with forms of bitheism, including the philonic logos and the Ezekiel traditions of an Angel of God in the image of a man appearing on the throne. Even rabbinic liturgical terminology, such as the Alenu hymn, speaks of “The Lord of All” as distinct from the “Creator of Bereshit.” (A compete treatment of the topic of bi-theism by Boyarin- here in pdf.)

For Jews, the two powers are one and a person does not worship one without the other. Most Jews are no longer aware of this bitheism and the rabbinic polemics against considering them two entities. Yet by the time we are done with the book, or actually from the very first pages of the volume, the Trinity is a Jewish concept

Boyarin thinks that many of the theological concepts, which earlier scholarship, such as Rudolf Bultmann, had credited to a Hellenistic break from Judaism are actually antecedent to rabbinic Judaism as part of second Temple Judaism. Bultmann in the 1920s declared that the wisdom traditions of the logos were not a living force in Judaism. For Boyarin, the logos is ever present as the site of God’s presence in the world in the targumim, in Philo of Alexandria, in Ben Sira, and then later in the midrashim.

This is not at all like the ill-informed gibberish of Boteach who lacked any research skilled. Yet, I don’t know how this will play out among ordinary non-academic Jews. Boyarin does not accept Kosher Jesus and thinks that Rabbinic Judaism in its definition rejected it. This rejection of a “second power” by rabbinic Jews, begins a “heresiological” process in Christianity and Judaism. Polemics created the nascent borders, yet it was intellectual “smugglers who transported discourses [. . .] in both directions across the abstract frontier of the two groups.” In non-technical terms, Boyarin assumes that these positions were slowly rejected in the first centuries though self-definitions and polemics. They were no longer kosher by the end of the process.

In contrast, the academic field won’t accept all of Boyarin’s conclusions; however, they will embrace the book because he pushes the limit on questioning our essentialism and fixed boundaries of the first century.

On today’s Huffington Post, Gilah Kletenik an alumnus of Stern College’s Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmudic Studies (GPATS) has moved from calling herself educator to being an Orthodox Jewish clergy. She has burst beyond her official title of Congregational Scholar at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun  by officially calling herself clergy and for the removal of the glass ceiling for female clergy.Along the way, she is going to “ameliorate the religious fundamentalism and extremism” through “cooperation across the denominational, religious and secular spectrum.” She can now be counted among America’s rabbis by a simple reorientation of her thinking. 

Republican Congressman Darrel Issa deserves our gratitude for his selection of an all-male panel of clergy witnesses to testify at the recent congressional hearing on reproductive rights and religious freedom. He has unintentionally sounded a startling and overdue wake-up call concerning the face of religion in America. Thankfully, our country is finally able to appreciate the deep disparity in the ranks of our spiritual leadership. According to a 2009 finding by the Census Bureau, women comprise only 17% of our country’s clergy.

As a young Orthodox Jewish clergywoman and former intern at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, I am especially grateful to the GOP. It has drawn national attention to the need for women religious leaders. Particularly, when our reproductive rights are continuously imperiled in the name of religion. 

The gender disparity amongst clergy is not simply a concern to those among us who belong to synagogues, churches, mosques and other houses of worship or who are actively engaged with our faith. Rather, it affects all Americans, believers and atheists alike, whether we like it or not.

It is time for all citizens to take claim over religious leadership in our country and to push for gender parity throughout its ranks.

Perhaps engaging the other half of our population in the spiritual ranks might even ameliorate the religious fundamentalism and extremism we have come to take for granted here in America.

Together with my female colleagues, on a daily basis, I am engaged in the arduous task of breaking the stained glassed ceiling. However, our efforts will prove unfruitful unless there is cooperation across the denominational, religious and secular spectrum.

 

Read the Rest Here

About two years ago, when I started this blog a document appeared on Torahweb (a website dedicated to the values of the influential Centrist Orthodox Roshei Yeshiva) that is a great primary document about the opinions of a solid plurality of YU in the last decade. The document reflects the tension between the Centrist Torah lifestyle of study, Yirat shamayim, and family on one side and the needs to have a solid upper-middle class well-paying career on the other. The document is 20 pages long, so here are just excerpts- here is a pdf. I am surprised that in the interim no one has gone beyond mere mention and picked up on for definition or fully discussed the document. I see the document as extremely important for understanding certain segments of the community. (I was reminded of it because I went for mincha yesterday to a group that both produced and is reflective of the document, wonderful people).

