Reblen

Two Talmudic Paradoxes

2011-06-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

I think we have all been fascinated by the question: What is peculiar about Talmudic logic? Is it the same as Western logic but presented differently? Does it have methodological procedures that violate what a Western logician (or a naïve modern student) would regard as normal or acceptable? Does it push forward where Western logic fears to tread, sometimes (maybe anticipating Gödel) pointing out the Achilles heel in Western (read: Aristotelian or Euclidian) logical assumptions?

Probably yes to all the above.

And finally (the real payoff in my opinion): Where does Talmudic logic lay the basis for Talmudic meta-ethics and ethics? What (in the Talmud) is the bottom-line criterion (or is there more than one) of determining right action?

A colleague of mine said that in teaching Talmud there were instances too numerous to count when a student would react in surprise or disbelief: How can you reason that way? The experienced student of Talmud has learned to take for granted the idiosyncratic methods of reasoning that are part of the fabric of Talmudic argument. By slowing down and recapturing the idiosyncratic and odd in Talmudic discourse, we can perhaps isolate and identify the core of Talmudic logic itself, and shed light on our initial questions—and lead also to additional questions that remain unarticulated at this point but are just as much part of the enterprise (rightly conceived) and worth pursuing.

Case #1: The Failure of Transitivity (A > B and B > C but (A not > C))

I start with one example that sticks in my mind from the time that I was studying Chapters 4 and 5 of Sanhedrin with some friends. I refer to the sugya that links Sanhedrin 35a-35b:

Said Resh Lakish to R. Johanan: Shouldn’t burial of a “met mitzvah” override Shabbat from kal-vahomer? Just as the Avodah overrides Shabbat, so burial of the dead should override Shabbat deriving from “ve-la’ahoto”, as it is taught (citing Numbers 6:7)...: What does this come to teach us? Even if [a Nazirite] was going to slaughter his Pesah or circumcise his son, and he heard that a relative of his had died, could it be that he should defile himself? You say, “he shall not defile himself.” Could it be that just as he should not defile himself for his sister, he should not defile himself for a “met mitzvah”? The text teaches, “ve-la’ahoto” —it is for his sister that he does not defile himself, but he defiles himself for a “met mitzvah.” Now, if Shabbat is overridden by the Avodah, does it not follow logically that burial of a “met mitzvah” should override it? (But of course it doesn’t.)

Explanation:

Met mitzvah: If one is traveling and finds an unattended dead corpse, one is duty-bound to set aside all other tasks and bury it.

Avodah: The Temple service.

Avodah overrides Shabbat: The daily sacrifices in the Temple must be offered on Shabbat, even though offering them entails certain actions (such as slaughtering) which ordinarily would be forbidden on Shabbat.

Met mitzvah overrides Avodah: A Nazirite, going to the Temple to offer his Pesah sacrifice, if he encounters a met mitzvah, must bury it, even though he thus defiles himself and disqualifies himself from offering the Pesah sacrifice.

Shabbat overrides met mitzvah: If one encounters a dead body on Shabbat, he should wait until after Shabbat before burying it.

Kal va-homer: If Case A is more severe than B, and particular "p" is true of B (B(p)), then particular "p" should be true of A also (A(p)). In this case, the particular is "overrides C." Thus, if B overrides C, and A is more severe than B (because A overrides B), then A should override C.

Attempted application of Kal va-homer in this case: If burial of the dead overrides the Temple service, and the Temple service overrides Shabbat, shouldn't burial of the dead override Shabbat? (But this is refuted: Shabbat overrides burial of the dead.)

Argument from ve-la'ahoto: A Nazirite is forbidden to defile himself, even for close relatives. But the rabbis interpreted the redundant vav in the word ve-la'ahoto to mean that he should defile himself for a met mitzvah.

Analysis:

On the one hand, this may fall into that long series of specious kal va-homers which are strewn throughout the Talmud. That would be significant enough, and at some point I think we should stop to analyze the deeper significance of the fact that the rule of kal va-homer is so much honored in the breach. But it seemed to me on studying this passage that it took a somewhat different tack, and was trying to offer a paradigm of:

A > B, B > C, but C > A

Namely:

Met mitzvah overrides Avodah, Avodah overrides Shabbat, but Shabbat overrides met mitzvah.

To a Western logician, this is a slap in the face of a Euclidian axiom:

If A > B and B > C, then A > C

This issue is referred to in the contemporary literature of philosophical ethics as “transitivity.” (A recent student of mine referred me to Joseph Raz’s discussion of this issue in The Morality of Freedom, pp. 322ff.) If there is one uniform scheme of human values applying to all rational agents, then certain goods should be universally deemed to be better than others in a consistent hierarchical progression, but (alas?) they are not: one agent prefers A and another prefers B and the attempt at establishing a universal, consistent hierarchy of all goods is bound to fail.

It seems to me that both the Talmud and the modern discussion are running up against the limitations of abstract logic when the attempt is made to apply it to human experience. Human experience has so many variables that a simple-minded logic of abstract consistency is bound to fail when trying to account for it. Thus the anomalies of Talmudic logic (as in this case) may be a tribute to the complexity of human (or human-and-divine) reality, that demands a more subtle and at times paradoxical approach rather than a simple-minded straightforward one.

Case #2: The Case that Falls Between the Cracks of Classification

The following narrative is brought in Bavli Bava Batra 22a: R. Dimi wanted to sell his load of figs, and Rava authorized Rav Adda bar Abba to test his expertise to see if he could qualify to get a visiting scholar's commercial privileges for a day. Rav Adda posed the following stumper to Rav Dimi: "If an elephant passes a basket, what is its status [is it a "vessel" and thus susceptible of defilement, or as excrement is it immune to defilement]?" R. Dimi was unable to provide an answer, so he lost his chance at market-privilege and could not sell his figs. [The tragic sequel of revenge is irrelevant for my current purpose.]

What is characteristic of Rav Adda's question is that it serves to prove the incompleteness of the halakhic thought-system (in the sense that Gödel used a similar theorem to prove the incompleteness of the system of mathematics in his famous Proof, cited by Gordon Tucker in his Gerson Cohen Memorial Lecture, published a few years ago in Conservative Judaism). The halakhic thought-system puts everything into categories. Women are either eligible or not eligible for matrimony to men of specified relations (if you want an exhaustive list, check out Yevamot 1:1); certain cases are either eligible or ineligible for payment of damages; certain foods are either permitted or forbidden; certain items either are susceptible of ritual impurity or not; etc.; and the whole world of objects and cases is classifiable in this way. Or is it? Rav Adda gives a counter-example. It seems in retrospect that he was looking for the Achilles heel in the system, and found it in a similar way to how Gödel found it in mathematics: by looking purposely for a case that confuses the paradigm, by belonging to two opposite classes. The basket that passes through an elephant is at one and the same time a member of the class of "vessels" which are susceptible to impurity, and of "excrement" which is insusceptible.

How is this possible? One reason is that there is a transition of thought-mode from Biblical to rabbinic thought from narrative mode to static-analytical mode. The Bible is full of narratives, and the basic evaluative mode of the Bible is narrative-based. Every narrative is unique; the narrative of what transpired between Jacob and Esau is different from anything that transpired before it (though bearing some similarity to what will transpire between Jacob and Laban in the next episode), and the parties are judged on how they respond spontaneously to the unique features of that episode, having to make instantaneous judgments based on the logic of events as they unfold. Even the laws of the Bible are often presented in narrative form: "If two men are fighting, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results...and other damage ensues..." Judges must decide the unique cases that come to them on the basis of the always-imperfect analogies between the presented case and precedent cases, employing that elusive quality of "hokhmah" which is illustrated in the famous story of Solomon and the two mothers: the ability to invent a solution that is also unique and adequate to the unique case presented, while remaining true to time-honored criteria of fairness.

But along come the Greeks and tell us that everything is classifiable: that there are objects and essences, and all you have to do is determine what kind of object is before you, and what is its essence. This works in a static universe, where the objects have no history. The objects classified in the rules of "kelim" are by and large static and can be examined in their current, unaltering state to determine whether they are tamei or tahor. But along comes Rav Adda and introduces narrative into the picture. The basket that he proposes has a history, and it is its history that confounds the paradigm, for at one point of its history it is clearly in one class, but then it passes into an opposite class. By re-introducing narrative into a system that is based on static essences, Rav Adda demonstrates its incompleteness.

But by telling the story of Rav Adda and Rav Dimi, the editors of the Bavli were doing one of the things that they do best: pushing the rabbinic thought-system itself to its limits.

Lenny's Short Guide to Zionist History

2011-05-23T06:06:00.000-07:00

1948 and Other Key Dates in Zionist History –

A Narrative-Conscious Approach

May 21, 2002

I am sharing this historical analysis of the unfolding of the stages of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio that I wrote in 2002. Little has changed except that the references to Israeli settlements in Gaza were evacuated in 2005 and so accordingly I have changed references to them to the past tense. Most of the information here is well-known to informed readers. The only novel aspect is my attempt to view the events described simultaneously from the different perspectives of the opposing actors in the historical drama. — LL May 23, 2011

Methodological Premises

In this essay, I discuss the significance of various dates in Zionist history in the full knowledge that there are at least two narrative frameworks from which the story of Zionism can be told – the Jewish-Zionist and the Arab-Palestinian. As an interested party, I naturally tend to see the story from my side. I do so in the awareness that there is another interpretation that can be given to the “facts” I present. Though I try not to be blindly locked into one narrative viewpoint, my perception cannot help being colored by it. I am at times judgmental of the premises of the alternative viewpoint from the standpoint of my own; that is, I speculate on how certain of what I perceive to be blind-spots and injustices of the Zionist story told from the Palestinian viewpoint may have arisen historically, but my speculation is admittedly partisan and told from my Zionist viewpoint. The judgments that I render are thus admittedly not final, but would have to be addressed and redressed from someone of the other viewpoint who had digested my observations and responded with his/her side of the story.

1881 and 1897: Modern Zionism Is Born

A non-Jewish colleague and friend recently remarked to me that the State of Israel can be justified as a response to the Holocaust of European Jewry. This is a useful starting point with much truth. However, it needs some qualification. The “Holocaust” must be understood in the broadest sense, as the climax of a crisis in European-Jewish relations that had been germinating for 1800 years, and which worsened noticeably with the rise of anti-Semitism throughout most of Europe from 1870 onward. Those Jews who picked up on the early warning signs, started devising Zionism as a response before the calamity struck in all its horrible force.

Modern Zionism had independent beginnings in eastern and western Europe. In Russia, 1881 marked the assassination of the liberal Czar Alexander II and the ascent to power of his reactionary son Alexander III. Alexander III initiated a campaign against Russian Jewry, marked by discriminatory legislation and pogroms. His minister Pobedonotsev was reputed to have advocated the elimination of Russian Jewry, a third by emigration, a third by extermination, and a third by conversion. The 1880’s saw the publication of Leo Pinsker’s seminal essay, “Auto-Emancipation” and the proto-Zionist groups Bilu and Hovevei Zion. The “First Aliyah” of this decade saw scattered dozens and hundreds of young Russian Jews moving to Palestine with vague dreams of settling on the land,[1] the first precursors of the agricultural settlements (including the kibbutzim) that would become significant after 1900.

In the 1890s, the Viennese Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial in France as a correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse and observed the mobs of French anti-Semites (followers of Eduard Drumont’s Action Française) crying, “Death to the Jews!”[2] Although he did not have the historical hindsight that would establish a definite historical link between these phenomena and the Holocaust of 1933-45, his confidence in the security of European Jewry was definitely shaken. He perceived the status of European Jewry as that of a people rendered anomalous by lack of a clear and present homeland. The return of Jewry to its ancient homeland would hopefully normalize Jewish status and reduce the motivation of anti-Semitism.

Both the Russian Zionists and Herzl conceived of the tie of the Jewish people to the land of Israel in secular-historical terms. On those premises, a people’s “title” to its land is based on historical associations, not the will of God. Both were naïve as to the prior presence of Palestinian Arabs in the land and the problems that this might raise for the Zionist enterprise.

1917: The Balfour Declaration

The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government in the midst of World War I, at a time when Allied politicians were anticipating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and planning how to parcel out its remains. Whose interests and ambitions were to be accommodated? British diplomats contemplated the facilitation of both Jewish and Arab national projects after the war. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was in contact and negotiation with both British and Arab diplomats to express Zionist interests and negotiate their fulfillment in tandem with Arab interests.

When the war actually ended and Britain assumed control of Palestine, she had to contend with a situation where Palestine west of Jordan was home to about 600,000 Arab-Palestinians and 100,000 Jews.[3] The Jews comprised some ultra-Orthodox who had lived in scholarly enclaves supported by the charity of their European coreligionists, and a growing number of “Halutzim” (pioneers), the new settlers, mostly secular, who had come in the last 40 years to develop a new life in the towns and agricultural collectives. Colonial rule by a Jewish minority over an Arab majority was out of the question. Indeed, the local Arab aristocracy felt their rights had been slighted, for they felt that after the demise of the Ottoman Empire the political leadership of Palestine should have devolved on them exclusively. Some of the Zionist progressives dreamed of Zionism having a quiet revolutionary effect on the Arab peasant masses, weaning them from their quasi-feudal dependence on their traditional landlords and leading to an improvement in their educational, social, hygienic and political situation. They even attributed the growing Arab opposition to Zionism as an attempt by a reactionary class to salvage their hegemony by suppressing social progress.[4] Nor was it obvious from the outset whether the Arab leadership would adopt a compromising or intransigeant stance toward the Jewish inroads in Palestine. Under these circumstances, the Zionist plan was to grow the Jewish population in Palestine to the point that they were a majority, and then work for statehood under conditions favorable to Jewish national hopes. Though the territorial unity of western Palestine (west of the Jordan) was assumed at this point, later developments would show that it was not a non-negotiable item for the majority of Zionists. However, a minority, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky and known as “Revisionist Zionists,” harbored maximalist territorial ambitions. This policy division within the Zionist leadership foreshadowed the later political division between the Israeli Labor party (led successively by Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Rabin, Peres, and Barak) and Herut/Likud (led successively by Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu and Sharon).

