I originally asked for a wide variety of responses to Rabbi Tucker’s book and my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker.  We already received a nice series of responses so far. The first response was  by Dr. Malka Simkovich, the second response was by Yoav Sorek, the third response was by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, and the fourth response was by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper. The fifth response was by Rabbi Professor Yehudah Mirsky. I sought diverse responses including ones from the OU and from a Sephardi perspective, they never arrived. However,  below is a sixth response from a Conservative movement perspective.

Last week, I received one from the Conservative movement written by Rabbi Prof. Pamela Barmash who is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Washington University in St. Louis. She received a B.A. from Yale University, rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is the author of Homicide in the Biblical World (Cambridge University Press). She is finishing a book on the Laws of Hammurabi. She has served as the rabbi of Temple Shaare Tefilah, Norwood, MA.  She has served on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly since 2003 and has served on the Joint Beit Din of the Conservative movement since 2008. She has written many teshuvot for the movement.

In specific, she wrote a recent responsa for the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards entitled “Women and Mitzvot” asking the question:  “Are Jewish women responsible for observing the mitzvot from which they have traditionally been exempted?” To which she answers on behalf of the assembly: “We rule therefore that women and men are equally obligated to observe the mitzvot. We call upon Conservative synagogues, schools, and camps to educate men and women in equal observance of  mitzvot and to expect and require their equal observance of mitzvot.”

So the question in all of this for some of my readers is where is the push for egalitarianism among liberal Orthodox, Israeli liberal Religious Zionism and halakhic egalitarianism is different than the Conservative movement? This post will allow the reader to decide.

Particularly important is Rabbi Barmash’s special note about the role of women in society, in that, it touches on some of the prior responses that were posted here. It was an aside, a special note in the responsa, but the focus of our discussions here.

A Special Note

It is the case that learning to integrate the performance of mitzvot into our daily routines  takes time and reflective effort for all of us, both women and men. For those in our communities  who are in their beginning steps in the journey of mitzvot, and even for those of us who have  integrated many mitzvot into the path of our lives, it must be emphasized that we are all trying to  increase the holiness that mitzvot bring to our lives and that each mitzvah observed causes  holiness to suffuse our lives more and more. Each mitzvah allows us to walk another step in the  journey toward and with God. In the process of learning the observance of mitzvot, no one is  expected to learn to fulfill every mitzvah all at once.

For many women who grew up in a different atmosphere regarding women’s roles, the  call to observe mitzvot heretofore closed to them will be inspiring and deeply spiritual. They will  feel ready to fulfill many mitzvot, and they will eagerly learn new habits. But for some women  who were raised in a non-egalitarian or not-completely egalitarian atmosphere, it is  understandable that they may be hesitant to take on new mitzvot. Learning new mitzvot may be  challenging, and some women may find certain mitzvot daunting for a significant span of time.  However, it is the calling of our communities, synagogues, schools, and camps to teach men and  women to consider themselves equally obligated to fulfill mitzvot and to educate them equally in mitzvot.

Rabbi Pamela Barmash on Rabbi Tucker

I largely agree with Rabbi Ethan Tucker’s assessment of the unfolding of halakhah. I have written three teshuvot that I would like to bring into conversation with his interview.

In his discussion of the changing social status of women, Rabbi Tucker points to an analogous development in the assessment of the deaf. I wrote two teshuvot dealing with the deaf who use sign language, here and here.

I argue that the rabbinic categorization of the heresh (deaf-mute) together with the shoṭeh (mentally incapacitated) marginalizes the deaf.(Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 2b) By contrast, those with other physical disabilities are restricted only when their particular physical limitation prevents them from participating in a particular act: their impairment hinders them from specific practices. For the deaf-mute, their physical disability disenfranchises them completely. They are thoroughly excluded because their disability is associated with a mental incapacity, not solely a physical limitation. The rabbis categorized the deaf-mute in such a way because the rabbis were unable to determine their mental functioning. A person must have sound cognitive ability (דעת) in order to be a fully functioning individual in the realm of halakhah.

The ruling about the heresh arises from the rabbi’s inability to determine the mental function of a deaf-mute person as illustrated in Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 113a-b. Two questions are analyzed: 1) Terumah must be intentionally separated from other produce. The question arises as to whether terumah separated by a deaf-mute remained unconsecrated produce. 2) If a man had intimate relations with the wife of a deaf-mute, would he be required to offer the sacrifice of asham talui because the marriage of a deaf-mute was valid only according to special rabbinic enactment. A number of rabbis contended that if a deaf-mute separated terumah from other produce, even though he was prohibited ab initio from doing so, his separation of terumah could be considered valid ex post facto because it could be that he did so with the proper intention. Therefore, the terumah cannot revert back to unconsecrated produce. In regard to the second issue, the marriage of the deaf-mute, the rabbis were unsure about its source of authorization. If the deaf-mute were allowed to marry only by special rabbinic enactment, then another man who was intimate with the deaf-mute’s wife did not transgress a biblical prohibition and therefore did not have to offer the sacrifice of asham talui. However, some rabbis argued that the offender does need to offer that sacrifice because the source for the deaf-mute contracting a marriage might be the same as for all Jews because the deaf-mute has the same mental capacity as other Jews do, and no special rabbinic enactment was necessary.

Rav Ashi asked: What is Rav Eleazar’s reason [for not permitting the terumah that a deaf-mute has separated to revert to unconsecrated status and for requiring an asham talui for intercourse with a deaf-mute’s wife]? Is it obvious to him that the deaf-mute is weak in cognitive ability? Perhaps, he is doubtful as to whether [the deaf-mute’s] mind is sound [and therefore the deaf-mute can understand the proceedings and so his separation of terumah is valid and his marriage is not only valid according to rabbinic enactment] or not sound [and therefore the deaf-mute cannot understand the proceedings and so his separation of terumah is invalid and his marriage is at most valid through rabbinic enactment], though [in either case] his cognitive ability is always in the same condition [the deaf-mute’s mind is always in the same condition, unlike the mentally incapacitated who might be lucid at times].

Or perhaps, he has no doubt that the [deaf-mute’s] mind is weak and never lucid. [Rav Eleazar’s doubt] here is due to this reason: Because [the deaf-mute] may sometimes be in a normal state and sometimes be in a state of mental incapacity.

In what respect would this constitute any practical difference? [It makes a difference in respect to] releasing his wife by a letter of divorce. If you grant that his mind is always in the same condition,  his divorce [would have the same validity] as his betrothal.  If, however, you contend that sometimes he is in a normal state  and sometimes he is in a state of mental incapacity, he would be capable of valid betrothal, but he would not be capable of giving divorce [because he might be of weak mind at that time, in which case his divorce would be invalid]. What [then is the decision]? This remains undecided.

The confusion of the rabbis about the mental capacity of the deaf-mute extended to divorce. In extending a divorce, the deaf-mute must be in the same mental state as when the marriage was contracted.( Mishnah Gittin 2:6 ) If the deaf-mute were only intermittently impaired, the divorce could not be executed because it would be unclear whether at the moment of divorce the deaf-mute was lucid. The quandary the rabbis faced was that they could not determine the mental state of the deaf mute and, therefore, could not decide the questions before them.

Starting in the nineteenth century, significant advances were made in the education of the deaf-mute, and their soundness of their cognitive ability became evident. Nonetheless, the assumption that deafness was evidence of flawed intelligence continued to prevail in the general community. Sign language was maligned as a broken version of a spoken language. Only in 1960 did a professor of linguistics at Gallaudet University (then College), William C. Stokoe, Jr., publish the first analysis of a sign language as an ordered system governed by syntax.  In 1979, two linguists, Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi, demonstrated that sign languages are as complex, abstract, and systematic as spoken languages: they are controlled by the same part of the brain as spoken languages and are mastered in developmental stages like spoken languages.

A number of Jewish communities began to establish schools for the education of deaf children. Among halakhic authorities there has been a slow drift toward recognizing the cognitive ability of the deaf.

My teshuvot rule that 1) the categorization of the deaf-mute as mentally incapacitated is to be revoked and that they are to be considered completely lucid, and 2) sign language may be used in matters of personal status (such as weddings and divorces) and may be used in liturgy This is mandated by a new understanding of the cognitive ability of the deaf. Their social status has changed due to two factors: a transformation in the understanding of hearing people, who now comprehend that the deaf who use sign language have sound cognitive ability, contrary to the assumptions made in the past about them, and the increased educational and societal opportunities for the deaf.

An analogous developed has occurred with regard to women, the topic of another teshuvah of mine.  Cultural attitudes have shifted dramatically in society in general, and doors into business and the professions formerly closed to women are now open. Women participate in public life in ways unimaginable a century or two ago, or even a few decades ago. This is an intellectual and psychological transformation in how women perceive themselves and are perceived by others. Women are now seen as equal to men, in social status, in political and legal rights, and in intellectual ability by both men and women. A new world-view has resulted in new roles for women.

It must be emphasized that the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud did not doubt the intellectual abilities of women. Women were charged with responsibility for certain domestic mitzvot, mitzvot whose breach incurred serious consequences for the members of the household, including the (male) head of the household. Women were given responsibility for separating hallah from dough at home. (The mitzvah for bread baked outside the home was fulfilled by men, who served as professional bakers, and the Mishnah does mention dough prepared by herdsmen, such as in Mishnah Hallah 1.8) Women were given the responsibility for the preparation of matzah, and despite the seriousness of the preparations for Passover, they were not supervised by men. The (male) head of the household had the responsibility, according to the Mishnah, to make sure that food kept warm on the Sabbath was done without violating the Sabbath. The Talmud shows that women took care of this task, with many references to women knowing the many details on keeping food warm on the Sabbath.

Women were given responsibility for ritual tasks that took place in the home without any concern for any lack of knowledge, reliability, or intellect on the part of women, according to the Mishnah and Talmuds. At the same time, women did not serve in public ritual roles, nor were they required to perform the mitzvot to be performed by those of highest social standing.

The exclusion of women from public ritual roles was due to two principles. The first is that an individual who is not obligated for a specific mitzvah cannot satisfy the obligation of another individual who is obligated for a specific mitzvah.(Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8) The second is that social standing matters and that those of higher social standing would lose their dignity if some of lower social standing functioned on their behalf. In the case of the public reading of Scripture:

A minor may translate for an adult (who is chanting from Scripture in public) but it is beneath his dignity for an adult to translate for a minor.

(Tosefta Megillah 3:21)

The reader’s social status mattered: a woman or a minor was eligible technically but nonetheless could not represent the congregation, and to do so would infringe on the dignity of the congregation. A woman could not fulfill the obligation of a man because she had a lower social status.

Often, the discussion of women’s status vis-a-vis the mitzvot revolves on the traditional exemption of women from what were deemed time-triggered positive mitzvot. The problem with this exemption is that women were required to perform many time-triggered positive mitzvot. Moreover, many of the time-triggered positive mitzvot did not have to be performed in a narrow window of time. They can be performed at home, and a number of them require only a slight amount of time to fulfill. Women were exempted, for example, from hearing the shofar, a mitzvah that could be completed at any point during the day and one that does not take much time to fulfill.

Women were put into the same category as minors and slaves with an essential difference: minors could grow up and slaves could be emancipated, but women deemed to remain in the same social status.(Babylonian Talmud Bava Kamma 88a and Berakhot 47b)

Women were exempted because the acts of those who are subordinate to an earthly master honor God in a lesser way. It must be emphasized that the subordination of women was about their social status, about their place in the hierarchy of family and society.

When social customs change significantly, the changed social reality requires further unfolding of halakhah. I argue that women are now to be held as equally responsible for the mitzvot as men have been and that the social status of women entitles them to participate in public ritual and may fulfill mitzvot on behalf of others.

Other significant social changes need to be considered: if both men and women are now taking responsibility for infants and young children as well as for frail relatives and friends, it may be that they should be released from the mitzvot that interfere with care-giving for the duration in which they bear those duties. An essential principle of rabbinic tradition has been that an individual who is busy with one mitzvah is exempt from another.(Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 25a). Caring for the young and the elderly and frail are religiously significant tasks, and if a person is busy caring for those in need of care, s/he ought to be released from specific mitzvot that might interfere. It must be noted this exemption should be limited to that particular span of time when an individual care-giver is occupied with care-giving and that otherwise that care-giver would retain the responsibilities and privileges that he/she would otherwise have. This exemption would apply only to individuals during the time they are fulfilling a mitzvah and would not be applied across the board to them as a class. Care-givers would be included in the minyan because they still are obligated for prayer, even if at times they may be exempted. This exemption would be a powerful statement of the importance of care-giving.

Rabbi Tucker’s interview concludes with a discussion of a number of Conservative/Masorti movement teshuvot from the 1980’s, so I would also note a number of more recent teshuvot. The teshuvot of Rabbi Myron Geller and Rabbi Susan Grossman on women and edut (testimony) were approved in 2001, and Rabbi David Fine’s teshuvah on women and the minyan was approved in 2002.

Barmash’s own Summary of her Responsa (from the end of the Responsa)

Summary

The general exclusion of women from many mitzvot is based on the characterization of those mitzvot as positive and time-bound. A number of reasons have been devised for the link between this category and the exclusion of women from those mitzvot. However, it turns out that this category was devised for exegetical (formal interpretive) purposes, and only later was the category extended to other mitzvot from which women had already been excluded. It was never a generative principle.

Instead, women were excluded because they had subordinate status. They were exempted from the mitzvot that Jews are obligated to observe in the normal course of the day, week, and year because the essential ritual acts should be performed only by those of the highest social standing, those who were independent, those who were heads of their own households, not subordinate to anyone else. Only males were considered to be fitting candidates to honor God in the most fit way. The acts of those who were subordinate honor God in a lesser way and,therefore, women were excluded from them. Furthermore, social standing matters in relations between human beings, and those of higher social standing would lose their dignity if some of lower social standing functioned on their behalf. Women were endowed with ritual responsibilities for others inside the home because the rabbis thought that women had the intellect and reliability to do so. It was social status alone that determined whether women were exempted from certain mitzvot. Women were also not involved in public ritual ceremonies because of their position in social hierarchy.

The involvement of women in Jewish religious and liturgical life has changed significantly in the past century and even more in the past few decades. Jewish women are aspiring to the privileges and responsibilities enjoyed by Jewish men through the millennia. The halakhah has recognized that when social customs change significantly, the new social reality requires a reappraisal of halakhic practices. The historical circumstances in which women were exempted from time-bound positive mitzvot are no longer operative, and the Conservative movement has for almost a century moved toward greater and greater inclusion of women in mitzvot. In Jewish thought and practice, the highest rank and esteem is for those who are required to fulfill mitzvot.

For other reactions and responses to Rabbi Barmash’s opinion- see these links, especially for the discussion here one should see the abstentions and dissents.

Pamela Barmash, “Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014a

• Jeremy Kalmanofsky, “An Egalitarian Abstention” YD 246:6.2014b
• Loel M. Weiss, “Dissent on Women’s Hiyuvim” YD 246:6.2014c
• Reuven Hammer, “Concurrence on Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014d
• Daniel Nevins, “Concurring Opinion on Rabbi Barmash’s Responsum on Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014e
• Avram Reisner, “Mikhal bat Kushi Wore Tefillin: A concurrence to Women and Mitzvot by Pamela Barmash” YD 246:6.2014f
• Elliot Dorff, “A Concurrence with Rabbi Pamela Barmash’s Teshuvah: The Use of Principles in Jewish Law” YD 246:6.2014g
• Baruch Frydman-Kohl, “Women and Mitzvot: Abstention and Dissent” YD 246:6.2014h
• Joshua Heller, “Dissenting Opinion on Rabbi Barmash’s Responsum on Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014i

I will continue with my tribute to the work of Peter Berger as a theologian from a Jewish perspective. I dealt with question of theology and the sacred canopy in the first part- here. read that post first for the basic insight into his value for Judaism.  This second part deals with mysticism, interfaith miracles, and the return of non-pluralistic religion.

However, before I do that, a few topics came up in the FB discussion that are worth dealing with. First, someone asked, if he is a sociologist, then does he agree with Feuerbach’s reduction of religion to human projection? The answer is no. In fact, he is explicit in his rejection of Feuerbach, claiming the converse that the  world is a projection of God. The “World is a fragmented face of God.” He has been called a Christian humanist and a Lutheran Rabbi, reflecting about himself that  “I’ve always had a weakness for divinity”

Many sociologists, such as Bryan Wilson did not approve of Berger’s theology and sociology mix. Berger considered the functional sociology of the Chicago school as the human condition, while theology is outside of human condition. Berger sought faith, transcendence, hope and seeking a confrontation with God, he nevertheless considered institutional houses of worship as social in orientation, as following Durkheim. He considered most houses of worship and their followers as inauthentic and self-serving. At points, he even considers organized religion and socialization as Weber’s iron cage or as original sin.

Berger’s goal is to relativize the relativizers and show that atheism of Western sociological functionalism was itself a product of a narrow plausibility structure.  He rejected the late 1990’s Fundamentalism project thinking that the only people who don’t know that the ordinary public take their religion seriously are the sociologists.

Another thread thought that Peter Berger’s ideas were just Mordecai Kaplan’s sociological naturalism, but that misses Berger’s original ideas of the sacred canopy of existential meaning, his quest for transcendence, his thinking naturalism is reductionism, and his thinking that Jewish Centers are iron cages.  Berger’s writings have been positively used in the full spectrum of rabbinic seminaries, and as one FB commenter noted: to account for the changes in thought since the 1930’s someone else in the 1970’s should have updated Mordecai Kaplan’s ideas.

Mysticism

Berger’s views on India and mysticism were the parts that I felt the need to respond in a blog post. To understand his views on mysticism, we need to return to the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s, when a new series of books appeared- The Classics of Western Spirituality, which produced nicely edited translations of Western mysticism. The series included for the first time as part of the same set works by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Native American authors. The idea was partly an outgrowth of the counter-cultural turn to mysticism of the 1960’s, but more importantly for its conceptual frame and the frame of the volumes of World Spirituality was a rejection of Peter Berger’s denial of mysticism in Western culture.

Berger, in his early writings present a sharp divide between two types of religion, the religion of Jerusalem or the religion of Banaras.  Western religion based on Jerusalem is a religion of divine confrontation. Eastern religion based on Indian culture is a religion of interiority.

Berger’s chapter in The Heretical Imperative “Between Jerusalem and Benares: The Coming Contestation of Religions,” posits two major forms of Divine encounter. A confrontation with the divine (epitomized in the West with the monotheistic tradition, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam); and the interiority of the divine, exemplified in the East with such religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. For Berger, these two forms of divine encounter are antagonistic to each other. Western monotheism has a transcendent God, while Eastern interiority have a merger into divine immanence in which human consciousness dissolves into a greater oneness.

Berger was not concerned with empirical studies of mysticism or religious experience, rather with theology. The Protestant theologians of the 20th century dialectic movement such as Karl Barth rejected “every form of mysticism as unbelief, it was converting God into an object. They considered it self-serving and not based on God’s demand.

Berger follows this theological trend in general, and in particular relies on the Protestant theologian Freidrich Heiler whose work Prayer A Study In The History And Psychology Of Religion. The latter work made a sharp distinction between prophecy and mysticism, or more specifically between Biblical prophetic prayer of confronting God and/or petition to God, as opposed to mystical prayer of enthusiasm and absorption into God. Heiler’s two groups are the proper Lutheran prayer as opposed to pagan and enthusiastic prayer such as German spiritualists or Shakers. Berger included in Western prayer two aspects -confrontation and personalist identity- corresponding to prayer in Soloveitchik and Heschel respectively.

It is important to note that this same distinction about prayer used by Freidrich Heiler was eagerly adopted by Jewish studies. Jospeh Heinemann in his Prayer in the Period of the Tannaim and the Amoraim, & Prayer in the Talmud  presented rabbinic prayer as prophetic and confrontational as opposed to the mythic-mystical prayer at the margins of the rabbinic world. Moshe Greenberg presented Biblical prayer as prophetic without myth or mysticism.

Actually, Jewish prayer may be neither of these categories, or at least has more than these two, in that it is also adoration, doxology, magic, theurgy, contemplation, and chant. There are many Jewish educators, and even Talmudists, who because of their lack of interest in theology are still stuck using only Heiler’s Protestant categories.

Berger accepted this dichotomy and globalized it as the West as prophetic and East as mysticism. Nevertheless, Berger does concede that there are Western mystics but says that we have to distinguish mode from content. There is a mystical mode in the West but Western mystics do not have oneness of reality, while Eastern religion can be faith without any mystical experience but their essence is oneness of reality even without the experience.

The Other Side of God

In order to investigate the divide between the religion of the East and of the West, Peter Berger hosted a series of seminars for several years, starting in 1978, called “Monotheism and the World Religions.”   The papers were published in 1981 as The Other side of God: A polarity in world religions.

Berger asked: how can we reconcile these mystical traditions with our firm monotheistic confrontation. Berger’s fellow-scholars criticize this theological dyad of confrontation and mysticism in the light of their own phenomenological research.  Among those invited to attend included Ewert Cousins, the general editor of the new Classics of Western Spirituality (and my doctorate advisor), as well as the quite young Jewish representations, Michael Fishbane and Arthur Green.

Michael Fishbane adapted this distinction to the Bible as similar the distinction of the nature worship of Baal and the goddess as opposed to the worship of the Biblical God.  He supports Berger in showing that the vision of Ezekiel was transcendent and not one of merger. Yet, he then boldly reversed the dichotomy by saying that the Bible exaggerates the battle of God and Baal. On the popular level, the people mixed the cults and practices. Nevertheless, the mythic element comes back, as a return of the repressed, in Midrash and Kabbalah. In the kabbalah, once again god-man- world become one. Kabbalah has the mythic and mystical aspects.

Arthur Green presented Hasidism as a mysticism outgrowth of Judaism in which there is indeed an interiority and absorption into God. Green presented Hasidism as beyond the strictures and institutions of Judaism. A direct outgrowth of their experiencing oneness with God in their minds and within the natural order. Green cites Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Epstein of Homel who clearly expressed their pantheistic view that “all is God” (als iz Got).

Parenthetically, Berger repeatedly misquoted this in the name of Rav Nachman and credits him with Chabad organizational zeal. “The famous Kabbalist Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), corresponded with kindred individuals all over the Jewish world from his obscure locale in Ukraine.” Berger’s version compared Hasidism to the pantheistic heresy of the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj, in which, “that “everything is God”, an idea obviously blasphemous in Jewish law.” Nachman  of Bratzlav “wrote this sentence in one of his letters, but he did not dare to write it in Hebrew, the sacred language of Torah—so he wrote that one sentence in Yiddish.”

Fishbane established the approach of treating the Bible and Rabbis as mythic and both Fishbane and Green gave an emphasis to experiential God consciousness and mysticism to their studies of Kabbalah.

Ewert Cousins in his response to Berger used the medieval Neo-platonic tradition to show that a mainstream Western mystic such as Francis of Assisi had a unified vision with natural realm, a nature mysticism without pantheism or absorption into God. Cousins showed how Francis saw a divine plenitum in the world as a unity in the difference. For Cousins, the Neoplatonism tradition, long buried finds mysticism in the plurality of this world.. After the series of seminars, Cousins was the major drive behind the Classics of Western Spirituality and World Spirituality volumes. Only recently, have Jewish scholars such as Adam Afterman returned the study of Jewish mysticism to Neoplatonic concerns

Yet, Berger continued to treat Neo-Platonism as mythological more than Western, the way Protestant theologians such as Barth did in some of their writings. Berger understands Rudolph Otto’s sense of mysterium tremendum”/”ganz andere” as supporting the Western idea of confrontation and not the concept of mysticism.

Turning to Hinduism and my intest in Banares, there was a nice article by John Carmen on Hinduism as a theistic interiority and showing that the Bhagavad Gita presents a confrontation with God. Nevertheless, Berger never retracted his position to see Hinduism as devotion to a theistic God in which one seeks God help in prayer and to attain merit.  (See my forthcoming book for more on this.)

In his introduction to the volume, and in later essays, Berger treated Gershom Scholem as the reappearance of mythological forms in Judaism despite Judaism as being the most anti-mythological. He concludes that myth is a primordial human experience.  He places Eliade in the same group. Berger acknowledges that his own idea of a sacred canopy bears commonality with the mythic vision of Scholem and Eliade, but thinks the sacred canopy is meaning and plausibility, not myth.

Gershom Scholem saw mysticism as just a symbolic understanding of an ultimate reality, a universal phenomena that plays itself out in non-reducible languages and systems. However, in this case Peter Berger’s phenomenology, based on Alfred Schutz, can be more useful to explain diversity. Berger is willing to consider the various phenomena of mysticism, psychoanalysis, demonic possession, magic, ascents of the soul, meditation, as different plausibility structures. There are different and non-reducible ways to experience reality. Berger acknowledge the diversity of actual people. However, he speaks as an advocate for Western confrontational religion.

Unlike Scholem, Berger does not think that relgion should be reduced to its mystical core or “what William James called the “mysticism of infinity” in which self, world, and divinity merge in ecstasy.” For Berger, mysticism is only a relatively small area within the vast array of human religion.

Finally, as recently as this decade, Berger questioned the compatibility of Yoga with Western religion because they share different views of human destiny. Yoga is self-liberation and Berger’s reading of Western culture is a need for revelation and redemption outside the self. He acknowledges that many just do Yoga as an exercise but he asks “Could one say the Lord’s Prayer while sitting in the lotus position? Conversely, could one seek “emptiness” while receiving communion? The short answer is: One could, but it would be awkward.” Once again, Berger lacks a sense of Yogic Kabbalaists like Abulafia or Hindu theist yoga.

Interfaith to Seek Truth

Berger advocated a non-pragmatic motive for engaging in interfaith activity, which is, quite simply, to engage in a renewed search for truth. For him, “Obviously, such a statement contains an implicit theological assumption, one that is, broadly speaking, liberal. Which is to say, it will make no sense to any orthodoxy holding to the belief that, short of the eschaton , everything has been revealed that is going to be and therefore there is nothing new to be learned of religiously relevant truth.”

For Berger, this is the dialogue between Jerusalem and Benares, between the faiths that descend from the biblical tradition and the faiths of South and East Asia, which to him is the most promising and most challenging questions intellectually.

Nevertheless, Berger cautioned about interfaith and intergroup activities  that harmony will always come from a better understanding of each other. Intergroup tensions and conflicts are based on hard vested interests, on ancient and newly invented hatreds, and on emotional and ideological needs. However, he was in favor of pragmatic purpose in helping to reduce tensions through mutual understanding and empathy. But bearing in mind that it will not effect  the more determined bigots.

Despite being a sociologist and advocating that we have to acknowledge that, we live in an age of pluralism. Berger thinks that the pluralistic situation forces us to choose our religious belief, and every religious affirmation we then make is the result of choice, even if we choose this or that orthodoxy. It becomes very difficult to say innocently, “we believe”; even if we use such words, what we are really saying is, “ I have chosen to identify with this we .” At the same time, I must remain faithful to my own experience, even though I know this experience to be relativized by my historical and social location.

According to Berger, the first insight makes it impossible for him to be “exclusivist,” thinking his religious views are the only way. The second insight make it impossible to be a “pluralist.” Because relgious truths are contradictory or some of them are. They cannot readily be put together into a better picture like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; some of them belong to different pictures.

Berger sees three broad interfaith challenges. The first challenge to Western monotheism is the experience of the mythological matrix . Anywhere in the world, if one goes back far enough, one comes upon a worldview that can be described quite adequately as mythological, characterized by fluid, permeable boundaries between the realms of men, of nature, and of the gods. The radical rupture of this world that took place in ancient Israel and is at the root of the biblical tradition almost certainly served to reinforce these boundaries. He never did accept Michael Fishbane’s ideas.

The second challenge of the religions of South and East Asia is their experience of Buddhist emptiness of nirvana, an-atta, shunyata, satori .  Here he learned something from his seminars from Ewert Cousins and Arthur Green, acknowledging those who “tried to reconcile the insights coming out of this experience with the monotheistic affirmations of biblical faith”such as Isaac Luria, the principal theorist of the Safad school of the Kabbalah…or Bonaventure, who sought to retain the speculations of radical Franciscanism within the fold of Catholic orthodoxy…”

Finally, Berger thinks there is the third challenge: the experience of other particular revelations because of the particularistic and historicized character of Israel’s understanding of God’s revelation. “ If God chose Israel, could He have chosen any other people and if so, how are these two elections related to each other?”  Speaking in a Judeo-Christian voice, Berger asks: “Is there any way in which a Jew or a Christian could understand God as speaking in the Quran?” He was the issue with Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s Dignity of Difference, the award winning first edition said yes. While the revised safer second edition removed those lines.

In conclusion, Berger writes about maintaining religious differences: “I am convinced that interfaith dialogue, while acknowledging areas of agreement, must also be frank in stating disagreements. In other words, it is as important to say no as to say yes .”

Lutheranism, and the Heretical Imperative

In my prior blog post, I noted that in his book The Heretical Imperative, he distinguished between the Orthodox deductive position and liberal reductive position, between the positions of a return to certainty despite modernity and the position of accepting the rationalism of modernity. Instead he advocates, a theological pluralism of always seeking to balance the extremes using social science.

However, in some of his later works, he surprises us by crediting his pluralism scheme directly to Lutheranism. On the orthodox side, Catholics have “the miracle of the Mass,” where the “transubstantiation” was supposed to occur.  On the other hand, there was the Swiss view of Zwingli  that the Eucharist was a simple memorial. These are the extremes of reductionism and deductionism, while only the Lutherans understand that the Eucharist, Christ is present in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine: neither transubstantiation nor a simple memorial, rather a balance.

Returning to our opening about Berger’s mixture of theology and sociology, for him the Church is a thoroughly human institution, with all the vices and follies of such an entity, possessing no intrinsic authority and certainly not the power of infallibility. God’s revelation is communicated in, with, and under an all too fallible institution.

In many ways this also fits, the middle range of contemporary Jews who treat mizvot not as supernatural nor as merely a symbol. Rather, they are the ways we come to God. Modern Orthodoxy is in its classic mid-20^th century form approached Berger’s Lutheran middle position. Moreover, even now when it leans more to the deductive side, it still rejects the miraculous for a Weber sense of rationality, or even Lutheran balance. Therefore, until the recent influx of magical ideas in Modern Orthodoxy, it avoided the miraculous in daily life.

Two years ago, I gave my talk on the “Varieties of Modern Orthodoxy” at a major University. They arranged for a Catholic professor to respond to my talk. She responded that modern Catholics share many of the issues of Modern Orthodoxy Jews, including that both combine their faith and secular studies. However, she added that Catholics have a third element besides the modern and the Orthodox, that of the miraculous.  For her, one must always balance faith with both modernity and with the miraculous. The Catholic Church has been supernaturalist in principle, but cautious in practice: Saints are expected to perform miracles, but these are juridical investigated and bureaucratically regulated; miracles outside these procedures are frowned upon.

This struck me because it was never a Jewish perspective. However, with the return of Neo-Chassidus and magical thinking to Modern Orthodoxy, it may play a bigger role in future thinkers.

However, what is noticeable is that in some issues like the origins of the BIble, Modern Orthodoxy is unlike Lutheran middle  rather closer to the Evangelical deductive. Right wing Conservative is closer to Berger. According to Berger’s “Lutheran view, in which the Bible is a collection of texts produced by human beings under specific historical circumstances, neither directly inspired nor inerrant. God revealed himself in, with, and under these contingencies of history.

Modern Orthodoxy has traditionally been closer to the Protestants who have been more wary of the supernatural: God speaks to us through the kerygma , the proclamation of the Word, yet keeps the miracles  of the past open. Modern Orthodoxy, in some ways, has a similarity to American Evangelical theologians (very non-Pentecostal ones) who have developed a doctrine called “cessationism”: Miracles have ceased because they are no longer needed, or after the canon was completed.

Pentecostals, New Age, and the turn to Ultra-Orthodoxy

Berger writing from a personal biographical perspective of Lutheranism has never been attracted to  Pentecostalism. But as a sociologist he have been fascinated by it. And furthermore, he sees that it improves people’s lives by providing comfort and community for people. It preaches a morality that encourages sobriety, discipline, and devotion to family. Those who do, begin to experience social mobility and will indeed improve their lives. Pentecostalism is itself a modernizing movement in the developing world.  This is an important point for those Modern Orthodox authors who have an animus against the more right wing Yeshivish or Chabad and do not see their value in modernizing, in social mobility, and in producing a disciplined life.

On the other hand, Berger originally supported the need to bring religion into the public sphere as part of conservative trend of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, founded in 1989 by Richard John Neuhaus. Yet, he subsequently broke with them over their obsessions with abortion and same sex relations.

On the other hand, Paul Heelas, one of the leading scholars of the new age movement, points out how Berger never really understood the turn to spirituality. scholars of 21^st century religion, note that Berger is not useful for dealing with the new age, therapeutic, and the immanence of religion in our lives. And Berger certainly has fewer insight to apply to the return to non-pluralist religion. Berger understood interiority- the lonely man of faith-  but not how people find God in social activities of helping other, of therapeutically helping themselves, in use of Asian religious ideas, in small groups, and in the arts. He could not see the current immanent form of religious humanism, in which the homeless religious mind found a new home in the immanence of daily life. Berger had too sharp of a sacred and profane distinction. He would not be helpful in understanding the plethora of new age and therapeutic forms of Chabad and yeshivish.

Modern Orthodoxy

Gerald Blidstein  notably compared Rav Soloveitchik’s constructivist  approach of  “world-building and world-perceiving” to “certain  facets  of  the  work of people like [Peter] Berger, [Clifford] Geertz, [Charles] Taylor,  [Michael]  Walzer,  and  others..”  An important point.

But by the time, Blidstein wrote those words, Modern Orthodoxy stopped caring and in an undereducated and frightened but belligerent way thought  Peter Berger was post-modern, and therefore oppose to religion. However, Berger himself had to clarify occasionally his own positon before the misreading of his pluralism and constructivism. Berger’s pluralism is a form of realism in which the modern believer has to have discernment to choose between the options and  not rely on dogmatic deductivism or reductionism. However, the word pluralism twenty years later by other thinkers meant that we have no truth or that all truth is just a subjective construct.

A different distortion seemingly common among Modern Orthodox is to misread Berger’s pluralism and heretical imperative as if he was the first to discuss the voluntary nature of religion after the Enlightenment and Emancipation, as if he is a liberal affirmer of individual conscience. (Get ready for a short screed.)

There is an Orthodox interpretation of Peter Berger, almost a meme, crediting him with the Enlightenment saying that we are all freethinkers today and not locked into a socially imposed religion, as were the pre-moderns. Therefore, these modern Orthodox think he is similar to the Hazon Ish’s statement that there is no heresy today because the social-religious framework cannot the taken as a given. The Hazon Ish notes that in Jewish modern life after the Emancipation if one chooses a non-observant life, it is not an act of deep rebellion. There also seems to be some sense in which these meme users think this misreading distinguishes themselves from Haredim.

However, the Hazon Ish is just responding to the 19^th century. Almost any thinker from Locke, Lessing, Hume, Jefferson, Mendelssohn, or Kant says we no longer have an established religion and follow our own conscience. Jews after the Enlightenment and Emancipation can choose to remain Jewish or to leave. Many 20^th century books on the modern Jew make a statement to that effect in the first chapter.