A Ben Torah’s Guide to Parnassa

The goal of this publication is to share with current talmidim the insight and experience of bnai Torah who are, b’ezras Hashem, succeeding both in their profession and in other aspects of life. They discuss how to prepare for and succeed in their profession, as well as how to strike a proper balance between hishtadlus forparnassa and other mitzvos. We hope that this will give current talmidim the information they need to avoid the trap of spiritual mediocrity.

Hashem is perfectly capable of making things work out for us. However, He requires that we play by His rules, i.e. we must make a realistic hishtadlus, keep our priorities straight, and trust that He will bless our efforts with whatever success we are allocated each year on Yomim Noraim. One who thinks that it is in his hands to earn a living (“kochi v’otzem yadi” – Devarim 8:17) is delusional. At the same time, one who does not play by Hashem’s rules and expects things to work out on all fronts is severely misguided. Of course, our hishtadlus is not limited to parnassa! We must also make a realistic hishtadlus for having learning time and family time.

Invest in Your Future
There is a common, and unfortunate, desire among bnei Torah to “patter up” college as quickly and as easily as possible. This desire, when examined in the context of a life-long pursuit of shleimus in avodas Hashem, must be seen as nothing other than a powerful atzas Yetzer Harah. The modern economy awards those with higher levels of skills and training. One whose goal is to “patter up” college generally chooses an easy major in college which may not provide professional skills that would be in high demand in the economy.

One who wants time to learn, parent, and properly perform the other duties of a ben Torah, is looking for a better than average work situation and must therefore have better than average qualifications and training. One who “pattered up” college and did not go to graduate school will not be in high demand, and the odds are that he will have to work long hours for the majority of his career to make ends meet, thus eliminating learning time, parenting time, etc. Similarly, in tough economic times, it is easiest to fire lower-skilled employees, as they are easily replaced once the economy picks up again.

The Yetzer Harah dresses himself up in the clothing of “tzidkus” and “hasmada,” telling you that you need to over-extend your learning time for the three or four years you are in college by “pattering up” college. But in so doing he undermines your avodas Hashem for the rest of your adult life.

A talmid who seeks shleimus should invest the time to get the higher level of skills and training that will enable him to command a better work situation and thus more time for learning and other mitzvos. This means taking college seriously and, more often than not, going to graduate school.

Of course, one must also spend long hours in the beis medrash during his college years. After all, if one does not learn to correctly balance learning and college, how can he be confident he will balance learning with working, parenting, and more? A talmid in Y.U., for example, should strive to have at least a full morning seder,shiur, and a significant night seder, coupled with serious college studies that are relevant to his parnassa.

Priorities and Lifestyle
It is the priority of a ben-Torah to follow the will of the Ribono shel Olam as outlined by the Torah and interpreted by Chazal. Our priorities have an enormous affect on all of our life decisions: what occupation to choose, whom to marry, and where to live. As early as high school we start making priority-based, career-oriented decisions that will significantly impact our avodas Hashem, be it our bein adam lamakom (learning, tefillah btzibbur, etc.) or our bein adam lachaveiro (being a good spouse, parent, etc.).

Our priorities determine the lifestyle we would like to live and that lifestyle will heavily influence our choice of occupation. WordNet defines the term “lifestyle” to mean “a manner of living that reflects the person’s values and attitudes”. If our true priority in life is to serve Hashem, we will choose a lifestyle which will deemphasize physical luxuries and allows us time to learn and be good parents. If we choose to work long hours for a high salary while sacrificing growth in learning and time with our children, our lifestyle makes a clear statement (especially to our children) about our real priorities, all lip-service to the contrary notwithstanding.

In order to avoid a spiritually bankrupt lifestyle we must differentiate between comfort and luxury. We need to know what is necessary for the level of yishuv hadaasthat will allow us to optimally serve Hashem and know when we have crossed the line into a pursuit of luxury that will pull us away from serving Hashem.

Personal Accounts
In this section bnei Torah in different professions share their own experiences and approaches to balancing work and other mitzvos. Their accounts include both general advice as well as personal reflections. The general advice gives the reader the facts and insights he needs to make informed career decisions. The more personal reflections provide a glimpse into the decisions these bnei Torah made and into the role of yad Hashem in their careers.