1929: The Struggle Turns Violent

In 1929, a wave of riots broke out among Palestinian Arabs, who attacked Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Hebron and other locations. The worst damage occurred in Hebron, where over 60 Jews, mostly ultra-Orthodox, were killed. The most charitable interpretation, offered by some recent historians, is that there was a misunderstanding on the part of the Arab rioters, who mistook the erection of a screen to separate the Jewish men and women worshipping in front of the Western Wall on Yom Kippur as the beginning of a change of the religious-territorial status quo aimed ultimately at desecrating and destroying the Dome of the Rock. The standard Zionist interpretation is that the intransigeant wing of the Arab-Palestinian leadership, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini (Mufti of Jerusalem), deliberately used false propaganda to incite the Arab masses and supplied them with weapons to wreak violence and terrorize the Zionists into calling off the Zionist project.[5] What is undeniable is that the 1929 riots marked the beginning of increasingly violent confrontations between the Arab-Palestinian leadership and the Zionists which escalated ultimately into the 1948-9 war. The interpretation which I grew up with, and which no evidence has yet led me seriously to question, is that a moderate Zionist leadership which sought conciliation and compromise was rebuffed at every step by an extremist Arab-Palestinian leadership. Not that there were not moderates and extremists in both camps, but from 1929 to 1948 the moderate faction clearly held the upper hand on the Zionist side, while the extremist faction dominated on the Arab side. The al-Husseini faction prevailed in the Arab camp, not because it was representative of the Arab-Palestinian people (on this there is no conclusive evidence), but because through his office as Mufti of Jerusalem, his strong-arm tactics (including assassination of moderate Arab-Palestinians who dared challenge his leadership), and constant provocation of violence, he defined a situation to which others must necessarily respond. His constant opposition to immigration of Jews into Palestine, even when the ascent of Nazis to power in Germany made this a dire necessity, and even after 1945 when the survivors of the Holocaust languished in displaced-persons camps, is notorious, as is his consorting with Mussolini and Hitler during the war years. He opposed every proposal of partition of Palestine, even the 1936 plan which would have given the Zionists a tiny sliver of land, and most crucially the 1947 partition which the Zionists had enthusiastically accepted. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 partition as the Zionists did, there would be no Arab refugee problem, no expulsion of Arabs from their ancestral villages, no continuing state of hostility and intermittent warfare between Israelis and Palestinians for the last 54 years. I would welcome a coherent, convincing narrative of the 1929-1948 period that would lead me to revise my estimate of the developments of this period. To date, I have seen none.

1948: Israeli Statehood and Al-Naqba

The date of Israel’s independence is celebrated by Israelis, and mourned by Palestinians as a day of national tragedy. The day commemorates the events of 1948, in which the Israeli state came to be, and in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes and became refugees. From my liberal-Zionist perspective I see the Palestinians in their tragedy as the victims of a struggle between two nations in which the blame, though not wholly borne by one side or the other, lies predominantly on the Arab leadership (including foreign Arab nations) that rejected the 1947 partition and led the Arabs into war. The Palestinian narrative with which I am somewhat acquainted lays the blame mostly on the Zionists. I believe that it is the Palestinian interpretation of the 1948 events which colors their whole perception of Zionism, and leads them to portray it as a revival of the ancient Israelite conquest policies of Joshua. By eliminating the context of pre-1948 Arab rejectionism, they are left with a picture of Jews who invaded a land of peaceable inhabitants and expelled those inhabitants willfully in order to make room for themselves.[6] Indeed, if we were to eliminate the whole pre-history of Palestine from 1900 to 1948 (including the war which the Arabs declared on Zionism in 1948), and if we viewed the expulsions of 1948 in isolation, the actions of the Jews toward the Arabs in that year would seem monstrous and indefensible. A Palestinian growing up in refugee camps from birth on, who hears the story of his people from that vantage point, and perceives his wretched living conditions in contrast with those of his middle-class Israel neighbors, cannot but view the role that Israel has played toward his people with resentment and hatred.

And who am I to say that this Palestinian is responsible for the conditions from which he suffers? He who was born after 1948 did not participate in the historic decisions, whether to welcome the original Zionist settlers at the beginning of the century, or what stand to take on the Balfour Declaration and British mandate, or whether to ratify or reject the partition plan of 1947. All he knows is that he personally suffers the consequences of al-Naqba, the uprooting of the Palestinian people from their homes in 1948, and that the poverty and lack of opportunity from which he suffers is unfair. Israel benefited from the same events that caused his suffering, so it is natural in his eyes to blame them. He does not understand why Israel refuses to entertain a recent proposal, that the “right of return” of Palestinians be finessed by a complex formula including return of a nominally small sample, financial remuneration for the rest, and admission by Israel of responsibility for the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.

From the Israelis’ point of view, refusal of the last condition is perfectly understandable. First of all, not all of the Palestinians were actually expelled. Some were (a fact which traditionally-patriotic Israelis are still denying). Many evacuated their homes willingly – some as part of a conscious strategy to facilitate the war against the nascent Israel, many more in panic (especially after the Irgun massacre of the Arab village Deir Yassin in western Jerusalem). Some of the Israeli expulsions had clear military justification, especially in those cities of mixed population where prior Arab hostilities posed a clear and present danger to the Jewish population; others were not so clearly justifiable. But it is overwhelmingly arguable from the Israeli point of view that a conciliatory approach of the Arab leadership would have been reciprocated at once on the part of the Zionists, and the Palestinians would have been left unmolested to live where they were. It was the clear and present danger to the Jewish population from the war initiated by the Arabs, and the defensive measures which the Israelis had to take for their own survival, that resulted in the dislocation of the Palestinian people. Security concerns were also cited in support of the refusal of Israeli leaders to readmit them to home communities immediately after the war. Though many of the Palestinian Arabs were probably not individually responsible for the fate that overtook them, collectively the Arab nation was accurately perceived as the adversary. In a state of war, when national survival is at stake, the distinction between individual and collective responsibility is regrettably one of the first casualties. Especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the dangers to Israel’s survival were not to be taken lightly in 1949.

Israel has countered the Palestinian assertion of a “right of return” by pointing out an analogy with other cases of national partition and border realignments. In 1945, the borders of Poland were moved westward on both the German and Russian frontiers, and many Poles and Germans moved west in order to remain politically integrated with their compatriots, though it meant giving up their former homes. In 1947, the partition of India and creation of Pakistan led to similar relocations. The relocation (part forced, part voluntary) of Palestinians beyond the Green Line in 1948-9 was balanced by the relocation (part forced, part voluntary) of Jews from Arab lands to Israel in the years immediately following. In all these cases other than the Palestinian, the relocated individuals and families were integrated into their new host countries and became politically settled and economically productive. Whether rightly or wrongly, Israel has seen in the continuing “refugee” status of the Palestinians after over half a century the willful pursuit of a political agenda continuous with the aims of the Arab rejectionists of 1947. The origins, activities, and constituency-base of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, from its origins before 1967 to the start of the Oslo process in the 1990s, lend support to this interpretation.

The political platform of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed in the post-1948 context, and bears clear witness to the pre-1967 origins of the sentiments it expresses. Indeed, Arafat’s guerrilla activities against Israel predate 1967. In 1966 there were no “occupied territories” to oppose (if by this one means the West Bank and Gaza); there were no “settlements” to oppose (if by this one means settlements in the West Bank and Gaza). There was only Israel within the Green Line. But that Israel was home for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before 1948, and that was what they wanted to recover. There was incessant low-level sniping and guerrilla activity between 1949 and 1967, which was one of Israel’s motives for the 1956 Sinai war. The guerrillas were unreconciled to the 1949 armistice; they wanted their homes back. Their interests would later be one crucial factor motivating Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s Camp David offer in 2000, and his insistence on the Palestinian “right of return.” How many of the refugees from which the guerrillas were recruited, were continually motivated by the same intransigeant opposition to accepting one square meter of Jewish sovereignty that motivated Haj Amin al-Husseini’s rejectionist cadres before 1947, and how many simply wished to return to their homes and live in peace, is the big question that can never be answered definitively. But in either case, from 1948 onward (and especially after 1967) the pain of homelessness and uprooting were potent factors motivating the guerrillas to fight against Israel’s existence. Their hostility, in turn, was correctly perceived by Israel as a threat to her security.

1967 – Victory, Occupation, Settlements

In 1967, Israel fought again for its survival against a massive Egyptian buildup and blockade, and captured control of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan heights. During the next decades, Israel built a network of homes, settlements, suburbs, towns, and villages in the occupied territories. The motivations of these new (and sometimes old-new) settlements were diverse and complex. The whole range of these situations and motivations must be described, in order for any intelligent judgment to be made concerning them. I am reminded in this connection of H.W. Fowler’s demarcation of five classes of English-speakers regarding split infinitives: those who neither know nor care what they are, those who do not know but care very much, those who know and condemn, those who know and approve, and those who know and distinguish.[7]

The Western Wall (and nearby, the Jewish Quarter whose synagogues stood desolate from 1949 to 1967) stands in the territory outside pre-1967 Israel. No serious student of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has proposed that Israel should cede the Western Wall and its adjacent plaza to the Palestinians. That the site most sacred to Jewry should have been in Arab hands from 1949 to 1967, with no recognition of the right of a Jew to visit it to pray, was a crying injustice waiting to be righted. This is one “territory” which I cannot see how any decent person, Jewish or not, would vote to return to its pre-1967 status.

The village of Kfar Etzion south of Bethlehem was one of the first to be settled after the 1967 war. The history of the village is instructive. It was founded in 1935, evacuated in the face of Arab attacks in 1936, and re-settled in 1943. In 1948, it was besieged by the Arab Legion; the women and children were evacuated, and the men were massacred by the Arabs. The survivors of the original village and their descendants spearheaded the resettlement in 1967; for them, it was a homecoming and vindication. In succeeding years, the “Etzion bloc” has been expanded by the addition of several nearby villages and the town of Efrat, all of them on previously vacant land. In 1996, a bypass road was constructed to allow the residents of these communities to commute to Jerusalem without driving through Bethlehem; these commuters were subject to near-constant shooting attacks during the Al-Aksa intifada. Most peace-settlement scenarios assign the Etzion bloc to Israel, with the possibility of other Israeli land being given to the Palestinians as a swap.

Ma’aleh Adumim is a thriving new eastern suburb of Jerusalem, on the road toward Jericho. It sits isolated on a stretch of red desert hills reminding the American visitor of Arizona, sparsely populated with a few small Arab villages and Bedouin camel-stops. This settlement has filled an urgent need of housing for greater-Jerusalem residents, at a minimum of inconvenience to the surrounding population. It has been generally quiet during the intifada, in stark contrast to Gilo, a contiguous suburb of southern Jerusalem which has been the object of frequent attack.

The Jewish settlements in the Golan occupy the high land from which Syrian artillery took pot shots at the lower-lying villages of Huleh and Galilee from 1949 to 1967. The region possesses few historical-religious associations (mostly from the Roman period), but considerable strategic value. It also produces the best-quality wine currently produced in Israel. The current residents are among the most pragmatic and flexible of Israeli “settlers,” and though they love the land and have lived there most of their adult lives, they would pick up and leave without a fuss if a peace settlement required it.

Hebron is arguably the most ancient Jewish historical site, containing the tomb of the patriarchs. It was for a long time one of the traditional four Jewish “holy cities” and home to an ultra-Orthodox scholarly community until the massacre of 1929 caused its evacuation. The proximity to sacred history is bought here at a fearful price, for Jewish and Palestinian extremists are both drawn to it disproportionately, and (including the nearby Jewish settlement Kiryat Arba) it has been one of the worst chronic hot spots of violence in the land since 1967. Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Moslem worshippers in 1994 was the most notorious incident in a constant two-way vendetta, which has picked up where 1929 left off.

Katif and Netsarim in the Gaza strip laid no pretense to sacred history (indeed, in Biblical times Gaza was the stronghold of the Philistines, not part of Israel), but they consisted [before the Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005] of islands of middle-class suburbia (complete with beachfront) alongside the most crowded concentration of refugee camps and slums in the Middle East. Here one needs no conspiracy theory of directed attacks to account for the frequent violence which claimed many lives (including Alisa Flatow of West Orange, New Jersey, my neighboring community). Their very existence was a gratuitous provocation.

This sampling shows the variety of motivation and significance behind the settlement phenomenon: historic sanctity, middle-class comfort, suburban convenience, military-strategic value, triumphalist assertiveness. The diverse attitudes of Israelis toward the settlements are as instructive as the diversity of the settlements themselves. We must recall in this connection, that Israeli political leadership was exercised exclusively by Labor from 1948 until 1977. In the last quarter-century, the right-of-center Likud party has enjoyed political parity with Labor. Israelis have expressed their profound ambivalence on the “land or peace” by alternately selecting first one party, then the other, to carry the banner of leadership.

Even before the rise of Menachem Begin to power in 1977, Israelis were in a dilemma on the issue of what to do with the land acquired in their 1967 victory. One counsel suggested returning the land in order to obtain a lasting peace, but there seemed to be no responsible party in sight with whom to deal. Arafat’s PLO then wanted nothing less than the undoing of the 1947 partition, and spoke only with violence, directed variously at Israeli schoolchildren, Olympic athletes, and Jewish tourists. There were plenty of decent Palestinians in the territories willing to sell produce and crafts, but they lacked a mature political voice.

In this setting, Israelis fell guiltily in love with the land and acted surreptitiously on that feeling, much as a teenage couple whose parents do not approve of their relationship will steal kisses and more when they can seize the opportunity, torn between desire and guilt. When Likud came into power (as a consequence of the perceived failure of Labor in the Yom Kippur war and the social rise of the more conservative Sephardic Jews of Arab-country origins), the same objectives were pursued more aggressively and without guilt. The peace faction argued that it would be necessary eventually to trade land for peace, and meanwhile there should be as little change in the status quo as possible. The expansionists responded that the Palestinians as a group would never accede to a reasonable settlement, so what was the point of remaining “virtuous” – denying one’s love for the land and its historic-religious associations – for the sake of an idealistic chimera with no practical chance of realization?