In contrast, Berger’s pluralistic choice is about the believer needing to forever be mediating and negotiating using current academic study. Berger was a firm conservative believer against freethinkers since they are giving up the needed pluralist negotiation and seeking of transcendence. For Berger the need to choose is not the decision to be religious or not. It is a philosophic position of a need to create a sophisticated faith- choice means sophistication and the need to apply critical methods, especially of sociology.  Think of his position as the need to affirm Torah Umadda or Tradition and Modernity, or a critical modern faith. Berger is not about autonomy and finding one’s “religious preference”. He is not Rabbi Eugene Borowitz and is against such liberalism. As noted above in the interfaith section, Berger simultaneously affirms that all choices are personal, but we then fully accept them as our Existential choose. Those who follow the meme comparing the Hazon Ish and Peter Berger are themselves guilty of not have a heretical faith informed by social science.

Conclusion

In conclusion, what was the attraction of Berger’s writings for Jews? In a Jewish context, his ideas were generally formulated his ideas as a tension to be negotiated, a hallmark late 20^th century of Jewish religious thought. Among the specific Jewish tensions are autonomy and rabbinic authority, between legitimation by personal choice or by Rabbinic tradition, between identity and status in a Jewish community, and critical studies and rabbinic tradition. Different Jewish denominations resolved the tension in different ways.

There were, however, Jewish critics of Peter Berger who bristled against his definition of Judaism as a religion and faith commitment, when they instead defined Judaism Jewish peoplehood or the Jewish historical experience, especially the Holocaust. Yet, the Reform movement even consulted Berger when they considered a campaign of outreach to non-Jews. (I did not deal with these aspects in this essay.)

Nevertheless, Berger remains the model for attaining clarity about a certain form of 1960-1985 form of middle point religion. Jews used Berger’s socio-theological faith as a way to show how to negotiate religious options in tension with each other.

Rav Kook described prayer as a means to “deepen our feelings of holiness and our sense of closeness to God.” It will be so intense that the “immediacy can be felt by others due to the “exalted sense of Divine immediacy.” And from the midst of all its influence upon the world in the past, present and future.”Rav Kook assures us that “When that prayer of the people of Israel comes, the entire world will be astonished at its glory and splendor, its strength and grace.  It will come from the midst of that perfect will that makes the entire world one bloc of holiness, that turns all of life into one chapter of supernal song, a new song, a song of Hashem upon the land of Israel, a song of Zion redeemed and filled with eternal redemption.” (Orot Hakodesh III, p. 227)

However, what happens when your prayer life and the prayer life of your friends and seemingly your entire generation no longer senses the promise described by Rav Kook? What does one do if the hope of a transformed reality through prayer has vanished? What if prayer does not seem to offer benefits and all one has is silence from the act of prayer leaving one without any hope?

To answer this problem, Rav Shagar turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida, the Algerian -born French Sephardi thinker, via a Hebrew secondary source, to respond to the current impasse of  prayer without hope.  (For links to our more than 17 prior posts on Rav Shagar,  see here, here. here, here, and here. We have once again to thank Levi Morrow for his first draft of a translation. Please let me know of any errors.

Rav Shagar acknowledges that for many their prayers are without benefit or hope. To offer a path of continuing to pray despite this lack of  hope, he finds a parallel to Derrida’s prayer as without hope in which Derrida nevertheless  says despite the despair and lack of hope, there is always a possibility of that one may be answered.

Shagar interprets the traditional Hasidic concepts of offering as prayer without hope. Shagar equates Derrida’s prayer without hope to Rebbe Nachman’s Void, the Halal Ha-Panui, which is seemingly empty without hope. However, according to Shagar, prayer has the possibility to cut through the void. In addition, God must be in His seeming absence. Not because of a holism in which everything is God, rather because there is always the possibility of breaking though the void. In the meantime, prayer is an imposibilty, yet we still pray.

Shagar compares the negative theology of Derrida to the negative theology of Maimonides and kabbalah. Yet, Derrida himself said negative theology was precursor to his concept of différance but clearly differentiated his thought from medieval thought in that medieval negative theology was still tied to a higher reality. Derrida was especially adamant that différance was not God.

In contrast, to the actual thought of Derrida, or his major interpreters, Shagar make Derrida into a mystic and treats deconstructionism as similar to the kabbalah. He also thought Derrida’s différance is God as a higher reality and it is our higher self in the transcendental and existential senses sthat Derrida rejected. In this, Shagar was probably just following the Israeli presentation by Michael Govrin, who combined her own kabbalistic views with those of Derrida in the same volume. Shagar’s usage of Derrida is basically a few unexplained quotes that are contextualized in his own Hasidic thought.

Shifting back to Rebbe Nachman, Shagar considers all prayer as a grace of God  and all the words are a grace in that they are not guaranteed in a natural way.  Here Shagar shifts Rebbe Nachman’s ideas of divine gift and divine miracle into the ideas of possibility, or even without hope.  There is no transcendence, we do not experience the promise of the Kabbalah or Rav Kook, only the possibility.

The essay ends on a more radical note claiming that God lacks independent meaning of our prayer or any transcendence. God is not outside standing above, rather God is  our deep self or in the language of Hasidut, it is the root of our souls. This harkening back to the end of the introduction to his work Kelim Shevurim (2002) where he reads Rav Zadok HaKohen in this manner. He concludes by identifying God with the Lacanian Real, thereby collapsing self, God and divine immanence. (see his Hanukhah homily for more on this.) Shagari s using Lacan’s  idea that at one stage of development the “I” is an empty signifier within the field of language and one enters via language into the symbolic order. In order essays Shagar identifies Torah with this self-creating symbolic order.

In the 1980’s Shagar used modernist existential themes to interpret the alienation from prayer. For example his student, Rabbi Dov Zinger, head of the yeshiva high school, Mekor Chaim has the students do Buber I-Thou dialogue with their classmates and then has them turn to God with the same I-Thou intimacy. Another student, Rabbi Benny Kalmanson of Yeshivat Otniel, reflects a more frustrated Existential moment by speaking of Elie Wiesel’s concept of the need to argue with God even if one does not belief or expect an effect. Prayer is like story telling it is a form of witness and memory. In this essay, we see Rav Shagar use of postmodern language from the last decade of his life.

It is worth noting that in all of his work Rav Shagar identifies with the breakdown not the solution. When Buber, Heschel, and Soloveitchik use Existentialism, they all see prayer and faith as an answer to the absurdity, meaningless, and futility of life. In contrast, Shagar accepts that our thrown situation is absurd, meaningless, and in this case hopeless. His goal is to explain this hopelessness and absurdity as our religious life, then to channel it back to a religious perspective.

To conclude as we started by returning to Rav Kook, one can still use the words of Rav Kook but now we can relate to them in a new Rav Shagar post-Derrida understanding. “When we pray to find our purpose in life and our path to serve God, such a prayer is an authentic reflection of the soul’s inner desires… prayers express our true inner will.” (Olat Re’iyah vol. I) Prayer, in this new reading, becomes the Lacanian Real and the inner self of Hasidut, both of them only a possibility.

Interlude on Prayers of Derrida as needed for this essay.

For those not familiar with Derrida, here are his ideas of prayer and atheism that will add to understanding this essay of Rav Shagar. If you wish, you can skip this interlude and go directly to Rav Shagar’s essay below.

Derrida, the “father” of deconstruction, was nothing like the stereotypical caricatures. The philosopher/theologian John Caputo in his many works especially for this essay The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997) presents a religious use of Derrida and in Caputo’s recent works (2011-2017) of the last few years, brings us a position that is similar to what Shagar is struggling to articulate this  essay.

Caputo writes on Derrida’s prayer:

The religion of Derrida, is quite paradoxical. He considered himself an atheist, but yet he would pray at least nightly, sometime to the point of tears. What is so interesting to me is not so much the atheism, nor the fine intricacies that Derrida went about to define his religion as a “Religion without religion” and who prayed to a “God without God.”But rather what has been so moving to me is the sincere humility Derrida went about his religion and prayers…

In short, Derrida realizes first and foremost, that he is human. and thus he is fallen and fallible. And the human tendency is to think that our world revolves around each one of ourselves. But yet, we know the world doesn’t revolve around us, and we are not the center of the universe. Thus prayer in a way, is a way Derrida seeks to rid himself of self. He wants to love people, and thus in prayer he attempts to repent of himself so that he won’t get in the way of love.

Thus, for Derrida,  prayer is not just a lifting up of God, but it is also just as much a repositioning of one’s self in relation to God as to not distort our view of God.

“My prayers have more than one age, one layer, in the same instant. There is something very childish, in the imagery, iconography of God as a stern grandfather and at the same time as a mother who thinks I am innocent, who is ready to forgive me. God is just and forgiving at same time. This is the childish layer of my prayers.

“On top of this layer there is another layer: my culture, a very critical, experience of religion, referencing the philosophers and scholars I have studied… In this layer of sophistication, I ask who is praying and who is receiving the prayer.

Thinking about the unnameable, etc.: it is a very skeptical prayer. Skepticism is part of the prayer. The suspension of certainty is part of the prayer.”

My assumption is I must give up any expectations regarding The One or the more than One to whom I address this prayer if this is still a prayer.”

There is at the same time some suspension of any calculation. I’m not hoping. It’s a ‘hopeless’ prayer. Hopelessness is part of what a prayer should be.There’s hope, calculation, economy.

Caputo on theism/atheism

Derrida has continually drawn attention to the “porous boundaries” between atheism and theism. He speaks of a certain type of “theism” that “at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it,” as well as a certain form of “atheism” that has “always testified to the most intense desire for God.”

Derrida is drawing attention to the “structure of belief/unbelief” itself, as that which always underlies any particular claim, including atheistic and theistic claims. In this way, Derrida was avoiding and critiquing the “dogmatism” that applies equally to any “strong atheistic” or “strong theistic” claim that fails to honor the fact that whatever one believes, belief and unbelief are always inextricably linked.

Prayer and faith are based on  “trust,” in God and trust always demands a certain level of “risk.” In this sense that a confessing believer can admit that at times she “quite rightly pass[es] for an atheist.” (For more on this topic, see this NYT interview

Praying without Hoping 

Translation by Levi Morrow & Alan Brill  Here is a downloadable version of Praying Without Hoping in Word to create handouts for synagogue and classroom. At 1500 words it can be covered entirely in a single class. The original Hebrew is here The Redemption of the Postmodern- On the Messiah of the Matrix. This essay on prayer is an appendix at the end of a longer essay on the movie The Matrix. If you have suggested improvements to the translation, then please let me know

Both Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav and Jacques Derrida taught that prayer, as well as faith, are only possible through absolute renunciation, praying without hope or future.

Rebbe Nachman wrote: “This is when you pray without any intent for personal benefit, without thinking about yourself at all, as if you did not exist. Following the verse, ‘It is for your sake that we are slain all day long’ (Psalms 44:23).”^[1]  Derrida’s version: “Prayer does not hope for anything, not even from the future.”^[2]

Prayer without hope does not demand the typical religious self-sacrifice (mesirut nefesh), in which a person nullifies (mevatel) his self and his needs in favor of God. Rather it embodies self-sacrifice, in that the purest prayer is located in its impossibility, as total self-sacrifice, purposeless suicide.

[According to Derrida,] Prayer turns “to the other without future hope, only towards the past. It returns, without a future. However, despite this, you pray. Is this possible?” If this is so, we might ask: why, indeed, should you pray?

[Derrida answers:] Is it possible to pray without hope, not just without any request, but while renouncing all hope? If we agree that this prayer, pure prayer, cleansed of all hope, is possible, would that not mean that the prayer’s essence is connected to this despair, to this lack of hope? […] I can imagine a response to this terrifying doubt: even then, at the moment when I pray without hope, there is hope within the prayer. I hope, minimally, that someone takes part in my prayer, or that someone hears my prayer, or someone understands my hopelessness and despair. Thus, despite everything, there is still hope and future. But perhaps not. Perhaps not. At least perhaps. This too, in regards to the terrifying nature of prayer.^[3]

Prayer is empty mechanical speech, but in some form or another, it cuts through what Rebbe Naḥman called the void [lit. empty space] (haḥalal hapanui) thereby overcomes the gap, even though it remains in the negative space of complete silence:

It requires you to affirm two opposites, Aught (yesh) and Naught (ayin). The empty space comes from the contraction (tsimtsum), as if God had removed himself from that space, as if there was no divinity there, otherwise it would not be empty […]. But in the absolute truth, there must be divinity there despite this […] and therefore it is impossible to understand the idea of the void until the future yet to come.^[4]

Even though both of them recognize the impossibility of prayer, Rebbe Naḥman and Derrida do the opposite – they pray. Paraphrasing Maimonides’ statement that God “exists, but is not in existence,”^[5] Derrida and Rebbe Naḥman ask if the Naught cannot also be Aught? Is it possible to pray without hoping? Is it possible to despair of hope and thereby to receive it, as a despairing hope? Then there is a hope and a future, and someone hears my voice. The connection to Maimonides is not incidental. Derrida saw the idea of negative attributes, Maimonides’ negative theology, as the basis for deconstruction, and thus also for prayer. ^[6] Similarly for Rebbe Naḥman: “this is prayer, for when we call to God with the attributes of flesh and blood, and it is improper to describe and call to God with attributes and praises and words and letters.”^[7]

Some found Derrida’s statements about prayer incredibly shocking for “the philosopher who for years was considered the standard-bearer of anti-metaphysical radicalism, the guru of believers in materialism lacking any ‘beyond.’”^[8] Indeed, Derrida was forced to defend himself from criticism by thinkers including Jurgen Habermas, according to whom he was nothing less than a Jewish mystic.^[9]

Is this claim not correct? Derrida’s worldview is far from rationalist or anchored in philology. His deconstructive games sometimes seem, not coincidentally, like Kabbalistic-Hasidic homilies. He defended himself, claiming that his project was “a deconstruction of the values underlying mysticism,”^[10] and in this, he was correct. However, Habermas’ accusations are not wiped away or confronted by Derrida’s claim since the passage from deconstruction to mysticism is not just possible, but is, perhaps, obvious. Derrida’s project denied all positivity, but this goal clears the way for the mystical leap, for the hope “that someone takes part in my prayer […] At least perhaps.”

The difference between Derrida and the mystic is a matter of pathos. Someone once said that the mystic and atheist say the same thing, “nothing.” The difference is that the mystic says it with a capital “N,” with a feeling of tremendous freedom that breaks him loose from the constraints of reality. Meanwhile the atheist says it as a depressed and “terrifying possibility.”

Rebbe Naḥman and Derrida perhaps expressed better than others did the gap, the différance between the word and what we expect to accomplish.^[11]  The void is the source of the structural contradictions of reality itself, what Rebbe Naḥman called “the questions without answers.”  ^[12]

And yet they prayed?! This miracle happens in present tense. This moment has no external justification nor is it a result, rather an event. This is grace that is a possibility; a possibility for prayer without promise. “Prayer is when we call to God using flesh and blood qualities. He is then present for us in our calling to him. This is the grace of God. Without the grace of God, it would be improper to describe and call to God with attributes and praises and words and letters.”^[13]

The question becomes one of grace, and paradoxically this grace is dependent on the human renunciation of the will to transcend. Self-acceptance, giving up on transcendence, “is not true or false. It is, word for word, prayer.”^[14]

Self-sacrifice, suicide, is a condition for prayer because it liberates a person not just from the language, but from its logic as well. Prayer is therefore divine grace because it is impossible and yet occurs, or at least, perhaps occurs. This “perhaps” is important, because the “perhaps” elevates it to the realm of worldly possibilities; it therefore exists, if only as a possibility.

Perhaps someone hears and takes part with me in the prayer? Is this enough to create hope? I pray, but am I certain that I will be answered? No, I am not certain. I am also not certain that I will not, but the prayer does something. Someone hears. Who is this someone? We say “God,” but this word lacks any independent meaning. It is enough for me that “I” hear, but who is the “I” that hears? I believe in the deep “I”, an “I” with a transcendental horizon. This is what the Hasidim called the root of the soul. Where there is an “I” like this, there is God.

The problem of attributes that Rebbe Naḥman pointed to is the impossibility of language actually doing what it claims to do, actually making contact with the real/Real. If I understand God as something that exists outside of me, I have strayed from the Real. Yet, in truth, [Lacanian] psychological reduction of faith is possible when raised to the Lacanian Real.

Reaching the Real requires the human renunciation of the will to transcend itself, and only after this, it is correct to say that this “someone” is the “I”.

^[1] Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav, Lekutei Moharan, I 15:5.

^[2] Jacques Derrida, Guf Tefillah  tr. Michal Govrin (Tel Aviv: Mekhon Mofet Vekav Adom Keheh/Hakibuts Hame’uḥad, 2013), 87.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Naḥman of Breslov, Lekutei Moharan, I 64:1.

^[5] Rabbi Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, I:57, Unlike Maimonides, Derrida rejects the second part of Maimonides’ teachings, which believes in the knowledge of God, in the unity of the knower, the knowing, and the known, in the possibility of “if I knew him, I would be him,” which according to Derrida is simply death.

^[6] Derrida was not familiar with the theory of attribution from Maimonides himself. See Gidon Efrat, Derrida Hayehudi: Al Yahadut Kepetsa Ve’al Haguto Shel Jacque Derrida (Jerusalem: Ha’akademiah, 1998), 68.

^[7] Naḥman of Breslov, Lekutei Moharan, I 15:5.

^[8] Michal Govrin, “Setirah Petuḥah. Lelo Siyum, O Segirah,” Ha’aretz – Musaf Tarbut Vesifrut, October 22, 2004. The article was written following Derrida’s death.

^[9] Efrat, Derrida Hayehudai, 112.

^[10] Cited in Efrat, Derrida Hayehudi, 111.

^[11] In the language of Rebbe Naḥman: “There needs to be a separation, so to speak, between the filling and the surrounding. If not, then all would be one. However, through the empty space, from where God contracted his divinity, so to speak, and in which God created all of Creation, the void has come to encompass the world, and God surrounds all worlds, surrounding even the void […] and in the middle appears the void from where God withdrew his divinity, so to speak” (Rebbe Naḥman, Lekutei Moharan, I 64:2).

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Rebbe Naḥman, Lekutei Moharan, I 15:5. Based on this paradox of impossible prayer as the only possibility of prayer, the possibility of a miracle, Rebbe Naḥman and Derrida claim that they are the only people who really pray.

^[14] Jacques Derrida, cited in Govrin, Setirah Petuḥah.

Here is the fifth response to my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. The first response was  by Dr. Malka Simkovich, the second response was by Yoav Sorek, the third response was by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, and the fourth response was by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper. Finally, we have a response by Rabbi Professor Yehudah Mirsky.

Yehudah Mirsky is Associate Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, and is on the faculty of the university’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He is the author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2014) and tweets @YehudahMirsky. He appeared on this blog in fruitful interview on his Rav Kook biography.

Mirsky reminds us that halakhah is law, with its implicit sense of obligation, power structures, and connection to justice. He cites Robert Cover’s indelible point that as law, the law is violent. “Legal interpretation takes place on a field of pain and death.”  And those interpretations have consequences. As Cover notes: “When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence.”

For Mirsky, the issues of synagogue inclusion are connected to the injustices of a system that is not responsive to agunot, tolerates get refusal, and is many times unjust to women appearing before the rabbinical court.  Our directive should be to avoid cruelty.

In addition,  Mirsky declares: Jewish marriage and divorce on the one hand, and Jewish prayer on the other, are intimately connected.” In Israel, the private and legal realms have become muddled so that there is coercion even in the voluntary private realms. While in the diaspora,  “policing the boundaries of marriage and divorce is for traditional rabbis, as it is for traditionalists in other religious traditions, almost the only power they have left.”  Mirsky lays down a gauntlet for the opponents of egalitarian prayer to explain “why non-egalitarian prayer does not contribute – wittingly or not- to the terrible cruelties that the institution of Jewish marriage has tragically come to inflict in our time. ” In short, choose kindness over cruelty.

Communal Prayer and the Meaning of Law and Dignity, or, Counting the Agunah who is Always in the Room

Yehudah Mirsky

As I once told Ethan Tucker, I regularly have a running conversation with him in my head – as he challenges us to think harder and more clearly about halakha with rare creativity and sensitivity. I haven’t yet had the chance to read the new book he’s written with Micha’el Rosenberg (indeed, Amazon has already run out of copies!), though I’m confident it is  an important intervention in contemporary discussions. My comments, then, are limited to his post at this blog,

Rabbi Tucker is admirably open about his position and presuppositions, and I will try to be here. My own practice, since the early ‘90s and the founding of the (sadly now late) Kehillat Orach Eliezer, is to belong to and participate in partnership and traditional egalitarian services as often as possible (and when those are unavailable I generally go to Orthodox services).  I am in very deep sympathy with his arguments and conclusions, but wish to suggest that the meaning of legal obligation and claims of human dignity he puts forward run even deeper than he suggests. There is, in other words, an elephant in the room, as I hope to make clear below.

His argument that “(w)e are not coming with an outside critique of halakhah.  Instead, we are trying to apply halakhah’s internal logic to a changing reality” is bracingly refreshing,. It offers a way out of regularly unsatisfying arguments over ‘meta-halakha’ and the like, which effectively lock participants into rigid positions of Legal Realism and Legal Formalism, neither of which do justice to the history and reality of halakha, or for that matter of most any legal culture.

In looking at the internal logic of the halakhah, he argues that gender was for Hazal, not about sheer biology, at least not when it came to communal prayer, but rather a proxy for other categories: honor and dignity, and maximal obligation in mitzvot. One of the many virtues of this approach is that it can make sense of why excluding women from communal prayer made sense for a long time, even if we conclude that it no longer does, as modernity has shifted the ground under so many things, to the point of creating Orthodoxy as a self-conscious ideology of resistance to change. (I’ve written at greater length about the socio-historical dimensions of Orthodoxy’s emergence and my understanding of the theological reach and limits of that emergence.)

In truth, gender does seem more essentialized than that in Rabbinic literature, certainly when it comes to theology and utterly when it comes to Kabbalah. Indeed, one way of framing the deepest divides between the Jewish philosophic and kabbalistic traditions is whether God can in any ways be discussed in terms of gender at all. 

Rabbi Tucker’s starting point of gender being, when it comes to prayer, not an immanent category but a proxy or signifier for issues of obligation and dignity is prima facie reasonable, and squarely within a formal-rational understanding of the halakhic process.

I will first say a brief word about the legal freight of the very term “obligation,” and then move to my core points, about the legal meaning of human dignity.

I suspect I am not alone in sensing that to many non-orthodox critics of Orthodox prayer (and of Orthodoxy in general) fail to understand that Orthodoxy, takes religion as law. Halakhah is for Orthodoxy as it was for pre-modern Judaism, as Prof. Gerald Blidstein so well put it, “the normative structure undergirding Jewish life in both its private and public dimensions.”  Because halakha is law, it has, or at least works towards, the internal morality and coherence of law. (Gerald J. Blidstein, “Halakhah – The Governing Norm,” Jewish Political Studies Review 8:2 (1996), 37).

In other words. someone who is not obligated in a mitzvah cannot help another person fulfill that obligation, the same way that under the laws of the United States the Postman can’t write you a parking ticket and you can’t be arrested by a diplomat from the State Department.  In this light, reckoning with degrees of male and female obligation, makes eminent legal sense.

For non-Orthodox Jews (and for many Orthodox laypeople too, one suspects), Judaism is not about law, but about “religion,” that distinctively modern Western notion that our relationship to transcendence is something that exists outside or alongside law, and takes shape under the rubrics of “community,” “ritual,” and “ethics” – all terms which, whatever their premodern antecedents, mean very different things now than they did in the many centuries when people’s primordial, civic and transcendent identities were knotted more tightly together. (I go into this a bit more here and with specific reference to Israel and Zionism here).

One of the myriad changes wrought by modernity and its disestablishment of organized Jewish community, is its changing the very existential stance and meaning of communal prayer, from something utterly continuous with the socio-political and legal life-world to a privatized space, standing as an alternative to the life-world shaped by law. Indeed, for those to whom Judaism means ethics and ritual, the exclusion of women, not to mention the fine distinctions of devarim she-bi-qedushah and eyno metzuveh ve-‘oseh, make little sense. But if halakha is law, then those distinctions make all the sense in the world.

Thus, a key claim of Orthodoxy, and indeed of the word halakha, whoever employs it, is that whatever else Torah is, it’s law. Indeed, in some ways Orthodoxy’s problem is that it sees halakha as law, but not all the way down. I say that because to take halakha seriously as law, means, at the very end of the day to see it as being about the legitimate use of force, or at the very least, of other means of coercion and social control. As my late teacher, Robert Cover put it in his less-well-known but important essay, “Violence and the Word”: “Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another.”

The idea that a quorum of adult males constitutes the public and coercive face of community seems to me implicit in the very proof texts used to establish it, at BT Megillah 23b. The word edah is the very word used in Mishnah Sanhedrin 1:6 to establish the quorum necessary to inflict capital punishment. This linkage seems not merely semantic but essential.  Minyan is the public face of the community at prayer. Minyan is the public face of the community enforcing its boundaries.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room when it comes to the role of women and communal prayer and that is the structure of Jewish marriage.  If communal prayer is indeed communal, it is all about the community and its boundaries, and not only in public, in synagogue and on Shabbat mornings. Communal prayer is inextricably connected to Jewish marriage.

To disallow egalitarianism in the synagogue is to disallow it under the chuppah and ultimately in the beit din.  The most potent female figure in the moral universe of communal prayer is, to my mind, not the ba’alat tefillah or kriyah, but the agunah,  potential or actual. The way we structure our community in prayer will further chain her or help set her free.

In other words, the moral claims of egalitarian prayer arise not only from women’s legitimate concerns for spiritual self-expression, but from what is in many ways the only thing that matters, and that is the avoidance of man-made cruelty.

Now, part of being human means that we cannot ever fully be rid of our abilities to inflict cruelty on one another.  I regularly tell my students that I often hope that future generations will find it as hard to understand how we lived with our moral failings today as we find it hard to understand how people lived for so long with slavery.  Nevertheless, the humbling knowledge of our own inevitable moral inadequacy is no reason to give up trying to minimize as best we can the cruelties we can avoid. The attempt to avoid man-made cruelty in our processes of governance and law is itself the deepest meaning of human dignity, and whatever kavod ha-tzibur may be, the avoidance of organized cruelty is surely a part of it.

I freely declare that much of what has driven me to egalitarian services over the years is the recognition that at the very end of the day the system that excludes women from the public space and public speech-acts of communal prayer is the system that runs roughshod over them in court. And in matters of domestic relations regularly treats them with great cruelty.

Jewish marriage and divorce on the one hand, and Jewish prayer on the other, are intimately connected. The cord connecting the two is that both take the form of law. This relationship is regularly muddied in both Israel and the Diaspora, each for its own reasons.

A key feature of the State of Israel, and the source of many of its dilemmas, is its being a nation-state created to answer the problems of both sovereignty as well as the crisis of modern Jewish community. As a result, the lines between the state, as the monopolist of legitimate coercion, and community, as an essentially voluntary association, are regularly, and hopelessly, blurred. Rabbinic authorities regularly wield a coercive power to which much of the citizenry has hardly given informed consent.

(See on this Rivka Lubitch’s extraordinary new book recounting her nightmarish experiences as a to’enet rabbanit working with agunot, converts and others in Israel’s regularly Kafkaesque rabbinic courts. But is also certainly true in Diaspora communities, as many of us who have been involved in one agunah situation or other can attest. I do think pre-modern halakhists, for whom evidentiary issues predominated, were regularly more morally responsive to the dilemmas of igun, than their modern successors, but that is for another time.)

In the contemporary diaspora halakha is the circumscribed dance of a community nestled in the larger framework of the liberal state – indeed what makes today’s diaspora communities distinctly modern is precisely their lack of the corporate identity, and regularly coercive frame, of the pre-modern kehilla.

Diaspora communities are voluntary and their power of suasion is a mix of the social and the spiritual, therefore we can lose sight of the arenas in which coercion is still central to the enterprise. Indeed policing the boundaries of marriage and divorce is for traditional rabbis, as it is for traditionalists in other religious traditions, almost the only power they have left.  (I am indebted for this observation to Prof. Frank Vogel, formerly of Harvard Law School.)

Which is another way of saying that I understand why egalitarian prayer is genuinely and understandably threatening to many observant Jews. Especially when pursued – in partnership minyanim – by people who know what tradition is, who are committed to it, and who cannot simply be waved away as lukewarm Jews.  Because, indeed, once women are treated as equals in the form of communal structure of prayer they can only with much greater difficulty be unequal in the communal structure of law.

We are by now deeply inured to the privatized nature of prayer in the modern world, including its being encapsulated in this category called “ritual.” Prayer is of course ritual, as we understand it, and is deeply expressive, indeed the claims of self-expression regularly twist and press against the necessary conformities of public prayer. As Rav Soloveitchik so powerfully wrote so often, we regularly turn to prayer, and prayerful community, precisely as a haven from the relentless and regularly terrifying daily pursuit of getting and spending and accumulating power. (See, for instance, his essay, “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah.” )

But in as much as prayer is about halakhic community it is also about power, much as we might wish it were not so.

I certainly don’t mean to argue that gender’s place in Judaism starts and ends with the problem of igun or that legal equality and its corollary of egalitarian prayer do or should exhaust the range of religious experience.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Maimonides call to imitatio dei itself implies a spectrum of religious life embracing both sides of the gender divide and going beyond them as well, though what I’ve called “a shtiebel of one’s own.”  But once the shtiebel is no longer just one’s own, but of the community, we must be aware of the ways we are talking about boundaries and power.

I see power at work in many places, but not anywhere and everywhere, nor do I think the power entirely defines and circumscribes the range of human action, choice and freedom. I am not a disciple of Michel Foucault, for whom power is so all-encompassing that escape is impossible. I do not believe escape is impossible and we can choose our lives. But in order to do so we need to understand the ways in which power shapes and determines our lives and especially our religious lives.

While I am very much in agreement with Rabbi Tucker, and see his overall project as a vital contribution to the renewal of Torah in our time, I urge on him, to be frank, a more suspicious hermeneutic of halakha, and not only because the texts we are studying have all been written by men.  I say this because Torah is too precious to be deformed and be made an instrument of cruelty as it has so often been, and is today, precisely through the renewal of Jewish sovereignty.

Rabbi Tucker’s powerfully attractive stance as a student and practitioner of halakha assumes someone who not only stands before law but also is analytically prior to the law, with their own moral and religious judgments.

I envision someone with commitments, including moral commitments, some of which are shaped by tradition, and some of which we come to by ourselves, given this historical moment in which we find ourselves caught up. Now one could assume human being are constructed entirely by the tradition.

Indeed, some forms of Orthodoxy have been very busy trying to construct that very kind of person, or at least the idea of that kind of person. But it is unclear if such a person actually exists. And even if such a person does exist, he or she must, when faced with the suffering of other human beings, make a decision.

Invariably a person must choose to be cruel or choose to be kind. The law we hope will guide us to choose kindness. At least not affirmatively to choose cruelty. Those are the stakes of egalitarian prayer – and the challenge for its opponents is to answer how and why non-egalitarian prayer does not contribute – wittingly or not- to the terrible cruelties that the institution of Jewish marriage has tragically come to inflict in our time.

Here is a fourth response to my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. The first response was  by Dr. Malka Simkovich. The second response was by Yoav Sorek and the third response was by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz. The fourth response is by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper. I would have liked also responses from the left/progressive side or a non-polemical one from the Haredi right, but as of now it has not appeared.

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper is Dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership which organizes many programs including his long running Summer Beit Midrash Program. More of his articles and approaches to topics can be found at his website by topic from a pull down menu including the topics of : gender, halacha, and halakhah and public policy. Klapper’s approach is that of  treating the halakhah as a system of law and authority to which he applies his own talents of what the Talmud calls “up-rooter of mountains” (oker harim), the ability to interpret the text as clay in the hands of a potter.

Rabbi Klapper was part of the panel discussion and public conversation for the release of R. Ethan Tucker and R. Micha’el Rosenberg’s Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law along with R. Judith Hauptman and R. Joanna Samuels. (June 13, 2017)- Full recording here.  Rabbi Klapper’s talk on that panel will be published in a forthcoming issue of the JOFA Journal.

Klapper’s reservations about Tucker’s approach revolve around his rejection of legal originalism or the quest for a stable original intention or the original reason for the command.  Klapper avoids originalism in the context of halakhah because he thinks that it weakens commitment to observance, as well as the fact that mitzvot are multivalent over times and places and that  mitzvot may have many reasons, or embody a balance of values.

Klapper’s own approach is to treat a particular law as a chok, a law without a reason, when it seems to present an irreconcilable conflict with our values, thereby creating space for practical solutions in the application of the law. He is worried  about disparaging those who have lived honestly without achieving such resolution of values and halakhah. Based on prior practice of the halakhah, he refers to the new approaches as “identitarian” rather than egalitarian.

Even though, he opened by stating that he was going to work within Rabbi Tucker’s need to reduce submission and tension, by the end of the response Klapper advocates living with tension and a less than ideal relationship, the same way we tolerate faults in spouses and friends.

At the end of the aforementioned panel at Hadar, Klapper mentioned that a legal authority has great power of interpretation but needs authority going so far as to say that a rabbi could permit swine flesh by interpretation. When asked: how could it be permitted? He answered: pigs were genetically very different than the chazirim mentioned by the Torah.  One could find distinctions in  morphology, behavior, social significance, etc.  In context, Klapper’s point was that without authority, anything is possible. For him, this was parallel to Rabbi Tucker’s move regarding women. It is all in the hands of the authority of those who accept the law as it is practiced. His answer was seemingly tongue in cheek or for the rhetorical effect, yet it shows how he approaches the issue differently than Rabbi Tucker’s earnest application of rabbinic values.

Are Rabbis Klapper and Tucker speaking to two different communities, two ends of the same community, or one single community? Does it even matter?

As a side point, Rabbi Klapper asked rhetorically in this response as an obvious incorrect approach “about limiting minyanim perhaps only to the wealthy, or the graduates of exclusive colleges.” However, in this entire thread of discussion from all the respondents there does seem to be unacknowledged issues of class and education that are worthy of exploring.

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper- Response to Rabbi Tucker

Rabbi Tucker’s humility is evident in his recommending me as a respondent despite, or because of, the “sharp critiques and criticisms” he thanks me for in the book’s Introduction.  I fear that I will not disappoint; but I want to preface my comments with as clear a statement as I can of personal appreciation.  No matter how strongly or deeply we disagree, it is a great pleasure and privilege to know him.

My focus here is not on the book, rather it will be on Rabbi Tucker’s treatment in his interview of the interrelationship among halakhah, autonomously derived values, and rationales for mitzvot.

I argue in response that the costs of his method should outweigh its gains even for those who fully agree with his values and fervently welcome his halakhic outcomes. Those costs are shown in least two areas.  First, in order to salvage contemporary halakhah for his values, he binds halakhah throughout history to an ethic of social exclusion.  Second, he radically devalues the lived experience of past and present observant Jewish women and men.

I will try to conduct the discussion on Rabbi Tucker’s terms, that is to say without any of what he describes as “bludgeoning our values with the formal discipline of submission”, or “hiding behind the Torah’s authority in order to dodge the conflict”, or “overruling a position with the force of more precedents on my side or with my presumed ethical superiority”, or even “valorizing the conflict between morality and Halakhah”.

This does not mean that I agree with these harsh characterizations.  Indeed, it seems to me that Rabbi Tucker’s concept of “making our ears into hoppers” should encourage a fuller and fairer hearing for the undeniable thick strands of our tradition that he portrays so unsympathetically.