Law
So now, instead of working at a prestigious big firm job with a nice window office in midtown Manhattan with a secretary and access to paralegals and junior associates, I work for a company in a windowless office in a boring office park in suburban NYC and I make my own copies. But I usually get home by 7 pm to help my kids with their homework and put them to bed. At my law firm job, working late into the night was routine. For my in-house jobs, it is a rarity. There is no question that my in-house jobs have provided more time outside the office for family and learning than the big law firm jobs. Not being in NYC also helps since the commute is shorter and there are far fewer people in the office that have made their work their life.

Computer Science
1. Live reflectively. Have a daily mussar seder and some kind of daily reminder (ex – daily alarm on your phone) of why/how you work. Otherwise, you are in great danger of “going with the flow” of the corporate culture. The culture of corporate America is a secular religion, and you need to be strong in your real religion to not get sucked in.
2. If possible, learn daily in a yeshiva. Once “grown up”, one is less likely to accept spiritual mediocrity for himself if he is consistently exposed to the ruach of a yeshiva.

Marketing
One of the first things I had to get used to was being called by my English name, which I rarely used in the previous 21 years of my life. Although today, with many other minorities having non-English names as well as many frum Jews deciding to use their Hebrew names, going by one’s Hebrew name is much less of an issue now than it was 15-20 years ago. I would highly recommend keeping your Hebrew name since it goes with my overall theme of maintaining your Jewish identity and not being bashful at all about it. (In fact, as you will see, you will be treated with more respect.)

1. You only have one chance to make a statement about how important Yidishkeit is to you. Once you cross the line, it is almost impossible to go back. If you give-in once, you are doomed. I remember interviewing on a Friday afternoon for my current position, the series of interviews dragged on and the fifth one that day, with my prospective boss, was cutting into my driving home time to make Shabbos. After realizing it is now or never, I politely apologized and informed him that I needed to leave for sundown. He completely understood and was actually a bit embarrassed that he might be infringing upon my Sabbath. After I got the job, he mentioned to me what strong moral courage it took to do this and it was one reason why he hired me.

Medicine 1
In addition, given the length of time spent in training, you should not view these years as time to get through as quickly as possible. Typically you will spend your late 20s and early 30s in training. This a critical time for your personal, family, limud hatorah, and ruchniyos development. During this time you will likely see your family begin to grow, and you will be making decisions that will impact you and your family throughout your working life. The portion of your time outside of classes and clinical activities should center around your family, your shul, and/or your frum friends.

People who have successfully [from the point of view of shmiras mitzvos and yiras shomayim] navigated the long training period in medicine have had their social and family life anchored by individuals and institutions who share values they wish to reinforce. Conversely, people who developed their primary friendships with individuals whose values are not defined by Torah were rarely successful in staying frum.

1. Develop a relationship with a rav or poseik with whom you can freely turn to ask sheilos. These will be numerous. Issues ranging from Shabbos to Yichud toMaacholos Assuros and even end-of-life questions will come up. Patients will turn to you with questions that have halachic ramifications. Make sure you pass them on to a poseik.
2. One of the secrets of getting through medical school and post-graduate training and remaining frum is to develop as many connections as possible with thefrum community. If you are male, tefilla betzibur whenever possible is critical. If there are regular shiurim or chavrusos available, take part. Nowadays, if you don’t have a local chavrusa available, set up a telephone chavrusa. If you are a woman, daven in a shul on Shabbos and Yom Tov. Go to shiurim.

Physics / Engineering
“What’s a good Jewish boy going to do as an engineer/physicist?” I cannot tell you how many times I heard variants of the above question from various relatives and friends throughout my years in high-school and college. Now, more than 15 years later, I still hear the same question.

Read the Rest Here and as pdf file here.

I was traveling so I did not get to write this up until now.