The expansionist assertion of a Jewish “right” to the entire land was based on three arguments: (1) God promised this land to the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible. (2) Historically, the “West Bank” was the historic heartland of the Jewish people. Indeed, the majority of Biblical history was lived in the hills of Judea and Samaria, and in the towns of Shechem, Bethel, Gibeon and Shiloh, Bethlehem and Hebron. Here the patriarchs wandered, the judges judged, the kings ruled, the prophets taught. (3) The “Arabs”[8] purportedly forfeited whatever claim they may have had to even a part of the land by their unjust wars against Israel in 1948 and 1967. Though in the aftermath of a bloody century of world history most people would the general principle of establishing title to land by conquest, the argument that the wars of 1948 and 1967 were defensive and justified from Israel’s side strengthened the Israeli rightists in their perception that Israel now held the territories for a good and just reason and should not relinquish them.

1987-2002: Intifada I, Oslo Agreement, Intifada II

The Palestinian intifada of 1987 forced Israelis to reexamine some of the assumptions which they had harbored since 1948 and 1967, and to reevaluate the actions to which those assumptions had led them. The reevaluation has not proceeded in a straight line, and has suffered some reverses since the intifada of 2000. As the controversy is particularly intense right now in the thick of the events we have most recently experienced, the views I present here will necessarily be my own, and people of good will may disagree. However, the issues I raise will be offered as essential for anyone to address, whether he agrees with my conclusions or not.

The 1987 intifada (in which Arafat and his PLO did not participate, because they were then in exile) demonstrated that the common mass of the Palestinian people do have a political will. They are still groping for the means with which to give it mature expression. However, concerned people must work in concert to help create the conditions under which they can do so appropriately and positively. Failure to do so will only result in the already bad situation getting progressively worse. It was Rabin’s perception of this truth that led him to shift course from cracking down on the Palestinians to pursuing the peace process.

Is the content of that Palestinian popular will for the Palestinian people to achieve self-determination-in-place, or is it the old rejectionist mantra that wishes to put an end to the state of Israel? Here the Palestinians are divided and need constructive leadership from within. Polls have suggested for the past several years that a majority of the Palestinians would welcome the opportunity of a Palestinian state within the West Bank and Gaza. However, from 1929 onward, it is not the Palestinian majority that has generally seized the situation, but an activist minority. When the Oslo accords were ratified and the Palestinian Authority poised to begin operation in 1996, a wave of terrorist activity from Hamas raised anxieties among Israelis and influenced the electoral victory of Netanyahu over Peres that year, an outcome which froze the peace process at the very point it needed to move forward in order to succeed. This is just one example of many in recent years which show how extremists in each camp create crises which can scare the other camp into tilting toward extremism at the very moment when moderates should have been in the ascendancy. The balance of power in each camp is held by those in the center. They would prefer in their heart of hearts to pursue a moderate course, and they wish they could trust the other enough to feel secure in doing so. But when push comes to shove, they feel they must act defensively when attacked. The pattern was repeated in 2000, when the Israelis elected Ariel Sharon by a decisive margin in response to the Al Aksa Intifada and Arafat’s rejection of the Barak and Clinton offers.

I believed in 1995, and still believe now, that the majority of the Palestinian people would be willing to live peacefully in a state comprising the West Bank and Gaza, with border adjustments to be worked out swapping a few small settlement blocs for other land. But who will lead them to this goal? It seemed promising to some of us in 1995 that Arafat would follow the historical example of the Vikings[9] and Menahem Begin, and would mature in his persona (given strong enough incentives), graduating from terrorist/freedom-fighter to statesman. It was clear in an instant at Camp David in 2000, that that hope was to be disappointed. The conspiratorially-minded will maintain that Arafat’s reversion to his PLO principles in 2000 was merely throwing off the mask, that his touting the “peace of the brave” during the Oslo negotiations was a sham, and that the whole establishment of a legitimate base of power through the PA was merely a Trojan-horse maneuver, like Hitler’s non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union which he honored for scarcely two years, a tactical positioning to prepare him for the final assault on his eternal enemy. I must admit in candor that this hypothesis is within the realm of possibility, given the available evidence. I prefer to believe, however, that Arafat could have been converted – if not to principled devotion to peace, at least to pragmatic compliance with the requirements of a peace settlement – if Israel had been more perfect in her own conduct, virtuously resisting the temptation of the settlements and their expansion, and engaging more vigorously in dialogue with the Palestinian people on all levels. On the other hand, I do not think Israel is to be unduly condemned for behaving about as well or poorly as most people would have behaved under similar circumstances. We are not saints, nor are we wicked. We are simply fallible human beings. As for Arafat, if my free-will hypothesis is correct, he was granted the opportunity for personal redemption and he failed, and in his failure he doomed Israel and the Palestinians to another cycle of violence, which hopefully is drawing now to a close.

Principles for Moving Forward

If the constitutional experience of the American people has taught us anything, it is that we must arrange our public lives so that we do not rely too much on the heroic virtue of this individual or that group of people, but we must devise a structure so that the ordinary interests of people of average virtue will tend to drive the structure so that it will work to the advantage and happiness of all alike. The principles of that structure should be clear by now to most people. They include:

(1) The establishment of a Palestinian state. The final borders of such a state must be negotiated in an international forum, probably along the lines that were emerging at the Camp David talks and the subsequent Taba talks in 2000. Retreat from the majority of West Bank settlements will probably required by the terms of such a settlement.

(2) Security against terrorism. In the light of the past two years’ experience, this will probably require severe limits on Palestinian military capabilities, and third-party inspections to enforce those limits. It may also require establishment of a Palestinian leadership cadre recruited in substantial measure from people with no prior involvement with the PLO, Hamas, or other organizations devoted to terroristic violence. Distinctions may have to be made between different degrees of involvement in such activities. By way of analogy, it may be useful to recall that many of the first generation of Israeli politicians belonged to the Haganah, the conventional military body which fought the early wars for the protection of the Jewish community of Palestine, but the leaders of the terroristic Irgun and Stern Gang – Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – were kept out of full political leadership for a variety of reasons for a quarter of a century. Though it is necessary that Palestinians shall select their own leaders, ways should be found to encourage them to select as leaders those who can honor the requirements of a political settlement with conviction and full integrity, and not fall back automatically on the solutions favored by long years of violent struggle.

(3) Active participation of third parties, especially the United States. Objective arbiters will be required to assist in whatever capacity needed, starting with the formulation of the terms of an overall settlement, and proceeding to their enforcement. The Oslo accords, imperfect as they were, would not have come to be without international participation. The early Bush’s administration’s distancing from the conflict led to dramatic deterioration. An international conference[10] is needed now to provide the principal parties with a viewpoint beyond their own, to explore options until formulas are found that both can live with. Unfortunately it is all too likely that there will also continue to be local incidents, such as the recent standoffs in Ramallah and Bethlehem, where third-party arbitration is essential to negotiate compromises. And there may be security issues where the mistrust on both sides is so great that the continual presence of a third-party guarantor on site is essential. This leads to the fourth point:

(4) Justice must replace revenge on the public level. An individual must take his own justice where no other recourse exists; but an individual taking his own justice is by the nature of things too subjectively involved to distinguish accurately between justice and revenge. The wisdom of the ancients decreed third-party arbitration for precisely these kinds of situations, and the remedy which that wisdom proposed then is very much called for today. There must be a continually available resource, in the form of an arbitration court or council, to handle disputes between the parties as they arise. On the other hand, external constraints are not enough; there must also be internal ones, which leads to the fifth point:

(5) Forgiveness must replace revenge on the private level. There are wrongs committed generations ago which are still distorting the lives of people who were born after that time. These people seek redress for these ancient wrongs from their current adversaries, and they are looking in the wrong direction. They will pound their adversaries mercilessly in vain for these unrightable wrongs, thus poisoning the present with the undigested waste-matter of the past, until they realize that a different method of purgation is required, which must come from within and without simultaneously. Today’s Israelis are not to be blamed for the expulsions of 1948, and today’s Palestinians are not to be blamed for those Holocaust relatives who perished because of the White Paper of 1939. People need to unburden themselves by ventilating and sharing their narratives with the other; people need to acknowledge to the other: “I feel your pain; I am sorry for what you went through.” But whoever expects to hear from the other, “I bear the guilt for your suffering; I am sorry for what I did, and I repent of my actions,” will be disappointed. The Israeli of today is not the Irgun commando of 1948 who massacred at Deir Yassin, and the Israel which he affirms in his heart is a bastion of social idealism, for which Deir Yassin was a freak aberration. He may condemn the action, but he will not identify with it, so “repentance” is not in his power. On the other hand, the Palestinian of today is not Haj Amin al-Husseini, nor is he one of the rioters who pillaged the peaceful religious community of Hebron in 1929. Thus the Palestinian and the Israeli will each pursue the real criminal, the real object of his resentment and revenge-obsession, in vain. They are ghosts and phantoms. To seek them among the living will result only in demonizing one’s innocent, honorable opponent unfairly, and in perpetuating the revenge-cycle through delusional identifications.

Of course, each will say he is responding only to current wrongs. But the perception of current wrongs is shaped by the significance of an action in the context of a 100-year narrative, on which there is never any consensus. For instance, a Palestinian in Jenin will rail at an Israeli, “You destroyed my house.” The Israeli will respond, “I needed to do it to weed out your suicide bombers who are destroying my society.” The Palestinian will reply, “The suicide bombers are the only means left for us to fight for our homeland, which you insist on denying us.” The Israeli replies, “You would have had it by now, except for your mistake in 1947 in turning down partition, which you compound every time you attack us.” And so the interpretation one makes of today’s actions leads right back to the ghosts.

Nor can one settle this kind of argument simply by sharing narratives in the hope that one will convert the other. The one who says, “I have heard your narrative; now I know that you are right and I am wrong; I repent of my narrative and adopt yours in its place” is a liar. Dialogue must proceed from honesty. By listening, one learns what one did not know; one will need to adjust one’s narrative as a result to accommodate the new information. One must learn to know the other through his narrative, while remaining true to oneself and one’s own narrative, for the selves that we are have grown from the histories of our peoples and their understanding of those histories. We can correct our understanding of the past, but we cannot undo it. Our best hope is to understand ourselves and our opponents better through sharing our narratives, and to construct on that past the best future we can come up with. We will hopefully be less dogmatic in our disagreements, and less willing to kill over them, if we understand our opponent’s point of view even half as well as we understand our own.

Honesty means pursuit of truth – being as true to the truth as one can, through openness without giving up one’s core convictions. The concept of “truth and reconciliation” (which has developed into an institution in South Africa and elsewhere – the formal hearing and judging of past wrongs, without criminal penalties, for the moral vindication of the victimized) implies that hearing and sharing the truth will lead to a lessening of hostilities. This means that both parties must be committed to that goal, and both parties must be willing to accept that exhuming the past and burying it are part of the same process. We exhume the past to reveal it, and we bury the poison of resentment which we have harbored, which we have the power to relinquish once the truth of the past has been revealed. By relinquishing the poison of resentment, we also relinquish blame, at least of our current adversary. And that is a kind of forgiveness, the quality on which our future depends.

Forgiveness also has its limits. It can relax its quest of righting past wrongs, but righting present wrongs takes priority. Especially where the consequences of past wrongs persist in the present, they must be corrected, as long as that does not perpetrate new injustice. The answer to denial of Palestinian national aspirations in the past is to grant them in the present. But to insist on granting them full repatriation to their original homes of 1948 is to risk repeating the whole complex of problems which led us to where we are now, trying to force two national groups between which there is a great deal of mistrust into unnatural proximity. We have to employ good fences in this situation to try to make good neighbors. Someday, we hope we will be such good neighbors that we will be able to cross the fence whenever we want. I almost said, “to do away with the fence.” But that is too optimistic – at least for now.

On Agreeing To Disagree

The rabbis said: “A disagreement which is for the sake of Heaven will endure, but a disagreement which is not for the sake of Heaven will not endure. An example of the first: Hillel and Shammai. An example of the second: Korah and his rebellious company.”[11]

There are Jews who will disagree with what I say here. I have had these discussions with them before, and I welcome their different viewpoints, from which I hope I can learn.

There are Palestinians and their sympathizers who will disagree with me from another perspective. I wish to hear what they have to say from their perspective, and I hope to learn enough from it to bring us closer in understanding. I hope they will listen to me in the same spirit and for the same ultimate goals.

The kind of disagreement which we need to bury as soon as possible, is the kind of Cain and Abel (whom the rabbis could have mentioned in place of Korah) – the kind which leads people to kill each other. That kind of disagreement only brings pain and suffering. Instead of destroying our opponent as we wished, it only turns him into our worst image of him. He needs to transform himself into the monster we took him for, in order to defend himself. And then we must turn ourselves into that same monster, in order to defend ourselves from him. We must move into a future in which the first rule is: never kill; never take vengeance in blood; never perpetuate the cycle of violence. If we cannot agree on this rule, we cannot get to first base.

Stopping the killing and speaking honestly with each other go hand in hand. When I am in fear of my life, I weigh my words as to what will be strategically and tactically to my advantage, for survival is the first rule. It is only when we have put killing behind us that we can be honest enough to share our narratives in full honestly, and from that gain the trust to live with each other in trust and peace.

A rabbi of the second century said the world rests on three pillars: on justice, truth, and peace.[12] We cannot have justice until those who are currently disenfranchised have their place in the sun. We cannot have truth until we trust each other enough to risk saying the real truth about ourselves to our adversary, and listening truly to the truth he has to impart to us. And the only way to gain this trust is if we stop killing each other – that is, until we achieve peace. On the other hand, we cannot achieve a true and lasting peace unless it is based on this justice and this truth of which we have just spoken.

The three must be achieved simultaneously. And as a wise man noted many years ago, the threefold cord is not easily broken. (Ecclesiastes 4:12)

[1] As it was initially beyond their means to establish independent settlements, they started out as hired laborers on the plantations which the bourgeois proto-Zionists Moses Montefiore and Edmund Rothschild had already established since the middle of the 19^th century.

[2] Vienna itself had a mayor, Karl Lüger (1844-1910), elected on an explicitly anti-Semitic platform. Though elected twice to the office already and barred by the Emperor, he was finally confirmed in 1897, the year of the First Zionist Congress. It is curious that with so much expression of anti-Semitism in Herzl’s home community, it took events in France to trigger his Zionist epiphany.