Halakhah and Legitimization 

Please note that each of the core terms above in my preface- autonomously derived values, rationales for mitzvot, and halakhah –  should be more tightly defined.  We should really provide separate treatments of

1. values derived via practical reason, values derived by pure reason, and values derived by intuition;
2. rationales for specific Torah commandments (=taamei hamitzvot), rationales for halakhic principles, and rationales for halakhic details;
3. halakhah as a practical legitimization or delegitimator of human actions, and halakhah as a source of philosophic truth or inspiration etc.

However, for the purposes of this discussion, I insist only the distinction between halakhah in its role as the practical legitimator or delegitimator of human actions, and its other roles and purposes.  In this essay, the unqualified term “halakhah” will refer only to that first role of legitimation.  For example, it will not include the formal legal outcomes of discussions about the Laws of Meal Offerings, so long as those rulings have no practical contemporary legal effects.

Halakhah is a legal system that simultaneously claims Divine authority and at the same time recognizes its own fallibility. In other words, it acknowledges that the law is not always what it should be.  However, as within any legal system, an action’s legitimacy is determined by reference to the law as-it-is, not the law as-it-should-be.  This is so even if one agrees that the law should be changed by contemporary authorities.

Let us begin from halakhah’s explicit internal validation of autonomously derived values.

The Talmud derives that there are three sins that one must die rather than commit: avodah zarah, giluy arayot, and shefichat damim (Sanhedrin 74a). How does the Talmud derive these points?

Avodah zarah is derived from Deuteronomy 6:5: “You must love G-d with all your heart and nefesh” – even if He takes your nefesh/life.

Giluy arayot is derived from the explicit analogy between adulterous rape and blood shedding in Deut. 22:26.

What is the source for shefikhut damim/bloodshedding, so that it can become the basis for gilui arayot?  There is no Biblical source. There is only the argument, in Rava’s formulation: “What have you seen that makes your blood redder than his?!”.

Since the Torah’s analogy between gilui arayot and bloodshedding can be properly interpreted only on the basis of Rava’s reasoning, this passage not only validates autonomously derived values, it declares that Torah cannot be understood properly except in the context of such values.

Rava’s principle also appears to contradict Rabbi Akiva’s authoritative interpretation (Bava Metzia 62a) of Leviticus 25:36: “And your brother shall live with you” – your life precedes your brother’s.  The Talmud does not raise this issue, but all later halakhah is compelled to distinguish the cases.  But this distinction is beside the point; the fact that Rabbi Akiva is not used to delegitimate Rava demonstrates that autonomously derived values can even overcome a strong textual challenge, and compel a reconciliation between text and values.

Values

At the same time, how can we develop our values properly other than by studying Torah?  Do we not have the obligation to put Torah at the core in developing, refining, and sometimes reconstructing our moral intuition and reasoning?

Let us assume that we should resist the temptation to idealize this sometimes tempestuous dialectic between the study of Torah and values. Rather, we should instead try to harmonize halakhah and values.

The question is what we do in the interim, when we individually or collectively experience unresolved conflict between halakhah and our autonomously derived values.

The fully integrated religious life may be a noble aspiration, but there are many ways to go astray in the attempt. We should be very wary of personal claims to have achieved it (and also of daas Torah claims that others have achieved it).

We must be clear that genuine integration does not involve reducing halakhah to ethics.  There are legitimate grounds of autonomous value other than ethics, such as morality and holiness.  These can conflict with each other as well as with halakhah, therefore any halakhah may reflect a balance among those separate grounds of value.

Conflict between halakhah and values can happen either on the level of practical outcomes, or on the level of fundamental values.  In the former case, my values lead me to think that the halakhah as-it-is is wrong, even though it was instituted for proper purposes. The disparity is either because of a mistaken policy decision in the past or because circumstances have changed.  In the latter case, my values lead me to think that the values embodied by the halakhah were wrong from the start.

Rabbi Tucker argues that with regard to gender, he has no remaining conflicts on the second level – his values and those of the halakhah are in perfect accord.  Nor does he express interest in challenging the policy judgments of the past halakhic tradition.  He contends, however, that because of changed circumstances, the halakhah no longer properly expresses its own values, and therefore it must be adjusted.

But how can one reliably know what the halakhah’s values are, if its mandates no longer express them accurately?  Won’t you end up changing halakhah to match your preconceived notion of what its values should be?

Rabbi Tucker responds to this question by adopting an originalist approach to explaining mitzvot and halakhah.   He provides rationales that make sense in a speculative reconstruction of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual universe in which a specific obligation arose.

(He does not raise the thorny question of when a mitzvah is supposed to have arisen.  But it seems to me that an originalist approach must be very subject to the position one takes about the dating and composition of the Torah, and of the provenance of other elements of halakhah.)

Originalism 

I am not a fan of originalism in the context of halakhah, for four reasons.

My first ground is pragmatic.  In my experience, originalism tends to weaken rather than strengthen contemporary commitment to observance.

One lesson I learn from Maimonides’ efforts in the Guide of the Perplexed at providing originalist rationales is that they tend to make mitzvot feel obsolete.  Maimonides himself generally avoids using those rationales to frame specific halakhic rulings.  We should not model our tzitzit on the specific forms used by ancient idolatrous priests, even if we are convinced that tzitzit were initially intended by the Torah to visually mark us as “a kingdom of priests”.  Similarly, very few Jews feel religiously bound to eschew pork because pigs once carried trichinosis.

I have three other grounds for rejecting originalism in principle.

1) mitzvot may have different purposes in different times and places.

2) mitzvot may have many reasons, or embody a balance of values.  (For example: We wear tzitzit as did idolatrous priests, because we are a kingdom of priests, but we don’t wear shatnez, because – wait for it . . . that’s what idolatrous priests wore.)

3) mitzvot may accumulate meanings as a result of their practice over time.

I prefer to conceive of taamei hamitzvot in the following terms:

(1)   Each mitzvah or practice has a complex set of purposes

(2)   The specific forms of mitzvot often reflect a delicate balance among competing values (3)   Some purposes for some mitzvot will be relevant or intelligible only to some communities at certain points in history

Furthermore, when social change makes the generally accepted import of a mitzvah less intelligible, Halakhah and halakhic societies rarely react by changing the law.  Instead, our job is to infuse the sociologically antique meaning into the mitzvah.

Take shofar as an example. Many rationales have been offered over time for the mitzvah of shofar.  The two for which we have the best originalist evidence (i.e., clear parallels in Tanakh) are: (1)  To announce the coronation or at least arrival of a king  (2)  To raise an alarm.

I think it is clear that if the mitzvah were given today, with the same intent, we would use either a brass band or artillery to fulfill the former reason, as we do at the arrival of a president, and an air raid siren to fulfill the second reason.

Yet I presume that Rabbi Tucker agrees that one cannot fulfill the mitzvah today without an animal’s horn.  Why not?  The Torah says only “teruah”, and gives no explicit instructions about a specific instrument.  If one is not to resort to formalism, one must say that the ram’s horn has acquired a significance over time that is distinct from the originalist meaning.

Note also that if the mitzvah is intended to fulfill both originalist purposes, no contemporary practice could likely fulfill the obligation.  On a superficial level, this is because we do not use marching bands to raise alarms, or sirens to inaugurate presidents.  On a deeper level, this is because the president’s arrival does not arouse fear that we will soon be on trial for our lives.  Therefore, the two purposes are not compatible in contemporary semiotics, whereas they were once identical.

With this introduction, we can turn to the question of whether it remains true that only males can blow the ram’s horn in order for their fellows to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing it.  I think it is clear that the mode of analysis above creates a very strong predisposition against changing the law in this regard, even if the meaning of gender-distinction has changed in exactly the way that Rabbi Tucker postulates.  We would instead seek to carry out the mitzvah as before while preserving the historical significance of gender in our minds and souls, as we preserve the significance of animal horns.

This approach has the advantage of humility.  If we are wrong about the reason, we still preserve the formal practice, and sometimes our hearts are drawn after our actions.

Rabbi Tucker’s response must be that the cost is too great, because continuing the gender requirement for the shofar-blower offends his autonomously derived values in a way that using the horn of an animal does not.  So here, it is necessary to make our aspiration a reality, and move the halakhah to match our values.

I think we should be very conscious of three dangers in such efforts at integration of our values and the halakhah. Two of these are apparent and mirror images of each other.

(1) We might fall into self-fufillment and constantly see in Torah only a reflection of our own image.

(2) We might develop an akeidah complex, in which we think that the goals of serving G-d with all our heart and soul can be achieved only through submission to religious mandates that violate our moral reason and intuition.

Rabbi Tucker is aware of, but not cowed, by the first danger, and hyper-alert to the second. I think that Rabbi Tucker overreacts to the second risk.

My Opinion: chokifying and  respect for the past

I prefer two alternative approaches to his concern lest we overvalue submission.

First: one can preserve the conflict by assigning mitzvot to a category of laws with no humanly intelligible purpose (hukim), a “chokifying” of the mitzvah.  There is no reason to suspect that this will result in our preferring unintelligible mitzvot over the intelligible. This approach creates space for many less radical approaches to reconciling the halakhah that one practices with one’s values. (For more on his idea of chokifying, see here, here, and here).

Second: even if one holds that reconciliation is the ideal, that does not justify disparaging the profound religious experiences of those who live and have lived honestly without achieving such resolution.

Sacrifice and Conflict 

We should not go through life looking for ever-greater opportunities to offer our values up as a sacrifice to G-d, in order to ensure that our motives are purely submission to His service.  Rabbi Yisroel Salanter might have said: Each time we set out to sacrifice our own ruchniyus (spiritual needs or desires), we end up being sacrificing someone else’s gashmiyus (physical needs or desires).

But every serious observant Jew lives with some degree of conflict between their religion and their independent sense of right; we have all eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  G-d’s choice to express His Will in the form of law, and for that law to become a national-collective religious enterprise, means that there must be enormous value in obeying the system’s outputs even when one disagrees with them.

Another way to frame the issue is that the ideal Jew lives in a deep and joyous relationship with G-d and Torah.  Relationships build over a lifetime; joy does not require perfect agreement; and genuine relationships can require you to find meaning in things that fulfill your friend or spouse or parent’s values rather than your own, even when those choices are painful, and even though you surely do not seek them out.

It must be noted that this discourse is once again being conducted largely among men.  For those interested, a model of the discourse I think is needed can be found by reading my article on Tzeniut, found here, and then Miriam Gedwiser’s beautiful, powerful, and challenging response. The dedicated can go on to this longer article by Miriam Gedwiser.

3) A third danger, lying between the extremes of imposing self-values and submission to incorrect values, is that in the attempt to integrate values and halakhah, we may end up reading a hybrid morality into and then out of Torah that conforms neither to the text nor to our souls.  This risk inheres in all efforts at integration, but I think Rabbi Tucker’s method exacerbates it.

Rabbi Tucker’s method requires a contextual morality, and ironically ends up binding prior halakhah to a speculatively reconstructed premodern morality.  His readings of the Rebellious Son and the Akeidah leave room for the halakhic Jew to condone the execution of disobedient children (in cultures where parents are sort of like contemporary police), and perhaps even human sacrifice (in non-Jewish cultures which find human sacrifice meaningful).

More immediately, his halakhah prioritizes the dignity of ritual over the dignity of human beings.  He confirms that social inferiors should not be allowed to play prominent roles in public liturgy etc.; it is just that contemporary Orthodoxy has incorrectly identified women as a socially inferior class.  Perhaps only the wealthy, or the graduates of exclusive colleges, should count to Modern Orthodox minyanim today, albeit regardless of gender, because of kavod tzibbur.  This to me does not seem a moral improvement.

These difficulties seem endemic to the method.

Many of the issues raised here hark back to intense conversations Rabbi Tucker and I had twenty-five years ago at Harvard Hillel; some of them take me back even further, to conversations with my dear friend Rabbi Elisha Anscelovits when we were students at Yeshiva University.  I am glad that some elements of those conversations will now have a broader audience.

Other Gender Discussions with Rabbi Tucker

Readers may be interested in two efforts to share other elements of those conversations with Rabbi Tucker.

1) In a response to Rabbi Tucker’s article on Women and Tefillin several years ago, I took strong issue with his claim that women can be full citizens only in a halakhah that eliminates gender as a relevant category, and that past gender distinctions can only be understood in terms of women’s incomplete citizenship. I highlighted what seemed to me a failure to consider non-sexist rationales for specific halakhot:

“Failure to imagine the hava amina – to treat one’s own position as unproblematically peshitta (so obvious that it goes without saying) –  results in a vicious cycle: texts are read exclusively through the lens of ideology, and then cited as evidence for that same ideology”,

and a failure to respond religiously to the reality of gender differences:

“religion must take into account and ideally channel the differences between male and female experiences, rather than denying them”.

Raphael Magarik, (a student of both Rabbi Anscelovits and Rabbi Tucker at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa & Yeshivat Hadar, now a PhD Candidate in English, University of California, Berkeley)  critiqued my critique here, and I responded here.

2) My forthcoming review of Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law (JOFA Journal) states that

The quality and humility of Rabbi Tucker and Rabbi Rosenberg’s work can serve as a model for private and public halakhic conversations about such issues.  But despite my deep personal appreciation of its authors, this book does not succeed in gaining practical halakhic legitimacy for gender-identical, or “identitarian,” prayer services.  

My central point is that the personal and communal authority to change halakhah to what it should be rests solely with those who accept the authority of halakhah as it is.

Nothing I have written here, or previously, is intended to deny the reality of the challenges Rabbi Tucker raises, or the value of his effort to create a systematic and authentically halakhic response.

We agree that a halakhic system, which speaks to only a minority of Jews, and commands the allegiance of even fewer, has failed, regardless of where one puts the blame.  We agree that the solution is not to abandon halakhah, but rather to seek to expand its constituency.  We agree that this requires thinking systematically about halakhah. These are no small things.

I look forward to his response, and to ongoing conversation, with gratitude and appreciation for the past, and in recognition of the ways in which my own thinking on these issues has been developed and deepened by engagement with Rabbi Tucker.

Here is a third response to my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker.  The first Response was by Dr. Malka Simkovich. The second response was by Yoav Sorek.  The third response is by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, chair of Talmud at YCT and Rabbi/posek of the Prospect Heights Synagogue

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz received ordination from Rabbi Yechezkel Roth, dayan of UTA Satmer. Rabbi Katz studied in Brisk and in Yeshivat Beit Yosef, Navaradok for over ten years. He is head of Talmud study at YCT . For a full presentation of his views, see his statement called “Torat Chaim ve Ahavat Chesed” as well as here and here.

Rabbi Katz, while respecting the great learning and erudition of Rabbi Tucker, finds himself on the other side of a divide from the latter’s position. Katz rejects seeing Biblically mandated laws and concepts as subject to social and historical contextualization. For Katz, gender roles is part of the halakhic understanding of the Bible, In addition, Katz does not think we can ever extract the original value behind Jewish law in an act of retrieval of original values.  We only have the flexibility of the halakhic system with which to work.  Katz finds the concept of intuiting the divine moral direction, using the text as a moral compass, as, at best, conjecture. Finally as a coda, Katz declares that he is worried that changes weaken the integrity of the religious fabric that holds the community together. He is worried about questions of reverence and the community as being able to withstand challenges. Katz sees the embrace of progressive social idea predominately as a way of bring a religious message to a broader array of people.

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz’s Prospect Heights Shul recently hired a woman as “Rosh kehilla” Michal Kohane, a Maharat-in-training.

Demarcating God’s Presence and Interpreting His Words

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz

Rav Ethan is an important contemporary thinker and teacher of Torah. To use a common paraphrase of the gemara in Avodah Zara (5.): הוא הגבר אשר הקים עולה של תורה; Rav Ethan’s unique Torah is responsible for bringing many people closer to Torah and yiddishkeit. It is a real merit to dialogue with him.

Before I start, please allow me to mention two things:

• I do not represent any organization or institution. I speak only for myself.
• The interview provides tremendous insight into Rabbi Tucker’s thinking. I encourage the reader to also read the linked essays on women and tefilin and women as rabbis. They nicely compliment this interview. Combined, they provide a fuller understanding of Rav Ethan’s well thought out and beautifully articulated Halakhic philosophy, along with its theological underpinnings.

With that I will begin.

Even though some people conflate my approach with Rav Ethan’s, they are very different. While there is overlap in our respective philosophies, at a certain point our approaches diverge. My method exists on a continuum of what Modern Orthodox pesika has always done, but I am limited by the parameters of that philosophy. Rav Ethan traverses those parameters, suggesting an approach which is of a whole different magnitude.

Modern Orthodox psak is informed by a belief in a halakhic system that is in dialogue with contemporary norms. While poskim might differ on the specifics of that philosophy or how broadly to apply it, they all endorse the basic ethos of reconciliation, as best as possible, between these two value systems; halakhah and modernity.  Much of what Rav Ethan says in his book Gender Equality And Prayer In Jewish Law operates on that continuum. He too attempts to resolve the conflict between traditional exclusionary attitudes and modern notions of egalitarianism. However, in order for his argument to work perfectly, he ultimately needs to make a Halakhic leap from the outer limits of Modern Orthodox philosophy of psak towards a place where it, in my opinion, cannot go.

Egalitarianism

Rav Ethan needs to embrace a robust egalitarianism which encompasses the entire Halakhic corpus, one that believes that every gender based distinction in Halakhah is sociological, not biological. According to Rav Ethan, whenever we encounter a gender based distinction, in Chazal or the Torah, it is not about women per se, but instead is referring to someone who is part of a trio of individuals “known to be adjunct or second-class citizens in the larger Greco-Roman world in which the Sages lived” (the other two being minors and slaves). It is not gender essentialist and would therefore not apply to the women of our time.

Consequently, when the Mechilta says that women are exempt from wearing tefillin because the word בניכם (Devarim 11:19) means sons, not daughters, or when some poskim say that women do not count in a minyan because the word בני that is used in the context of devarim she’be’kedusha (Va’yikra 22:32), that distinction no longer applies. Similarly, when Chazal infer from the biblical gendered language used in the context of Jewish monarchy, שום תשים עליך מלך (Devarim 17:12), that a woman cannot serve as a queen (“מלך ולא מלכה”), that distinction also no longer applies today. Again, the origins of this gendered distinction was sociological; women at the time were “adjunct and second-class citizens.” Today’s women are culturally equal and accordingly not subject to the biblical exclusion.

While I am in agreement with Rav Ethan’s overall feminist critique of gendered observance, I am unable to accept his all-encompassing dismissal of the category of women in modern times. Instead I believe that we need to apply it in a more limited fashion. An egalitarian critique, in my opinion, is legitimately applied to de’rabanans, but de’oraita based distinctions, which are derived from the Torah’s gendered language (בניכם ולא בנותיכם, אנשים ולא נשים), are immune from such critique. When God makes those distinctions, it is perhaps capricious (descriptively speaking), but is certainly not discriminatory-in a moral sense. God’s words are eternal and transcend cultural influences or human values. To import a cultural based definition of women in the Rabbinic context to its appearance in the Torah is a conjectural leap. The latter’s speech is obviously informed by contemporary norms, the former’s is not, at least not according to conventions of traditional biblical theology.

Rav Ethen goes from women in Chazal, to gendered language in the Torah. While rabbinic women can easily be explained as referring to a sociological construct, it is much harder to make that claim about verses in the Torah where the gender-specific language is solidified in Midrash Halakhah.  These drashot, from a traditional perspective, are merely interpretive, revealing what the text means when God uttered those formulations.

While Rav Ethan indeed provides multiple proofs for the claim that rabbinic categories are culturally subjective, none of them, however, are categories with a specific basis in the Torah. (Rav Ethan, in his various writings, has employed different examples to prove his claim. He either mentions “nochri” “cheresh” (Gender Equality And Prayer In Jewish Law P. 145, n. 80) “the obligation to air out once a month found books,” (in the interview with Dr. Brill) or “the inability of women to offer things for sale at the market” (in the above linked essay on women as rabbis). The common denominator in these examples is that they are all rabbinc concepts or formulations, none of them is predicated on an explicit biblical formulation.  

Practically then, in the context of Jewish monarchy, according to the drash adopted by the Rambam, women are excluded, by divine decree (or perhaps even divine caprice or whim) from any authoritative position. Those terms (מלך ולא מלכה, or the comparable case of tefillin or minyan, where women are excluded because it saysבניכם  or בני respectively), uttered by God, are clearly about essentialist gender and not about a subjective social construct.  The Torah exists outside of a particular social construct. This, essentially is the idea behind concepts like גזירת הכתוב, לא דרשינן טעמא דקרא, or מה אעשה ואבי שבשמים גזר עלי. They imply that God’s commands can be capricious, and that we cannot know definitively the purpose, reason or intent of Biblical commands or their seemingly arbitrarily imposed boundaries, gendered or otherwise.

Can We Know the Divine Will?

Rav Ethan believes that mankind can (and is perhaps even obligated to) discern and fully comprehend the Divine will, to “know what God wants from us.” That ability is partially attainable because of the “kernel of prophecy” embedded in the “Halakhic instincts” of “the Jewish people.”

A corollary of this confidence in humanity’s ability to comprehend God’s inner workings is the assumption (attributed to my dear friend Rav Elisha Anscelovits) that we can definitively “identify what a mitzvah or practice is about, what are the values that are guiding it.” Rav Ethan consequently sees “as problematic an aversion to seeking out reasons for mitzvot.”

Beyond expressing discomfort with those who refuse to say definitively why God wants something, Rabbis Ethan and Elisha also reject the traditional notion that Halakhah is “like an electric fence.” They instead believe that its purpose is to function as a “compass.”

I am uncertain about the theological postulates which provide the framework for Rav Ethan’s Halakhic philosophy. The ability to negate biblical categories which are incompatible with contemporary norms is informed by a belief in our ability to “know what God wants” and that we can “identify what a mitzvah or practice is about, what are the values that are guiding it.” (Rav Ethan and Rav Elisha would argue that He is presumably guided by our value system and therefore “wants” a religious life that is universally egalitarian). I believe that such a level of certainty about the will of the ineffable is impossible.  We can be certain about what He wants us to do, but extrapolating from that what it is that He really wants, is at best conjectural.

The sources that express this unbridgeable gulf between His will and our capacity to decipher it are innumerable.  One, however, is particularly evocative. It expresses the idea with brevity and precision. Chazal tell us in masechet sukkah (5.)  that the Shekhinah perpetually hovers ten cubits above earth, never descending completely. The gap between God and mankind is indeed small and our charge is to continuously shrink it. Yet, despite our best efforts, Chazal tell us, the gap will never be completely closed.

While the statement is primarily mystical, its implication for psak is dipositive. There will always be a categorical difference that separates God from us, our values, and sociological categories. It is noteworthy that they use the Shekhinah aspect of the Divine. Shekhinah in kabbalah represents the immanent aspect of God, the one that interacts with our world. For them, even an immanent God remains somewhat aloof and unattainable. Denying the gap is akin to anthropomorphism. It sees God and mankind functioning on a level playing field. He is lowered to this world, made to conform to our moral and ethical constructs.

Parenthetically it is worth noting an informative similarity. Rav Ethan says that his belief in our ability to discern the divine will is informed by a modicum of contemporary prophecy. He believes that there are traces of “prophecy” in our “Halakhic instincts.” This notion has echoes in 11^th and 12^th century Ashkenazi poskim’s disproportionate reverence for minhag. The Rishonim’s exaggerated awe for their communities’ cotemporary practices, to the point where they have the ability to challenge the authority of codified Halakhah, is understood by many to be informed by a belief in the inherent sanctity of their community. Their martyrdom during the persecution of the Crusades sanctified their practices and intuitive behaviors, infusing them with the power to force the Rishonim to reevaluate assumed norms and established textual interpretations. Ultimately, those Rishonim, like Rav Ethan, attributed transcendental value to the practices and intuitions of the observant community.

The comparison is informative in the breach. While Rav Ethan allows the communal “prophecy” to challenge established norms which have their basis in the biblical texts, the Rishonim limited that power to the Rabbinic realm. Rabbeinu Tam and others in the group of Ashkenazi poskim who gave Halakhic credence to their contemporaries’ behavioral traditions, drew the line at biblical norms. Communal practices indeed have the power to make us reexamine assumed Rabbinic laws and requirements, but never where they allowed to upend established biblical norms.

(Another pillar of Rav Ethan (and Rav Elisha’s) Halakhic philosophy is the claim that the purpose of the Rabbinic project is to serve as a “compass,” not as a “fence.” It is my sense that such claim would be counterintuitive to most traditional learners. The general impression is the exact opposite, that they see their role as gatekeepers, not as guides. To fully explore this additional disagreement is beyond the scope of this essay. I hope to address it more in depth at a future time.)

Conclusion

Rejecting Rav Ethan’s two fundamental postulates makes it impossible for me to embrace his all-encompassing negation of gender differences, regardless if the source is biblical or rabbinic. I believe that certain gender-based Halakhic distinctions, because of their biblical origin, will (unfortunately) continue in perpetuity. It will, of course, always trouble us, but we will never be able to change that. Our religious mandate, instead, is to, subserviently, accept the burden of divine capriciousness. Rav Ethan’s attempt to alleviate that burden, cannot work because we disagree on the fundamentals.

Postscript on Community

Rav Ethan’s sefer highlighted for me an oft-repeated critique of the entire progressive enterprise. After 183 pages on the Halakhic legitimacy of a robust religious egalitarianism, he spends a scant two pages exploring its sociological implications. This discrepancy is not unique to Rav Ethan, it is true for all of us who are involved in this project. We pay insufficient attention to the socio-religious implications of such drastic changes, introduced at such a fast pace.

The modern religious landscape has been radically transformed in a mere fifty to sixty years. Such rapid change will obviously cause major socio-religious convulsions. We, therefore, need to remember that we are not just rabbis, responsible for our communities’ intellectual growth. Rather, we are also pastors who have been entrusted with our congregant’s spiritual wellbeing. We, therefore, cannot afford to merely focus on the intellectual aspects of the feminist critique, we also need to ensure that these changes are implemented with caution and sensitivity. These changes, if done wrongly, could potentially rent the religious fabric that sustains our communities.

Reverence for tradition is what scaffolds our communities’ infrastructure. When that is gone, the communal edifice falls apart, leaving our congregants exposed and religiously vulnerable. That is a price we currently cannot afford. Our immunity to the potent anti-religious elements that envelop us everywhere we turn are weak and depleted. It would be difficult to justify the progressive agenda if the end result of these changes is a depletion in our religious antibodies instead of an increase.

The real goal of this intellectually challenging and emotionally draining project, at least for me, is to provide an all-encompassing religious arena whereby everybody, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, feels that they have optimal access to a robust and comprehensive spiritual life. For me, progressiveness is merely a platform which allows a broader array of people to grow religiously, and spiritually excel.

Last week, I posted a widely read and discussed interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. This week, I will be posting several diverse responses.  The first Response was by Dr. Malka Simkovich. Here is the second response by Yoav Sorek. Rather than just looking at technical details, Sorek thinks such decisions need to be grounded in bigger questions of family and society.

Yoav Sorek is the Editor in Chief of the Shiloach Journal of for Policy and Thought (Tikva Fund). He created the Musaf Shabbat section for the Makor Rishon newspaper and was its editor for seven years. He is the author of The Israeli Covenant (Hebrew) and has published numerous articles on Judaism, Zionism and public policy. He is a graduate of Mercaz yeshivas and holds a BA and MA from the Open University in Jewish History. . Yoav is currently pursuing doctoral studies at Ben Gurion University.

In theory, Sorek agrees with Tucker’s method and his conclusion, however is unsure on issues of whether the laws are based on discrimination and not a Jewish vision of the family. Sorek’s views of halakhah compared to others is shown on this report of a panel at Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak that he was on seven years ago in which he spoke alongside Rav Eliezer Melamed, Rav Baruch Gigi, Rav Shlomo Dichovsky and Rav Yair Dryfus. As reported by Tomer Persico. (article is in Hebrew), Sorek stood out on the panel for advocating changes to the halakhah to respond to the major changes of the last century. Halakhah, for Sorek, should not exclude the majority of the Jewish people. On the other hand, he is an active social conservative editing a Tikva Fund publication.

Beyond Technical Details:What about the Family?
Yoav Sorek

I cannot recall any previous experience in which I read a conversation about Halakha and enjoyed it so much. Reading Rabbi Tucker, on the background of the contemporary discourse of halakha, was extremely refreshing. His attitude is not only brilliantly articulated but first and foremost very precise, and deeply loyal to the essential basics of halakha. This is a manifesto of a real talmid hakham

He is a true Talmid Chachm – like the one he mentioned, Dor Revi’i (Rabbi Moshe Glasner, the great-grandson of the Hatam Sofer), of whom I am writing my PhD dissertation. Glasner is relevant in another aspect also: He was probably the first modern Jewish scholar to promote post-denominationalism. After defending the concept of Orthodox separatism in his middle days, he powerfully went beyond it in his last years – believing that when and where there is no danger of assimilation there is no justification to the creation of separate communities.

Nevertheless, as to the topic discussed in the interview, I don’t accept Tucker’s position easily.

I understand his case: when dealing with American Orthodox discourse, Tucker finds himself confronting Jews who believe morally in egalitarianism, but believe that the Halakha can’t adhere to it because of formal considerations. We believe in X, but we can’t touch the Halakha that says Y. Justly, Tucker argues against this approach, which turns the rich and meaningful halakhic tradition into a mere formalistic and stagnated position. Halakha should not challenge our moral believes; it should cultivate them.

As Tucker beautifully articulates, halakha should never be isolated from values. Learning halakha contains the mission of listening to the values that Jewish law echo – which can differ from that we collect from the surrounding zeitgeist. Nevertheless, maybe this is the case here. Maybe, the halakhic rulings cited by Tucker are not merely a reflection of the social and economic status of women in the age of the Sages, rather they contain values that we should learn from.

Tucker is so captured in his egalitarian approach, that he does not really consider its own biases. For Tucker, there are only two possible explanations to excluding women from the minyan: The first is their social status at ancient times, and the other is their “xx chromosomes” – a code that represents a discriminating approach. I believe that Tucker is right and that many of the halakhic rulings towards women are a function of their legal and economic status in ancient times; but I believe that this is not the full picture. Halakha thinks that men and women are not identical, and sees them as having different roles in a way that is essential for family and society. God could have created humanity as a single sex. He did not do so.

Where should we draw the line? Which rulings are based on social status and which have to do with the positive differences between men and women? I don’t know. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that are on the table of this generation’s sages. My personal tendency is to count women for minyan, and I think this will become natural; but I am not sure.

Take just one application: a minyan is not just an instrument to allow certain rituals; it is the core of a Jewish community, or edah in halakhic discourse. While we were counting only adult men, we needed ten Jewish household to create a community. If we will count the women also, then we can be satisfied by five. This is a huge change, which is far from being technical. By counting two adults in every family, we reconstruct the meaning of a Jewish family or household. If until now the family was treated up to now as an organic unit, it is now closer to be an umbrella of two adults who share some kids.

I acknowledge that this is the real world we live in. A world of individuals who share their lives, rather than the old world where the family was the basic unit of society. However, isn’t this change destructive to the concept of family? Is it not worth it to consider the that Jewish tradition conserves a different approach to family worth consideration? Do we accept automatically the attitude that treats traditional institutions as oppressive and ignore their benefits?

When we ask about egalitarianism and family, we should not just focus on the technical question of who will stay with the kids. This is not the point (and men can do stay with the kids just like women). The question is what is a family? Does it have any structure? Is there a “head of the family”? Is hierarchy only a bad word, which represents power – or is it also a key for responsibility, accountability and division of labor? These questions are hard to hear for a liberal ear geared toward egalitarianism. However, I think that when learning Torah we should be open for also for these questions.

Because of these considerations, I am not rushing to create egalitarian minyanim– although I can hardly question their halakhic legitimacy. I am afraid that we have not yet really thought through all of the consequences, and we never investigated the question of where differences are discriminating and where they are real and good. This is a huge challenge which I would like Rabbi Tucker, as well as other brave and devoted Torah scholars, to take upon themselves. I will be more than happy to take part.

Tucker’s attitude towards Halakha is loyal and precise, more classic than classic, in the best meaning of this term. Is he also ready to question his liberal egalitarian preconceptions?

Last week, I posted a widely read and discussed interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. This week, I will be posting several diverse responses.  Today’s response is by Dr. Malka Simkovich, who first points out a different set of Rabbinic texts than Tucker used, ones that talk about the family, mothers, and feminine qualities. She also points out the practical issues. Then she reaffirms the need for more female voices in the discussion.

Malka Z. Simkovich is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and Director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in Second Temple Judaism from Brandeis University. She has an M.A. degree in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University and a B.A. in Bible Studies and Music Theory from Stern College of Yeshiva University. Her research focuses on universalist Jewish literature that was written in the late Second Temple period. She recently published  The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria (Lexington Books, 2016). She is currently completing a book on Second Temple Judaism that will be published by the Jewish Publication Society.

This response is not about the distinction between leadership and minyan, rather seeks to open the discussion to a broader range of issues.  I note that this essay, in contrast to Tucker’s, speaks more of system then values, responsibility than what God wants, and more about the family and private space than ritual space.

What do Observant Jewish Women Want?

Malka Z. Simkovich

Rabbi Tucker’s arguments rest on his conviction that the essential biological difference between men and women did not interest the early rabbinic formulators of halakhic practice. According to Tucker, the rabbis did not see an innate difference between genders that led them to put foundational proscriptions for men and women into place. Instead, Tucker notes, halakha was once motivated by interests in preserving “class and power.” Now that women’s positions of class and power have changed, halakhic practice must change too.

The assumption that halakha was formulated based on interests in preserving class and power is where Tucker and I disagree, and this disagreement may have substantive ramifications. If Tucker is correct, then one may naturally (and correctly, I think) argue that we need to look within the halakhic system to make changes that accommodate the changes we have seen in women’s social standing. But I don’t think any of these categories—biology, class, or power— is the main driver of the halakhic system. I think the rabbis were more concerned with preserving a stable social organism that depended on a traditional family structure with a husband and wife at the core.

Innumerable statements in rabbinic literature testify to the rabbis’ sense of responsibility when it comes to protecting and nurturing familial stability. When the rabbis ruminate in Genesis Rabbah 17:2 on what living without a wife can be compared to, for example, they are not praising a wife as one would praise an obedient servant or dutiful employee. Rabbi Joshua’s statement that a man who has no wife “lives without goodness, assistance, blessing, or atonement,” or Rabbi Levi’s statement that a man who has no wife is “without life,” can certainly be read through feminist lens that highlight the male-centricity of the rabbinic psyche, which perceives the religious experience mainly through masculine lenses. But these statements should also be appreciated for how they underscore the rabbinic belief in the cosmic necessity of marriage, the foundational connection in the marital relationship that lays the groundwork for everything else that is blessed and good.

Even the mandate in Tanakh to honors one’s parents, which is so developed in rabbinic literature, has the familial ideal in mind.  When we are told in the Talmud (b. Kid. 31b) that Rabbi Tarfon bent down so that his mother would step on him to more easily get in and out of her bed. In the story, Rabbi Tarfon physically and psychologically lowers himself to honor his mother, to allow her the senior status that her motherhood invites–and demands. We are told in the same passage that when Rabbi Joseph heard his mother approaching, he would say to himself, “I will stand before the approaching Divine Presence.” What accounts for the extreme acts of respect that these rabbis paid their mothers? It seems that underlying the emphasis on preserving and honoring parents, especially mothers, is an acknowledgment that they have had a hand in the divine act of human creation. The very act of determining how family units should live and function, moreover, required the rabbis to acknowledge how vital women were to the social system that they were creating.