On Thursday February 16th, David Brooks called Lin heroic due to his education and belief in contrast to the vulgarity of sports; he even connected Lin to Rav Soloveitchik. I got a smile about it because I had typed the same thing three days prior on Monday February 13th. That prior Monday I had entered into my computer a paraphrase from a new book that “most contemporary religious American life was dogmatic hierarchy grounded in an absolute transcendent with contrasting foreground of the self-obsessed contingent individuals lost in money, sports, and consumerism.” The new book asked: What happened to the hero of modernity? Where are the heroic visions of Camus, Unamuno, or Niebuhr? I noted to myself that Monday: We should compare contemporary Evangelical or Centrist approaches to Rav Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Prayer. And my relationship with Brooks has been going on like this for several years.

When Brooks published his Social Animal last March, I had just written my Orthodox Forum paper. Looking at the footnotes to Brook’s book, I saw that we had very similar reading lists, we kept up on the same authors, journals, and schools of thought, and we agree on what was an important fact. The difference was that he glorified the intuitions of the middlebrow upper middle class life style and I had described problems from both secular and Torah perspectives.

So, on Feb 13th I was reading James S. Bielo’s important new book Emerging Evangelicals: Faith Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (NYU Press, Oct. 2011) where he contrasts the heroic religion of mid-twentieth century to the combined authoritarian and self-absorbed religion of today. Bielo relied on several articles written by others in 2009 and 2010, but whether Brooks had just read Bielo or had read the earlier articles we are still keeping pace. The differences was that Brooks offered a self-comforting message that Lin is our religious heroic similar to Soloveitchik and my notes pointed out the contrasts.

In any case, James S. Bielo’s Emerging Evangelicals is a good book and worth reading by academics, its notecard summaries of the current data and micro-studies would be too much for a general reader. His book is part of a new trend of Christian Anthropology, that is, not asking questions about the relationship of religion and modernity, rather the more subtle questions that distinguish between congregations.

Bielo points out how many people are now moving beyond their Evangelical religion of the 1990’s to new forms especially the Emergent Church. He contrasts what they are leaving and what they are seeking. You can compare the Evangelical issues to the Orthodox concerns of the gen y and gen z.

1) 1990’s made everything into “objective” facts, into truth claims and dogmatic truth or wrapped themselves up in a mantel of scientific objectivity.
Now people want their religion to speak about the human narrative, human relations, or our problems and frailties.
2)The 1990’s made everything text based and now people want local concerns, local color and lived life.
3)The 1990’s counted heads and wanted outreach and now people want saintliness and sincerity. (Germane to the Brooks discussion, we don’t do kiruv by sports and pop culture. Brooks found the heroic in sports.)
4)The 1990’s dogmatically insisted that one must follow the religious mores and practices of the 1980s and 1990s, now people want to go back to medieval, Renaissance, and even early twentieth century. We can now go back to viable practice and ides from earlier times.
5)Finally, the current trends seek an authenticity in religion – liberation from false beliefs and practices of suburban life that undermine freedom. Now there is desire to overcome fragmented, economic pressured consumerism. For more, see Bielo’s introduction.

The best part, in my opinion, of Bielo’s book is his discussion of deconversion. Bielo contrasts those who go off the path and leave- usually from a more restrictive enclave- to those who are deconverted and are left in a wilderness or looking for a new formulation. The latter group of Emergents find that the religion is not what they were promised or what they think is correct so they go the way of many greats before them and seek a return to true religion. They don’t question religion as a whole, rather they want something different. In Bielo’s case, they become Emergent Church. They are self-conscious about what they want, unlike those who leave religion and their conversion involves an opening of the eyes and a loss of naivete (see Louis Frankenthaler on Haredi Departure Narratives).

Bielo and the hundreds of studies of the last six years show that knowledgeable people are leaving because they find their religious group too dogmatic, or too anti-science, or lacking artistic values, intellectual striving, and creativity. They were promised a religion has the best of Orthodoxy and the modern world and did not find it. This is the point where Bielo shows that they are not leaving the Church but “deconverting.” They are involved in a two step process of turning from their communities and formulating a self-conscious critique. They become more into relgion rather than less into it.

Bielo compares them to the 17th century author John Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress, and those who want to leave the association of religion with specific demands of materialism, vanity fair, and a culture of belonging, not one of virtue.

This group does not seek to jettison faith, rather they cultivate a self-conscious highlighting of religious attention because they find that their former their religious lives were wanting. They have hope and choice as effective tools for change. They want a return to the heroic virtues of religion, the aspirations and heights of the heroic struggle. They want to do it as religious individuals not as self-obsessed consumers or submissive to an authoritarian hierarchy.