[3] The Arab population in Palestine was lower in the 19^th century, but the economic development of the land concurrent with the Jewish settlement attracted Arab immigration from neighboring countries.

[4] See for instance Maurice Samuel, On the Rim of the Wilderness, Liveright 1931, Chapter 13, “Liberating the Fellah.”

[5] For an expression of the modern view, see Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete,Holt 2000, pp. 295ff. For the traditional Zionist view, see Maurice Samuel, What Happened In Palestine, Stratford 1929.

[6] The expulsions of 1948 are conflated in the Palestinian narrative with evictions of Palestinian-Arab tenants from purchased lands in 1920’s-30’s. The two phenomena are very different. Jews who purchased Arab agricultural estates for purpose of developing their own agricultural settlements found the presence of Arab tenant-farmers inconsistent with their own planned use of the land, and sometimes they evicted them. Though this was undoubtedly an evil to the evicted tenants, it was well within the letter of the law and the traditional institutions of agricultural landlordism. Compensation measures established in the 1930s for the relief of the farmers thus evicted elicited 3000 claims on behalf of 15,000 people – clearly a small minority of the total Arab population in Palestine. (Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Holt 2000, p. 274) No one, to my knowledge, has done a quantitative analysis, what percent of Jewish agricultural settlements used pre-worked Arab land requiring eviction of the tenants, and what percent used new land – the famous Huleh valley kibbutzim whose settlers drained the swamps to reclaim the land at the risk of contracting malaria, or those who irrigated the arid wastes of the Negev. Palestinian narrative deplores the former; Zionist narrative celebrates the latter. We need to weigh both in our considered judgment of the whole phenomenon of Zionism.

[7] H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage, Oxford 1965, p. 579.

[8] The Israeli parties of the right prefer to call the Palestinians “Arabs,” not wanting to concede that they have a national existence apart from Arabs generally.

[9] Let us not forget that the Vikings, or “North Men” (Norsemen), settled northern France which was named “Normandy” after them. A certain “William of Normandy” founded the present British monarchy.

[10] In an ideal world, the United Nations would provide that objective role. It is beyond the scope of this paper to inquire why the presently-existing United Nations (as opposed to the Platonic-ideal “United Nations”) has been so corrupted as to be incapable of performing that role with any credibility. How the head of an International Red Cross which blackballs the Magen David Edom (Israeli Red Shield of David) could be proposed to sit on a commission to judge the actions of the Israeli army, boggles the mind.

[11] Mishnah Avot 5:17.

[12] Mishnah Avot 1:18, citing Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel.

Theological Reflections After the 2004 Tsunami

2011-03-11T07:08:00.001-08:00

To Break or Mend A World:

Thoughts on Theodicy After the Tsuanmi

Leonard Levin

This article was published in the journal Conservative Judaism, Summer, 2005.

I had been working on distilling the theological outlook of Bavli Berakhot when the tsunami of 2004 struck all the countries of the Indian Ocean rim at a single blow, killing over 200,000 human beings. It shocked me into appreciating at least for a moment the force of Stephen Weinberg’s remark, “The more we know about the universe, the more pointless it seems.”[1] The present crisis also reminded me how the Lisbon earthquake of 1759 sparked Voltaire’s Candide pillorying Leibnitz’s theory of “the best of all possible worlds.” It raised once again the question: What does classical Judaism say to relieve the canker sore of evil in the world? And how relevant does that message seem for us?

What I offer is not a complete survey or analysis. Israel Zinberg prefaced his monumental history of Jewish literature by saying that all Jewish literature addresses the problem of why the righteous suffer. His history ran to seven volumes in Yiddish and twelve volumes in English, and left much out. In this little essay I will focus on two small vignettes in that saga – one chapter of aggadah in the Talmud, and ten chapters of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed – and tease out some ideas that came to me in my encounters with those texts as a tiny contribution to an enterprise that has been going on for as long as we have been a species and will continue going on for untold time to come.

What Bavli Berakhot Chapter 1 Says About The Problem

The first chapter of Tractate Berakhot in the Babylonian Talmud is among other things a marvelous example of literary structure in the Talmud. One may summarize the presentation by saying that the Mishnah restricts itself to the “when” and “how” of prayer, whereupon the gemara expands on the “what” and “why” of the matter. In doing so, it delves into the larger questions that the Mishnah glosses over – such as what is God? What is humanity, sin and retribution, justice and mercy, exile and redemption? Why do we live in a world that is in need of prayer?

The chapter starts with the Mishnah: “From what time do they recite the Shema of evening? From the time when the priests enter to eat of their heave-offering until the end of the first watch…” The Apollonian majesty of this opening must be appreciated along the lines of Jacob Neusner’s observation that the Mishnah in its totality responds to the catastrophe of the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth by instituting a sacred regimen of ordered conduct. The times of prayer are first of all a reminder that the order of prayer perpetuates in memory the order of the Temple service, of which the priests were the major players. In the serenity of maintaining that order, the pain of loss is covered over for now, but will re-emerge with devastating force in the gemara, a few pages later. But for now, the orderliness of the daily regimen is an implicit affirmation that the world is well-ordered under God’s rule.

The gemara does not burst this bubble at once, but first engages in an orderly analysis of the mishnaic law in relation to its sources in the written Torah. The traditional time-designation with references to the priests is correlated with the (by now) more familiar times of ordinary people sitting down to their evening meals. But the reference to the “end of the first watch” focuses our attention on that time of night when decent people are asleep and the lone individual looking into the heavens encounters God roaring (or moaning) “Woe to the children, on account of whose sins I destroyed My house and burnt My temple and exiled them among the nations of the earth!” [2] Repression fails. The searing wound is out in the open and must be dealt with.[3]

One way in which the rabbis often deal with the problem of suffering is through appealing to traditional theodicy. If we can believe that our suffering is the product of our sins, then we have subsumed the anomaly to an orderly pattern. Presumably we can then mend our ways and restore ourselves in God’s good graces. It is noteworthy that in the course of the long gemara to this mishnah, this traditional explanation is raised for discussion in two important passages, and each time it is questioned or rejected.

The first of these passages is found on pages 5a-5b. The darshan expounds on the verse from Psalm 4: “Tremble and sin not; commune with your heart upon your bed and be silent.” This verse suggests a series of prophylactic measures against sin: moral self-control, study of Torah, reciting the Shema, and reflecting on the finality of death. Torah-study itself is recommended as a prophylactic against suffering. If one suffers, one should look to the probable causes: sin, or neglect of Torah study, in that order. However, it is possible that neither of these applies in an individual case! One should then conclude that the suffering one experiences is a “chastisement of love” – “whom the Lord loves, He chastises.” But it is objected: If the person’s suffering is such as to prevent him from study of Torah or prayer, these could not be chastisements of love! What if, indeed, one suffers leprosy or buries one’s children? These might be an “altar of atonement,” but surely not “chastisements of love”!

This line of argument culminates in a story which is repeated in three variants, with Rabbi Hiyya, Rabbi Johanan, Rabbi Hanina, and Rabbi Eleazar alternating roles as the protagonists. In each account, one rabbi is ill and another rabbi visits him and asks him, “Are your sufferings dear to you?” The patient replies, “Neither them nor their reward.” The patient then requests, “Give me your hand.” The visiting rabbi extends his hand and lifts him up.

The moral of the story (reinforced by its position as the culmination of the gemara passage) is clear. We can go from level to level seeking explanation for our sufferings. If any of the offered explanations works for us, well and good. But we reserve the right to reject all explanations – including the most inclusive and powerful of all (“chastisements of love”). What, then, is left? The hand of friendship and assistance – love and cooperation, practical action to lift us up out of our suffering.

The other discussion of the problem of theodicy is found on page 7a. Here the darshan expounds on the passage in Exodus 33 where God and Moses have a prolonged exchange on whether God will show favor to the Israelites and whether He will show Moses the divine glory or the divine face. In this context, God tells Moses, “Let My anger pass and I will give you rest.” The darshan infers from this (and from the verse in Psalm 30 “His anger is for a moment”) that God is angry every day for a “moment” that lasts one 58,888^th part of an hour (i.e., about one-sixteenth of a second, or a phenomenological instant). This is an intriguing explanation – such a tiny time-interval, multiplied by the infinite divine power, can indeed wreak a lot of havoc in the world! But on what principle is the divine wrath exercised? Moses’s request of God, “Please show me Your ways” is understood as asking: please reveal the answer to the eternal mystery, why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper!

To this, several solutions are proposed. It is first suggested that the righteous who suffers is the righteous son of a wicked father, and the wicked who prospers is the wicked son of a righteous father. This suggestion is rejected. It is next suggested that the righteous who suffers is one who is not perfectly righteous, and the wicked who prospers is not perfectly wicked. But the last word in this discussion is given by Rabbi Meir who says, “The other two of Moses’s requests were granted, but this request was not granted.” Moses – even in his most intimate moment with God – was not given the answer to the theodicy question! How much less should we presume to have the answer. (It is hardly an accident that this negative answer is ascribed to Rabbi Meir, who suffered the tragic loss of his children in his lifetime to the plague.)

In short, we are left before God with our suffering. The way of understanding has proved futile. What remains?

The first step is to reduce the pain. This is not an automatic response. Sometimes we are tempted to resort to revenge, thus compounding the problem. The gemara tells us of such a case. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was tempted to make practical use of his knowledge of the secret of God’s anger. He had a sectarian neighbor who constantly pestered him by quoting Biblical verses proving the truth of his heresy and the falsity of rabbinic Judaism. It was commonly believed that at the moment of God’s anger a cock’s comb turns completely white. R. Joshua thereupon tied a cock to his own bed, determined that when the cock’s comb turned white he would call down God’s wrath on this neighbor and be rid of him. But when the moment came, R. Joshua slept through it and missed his opportunity. He took this as a sign that it is not proper to harbor such grudges, nor to act on them.[4]

What is fitting for man, is fitting for God also. God regrets His own anger and its consequences. He seeks to reduce it. One method is by engaging in prayer. God prays, “May it be My will that My mercy may suppress My anger.” Another way is by relying on human prayer. When R. Ishmael was offering incense in the inner sanctuary, God asked him for a blessing. R. Ishmael replied: “May it be Your will that Your mercy suppress Your anger, and that in Your dealing with Your creatures You stop short of strict justice.”[5] The parallel and similarity of God’s prayer and R. Ishmael’s blessing is intentional and highly significant.

The last pair of anecdotes stresses the reciprocity of God and Israel. This is an extremely common motif in the rabbinic lore. A classic instance of it that occurs in the present gemara is the description of God wearing tefillin. The tefillin of Jews reminds them of their loyalty to God, as it contains the verse “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It is altogether appropriate, therefore, that God’s tefillin reminds Him of His obligations to the Jewish people, and indeed they contain several verses which share the common sentiment of “Who is like Israel Your people, a unique nation in the earth?”[6] Thus the tefillin are like love tokens – each is a reminder to one partner of the other partner in the relationship.

Where there is relationship, modern therapeutic wisdom says that it is a mistake to blame one partner exclusively for whatever trouble or fault may exist: responsibility is shared. Though the rabbis tended toward a unipolar view in the divine-human case (“Yours, Lord, is the righteousness, and ours is the shame”), there are places where they anticipated this modern insight. Rabbi Alexandri used to pray: “Sovereign of the universe! You know full well that we desire to perform Your will, and what prevents us? The leaven in the dough, and subjection to other nations.”[7] The “leaven” is of course the evil impulse. But God created it, so He shares responsibility. As R. Hiyya the Elder said elsewhere, “Sad is the dough whose baker testifies that it is bad!” And Abba Yossi the potter said, “Sad is the leaven whose maker testifies that it is bad!”[8] The present chapter voices God’s lament in the first person: “Woe to the children on account of whose sins I destroyed My house and burnt My temple!” And “woe to the father who had to banish His children!”[9]

As we share responsibility for the tragedy, so the effort at rebuilding and repair requires a cooperative effort. That is why it is so significant that prayer is depicted as a coordinated activity that takes place both in heaven and on earth. God “roars” from heaven at the three watches of the night. Rabbi Yose heard a voice in the ruin which Elijah informed him can be heard three times every day, corresponding to the three times of human prayer. The same passage explicitly says that when Israel say “May His great name be blessed,” God responds by saying, “Happy is the king who is so praised!”[10] The divine and human prayers are linked in time-frame and in mutual reference. Both pray for the redemption from exile, which will require an even greater cooperative effort, for which the antiphonal prayer is a preparation.

Translating religious discourse from parable to prepositional form is notoriously risky. Nevertheless, I will hazard that the outlook of the rabbis expressed in the aggadah of the Bavli Berakhot can be faithfully paraphrased in the following propositions:

1) The world is in disrepair. Prayer articulates an ideal order of existence (we set our times of prayer as if the Temple is standing) while at the same time it laments the absence of that order and yearns for its restoration.

2) It takes two to produce a broken world. We sinned. Our sins are a major contributing cause of the world’s disrepair. But God bears responsibility on two levels. For one thing, God is the “baker” who produced us, and we are His “dough.” Our sinful nature is what it is because God made us that way. Moreover, God is also directly responsible for bringing about the destruction as punishment. God has an anger problem. A split second of the divine wrath wreaks havoc in the world.

3) We are not privy to understanding the reasons for the world’s disrepair in all their profundity. We have partial answers but no complete answer. The partial answers help us cope, but only up to a point. At that point, we must confess ignorance before the ultimate mystery.

4) Better than understanding, we must act to bring about mending. Rabbi Johanan and his colleagues were aware of the “sufferings of love” doctrine but found little comfort in it. Instead, when they were in the midst of suffering they all said, “Give me your hand and help me up.”

5) Mending the world requires divine-human cooperation. Prayer is important as an expression and strengthening of the partnership between God and us. We wear tefillin reminding us of God, and God wears tefillin reminding Him of us. We pray for God’s mercy to overcome his divine wrath; God solicits our prayer, delights in it, and prays similarly for the same objective. By working together to strengthen our partnership, and by praying together for the redemption, we prepare ourselves for the cooperative divine-human effort that alone can mend the world.