Much of halakha regards family law and is based on, or hopes for, community units that comprise family units which comprise individual units. When the family unit is threatened, the halakhic system is threatened. Demanding that both husband and wife participate equally in ritual law, therefore, may have been regarded as threatening to the family unit. I am not arguing that the concept of a stable family unit needs to remain static throughout the centuries, but noting that the ideal of familial stability motivated the rabbis.

Anyone who wonders whether the halakhic system rests on the ideal of a traditional family structure should ask a single or gay friend who affiliates with the orthodox community to relay their experience of seeking to participate in public ritual life. While many congregations are moving towards finding ways to include those who do not participate in a traditional family unit, most orthodox communities are not sensitive to how isolating it is to live as an orthodox Jew outside of a traditional family. Perhaps our goal, then, should be to ask whether we can change the concept of what a stable family unit looks like.

My second point regards Tucker’s argument that he is not seeking to change halakha, but trying to “apply halakhah’s internal logic to a changing reality.” I appreciate the effort to look for spaces in halakha for women to participate alongside men, should they choose to. As the years go by, attending synagogue becomes more of an outsider experience for me. The pain of being on the outside looking in grows more acute, rather than more faded. I want my daughters to have the opportunities to participate in ritual life that I do not have. I am wary, however, of innovators’ claim to be inheriting, rather than innovating.  Yet the rabbis, who revolutionized Jewish law and made it normative, claimed in the first chapter of Abot that they were simply inheritors of an ancient tradition and nothing more. I suppose that there is nothing more “rabbinic,” then, than making major changes and arguing that you’re not making any change at all. Still, I find the insistence that the halakhic system is being preserved here rather than being remodeled unsettling.

One final point. I follow discussions about women’s ritual participation on social media and in print with interest, but also with detached bewilderment. The majority of these discussions are occurring between men, despite the fact that we are fortunate today to have plenty of women who are knowledgeable in rabbinic literature. I suspect that despite their scholarship, many women scholars have not imbued themselves with the authority to engage in these conversations as overseers and protectors of the halakhic system. I’m afraid that the most important question, Freud’s question, gets overlooked in these discussions: What does a woman want?

Unfortunately, this question has already been answered in the Haredi community in a way to shut women out. I’ve been told myself multiple times that if women were obligated to attend minyan three times a day, they would not be able to fulfill this commandment. Women don’t want, so the argument goes, full ritual equity and obligation. Despite the problems with making such presumptions, we must take into account the following question: is your equality my equality? Or is it simply placing a major burden on women, who—let’s face it—are often mothers who are doing the majority of the carpooling, laundry, cooking, and cleaning?

Again, I refuse to use the above questions as a means to justify denying women opportunities. I believe that we should seek (and perhaps create) equality and opportunity within the halakhic system. But I also want to take a step back before we move forward. Has anyone asked women what they want? Certain aspects of equal ritual participation seem intuitive, at least to me. I would love to see women being more active as leaders in the ritual sphere. But I also know that some of my friends who “have it all”—my friends who have small children and big careers—are struggling to get everything done, and struggling to find gratification in every part of their fractured lives. Or maybe that’s just me.

My suggestion, therefore, is two-fold: first, we must put women at the foreground of these conversations. Second, we should increase communal and religious elasticity for both men and women by offering more space for men in the household sphere and more space for women in the public, ritual sphere. I emphasize that this space should be offered rather than required.

As a postscript, I will add that after writing the above comments, I made note of some responses to Tucker’s piece on Facebook.  I want to specifically address Sarah Rindner’s important point there that the experiential aspect of Judaism within the home has always been where women have shone as partners alongside men (and often, I would venture to add, more than partners). Rindner indicates that by emphasizing that Jewish women should practice Judaism alongside men in the public sphere, Tucker actually runs the ironic risk of erasing a particular space that has been made for women to function as educators and leaders. If I understand her correctly, I believe that Rindner’s point correlates with my argument above regarding the rabbinic concern for protecting the family unit.

While I am not certain that Ridner’s point was fully addressed by Rabbi Tucker, I was heartened to see that Tucker clarified in his response that the goal of his book is to “open up possibilities, [and not to] dictate anything to anyone who doesn’t want it.” If this is the case, then I assume he would agree that our priority must now be to bring women into the foreground of this conversation and consider what they actually want. We should also prepare ourselves for the consequences of offering these possibilities, which may be that observant Jewish communities will continue to grow more fractured and less cohesive, as men and women forge new paths in prayer worship which involve women in different ways and employ increasingly varied structures.

I am open to Tucker’s ideas, and appreciate that he is galvanizing an effort to formally include women into the sphere of public ritual. I especially appreciate and enthusiastically agree with his point that “the moment we isolate halakhah from values, the word of God from what we think is right…we create a halakhah that is amoral, valueless and all about discipline.” But I want to hear more from Rabbi Tucker and others about why equal ritual participation is a goal in itself. I would prefer to see equal religious gratification as a goal in itself. This gratification should be used as an umbrella category which can include equal ritual participation, but does not demand it.

Rabbi Ethan Tucker is President and Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar. Rabbi Tucker also directs Mechon Hadar’s Center for Jewish Law and Values. Rabbi Tucker studied at Yeshivat Maaleh Gilboa of the Kibbutz Hadati movement. Tucker was  ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He earned a B.A. from Harvard College and a doctorate in  Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Rabbi Tucker recently published together with Rabbi Micha’el Rosenberg a book on egalitarian prayer called  Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law (Urim Press, 2017). The book starts with the assumption that gender equality has spread even among the religiously observant traditional communities necessitating  a need to re-examine old questions.  The book presents the wealth of Jewish legal material surrounding gender and prayer as a resource for grappling with these issues. The book presents the texts on both sides of the issues, letting the texts speak for themselves. The goal of the book is not to decide law as much as clearly analysis texts.As one Amazon reviewer, aptly evaluated the book: “Whether a reader agrees with the two rabbis who authored the book or not, he or she will find a wealth of information in the book that will prompt thought.”

The presentation of the texts in the book show the use of the scholarly approaches to Rabbinics as well as the many contemporary articles on the issue. However, one of the innovations of the book is the integration of these academic writings into the textual method of the Yeshiva allowing these ideas to enter the rabbinic study hall, the beit midrash.

This interview is on the broad theological premises of Rabbi Tucker’s approach allowing the reader to see his method, which focuses on values of the halakhah. His approach is to attempt to listen to what the tradition says and then to think about what tools we might have for responding to tensions between ourselves and the texts.  Tucker honestly wants to listen to the many voices in the texts and see where that takes him. Since the book does not advocate a specific halakhic position, he is free to show the complexity of the system.

In the book, Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law as well as in the interview, Tucker opens up the possibility that the root of the obligation gap in rabbinic sources is in fact about social status in a society where women would be compared to slaves and minors. Today, in Tucker’s reading, the rabbis would not have made this comparison.

Tucker explicitly rejects approaching the Rabbinic texts with an agenda to find a leniency or starting with what one desires to prove before one starts. In addition, Tucker does not believe in the “adjustment of the law” as in liberal approaches.  In fact, he states that the entire language of “halakhic change” and “authority and innovation” as anathema to the project of the book. However as amply displayed in the interview below, this leads to a certain amount of passive voice of implying that choices need to be made, law has to be adjudicated, and decisions need to be made, but purposely without discussing how this relates to issues of authority and normative halakhah.

Noticeably, Tucker actually makes an argument about the rebellious son (Ben Sorer uMorer) that justifies the original law in its original context.  He rejects the idea that the rabbis saw some divine laws as  immoral and sought to marginalize them, as claimed by many liberal approaches.

During the 2015-2016 cycle of Torah readings, Rabbi Tucker sent out a phenomenal weekly Torah email, where he developed each week a different topic clearly showing his approach and explaining it fully,  The essays and the source sheets are available here. They are worth reading and I look forward to seeing those essays as a  book. The publication of these weekly classes will provide a seminal theology and theory of a halakhah concerned with values. I posted about some of these sheets when they came out. In contrast, this book on prayer is more of a hundred-page worksheet of sources, which only begins to touch on bigger questions and  without an explicit presentation of his theory.

At times, Rabbi Tucker’s approach can seen  to be addressing a specific audience with specific reactions to their prior teachers-especially on topics of submission, community, and rationality- offering a needed corrective. (For example, the era whose religious approach was already mediated by the modernism of Peter L Berger may not see the dichotomies the way he sees them). But for many, his is the voice that resonates with them as offering the answers to their religious quest. For those who want to see how Rabbi Tucker was presenting these ideas six years ago, see this write-up of his local talks, which gives the earlier kernel of these ideas.

The interview below is on his meta-halakhah, not his actual legal positions or on the way he understands specific texts.

1. What is new in the book about  Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law  that is not already in the many volumes on the topic? (See appendix at end of interview for prior literature)

Well, the book indeed stands on the shoulders of prior efforts. I would say the original contribution of the book is twofold.

First, it brings together scattered discussions in one place.  The important book Women and Men in Communal Prayer—despite its title—focuses only on Torah reading.  The Frimers have addressed the topic of minyan over the years, but have mostly been focused on women’s prayer groups (that omit or modify parts of the service that require a quorum) and Torah reading.  The Conservative movement dealt with these various issues in a series of responsa over the years, but there was never a unified presentation of the whole.  We tried to unify the major discussions around prayer, Torah reading and minyan in one discussion.

Second, I think we are unusually transparent in our discussion, though that is obviously for the reader to decide.  Let’s not be coy—we obviously have a perspective on this topic.  Nonetheless, we didn’t want the book to be simply an advocate’s manual.  Rather, we wanted to lay out the issues at stake and to give credence to egalitarian & non-egalitarian positions and how they could be substantively, not just formally, grounded in the sources.  Earlier treatments of the topic, in our experience, are either advocacy pieces that are happy to ignore or steamroll over troubling evidence to the contrary, or seek to shoot down any legitimacy for an egalitarian position whatsoever.  We have tried to locate the underlying values in the texts we studied such that the debates over gender and prayer are actually substantive debates about gender and prayer rather than arguments about halakhic authority and formal precedent.

2)      Can you explain your basis for gender egalitarianism? 

I think one of the most interesting things about the book is how we often maintain two arguments in parallel for a gender-equal practice in the synagogue.  We are trying to listen to what the tradition says about gender and prayer and then to think about what tools we might have for responding to tensions between non-egalitarian ritual and our increasingly gender-equal reality.

We don’t have an agenda on this topic that stands independent of the rabbinic corpus and the halakhic tradition. In short, when you explore this topic you find that the halakhic tradition provides two main pathways for thinking about the significance of gender in the context of communal prayer: 1) notions of honor and dignity, 2) maximal obligation in mitzvot.

The honor/dignity frame turns us towards a discussion of what is now dignified in terms of gender norms and whether that is different from earlier points in time.  We make the case that those standards have shifted and thereby so has the halakhah, which is internally concerned with these sociological categories.  However, we also create space for those who claim these concerns have not shifted and that gender equal participation in communal prayer might continue to lower the dignity of the service.

Some sources point to an obligation gap in mitzvot as the source of gender hierarchy and exclusion in communal prayer.  We try both to show that this is only one branch of the tradition and need not box out the honor/dignity frame, while also taking it seriously as a legitimate and even somewhat compelling way of thinking about our topic.

In this context, we engage the possibility that the root of the obligation gap in rabbinic sources is in fact about social status (a bolder category than honor/dignity).  We argue that this too must be reevaluated in a society where women would never be compared to slaves and minors (as they have been, without angst or embarrassment, in most earlier patriarchal societies).

3)      How can the law be adjusted for gender egalitarianism?

This is perhaps the most important point in our approach to halakhah. We don’t really believe in the “adjustment of the law.”  In fact, that whole language of “halakhic change” and “authority and innovation” is somewhat anathema to the project of the book.  We are not coming with an outside critique of halakhah.  Instead, we are trying to apply halakhah’s internal logic to a changing reality.

Think of halakhah as an eternal light refracted through changing lenses of reality.  You place a light bulb on a roadway with a red lens and all drivers know to slam on the brakes.  Take the same light and put a green lens in front of it, and the same law-abiding drivers floor the gas pedal.  This is not a shifting law, but a shifting reality.  Our claim is that the halakhah never cared about biology per se when it came to public prayer.  Rather, gender was a proxy for other categories of significance, categories that are themselves grounded in social realities.  A shifting response to gender and prayer may then actually be a more faithful fidelity to the underlying values of the halakhah.

4)      How do shift in categories work, especially in regards to gender?

The notion of a category shift is that an object or type of person might signify one thing in the context of one reality and something entirely different in another.  Here are two examples: Mishnah Bava Metzia states that if you find someone’s lost sefer, you must read it or at least roll it once a month.  The commentators make clear that this is because scrolls, when left in one place for too long, begin to decay through trapped moisture and other materials.  Only by rolling them and getting air into them are they kept in good condition, and one who finds a lost object must keep it in good condition until it is returned to the owner.

By contrast, the same Mishnah says that one who finds a glass object should not even touch it, since doing so could only risk its fracture.  Now, in medieval and later times, the word sefer comes to refer not to a scroll, but to a codex.  Same word, similar cultural function of reading recorded information, but completely different technology.  If one were to apply the Mishnah’s rule of reading a lost sefer once a month to what we call a book, one would only weaken the binding!  Thus the sefer of today plausibly jumps from the “use it to keep it in good shape” category to the “don’t touch it!” category.  The value is the same: preserve the lost object for its owner, but that eternal value is filtered through shifting realities and language.

Another example: the heresh—a deaf person—is exempted from a range of mitzvah obligations and thus disqualified from performing various rituals for others.  But the Talmud already points out that these exemptions (and corollary disqualifications) only apply to a deaf-mute.  Even though a deaf person who can speak is commonly called a heresh, a speaking deaf person is not in the legal category of exemption.

The Talmud even backs this up with a textual basis/derivation: Much of the time when the term heresh appears in early sources, it is matched up with shoteh (a mentally incompetent person) and katan (a minor).  The Talmud argues that this juxtaposition is substantive: these three types of people are instantiations of the more general category of those who lack da’at, basic mental competence and responsibility for one’s actions.  By their speech, speaking deaf people reveal their mental competence and are thus plainly obligated in all mitzvot.  When we come to consider contemporary deaf-mutes who speak sign language, it is thus highly plausible—if not self-evident—to suggest that they possess da’at and thus shift categories from exempt to obligated.  Again, nothing has changed about the law—it was always about da’at and always will be—but the mapping of deaf-muteness onto lack of da’at has been destabilized and perhaps vitiated.

This is the same sort of process that can be argued for around gender.  In many areas of ritual law and practice, women are treated as exempt, marginal or excluded.  But they are almost always so classified along with slaves and minors.  This forces us to ask: what does the word ishah signify in those sources?  Is it a term pointing to those with a certain chromosomal and biological makeup?  Or is it one member of a set of three (women, slaves and minors) known to be adjuncts or second-class citizens in the larger Greco-Roman world in which the Sages lived?

Until recent decades, it was self-evident that those with XX chromosomes, as a class, were subordinate in all kinds of ways.  The category shift argument—proffered already several years ago by Rabbi Yoel bin Nun and developed further by me in a recent essay—suggests that the Sages’ original intent in these halakhot that speak about women, slaves and minors was never about biological sex per se, it was about class and power.  Now that those variables have shifted dramatically in our society, women shift from exempt to obligated.  The halakhah stays the same: those with power must subordinate themselves to serve God.  And this is the key point: according to the category shift argument, maintaining an exemption from mitzvot for contemporary women because of their biology actually risks failing to direct them to fulfill their Biblical obligations in a range of mitzvot!

5)      Can we have egalitarianism without adjuncts taking care of the family?

This is a great question, and I am frankly not sure what the answer is.  I have tried to play this out in an essay as well.

My general principles are as follows: 1) The nature of the Torah’s vision of mitzvot is democratic.  It is not a system where a select group of priests do the mitzvot; it is a vision of a mamlekhet kohanim.  We should therefore be generally biased towards more obligation not less.  And if the Torah assumes that people are meant to have children, it must be that care for a family can be fully integrated into an obligated life.  2) There is no question that mitzvot often require the support of others, or a kind of focus and presence that can be hard to attain unless someone else is creating that space for you, particularly in contexts where small children need to be cared for.  3) We can usually hit the right balance here by recognizing that most mitzvot can be performed by all without any real difficulty.  Let’s be honest: most positive mitzvot take a few seconds to perform and can be done even when caring for children.  We are mostly talking about the time consuming practices around public prayer and ritual.

A close look at rabbinic precedents on sharing obligations with more limited resources reveals some interesting models.  In some cases, balancing broad obligation was accomplished in shifts—the way all traditional communities handle the obligation of megillah, where there was never understood to a non-obligated class of adults.  In other cases, we find that participation can indeed be divided up, but the set of adjuncts is shifting, rather than permanent and essentialist.  For instance, even if all adults count in a minyan, they can’t all go at the same time.  [Truth be told, this was always understood in terms of the division between the older/retired/batlanim class and the working family units, but that is another story.]  But one can go while the other cares for the child, without making this essentially about gender.

I think this approach can get us where we need to go.  But we do need to have some culture shifting here, no question.

6)      What is unique in your method of learning? How can you look for a reason for a Tannaitic source or an early medieval commentary and then use the reason or value outside of its reception in the tradition?

Well, I don’t think we think of ourselves as using any sources outside of their reception in the tradition.

As we engage gender, we are trying to find reasons and values in our sources and to understand them.  We are actually deeply invested in understanding those sources within their reception in the tradition.  In fact, we probably make some of our readers uncomfortable when we seem to justify and explain why it might have made sense to exclude women from minyan!  We take seriously the notion that there have been and still are human societies where enfranchising women in a given activity is perceived as lowering the honor or seriousness of that activity.  While we might lament that, seek to change those realities or even preach against them, it might be that until we do, the halakhah’s concerns around honor indeed argue for a less than egalitarian regime.  We don’t think that is true of the world we are writing for, but this openness to multiple realities and to the underlying concerns of our sources is a feature of our work.

Our innovation, such as it is, is being willing to take that value-based consideration into what we see as a different reality.  But our fundamental claim—as is the claim of anyone engaged in traditional psak—is that if R. Tam or the Meiri or the Levush were to confront our reality, they would say exactly what we are saying.  (Provided, of course, that they agreed with our assessment of reality, which they might or might not have.)  So, to the extent there is something unique, it is maybe only in light of more recent tendencies towards a hyper-formalism in psak halakhahin the modern period.  But—using an example for those who have read the book—the way we talk about minyan and gender is virtually identical to how the Beit Yosef talks about a minor leading Arvit when he builds off of the Ra’avad’s value-based analysis of the Mishnah that seems to prohibit that.

7)      Are you uprooting the Shulkhan Arukh and Ahronim?

We are not interested in uprooting anything.  If we say a minyan can be gender blind, even though the Shulhan Arukh clearly does not, we are not uprooting the Shulhan Arukh.  We are claiming that when the Shulhan Arukh excludes women (along with slaves and minors) from minyan, he is not talking about biology, but is expressing, in shorthand, a value category that is either about social gravity or obligation in mitzvot (which is itself plausibly about social gravity of a higher order).

8)   How can our values influence our understanding of the tradition?

Another big question. My overarching approach is to insist that there is only one conversation: What does God want of me?  The moment we isolate halakhah from values, the word of God from what we think is right, we create religious and moral Frankensteins.  We create a halakhah that is amoral, valueless and all about discipline.  And we create a morality that is prone to being trapped in an echo chamber of self-righteousness.

A deep process of Talmud Torah is one in which two things happen in parallel:

(1) I listen deeply to the tradition and to what the tradition is saying and I challenge my preconceptions.  The values I came to the table with may only be a part of the story; they might even be wrong.  But I don’t bludgeon those values with the formal discipline of submission; instead I open myself up to being persuadedby the sources of our tradition.  This has to be an exercise in intellectual and moral curiosity and humility and is, to my mind, what any true learning is about.

(2) My deeply felt moral instincts come from somewhere, and when they stubbornly persist even in the face of honest listening to the tradition, they can be presumed to be of some worth. Our Sages said about the Jewish people: If they are not prophets, they are descended from prophets.  There is some kernel of prophecy that the Jewish people retain in their halakhic instincts even in our own time.  A true journey into the discourse of values and morality then searches the tradition for sources and perspectives that capture these values in the distinctive language of halakhah.  Sometimes a person can do this on their own, but usually they need a guide, someone who knows the territory of the rabbinic canon and who can show them the way.

The overarching goal is simple: the telos of the conversation is eliminating the perceived gap between morality and halakhah.  Angst about the conflict between the two is not to be valorized; it is an opportunity to strive for synthesis and resolution.

9)   You use the Dor Revi’i  to increase the role of ethics in our halakhic understanding. How?

The Dor Revi’i is a remarkable and fascinating Talmudic commentary by R. Moshe Glasner, the great-grandson of the Hatam Sofer.  He was an early 20^th century figure steeped in deep traditional learning and asking fundamental questions about Torah.  (He was also one of the early religious Zionists.)  He is, to my mind, one of the most powerful voices for insisting on a unified conversation that incorporates our internal normative Jewish tradition and the larger framework in which the Torah embeds that tradition: the human project of stewarding God’s physical and moral world.  You can read more about him here.  I think there are some who “disagree” with the Dor Revi’i who don’t understand him, taking him to mean that universal standards of morality always trump halakhah when the two come into conflict.  I think that is incorrect.  The Dor Revi’i would have defended circumcision tooth and nail, even if he lived in an environment hostile to it as a form of barabarism.  What he would have done, however, would be to argue for circumcision’s fundamental morality within the terms of an ethical discourse, bringing the Torah’s unique perspective to the conversation.  He would not have hidden behind the Torah’s authority in order to dodge the conflict.  That distinction is critical, in my view.

Others oppose his way of thinking because they have come to see a willingness to follow seemingly immoral halakhot as the acid test of true religious devotion.  I have written about this view in the context of the Akeidah.  I think it is a misreading of the Akeidah—Avraham would not have understood the command to sacrifice (not murder!) his son as unethical—and is a very dangerous blueprint for religious life.  It buys religious obedience in the short term at the expense of the proper internalization of the values of the tradition in the long term.  Rulers who ultimately rule based on power and authority are generally considered tyrants, whose rule we escape at the fist plausible opportunity.  I don’t (want to) relate to either God or the Torah in that way.

10)   How does the study of the rebellious son help us in this ethical quest?

The rebellious son is, in my mind, one of the most misread passages on this topic.  A number of contemporary scholars see it as a classic case of a Biblical law that the Rabbis found to be immoral.  They then set to work marginalizing the law and killing it through the death of a thousand qualifications.  The law is perceived as immoral because of its execution of a juvenile, its punishment of a disposition more than a crime already committed. The famous statement of at least one Sage that “the case of the rebellious son never came to pass and never will” is taken by some as a defiant program for eliminating this blight of unjustice on Jewish law.

I think this is all wrong, and my critique is great example of playing out the method I described above.  If we really listen, and I mean really listen, to the text and context here, I think we emerge with something quite different than the above reading.

First of all, it is noteworthy that I know of not a whimper in rabbinic sources about the law that says one executes a child for cursing their parents.  I think it is very difficult to claim that Hazal were bothered by the death penalty served up to the rebellious son; they are silent in too many other parallel places where improper use of words alone condemn a person to death.  We then have to be honest that we engage in this sort of “pre-crime” enforcement all the time in areas where we are worried the basic structure of society is at stake.  If you walk on to a plane with a firearm—even though you never picked it up, threatened anyone, much less fired it—you can be locked up for 20 years.  Further probing of context should lead us to recognize that the Torah is operating in a framework in which there is no strong central government, no meaningful monopoly on violence in the hands of the state and the death penalty is a basic tool of discipline in a more unruly and violent society.  A child disobeying a parent in earlier generations is more like the assassination of a police officer in our own than we might at first realize or be comfortable admitting.  All of these hard questions and openness to learning have to be a part of the process.

Second, we have to be careful not to project our own—reasonable and moral!—misgivings about applying this law today onto those of earlier times.  Indeed, a close reading of the passage where Hazal “eliminate” this law reveals nothing of the sort.  The Maharsha (R. Shmuel Edels, Poland, 16^th c.) has a great reading of that passage.  The Talmud’s formulation is: “Can it be that because this young man ate some meat and drank some wine that his father and mother will take him out to execute him?  Rather, this case never happened and never will.”  Maharsha notes the presence of the father and mother in this depiction; indeed, it is unusual that the Torah itself involves them in the due process required to execute the boy.  He sees the Talmud as noting that, once the father and mother need to sign off on the execution, there is no way any parents will actively participate in the execution of their own child.  This is not a moral critique of a law, rather a clear-eyed view of the reality of the law’s application. (In addition, perhaps the Torah’s sense that only a child whose parents have completely given up on him is really the sort of threat we should be dealing with in such an extreme way).  Beautifully, the Maharsha goes on to say that the law was nonetheless taught because of the deep values to be learned from it.  Adolescents can be dangerous and parenting is serious business.  Parents should approach their work as a life-and-death responsibility, because if their child indeed becomes a threat to society on their watch, they bear responsibility.

11)      What is the influence of your teachers at Yeshivat Kibbutz Hadati?

Rav Elisha Anscelovits taught us many things, but I will highlight two:  1) Never be afraid to try to identify what a mitzvah or practice is about, what are the values that are guiding it.  He goes further, which is essentially to reject as problematic an aversion to seeking out reasons for mitzvot.  When we both first encountered R. Elisha, we still had unreformed instincts to treat halakhah as a set of boundaries and rules, a kind of formalistic game, as opposed to a force for purpose and meaning.  R. Elisha helped us start treating halakhah less like an electric fence and more like a compass.  2) Never dismiss any source you come across.  Try to understand it on its own terms and generally don’t just overrule it with the force of more precedents on the other side or with your presumed ethical superiority.  If you really believe in the multivocality of halakhah, if you really take seriously the gemara’s injunction of aseh ozneka ka’afarkeset—make your ear like a hopper—then you have to account for all views that arise.  We hope that comes through in our effort to give full voice to the non-egalitarian sources we analyze throughout the book.

We also feel a great debt to Rabbi Bigman, not only for creating the yeshiva where we spent many years of happy study, but also for the wisdom he shared with us from his many years as a communal rav.  Rabbi Bigman’s psak is always so intrinsically humble and grounded in the facts of the people standing in front of him.  This book, by its nature, had to make general pronouncements.  But I hope we have done our teacher proud by trying to retain a humble tone that recognizes that any analysis of halakhic texts, no matter how correct, may also be bound to a certain audience with certain boundary conditions.

12)   How are you different than the Conservative Judiasm of the 1970’s and 1980’s whose egalitarianism declared women rabbis as obligated as men. And how are you different than Open Orthodoxy’s quest to read between the lines to create leniency?

Let me back up for a moment and acknowledge that none of the process we went through in this book would have been possible without those earlier iterations of the conversation.  Speaking personally, I am indebted to my rav hamuvhak, avi mori, R. Gordon Tucker, who not only taught me Torah from a young age but also went through his own journey on this topic.  He was educated and raised in observant, non-egalitarian environments in his youth and davened and practiced that way throughout college.  He arrived at JTS around the time when the issue of women’s ordination—and corollary ritual roles—was being taken up and he quickly became an advocate and a leader on that front.  It is hard to imagine how I could have arrived at my own thinking on this matter without his influence over the years.

But a closer look at the debates and arguments tossed around in the early 1980s in the Conservative movement around this topic did not really embrace an egalitarian regime of obligation.  Nor was it really a values-based discussion at all.  The most prominent papers written in favor of a more egalitarian approach were those of R. Mayer Rabinowitz, who argued that the widespread availability of siddurim rendered the formal requirements for the sheilah tzibbur obsolete, and that of R. Joel Roth, who suggested that women could electively obligate themselves in mitzvot.  These were what I would call classic workarounds: they took the exemption and exclusion of women for granted, but then pondered whether there was a way to end-run around it.  There was no claim that the underlying categories behind the gendered halakhot needed to be mapped differently onto contemporary women, much less that contemporary women might be fully obligated just by dint of their social status!  This, it seems to me, is one aspect of our own analysis that is dramatically different from those earlier efforts.

I can’t speak for Open Orthodoxy—I am not even sure what that delineates anymore—but I see what we are doing as part of a larger conversation about the interaction of a gender equal world with a rigorous commitment to and grounding in the halakhic canon.  I have heard a number of people say that they can buy the conclusions of part I of the book—full equality of leadership of the service—but not part II—full equality of citizenship through minyan.  I am not sure that is a truly principled distinction, it might just be the right next step for a whole set of communities.  I also think the category shift approach is still sinking in.  When I first taught it myself 15 years ago, I thought it was crazy and no one in the audience would buy it.  I now find that for more and more people it is the only intuitive way to think about it.  I think those of us who are honest here should recognize that there is a process at work on a spectrum.  My own bias is to see allies everywhere, not competitors or rivals.  We’ll see if I am naïve or prescient in the long run.

13)   At various points you have defined yourself in three different way: as following the 19^th century Rav Bamburger about keeping the community in tact as a whole, other times as non-denominational, and other times as kibbutz Hadati? How do these relate and how does it not matter?

I think these all tie together for me, and the unifying element is taking responsibility.  Rav Bamburger remains a powerful model for refusing to relinquish a covenantal vision for the entire Jewish community; that continues to motivate me in deep ways.  The most powerful (and perhaps scary) dimension of a multi-generational covenant is that it binds everyone.  That means that every Jew is the addressee of the Torah’s mitzvot, whether they acknowledge this or not.  And a key corollary of this: every Jew is the Torah’s constituent and the Torah is accountable to them.

In many ways, I see a non-denominationalism as the American-Jewish translation of that attitude.  Yes, many communities and even religious leaders might say that they have no interest in Torah or mitzvot, only peoplehood and Jewish identity.  But a covenantal vision of Torah doesn’t really have the luxury of simply letting people opt out and then reaping the rewards (such as they are) of a smaller, tamer, more monolithic constituency.  Instead, we must ask ourselves:  How do we create a vision for Torah and mitzvot that is not that of an interest group but of a vision for national destiny and purpose?  And that will also require some respectful persuading of fellow Jews as part of that process.

Kibbutz Hadati and the wing of religious Zionism it represents captures this as well: We have to take responsibility for the entire Jewish enterprise in the modern world and we must insist that secular politics alone cannot be the answer.  I think the most interesting parts of religious Zionism in Israel right now are asking how the instincts of many self-described secular Jews are woven into a covenantal framework for all Israelis.  See Yoav Sorek’s latest book, Haberit Hayisraelit for a great example of this sort of conversation.

I think these different strands also have in common a certain irresponsible disregard for realpolitik.  That is sometimes a weakness, but the payoff in the integrity of the larger project is worth it to me.

I always admired the works of the sociologist Peter Berger as a formulation of religious commitment under the conditions of modernity.  Berger died two months ago and deserves a Jewish retrospective. I wavered if I should write the respective, hoping that someone else would write it first.

However, one morning, a few years ago, I woke up to discover that Peter Berger, someone whom I only knew from afar, quoted one of my articles approvingly as a springboard to discuss contemporary issues. This compliment was the momentum that resolved my indecision.

Berger praised my article for its noting the greater Jewish openness to Christianity today and how the thinkers in the 1960’s “era of dialogue” did not actually know anything about Christianity. This is unlike today where there are Jews deeply knowledgeable about Christianity, and vice-versa.  Berger singles out my statement that differences internally between certain Jewish theological positions may be greater than between Jews and Christians of like mind.

However, Berger always elided the differences between Judaism and Christianity.  I always wondered about that. I knew that he came from a Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism in 1938 when he was nine years old. However, my big surprise discovered while writing this blog post is that his family survived the Holocaust by fleeing to British-mandate Palestine until 1946. How did he spend the years?  I wonder what occurred during those years. . Berger came of age as a Jewish refugee in mandate Palestine, meaning he certainly knew basic Jewish life and practices. Surprisingly, I have not found any popular or scholarly article discussing this aspect of his life.

UPDATE: I was notified by a colleague of Peter Berger’s who saw this post that he wrote an autobiography, which was only published in German Im Morgenlicht der Erinnerung: Eine Kindheit in turbulenter Zeit (2008)  There are only 8 libraries in US that have a copy of this rare volume, yet a full copy is available online. It has not been distributed and has not made it into the secondary literature. In the volume, Berger describes how his family converted to Anglicanism for potential visa and immigration opportunities They then fled to Haifa where they assumed they would quickly get a visa to the Americas, instead they were there for eight years. When he first arrived he went to a Jewish school that used Hebrew and uncomfortably wanted to call him Yakov. Berger claims his remembers little of this Hebrew. Originally, people did not know that his family was Christian, but when people found out they shunned the family. The family was aided by other Christian Jews who found his father a job and found schools for the young Peter. He went to a Swiss mission school that instructed in German and socialized the students in traditional Lutheranism including pious visits to the Christian sites in Jerusalem. There Berger adopted their German Lutheran piety as his own. Berger was later rejected from Haifa Reali High School because of his faith and instead attended an Anglican Secondary school.  Haifa is where he first encountered Bahai, the topic of his Ph.D. thesis. The book also describes his encounter with Zionism and with American Jewish congregations upon arrival in the US.

Berger correctly credited me with bringing the gap between “intellectual religion of the books and the lived religion of the pews,” as reflected in the Saadyah dyad in the title of this blog (intellectual beliefs and lived opinions). His reading of my article shows his insight into authors he never met. However, the attempt to hold both aspects at the same time is the hallmark of Berger’s own thought. In this review, I will deal only with his theology and not his sociology; his religious vision moving from critique of suburban religion to explaining the existential value in religion, to developing his own deeply committed religious humanism.

(This is a first draft of some first thoughts on his theology growing out of decades of teaching his work. The post is subject to change. If anyone has any further Jewish applications of his thought, then let me know. maybe I should do one of these for Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman, or Tzvetan Todorov)

Peter Berger was born in Vienna on March 17, 1929, arriving in the United States shortly after World War II ended. In 1950, he produced a thesis on Puerto Rican Protestants in East Harlem; for his doctorate four years later, he focused on the Bahai movement in Iran. Berger served in the Army for two years in the mid-1950s and taught at schools including Rutgers University and Boston College before landing at Boston University in 1981. Four years later, he founded that university’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, where he served as director until 2009.

The Noise of Solemn Assemblies

Berger finished his PhD in 1954. Before he embarked on his steady stream of sociological works. He produced a youthful work in 1961 of his struggle between his committed belief in Lutheranism based on the philosophic works of Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, which demanded full commitment to a higher revelation and the lightness of the typical suburban congregation. This 1961 jeremiad, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America is the work I think of most often when looking at Modern Orthodoxy.

Taking his cue from Amos 5:21 “I hate all your show and pretense–the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies, “Berger finds suburban religion as entirely this-worldly and social without a sense of the transcendental, more concerned with political and social identity, a hypocritical solemn assembly.