They are now are concerned about the loss of their soul, they despise the consumerism, they start to read socially banned books and they seek to apply religion to broader realms of their lives.

They show irony and mock the established wisdom like Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. And they are willing to read negative criticism of their own community or secular books and to ask how their community is lacking. They are self-conscious about living post-Durkheim and acknowledge the social elements of what they do. And they want social change, to go beyond consumer society, and to transform the world into a kingdom of God, not Brook’s acceptance of it.

Brooks saw a tension between the shallow consumerist life and religion and was criticized on a NYT watch for seeing the mere existence of Lin, the future Presbyterian pastor, as a solution to our current consumerist un-self reflective religion. But the real tragedy, is that all the people who took pride that Brooks quoted their patron saint Rav Soloveitchik did not realize that he quoted him wrong and that their own Orthodoxy reflected the very banality that David Brooks and the Emergents decry. But Brooks, and those who linked to it, thought all that is needed to change reality is a good quote rather than seeking to face our human condition with the requisite heroic virtues. For a long detailed take down of the piece with full quotes from Rav Soloveitchik, see here.

Modern Adam the second, as soon as he finishes translating religion into the cultural vernacular, and begins to talk the “foreign” language of faith, finds himself lonely, forsaken, misunderstood, at times even ridiculed by Adam the first, by hinself. When the hour of estrangement strikes, the ordeal of man of faith begins and he starts his withdrawal from society, from Adam the first—be he an outsider, be he himself. He returns, like Moses of old, to his solitary hiding and to the abode of loneliness. Yes, the loneliness of contemporary man of faith is of a special kind. He experiences not only ontological loneliness but also social isolation, whenever he dares to deliver the genuine faith-kerygma. This is both the destiny and the human historical situation of the man who keeps a rendezvous with eternity, and who, in spite of everything, continues tenaciously to bring the message of faith to majestic man. (“The Lonely Man of Faith,” p. 65)

Yes, I assume Brooks just read his copy of Bielo. But our solutions are different.

One of the best academic books of 2010 was Michael L. Miller’s Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford University Press). It is an excellent political history of Moravian Jewry in the nineteenth century. Miller takes the well-trodden account of Enlightenment, Edict of Tolerance, and quest for Emancipation in Germanic lands and uses remarkable attention to detail to make it fresh. The book ends with the attainment of Emancipation and its immediate aftermath by Moravian Jews. As a second focus of the book, Miller fixes his sights on Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch who was chief rabbi of Moravia in Nikolsburg during the fight for Emancipation.

Miller paints a vivid picture of life without Emancipation. Jews were subjected to numerous restrictions including the familiant laws of 1726 -1727 which only granted rights for a first born to marry, all other siblings had to marry clandestinely or to the new lands of Hungary to get married. They were 30% tailors, as well as glaziers and butchers, but most were traders. There were very limited numbers of stores or property and rental rights for Jews . Many Jews were village merchants and peddlers, which lead to a degradation of Jewish life. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lamented how husbands and wives were always on road with their children elsewhere, they were not together even for holidays.

The Edict of Tolerance mandated elementary school with a curriculum of math, geography, German literature, and Enlightenment morality of universalism and productivity. Many Jewish schools in the Enlightenment spirit were set up. And Rabbinic figures such as Rabbi Eybeschutz, Landau, and Horowitz accepted this moderate haskalah. In Moravia, Mendelsohn’s approach worked. There was no anti- rabbinism among the Enlightened. And more importantly, there was no bunker mentality as developed in Hungary, western aesthetics were accepted, secular studies were the norm, along with the study of Hebrew and medieval works such as Albo. Chief Rabbi Banet treated these fields as extra-Talmudic accompaniments (parperaot le torah). Day schools had secular subjects but left Torah as traditional study with the addition of Bible and Hebrew. The Jewish studies was not put in the hands of anti-rabbinic approaches. In Moravia, even the maskilim remained in fold and were not connected to anti-rabbinic reformist tendencies. Banet’s successor Rabbi Nechimias Tribitsch was more reluctant to accept the Enlightement and was leading the rabbinate into a decline. Rabbi Hirsch was chosen as a modernist arriving to restore the glory to the Rabbinate.