What Maimonides Says About the Problem

The midrashic treatment of evil and redemption that we have just examined is mythic in tone. It rejects certain easy answers (such as the simple ascription of suffering to sin on a proportional basis), but it is still hard to apply literally to a scientific world-outlook. If we turn from here to Maimonides’s theory of evil and providence, we are confronted with a tradeoff. Maimonides introduces a very important factor that is barely noticeable in the Berakhot passages: the constraint of natural law. Yet his account is missing some of the outstanding virtues of the Berakhot outlook: the sense of divine-human cooperation, joint responsibility and reciprocity.

Maimonides takes a clear stand in favor of natural law throughout the Guide, especially in his withering critique of the Kalam. The Mutakallimun, especially the Asharites, held that God determines directly, instant by instant, every minute event that will occur in the universe, down to the falling of a leaf or the injury of a flea. Against this total dependency on divine caprice, Maimonides maintains with Aristotle that the external world has a stable configuration on which we can rely (at least for the most part). Interpreters of Maimonides differ as to whether this natural order is implanted in the world by God at the moment of creation, or whether it is (as with Aristotle) eternal and beyond even God’s power to institute or modify. However, on either interpretation it is a practical limit within which the possibilities of all action (including divine action) in this world are currently constrained.

With this view of natural law as a fundamental assumption, one may read the sequence of Chapters 8-18 in Part III of the Guide as a consecutive development of a consistent thesis of the limits of divine action in the existing world, and the understanding of evil in that context. The existing world is a theater of conflict between the principles of “form” (representing moral discipline and the realization of higher values) versus “matter” (representing the tendency for nature to take its course oblivious to considerations of value).[11] Our corporeal nature is a kind of partition that blocks us from the understanding and realization of higher truths.[12] Evil may be defined first of all as a privation or lack, a failure to realize the highest potential of which material beings are capable – in other words, the inevitable failure of matter to be fully realized in ideal form.[13] Ignorance – the lack of knowledge or wisdom – is a cardinal instance of such failure of higher realization, and is a prime or contributing cause of most human-caused evil.[14]

For purpose of convenience, the evils of existence can be categorized into three categories: (1) those which are an inevitable product of our material condition (such as illness, death and earthquakes); (2) those perpetuated by one person against another (such as murder, war, and robbery); and (3) those committed by a person against himself (such as addiction to luxury and ignoring medical advice). Maimonides exonerates God of responsibility for evil of any of these kinds, including the first. He also maintains that the majority of evils that we suffer are of the third kind, and he minimizes those of the first and second kind.[15] He also derides as naïve the conceit that people have that the universe was created for the sake of humankind, or that we are the crown of creation, the supreme beings of value in the universe.[16]

Maimonides adds the further observation that there are things impossible in principle, such as logical contradictions, and that it is no defect in God to be incapable of overcoming the limits of possibility.[17]

As to providence, Maimonides delineates six theories (including his own):

1) The Epicurean view, that all is random, without order.

2) The Aristotelian view, that there is “general providence,” to be identified with natural order. This includes the provision to the various species of their equipment for survival as species – strength and claws to the lion, fleetness to the deer, etc. The fate of individuals is however a matter of chance.

3) The Asharite view, that all – even the death of a fly or the falling of a leaf -- is the will of God, who acts capriciously, beyond our understanding.

4) The Mutazilite view, that everything to the last detail is wrought by the divine wisdom. We may rest assured that seeming injustice in this world will be compensated in the afterlife.

5) The Torah’s view, that God does not condescend to manage the detailed affairs of subhuman creatures, but every detail in human affairs is arranged in accord with justice.

6) Maimonides’s variant of the Torah’s view, that providence extends proportionately to intellect: the animals, without intellect, are not the recipients of individual providence, and even among human beings the more intellectually developed an individual is, the more providence he is accorded. (Between the lines, we may read in Maimonides here a secret agreement with the Aristotelian outlook. Intellect is itself a gift of providence, the survival equipment specific to humans, as strength and claws are specific to the lion. The development of this gift is up to us. Our reward for doing so is the survival advantage that it confers on us, neither more nor less.)[18]

The coherence of all these statements of Maimonides is left for the reader of the Guide to ponder, and has occasioned much discussion among his interpreters. I find most plausible the view that Maimonides seeks to reconcile the principles of divine justice and natural order, but he warns that complete reconciliation is not possible (even for God), and where they come into conflict, natural order wins out. Had he been privy to the findings of modern sciences such as genetics and geology, he might have pointed out that there is no evolution of life without genetic variation, which has the downside of genetically-based disease. Similarly, there would be no mountains (and possibly no life-producing earth) without continental drift and earthquakes. Only a capricious Asharite God could override natural law constantly to avoid its amoral consequences, and the physical unpredictability of such a world would make it very difficult to live in it.

Kenneth Seeskin has rightly called the God of Maimonides’s theological imagination a “distant God.”[19] He is distant because of the doctrine of “negative attributes,” according to which any positive predicates that we propose are ipso facto inapplicable to God, who is beyond human conception. But this God is distant also because nature in its material aspect is conceived as a partition separating us from the divine rather than as a manifestation of divinity. God is exonerated from evil, but at a price; material nature is saddled with evil and divested of divinity.

Putting These Two Outlooks Together Today

In evaluating our theological options today, we have a varied legacy on which to draw. Ideally, we should probably want to combine the advantages of different past traditions – for instance, to combine the intimacy and engagement of the rabbinic theology with the scientific realism of the Maimonidean approach. Such a balancing act is not easy.

A present catastrophe such as the tsunami of 2004 makes the need for theological affirmation more acute, and the content of such affirmation more difficult. Is natural catastrophe a manifestation of God? Is God master of good and evil, life and death? A God who produces such evil may be demonic, but a God who is totally aloof from it may be irrelevant.

In my recent theological searchings, I have been drawn to the notion of a “bipolar” God in the panentheistic mode, as depicted by Charles Hartshorne, drawing on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (to whom I would add William James, Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin).[20] Such a God participates in nature, yet also stands apart from it; nature, in relation to such a God, is both a manifestation and a product of the divine activity. The artistic metaphor is apt. The artist expresses his creative activity in his product then steps back from it, evaluates it, and steps forward again to remold it, trying to improve it in the direction of his evolving conception.

In the view that I am considering, God strives to create life through the medium of this physical universe, which as divine creation is both an end in itself and a means to the higher ends of life, consciousness, intelligence and ethical cooperation. Natural causality is the primary means by which God has chosen to achieve these ends. However, the recent advent of quantum physics has shown that natural causality is not the straitjacket that the Stoics, Averroes, and Spinoza (and possibly Maimonides) thought it to be, but includes a subtle degree of freedom, tiny as we measure things but possibly enough to account for directional genetic evolution and human free will. To modify the traditional determinist adage – natura non facit magnos saltûs – nature does not make large leaps, but maybe tiny ones are enough to advance God’s purpose.

The degree of freedom described by quantum mechanics – if used by a participating God – is great enough to predispose the emergence of life from pre-biotic molecules, but it is not nearly great enough to prevent the seismic catastrophe snuffing out that selfsame life. Here we must reckon with Maimonides’s principle that even God’s action is constrained by the limits of possibility. As Leibnitz said (in a further refinement of the same principle), not all goods are compossible. God had to choose between the capricious world of the Asharites, and the natural order that brings with it natural evil. Some of us may disagree with the choice that God made, but it is as clear as day that if this world is the creation of a divine purpose, then God chose the Maimonidean alternative.[21]

We may disagree, however, with Maimonides’s argument that evil, as mere privation, does not really exist, and that God is to be exonerated from the production of evil. An automobile company that designs an overall superb car with some design flaws is legally and financially responsible for the injuries that ensue from the design flaws. By analogy, if the overall excellence of God’s creation Earth is enhanced by the presence of mountains that are produced by continental drift, but the same process causes earthquakes and tsunamis that annihilate Sodom-Gomorrah and Banda Aceh respectively, then God is both to be praised by the excellence of the mountains and to be questioned (in the tradition of Abraham and Job) for the associated evil.

It is part of the strength of the rabbinic tradition that it validates the protest against God that Maimonides seeks to silence. It also insists that the participatory God suffers when human beings suffer. (Rabbi Meir said: When a person suffers, God says, “My head hurts! My arm hurts!” This is so when the wicked suffer; how much more so for the righteous![22])

Above all, the evolutionary-process view can give new meaning to the concept of divine-human partnership, which is a vital part of the rabbinic theological legacy and is especially relevant to our present historical moment. As junior partners to God, we are both passive beneficiaries and active contributors to the ever-evolving task of constructing a bio-friendly world. The process of biological evolution endowed us with the gift of intellect, whose special providential role Maimonides pointed out so emphatically. The natural environment that produced us and conferred the gift of intellect on us is limited by the constraints of physical causality that have natural evil as a side-effect – including disease, earthquakes, and tsunamis. But our intelligence then becomes a God-given, providential factor in the next stages of evolution of the natural environment of which we are a part. The Bible expressed this in the divine command to the human race: “Rule the earth and subdue it.” Whenever we try to bring the terrestrial environment somewhat closer to perfection, we are exercising our God-given endowments in furtherance of the divine plan.

It is not my business to justify material evil as the spur to human enterprise – though some have argued along these lines. It is enough to concede the necessity of material evil as the flip-side of natural order: the best-conceived physical law is at partial cross-purposes with moral law; the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. But if we see the divine purpose in the origin and advancement of life, then we must surely see it in the application of human intelligence to securing and improving the conditions of life.

We can see how all these factors interact in an area such as the development of medicine. Disease is a defect in the material constitution of our bodies, and may be regarded as a flaw in the divine design. It is inevitable that given the conditions in which life evolved in this material universe, the random play of genes should lead to anomalies that in unfortunate cases are stunting, crippling and even fatal. When we or our loved ones suffer these diseases, we struggle against them with every fiber of our being – a struggle that may well be continuous with the primal struggle that brought about life in the first place. But in our struggle we also deploy our intelligence against the conditions of the disease, and in so doing develop the art of medicine. At a minimum, this art aids us in the specific struggle against a specific disease. At a maximum, it transforms the whole human condition, improving longevity of the species and constituting an advance in the progress of life that is an unfolding of the divine plan.

All the resources of Jewish theology – both from the Biblical-rabbinic and from the philosophical tradition – must finally be combined to construct an adequate response to a catastrophe such as the recent tsunami. We must first of all recognize the natural dimension of the catastrophe as a product of the geological processes that continually mold the earth – its mountains, its oceans and its coastlines. This was not the arbitrary act of a willful deity, but the consequence of universal laws of nature. At the same time, if we conceive of nature as God’s creation we must attribute at least indirect responsibility to God for the catastrophe – contextualized by the complex of good and evil that is the totality of creation.

Next, if we see the rise of life in the universe as a supreme manifestation of God’s purpose, we must allow that God may be pained at the imperfections in His design and the resultant loss of life, pain and suffering that they cause. The God who grieved at the exile of Israel must surely grieve for the victims of the tsunami.

Moreover, we must confess a residue of absurdity in this evil that defies all our attempts at understanding. We are as perplexed as Moses, Job and Rabbi Meir at the unfathomable quality of God’s ways.

But when all is said and done, the most adequate response is that of Rabbi Johanan: “Give me your hand and lift me up.” As God’s agents on the scene of the catastrophe, we are called on to exercise our God-given intelligence and compassion to carry out God’s purpose of the securement and enhancement of life. Aid and rescue to the survivors is only a first step. Ultimately, we must construct systems of detection and warning in every similar situation to prevent the recurrence of such catastrophes, insofar as it is within our power to do so.

And if we do so, the rabbis might well conceive God as observing approvingly and saying, “Happy is the king whose children share up the ramparts of His castle and save His obedient subjects from harm! Happy is the master whose servants step in the breach and – by salvaging His enterprise – deserve to be called full partners in it!”

[1] Stephen Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, Basic Books, 1993 (2nd edition), p. 154.

[2] TB Berakhot 3a. And in the parallel version that immediately follows: “Woe to the father who had to banish his children!” God suffers too.

[3] The esthetics of this procedure is analogous to the opening movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, where the single sour note in the sunny major opening theme presages the tragic outburst in the climax of the development section.

[4] Ibid. 7a.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid. 6a.

[7] Ibid. 17a.

[8] Genesis Rabbah 34:10, on the verse, “For the devisings (yetzer) of man’s heart are evil from his youth.” The Genesis narrative, too, expresses God’s regret and shortcomings in trying to get society off to a decent start but suffering the setbacks of human violence and the Flood.

[9] TB Berakhot 3a.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Chapter 8.

[12] Ibid., Chapter 9.

[13] Ibid., Chapter 10.

[14] Ibid., Chapter 11.

[15] Ibid., Chapter 12.

[16] Ibid., Chapters 13-14. This Maimonidean assertion provoked unusually wide dissent among later Jewish philosophic thinkers who otherwise accepted the Maimonidean philosophy.

[17] Ibid., Chapter 15.

[18] Ibid., Chapters 17-18.

[19] See his recent book, Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides, Oxford, 2000.

[20] See Hartshorne & Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, Prometheus Books 2000, especially “Introduction: The Standpoint of Panentheism” and “Epilogue: The Logic of Panentheism”; also William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909, reprinted 1996 by University of Nebraska Press); Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911, reprinted by Dover in 1998); Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Macmillan 1929; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper 1955; also articles published in the journal Zygon over the years. Echoes of this movement in Jewish theology have been examined in Sandra Lubarsky & David Ray Griffin, eds.: Jewish Theology and Process Thought, SUNY 1996.

[21] The Western tradition of theodicical discourse has tended to raise objections based on absolute notions of God’s perfect omnipotence and perfect goodness ignoring the considerations of a finite, ordered reality, and at most admitting human freedom as a possible complicating circumstance. (A classic recent discussion on these premises is Anthony Flew’s “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom,” in Flew & Macintyre, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, Macmillan 1964, pp. 144-169). When the requirement of a finite and predictable natural order is added to this picture, it becomes clear that even if the theoretical omnipotence of God was granted in theory, a divine self-limitation (or tzimtzum) is required in practice for the finite world to have any autonomy, and only in that finite context is human moral choice meaningful. Biblical thought and modern process theology both take the given finite world as a starting point rather than the theoretical notion of divine perfection, and both the Talmud and Maimonides continue in that tradition. Given that starting-point, it even makes sense to question what implications the notions of divine “omnipotence, omniscience, etc.” could possibly have in practice. See Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes, SUNY 1984.