Berger saw religious institutions as dedicated to American culture, sensible, tolerant, far removed from the fierce piety of Kierkegaard. Years later, Berger himself admits: “It is hardly surprising that I had difficulties coming to terms with it.” The suburban congregation was not a locale for desperate leaps of faith, rather it was the worship of the goodness of America. He “was not prepared to worship it or to equate its morality with Christian faith.” Berger quotes his contemporary colleague John Murray Cuddihy who called it the “Protestant smile.” Put sociologically, he declared the principal function of these churches was to legitimate the middle-class culture of America, to certify that the latter was indeed “OK.” They condemned or sought to explain the deviants such as the divorced, the socially rebellious, or those who left the faith, but they avoided commenting on the religious nature of marriage, community, and faith.

This analysis is of the same cloth as that of his contemporary Rav Soloveitchik, who from 1956 -1970 also worked on the tension between the happy unreflective materialism of Adam I and the Kierkegaardian faith of Adam II, especially in his Lonely Man of Faith. Soloveitchik, like Berger, coming from his study of Buber, Barth, Brunner, had abstract ideas of the covenantal community, the covenetal nature of marriage, and of faith, but these ideas hit the wall of the actual suburban Jewish congregation. However, Soloveitchik ideally envisioned repentance (teshuva) and halakhic observance as overcoming this cultural religion bringing one to the transcendental, yet empirically most of those who followed him only produced a world of Adam I, happy congregations of the communal. Followers of Soloveitchik, not Soloveitchik himself, saw the very act of joining the solemn assembly of a modern Orthodox congregation and following its norms as somehow overcoming the lightness of modern religion. Berger, in contrast, provided the sharp and personally pained observations that transcendence was missing in the life of most congregants..

Berger encouraged us to look for “signals of transcendence,” moments that pointed to an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.” A Rumor of Angels 1969. Heschel, Soloveitchik, Buber, and most religious Existentialists offered similar advice.

In 1963, Berger published his classic Invitation to Sociology  presenting sociology as a form of humanism able to teach tolerance and compassion as well as an ethic of responsibility. Social thought sharpens our religious and theological thinking. Among Jewish thinkers, there were few that fit this plan except for   Will Herberg who was already creating a sociological theology in the 1950’s and Arnold Eisen in the 1990’s. Are there others?

The Sacred Canopy

His most famous work was The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967), a classic assigned in many university religion classes and which offers important insights into modern religion, especially the ideas of worldview, sacred canopy, plausibly structure. If you never read this work, then you should immediately do so.

For Berger, in the modern age we are constantly forced to choose how to interact with the world and shape it. We want our choices to be stable, but since society is always in a state of change, it does allow the stability. Religion’s main project is to create this sense of stable predictable order and to make all of us believe in it, although in fact it is always an illusion. More importantly, society wants us to believe that those choices are not really choices. Society wants us to act as if they are necessary and inevitable; as if they are an objective reality beyond our ability to change.

Religion is the means of objectifying a stable nomos based on a fixed pattern of the cosmos, society, or in the contemporary orthodox Jewish case, the halakhah. Berger calls the interaction by the term “externalization” and the creation of stable products as “objectivating,” which means teaching us (especially when we are children) to make the same choices repeatedly as we externalize ourselves.

The ultimate threat for the religious person, however, is to lose the nomos altogether and be plunged into the chaos of anomy. Therefore, whatever we practice today as Jews is generally presented as in continuity with the past, as outside of the rapid changes of history and society, and as inviolable. Religion denies reality beyond the nomos of the community. A group of people who maintain a body of knowledge, along with the institutions they have created, is called a “plausibility structure,” which according to Berger offers a sacred canopy for understanding our lives. The nomos will seem plausible as long as it is supported by a strong plausibility structure. Since society wants to maintain its nomos, it will try to exclude or destroy every alternative nomos. Hence, Jewish ideas such as tradition, peoplehood, and mesorah are essential to maintain the stability.

Three take-away ideas from Berger’s thought. The issue of plausibility structure and reason, the disbelief in the sacred canopy, and the nature of the structure itself.

The first is that according to Peter Berger people do not decide if a religious system is logical or if the dogmas make sense or if they can be defended. Rather, they decide if it offers a working sacred canopy providing a safe worldview that makes sense of their life. People become Evangelical or Orthodox because it offers a sacred canopy, a worldview to live within its system. Religious claims are not about whether its tenets are true or false, rather people adopt an entire sacred canopy, an entire system, if it makes sense and grounds the world they live within. Peter Berger discusses how Eastern European Jews who came to the United States lost their sacred canopy. The supernatural world of the shtetl made little sense in scientific and educated America. The American forms of Judaism had to create new sacred canopies with new plausibility structures.

By extension, when people leave Orthodoxy today, it is not because of a specific doctrine; rather the sacred canopy no longer corresponds to reality. It is not an issue of defending a specific doctrine or belief, nor is it a minor repair to an idea or practice. Rather, the entire canopy no longer works since it lost its plausibility. However, as long as it still works, then no specific problem necessary matters. Answering up questions on small points or defenses on a given topic of belief do not work since people choose an entire sacred canopy. As long as it works, then minor issues don’t matter and when it cracks then the entire canopy gets replaced.

Conversely, when someone does become orthodox, it is because the sacred canopy of the family values and Shabbat observant lifestyle makes sense as a way to create an ordered reality, not because of cogent doctrine.

Second, the moral qualities of a sacred canopy are deeply important. If clergy turn out to be involved in scandal and corruption, logically, that should not tell us anything about the truth or falsity of religious truth claims. However, emotionally most of us do judge a nomos by its plausibility structure, for they are the people who represent the nomos to the public. When the plausibility structure is called into question, this can lead to both denial and changes in the nomos. Nevertheless, for many in an open society, it leads to them finding a new nomos, a new sacred canopy- leaving their denomination. The similar moral issues of politics, child abuse, or economics can also lead to the shattering of the sacred canopy.

Third, despite  widespread  acceptance  of  Peter  Berger’s   cultural  framework,  theories  of Torah  u-Madda continue  to  use  nineteenth  century  understandings in which Judaism and the world around it are separate cultures.. For  example, many modern Orthodox authors assumes  culture is produced by the surrounding non-Jewish society, in that the cultural elements of philosophy, medicine, literature, or entertainment are outside Judaism. Modern Orthodox Jews can decide to accept  or  reject these eleemnts. In Peter  Berger’s  terms, we live  in  a  single  cultural worldview and create as much “sacred canopy” as needed to maintain the plausibility structure, the coherent nomos. The encounter with “western secular  culture”  is from  Berger’s  perspective  not  an encounter  with  an  outside body of knowledge, rather a  Jewish  plausibility  structure of Torah uMadda or Shadal’s Jewish humanism, or Israeli Religious Zionism. The acceptance of   secular studies , professional life, and  popular culture by Modern Orthodoxy is part of the construction of their sacred canopy of  Judaism. Berger  discusses explicitly the  Jewish  encounter  with  modernity  as  the  breaking  of the  Eastern  European  Jewish sacred  canopy  in  the  move  to America, and the subsequent need to reformulate a new Jewish sacred  canopy.  Hence, the secular studies in Modern Orthodox was itself part of its formulation.The current lack of a need for secular studies above a high school level or for career purposes is itself part of the construction of today’s Orthodoxy.

Berger’s view of religion is existential in that we each construct our own plausibility structure, our own sacred canopy and if we choose not to then it is an act of Existential bad faith, a lack of authenticity and not taking responsibility for choices. Even though he is a sociologist, he has little tolerance for those who just go with the flow of their friends and community.  Berger’s thought opens up the abyss between ideals and community, or between modern Orthodox (or any other movement’s) theology and the lightness of the community members.

The Heretical Imperative

The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1980) was his theology of humanism in an age of pluralism and choice. The book made a lasting impression on many as a clear theological definition of the modern believer as educated humanist.

The main thrust of the book is that we now live in an age of pluralism, in which modern people naturally question ideas and their sacred canopies and do not just accept them by fate. Today, we choose our sacred canopy. Berger reminds us that the original etymology of the heretical (hareisis) is “to choose.“ the taking of a choice. For Berger, the necessity of choice becomes the virtue of choice. Hence, the title means the imperative to choose. By “the heretical imperative”, Berger means this radical necessity to choose.

Berger discusses three possible responses to the modern religious crisis:

The first of these involves the reaffirmation of embattled tradition, or in other words neo-orthodoxy, especially the path of Karl Barth. One reaffirms the tradition as the one true tradition avoided the new condition. This approach is higher influential in Jewish Orthodoxy. Berger points out that neo-orthodoxy can never have the pristine innocence of simple orthodoxy.

The second possible response to the modern situation is “reductive,” best exemplified by Rudolf Bultmann. This approach allows one to create naturalistic and reforming versions of religion acquiescing to the modern condition, which for Berger entails excessive concessions to it. Many rabbis who turn Judaism into pop-psych, pop-culture, or social utility fall into this category even if they are observant.

The third and final possible response discussed by Berger, and for him the only valid one, is to be open to the human experience of faith. A religion that is open to the changes in society and knowledge and to the fact that we are choosing this affiliation. In many ways, it is a new form of humanistic religion.  Whereas, Shadal said nothing Jewish is foreign to me, implying that there is a fixed body of humanistic knowledge. For Berger, this need to be modified in that we are ever needing to confront the changes of society and ever widening circles of knowledge

Berger advocates a “mellow certainty,” a moderate position. A historically oriented approach within a tradition, with the understanding that one cannot simply swallow the tradition but has to enter into a reasonable dialogue with it.  We can associate this position with William James or Charles Taylor.

Elsewhere, he quotes his colleague Adam Seligman who uses the term “epistemological modesty.” Epistemological modesty means that you believe certain things, but you’re modest about these claims. You can be a believer and yet say, I’m not really sure. I think that is a fundamental fault line. For him this is the greater dividing line than between faiths, rather it is between those who pretend we are not making choices and those who are.

For Berger, the basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.  However, for him, it is not a pluralism as much as I make a decision based on what is known to me. Berger stated that modern individuals are, or ought to be free and are responsible for their own. An individual’s subjective experience of the world is “real” by definition and they possess certain rights over and against collectives.  (In contrast, postmodernists do not have individual subjectivity as much as a self that is constructed by situation and society.)

Berger’s stress on individual experience of choice is reflective of modern consciousness, which turns religion into a private act, essentially individualistic and experiential. Berger welcomes the pluralism of perspectives resulting from secularization. Since all thought, including modernity itself, is shaped by plausibility structures, no thought has a cognitive privilege with reference to any other thought. The theologian Van A. Harvey (1973) in an widely-read important review of Berger pointed out: “Berger’s own attempts at theology are a reflection of this crisis rather than a cure for it because his own theology itself has no norms or criteria that govern his statements. It simply is a reflection of his own personal sensibility.”

Berger emphasizes a middle approach that balances religious submission with an awareness of the modern condition, historicism, and contingency. He represents the modernist religious situation, especially the strategy of collective bargaining in which an “internal dialogue goes on within the believer, or within the community of believers.” The believer says to himself, “There is no way of holding on to the miracles, but we won’t give up on the revelation.”

Personably, Berger rejects the notion of a decisive revelation in Christianity but retain the notion of the Biblical God. He needed to maintain this pluralistic condition and found the negotiation that worked for him.   Or the observant Jew who may accept the State of Israel as messianic but not Chabad messianism, or she accepts the efficacy of prayer but not the Breslover conversation with God. It is a constant mediation and bargaining between the modernity and the belief.  (if one is actually interested in the Hasidut, then see my follow-up post on Berger and mysticism.)

Several modern Orthodox authors in the 1980’s and 1990’s used Berger’s qualities of the modern condition -autonomy, independence, and self-aware choice as their definition of Modern Orthodoxy. One author even directly associated the ideas of Peter Berger with Rav Soloveitchik. However, Berger’s approach is much more dynamic, individualistic, and accepting of the historical and social sciences. While, in my opinion, Rav Soloveithcik and Modern Orthodoxy was more Barthian, tradition bound, and collective. Even now, there is still a core of intellectual Modern Orthodoxy who understand Rav Soloveitchik’s Existentialism in Peter Berger terms, even acknowledging the influence of Berger’s definitions of modernity, autonomy, and pluralism on their Torah uMadda thinking, yet not seeing Berger’s differences from their perspective.

For example, as an existentialist, Berger places the legitimation of the community’s practices in personal choice, not denomination, gedolim, community, or tradition. If there is a tension between the tradition and the personal choice, then one must personally resolve the tension. However, a modern Orthodox author who finds a place for personal choice is their Orthodoxy is not the same as the fundamental sociological question of legitimization.

The tension of autonomy and tradition was a widely used phrase of 1990’s Modern Orthodoxy. The first Orthodox Forum was actually on personal autonomy and rabbinic tradition as a way of staking out a modernist claim. In the volume, Lawrence Kaplan advocated for greater autonomy and a virtue of individual decision-making. (Already a harbinger of things to come, one of the papers claimed that autonomy and creativity was to be limited to Roshei Yeshiva and Torah study). A similar question was asked in an Israeli volume  Between Authority and Autonomy in Jewish Tradition, eds. Avi Sagi & Zeev Safrai [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1997) Twenty years later, a different Orthodox Forum returned to ask a new generation about autonomy.  Yet, individual autonomy and acting according to the dictates of their conscience is still used by older observers to discuss Modern Orthodoxy in recent discussions.

The question is who is observant and Orthodox with a vision closest to Berger’s vision. Are Shadal, Levinas, Benamozegh, Hartman, or Boyarin closer to Berger’s vision? The question today is if one were to follow Peter Berger, then can Torah be open in the same way to new horizons of knowledge, of secularism and of society? Can one combine Torah with the pluralistic condition including the critiques of history and sociology? If one is already a furnished soul possessing all of the answers via the tradition, then Berger would see it as a retreat from the modern condition. Or maybe there does not have a Jewish equivalent to Peter Berger. There are enough educated lay people in the Jewish congregations who feel close to Berger’s existentialism and his heretical imperative who just use his thought by which to process and conceptualize their Torah.

I was recently at a wedding in which the person sitting next to me, an educated committed open Modern Orthodox person, pondered how the modern Orthodox world wants their children open to the world but not too open. In terms of Peter Berger, we can see that statement as  showing simultaneously that education is the key to being socialized into a community with its given plausibility structure. Nevertheless, the education should only be pluralistic enough to function in the world and attain professional success, but it should not be too open so as to break the current plausibility structure.  The education should not remove the taken-for-granted certainty provided through socialization in school.  Hence, Jewish day schools have a crucial function to both give a plausibility structure and at the same time to prevent Berger’s pluralism.

Some fault Berger for not depicting Judaism correct in his books. However, it is less accurate to fault Berger for not doing justice to Judaism because he also he does not do full justice to Islam, Catholicism, or Asian religions. He does focus at all on institutions, tradition, ritual,  authority, or study; today he would be read in conjunction with Talal Asad and others who see religion as law and authority

Later Essays

His later essays fill out many other aspects of the theological positions make up Berger’s worldview, which combined both liberal and conservative elements.  He became one of the main intellectual figures in the neoconservative movement along with his friend and First Things founder Richard J. Neuhaus.

Among the many notable points of Berger’s later work is a sustained rejection of the sociological thesis of secularization; most recent obituaries mentioned this point. His earlier works followed the majority of sociologists and assumed that religion was in decline before secularism. By the 1990’s, Berger firmly rejected that position and believed that religion was not declining or dissolving into obscurity in an increasingly secular world. Rather, religion was holding fast and even growing in some places, offering an increasing number of ways for human beings to find solace in a frightening world.  Nevertheless, rather than a reaffirmation of tradition, for Berger “Modernity is not characterized by the absence of God,” he wrote in a 2008 essay for the journal First Things, “but by the presence of many gods.”He critiqued the Fundamentalist project of the University of Chicago and even the use of the word fundamentalist as created by people who have no sense of the actual beliefs of the people.

For Berger, religion is an enduring quality and is ever returning. He often repeated that he expected a great revival in secular Scandinavia since transcendence always returns. He noted often, that the more colorful eruptions of transcendence have occurred in those places where secularization has been most aggressively enforced.  The children of the most orthodox secularists and enlightened modern homes have children who become members of Iskcon or returnees to orthodoxy (baalei teshuva).

On the other hand, the formerly pious world of rural America, which were once a bastion of religious commitment, are now in decline as portrayed in the book Hillbilly Elegy. They are now a main group of the growing number of “Nones”, without religion. Their sacred canopy was lost, in that it no longer sheltered them in their current decline and hence they gave up religion. However, for Berger they are a group that is likely to return once there is a new religious configuration speaking to them.

Second, he rejected the widespread concern about a supposed rampant individualism in the U.S., or the prevalence of an “autonomous” self.  For him, “The assumption made by Robert Bellah and Putnam that community in America has been falling apart is empirically questionable. It’s amazing to what extent Americans do in fact participate in every kind of community you can imagine–and give money and time and so on.  I don’t think Americans are all that individualistic.”

Third, he thinks that the problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance through the psychologizing of religion, as a therapeutic agency, and through the politicizing of religion. From his point of view, those who make their religion about culture will eventually lose their members because do not need the congregation if it lacks religious substance.

Fourth already in the 1990’s, Berger noted that the United Sates was breaking into two middle classes, a bourgeoisie, centered in the business community and a new middle class, based on the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge, whose members are the increasingly large number of people occupied with education, media, therapy and social justice.  Many of these people are on payroll, employed in bureaucracies or dependent on state subsidies. The new middle-class culture understood itself as “emancipatory” or “liberating” as against the traditional bourgeois virtues, most visible in the areas of sexual .and gender behavior. For Berger, this creates two conflicting middle class approaches to religion. Many of the issues dividing Modern Orthodoxy can be linked to this distinction of two cultures.

A Weak Skeptical Pluralistic Faith

If Berger advocates a pluralistic softer faith, then how can one build institutions on such a fragile basis? According to his own theories, there is a sociological need for institutions to preserve the faith. Viable institutions require a strong foundation of taken-for-granted verities, which exude an air of self-assured certainty that the pluralistic lack. If one constructs institutions on the basis of skepticism will these institutions not be extraordinarily weak, associations of individuals with no deep commitment? Can such institutions survive?

According to Berger: Yes, such institutions may be “weak”; the commitment of their members may be rather unreliable; but, yes, they can survive—and sometimes they show a surprising vitality.

Can permanent reflection be institutionalized?” By “permanent reflection”, he meant precisely the sort of skepticism and self-questioning that is created when the world is no longer taken for granted. Yes, such institutions are possible, but they differ from the older institutions built on the foundation of taken-for-granted verities. Such institutions are, by definition, voluntary associations. The same voluntariness by which people choose to join them may later allow them to leave. In this sense, these institutions are “weak.”

According to Berger, one  can convey values to children without pretending a fanatical certitude about them. There is a viable middle ground between fanaticism and relativism, in which one can build a community of people who are neither fanatics nor relativists.

The reason for his conclusion as to why a moderate faith will survive is his personal theological belief that at the core of his Christian tradition is truth, and this truth will reassert itself in every conceivable contestation. To be sure, he acknowledges, that no one who honestly enters into such a contestation emerges the way one entered; if one did, the confrontation was probably less than honest. In the act of reflection, every honest individual must be totally open, and this also means open-ended. Berger’s faith allows him to affirm that the church will survive until the Lord returns.  Jews, on the popular level, usually dont have such confidence and predict the downfall and death of Torah unless one capitulates to ignoring the modern condition.

Seeking Certainty

Does everyone have this pluralism? Can people retreat back into the position of certainty? Berger acknowledges that some seek refuge in the certainty of institutions and the tradition. Others, seek for certainty on the basis of an absolute understanding of the biblical text.  And third, one can seek certainty on the basis of one’s own religious experience, especially in the ever present the American revival movements.

Nevertheless, Berger always assumed that pluralism was our modern condition. For Berger, to pretend that one has certainty, in most cases, is a self-delusion. He never fuller appreciated the return of Christian Evangelicals and Orthodox Judaism in the 1990’s and first decade of 21^st century who sought certainty, eternal values, textual and institutional absolutes.  (I posted a few years ago about how he was just discovering the paranoid style of contemporary Judaism, which focuses on the Holocaust.)

Some Centrist modern Orthodoxy authors decry the contemporary condition of pluralism and choice, a key feature of 20^th century modernism from Virginia Wolf and William James onward to the existentialists as what they polemically and pejoratively mislabel as post-modernism relativism.

When looking at 21^st century congregations, Berger saw that the face of suburban congregants “now has a set and sour mien, an expression of permanent outrage,” in which a Protestant scowl has replaced the Protestant smile. Feminism more than anything else has set this tone in recent years for the displeasure among believers. According to Berger, this grimly humorless ideology has established itself as an unquestioned orthodoxy throughout the mainline churches. They still do not have transcendence or a serious relationship with God, but they have replaced their pleasantness with disdain for others, especially on gender issues.

Berger’s student James Davison Hunter wrote the classic Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), showing how the United States divided into conservatives and progressives, in which Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews are on one side and Liberal Christians and Jews are on another. In 1991, this was a new alliance limited to a few hot issues such as abortion. A quarter of a century later, a large plurality of Modern Orthodox has taken on much of the politics, values, theology, and style of the Evangelicals proving Hunter’s thesis.

In sum, Berger always held both his ideal belief in faith, piety, and personal commitment as a benchmark by which to judge sociological patterns. He was both a believing theologian and descriptive sociologist. As noted by many, the various positions Berger assumes and identifies are not always in perfect harmony with each other and sometimes they seem to operate at cross-purposes. Many faulted his sociology for having an implicit theology and conversely many faulted his theology for its sociological orientation.  Yet, this was the attraction of combining Existential theology with the lived religion of the pews useful for many clergy and religious thinkers to  make sense of the tensions of their religious communities.

To be continued with a follow-up post covering Peter Berger on Eastern Religions and Mysticism

The students and colleagues of Rav Shagar each developed different aspects of his thought. Rav Yair Dreyful, his co-founder of Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak emphasizes the emotive and personal existential value of Torah and mizvot. Some of his students, emphasize the need to re-integrate mysticism and meditation, of Rebbe Nachman, Chabad, Zohar, Rav Zadok, and Rebbe  Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. Others prefer intellectual discussions of post-modernity, language games, paradox, and Israeli society. Some of his students learned from him a need to be open and found paths in psychotherapy, poetry writing, film-making, and scholarship. Yishai Mevorach, one of the editors of the Rav Shagar’s writings, looked where he was pointing and went forward into the chaos.

Mevorach recently published a book called Theology of Absence: On Faith after Chaos (Resling Publishing, 2016) 171 pp, [Hebrew] where he is developing a post-secular, post-modern theology from Rav Shagar. (Resling publishes translations of works of literary and philosophic theory.)

Yishai Mevorach was born in Gush Etzion and after two years in Yeshivat har Etzion switched to become a devoted follower of Rav Shagar. He teaches in various locations.  Mevorach is in the midst of writing a trilogy about faith after the abyss. This book was the first; the second book will appear next year.  He is also still involved in editing Rav Shagar’s homilies.

Below is an interview with Mevorach based on his Hebrew book. We have to thank the translator Rabbi Josh Bolton, director and Senior Jewish Educator of the Jewish Renaissance Project at Penn Hillel. A graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Rabbi Josh also holds and MFA in poetry from UMass, Amherst. His new book, 100 Suggestions for Seekers and Spiritual Activists, Alternadox Press (forthcoming).

The most exciting part of this book is that it is a reflection of what is considered legitimate discussion and free exchange of ideas in the world of Rav Shgaar’s students and within certain parts, albeit rarified and narrow, of the religious Zionist world.  Mevorach has a really good collection of lectures and shiurim on Youtube, they are worth listening to, including one on Rav Shagar’s views about the first and second Temples. In the shiur, the First Temple represents certainty and the cherubs on the Ark behind the curtain, while in the Second Temple there is nothing behind the curtain, grasping toward the unknown.

Mevorach follows his teacher Rav Shagar in looking for new modes of study and new juxtapositions in Torah and new methods of study beyond what he considers the spiritual dryness of the Yeshivat Har Etzion method. He is original in formulating this as post-secular, in that the secular has already won. We now live a faith that bears both deep Godliness and simultaneously deep acknowledgement of the post-secular condition. Mevorach uses models of Torah after the destruction, Torah from the abyss, and Torah as post-Holocaust. Those who want to deny this condition are psychologically seeking a fundamentalism even if they live a modern life. At one point in the interview, he sees this need for Orthodoxy as the castration anxiety from the fear of losing the guarded object.

What is Torah in this new era? Mevorach gives theme and variations ranging from considering Torah as our linguistic discourse, to our existential commitment of love, to our surplus enjoyment and jouissance, in the language of Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan.

Other points, he frames this attachment in more minimal terms of the sign of circumcision, our naming ourselves Jews or the remnant that remains after everything, the way Freud identified with Judaism. Rav Shagar himself played with these ideas, in claiming that Jewish  nationalism  is  a  world  unto  itself –based on a citation from Zizek that the  Jews  “have  no  place  in  the  order  of  nations,” which for Shagar meant represents  the remnant, the sheerit, a particularistic,  of  attachment  to  the Jewish people and the  land. (Shagar, BeTzel  HaEmunah 126, edited by Mevorach).

Mevorach’s book is short, only 177 pages total, and a quick and enjoyable read. But only for those comfotable with Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, and Rosenzweig as well as the requisite knowledge of Talmud, Rav Zadok of Lublin and Rebbe Nachman. The first chapter jumps right into his thesis of a post-secular condition and the third chapter deals with the premises of the thesis surrounding Torah as described in this interview. When I asked Mevorach why he did not place chapter three first, he said that in an earlier draft it was first. You may want to skim it before the first chapter, and then read it in its current sequence. The second chapter was its own post-secular homily on love in Torah. The last part of the book on prayer as a simple necessity as a surplus of being was a good application of current theology to Torah. The book returns a humanism and an engagement with critical thought that many of the interpreters of Rav Shagar lack. Overall, Mevorach is quite optimistic and passionate about his project and its positive potential for a meaningful and energized Torah.

The book received a glowing review as a “celebration” and  “true and direct interpretation,” yet another review claimed he misread Rav Shagar and Rav Zadok but the review spends most of the review arguing about his application of Zizek. But notice, how telling is it that we now have a group of teachers of Torah that get  into public disputes over Zizek. As one comment on the review asked: “Who are the intended readers of such a review and this discussion?”

For those not familiar, here a few technical words that will help one in this interview. One should properly study these thinkers, but as a help to reading the article here are a few points as used in the interview. Bear in mind that Rav Shagar read Eric Santner’s  On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (2001), which put Franz Rosenzweig in dialogue with Jacques  Lacan connecting two thinkers who originally had no intrinsic connection. (Free free to skip the next few paragraphs and get right to the interview if you wish.)

Loosely based on Franz Rosenzweig: Existence means the true existence of the subject confronting his or her human condition directly. It does not mean as it often does in the Jewish world, the deep points of experience or connection found in prayer or human life. Rather, we are being who have to confront our finite existence and the horizons, in this case post secular, in which we live.  For example, Rosenzweig created an institution of adult education, a lehrhaus, where the goal is not to start with expertise or erudition but with a confrontation of the human condition, including finitude and secularism.  “A learning, no longer out of the Torah into life, but out of life, out of a world that does not know about the law, back into the Torah.” For Mevorach, we are creating Torah out of the depths of the post-secular condition.

The second concept needed for this interview are the 1970’s ideas of the French psychoanalyst Jacques  Lacan in which we use pieces of language and culture as a signifier, which is a sign without any referent. It does not refer to anything; rather absence is its fundamental feature.

Lacan thinks we recognize a signifier by reference to its place among other signifiers. For example, if we take a signifying system such as the Dewey decimal system in a library, I know that a book should be at a certain place on a shelf even if that place is empty and the book is not there. What Lacan calls here “the place where it has been effaced” remains even if the book itself is missing. For Mevorach, our Torah study is like the system by which we understand everything.

The third term needed for this interview is the concept of surplus and excess as well as the concept of remnant, as found in the thought of Lacan and Zizek.  The former term is what Mevorach seeks in religion and the remnant is what Mevorach thinks we have. For Lacan a surplus is always produced of jouissance-, an enjoyment that has no value but exists merely for the sake of the enjoyment. The remnant is what is left over after our signifiers, a residue, or remnant of the symbolization process.For example, when looking at an old photograph we are being touched by the remnant of the self, and this left over remnant.

Žižek talks about excess as surplus enjoyment, or what Lacan called jouissance. For Zizak, excess always corresponds with some lack, which creates a fetish as a substitute for something missing that saves us from having to confront the full impact of it’s absence. The power of any ideological structuring of reality lies in it’s ability to transform the source of its weakness, whatever is lacking, into a source of strength, its “excess”.

Interview with Yishai Mevorach

Translated by Rabbi Josh Bolton, revised and edited by Alan Brill

1. What was your vision in editing Rav Shagar’s lectures?

This is actually a difficult question for me because I don’t know to what extent I had a clear vision at the start of the whole project. The work was done with a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty as to whether I would edit it correctly, and an even greater uncertainty as to its reception and even whom its readership would be – a readership not even really “born” as I edited the books.

I can say that my original motivation was to be in touch with that important moment in my life in which I met Rav Shagar.  The editing the books was a type of havruta with Rav Shagar.

While he was still alive, I merited to sit and listen to his Torah. After his passing, fulfilling his request that his writings be published, a number of us were brought in to do this work. I was given the opportunity to create new juxtapositions (tzerufim hadashim) with Rav Shagar – even after he had passed. This task was something different from just editing. It was a type of cleaving (devekut) between two souls. To a certain degree, it was an experience of spiritual conception and I don’t possess an adequate enough perspective to describe its meaning for me – and for him.

As I worked, the words of Rav Shagar stood before my spirit: “It is impossible to grasp religion without its mystical core. Not mysticism in the sense of a “mystical experience” – but a mysticism that overwhelms one’s entire existential reality”. A type of “solid point” as he would say, which necessitates religious existence.

Again in his words, “To understand oneself in a radical way”. That is to say, there is no possibility of grasping religion without its radical core. It is impossible to engage religion without tapping into the radical foundation that enables and necessitates the mystical engagement. Religious engagement is a radical act, connected to the religious situation of “the surplus or excess.”

All this was included in my intentions as I edited the work – to implant Shagar’s radical foundation into the Religious Zionist world, with the understanding that this may be the only possibility for its revival.

2. Can you tell the story of how you left Har Etzion and came to Rav Dreifus?

I had begun studies at Yeshivat Har Etzion where I learned for two years, completely immersing myself in a life of Torah. Nevertheless, during that whole period and especially after my entering the army, I felt like the Torah I was learning had become secondary or incidental to my life.

I’ll be more specific. The Torah offers great assurances for this life. Rebbe Nachman describes this “double portion” (pi shenayim) in several teachings. However, the musar and religious books (seforim) that I was studying did contain the elevation and tension as promised in the texts that I was beginning to explore, but it was not being taught to me.

I felt emptiness and disappointment. It made no difference how hard I attempted to learn Torah, even with a totality akin to the manner of Hasidut (in its original sense), I still never tasted that “God is Good”(Psalm 34:9). I want to emphasize that I have never sought any type of spiritual experience. I have only sought an elevation in my life of faith, such that the Torah would be a catalyst to challenge my religious life through unexpected magnitude and elevation.

During my army service, began to feel like very little stood between me and pursuing a life outside the Torah world. Truthfully, it made me very sad. So when I finished my service, I really didn’t know what direction to take. Back to Har Etzion? Somewhere else? My sense at the time was that there were no other places for me outside Har Etzion, so I had resigned to return there and basically to wait for the flickering flame of Torah to die out.

Yet. three years earlier, I had been present for one single shiur of Rav Shagar’s – a fact that changed everything for me. I didn’t understand a single word he had said and actually his lack of charisma left me with a sense of discomfort. Nevertheless, for some reason as I sat in this shiur I knew with certainty that I was going to be his student. It’s that experience that brought me three years later to stand at the doorway of Yeshivat Siach, the yeshiva of Rav Shagar and Rav Yair Dreifus.

Rav Dreifus greeted me, sitting me down for a conversation that I remain grateful for until this day. As we spoke, I described to him my feelings of emptiness and disappointment with my studies until then. That I had not found my place in the Beit Midrash. Rav Dreifus lowered his gaze and told me how he completely understood all the things I was describing. However, he asked that I try Yeshivat Siach for one month. If it did not work, then he would give me a blessing to pursue a life outside of the Torah. Nevertheless, he was certain, so he claimed, that Rav Shagar would change my life – which is indeed, what happened.

In retrospect, I believe that what changed my life was encountering the radical core, which Rav Shagar made possible. Not a radicalism in the sense of radical content like the Torah of Ishbitz or Rebbe Nachman. Rather, the radical quality of religious existence. A quality found in the teachings of Rav Shagar.

3. Why is the passage from Rav Shagar’s, “Remnant of Faith (Shaarit HaEmunah)” describing faith as “excess” or “surplus” so important in his thinking and in yours? 

This question is at the foundation of my entire book and touches on something essential in the thought of Rav Shagar. I contend that our faith today exists in a modality of “what remains”, or surplus.

Various scholars describe our period as “post-secular”; a period in which religion and religious faith have found their way back to the center of the stage after the secularism of modernity. Nevertheless, this faith comes after secularism. It is not the same religion and knowledge that once was dominant in the world, taken for granted, and at the core of human identity. Rather, what we are talking about today is a religiosity that has appeared in the world even though God had already died in – a religion that has appeared as a ghost.

The post-secular age does not mean that people who were discrediting religion and scorning faith are now suddenly donning tefillin, observing Shabbat, and praying for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rather, post-secular means that people are sobering up to the reality that for some reason the project of secularism did not necessarily succeed. What was thought to be a reliable solution, ended up leading to the stubborn return of a repressed religiosity.  After science and technology completely dominated the reality of life, and after the smoke of the chimneys of Auschwitz and Maidanek, religious faith should have faded into nothingness – and in some ways it did. Nevertheless, we find that it constantly remains, though in a different form.

Today, accord to Rav Shagar, faith is present as “a psycho-theological symptom of unexplainable stubbornness”. It is in this spirit that one can read the works of Rav Shagar. They were written in the state of being of the Tribe of Dan, the tribe that according to tradition was comprised of the stragglers who traveled toward the rear in the journey from Egypt to the Land of Canaan. The rabbis of the Talmud teach that the tribe of Dan collected all the stragglers and all the lost items of the tribes that proceeded them in the journey. One might say, the tribe existed in a modality of “what remained”; of “remnants” – a “remnant of faith”.

4. What does it mean to be “Orthodox but not Orthodox”

This expression “Orthodox but not Orthodox” is an expression of Rav Shagar’s from his essays, “On Translation,” “Multiple Worlds,” and “In the Doorway of Academia”.

In these essays, Rav Shagar tries to conceive of a religious existence that is not wrapped up in the attempt to guard an object of faith as an object. For just as one tries to guard that object it slips from the hands of the believer for any variety of reasons: outside influences, the evil inclination, secularism, and other various forces.

Rav Shagar attempted to describe a believer who does not guard against anything. He wrote, “[This religiosity] is in tension with the impulse within religious society to “guard [or keep]” the [observance of the] kippah, prayer, tzitzit, tefillin, etc. – an attempt to change religiosity into something artificial, lacking a spine and independence, which is one of the reasons for spiritual superficiality within the religious community. Religion that conceives itself as a manager in a battle for survival is a religion that lacks roots and depth”.

If this is true, then who is the believer who does not guard against the object and objects of faith? Rav Shagar envisioned a believer who regards these deeply imbedded objects as a type of “remnant”. That is, they are not elements added to the believer’s life, but rather are elements that are impossible to erase from his experience. No matter what he becomes, they remain within him. This is a believer who sees faith and the commandments as a surplus of his being, and as such, they are constantly present, wherever he goes. Therefore, the verse states, “For what great nation is there that has a God so close at hand as is Hashem our God whenever we call upon Him?” (Deut 4:7).