Miller paints a nice picture of the modernizing rabbinic advocates of Enlightenment and Emancipation such as Hirsch. And has a nice presentation of the debates between Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Hirsch Fassel. They shared similar views of education and enlightenment and both firmly rejected the pre-Enlightenment Yeshiva approach to education but differed they over Jewish practice. Fassel criticizes Hirsch for including in his Horev the kabbalistic custom to look at one’s fingernails at havdalah and for maintaining the Shulkhan Arukh’s requirement to give oneself lashes before Yom Kippur. We see Hirsch at his best in his use of kabbalistic customs, not as a kabbalist, but as an anti-kabbalist who has a good phenomenological sense of synagogue ritual, like Franz Rosenzweig. (Hirsch displayed this same ritual sense in his first year in Frankfort where he almost lost the job for instituting Simhat Torah hakafot at night. He converted a Safed pietistic custom from a theurgic rectification to a children’s holiday of circling the synagogue for sweets.) Hirsch even allowed noisemaking on purim.

In contrast, Fassel wanted to abolish anything irrational and non- Talmudic and he wanted customs abolished if the acceptance was accidental, not universally accepted, or the conditions changed. (For example he abolished kitniyot in 1846 as rabbi of Prossnitz). Fassel is immortalized in Jewish literature as calling, in the course of this debate, Hirsch a siddur-lamdan and not a Rabbinic scholar.

Hirsch focused his efforts on synagogue reform in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He demanded that synagogue attendees wear clean clothes, prayer in unison, wear clean prayer shawls and not bring children under five into the synagogue. Hirsh modeled his service after his friend and colleague the Reformer Isaac Manheimer who devised what became known as the Vienna rite. The service was to have a male choir, the bimah moved up front, weddings in synagogue , and sermons in German. Manheimer created a Unity Prayerbook (Einheitsgebetbuch) of 1840. Manheimer, who preached in German and recited the poetry of Schiller, Lessing, and Goethe in his sermons, was close to Hirsch’s own aesthetic approach. Hirsch implemented an Enlightenment aesthetic of oratory, choirs, decorum, clerical gowns, patriotism, and the use of musical instruments for non-service special events. The lines not to cross were prayer in the vernacular (which was not a problem in Catholic Moravia), no organ during the regular service, and no liturgical change.

In this middle period of Nikolsburg, we see Hirsch working with and friendly with mild Refomers, working with the entire community (gemminde) and willing to follow the practices of Refomers and the Enlightenment. He did not share the prohibitions of the followers of the Hatam Sofer for adopting changes or copying the ways of the Reformers. As chief Rabbi, Hirsch even wanted to institute a modern scholarly seminary based on the seminary in Padua, eventually Rabbi Hildesheimer fulfilled this need for Germanic lands. (Even in Frankfort, Hirsch did not create any form of yeshiva and is best remembered for discussions with rabbinical students about German poetry).

As chief Rabbi, Hirsch sent his synagogue reforms to be posted in front of every synagogue which elicited much bad will. He was seen by the smaller communities as autocratic. And with an ironic twist to Hirsch claim of Orthodoxy as allowing one to realize Schiller’s aesthetic education for freedom, Hirsch was seen by the smaller communities as taking away freedom and was cast as the tyrant Gessler of Schiller’s William Tell.

Noah H. Rosenbloom claimed that sources to discuss Hirsch’s involvement in the events of the the 1848 revolution are sketchy. Miller, in contrast, documents in great detail how “Samson Raphael Hirsch, in his capacity as Moravian Chief Rabbi, was actively involved in nearly every stage of the struggle for Jewish emancipation from the outbreak of the revolution in March 1848 until the attainment of emancipation in March 1849… Hirsch was expected to oversee not only the religious and educational needs of his Moravian Jewish flock, but also their political needs.” Hence, Hirsch was one of the first modern rabbis whose authority derived not only from talmudic erudition, but also from his university education and his ability to serve as political leader of his community in the fight for Jewish rights. In both Oldenburg (1831- 1841) and Emden (1841- 1847), Hirsch had served as a political intermediary between the government and the small German Jewish communities.

Miller collected many of the primary documents in this political battle. On 20 March 1848, in a broadside addressed to “our Christian brethren,” Hirsch adumbrated the basic political philosophy that would guide him through the revolution: the Jews must be emancipated with the Christians as equal citizens, not separately as Jew.