[22] Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5.

My Presentation at the Veritas Forum

2011-02-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

Three Religions: Same Contradictory God?

Christian, Jewish and Muslim theologians wrestle with the apparent contradiction of God's love and judgment.

February 2, 2011 at 08:00 PM
Roone Arledge Auditorium

Presenters:

Miroslav Volf, Director, Yale Center for Faith and Culture; Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale Divinity School
Shakiel Humayun, Muslim President of the Foundation of Knowledge and Development
Leonard Levin, Assistant Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Jewish Theological Seminary.

My presentation commented on a series of Biblical and rabbinic quotes that were highlighted on the screen. Here are the quotes and my comments on them:

Quote 1:

The LORD passed by before [Moses], and proclaimed:

a. 'The LORD, LORD, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin;

b. But that will by no means clear the guilty; accounting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation.' (Exodus 34:5-6)

In August, 2009 I received a letter from Helga Schneider of the German Office of Reparation in Saarburg, saying that after the death of my mother-in-law Regina Freeman in March of that year, Regina’s heirs were still entitled to a final payment of 455 Euros in token of the pain and suffering that my mother-in-law had suffered in the years 1940–45 at the hands of Nazi Germany. I must say that I was moved by this letter. It is a safe guess that Helga Schneider is of the third generation from those who perpetrated the crimes against humanity in the middle of the 20^th century. She and others like her have taken responsibility for the sins of their ancestors and undertaken a broad spectrum of constructive actions — including massive re-education, dedicating memorials and museums, restoring defaced cemeteries, and engaging in ongoing dialogue with the descendants of survivors of the catastrophe — in order to make reparation for evils of the past to the extent that this is humanly possible. If they did not undertake this reparative action, I believe with full certainty that the costs for the sins of the past would be exacted in other ways — by the perpetuation of past evil among the later generations of the original perpetrators. History teaches us that those who do not correct for the sins of the past are doomed to repeat them.

Quote 2:

"God considered at first whether to create the world on the basis of justice alone, but decided that the world could not survive on that basis. God therefore reconsidered and decided to create the world on the twin pillars of justice and mercy." (Midrash Genesis Rabbah 12:15)

As I am a teacher, I like to imagine God as a teacher. God knows, as I know, that all students start out from a position near zero, and that mistakes are part of the way toward learning — and mistakes can be more or less costly, depending what skills are being taught. I am glad I am not teaching automobile driving or piloting small planes. The teacher must adopt a policy of combining justice and mercy in order to encourage the student to make progress along the necessary path. Justice is enforcing the consequences for mistakes. If there are no consequences, the student will go on making the same mistakes and not make progress. But if every mistake is reprimanded with maximum harshness, the student will become totally discouraged and give up.

The rabbis said that God considered at first whether to create the world on the basis of justice alone, but decided that the world could not survive on that basis. God therefore reconsidered and decided to create the world on the twin pillars of justice and mercy.

Quote 3:

Abraham appealed to God: “Will You sweep away the innocent together with the guilty? Far be it from You to do such a thing! Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?” (Genesis 18:24–25) But the LORD rained brimstone and fire and annihilated these cities of the plain and all their inhabitants. (Genesis 19:24–25)

We also know that the world, as presently constituted, is based on physical law, which does not recognize moral boundaries. Earthquakes and tsunamis kill innocent and guilty people alike, without discrimination. It seems likely to me that contemplation of this fact led the authors of the Bible to a train of moral reflection in response to the geological catastrophe that buried the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, next to the Dead Sea, at the bottom of the Jordan Rift Valley, around 4000 years ago. Monotheism, in its infancy, had to face a dilemma: Is God responsible for this kind of evil, or not? If you say not, then God is not fully God — then there are powerful forces in the world that God cannot control. If you say yes, then God’s goodness is placed in jeopardy — how could God allow such a catastrophe to happen? The Biblical authors tried to finesse this question by saying that the inhabitants of those towns must have been very wicked indeed, to the point that they deserved this horrible fate. Sodomites have had a bad reputation ever since. But a fateful dissent was recorded on the same page of the narrative, and put in the mouth of Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish people: “Will You sweep away the innocent together with the guilty? Far be it from You to do such a thing! Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?”

Quote 4:

“It is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is dispossessing them before you.” (Deuteronomy 9:5)

God said to Jonah: “Shall I not have mercy on that great city Nineveh, on which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and many cattle?” (Jonah 4:11)

This dialectic of justification and questioning runs like a rift throughout the ages of Jewish thought. The author of the book of Joshua, like the theorists of American manifest destiny, thought God was on the side of his nation in every war, and that the conquered nations of Canaan must therefore have deserved their fate. But the author of the book of Jonah burst the bubble of this chauvinistic self-congratulation with a broader, more universalistic perspective. Jonah is made to acknowledge at the end that the Ninevites — arch-enemies of Israel — are also worthy of the message of forgiveness. “Shall I not have mercy on a city of 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and many cattle?”

Quote 5:

Moses asked God: “Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?”

a. View #1: The righteous who suffers is the righteous child of a wicked parent; the wicked who prospers is the wicked child of a righteous parent.

b. View #2: God had no answer for Moses. “We have no explanation for the tranquility of the wicked or the suffering of the righteous.” (Talmud Berakhot 7a; Mishnah Avot 4:19)

In later times, when historical suffering was the lot of the Jewish people for centuries, the major tendency in Jewish thought was to acknowledge this suffering as a just punishment. “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.” But every now and then (as in the book of Job), the justice of this apparently divine verdict is questioned. The rabbis of the Talmud projected this perplexity onto Moses. They imagined Moses arguing with God and demanding an explanation for the mystery: “Why do the righteous suffer, and the wicked prosper?” In one view, God answered: “The righteous who suffers is expiating the sins of his wicked parents, even to the third and fourth generations. The wicked who prospers is graced by the merits of his righteous ancestors.” But according to another view, God had no explanation for Moses. “I will be gracious to whom I choose to be gracious, and merciful to whom I choose to be merciful.” In the words of Rabbi Yannai: “We have no explanation for the tranquility of the wicked or the suffering of the righteous.”

Conclusion:

The rabbis never accuse God of malice or of having an “anger problem.” (Well, hardly ever.) At worst, God may be too hung up on justice and needs to be swayed to be more merciful. Or maybe the problems of this humungous universe are too much even for God to square physical necessity with moral equity. Bottom line — we don’t know.

The questions are perennial and everlasting. The debate is ongoing. We are always open to new answers.

Pneuma and Ruah Compared

2010-10-30T04:51:00.000-07:00

Lee Price: Someone mentioned to me an ongoing discussion in the halls of academe about whether/how much the Hebrew "ruach" overlaps the Greek "pneu." Any thoughts? Any sources you'd suggest?

Lenny Levin: My educated guess is -- a lot. Compare the Greek New Testament with the Delitsch Hebrew translation of it -- that would be a good test. Please direct me to a source of the current discussion!

Lee Price: Well, the person who told me the discussion exists is too crabby to risk emailing at the moment, but I'll see him Tuesday and ask then. The difference is what's commending itself to my attention: "ruach" ultimately translated itself into "action" whereas "pneu" translated itself into "spirit."

Yazmin Lebbe May I suggest another source? Please refer to Itzchak Salkinson's Hebrew version of the Brit HaChadaschah.

Lenny Levin: It is my observation that the attempt to conceptualize something completely "non-material" generally starts with the thing in our experience that (though material) most closely approximates the non-materiality that we are trying to allude t...o. This is most commonly air (or wind, or breath -- all different forms of the same thing). The word "spirit" retains its material sense in usages like "respiration", "spirits of ammonia," etc. The Greek "pneuma" and Hebrew "ruah" both originally meant the material substance that we call "air=breath=wind" and by transfer of meaning through metaphor came to mean that which is completely immaterial. Moreover, the expression "ruah adonai" or "ruah elohim" is used in the Bible in a number of contexts -- creation, prophetic inspiration, influx of supernatural strength (as with Samson) -- all of which became imported into the Greek "pneuma" with the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The New Testament usage is clearly based on the Old Testament usage, with additional inflections for which parallels can be found in rabbinic literature. Those who want to build an essential dichotomy between the two are afflicted with an "Us Versus Them" competitive mentality that finds little support in the facts. That's my take, for better or worse.

Lee Price: Et tu Lenny. Crabby, crabby. I gather(though am admittedly too under the gun to check it out) that "pneu" has a distinct derivation stemming from its connection with " logos," and the comparative superiority of (pneu-borne) speech over writing. Doesn't seem to jive with the idea of being book- or written-law centered. Sorry if I offend your liberal humanist sensibilities:)

Lenny Levin: Not at all. Derrida was a brilliant philosopher in part because he was so brilliant in arguing on behalf of outrageous ideas. The American Heritage Dictionary has an appendix with lots of ancient word-stems. It lists "pneu": "To breathe...." (imitative root) Germanic: Fniu. Old English Fneosan, to sneeze. Greek: Pnein, to breathe. Derived words include apnea, dyspnea, pneuma, pneumatic, etc. My tires are pneumatic because they have air in them, not speech. If they spoke, I would take them to the service garage to be checked out. Call me crabby. I can take it!

Lee Price: I think it would be instructive to see how Plato uses "pneu." In the Phaedrus or the Phaedo or one of those dialogues starting with "ph" there's some myth purportedly from Egypt in which speech (logos) is held to be better than writing. ...And if "pneu" is associated there with logos, then it's better than writing, because Plato created the logos and saw that it was good. And then wrote it down, but that's another matter. Whereas, "ruach" has no relation to writing that I know of -- I don't think that relationship is on the Biblical or the rabbinic radar screen. They may indeed both mean "breath" or "air" -- the question is, if the connotations are different does that make them mean different things? Well, yes and no, no and yes. That's about as far as I can go, since Mrs. Cheshvan now has to embark upon shabbat grocery shopping.

Lenny Levin: That can be tested. The Greek original of the Platonic dialogues is available online. Can you find the English passages?

Lee Price: These particular ones are in Phaedrus -- 276a-b seems good since it compares "living speech" to written discourse." But I would be interested to do a search on Perseus to see of pneu and logos ever turn up together with "writing" (I forget what it is in Greek) in Plato. I'll try to do this next Thurs when things have eased a bit... Shabbat shalom!

Lenny Levin: I await the results of your Perseus search. In the mean time, the source in Phaedrus 276a-b is a rich one for our purpose (even though the word "pneuma" in its various forms doesn't occur in it). Socrates is arguing that oral speech is more alive and fruitful of true instruction than a dead letter that can give only what was put into it, not any new spontaneous wisdom. Socrates praises “the sort of discourse that goes together with knowledge, and is written in the soul (psyche) of the learner, that can defend itself, and knows to whom it should speak…” Phaedrus elaborates: “You mean no dead discourse (eidotos logon), but the living speech ([logon] zonta kai empsychon), of which the written discourse (dikaios) may fairly be called a kind of image (eidolon).” To be sure, the word “pneuma” (spirit) does not occur in this passage in any of its forms, but we have two occurrences of “psyche” in proximity to “logos.” Maybe somewhere else you will find “pneuma” and “logos” in similar proximity. What would it prove?

First, I find delightful layers of irony in the fact that Plato (whose medium was writing) is making Socrates (whose medium was exclusively oral speech, for he wrote nothing) praise the virtues of the oral word over the written word (which I am guessing was the chief morsel of insight that Derrida gleaned from this passage). The passage uses the term “logos” evenhandedly to refer to the word in both its oral and written form. What is superior to the oral form of the word is that it is living and breathing — it can adapt itself by changing and modulating to the living event in which it participates, whereas the written word is frozen in its current form. The oral word is “pneumatic”—breathing, if you will, just as it is the product of the breath of the person who utters it. If so, the force of “pneumatic” in such an argument would not mean “pneuma = logos” but “pneuma = breathing / oral” —that is to say, the oral word has a pneumatic quality that the written word lacks. This is a delightful piece of insight but hardly justifies equating the meaning of “pneuma” with “logos.”

Second, as the argument that you cite claims to contrast “pneuma” with “ruah” in this respect, the relevant question would be: does the association of “ruah” with “speech” occur anywhere in the Hebrew canon? This is a loaded question, because though the Bible presents itself to us in “written” form, it is decidedly the product of an oral culture. Not surprisingly, as a lookup of the word “ruah” in a Biblical concordance will reveal, there are several associations of “ruah” with orality, especially with the phenomenon of oral prophecy inspired by God’s ruah. (See for instance Numbers 11:24-29, I Kings 22:23-24). Ruah is associated with life itself (as in Genesis 7:15 and Ezekiel 37:10). There is at least one famous association of “ruah” with a spirit of wisdom (Isaiah 11:2) There are two occurrences of “ruah” in conjunction with “mouth” or “lips.” Psalm 33:6 declares: “By the word (davar) of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth (u-ve-ruah piv) all their host.” Here you have the juxtaposition of “logos” and “pneuma” in the Septuagint translation of the verse. The other occurrence is in Isaiah 11:4, speaking of the Messianic ruler: “He shall judge the poor with equity and decide with justice for the lowly of the land. He shall strike down a land with the rod (Septuagint: “logos”) of his mouth, and slay the wicked with the breath of his lips (be-ruah sefatav — Septuagint has “en pneumati dia cheileon”). The plain sense here is that the oral judgment that he pronounces dooms the wicked; you might want to use it in support of the conjunction of word and action.

Bottom line: Both word and action proceed from spirit, whether you are speaking in Greek or Hebrew. I don't see any difference between "pneuma" and "ruah" in this regard. In fact, "pneuma" is the standard translation of "ruah" in the Greek Bible, as these instances illustrate.

Why The Settlement Freeze Is So Crucial

2010-09-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I posted on Facebook (à propos of a news item on Israel artists boycotting Ariel):

Israeli artists are acting as the conscience of their nation. “When two are holding onto a tallit — this one says, ‘It is all mine,’ the other says ‘It is all mine’ — they shall negotiate a division.” Forbearance regarding the occupied territories is essential to establishing a climate of trust under which negotiations can proceed. Israelis and Palestinians are at a delicate turning point. Every precaution must be taken for them to succeed. This should not be confused with a very different kind of boycott (by anti-Zionist elements) questioning Israel's legitimacy. These artists have Israel's (their own) interests at heart and deserve our support.