Even when the believer passes through experiential contexts (outer and inner) that reject religion, he remains entirely religious. He is not a particular type of religious person – he and the religious experience are one.  As Talmud Kiddushin speaks about a scholar for whom the Torah is “his Torah” – that is to say, there is no space between him and Torah/Faith.

Here Franz Rosenzweig’s idea comes to mind: “The word believing does not here mean a dogmatic self-commitment, but a total obligation embracing the entire person. In this sense, the heretic too can be a believer, and the Orthodox an unbeliever.” (Letter to Rosenheim)  The nearness of the subject to faith causes faith to include also its negation in the lack of faith, though faith remains ultimately inerasable. Elsewhere, Rosenzweig portrays the authentic religious person as both “disbelieving child of the world and believing child of God in one” (Star of Redemption 297.)

If this is so, a religious existence stands before us that is gripped by faith and the commandments, but does not grasp them. This is the difference between the Orthodox and the “Orthodox but not Orthodox.” The Orthodox grasp the objects of faith as objects, while the “Orthodox but not Orthodox” are gripped by them, and they do not release him.

Parenthetically, from a psychoanalytic perspective, this religious existence is in opposition to the usual tune of religious believers, the tune of persistent fear of loss of the object of faith.  Think of it as a fear of a castration (one formulated by Freud, the father of secularism) of the guarded object: faith. This fear of castration emerges because this religious perspective conceives of faith as just another object to be grasped. There is a fear of losing the additional object, which in reality does not belong to the individual in the first place.

Rebbe Nachman would refer to this relationship between this kind of believer and the object of faith as “another thing”. Faith becomes another thing, another object, which I grasp very tightly so that it does not slip away or disappear. I must present a claim of ownership. From this perspective, religion falls into an uncompromising and violent fundamentalism. Opposed to that relationship, Rav Shagar suggests another possibility in which faith exists as “a bit more” – an excess. Not as another object but rather as something extra in my being. This is a faith that does not work to guard itself because, in any event, it exists.

The difference between an existence that grips and an existence that is gripped seems at face value to be small and insignificant. The generational struggles between the various Jewish denominations – liberals and conservatives – have left us with the mistaken perspective that the place of meaning from a religious perspective is in political questions of “yes mechitza” or “no mechitza”, the position of women (yes or no), and many other things that distract us from questions of greater significance.

Definitely, there will be a political difference between the Orthodox and the “Orthodox but not Orthodox”. But this difference is less important than the essence of their different points of relationship to the world in general and to the religious world in particular.

5. How is the Torah a doorway to God in the postmodern age? How does Rav Zadok haKohen fit in?

From a certain perspective, I think this question might be leading us in the wrong direction. The basic assumption of the question is that the Jew requires a doorway in order to enter towards God. This assumption is founded on a particular theological conception and I would go so far as to suggest that the Jew has no need for a doorway because he is already there with God. In this sense, the Torah is not a doorway, rather it is something else that sustains our religious existence. The question is whether this “something else” is unique to the Torah or not. I don’t think that Torah is the only doorway – but for me it is the most meaningful one, and in that sense it is singular.

I will explain, having already arrived at a postmodern perspective. An individual is not a singular coherent existent or being, developing from the inside out. Rather, being is decentralized and begins from without.

The individual and the world are composed of many “letter permutations” (according to the language of Hasidut) of a symbolic order. These permutations create a system of identity for the innerness of the subject. [AB- Lacan argues that the subject is “the subject of the signifier”.] The individual is a creation of discourses and utterances, which compose who he is. In connection to our subject, we can say that faith in God is not born from the recognition or experience of the subject, but rather comes about as a result of the discourses and realities from which a person is composed.

As Jews the matter is clear to us because first of all, God has a name and he is identified with this name. Secondly, faith as a name is engraved into our bodies – through circumcision; and even more so, through our origin. As the verse states, “My people, upon whom My name is called” (Chronicles II 7:14).

Faith, the divine encounter, is within the very letters that sustain our being as Jews. This is the deep essence of Hazal’s statement, “Israel – Even if he sins, he is still Israel”. God and faith in God are not concepts – Name and names are engraved in the Jews existence.

The Torah for me is not a doorway, it is a language, a discourse – the words and names that are bound to my body. As Levinas’ writes concerning this point, the Torah is “the first words, spoken, words that had to be spoken in order to give meaning to human existence, and these words were spoken in a form open for interpreters to reveal their deeper dimensions”(Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo by Emmanuel Levinas). What is the meaning of Levinas’ statement here? What does it mean that the Holy Scriptures are “the first words”? Is this a historical statement akin to “the Torah proceeded the world”? Or let us ask further: Levinas states that the Torah is what imbues life with meaning. Does he mean essentially that the Torah is the reason for the creation of the world? Anyone who is familiar with Levinas would know that is not what he means to suggest. What he means is that consciousness in the religious dimension anticipates reality from an analytical and not an historical perspective. The religious dimension is ascribed a priority over reality, over “what occurs”. As Jews, the religious dimension is placed before our own existence. It is engraved within our origin.

This is addressed in the second part of your question concerning Rav Zadok. He is one of the thinkers who reflects deeply on this issue of faith as “name”. For example, his beautiful statement in Tzidkat Hatzaddik: “The essence of Judaism is in the calling of the name Israel”. It is a radical statement. The essence of Judaism is the very naming of a person as Israel. Judaism is not keeping the commandments, or faith, or beliefs. Rather, only my being “ba’al shem”, having the name of Israel.

6. What are “tzerufim chadashim” —new letter permutations?

“New letter permutations” is a concept that Rebbe Nachman (and following him Rav Shagar) dealt with at great length. Rav Shagar believed that religious language has the capacity to change its permutations, the way letters can be rearranged. Primarily, these permutations can interweave themselves and jumble themselves, creating new permutations and fashioning new vessels for the divine presence in this world.

And so sometimes language that is misconstrued as flawed or confused may in actuality be a new type of vessel, one conveying a different divine presence in reality. In his writings about these emerging permutations, Rav Shagar spoke about new and provocative religious images, ones that cause us to reconsider the assumptions we hold with regard to what we consider religious or not. In the same vein, Rav Shagar also experimented by integrating philosophical and scholarly modalities into his own Torah study, which he shared with his students.

“Letter permutations” is a concept from classical Kabbalah teaching that the individual and entire world are composed of letters. In the words of Rebbe Nachman, “Everything contains various permutations of letters through which everything comes into being”. The Kabbalah scholar Yosef Avivi claims that one of the Besht’s main innovations to Lurianic Kabblah was that while Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria) spoke of divine sparks of light that are scattered throughout existence bringing everything to life, the Besht spoke of scattered letters.

For example, the Admor Ha’Zaken (Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liady) writes in Sha’ar Yichud Ve’haEmunah concerning the verse in Psalms (119: 89), “Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens”. He cites the Besht who explains the verse as, “The words that you spoke.”   Is the “heaven in the midst of the water” (Genesis). The words and the letters of the Torah stand firm in the heavens and are forever enclothed in all the heavens giving them vitality.

Unlike sparks of light, every letter is different. A reversal of their order can cause changes in meaning and bring about dissonance. When the inner order of the letters is arranged optimally the inner life force corresponds. But when that order is flawed, then, in the words of Rebbe Nachman, “they are mixed up into alternative permutations”. That is to say, the words create a different unique type of life force, thereby forming the matter into something different. This is important to note because I think we are wrestling with something of great depth.

In the classical Kabbalistic concept of sparks of light, the flow (shefa) of divine light remains identical in every moment and place. Only the garment changes. That is to say, the sparks bring life both to the world of holiness as well as to the world of impure shells (klipot). A spark forever remains a spark, for light is light. The divine flow (shefa) of letters is essentially different. Not only can the letters change, the life force itself can also change. If a flaw is present in letter permutations causing them to be mixed up and disrupted, then we have a damaged divine flow (shefa). There remains the divine flow (shefa), but it is damaged. The dichotomy between perfect divine light and damaged shells (klippot) is shattered. After the innovation of the Besht, the divine life force itself can function flawed, mixed up and disordered.

If we push this just a bit more, we can see that before us is an analysis of religious language more generally. Religious language can exist in a flawed way, yet nevertheless function as a religious language. According to Rebbe Nachman, it still conveys divine flow, but of “shattered letters”.

We can apply these concepts in describing the religious subject as composed of permutations of letters, only now the letters are creating an “identity fusion” making the person one with them.  The subject’s own permutations of letters may create a sense of disorder and confusion, yet do not fully prevent the person from being a vessel for the religious divine flow. Perhaps this the situation for the “Orthodox-non-Orthodox”, who knows?

7. How does the Torah have infinite deconstructive meanings? What are we looking for when we create new Torah?

There is a letter attributed to Nahmanides entitled, “Discourse on the Inner Meaning of the Torah”, in which he responds to a student’s question: What is the inner essence of the Torah?The Ramban’s answer is surprising. We would think that a kabbalist like the Ramban would answer that the inner essence of the Torah was some type of mystical experience. But the Ramban chooses a different path.

For him, the inner essence of the Torah is the fact that it is without vowels, for, “if the Sefer Torah included vowels it would have a limit and a measure (like things of matter have known forms) and it would not be possible to interpret it except according to the particular vocalization of a word. But because the Sefer Torah includes multiple possibilities of meaning and because in each and every word there is an abundance of connotation, it was composed without vowels, permitting its maximum interpretation”. That is to say, the essence of the Torah is that it is composed without vowels, creating the need to return to interpret and to bestow meaning.

Afterwards he comments: “Always pursue her, and be concerned over what you do not understand and happy with what you do understand. For thus it is written, ‘It is no empty thing for you’ (Deut. 32:47). The Torah is not empty beyond its simple meaning. The Torah has a soul that God breathed into it, and this soul is its essence. If you find emptiness in the Torah it is only on account of your own short comings, as the verse states, ‘It is no empty thing for you”.  As the rabbis have interpreted, if it is empty, it is on account of you.”

In other words, the essence of the Torah and what defines its soul is its constant shedding of signified reading of the signs. Therefore, this essence, that which is the “root and essence of faith,” according to the Ramban, is not some specific content but rather its structure of linguistic dynamism.

For the Torah commentator, Rabbi Bahye ben Asher, this issue is even more pointed:

The Sefer Torah is composed without any vowels in order to allow each individual to interpret in a way that he desires. Letters without vowels can carry multiple intentionality and be divided into several sparks of light. Thus, we do not vowelize the Torah, for the meaning of any word with vowels is limited to a single matter, but without vowels, many wondrous and awesome things can be inferred.

The Torah as an unvoweled text invites a multiplicity of interpretations, issues, intentionality, and differentiations. To vowelize and punctuate the Torah would constitute a type of violence against the text, constricting it in the direction of particular understandings and definitions. Vocalization reveals itself as an attempt to domesticate and tame the savage creativity hidden within the restless text of the Torah.

Another Kabbalistic-Hasidic tradition related to the vocalization of the Torah describes the Torah as initially composed of a “mound of unarranged letters” (“tel shel otiot”); Or, in the language of the Ba’al Shem Tov, “All the words of our holy Torah were jumbled in a mixture.” Only later was the Torah separated into words when it came to earth: “The meaning of its order – according to the ways of the world”. This description of the Torah as being founded on a mixture of letters (or, more intensely, a “ruins of letters”, which is what tel actually means), suggests that there is something within the Torah that stands in tension with the meaning we ascribe to the Torah; in tension with its meaning and understanding. In other words, the heart of the Torah is [in the language of Lacan] an enigmatic signifier, a “mound of letters”.

The truth is that these traditions that touch upon the text of the Torah are related to the questions you asked previously. When I speak about the “name Israel” or about the names and syntactical elements that are engraved in my being, I can understand it two ways. Either as a signified particular verbal definition, which one could refer to as a Haredi perspective: a perspective that suggests that it possesses the specific understanding of the substance of the “name Israel” already with assigned vowels and vocalization.

Or, and in contrast, in the spirit of the esoteric sages I referenced, it’s possible to see that the name “Israel” does not in fact possess assigned vowels and vocalization. The name requires every individual to come and give it vocalization and meaning – a vocalization and meaning that the name constantly shakes off because the Torah does not permit itself to be ensnared by specific meaning. The Torah constantly creates tension with regards to the existing vocalization. That is to say, the name Israel creates a type of fundamental tension that demands a solution.

Of course, a more radical possibility exists, in which this name that appears as a “mound of letters” may also be a destructive foundation that has played out in the lives of Jews– both religious and secular – destroying all frameworks, destroying all that one thought he or she understood about this life.

The non-esoteric Torah considers anything that rejects or challenges its immutability as a something bad that a believer must guard against and resist.  However, the Kabbalist, person of secrets, internalizes that the Torah enforces itself, even the elements of destruction within it. The mixture and jumble are present in the very heart and structure of the Torah.

In one of the chapters of my book dealing with the Torah as an unvocalized text, I cite Freud in the introduction to the Hebrew edition of “Totem and Taboo”:

Anyone reading this book cannot easily place himself in the spiritual position of the author, who doesn’t understand Hebrew and is totally alienated from the religion of his forefathers…but who nevertheless never denied his belonging to his people and felt that his essence was Jewish and never sought it to be otherwise. Were they to ask him: What yet remains Jewish within this, considering you have given up on connection with your people? He would answer: A great deal remains, apparently – the essence.

Freud has no connection at all to the religion of his fathers, he is alienated from the national ideals, and nevertheless he feels that the essence of Judaism is within him. He is unable to know what it is and he is incapable of explaining it – but he is a Jew. He is a Jew even though his Judaism completely contradicts his identity: the identity of a Viennese scholar without religious (or any particular context), a man of the entire world.

Freud’s Judaism is nothing other than a disorder – a mound of letters – rejecting his identity.

He embodies what we could call “The Non Jewish Jew”. Judaism is present as a subversive foreignness within the Not Jewish. Therefore, it is understandable why Freud wrote his introduction in the third person. It was impossible for him to have written it in the first person because it attends to the stranger in his world. Following the emergence of a “remnant of Judaism”, he becomes a stranger in relation to his own self.

8. Why is Franz Rosenzweig so important for today?

Rosenzweig’s personal story, out from which his ideas emerge, enables us to build anew the religious world as “what remains”. Rosenzweig lived within an assimilated family, far from Judaism and actually quite close to the Christianity of his friends’ lives. And yet through the arch of his life, he experienced a return to Judaism.

What is so interesting about this return is that it never erased his perspective as an assimilationist. He had returned to a Judaism that had dissipated and yet nevertheless remained. Rosenzweig was never a returnee (hozer ba’teshuvah) who gave up on the fundamental experience of his life without Judaism. In some sense he never gave up on the “death of Judaism” all the while returning to it. He possessed a “remnant of faith” (as discussed in question 3). He never disregarded the “Death of God” even while God penetrates into his life. This dimension in Rosenzweig’s thought, found primarily in his letters, contains great contributions for those of us trying to sustain a religious, post-secular experience.

There is a trend of Americans rabbis going to Israel for a few weeks and upon return exclaiming: “how come we don’t have a Rav Shagar world here? Think of what our educational institutes would look like.” They imagine that Religious Zionist institutions, rabbis and youth are following Rav Shagar. It is somewhat akin to an Israel visiting Drisha, Mechon Hadar, and the 92^nd St Y, then proclaiming that the lectures he heard are what is being preached by the RCA-OU.  In actually, one of the leading intellectual influence of the Religious Zionist world is Rabbi Eli (Eliezer) Sadan (b. 1948) the architect of the religious military preparatory programs, Bnai David, which in turn became a model for the others. There are many other important figures including the heads of the yeshivot. I am offering this blog post as somewhat of corrective. (I will correct any errors as they are pointed out.)

In 1988 , Rabbi Eli Sadan together with Rabbi Yigal Levinstein set up the first pre-military preparatory program, Bnei David  in the community of Eli Shvat Shomron , which encouraging them to serve in combat units and officers. Rather than studying Talmud at a Hesder Yeshiva or going straight to the army, the yearlong program in the preparatory program get the the HS graduates for success in the army and a religious Zionism world view.

Sadan was a paratrooper and then studied for 15 years at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva , where he studied for 15 years under Zvi Yehuda Kook and Rabbi Zvi Israel Tau. His worldview is basically part of the world of the Yeshivot Hakav, that avoid secular culture, avoid academics, and would reject everything the liberal Orthodoxy of Israel represents. This yeshiva world has been aggressive in the placement of their graduates and the average school principal or teacher is a product of his worldview.

More significantly, the graduates of the preparatory programs have entered in large numbers the military and command echelons of the Israeli government including the Israel Defense Forces, the Mossad Intelligence Agency, the ISA (Israel Security Agency – Shin Bet) and the State Prosecutor’s Office. This ideology has become part and parcel of the current Israeli leadership

Rabbi Eli Sadan major work is His Hands Remained Steady (2001, reprinted in a new edition 2013) [Hebrew] is an essential book to understand todays religious Zionist work. A translation is a desideratum. His work is easy to digest and quite lucid.

I am summarizing the book to let my American readers understand the backdrop against which Rav Shagar and all the New Religious Zionists are working. I am not interested in discussing the political implications of this work, which are more significant than can be imagined. Please do not start sending me emails of your political views. I am interested in his view of Judaism.

The main purpose of Sadan’s preparatory program and of his teaching is to mediate the tension between the ideal Torah view and the requirements of the State, the government and the army (described here in a prior post by Elisheva Rosman-Stollman). To do this, Sadan invests the government and the army with messianic import as the realistic arm by which God’s providence takes place, similar to the kings in the Bible. The two other related goals is to apply the messianic teachings of Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook to the politics of the last 25 years as well as decrying the there media, liberals, the arts, and academic as entirely false and the enemy of religious Zionism.

In his vision, there is never a heresy in the authority of the state. Religion and Torah scholars define democracy. Unlike like Rabbi Tau who teaches that one can disobey orders. for Rav Sadan, one is not to disobey orders.  In Rav Sadan’s conceptualiztion, the basic values of secularism and non-Merkaz Torah are the individualism of self-realization and fulfillment of personal desires. (This would condemn Rav Shagar.) In contrast, the ideal Religious Zionist knows they are part of a collective messianic destiny.

The approach has come into the news recently with their condemnation of the LGBT community, his attacks on accuses the army’s Education Corps as trying to “re-educate” religious soldiers, and with Rabbi Yigal Levinstein’s condemnation of women in the army.  On a broader level, some critics feel that his disciples are attempting to create a religious army and establish a halachic state.

Rav Dreyfus, the head of Yeshivat Siah Yitzhak carrying on Rav Shagar’s legacy, stated in an offhand biting comment that most Religious Zionist Jews are only interested in the ideas of Minister of Education Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) and not those of Rav Shagar. In 2016, Bennett awarded Rav Eli Sadan the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievements. The summary of the book below will explain his importance and the connections.

The most important chapter is chapter four where he defines democracy as the collective work of the Jewish people to realize the messianic vision. He is against any form of minority rights, civil rights or liberal democratic principles. Additionally, since the government is like the kings of ancient Israel, he affirms Divine right of Prime Minister and he thinks the military police advance humanity. The message is that the current state is the Divine presence on earth and we have to study the current events through Torah eyes. This is a very strong exceptionalism outside of all secular and liberal understandings of politics and in which everything in the world and in Israel revolves around religious Zionism.

It is worth comparing this pre-millennial dispensation model to the Evangelical versions in the United States  or the anti-liberal democratic Muslim thinkers. How does this compare to American dominionists like pastor Hagee or Islamic democrats like  Yusef Al-Qaradawi. My own interest is what does this make of the Jewish religion? Torah study, prayer, ethics, and mizvot take a back burner to realizing the millinarian vision. One should compare this Torah to other recent formulations of Torah, either spiritual or intellectual conceptual.

His Hands Remained Steady

Rabbi Eli Sadan major work is His Hands Remained Steady (2001, reprinted in a new edition 2013) is a ten-chapter book that includes his own ideas, expositions of the classic positions of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook and Rav Tau, and question and answers on contemporary issues. One can hear in the background the original setting as lectures to eighteen year olds. One should note that the Hebrew word Emunah is translated as steadiness (as in Exodus 17:12), not faith, belief, or trustworthiness.  The goal is to remain steady in the messianic vision. I acknowledge again that this book is quite political but my interest is in its pre-millennial dispensations of current event and its vision of Torah. I apologize in advance to all those will offended by reading this ideology, but it should be better known.

Chapter One is an educational vision on the importance of understanding our Messianic age; we need to study inner process of history as known through the writing of Rabbbi Zvi Yehudah Kook, Maharal, and the forged Kol HaTor ascribed to the students of the Vilna Gaon. We have to devote ourselves to studying this order of redemption and then to actually sense it in our lives. We also need to see where current events fit into this pre-millennial dispensation scheme. Once we know the meaning of history, then we respond without vigilante actions or personal overstepping of the state, we respond with nerves of steel, and with a self-sacrifice for the entire people of Israel.  You will notice how far this agenda is from those of the past that stressed Talmud, halakhah or Jewish thought.

Chapter Two is on loving every Jew. But there is a strong paternal and judgmental sense of the need to love them even if they go to movies, watch TV, and go to theater, all of which destroy and make their souls impure. The removal of these cultural deviations is as important for our messianic future as settlement and security. Nevertheless, the non-religious are our brothers in building the state even if they are leftists, especially since many of them have left have done good things for the state at earlier points in their lives.

In this chapter, he also sets out that baseless hatred destroyed the Second Temple, it was not destroyed   because the Romans defeated the Jews militarily. Our success today is through all working together- religious and secular. When Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai asked for Yavneh and her sages, he was not a pacifist or accepting political realism as often preached, rather he knew the baseless hatred of brothers was going to lead to the downfall of the Temple.

The Religious Zionists are being falsely accused as an act of baseless hatred of killing Prime Minister Rabin, but that was a political, not a religious, act. Besides, Oslo was terrible.

Finally, chapter two brings up a theme that reoccurs often in the book that all Arabs and all Palestinians are terrorists who teach their children to be martyrs. They are entirely outside of the State of Israel, which is only for Jews as their messianic destiny. (For more on this see later chapters, especially on what he calls democracy.) He does acknowledge that we all know fine Arabs who are decent people in the sense of “some of my best workers are wonderful Arabs.” Nevertheless, his negative generalizations stand in his mind.

The Third Chapter is on the ideological battle his students will face. For Sadan, there is no freedom of thought in Israel because the left controls everything. Liberal pluralism is entirely wrong and nonsense. We need truth and justice of the Torah to be stressed in the public sphere. Pluralism is not tolerance but against truth and the Torah. For example, didn’t Bibi Netanyahu’s  “Terrorism: How the West Can Win”  1986  already prove that all Palestinians are terrorists but this truth does not matter to the Israeli pluralists and the media who ignore the truth.  Bibi’s book becomes part of the secrets of the redemption.

Chapter Four is the major innovation of the book and the most theoretical chapter offering his view of politics and democracy. I would assign this chapter to a class to understand his views. For Sadan, democracy means partnership (shutafut), a partnership of Jews only. For him, the original meaning of democracy of the Greeks was only a polis of Greek citizens they excluded others. Fpr Sadan, Jewish Israelis don’t and should not accept the liberal democracy of minority rights at all. Nor any other Western ideas of democracy. Rather for us, democracy means that since the coming to be of the Jews as a political nation in 1948, we are to work as one nation, a partnership of all Jews and we will agree to work out of differences by political means despite our differences.  We are the nation of Jews as a state and no longer just the Jewish people.

This is where Sadan makes effective use of questions and answers.

Question: But isn’t much of our agenda religious coercion?

Answer: Absolutely not! Coercion is only when you throw rocks at car on Shabbat but if we decide as a people that a law is needed as a nation for the nation then it is not coercion. Liberals think that there should be civil marriage to avoid coercion but it would break up the nation with potential mamzerim and non-Jews.  Hence, is not coercion because the law is needed or else it would break up the nation, the partnership. Even though the Knesset has atheists and anti-religious members they are all nevertheless working for the Jewish people and we listen.

The liberal world would claim such a law is not moral because it violates individual rights to make decisions but we as Religious Zionists have no interest or concern with being an American style democracy. We are a democracy only in the sense that we collectively work out the destiny of the Jewish people as a collective.

In fact, Western democracy is really religious coercion because I am put upon and have to tolerate decisions against my beliefs. In contrast, our democracy is working out the best for the people and they should be strong and accept it.

Question: Should we have a king? Answer: This is a debate of Maimonides and Abarbanel, but we restore a king only if and when the people want it and they do not want it yet.

There is no objective media. They are biased against religious Zionism. The left stirs up the other nations against us. The media supports our worst enemies.  Their ideas are dead. They are like the woman in the book of Kings whose baby died and claims the others baby as her own.

Question: What do we do if the Torah contradicts the state? Answer: The ethics of the Torah comes first, that is why the prophets often rebuked the king.

Chapter Five is on the need to learn Emunah meaning steadiness. We need to see clearly the stages of the unfolding of redemption from the 16^th century to today, and how our politics is miraculous.

Question: Aren’t we mixing religious mysticism with topics that should be approached rationally and as human events? Saying the “dawn of the messianic age” make me worry!

Answer: The concept “dawn of the messianic age” is not mystical or nebulous but is exactly defined. It is the removal of our subjugation and living as a free people. It started as a miracle in 1948 but is now a natural process. We follow a natural political process. When we say that this is the dawn of the messianic age it is to not evaluate the state now as a messianic state, rather it is on steady on how it will be in the future. You cannot call the prophets of Herzl mystical. They were rational and so is our vision.  (150)

Chapter Six is on the holiness of the State. The building of the state is a mizvah of Torah. The centrality of inheriting the land is the pillar of the Torah. Statements in the Bible such as being a “nation of priests”  or “one nation” and all other statements are about nation building. The whole Torah and its very essence is about state building.  The State of Israel is God’s presence on earth.

State building is a supernal holiness in the eyes of all the nations. It is also a rebuke to the Christians who stole our scripture and gave it a different meaning based on the claim that God left the Jews.  Everyone in the world will see how God keeps his promise to return the Jews to the land.  There is an inner sublime holiness to the state guided by the spirit of God. Yet we still see its human faults.

Question: But isn’t Israel a secular state with secular leaders, how is it divine? How do we work with secular if our goal is holiness and the presence of God’s spirit?

Answer: It still has Torah values, since (1) Most even secular Jews want Jewish values (He quotes newspaper surveys to prove this.) (2) We are confident that in time everyone will return to religious observance (3) Their inner soul and their decisions are part of the divine plan for the coming to be of the state even if they don’t consciously know it.

Question: But arent security, economics, health, transportation and other governmental departments secular realms and you make them sacred? Maybe we should separate the holy from the secular?

Answer: This is true about every other nation but Israel, which is not to be treated like other nations like France or the USA.  We are not a state in the Western liberal sense. We are a holy nation and a kingdom of priests living according to a divine promise. We don’t want to rule others either by Jihad or religious mission, like other nations, but we just want the fulfillment of the biblical promise to the patriarchs. We are the unfolding of the messianic age. I even dress for a religious holiday on election day because I rejoice in our becoming a nation.

Chapter Seven is the importance of honoring the State in all its branches as fulfilling the Biblical promise. Responsibility toward maintaining the public sphere is holiness. “The military police advance humanity” because they create a presence of the state. Providence is shown in through the natural workings of government.

Chapter Eight is on the possibility of tensions between religious Zionism and the State. He answers that there are not any tensions if everyone is working for the collective. The Prime minister should be treated as an angel of God; he is like a king of ancient Israel given by God. There is a divine right of prime Ministers as God’s chosen leader. We are not to change what most people want.  We need to pray for the success of the Prime Minister.

Chapter Nine presents the need for protest when governments go against God’s will and the need for rabbis to act as prophets to stand up to the Prime Minister the way the prophets stood up to the Biblical Kings. Sadan does not go into details.

Chapter Ten is the capstone of the book on how redemption is making itself manifest. He considers the use of rationalism as limited to what is now seen in the country, but emunah –steadfastness is the firm knowledge of the future, an optimism that the vision will be realized.. We believe in evolution not just in the physical realm but also in the realm of the spirit and the meaning of life. For us the evolution is the Jewish national revival to create a Jewish state. The state building is an inner redemption by natural means.

All of humanity will be raised by means of the Jewish nation. We are approaching the end of history when  God will be revealed to the world in the nation of Israel.

We should not hasten the redemption and take it into our own hands by individual action outside the government. The Jewish underground in the 1980’s of Gush Emunim did not fully recognize the importance of the State. One should not go against the state because (1) It is easier to break than to build, the state army and the concept of citizenship cannot be broken. (2) When you break things, you also destroy the positive forces. (3) You are not truly grappling with the problematic and impure when you destroy rather than raising it.  (4) We don’t want anarchy.

Redemption is a natural process, arising from free will. When we do what is right, God will help us.

Question: Is Zionism faith or rational?

Answer: The authors Amnon Rubinstein, Gadi Taub, and long ago Yehoshafat Harkavi all wrote books about the Settler’s movement and Gush Emunim  in which they each portrayed religious Zionism as irrational dreamers and a religious faith. They all wrote that the settlements are against rationality, against security and against what the state needs. They presented the settlers as chasing an illusion of messianic mysticism.

However, everything they say is complete nonsense. The Settlers are entirely rational. The country was founded with Divine guidance and miracles. We are destroyed as a nation if we do not see this country as an unfolding of redemption.

Question: Doesn’t the messianic vision make us do immoral acts and then legitimates these actions in the name of a higher holiness. Aren’t we like radical Islam?

Answer: This is also nonsense. This question is only from a lack of understanding. Yigal Amir was political and Baruch Goldstein was worried about attacks against Jews. You cant compare us to other religions, in that, we are all ethics, love, compassion, justice and uprightness. They In contrast are crusades, inquisition, programs, and Holocaust. The entire process of redemption is the victory of the good over the bad.

At the end of the 1970’s and start of the 1980’s there was a moment of Neo- Chassidic counter culture in NYC. The list included Reb Shlomo Carlebach, Reb Zalman, Reb Meir Fund and the Flatbush Minyan, Reb Aryeh Kaplan was teaching at his home in Kensington, and Reb Dovid Zeller formed the Network of Conscious Judaism. There were Ruach Seminar retreats, the Caldron restaurant by Marty Schloss was a frequent hangout, and Rabbi Meir Nissim (Michel) Abehsera gave classes on Torah and macrobiotic diet.  There was also Jeff Obler who had a weekly radio show Yedid Nefesh & a Center for Young Jewish Artists trying to bring all this to a wider audience. Lex Hixon, the universal Sufi of Tribeca ran a  universal Mosque and had a radio show featuring many of the aforementioned teachers on his show. One of the unique teachers of the period was Reb Dovid Din offer of classes in Manhattan & Brooklyn who died at the age of 46 in 1988. (Bear in mind that for other seekers, this era was the NYC of CBGB’s, Patty Smith and the Ramones.)

(Reb Dovid Din)

According to Eliezer Shore, Reb Dovid Din himself had come to Judaism late in life. At first, he had been a student of R. Shlomo Carlebach, living for a while in the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco. Afterward, he studied at Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld’s yeshiva Sh’or Yoshuv in Far Rockaway. He was also a student and friend of Rabbi Zalman Schachter, though he differed with Reb Zalman regarding Orthodox practice and commitment. After leaving Sh’or Yoshuv, he moved to Boro Park and gathered a small cadre of talmidim around him. There are almost no essays of his that remain. There were, at one point, hundreds or recorded lectures. (A number of his students are attempting to track down any remaining tapes and digitalize them. If anyone has tapes of R. Dovid, they should please be in touch Reb Shore.

Rabbi Eliezer Shore was one of his closest students whose life was transformed by Reb Dovid. Eliezer Shore narrates his life as having grown up in a secular, Jewish home in Great Neck, NY, and attended Sarah Lawrence College majoring in religious studies, and minored in music and the performing arts.  He engaged in an intense spiritual search, which took him to England and Scotland, over mountains and into Zen monasteries, and eventually, to a small cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. In 1982, he met Rabbi Dovid Din and became one of R. Din’s closest students for the next four years. Shore obtained Rabbinic Ordination and a Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University with a thesis on language  in the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Since then, Shore has taught at numerous institutions around Israel. Most notably, the Rothberg School at Hebrew University.

For many years, Shore wrote articles for Parabola, published by The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition a not-for-profit organization devoted to spiritual quest and the dissemination and exploration of materials relating to the myths, symbols, rituals, and art of the world’s religious traditions.  Recently, he  collected the best of these pieces, as well as a number of stories that he wrote — both original and retellings — and personally republished them in a single volume, called The Face of the Waters: Chasidic Teachings and Stories for the 21st century.  Available on Amazon and Createspace (20% discount with Code:  TVASZVMW.)

For those who want a few more sample pieces of Shore’s writing, then see his writings page and especially this short account of his spiritual quest and his application of the writings of Rav Zadok Hakohen of Lublin to education. If you like his writings, then buy his book or better yet, hire him as a freelancer for your journal (dont offer less than .40-.50 a word.)

This account of the relationship of Reb Dovid Din and Reb Eliezer Shore is quite a story of spiritual quest and devotion to Reb Din as a saint and Chassidic Zaddik. Shore recounts how Reb Din taught him that “Torah is a spiritual discipline. It is a practice that requires intensity and concentration no less than any other practice or meditation. I saw how he put avodas Hashem over everything; his money, his time, his health. Rather, these other things simply did not take up any authentic space in his life.” Din also taught Shore how to relate to the Haredi world:

Don’t ask from them more than they can give, and don’t give them more than they can take.” In other words, appreciate what the haredi world has to offer in terms of commitment and piety, but don’t ask them to discuss Buddhist philosophy with you! And don’t offer them that either, since they do not necessarily have the tools or interest to deal with it. In other words, don’t lose yourself there, either. Be true to that other part of yourself, and keep it separate

The psychologist Erich Neumann called the Zaddik, following Carl Jung’s terminology, a mana-personality, the archetype of the ideal integrated saint. Yet, Shore’s account shows that Reb Din was not integrated as much as single focused. Reb Din’s mystical fasting is worth comparing to the literature of holy fasting of mystics starting with  the two 1987 books on the topic: Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast as well as Rudolph M. Bell’s Holy Anorexia.

For those who want to know more about Reb Din, there was a 1984 interview with Reb Din himself by Howard Jay Rubin On the cover is a picture of Reb Dovid together with Reb Eliezer. More recently, there was an article by Shaul Magid of his own reminiscences of Reb Dovid Din, which is definitely worth comparing to this account There are also radio interviews with Reb Dovid Din from the Lex Hixon Show In the Spirit available for purchase.

Reb Dovid’s yarhzeit is next week 25 Tammuz. In commemoration, Reb Eliezer will give an online class: “The Fluid Soul: Everyday encounters as a setting for enlightenment. A class on Hasidut in memory of Rabbi Dovid Din”. The class will be this Sunday, at 12pm EST. They can watch it on Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/eliezershore or participate by signing into Zoom by computer or by phone. Here is the link info: https://zoom.us/j/176930764
Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +16465588656,800218559#

I never met Reb Dovid Din nor attended any of his teachings, although I knew he was teaching since he came up in conversations. However, Reb Din was studying mysticism at Fordham University at the time of his death. When I arrived at Fordham the following year form my doctoral studies, the other students in the mysticism program asked: Am I also like the Rabbi Dovid not looking at women by staring at the floor instead? According to them, he was working on a dissertation connecting esoteric Christianity to Kabbalah as having a common essence.