Speak with us, for us and on behalf of us! Show that justice has become a reality in your bosom; show that you want to blot out the indignity of centuries, not just the indignity that you have suffered; no, also the indignity forgive [me] – that you have inflicted! Show that you recognize us as brothers just as we recognize you as brothers, and that you are not capable of enjoying your own rights as long as just one fellow brother still has to complain before God’ s throne that his right to be a human among humans, a citizen among citizens has been denied and trampled on God’ s earth.

Hirsch called for the creation of a unified Committee for Moravian Jewry as a kind of cohesive lobbying organization.

Throughout April 1848, “much criticism had been leveled at Samson Raphael Hirsch and Moravia’ s ‘modern rabbis Hirsch Fassel, Abraham Schmiedl, Moritz Duschak, and Abraham Neuda for their relative inactivity in the political sphere. As chief rabbi and presumptive leader of Moravian Jewry, Samson Raphael Hirsch received the bruntof the criticism – especially after a Sabbath sermon delivered in Nikolsburg in mid-April. As reported in several Jewish newspapers, Hirsch preached that only strict observance of religious rituals would save the Jews from the ‘swelling torrent’ of the times. In a traditional formulation correlating religious laxity with divine punishment, Hirsch called on Jewish women to cover their hair, reprimanded Jewish men for shaving with razors, and warned both sexes against drinking Christian wine

Hirsch served as a deputy in the Moravian Diet and worked closely with his Reform Rabbi friend Isaac Mannheimer a deputy in the more influential Austrian Reichstag. Hirsch delivered no dramatic speeches on the floor of the Diet, Yet he proved himself to be an impassioned advocate of Jewish rights in his behind-the-scenes interactions with Moravian Governor Leopold Graf Lazansk. Hirsch and Mannheimer kept a regular correspondence of politics and friendship from September1848 until March 1849, which is being prepared for publication.

In Miller’s opinion, Hirsch distinguished himself more as a champion of Jewish rights than as an expositor of Jewish law. And Hirsch’s autocratic approach lead to a breakdown of the chief rabbi’s authority as head of the community (gemeinde)authority replacing it with independent synagogues and greater lay decision making. This already foreshadows Hirsch’s later dislike of consensus and working with a geminde.

Miller also ponders a question that has always bothered me: Why do we have no Hasidism in Moravia if the disciple of the Magid of Mezerich Reb Shmelke was rosh yeshiva in Nikolsberg? Furthermore, many Hasidic leaders spent their time in the Yeshiva, including Moshe Leib Sassov, the Hozeh Jacob Isaac of Lublin, The Koznitzer Magid and Kalever rebbi. Why did not nothing rub off on the population? Miller summarizes the answers as follows. Chone Shmurek thinks that the linguistic difference between Moravian Yiddish and Galician Yiddish were an insurmountable divide. Gershon Hundret credited the rise of Hasidism to an adolescent youth culture seeking rebellion and religious experience and Moravia had an aging population. Michael Silber thinks that Moravians already had deep Frankist roots and were therefore weary of even newer spiritualism. And Miller adds without negating the other interpretations is that Shmelke was too somber and ascetic to lead a pneumatic revivalist group.

My biggest complaint about the book is that in many cases I wanted more. Miller mentions many rabbis in the smaller communities who wrote important works about whom I wanted to know more. Miler mentions how by 1829 – there was only one yeshiva left in the region from the dozens that were there sixty years prior. I wanted to know the small decremental decisions by which parents and local rabbis lost interest in yeshivot for their children. Miller covered how Herz Homberg’s catechism Bene Zion was too liberal and that later Moravia rabbis wrote more traditional versions even if they “viewed Jewish catechisms with deep suspicion.” They considered Jewish catechisms by their nature aiming to distill religion to its essence without an appreciation for the slow study of Jewish texts. Yet, this method of religious indoctrination was the way the majority of Western European Jews gained their religion, and their Orthodoxy. These study of these works remains a desideratum. Finally, I wanted translations of many of the important texts in the volume as an appendix. I know a handout of the Hirsch-Fassel debate or the political sermons would make the era come alive in the classroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed byJohn Inglis, University of Dayton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Jonathan Judaken, Rhodes College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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