I have been asked for a clarification of this post. The rest of this post is an expansion and clarification of my Facebook posting.

When I read that over 100 Israel artists decided they would not perform in Ariel’s cultural center, I immediately felt a sympathetic rapport with them.

Let us consider the context of this declaration. For fully a decade, since the collapse of the Camp David peace talks and the Taba talks, Israelis and the PA have been avoiding peace negotiations (abetted by the neglect of the Americans during the Bush administration). However, before that time—and more recently—when there has been any hope of moving forward on negotiations, a major sticking issue has been that of the Israeli settlements in occupied territories.

Within the past year, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a temporary moratorium on settlements, at the urging of President Obama. The temporary moratorium is due to expire late in September, 2010. Abbas demands a renewal of the moratorium as a condition of continuing the peace talks that have resumed today (September 1). But Netanyahu’s right-wing Knesset supporters demand that it not be renewed. The issue is in doubt.

So what are the Israeli artists saying? They are saying that for them, it is more important to give peace negotiations with the Palestinians a chance, than to insist on Israeli settlers’ rights to continue to live and expand in the land that was occupied by Israeli forces in the defensive war of 1967. They are sending a message to Netanyahu: Do not regard the occupied West Bank as belonging to Israel by unilateral declaration, to do with whatever they want! Leave it on the table, so the Palestinians will feel that we are negotiating in good faith, and that the future of the land will be determined by the process of joint negotiation, not by unilateral actions on the Israeli side. Just as Ariel is part of the West Bank in dispute, so are the other settlements. By our refraining from performing in Ariel during this difficult and uncertain period of negotiating, we are saying to you: Keep your hands off those parts of the West Bank where the line of settlement has not yet advanced! Do not keep taking land away from the part of the pie that remains to be distributed. Do not destroy the chances for peace because of the settlers’ insatiable greed.

Underlying this are several other issues:

Who owns the land?

By what right is ownership of the land determined?

What is the big deal about a settlement freeze?

Is there a real chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians? What will determine the possibility of peace?

First of all, there are different points of view as to who owns the land. Hamas thinks that Moslems own “the land” (including everything between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, including Tel Aviv), by the principle of “dar al-Islam”: whatever land has once been conquered by the Moslem sword, must never again revert to non-Islamic ownership. Fundamentalist Orthodox ultra-Zionists believe that Jews own “the land” (again, including everything between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, including Jericho, Hebron, Nablus, and Jenin) because God promised it to Abraham and his descendants in Genesis, and that promise is irrevocable. Between Hamas and the ultra-Zionists, there can never be the slightest agreement. If either of their positions is taken as normative, then the Middle East is doomed to eternal war and peace is forever impossible.

Jewish law has a principle that is directly applicable to situations such as the one just dscribed: “If two persons are holding onto a tallit—the one says, ‘It is all mine’ and the other says, ‘It is all mine’—they shall divide it [50-50].” [Mishnah Bava Metzi’a 1:1] No Torah proof-text is cited as authoritative backing for this law, so we may count it among those rabbinic laws that are based on reason or common sense. What is the logical reason for such a law? The two parties each have entered a claim to 100% of the disputed article. But the claims are incompatible. It cannot belong all to Party A and all to Party B. If no objective reason can be brought to prefer A’s claim to B’s claim or vice versa, they must be regarded as logically equally probable. This translates into a 50% probability that A is right, and a 50% probability that B is right—and still no criterion for deciding that the one is all right or the other is all right. The just adjudication thus divides the disputed article 50-50, in accord with the 50-50 probability of validity of the respective claims.

The exact terms of partition of the land of Israel/Palestine has been the subject of international negotiations since 1936, when the first partition plan was proposed. It is not my purpose to go into the precise terms of a just partition. The Israelis and Palestinians came close enough at Taba in 2001 and the positions of that conference are in many people’s view the best starting point for further negotiations. In principle, the arrived-at settlement should give scope for each of the two nations—the Israeli and the Palestinian—enough land and control over resources to govern its own destiny.

So what is the big deal about a settlement freeze?

The practice of the maverick settlers who set up new settlements at the blink of an eye goes back to a practice of the Zionist Jews in the late 1930s. It has been called “creating facts.” In the 1930s, the Palestinian-Arab leadership, under Haj Amin Al-Husseini (the chief instigator of the 1929 riots and later an accomplice of Hitler), was pressuring the British to freeze the Jewish presence in Palestine at its then-current level. The Jews were understandably under pressure to maximize the extent of their land-possession as much as possible, so that in the event of partition, they would have enough land for a viable state. They would put up a watch-tower and stockade wall in the course of a day in order to lay claim to a new site and render it defensible, after which they could fill in the rest of the buildings at leisure.

The methods of extending claim to Jewish land are pretty much the same now as in the 1930s. But the circumstances have changed drastically. For one thing, the majority of the land-holding in the 1930s was Arab; today the position is reversed. For another thing, the Arabs in the 1930s never talked or negotiated with the Jews; today, some do and some don’t. Moreover, it is not the British who are custodians of the territories; it is primarily the Israelis themselves.

The biggest factor of difference is tied up with the question: Who owns the land? And there is a difference of opinion here between the settlers and the world community, with the Israelis themselves of divided mind between the two. The settlers who are expanding the settlements believe that of right, all the territories (or at least all of the territories not yet occupied) should belong to the Jewish people. They are staking out the land, tract by tract, on behalf of turning that hypothetical claim into a “fact on the ground,” so that (presumably) once the claim is reinforced by settlement and direct occupation, it will never be revoked but the land will always remain Jewish. That is the whole primary motivation behind the radical portion of the settler movement.

But if negotiations are to take place, and if those negotiations are to be taken seriously, then any land of the West Bank not already put in an exception class by the Taba negotiations (primarily the Etzion Bloc, the Ariel Bloc, and Greater Jerusalem) is on the table, in escrow so to speak, with its ultimate disposition to be determined by the negotiations. Some would go so far as to say, this disputed land presumably belongs to the Palestinians—it was agreed to be part of their domain by the 1949 cease-fire, and everything that has happened since then (the 1967 and 1973 wars, plus the intervening expansion of Jewish settlements) does not change that status. But without going even that far, we should at least stipulate: the status of this land is to be determined by negotiation.

Thus, the settlers, by expanding the settlements at this stage, are taking land with status “to be determined by negotiation” and marking it as “Jewish land.”

That is like moving the goal posts during a time-out.

If the status of the land to be negotiated is being changed while negotiations are pending or in progress, then whoever is doing that (or allowing or condoning it) is not taking the negotiations seriously. That is what is such a big deal. That is why it makes perfect sense for Abbas, Fayyad, and the other PA representatives to make a continued freeze on settlement expansion a precondition for going ahead with the negotiations.

And that is why the Israeli artists are boycotting Ariel, saying they will not perform there as long as the negotiations are a factor, and as long as the Israeli government is acting as if it will let the settlement freeze lapse, thus putting the negotiations (and peace itself) in peril. They are trying to deliver a wakeup call to the Netanyahu government, saying: “If you want your negotiating partners to take you seriously, you are going to have to adopt a ‘hands-off’ policy to the very thing that is being negotiated, until the negotiations have completed their course and its disposition is properly, legitimately decided by both parties in conjunction.”

Is there a real chance that this round of negotiations will lead to peace? I don’t know. It depends on the actions and words of both sides. But I do believe that it is our obligation to do everything that is in our power to give them the best possible chance. And continuing the settlement freeze indefinitely for the course of the negotiations is what common sense dictates, to show good faith with the other side, to demonstrate by our actions that we take the negotiations in all seriousness.

That is what the Israeli artists are trying to say by their boycott. And that is why I agree with them wholeheartedly, and consider them the conscience of Israel today.

Don’t Give the Button-Pushers the Power!

2010-09-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

I saw it happen 15 years ago. In September, 1995 Rabin was Prime Minister. The Oslo Accords had been approved. Our family went to spend a year in Israel, elated to be in Israel, but also elated that progress was being made, after decades, to move toward real peaceful relations between the Zionist Jews/Israelis and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East.

Then the extremists pushed their buttons. In November, Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Rabin. In February, around Purim (anniversary of the monstrous crime of another button-pusher, Baruch Goldstein), Hamas suicide-operatives began blowing up buses in the cities of Israel. Among the first victims were my JTS classmate Matt Eisenfeld and his fiancée Sara Duker. Although our son David and our daughter Rachel—then in 8th grade and 4th grade, respectively, in the Israeli public schools—handed out hamantaschen to the soldiers guarding the bus-stops and brandished posters supporting the election of the Labor candidate Shimon Peres, it did not help. Netanyahu won.

The extremists logic was: They didn’t want peace. They knew if they pushed the buttons of the moderates by dastardly acts inciting fear, enough moderates would drift from the center to throw the center of gravity to the anti-peace forces in both the Jewish and Arab constituencies. Peace would be defeated. The extremists’ agenda would prevail.

The same pattern is repeating itself. Last week, Al Qaida attacked targets in 13 cities in Iraq, on the eve of the American turnover of military control to the Iraqis. Yesterday, Hamas killed four Jewish settlers in the Hebron area, on the eve of the start of peace talks between Israel and the PA.

Hamas has consistently opposed peace. They have consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. They have consistently maintained that the only just solution in Israel/Palestine is the dismantlement of the state of Israel and the establishment of an Arab-Palestinian dominated state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Whenever Jews and Arab moderates get together to try to work out a fair peace settlement that gives a legitimate place to Jewish and Palestinian-Arab national aspirations, the minority party Hamas claims veto power. They think that if they wreak enough havoc, proving that nobody can control them and that they can kill Israelis/Zionists with impunity, they will alienate enough moderates from the idea of peace to kill the peace process. So far, they have managed to achieve this—following the example set by Arab extremists since the massacres of 1929.

We must not let them. We must not let a small violent minority veto the peace aspirations of the majority.

The only way we can stop them is to oppose their call to violence with an equally strong call to peace. We must not let them push our buttons. We must not let them trigger our own vengeful instincts, generalizing from the violent few to tar with the same brush the entire group that shares their religious or national identity.

Over 2800 years ago, when the Middle East was already embroiled in the inter-group wars and rivalries that have persisted there (and in most of the human-populated world) ever since, a Jewish prophet named Isaiah had a dream, that the nations would flock to Jerusalem and learn there of God’s Torah, and that when they did so, they would beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning-hooks, that nation would not lift up sword against nation, and they would not learn war any more.

The conventional wisdom was against Isaiah then. His dream has still not been realized. The same forces that conspired to defer the fulfillment of the dream then are still at work. But the dream still lives. The dream must prevail.

Letter to Cousin Nick

2010-06-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Nick,

You have asked me what I think about Michael Chabon’s NY Times Op Ed piece of June 4, 2010, “Chosen But Not Special.” I liked the piece very much. It raised a lot of pertinent issues. I think I would do justice to it only if I took up each of the issues and gave my reaction to it, point by point.

First, let me address the Facebook byline: “Jews would be wise to abandon the myth of their exceptionalism.” This is a loaded question. If it means Jews should not be treated differently than anyone else because of their presumed difference—whether greater intelligence, greater suffering and entitlement, or the like—this is a truism. Everyone should be treated alike on the basis of their actions. But if it means that Jews are the same as anyone else, and any differences are so trivial as to be negligible, this is false. Everyone is different, and differences matter. Our differences are two-edged. We can welcome them benignly and take the opportunity they offer to enrich our experience, or we can take them invidiously and use them to foment envy and hatred. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks addresses this in his book, The Dignity of Difference. It is our responsibility as human beings to acknowledge the fact of difference and use it for good, not for evil.

Are Jews special? Yes. But it would be wrong to measure different people’s specialness and to try to figure out, is one more special than another? Though we cannot “know” God, we are right to imagine God as a loving parent whose children are all God’s creatures, all people, all living things. In the 18th century, the German Enlightenment philosopher and dramatist Gotthold Lessing expressed this in a parable that he put in the mouth of his hero of his play Nathan the Wise (a character he based on his Jewish friend Moses Mendelssohn): A father had three sons and one precious heirloom ring. He hesitated to give any of his sons preference by giving him the ring exclusively, so he had an expert jeweler make two replicas. Before his death, he took each son into confidence and said, “I am giving you this precious ring because I love you.” At the funeral, the three sons were wearing the three rings and were perplexed. They went to a judge to help determine, which son had the genuine ring? The judge answered: The one who behaves in a loving fashion to his brothers, his ring is the true ring. So we should each regard our specialness in the eyes of God. Our relation with God is unique because each of us is unique. God’s love for one of us cannot be measured as greater or lesser than God’s love for someone else, because that which is unique is not susceptible of measurement or comparison without impugning its uniqueness.

What about Jews and smartness (or wisdom)? I do not want to enter into the questions of comparative measurement of intelligence that Charles Murray and Kevin B. MacDonald (cited by Chabon) discuss. To dwell on such questions serves envy rather than enlightenment. I think it is perfectly fair, however, to say that Jews have traditionally valued wisdom and intellectual achievement, and this is one of the most important positive features and contributions of Jewish culture. The phenomenon of the Bar Mitzvah, which you have portrayed in your cinematic work, is symptomatic of this. It is not every culture that celebrates an adolescent’s coming-of-age by calling on that individual to give a display of intellectual competence. Matthew Arnold was on the right track in his Culture and Anarchy in contrasting Hebraism and Hellenism in terms of their ideals. Hebraism in his view cultivated righteousness, while Hellenism cultivated “sweetness and light” (art and philosophy). The cultures of the world are importantly different in their emphases on the panoply of human ideals as ideals and we should learn what we can from all of them. But in this inventory, it would be correct to say that in the ideals that it strove for, Judaism has valued intellect and wisdom. Whether it has always achieved it, is of course another question.