(Update- Yes, Reb Dovid’s son is Shulem Deen. It does not play a role in this blog post. So, I originally left it out. However, I am compelled to add the connection in this updated note since a swarming number of people, more than I thought, felt an urgent need to contact me in their belief that they were informing me about that point.)

One final note before the spiritual journey of this interview. Notice that during those years the goal of outreach Judaism was to give spiritually and compete with the other spiritual teachers. Unlike later decades, where the goal was to offer a good lifestyle, family values and communal heritage. The goal was for ultimate meaning in life, not conservative moral order. This was looking for a path of spiritual discipline, not the current self-indulgence and isolationism of American Neo-Chassidus. For those who want more first person accounts of the era, see David Zeller’s The Soul of the Story: Meetings With Remarkable People  who presents a story that includes his meetings with Gurus and Swamis, and the classic Ellen Willis essay about her brother, Next Year in Jerusalem.

(Front row of teachers from right to left: Dovid Din, David Zeller, Shlomo Carelbach, Meir Fund. Back row, man without jacket behind Fund is Eliezer Shore.)

Interview with Rabbi Eliezer Shore about Reb Dovid Din

1. How did you met Reb Dovid?

I met R. Dovid in the spring of 1982. I was a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, taking a course in Philosophy of Religion. I was at that point majoring in Eastern Religions. Throughout the semester, we met various religious figures – Buddhists, Christian Monks, Sufis. One night, we traveled into Manhattan to hear a famous Rabbi speak at a synagogue in New York. It turned out to be R. Zalman Schachter. I had never heard of R. Zalman before, or even had any particular interest in Judaism as a spiritual path. My parents are both Jewish – my mother is a Holocaust survivor – but they both abandoned any religious affiliation they had after moving to America, and my connection to Judaism was little more than nominal. I had been searching for spirituality for several years – since I was twenty – and practiced Buddhist meditation, martial arts, wilderness survival. I was studying Japanese and had plans on traveling to Japan or entering an American Buddhist monastery after graduation.  However, it was also around this time that I felt an unusual stirring in me toward a relationship-based form of spirituality, what I understand today as a shift from a non-theistic to a theistic view of G-d.All of this was still very latent, and it was actually R. Zalman that evening who opened the first door.

I don’t recall the details of his lecture, but I believe he was speaking about the importance of approaching prayer as a personal expression. He illustrated this with an exercise. He told the entire audience to rise and put their feet together “as if” they believed in G-d. Then he told us to hold our hands “as if” we believed in G-d. And then he said to us “Now, if you believed in G-d, what would you say.” At that moment, I found myself praying for the very first time. It was a powerful experience. However, as much as I appreciated the exercise, I wasn’t particularly drawn to R. Zalman’s form of presentation, which was a bit to showy for me.

After R. Zalman finished, another Rabbi stood up. He was tall and thin, had long peyot, wore a long hasidic coat and a round flat hat, in the style of Yerushalmi hasidim. But when he spoke, it was with an Oxford English. He eloquently explained why he disagreed with R. Zalman, why prayer is not merely a matter of self-expression, but a discipline that one must follow, like any spiritual practice. That the words of prayer in the prayerbook pull a person out of themselves and put the focus elsewhere – on G-d, not on the self. His voice was rich and sonorous, he gestured gracefully as he spoke, and there was an air of holiness around him. This was Rabbi Dovid Din, and meeting him that night was certainly one of the turning points in my life.

There is a saying among spiritual seekers: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” and I do not think it could have been more true. I was in total shock when I saw him; for I heard from him everything I had been looking for in Eastern religions, though in the garb of an Orthodox Jew, with G-d at the center of presentation. I was mesmerized.

After the lecture, I went up to him to ask him a question, and from close up, he was even more frightening. R. Dovid was a true ascetic, and it reflected in his gaunt face, his threadbare clothing, his unkempt peyot. At the same time, the light that emanated from his face and eyes was astounding. I was certainly not the first to be drawn to him. R. Dovid was a magnet for spiritually seeking young men and women. Thus, when I approached him my question, he knew that he had a “live one” on the hook, and was not going to let me get away so easily. Even when he turned to address someone else, he made sure that he kept his hand on my shoulder, so that I didn’t run away. (I should note that over the next year, as I slowly became observant, I wanted to run away many times, but was unable.) Afterward, he invited me to his weekly class on 21st Street in Manhattan.

Actually, I did not reconnect with him until the next Fall – he went to Israel for the summer, and I continued on my Buddhist trajectory, working as a camp counselor at Japanese summer camp in the Catskills. Actually, even when I started attending his classes, I was still investigating various Buddhist monasteries around the States. It was not until things came to a critical turning point that I changed my direction. But that is another story.

2) How did you become his student?

It is an interesting story how I became his student. As I mentioned previously, I first met him on a class trip. I took his phone number and even called him for a meeting some weeks afterward. However, he was not available then, and soon after, he and his family traveled to Israel for the summer, so he wasn’t available at all.

Even though I was very impressed by him and wanted to keep up the contact, I was still deeply involved in Eastern religions, both in terms of practice and study. In fact, in the month after I graduated college, I spent the first week doing sesshin (an eight-hour a day meditation retreat) at the Zen Community of New York , run by Bernie Glassman Roshi. Afterward, I spent a week in Washington DC at a martial arts center practicing Kung Fu), and then a week learning wilderness survival in the New Jersey pine barrens, with Tom Brown – a famous survivalist. After that, I worked the entire summer as a camp counselor in a camp for Japanese children in the Catskills. I was studying Japanese at the time, and was one of the only American counselors there.

It was during that summer that I decided that I would enter a Buddhist monastery full time when summer was over. When I returned to my parents’ house, I contacted several Buddhist monasteries around the US. At the same time, I started attending R. Dovid’s weekly classes, and speaking with him privately. One day, in early autumn, I received a letter from the Zen Mountain Monastery in Woodstock, NY, inviting me to join their program. I could meditate half a day, work in their food shop in Woodstock half a day, get room and board and even $100 a month. Paradise! What more could I ask for?

The same day I received that letter, I went to R. Dovid’s class. After class, he called me over: “Eliezer,” he said. “I know that you want to get out of your parents’ house and immerse yourself in a fully spiritual environment. Well, we are opening an outreach center in Manhattan, called ‘Sha’arei Orah: Gates of Light,” where we will be giving weekly classes, communal meals, etc. We need someone to live there and be the caretaker. Maybe you would like to do it.”

I was in shock. In one day, I received two invitations to deepen my spiritual practice and commitment. One, from the path I had been following for several years, and the other, from a new path offered to me by R. Dovid. I didn’t know what to do. I went up to the monastery for a couple of days and found it a beautiful place, but when all was said and done, I realized that I couldn’t follow that path, that I had to return to New York to become Reb Dovid’s disciple. I even discussed it with the monastery head – John Daido Roshi – and he was very encouraging. “Follow the path of your heart,” he told me.

Reb Dovid knew of my visit to the monastery, and when I returned to New York and told him that I had decided to commit myself to being his student, he gave a knowing smile. I imagine he knew that he had me the entire time.

Ironically, the offer to live in the New York Center never materialized. Soon after, we learned that it was forbidden for anyone to live in the building – which was an old synagogue – due to zoning laws. So that offer never actually panned out. However, at that point, I had already decided on my path, and wasn’t going to change it.

I should also point that I didn’t automatically become Torah observant at this point. The prospect actually terrified me, and I fought it fiercely. I rented an apartment in Queens, and maintained some distance from Reb Dovid’s community. Many times, I felt that I had to run away, though I never could. There was a deeper force pulling me in, which I could not deny. Eventually, after about half a year of struggle, I took on Torah observance and moved into the apartment next to the Din family, and became Reb Dovid’s secretary and assistant. I lived there for the next three years, until I moved to Israel.

3)  What did you learn about the Spiritual Path from him?

This is a difficult question. On the one hand, he changed my life in myriad, unthinkable way. On the other hand, it was a long time ago, and much of what I learned has now become integrated in my life in a way that I am no longer as aware of it as when it was new. It’s also become combined with things I have subsequently learned, so that I’m not sure what comes from him, and what I added on my own later. In addition, I am no longer the same person I was back then. My drive for spirituality and devekut has mellowed. I’m not on fire for it, as I once was, and as I remember R. Dovid to be.

But let me find something… The obvious thing is that he brought me close to Judaism, to Torah observance, “under the wings of the Shechinah.”

More specifically, I learned from him that the Torah is a spiritual discipline. It is a practice that requires intensity and concentration no less than any other practice or meditation. I saw this in R. Dovid’s own life, and, like many other things I learned from him, it wasn’t only a verbal communication, but the result of real teacher-student apprenticeship. I saw how he put avodas Hashem over everything; his money, his time, his health. And yet, it wasn’t like there was a contest between these things, or any tension. Rather, these other things simply did not take up any authentic space in his life. I’ll mention something that Shaul Magid, who was a student of his before I came around, experienced (and wrote about in an article). He was traveling with Reb Dovid somewhere by plane. Dovid used to pray for a very long time. It turned out that because of Reb Dovid’s lengthy prayers, they missed the plane. However, Dovid didn’t flinch at all. He didn’t even show any regret. It was like nothing had happened. Because, after all, how could one compare catching a plane to praying to G-d. The latter expresses one’s commitment to ultimate reality, while the former is just a transient event. On another occasion, I once saw Reb Dovid put himself in a life-threatening situation, all in order not to transgress a Jewish custom – not even a halacha! This is how he approached every religious act – Torah study, charity, mitzvot. It’s the idea that serving G-d is more important than everything – than life itself. Obviously, this wasn’t always so easy for his family, but it was extremely inspiring for his students.

On another note, I also learned from him how to navigate in the haredi world. On the one hand, he taught us to deeply appreciate the haredi world for its strong points. We prayed each Shabbat at a Hungarian synagogue – Krasna hasidim – sort of an offshoot of Satmar. The congregation were simple, pious and deeply committed Jews. This appreciation of the average haredi individual, whether they are hasidim or litvaks, working people or learners, has stayed with me until today. There was never any criticism of “Oh, well, they are too religious, or not worldly enough, or too backward.” I think that this also connects to the earlier point – of putting G-d in the center. When serving G-d is at the center, then one doesn’t fault other individuals for not being worldly. Worldliness is one path to serving G-d, appropriate for some people, but simple faith is a path that everyone can travel, and should be appreciated.

At the same time, he taught me not to forget myself. Not to try to fit in or reduce my own past and values to some rather constricted haredi model, as I have seen many ba’alei teshuva try to do – at least at the beginning, until it usually backfires on them. (The truth is, I did this too, but much later, in a different context.) I recall R. Dovid telling me a statement that kept me in good stay for many years. When I first started going to yeshiva in Israel, he said: “Don’t ask from them more than they can give, and don’t give them more than they can handle.” In other words, appreciate what the haredi world has to offer in terms of commitment and piety, but don’t ask them to discuss Buddhist philosophy with you! And don’t offer them that either, since they do not necessarily have the tools or interest to deal with it. In other words, don’t lose yourself there, either. Be true to that other part of yourself, and keep it separate.

I think that above and beyond any of these things, the main thing I learned from him was not in the realm of content – one teaching or another – but of context. What it’s like being in a deep, loving relationship with a spiritual mentor – the idea that two souls can join in absolute commitment to the pursuit of something that transcends both of them. I know that in other religious traditions, Christian monasticism, for instance, total devotion to the spiritual mentor becomes an avenue to the total devotion to G-d, and I felt something like that here. I can imagine that people get scared when they hear the terms “total devotion” and “selfless service” of another individual. It sounds like a cult, and I’m sure that cult leaders can manipulate these feelings. But when it works, as I felt that it did for me, one’s life become framed within a context of humility, service, love, giving and selflessness.

I learned many things from R. Dovid. The path to G-d through silence, introspection, honesty, compassion, deep listening to oneself and others, selfless service, love, giving, patience. All of these things have made me who I am today.

4) Can you describe one of his classes?

1. Dovid’s classes were brilliant. He was a masterful teacher. His oratory style was slow, clear, delivered in an Oxford English and with a rich vocabulary. At the same time, he told personal stories and humorous anecdotes. He was a keen perceiver of human foibles, and would often jokingly discuss traits and actions we all take that are less than enlightened – always including himself in the description. I recall that he would weave myriad points into his classes, discussing an issue philosophically, psychologically, historically, and ultimately, he would tie it all together by showing the Kabbalistic root of the issue, which brought the discussion to an entirely new depth and shed light on all the previous elements together.
2. Dovid gave several weekly classes – as well as occasional lectures here and there in different forums. When I first started attending, he was giving one class a week at a synagogue on 21st Street in Manhattan. Soon afterward, he opened an outreach center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, called Sha’arei Orah – Gates of Light, where he taught several nights a week, and hosted all sorts of events. That lasted for about two years, until the center closed down. Afterward, he began teaching in the Village, downtown. His classes were attended by spiritual seekers of every religion, and not just Jews – people of all ages and denominations.

He had, however, a core group of close students, such as myself, who lived near him in Brooklyn. Several of us rented an apartment right next door to his, in Boro Park. These were young men and women who had committed themselves to Orthodox practice. At one point, he started giving us private classes on a deeper level than what he was teaching in public. Many of these classes, as best as I remember them, were deep analysis of fundamental issues in life and Judaism: What is the enlightened consciousness, what is the deepest purpose of the Torah, what is a human being? I remember coming out of these classes totally blown-away.

I don’t recall any specific path of study appointed by Reb Dovid. I learned a lot of hasidut, went to yeshiva half a day and studied Talmud. In addition, I worked my way through all the mainstream seforim – Chumash, Tanach, Midrashim, etc. Reb Dovid was always studying, which was a big inspiration to us. Reb Dovid studied a lot of Breslov hasidut. He wasn’t a Breslover, but was very close to R. Nachman (in personality too, it seems). If people needed to label him, he would say he was a Breslover, but it was only nominal.

5) What did you discuss with him?

One of the most powerful things that drew me to Reb Dovid, and which I remember vividly until today, was the fact that he was a genuine mystic – in the sense of someone who is having a direct, experience of G-d. It was simply awe inspiring to be around him, especially when he prayed. He would go into a sort of trance. His eyes would roll up into his head half-way and go completely blank, losing all light and life, as though his consciousness had retreated from the empirical world and was totally absorbed inwardly, in some immense and mysterious space. In Hasidic terms, he was in a state of total self-annulment. Then, when he would come out of prayer, there would be a sparkling light emanating from his eyes, as though he had just emerged like water from a crystal-clear spring. Furthermore, he was not only a master of entering deep states of self-annihilation, he was brilliant enough to understand and explain what such states of consciousness meant – for the individual, and for the cosmos, for G-d.

I have met and seen many holy people and tzaddikim since being a student of R. Dovid’s, and I have seen some examples of ecstatic prayer — I once saw the Amshinover Rebbe pray the Amidah, and his entire body shook like electricity was pulsing through it. However, I have never seen anyone who seems to go to that place where R. Dovid used to go to.  He used to tell us that when one learns how to enter these states of consciousness, it could be done as easily as flicking a switch. When I once asked him, “What are you doing when you go to that other place?” he replied, “I’m removing the distinction between me and G-d.”

In the four years I was with him, I accompanied him to several interfaith gatherings, where there were teachers from other religious traditions, as well as recognized and accomplished mystics (Christian contemplatives, Buddhist teachers). None of them seemed to come close to R. Dovid in the depth of his experience, not to mention his brilliance and piety, his eloquence and his poetry. More than once, I saw spiritual teachers from other traditions approaching him and asking to learn from him. Everyone understood that this was a human being whose consciousness was not rooted in this world, but rooted in G-d, was for me absolutely awe inspiring.

6) How long did you study with him?

Altogether, I studied with Dovid for about four years. When I was 27, I accompanied him to an interfaith conference in France, and from there, to Israel for the summer. The plan was for me to study in a yeshiva for a few months, and then return with him to New York, where we were going to open a Jewish retreat center in the Catskill Mountains. I was going to be the caretaker during the week, and Reb Dovid and his family would come up on weekends to hold meditative and silent retreats. However, it didn’t exactly work out that way. I became enchanted by Jerusalem and extended my stay through the holidays, and then extended it again, and then again. In the end, I remained in Jerusalem for two years straight, and during that time, Reb Dovid became sick and passed away. He was only forty-seven years old.

In retrospect, however, I think it had become time for me to move on. I had actually gained all that I could from Reb Dovid’s teachings, and needed to devote myself to full time yeshiva study. Unfortunately, I never learned those meditative techniques for achieving devekut that he wanted to teach me, but I manage to absorb his overall approach to Torah, which has been with me ever since.

I’ve also had the good fortune to be connected to other great chasidic teachers – R. Yaakov Meir Schechter of Breslov, R. Tzvi Meir Zilbergberg, R. Mordechai Zilber of Stutchin, R. Yochanan Shochet of Lutzk. However, as I mentioned above, I never met anyone like Reb Dovid, nor have I ever since had such an intense teacher-pupil relationship. I imagine that in many ways, I am carrying on his work, trying to bring the teachings of authentic Jewish mysticism out beyond the border of the Orthodox community. When I teach classes in Jewish mysticism to the young people at Hebrew U., I feel like I am speaking to myself forty years ago, and I recall the impression that Reb Dovid made on me back then. It’s very fulfilling.

7) Did you feel that you live up to his teachings?

There are two areas that I do not feel that I have lived up to Reb Dovid’s accomplishments. For instance, his absolute commitment to the smallest iota of halacha and ritual observance – to the point that he was ready to die for it. For the many years that I was single (I married at age 37), I was certainly strict in halacha. However, after marriage, I found it impractical, and did not want to burden my wife and family. I recall making a conscious decision not to be strict with them, which resulted in an overall lenient approach in my life.

The second area is in the contemplative dimension. I have never been able to go to that place of self-annihilation that I believe Reb Dovid went to. That was a unique, and perhaps unparalleled aspect of his soul. I do feel, at times, that I know which side of the room the “light switch” is on, and I have even dimmed the lights a couple of times, but I’ve never learned to flick the switch off completely, as he was able to.

I think of Reb Dovid often, and miss him each time I do. Everyone who ever met him was touched by his personality, and those of us who were fortunate enough to be his students were transformed forever. I am in loose touch with some of his old students, and we speak about his influence over our lives with a freshness that has not been dimmed by the thirty years since his passing. He was truly a unique individual.

The Talmud is chock-full of magic and ways to ward off demons. Rabbi Hai Gaon claimed that the belief in demons was widespread in the Babylonian academy of Sura as a continuity of the ancient magic of Babylonia court of Nebuchadnezzar, a world filled with spirits who inhabited the air, the trees, water, roofs of houses, and privies.

The Talmud taught that are invisible. “If the eye could see them no one could endure them. They surround one on all sides. They are more numerous than humans, each person has a thousand on his left and ten thousand on his right”. Yet, if you want to see them, “bring the tail of a first born black cat, that is the daughter of a first born black cat. Burn it in fire, grind it up, fill your eyes with the ashes and then you will see them.” (Ber. 6a). This topic has not been given the attention it deserves.

Most ignore this topic because Modern Jews feel they have evolved beyond the past and Orthodox Jews ignore it because they cherry pick this material out as folklore or the ideas of the common people irrelevant to the their reading of the halakhic project. Historians, however, seek to understand the thought patterns of the past and to comprehend the cultural construction and the discourse on the topic at that time.

Yuval Harari has recently written a tome entitled Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah, (Wayne State Press, 2017) dealing with this understudied aspect of rabbinic thought.  Harari did his PhD at the Hebrew University under the supervision of Professors Shaul Shaked and Moshe Idel. Currently, he is professor of Jewish Thought and the head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. (Not to be confused with the current bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari of Sapiens & Homo Deus).

Yuval Harari’s book appeared a few months ago in English offering an comprehensive overview of the topic. The first part of the book reviews the scholarship on magic, on Rabbinic magic, and on the role of magic in ancient Judaism. Then it presents the types of ancient Jewish magic as various typologies, categories and types of discourse, The book can be the basis for an entire course, almost a Germanic textbook of the field of Jewish magic.  His book focuses on magic in the Second Temple and Rabbinic era as well as Heikhalot literature, Geonim and Karaite writings.

Harari has also translated and annotated Harba de-Moshe the Sword of Moses (2012)a wide-ranging Jewish treatise of magic compiled in Palestine during the third quarter of the first millennium. In addition he has articles on magical love spells, on magic to gain knowledge,  magic to harm and kill people, and magic for economic success. 

Harari is not the only recent book in the field, a similar and complimentary work by Gideon Bohak Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (2011) gives a historian’s perspective. And recently, Naama Vilozny wrote a book on the pictorial representation of demons. Read together, these works will give one a complete overview of the current state of the field. Two basic texts available in translation that would serve as a basic for discussion are the Sefer ha-Razim, which reflects deep influence of contemporary Greco-Roman magic and a typical Jewish celestial hierarchy of firmaments and angelic hosts and Harari’s edition of  Ḥarba de-Moshe, which is contains a long list of magic recipes of Jewish Babylonian origin.

We have some surviving amulets from Jews from the rabbinic era but thousands of magical bowls. – see here and here. The need to warn off demons was a major Jewish concern of both common people and learned rabbis.

Personally, I know an elderly educated Christian who when confronted with the magic in New Testament replies that it is only metaphor or it was folk believe and not really part of New Testament’s binding message. He has no historic sense that they truly believed in it. Many Evangelicals (and Orthodox Jews) take this anti-historic approach, thereby denying that rationality includes historical consciousness. They also do not sense that the term “magic” is problematic, because it has generally been used to describe the religious and ritual practices of people whom the speaker disapproves of their practice. In the sense, that what I do is ritual, but what other people do is magic or idolatry.

Harari seeks to understand the worldview and discourse on ancient Jewish magic that was widespread during this time.  Since magic was part of an entire worldview, he does not draw hard lines between magic and ritual or halakhah. Harari’s book (together with Bohak’s) shows that Jews truly believed in magic.  This is in contrast to the 19^th century rationalist Rabbi Zvi Hirsh Chajes or the Talmudic historians Shaul Lieberman and EE Urbach, who made it disappear from significance.

Harari emphasizes that magic is a pre-scientific technology, and does not devote much attention to the other dimensions, the functional and symbolic aspects. Hence, the book does not serve as a detailed reading of individual formula. Hence, it does not discuss the language and structure of magic formula. But he does note that ancient Jewish magic was not to become a wizard in the Harry Potter sense, rather these works offer pragmatic actions for specific practical goals such as healing or as a hex.

He also notes that these works assume that God gave us this power to do magic, just as He gave us the ability to farm or heal as doctors,  and therefore it does not detract from God’s providence.  The power is in the Hebrew alphabet itself, so that Jewish charms are less performances like the enunciation  of hocus-pocus and more an actual power in the language. In the terminology of the philosopher of language, J. L. Austin- the formula are more perlocution than illocution.

We await similar volumes for Jewish magic in medieval and modern times. A book on the the worlds of Jewish astral magic, kabbalistic magic, amulet writing, and baalei shem is a desideratum. The 1939 classic Jewish Magic and Superstition by Teaneck Reform Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg is woefully inadequate at this point.

Harari is beginning to document more recent phenomena, such as his forthcoming article entitled  Three Charms for Killing Adolf Hitler: Practical Kabbalah in WW2. On the older segulot books available in most Israeli book stores, Harari gives a short introduction.

In our own time, magic has returned after a 200 year hiatus.  The scholar of religion Amanda Porterfeld (2001) notes that there was a steady decline and eradication of magic due to the Enlightenment project of rationality from 1780 to 1980’s. Now, we have witness an upswing in magic in which she claims there was more magic in the 1990’s than the prior 200 years. In the Jewish world, there are now many new Haredi works on magic and discussions of how Jewish law permits any form of magic needed for healing.

But now in the 21^st century, we do not refer to demons and magical bowls anymore, nor do we generally write amulets the way RabbI Yonatan Eybeshutz did. Rather, we give magical powers to ordinary activities. For example, a local Teaneck Orthodox –distributed for free –throwaway paper this month had an ad for how to cure the medical condition of depression using Psalms. The weekly paper usually presents a colorful gallery of upper middle class educated Orthodox Jews returning to magic including various donations to rabbis who will perform these practices just for you or how donations to a specific cause has magical powers.

Other common example of contemporary magic are the use of dollars given by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, visits to Rebbes Ohel, going to Galilee holy trees and graves in order to find a spouse, or the many recent segulot associated with weddings. We call them segulot but they are magic nevertheless.

The academic historian or scholar of religion does not dismiss these phenomena; rather they seek to understand the worldview and discourse of 21^st century magic. What functions does it have? and how does it shape their theology? Even the theologically inclined rabbi should ask: What need does the community have for these practices? This would serve as a window into their culture and thinking about theology. What are the critical points of weakness in life that need extra help? Where does the power come from? and what are their views of providence? Conversely, what is the power gained in condemning these practices and are the current condemnations similar to ancient Jewish debates with Christians and pagans saying what I do is religion and what you do is magic?

Harari’s goal is to try and answer these questions of the rabbinic age, late antiquity and the early Islamic period. The interview below gives the reader a good sense of his approach.

(A bowl to bind Ashmodai, King of the demons)

 1) Is sorcery and magic important for Rabbinic discourse?

Magic and sorcery are discussed in rabbinic literature in various contexts and are of great significance for the rabbis’ discourse on ritual power. It is evident that Jewish culture admits the idea of human ritual power and is reluctant to give it up.

Moses and Aaron, Elijah and Elisha are the most prominent biblical figures in this regard. Stories about them, as well as about other biblical and later outstanding figures, teach that God’s agents are capable of backing the truth they promote by means of ritual power which they possess and employ at need.

In antiquity, this kind of power had a major role in the marketing of the truth and in pointing out its possessed real agents. The problem arises when other agents also seem to control such power and to use it for backing other truth so as to undermine both the monopoly of God’s agents on truth and the social order associated with it.

From biblical time to our day, there is an unclear and sketchy borderline, between the prophet (or the rabbi or the ḥasid) and the sorcerer, between miracle and magic, and between prayer and incantation.

Since the insider available evidence of Jewish magic culture is now broad, we are not anymore dependent on the rabbis’ prism for understanding what that culture looked like in their time. The significance of the rabbinical magic discourse on magic is thus found more in the discourse itself than in the magic.

Traditions dealing with ritual power at the hands of the rabbis, accusation of women in performing witchcraft along with stories on conflicts between rabbis and witches and sorcerers (in which the former have, of course, the upper hand), point at the essentially political coping of the sages with the existence of ritual power outside their circles.

2) How is early Jewish magic a cultural system?

Magic is may be considered as pre-scientific technology, a scheme of technical practices founded on the belief in the way reality is run. Given the traditional premises concerning what forces that reality, magic behavior was rational.

Jewish magic is founded on a belief in human aptitude to affect the world by means of rituals, at the heart of which is execution of oral or written formulas. It is not different from Jewish normative religious view, which ascribes actual power to sacrifice, prayer, ritual, and the observance of law. Magic also does not differ from the normative views regarding God’s omnipotence or the involvement of angels and demons in mundane reality. It has elaborated as a system parallel to, and combined with the normative-religious one, a system that seeks to change reality for the benefit of the individual, commonly in order to remove a concrete pain or distress or to fulfill a certain wish or desire.

Books of magic recipes from antiquity as well as from later periods show that magic was pragmatically required in every aspect of life. Magic fantasy of the kind of One Thousand and One Nights or Harry Potter is missing almost all together from recipe books, which usually offers assistance in achieving targets that may be achieved also without magic. According to these Jewish books, magic power can be implemented personally or by an expert. Expert magicians offered their help in choosing and performing the right ritual and in preparing adjuration artifacts and other performative objects, such as amulets of roots and minerals.

Jewish performative artifacts from late antiquity, mainly amulets and incantation bowls, attest to the use of magic techniques for various aims including healing, protection, social and economic success, exorcism, love, sex, and harm. Recipe books also present the elements of the magic ceremony, which includes use of various materials – minerals, plants and animal (or human) organs, gestures on the side of the performer, and execution, either orally or in writing, of an adjuration formula. As noted, the goal of the ceremonial acts is to bring upon a certain result, desired by the beneficiary of the charm.

3) How is your approach different than Lieberman and Urbach and different than Nuesner, Gruenwald and Idel?

When it comes to magic, both Saul Lieberman and Ephraim Urbach seem to have had a pre-perception of the kind of religiosity the Sages had assumed and what could or could not have been part of it. They treated the rabbis as the founding fathers of Orthodox Judaism of the kind they themselves assumed. Their image of the Sages had a significant role in the self-image of these scholars.

It seems to me that in spite of their profound acquaintance with rabbinic literature they found it difficult to admit that rabbis not only believed in the actual power of magic but also carried it out. They both had a view of what real Judaism is and magic had no part in it. Thus, if we find expressions of magic belief and action in Judaism they certainly result from “foreign influence,” alien element that penetrated from the outside and stained it. Surely, there was no room for magic among the true founders of rabbinic Judaism. The problem is that this is not an easy claim to make about Rabbinic literature (Lieberman was actually more flexible than Urbach in this regard). Both scholars, however, made great effort to “clean” the rabbis from real involvement in magic either in thought or practice.

Jacob Neusner, Ithamar Gruenwald, and Moshe Idel presented a different picture. In their mind, there is no chasm between magic and religion, so they did not see a problem in assigning magic to the rabbis. They did not consider magic a superstition that stains the religiosity of those who believe in and practice it. Therefore, unlike Urbach and Lieberman, they did not abstain from pointing exactly at those sources that attest to the existence of magic in rabbinic thought and action.

I myself perceive rabbinic literature as a polyphonic corpus, which from the outset does not reflect monolithic thought, faith or stance. No wonder then that we find in it a prohibition against sorcery together with stories about rabbis who make perfect use of it. I also do not think that Halakha should receive priority over Aggadah in the investigation of the rabbis’ cosmology reflected in this corpus. This was a world where all peoples believed in and practiced magic.

Furthermore, why would ancient Jewry need influence from the outside in order to develop its own magic culture? Could not they do it on their own? Were they not capable or intelligent enough to create their own magic belief and praxis? I’m sure they were.

My own discussion on magic in rabbinic literature (and other ancient treatises from Second Temple and Heikhalot and Merkavah literature) differs from that of the scholars who preceded me because I approach it with a profound acquaintance with Jewish magic culture itself from the early Jewish magical texts.

In my book I aim at introducing the entire evidence of rabbinic magic discourse, or better occult discourse, for I also deal with demonology, divination, dream interpretation and astrology.

4) Why do we have to control demons? How do we do it?

Many peoples in antiquity believed in the existence of demons and Jews were no exception. Jewish cosmology ascribed to demons all kinds of misfortune – from illness and death to personal disasters and failures.

The significant role of demons in Jewish weltanschauung in late antiquity is attested by the many terms used for denoting the various kinds of these hidden entities: zika, mazika, nidra, barukta, tulin, deivin, shedim, lilin and many more. According to that view, demons can infiltrate one’s house, body, thoughts and dreams and cause harm. Exorcistic knowledge is thus required in order to treat illness, troubles and distresses. The Talmud discusses demonological issues and details a few spells against demons. The magic evidence attests to the use of exorcistic objects – amulets and bowls, empowered by spells and holy names that were written on them. These objects and spell had one goal: to prevent demons from harming the beneficiaries named in them and to expel them had they already penetrated into his or her body and life. In a few rabbinic stories, however, demons are domesticated and subordinated by rabbis and sometimes even act in their service.

 5) What are the types of Jewish magical artifacts? Can you give examples of the formula?

Two major types of ancient magic artifacts remained to our day: metal amulets and a few clay tablets from Palestine and its surrounding, which were produced for healing, exorcism, protection, success, and subduing others in order to gain their love or to control them; and Babylonian incantation bowls, which were used mainly for protection against demon and exorcising them (and in rare cases for cursing a rival or for returning evil sorceries upon their sender).

Whereas only a few dozens of amulets have so far been uncovered, the corpus of Jewish incantation bowls includes more than fifteen hundred items. Beside these two types we should note a handful of magic jewels (striking in their relative absence given the popularity of magic gems in the surrounding Greco-Roman world) and the remnants of five human skulls covered with spells.

These objects were mainly produced in the 5^th-7^th centuries CE. Dozens of hide and paper amulets, mostly from the 10^th-13^th centuries were found in the Cairo Genizah. All of these objects survived because of the material of which they were made or, in the case of the Genizah, because of the dry climate in their place of storage. Magic recipes from late antiquity and the early Islamic period indicate many other strata, such as leather, cloth, eggs, and leaves for producing written charms and there is no reason to suspect their use by contemporary charm writers. Other objects of performative nature such as roots, knots, bells, a grasshopper egg, a fox tooth and a nail from the crucified, are mentioned in Rabbinic literature.

Performative (magical) artifacts are identified as such by scholars through the linguistic components of the text. Here is an example of an adjuration text from an amulet which was probably produced at the beginning of the 7^th century CE. It was written for Yose, son of Zenobia, to rule over the inhabitants of some village and was found in Ḥorvat Marish (near Tel Ḥazor):

“For your mercy and for your truth” (Psalms 115:1; 138:2). In the name of YHWH we shall do and succeed. Strong and mighty God! May your name be blessed and may your kingdom be blessed. Just as you have suppressed the sea by your horses and stamped the earth with your shoe, and as you suppress trees in winter days and the herb of the earth in summer days, so may there be supp[ressed…    ] before Yose son of Zenobia. May my word and my obedience be imposed on them. Just as the sky is suppressed before God, and the earth is suppressed before people, and people are suppressed before death, and death is suppressed before God, so may the people of this town be suppressed and broken and fallen before Yose son of Zenobia. In the name of ḤṬW‘‘ the angel who was sent before Israel I make a sign. Success, Success, Amen Amen, Selah, Hallelujah.

6) Why are you personally interested in magic?

Some ten years ago, when I was sitting in an Oxford coffeehouse and pondering about the book I was about to complete, the following sentence came to my mind: magic is a rather boring matter. I knew immediately that these were going to be its opening words. And indeed, in itself, “magic is a rather boring matter: practical action, supernatural technology. In its simple version, a few words are uttered, some of them meaningless. In more developed versions, some acts are performed and then the words are uttered.”

I’ve studied philosophy, Jewish thought, Early Christianity, Gnosticism, Kabbalah and comparative religion. I encountered profound thinking, ideological systems, myths, ethics and sophisticated means of expression. Magic technology is very far from that. It was like turning to the study of Ritual Engineering. Nevertheless, as I also wrote there, something in it captures the imagination. But there is much more than that.

First, there are people behind the praxis. Magic recipe literature is a broad map of human fears and anxieties, distresses and needs, aspirations and desires. It is a practical literature that, focusing on daily needs of the individual, slips beneath the radar of social supervision and reflects life itself in a fascinating way.

Second, magic is highly democratic. It focuses of the individual and, indifferent to religion, race or gender, takes personal needs of all kinds very seriously. It supports the individual at times of crises and assists him or her in fulfilling personal wishes. Bronislaw Malinowski viewed magic as ritualization of human optimism and I totally agree with him. Belief in magic is an expression of human optimistic decision to act rather than to despair and give up.

Unfortunately, power always involves potential aggression and the promise of magical power also has a destructive facet. Books of magic recipes reflect that facet with instructions of how to harm and abuse the other. Painful as it is, here too magic literature mirrors life itself.

Finally, because of the vague borderline between magic and the power of “true religion,” magic discourse is political by its very nature. It concerns knowledge and power, ideology and hegemony, exclusion and reproduction of social structures.  That is true concerning all times – past and present.

7) Can you explain love charms and how they work? Give examples.

In Jewish magic literature the term “love” denotes a broad spectrum of relationships, from emotional attachment and marriage to sexual loyalty and abuse. In many cases, it is hard to separate these aspects from one another.

Here are a few examples. First, a cloth amulet that was found in the Cairo Genizah, written for arising feeling of love in a man’s heart toward a certain woman: “You, all the holy knots and all the praiseworthy letters, kindle and burn the heart of Tarshekhin son of Amat-Allah (in longing) after Gadb daughter of Tuffaha.”

The second example is a “tested and proven” recipe also from the Genizah. It aims at the same target but through different means:

“For love. Tested and proven. Take an egg and draw out what is in it through a small piercing and when the egg will be empty, take the blood of a man and of a woman and fill the entire egg and seal the hole in the egg with wax and write [on the egg] with the [mixture of the] bloods the names of the man and the name of the woman and bury it in the ground. And immediately there will be great love between them, so they will not be able to separate from one another.”

The third example is from the opening of a recipe in the early magic book entitled Sefer ha-Razim (The Book of Mysteries): “If you wish to turn (to your favor) the heart of a great or wealthy woman, or the heart of a beautiful woman…”

Sexual abuse of a woman is hinted in two close recipes in another old magic book, Ḥarba de-Moshe (The Sword of Moses). The first suggests: “For a woman to follow you.” The aggressive sexual meaning of this title is exposed through the following recipe, “For untying her,” which aims at untying the poor woman of the binding love charm when she is no longer desired.

8) What are the major magical recipe books? Why is Harba de Moshe important?

Two magic books have survived from antiquity: Sefer ha-Razim (The book of Mysteries) and Ḥarba de-Moshe (The Sword of Moses). Both were probably composed in Palestine in the second and third thirds of the first millennium CE respectively.

Sefer ha-Razim reflects deep influence of contemporary Greco-Roman magic, whereas Ḥarba de-Moshe contains a long list of magic recipes of Jewish Babylonian origin. These compilations, in which the recipes are enveloped by a theoretical, cosmological framework, are expressions of an advanced stage in the process of assembling and organizing written magic information.

Sefer ha-Razim is structured according to the seven firmaments and leads the reader from bottom to top. It specifies the names of the ruling angels in each firmament, their character and their area of authority, and guides him or her how to gain control over them and force them to act. Jewish cosmology typical of apocryphal treatises and Hekhaloth literature and (at times Judaized) Greco-Roman magic practices are firmly interwoven in this book.

Ḥarba de-Moshe points at a hierarchy of 13 arch angels who rule endless battalions of angels and who possess the magic sword of holy names as well as the Torah. The book starts with a description of a three-day complicated ritual, which prepares the performer to rule the sword of holy names. It then presents the sword itself and details some 130 recipes which use it (actually parts of it) in various magic rituals that target an array of goals. It is in this book that magic literature first shows itself as a map of human fears and distresses, needs and desires and proposes itself as a systematic solution.

9) What is the theology of these works? Did God give this power to humans? Can humans control angels?

Both treatises, Sefer ha-Razim and Ḥarba de-Moshe tie magic power with human capability to gain control over angels by means of rituals and adjurations and to force them to fulfil their adjurer’s will, and both exclude God from the influence of human magic.

As noted, Sefer ha-Razim is structured according to the seven firmaments. Six of them are described as inhabited by angels who are appointed over various aspect of life: healing, harm, success, love etc. Typically of this cosmology, God is located in the seventh heaven. The “seven heaven” is entirely dedicated to the description of God’s heavenly praise and worship and no recipe is proposed.

The Sword of Moses, which also distances the Lord from the influence of human magic, presents him as the patron of this art. The book opens with an explicit connection between the magical sword and the Torah and echoes the well-known tradition about Moses’ heavenly struggle with the angels and his return to earth with the Torah that God gave him and the heavenly secrets, “names by which the world is run” in the book’s words, which he received from the angels. It tells that God commanded the angels to honor his names, which were reviled to Moses, and to obey him or anyone else who would adjure them by these names.

The author of The Sword of Moses did not think there was a contradiction between God’s omnipotence, in which he faithfully believed, and human magic power, which he enhanced. According to him, performative use of God’s names became possible because God himself enabled it and supported it.

10) Do you believe in magic?

I’m an atheist. I was raised in a non-religious family and in a non-religious community. I do not believe in the existence God, angels, demons, or ghosts, let alone in their intervention in the mundane world. I highly esteem the significance of human rites and ceremonies and their influential power on the individual and society but I do not believe in their power to change the non-human world in a direct cause-affect manner. From this point of view, the distance between Jewish magic and religion shrinks. In many cases it is reduced to social questions of hegemony and margins.

I’m striving though to avoid judgmental attitude toward the many who do believe in magic, segulot, and “practical Kabbalah.” I’m also not part of the campaign against agents of magic and practical Kabbalists who are often accused of being charlatans. A charlatan is a person who pretends to do or to sell something he or she know they cannot supply. In the field of practical Kabbalah services the practitioner’s self-belief is crucial. Those who are in need of the ritual service and seek it undoubtedly believe in its potential value and are willing to give up time and money for it. If the expert also believes so, who are we to denounce this trade?

On the other hand, when it comes to a person who consciously takes advantage of others’ distress and deceives them, is magic service really differs from one through religious prayers, and blessings? I myself would not rely on any of them but who am I to decide for others what is and what is not real in this world.

11) Is magic perlocution according to J.L Austin’s categories?

Magic language is a performative language. It does not aim at describing the world but at acting in it. Many scholars consider magical speech act an illocutionary act in terms of Austin’s theory—that is, ascribing to the act of speech in itself, if performed in the right circumstances by the right person, the power to make a change in the world—and explain magic language in various cultures, including Judaism, by means of that theory.

I, on the contrary, believe that we should be careful about that. Austin’s theory approaches utterances within a consensual language. All the illocutionary speech acts he points at are dependent for their performative power on social consensus and generate results in the human, interpersonal sphere. Jewish magic, on the contrary, is based on recognition of the inherent power of (Hebrew) language, which can change every aspect of reality, human as well as non-human (God himself created the entire world through speaking!).

Now, can we really mix the two approaches? If we understand a magic incantation as a speech act à la Austin are we also willing to admit its actual performative result in the world?

But if we deprive the magical speech act from its performative results, what is use in explaining it in terms of a modern theory that aims precisely at explaining the performative character of human utterances?

Exorcistic spells and adjurations of angels could have been considered perlocutionay utterances in Austin’s terms—that is, utterances that affect other persons and make them do something—had the incantations themselves attested to their view as such in the eyes of their performers. But rather than driving these entities to act on the basis of a consensual inter-personal consensus, magic formulas aim at compelling them to do so in the same pseudo–illocutionary manner in which they impose their performative power on the world in general.

Whereas Austin’s speech act theory does not seem to be productive in the context of Jewish magic, I find Wittgenstein’s view of language and especially his famous concept of “family resemblance” highly beneficial for the theoretical move I develop in the book, a move which I believe leads us to a better understanding of ancient magic and its place in Jewish culture and society.

12) What are your next projects?
—I’m currently working in three main directions:
(a) Jewish dream magic. For example, dream inquiry (she’elat halom), dream divination through the dead, demonic dream divination, harmful magic by means of dreams and so on.
(b) Visual aspects of medieval and early modern Jewish magic manuscripts.
(c) Magic in Modern Israel. This includes an article on Jewish magic used  by Jerusalem Kabbalists during WW2 entitled Three Charms for Killing Adolf Hitler: Practical Kabbalah in WW2.

(A photo gallery of Rabbinic Demons, the sort the Talmud was worried about)

We return with yet another Rav Shagar translation, this one for Shavuot (Hebrew here). We have once again to thank Levi Morrow for his translation. For those who want prior posts on Rav Shagar, see here, here. here, here, and here.  (There are at least 16 in total at this point, I know this is becoming a single focus, but please wait for the return of other topics.)  I put this one up quickly, a little less edited, so that everyone can print it out to study on Shavuot, or even to give classes on it. Please let me know of any errors.

This essay on Shavuot is one of the best places to start with Rav Shagar in that it deals with the basic Existential & post-modern issues in a non-technical way along with an immediate application to one’s religious life.  This is the one to judge if you find Rav Shagar meaningful for today.

The basic question is what do we mean by revelation and commitment to Torah in a non-foundational age? The basic answer of the essay is to study Torah as a means for holiness in our lives and to ward off meaninglessness. Torah study is creative and individualistic, in that, anyone can make his or her own meaning in Torah. This Torah study is the empty void (halal panui), described by Rav Nachman, serving as a place to meet the infinite. (Not as a place of doubt.) Torah is the means by which we come to accept oneself and one’s specific condition, which Rav Shagar discusses in many of his other homilies.

The essay opens with the fundamental questions of revelation in our age. Rav Shagar starts by working within a Hasidic framework citing Chabad Hasidism, that Sinai was a direct encounter with God. But going beyond Hasidism, Rav Shagar asks, if revelation is given as a human experience and always processed through human concepts then how is it an infinite experience? For the original Hasidic texts, enthusiasm connects one directly to the infinite. However, in our current view of reality, how is it infinite? Rav Shagar also asks the classic question, of how can we see God Face to Face, yet “a man cannot see my face and live”. The essay has five sections. I am providing guideposts for the five sections on the specific question of revelation.

Section I- Experience of God as a Transcendental Experience of one’s own Existence

Sinai is a revelation of an unmediated knowledge of God’s existence as presented in Maimonides first chapter of the Mishnah Torah, that is, Rav Shagar reads Maimonides as a Hasidic identity with the divine.

But in a non-foundational era along with the traditional statement that we cannot see God face to face, this intimacy and identity with the divine is a non-verbal depiction in the soul. To which Rav Shagar, gives an Existential understanding. “This intimacy created the intimacy of a person with himself, the truth and calm of faith. Encountering the truth of existence grants a believer his own existence.” Meaning that unlike Heschel where one encounter God, here one encounters one’s own self. The answer to the possibility of revelation is that it is a transcendent experience that gives life meaning. He return to this later in the essay.

Section II Revelation as the Receiving of God by the Self in a moment of Love

Maimonides counts faith as a commandment, which for Rav Shagar means commandments should be fulfilled for their own sake, meaning out of love. A commandment is not a law. The command should be understood as the truth of God’s existence turning toward the individual and toward the truth in him, “face to face.” It is an I-Thou moment in which God turns toward man in order for man to receive God’s kingship with love, for man to receive God’s address and thus create man as existence. He uses Franz Rosenzweig’s description that this is the lover’s call, “love me. That simply happens in the present moment of revelation, and therefore it cannot held onto and posited as law. (For Rosenzweig on love as applied to prayer, see this article, Shagar applies it to Torah study.)

Section III Revelation as Inner Reality; Torah as our Inwardness

Rav Shagar moves from his Hasidic reading of Maimonides applied to Rosenzweig to an alternate approach to Sinai found in Sefat Emet (Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (1847-1905), which focuses on the inner vitality of all things. For the Sefat Emet, speaking face to face means the revelation of this inner vitality. Rav Shagar takes this in an Existential direction. People are trapped in isolation and inauthentic experience.  “In order to be freed from this state a person needs revelation.”  However, the revelation is transitory and returns to concealment amidst ordinary life.

This is the place where Torah study becomes essential for creating the space for holiness and the divine presence. “This is the Jew’s refuge from the alienation and estrangement of the outer world, and it is here that he finds his place and feels at home.”   This form of Torah is available to every Jew and shines alike on each person. Eventually, most things are again concealed in routine and repetition, Revelation is the starting point, the openness to the concealed innerness, renewing the connection from an old-new place.

Revelation is experienced foremost as fear (yirah), which Shagar defines as the terror of the nothingness of existence. “The revelation at Sinai does not grant human ethics support from an absolute and transcendent source” and ”is not evaluated based on an external fact.” In short, Torah is about inwardness and does not depict, represent, or refer to external things.” Yet, it gives great pleasure in its ability to help a person transcend.

Section IV Torah must be studied in Covenant, defined as our Commitment and Personal Meaning

Mount Sinai is about the deference of  “we will understand” by “we will do,” understanding is based on doing. “A Jew finds his Jewish identity in the Torah, and through that his connection to God.” Torah must be studied in love not as an outsider; “anthropologists claim something similar. Can a Western researcher ever understand the culture of tribesmen living in an entirely different existential space?”  Not only do you have to be a participant in the covenant in order to understand the Torah, but also the whole sense of it is just this revelation.

But what is Torah in a non-foundational world? “The Torah is not representation, and does not describe the world of the covenant but creates it…  The Torah in its entirety is a revelation of the “I am,” a speech that reveals reality rather than depicting it.” It is out commitment, our creativity, and our finding meaning in Torah is the revelation. Thereby, blurring “the lines between discovery and creation”  and by extension God and human. In the encounter with Torah, the student  gains the truth of existence, and the inner unity that rests in the declaration “I am who I am.”

Section 5 Revelation as an Outside Transcending Event Shaping Our Lives-Opening us up to Personal Inwardness

What is the place of compulsion (kafiah) in revelation? For Rav Shagar, “If the Torah shapes the Jewish world, then it must be a personal acceptance and not compulsion.  The important new point here is that for Rav Shagar even if the source of revelation is in man’s innerness, it is still experienced as transcending him.” Even in an age of autonomy and even more so an age of non-foundationalism, religion is experienced as an outside revelation even if it comes from within. And because of this he lives a scrupulous religious life. (This is not the same as his Lacan justification elsewhere.)

Revelation is treated as compulsion and externality, but the individual chooses to accept them, in that, he “opens himself to being shaped; gives up his hold on the way things are in order to enable the creation of the plane of holiness.” In addition, the “fear of returning to the primordial chaos, reflects man’s inability to create his own existence, and the fear of our familiar world crumbling away.”

In conclusion, he states, “when inner truth is revealed as an available option, man’s freedom to choose himself, to accept himself as he is… is revealed. Choosing that which is compulsory for him brings a person to inner oneness; it opens him up to the existence that rests within him.”

In this section, he also rejects Rav Kook’s sense of a natural inner nature of the Jew. He also considers apologetics as making “a person stubborn and militantly heroic” and “actually strengthens the nihilism.”

© 2017 Alan Brill and Levi Morrow, all rights reserved.

Face to Face

From Rav Shagar’s teachings for Shavuot 2007. Edited by Eitan Abramowitz in advance of the conference organized for the sake of Rav Shagar’s recovery. Translation by Levi Morrow

“God spoke to you face to face on the mountain from within the fire.” (Deut. 5:4)

What is the meaning of revelation, which stands at the center of the experience at Sinai?The Baal Hatanya (Shneur Zalman of Liady 1745- 1813) sees this question as particularly pressing when it comes to the content of revelation:

The first thing to understand is the meaning of “the giving of the Torah,” for our forefather Abraham fulfilled the whole Torah before it was even given… the verse says, “so that you will command your sons…” meaning that the Torah was something they would receive from their ancestors. Further, you must understand what it means that, during the Ten Commandments, God descended on Mount Sinai with thunder and lightning, and that the people’s souls left their bodies upon hearing each commandment. Further, the commandments say “do not kill, do not commit adultery, etc.” and these are banal matters that are necessitated by human intellect itself.¹

What value did the experience of Sinai add, if it only revealed things we already know? It seems that, as opposed to the things that occur in our regular existence, revelation is not evaluated based on the content that it transmits but based on the very fact of revelation, on the disruption of normal existence. According to the verse that we opened with, revelation is a revelation of the face, a direct encounter with God. This makes the question of the relationship between the finite and the infinite quite urgent.

What significance could revelation have if it must always be processed through human concepts and ideas? What connection could revelation create, when the very idea of a connection is a human idea? Furthermore, Moshe was told, “a man cannot see my face and live… you shall see my back but you shall not see my face.” What then was the face that the Israelites saw from within the fire

1.

Maimonides reads the first verse of the revelation as a commandment, and this is how he explains its meaning:

The foundation of foundations and pillar of wisdoms to know that there is a first existent, that brought into existence everything that exists, and everything that exists, the heavens and the earth and everything between them, exists by virtue of the truth of its existence… This is a positive commandment, as per the verse “I am the Lord your God.²

The fundamental term of faith is “the truth of its existence,” and from this true existence, all things receive their existence. The truth of existence is the assertion that God truly exists, while what we think of as existence does not necessarily exist. What we think of as existence is really just a possible, incidental, existence, in contrast to the true existence that is a deeper layer than existence itself. The revelation at Mount Sinai was an encounter with this layer, with the truth of existence that transcends the existence with which we are familiar. This faith gives us our existence, without it we lack substance; our lived existence is flawed and transient. Faith gives a Jew his place – he exists in God.

Already in Maimonides’ depiction of Moshe’s request, he describes knowing the truth of existence as seeing a face:

What did Moshe want to comprehend when he asked: “Please show me Your glory?” He asked to know the truth of God’s existence to the point of internalizing it in his mind, the same way you know a particular person whose face he saw and whose form has been engraved within your mind. This person is distinct within your mind from other men. Similarly, Moshe asked that God’s existence be distinct within his mind from the existence of other entities, to the extent that he would know the truth of God’s existence as it is. God replied to him that a living person, body and soul, does not have the ability to comprehend this matter in its entirety.  God revealed to him that which no man had known before him or would ever know afterward, until he was able to comprehend from the truth of God’s existence distinctly in his mind, as a person is distinguished from other men when one sees his back and knows his body and his clothing. This is alluded to by the verse, “You shall see My back, but you shall not see My face.”³

Knowledge of the face is knowledge of the essence; recognition is unmediated. In contrast, knowledge of the back, such as Moshe merited, is the ability to understanding characteristic movements, how the unique essence is reflected in walking, clothing, or writing. Both of these types of knowledge involve some degree of unmediated contact with the essence. This is what distinguishes between them and the normal ways we talk about God, which connect with neither God’s essence nor its reflection.

To use different language, we might say that unmediated knowledge is a knowledge of direct recognition, distinct from theoretical knowledge, which is indirect knowledge. The difference between them is like the difference between an exact description from a matchmaker and a direct encounter with a partner. An unmediated encounter reveals “the thing itself,” everything that escapes description. A person’s uniqueness is only revealed in such an encounter, while a description can always be applied to another person. According to Maimonides, any descriptions of God in the prophetic books are mediated descriptions; they don’t clarify God’s essence but only teach about God’s existence.⁴ The revelation at Sinai in this regard – only at Sinai was there knowledge of God’s unmediated presence. Only such knowledge can give faith its certainty, because it touches substance, the divine reality, itself. This is also what gives Mosaic prophecy its absolute quality.

This is the voice that Israel heard, “for hearing the voice without the mediation of an angel is called ‘face to face.”⁵ Revelation of the face cannot be repeated, as it is not a superficial knowledge but an intimacy (yihud), an illumination, or in Maimonides’s language, “the unity of knower, knowing, and known.” Can we encounter God’s face? Can we know God intimately, to the point of “if I knew God, I would be God?” As we said, already in the biblical text there is a contradiction between the description of the revelation at Sinai and the assertion that “a man cannot see me and live.” The sages said that the souls of Israel left their bodies and they had to be brought back to life.

The commandment of faith that springs from the revelation “is not something expressed verbally, rather it is something depicted in the soul when you believe in it as depicted.”⁶ Depiction in the soul, rather than intellectual knowledge, gives substance to the faith that God really exists and is present, exists truly and not just possibly. This knowledge is a connection to the thing itself, it is the encounter with the face that Israel saw at Mount Sinai. As is clear from Maimonides’s description of Moshe’s request, experiencing God’s uniqueness is a recognition that distinguishes between the layer of what is common to others and a revelation of what cannot be conceptualized. Uniqueness is not a philosophical assertion to be affirmed but a divine intimacy that is bared before the believer. This intimacy created the intimacy of a person with himself, the truth and calm of faith. Encountering the truth of existence grants a believer his own existence.

2.

As mentioned previously, Maimonides counts faith as a commandment, as opposed to all other early commentators. The statement “I am the Lord your God” should therefore be read not as God’s declaration presenting himself but as a command. However, Maimonides elsewhere taught that the commandments should be fulfilled for their own sake, meaning out of love. A commandment is not a law, enforced by violence, but it is also not a request, made from a position of inferiority. A declaration is not addressed to the listeners present; there is no turn toward them. The command should be understood as the truth of God’s existence turning toward the individual and toward the truth in him, “face to face.”

The command is a distinct type of speech. When a person enters a room and presents himself before those present with the words “I am Reuven,” he is not reporting on or depicting something but creating with his words, with constructive speech. However, such a person is not shouting into empty space. He needs the response of those present, for them to turn toward him in return; he needs their faces. If they turn away from him, he and his address remain incomplete, cut short and rejected. In the statement “I am,” God turns toward man in order for man to receive God’s kingship with love, for man to receive God’s address and thus create man as existence.

The force of a commandment is not a force of violence, it does not use strength, but rather its force comes from its origin. The address comes from the truth of God’s existence, from the depth of God’s intimacy (yihud). Rosenzweig describes this as the lover’s call, “love me.”⁷ In this address the lover turns toward his beloved with his essence, and it is impossible to ignore. This is an absolute demand that is not attempting to shape the future but simply happens in the present, in the moment of revelation, and therefore it cannot held onto and posited as law. In theory, it can be refused, but on the other hand there is no choice: if you don’t accept it, the world will return to chaos.

3.

In Sefat Emet (Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (1847-1905) we find another approach to the revelation at Mount Sinai.

For God created the world using the Torah. The inner vitality of all creatures is the primordial force from the Torah… but this innerness (penimiyut) was created hidden. On the day of the revelation of the Torah, however, it was revealed and each thing attached to its root, as depicted in the verse, “face to face God spoke to you”… for then the all-enlivening power of the Torah was revealed… and the primary aspect of receiving the Torah is this revelation.⁸

We can understand the words of Sefat Emet by using Existentialist concepts. In a person’s initial state they live in concealment and isolation. The vitality and meaning that rests in the world, its “innerness” in the language of “Sefat Emet,” is hidden from him. As a result of this, a person is trapped in inauthentic existence, which is, practically speaking, a lack of existence. In order to be freed from this state a person needs revelation, the disruption of this opaque existence and the revelation of reality. However, since we are talking about revelation and not an intellectual idea, the innerness must return to its concealment, submerged in the world of facts and generalizations.

In order to maintain itself, revelation requires a space within which to occur, a plane which will replace the existing plane. The Torah fills this role, creating the space where reality can be revealed, a space ready for holiness and the divine presence. The words of the Torah and the fulfillment of the commandments shape a world of holiness, the substance of which transcends the day-to-day world of facts. This is the Jew’s refuge from the alienation and estrangement of the outer world, and it is here that he finds his place and feels at home. This is not the holiness of time, space, or any object, but the holiness of speech, where a language itself becomes a holy language.

The revelation of the Torah is not tied to any special insight or deep understanding; it is readily available to every Jew that is involved in Torah for its own sake, conscious of the divine command. He lives in the spoken words, in the open book, in understanding. As opposed to forms of understanding and experience that are an inner light, and therefore vary from person to person, this light is an instance of “surrounding all worlds” (sovev kol almin), beyond the emanated world, and it therefore shines alike on each person.

Sefat Emet describes this revelation as a return to the beginning and as a source of renewal. Initially, you can encounter the substance of a thing clearly and directly. Eventually, most things are again concealed in routine and repetition, interactions dull and faces are no longer revealing, as if after many years of marriage. Revelation is the starting point, the openness to the concealed innerness, renewing the connection from an old-new place. What is revealed and renews is not some external object, but reality itself.

The revelation of reality is experienced first and foremost as fear (yirah), as Baal Hatanya explains in the continuation of the teaching with which we began: “The purpose of the Torah and the commandments is to reveal God’s will within the lower world, as the verse says, “God commanded us to follow all of these laws, to fear God.”⁹

 The fear that accompanies revelation is not fear of something, but rather a terror that overcomes a person without any clear cause. It flows from the revelation of the nothingness of existence, the laying bare of the substantive reality behind our existence. Existence loses its material quality, its factual concreteness, it is spiritualized and appears as oneness (ahdut) and innerness. This is the response to the Baal Hatanya’s question about the very human nature of the Ten Commandments: the revelation at Sinai does not grant human ethics support from an absolute and transcendent source, but rather ethics itself appears as “nullified” (bevhinat habitul sheyesh bo), as a revelation of the infinite. The revelation is specifically in the banal statements, the superficial words.

This requires changing how we think about the truth of revelation. As the creation of a space wherein reality is revealed, the revelation of the Torah, like the creation of the world, is not evaluated based on an external fact. The Torah is speech that creates, rather than depicting or representing. The words construct their meaning, which is not evaluated based on exacting adherence to existence but rather based on internal coherence, on being substantive and not artificial.

This distinction can be put in terms of the Baal Hatanya’s distinction between greater knowledge (Da’at Elyon) and lesser knowledge (Da’at Tahton): in lesser knowledge, truth is about speech matching reality, and the concrete stability of the fact is an important part of truth. In greater knowledge, truth is about speech corresponding to its own inner reality, the substance that gives it its innerness. The constructive speech of the Torah does not refer to external things; such a speech would duality, on an external existence rooted in the sefirah of Malkhut.

The Torah is a revelation of “I am who I am,” speech that is one with itself and therefore disrupts the familiar frameworks of existence. Of course, identifying the truth and revelation of the Torah is not a function of deep understanding or study. Therefore it is accessible to people beyond just Torah scholars: “there is a bit of this in every Jewish soul… this is what we see practically with every Jew, when he learns any idea regarding God’s immanence or transcendence, or the like… his soul is excited and he becomes entrenched in the idea and pursues it.”¹⁰

A Jew has a sense for divinity, for distinguishing between holy and mundane, between full and empty, and sometimes this sense is strongest of all in the simple Jew. The divinity in the Torah gives him great pleasure, not because of the content but transcending it. This pleasure is a manifestation of inner connection, of intimacy with the giver of the Torah who is present in it, of the covenant that is the Torah’s words. ¹¹

4.

The first expression of the covenant at Mount Sinai is the preceding of “we will understand” by “we will do,” an order considered “the mystery used by ministering angels.”¹² This mystery is the dependence of understanding on doing, which is [behind] the familiar assertion that no one who is not part of the covenant can understand the Torah. This assertion requires clarification, however: What is the connection between comprehension, covenant, and deed? Why can study not stand on its own?

The sages understood the Torah, first and foremost as God’s covenant with Israel. The primary meaning of Torah study is partaking in that covenant. The Oral Torah, which the sages called “the mystery,” is the intimacy between God and Israel. The sages expressed this in many homilies on their love of the Torah expressed through metaphors taken from marital life. A Jew finds his Jewish identity in the Torah, and through that his connection to God. That is how it was in the days of the Sages, and so it is today. Anyone devoted to the Torah experiences this, whether he is a student in yeshiva or a layman who gets up early to study a daily page of Talmud.

The bottom-line halakhah is therefore that a person can fulfill the requirement of the blessings on the Torah by saying the blessing of “Love,” [the 2^nd blessing of the twice daily recitation of the Shema] for both the basis and the content of learning is love. This affects the form Torah study takes. Not every form of study can be covenantal, just as not every student can partake in the covenant. A non-Jew who learns Torah receives the death penalty, not because he lacks the intelligence necessary to understand it but because he does not belong to the covenant and its meaning will not be revealed to him anyway. Even regarding an ignorant person the sages taught, “one who teaches Torah in front of an ignorant person is like someone who has sexual relations with their fiancé in front of an ignoramus,” a sensitivity that reveals but a fraction of the intimacy of the scholar with his bride-Torah.

A number of anthropologists claim something similar. Can a western researcher ever understand the culture of tribesmen living in an entirely different existential space? Simply translating the language and customs into another language is not enough; in order to understand the culture you have to live within it and be a part of it. The sense of texts and actions cannot be abstracted or described objectively; it derives from the cultural context and the way of life that they are rooted in, and therefore must necessarily change in the transition to another culture. This was also the claim of the Musar masters against academic Talmud study, and this lay behind their demand that the study of ethics (musar) precede Torah study.

Regarding the Torah the claim is even more far-reaching. Not only is there no Torah without covenant, which, as we have seen, is also true regarding other forms of understanding, but the Torah itself is the language or the speech of the covenant. Not only do you have to be a participant in the covenant in order to understand the Torah, but also the whole sense of it is just this revelation, the creation of the covenant through the learning. Here we return to an idea we mentioned previously about revelation: the Torah is not representation, it does not belong to the dualistic world and its meaning does not transcend it. The Torah does not describe the world of the covenant but creates it. The covenant rests in, and is realized by, learning.

Accepting the yoke of heaven by putting “we will do” before “we will listen” is the only way to escape the external way of looking at things, the stance that evaluates things based on external criteria. Sealing a covenant enables entrance into the world shaped by the Torah, a world that cannot be known before you enter it, a world in which holiness dwells. Some people want to justify the casuistic style of learning (pilpul) based on this. They claim that casuistry is like a work of art: not to be evaluated based on physical or philosophical truth, but also not just intellectual aesthetics.  Freed from practical learning, such as the exactitude of abstract research, which adheres to the words of the text, the imagination can create the vacuous space (halal panui) necessary for divine truth, which is infinite and unbounded.

The covenant creates a different type of learning and understanding, shaping the personality of the student in its image. The Torah in its entirety is a revelation of the “I am,” a speech that reveals reality rather than depicting it. Its truth is measured in its ability to be expressed; speaking Torah constructs it, without any dualism. Torah knowledge is not manifest in the ability to compare it to other areas, to identify similarities between it and some other meaning or value. Torah knowledge is manifest in the ability to speak it from the same place where it originated, in the ability to identify and unite with the intimacy it bears within it. “If I knew him, I would be him,” and the Torah can only be known by “being it.” This is how you understand a sermon, which is independent and constructive speech, by deeply studying the words until you feel that you could have given the sermon yourself. This unity blurs the lines between discovery and creation, and the student understands, interprets, and creates all at the same time.

This changes the position of the student, as Rav Hillel of Paritch taught:

“God spoke all these words to say, I am the Lord your God.” The word “saying” seems redundant, for throughout the Torah the word “saying” is said to Moshe as an instruction to convey the message to the Israelites… at the Ten Commandments all of Israel heard directly from God, so why was the word “to say” added?

This all makes sense in light of “The Giving of the Torah” (matan torah). This does not refer to the giving of the commandments of the Torah specifically, for they were given later at both Mount Sinai and the Tent of Meeting.

Instead, the intent is that the capacity for Torah was given to each and every Israelite, enabling him to create Torah by speaking and reveal “I am who I am” (this refers to God’s essence and nature) by performing the commandments, causing it to dwell within the Israelite… This is the meaning of “and he spoke to say I am,” for he drew these words into the souls of Israel so that each Israelite would be able “to say: I am,” revealing “I am who I am” within his soul.¹³

 In encountering and uniting with the divine speech that is in the Torah, the student receives its absoluteness, the truth of existence, and the inner unity that rests in the declaration “I am who I am.” The ability to speak the speech of Torah, the word of God, frees a person from the incidental and the possible in existence and enables him to encounter the substantive existent.

5.

Rav Hillel of Paritch’s words raise another point regarding the covenant of “we will do and we will understand.” Much has been written about the tension between the Israelites’ putting “we will do” before “we will understand” and the sages understanding of the revelation at Sinai as “overturning (kafiah) the mountain like a barrel.” What is the place of compulsion (kafiah) in revelation, when at its basis stands the absolute consent of “we will do and we will understand”?

We celebrate the giving of the Torah, and not the receiving of the Torah. However, as we said, the acceptance of the yoke of heaven, as expressed in the declaration “we will do and we will understand,” is critical. Without it, the revelation is just an unconvincing spectacle, a pyrotechnic display. In order to be a convinced, you have to be ready to be convinced.

If the Torah shapes the Jewish world, then there must be a process of contract entering a Jew into this world, where the Jew accepts it as his existence. Compulsory rules do not create a world. Ultimately, however, the flaw in freedom is in subjectivity itself, in its being a possible existent. The Tosafists expressed this distinction in their words about the preference of a person who performs commandments while being commanded over someone who performs commandments without being commanded.

The reason someone who is commanded is preferable seems to be because he is more concerned and distressed about accidentally transgressing than someone who is not commanded, who can simply forget about the commandment if he so chooses [lit., “he already has bread in his basket, so he can put this down if he desires” -LM]. (Kiddushin 31a)¹⁴

The greatness of a command is exactly the worry and distress that maintain the duality and the difference between limited human capabilities and the absoluteness of the command. The divine is not revealed to us as part of a natural process or as an inner nature.

Even if the source of revelation is in man’s soul and innerness, it is still experienced as transcending him and his concepts. The duality that we live in does not enable us to understand free will as creating itself outside of any external context. We constantly experience freedom from an external perspective, as a response to the causal frameworks in which we live. This stance creates nihilism, because there is nothing in our existence that contains absolute, non-relative, meaning.

In such a state, the need to justify the unjustifiable, to turn the external into the internal by way of apologetics that deny duality, arises. This process receives its meaning fromthe effort involved, and makes a person stubborn and militantly heroic. It rarely achieves its goal, because its lack of integrity actually strengthens the nihilism. The path to freedom is not in ignoring duality but in accepting it, as the Tosafists taught, for tension that is one with itself ceases to be tension.

Duality requires the compulsion and externality of revelation, but the individual chooses to accept them. The individual opens himself to being shaped; gives up his hold on the way things are in order to enable the creation of the plane of holiness. The compulsion, accompanied by the fear of returning to the primordial chaos, reflects man’s inability to create his own existence, and the fear of our familiar world crumbling away. In the affirmation “we will do and we will understand,” a Jew enters a world he did not create, the rules of which are not tailored just for him, and only there can he feel the holiness and achieve oneness. This is the meaning of the ability to say “I am who I am,” which Rav Hillel of Paritch says was granted by the revelation of the Torah.

When inner truth is revealed as an available option, man’s freedom to choose himself, to accept himself as he is and where he is, is revealed. Choosing that which is compulsory for him brings a person to inner oneness; it opens him up to the existence that rests within him. The “nullification” involved in putting “we will do” before “we will understand” lets a person hear the speech that creates the Torah, the letters whose roots start beyond conscious thought and external significance. The power of hearing creates a space for holiness, inspiration, and revelation.

© 2017 Alan Brill and Levi Morrow, all rights reserved.

1. Lekutei Torah Bemidbar 12:3.
2. Maimonides, Laws of the Foundation of the Torah 1:1-6. [Translation taken from org and edited for clarity. ~Levi Morrow].
3. Ibid, 10.
4. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 1:46.
5. Ibid, 37.
6. Ibid, 50.
7. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, p.209.
8. Sefat Emet, Bemidbar, Shavuot 5631, p.22.
9. Lekutei Torah,
10. Kuntrus Hahitpa’alut of the Mittler Rebbe, p.58.
11. “Normally if a person takes an object home from the market, has be purchased its owners? But God gave the Torah to Israel and said to them, ‘It’s as if it is me that you are taking,” Shemot Rabbah 33:6.
12. Bavli Shabbat 88a.
13. Pelah Harimon, Shemot, p.240.
14. Bavli Kiddushin 31a.