But is the fiasco of the Mavi Marmara to be chalked up to a lack of smartness? This is where I think that Chabon’s dry, tongue-in-cheek analysis is missing an important dimension. Even his reference to Chelm does not tell us the whole story about that phenomenon (and that may be the right place to start, as there is something very Chelm-like, though tragic, in the missteps of the current Israeli administration). The Jewish tradition does not speak of the “fools of Chelm” but of the “sages of Chelm.” The sages of Chelm were very ingenious in the application of their reason to solve puzzles, but they always came up with the wrong answers because they left out a crucial part of every problem they addressed. Indeed, the tradition of the Chelm stories may be read as a parody of the unworldly yeshiva students, learned in Talmud but ignorant in the ways of the world, who were therefore handicapped in their negotiation of reality. They were smart but not truly wise, for true wisdom must include breadth of experience and openness to viewpoints other than one’s own.

The current Israeli predicament reminds me of a different Talmudic story. Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua were arguing whether a stove made of a particular amalgam of materials was susceptible of ritual impurity. Rabbi Eliezer ruled: “Pure.” Rabbi Joshua ruled: “Impure.”

Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the carob tree is on my side, let the carob tree uproot itself.” The carob tree uprooted itself. Rabbi Joshua retorted, “We do not admit evidence from a carob tree.”
 Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the law is on my side, let the brook run backward.” The brook ran backward. Rabbi Joshua retorted, “We do not admit evidence from a brook.”

Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the law is on my side, let a voice from heaven prove it.” A voice from heaven announced: “The law is according to Rabbi Eliezer.” Rabbi Joshua retorted, “It is written: ‘It is not in heaven!’ Since the time that the Torah was given at Sinai, we do not listen to a heavenly voice, but we decide according to the majority.”

The story goes on to say that they ostracized Rabbi Eliezer for his failure to listen to the views of his colleagues.

Now, it is not said of Rabbi Eliezer that he was not smart. Indeed, he had a prodigious memory and remembered all the traditions of the previous generations. I am sure that his argument proving that he was right about the purity of the stove was intellectually impeccable—so solid, in fact, that a heavenly voice agreed with him! But he was not wise, because he did not learn from others. (“Who is wise? He who learns from everyone.”)

The more I think about what is missing from the thinking of the current Israeli leadership, the more it seems to me they are like Rabbi Eliezer. It is not stupidity or lack of smartness that is their problem, but close-mindedness, their lack of interest or responsiveness to viewpoints other than their own.

The rationale they give for their actions is factually and morally well-based every step of the way. Yes, the leaders of Gaza are by their own declaration at war with Israel. Yes, they fire rockets into Israel at every provocation (and no provocation). Yes, if they were given full open access to shipping, they would import weapons. Yes, if they had free ability to import metal and concrete, they could build their own weapons from them. Yes, the passengers on the Mavi Marmara attacked the Israeli commandos first, so when the commandos fired back, it was in self-defense and technically justified. Yes, when the Mavi Marmara was inspected after it arrived in Ashdod, it had weapons and large amounts of cash on board. All of which adds up logically, technically, to the conclusion: Israel acted in justified self-defense.

So why, they ask, are the nations of the world almost unanimously condemning Israel? Don’t they see the validity of their reasoning?

I want to say to them: Read the story of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua! The validity of internal reasoning is only one part of establishing the truth. The consensus of reasonable people is another equally valid part, and that is the part that is missing.

In particular, a moral law depends on consensus to be operable. If only a lone individual holds to a moral principle, it ceases to be an effective instrument in guiding humanity in their interactions. To act morally is to engage in a responsive dialogue with the people on the other side of the table until you have thrashed out common principles that can be binding both ways. It is to be engaged in reciprocal conduct that affirms the equal validity of both parties.

Admittedly, this is very difficult when the other party has refused, since the 1920s, to acknowledge your validity. But it is the only way. One must continue to talk to whoever will listen, the adversary or a third party, until reciprocity is achieved. One must listen to what they have to say, and keep sharing and listening, building bridges of understanding until a common perspective is achieved that will lead to a common plan of action. If one’s course of action is not achieving the desired results (as in the case of the siege of Gaza, which in three years has not advanced the Gazans toward a different regime, or the region to greater understanding), then it should be re-evaluated and a different course of action tried—in consultation with others, in an attempt to elicit their cooperation. This is what the current Israeli leadership has consistently failed to do, which has led to the current impasse. The “stupidity” (or lack of wisdom) was not what they did in this one latest instance. It was their obstinacy in their self-determined course of action, regardless of negative feedback, that led inevitably to being expressed in one crisis or another.

To declare one’s moral purity in isolation, regardless of the consensus of others, is to court ostracism. Rabbi Eliezer was ostracized for violating the mandate of reciprocity and consensus. The current Israeli leadership is courting ostracism by its willful adherence to its own view of the morality of its actions, in the face of the consensus to the contrary.

This is not stupidity. The policy and its justification are being pursued with the highest intelligence—equal to the famous intelligence of the sages of Chelm. But it is folly of another sort—the absence of wisdom, which must include openness to the views of other reasonable people.

I hope these reflections help you! Thanks for raising the questions.

Your cousin,

Lenny

She Doesn't Live Here Anymore

2010-05-04T04:17:00.000-07:00

SHE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
By Smadar Shir, Yediot Achronot April 30th 2010

From: SARTABA
[TRANSLATIONS FROM THE HEBREW PRESS]
http://sartaba.org
Translated by Jonathan Adam Silverman

Jessica Fishman no longer lives in Israel. Exactly a week ago she cleared out her rented apartment in central Tel Aviv, put the dog she called Jinji she picked up off the street, in the cage, and together they flew to her parents in Colorado. She has no plans, either on the personal or professional plane, but she needed the warmth of her family to rebuild her identity.

"Seven years ago, I arrived here as a Jewish and Zionist woman," she says teary eyed while packing her suitcases. "Now I am leaving Israel because in the eyes of the Chief Rabbinate I am not a Jewish woman, and when I myself am already not so sure I am so Zionist."

Her seven years in Israel were not a bowl of cherries. But Jessica, age 29, did not break. "To be a new immigrant is to go to war every day. It is a nightmare. It isn't a matter only of concessions and reductions in quality of life and comforts, but getting used to many difficulties including a lonesome life style. Even in the most frustrating times I said to myself that this is my time and the suffering will pay off, because the good follows bad. I volunteered, I studied, I worked, I served two years in the IDF, I met a boy, we were about to get married, I thought I finally was starting my own family. Look the new immigrant's biggest fear is where will we be for the holidays? Who will invite us for meals? And indeed when everything looked like it was falling into place, that seven black years were behind me and I can look ahead ˆ the door slammed in my face."

Suzie Fishman, Jessica's mother, who came to Israel to help her daughter with parting arrangements, shrugs in defeat.

"I ran a kosher home, I sent my two daughters to Jewish schools and I never hid from them the fact that I am a convert," she explains in English. "I always told them: "there are people who were born as Jews and never did anything to enrich the wonderful religion. I did: "I chose, I converted, I immersed myself in a mikvah. Today for the first time in my life, I do not regret this, but I am certainly sorry. I never wanted my conversion to destroy their lives."

Suzie (62), Jessica's mother, grew up in a Christian family in Missouri. "My mother was very religious, and every Sunday she took me to church," the mother recalls. "But in high school I started to move away from religion." In the framework of studies for becoming a registered nurse she met Leslie Fishman, who became a pediatrician. "We dated for two years, and when he received his certification in Minneapolis, MN, he proposed marriage. I knew he was Jewish before then, but between the two of us religion did not play a significant role. Love made me flexible. I need to convert? No problem. This was much harder for my family than for me, in particular my mother. My two parents were prejudiced, and my mother worried she would lose me, which actually happened. She respected my husband but the conversion separated them."

Fishman went through conversion with a reform rabbi in Saint Louis. "I did not know much about the various streams of Judaism, but Leslie explained to me that the orthodox are less progressive than the reforms in their approach to women, and therefore we chose a reform rabbi. I studied kosher laws and holidays and customs. Leslie came from a home in which the Judaism was a cultural and social matter more than religious, and it turned out that I learned things that he never knew. At the end of the process I immersed myself in the mikvah. Most of the reform conversions don't include immersion, but the rabbi explained to me that the mikvah will increase the chances that my conversion will be recognized in Israel, a question which at that time did not concern me at all. I received a certificate that I am a Jewish woman and I chose the Jewish name Shulamit, which is derived from the word shalom = peace."

In their home in St. Paul MN, Suzie was in charge of giving their daughters a Jewish education: Jessica (Tamar) and her younger sister Sheina, who lives today in New York. "We lived ten minutes walk from the conservative synagogue "Beit Yakov" led by Rabbi Morris Allen," Jessica recalls from her childhood. "Every Shabbat we walked to the synagogue, even when it snowed, and after prayers the children split up into classrooms where they learned Bible. My father was on the synagogue's board of directors, and my mother volunteered for Hadassah. She lit candles every Friday night, she built the sukkah on Sukkot and she taught me why we fast on Yom Kippur and why we light candles on Chanuka. For the seder night there was a big celebration, the whole family came to our house, and until today Passover is my most favorite holiday."

When she was three years old, her mother went through a Bat Mitzva ceremony. "For a year she studied and I applauded when she read from the Torah," Jessica recalls, who until sixth grade learned in a Jewish school. Because of her father's work the family moved to a small city in New York, and she remembers herself in the local supermarket, looking for food items on whose packages was written OU, specifying they were kosher. Summer vacations she spent in "Herzl Camp", and at age 14 she went with her parents and sister for a first visit to Israel. "We toured all over and I loved it," she says smiling. "In particular Tel Aviv. Even then I announced to my parents that one day I will return to Israel forever." Two years afterward she came to Israel for six weeks in the framework of the conservative youth movement. "We prayed three times a day, and every meal ended with the prayer after meals. "I was not so devout," she confesses, " but it interested me to see Israel from the point of view of people my age."

While studying communications and business management at Indiana U. she came to Israel again, learned for a half a year at Hebrew U. and at age 22 returned to Israel in the framework of a nine month volunteer project. "I worked in an absorption center in Ashkelon with Ethiopian children and I prepared young Israelis for their high school graduation exams in English. Afterward we moved to Migdal Ha Emek, we set up a chocolate milk house for children, I worked in a village for children at risk in order to contribute as much as possible," she stresses. "In the framework of the volunteer project I met Nachman Shai, who was then IDF Spokesman, I told him who I am, and he promised to help me. Two weeks later I received a phone call, someone asked to speak with Jessica Fishman Daughter of Eliezer. It took me a minute to understand that they meant me," She laughs. "They asked me to enlist in two weeks, I sought to postpone the enlistment until I finish the Hebrew class and finally they told me "Hey you can't choose the date of your enlistment according to what is comfortable for you, this is the army." I flew to my parents for a month and a half, I organized documents, I made Aliyah, and at age 23 I started to serve in IDF Spokesman."

"We were worried about her," her mother comments. "This was during the second intifada, it was dangerous, but we were very proud of her. She fulfilled her Zionism and her Judaism.:"

LOVE DEPENDENT ON THE PAST

For two years Jessica served as an aide in the Unit For Strategy and Initiatives. "Until today I am forbidden from telling too much about what I did there," she relates. "I thought that I would be Israel's spokesperson for the foreign press, but this was only one aspect of work in the unit, which prepared in advance ways of coping with atrocity scenarios. As a lone soldier woman I rented an apartment, I found friends and every day, when I dressed in uniform, I felt my Israeli identity getting stronger. When I was discharged I wanted to make a long trip abroad like everyone after the army. Instead of flying to India I flew to my parents, who had moved to Colorado, I went skiing and I returned home, to Tel Aviv."

She worked in an advertising office, started to study for a master's degree in business management in the interdisciplinary center in Herzliya and for the first time started to read in Hebrew. "They told me to start with books that I did not know in English, so I started with CATCHER IN THE RYE and from there I moved to BAGEL WISDOM. Reading in Hebrew took more time, but there was great satisfaction.

Two years ago she met M, who almost became her husband. "A friend told me about a guy who wanted my advice," she relates, "I assumed this was someone planning Aliyah. The first time I met M I was amazed that he had such good Hebrew. Later I understood that this was an alibi for a date. We fell in love. He is a fun loving guy who works in strategic marketing. We took a biking trip, his family adopted me like a daughter and I felt that finally I found a home. When we started to talk about marriage I told him that my mother was a reform convert, which the orthodox rabbinate in Israel did not accept. This I learned in the army. M said he did not want our children to suffer and asked me to convert. I was opposed. I claimed "Why should I convert? Am I not Jewish? After all I contributed more to the country than many who wear the kipa who refuse to serve in the IDF. These discussions became arguments and soured our relations."
According to her, M's mother used to say: "I love Jessica as if she is my daughter, but your children will suffer, they will not permit them to get married in Israel," And she applied indirect pressure. In the final analysis Jessica phoned her parents and asked them to try to obtain a certificate of validity for her mother's conversion. And then the blow struck.

Rabbi (advocate) Uri Regev, director of Hadush (Freedom, Religion, Equality) stated unequivocally: "Israelis born in Israel who want to get married go to the Religious Council, bring two witnesses who verify they are Jewish and single and the marriage is registered. When new immigrants want to get married, they are sent to Rabbinical court to verify their validity for marriage, and it demands that an orthodox rabbi from the place they live will verify that the party making the request is Jewish and single."

Suzie Fishman relates: "One day we received a phone call from an orthodox Rabbi who asked to know the names of my parents, and I understood that he does not realize I am a convert. So I told him that since the conversion I am called Shulamit daughter of Avraham. At that moment he stopped talking to me. My husband raised the telephone receiver in the next room, and the Rabbi continued talking but only to him. The orthodox Rabbi claimed that Reform conversion isn't valid and that Jessica is not a Jewish woman because the Jewish spirit was not in my womb when she was conceived. I broke out weeping. This was the first time that someone dared state to me that I who chose to be Jewish, am not Jewish."

"My father phoned me immediately after the talk with the rabbi," Jessica continues. "He reported to me about the nuances of the conversation and wept like a child. My father said that he felt he was raped. He wept and said Jessica I am so sorry we have not managed to help you get out of this trap."

In November Jessica said goodbye to her mate (it was no longer pleasant between us. The arguments killed the love") And she decided to leave Israel. "I felt that the country betrayed me, humiliated me and spit in my face."

'ANTISEMITIC BEHAVIOR"

Jessica's story is a sad human saga, strong and powerful, that exemplifies the growing crisis between Israel and Jewish leadership in the US, "says Rabbi (advocate) Uri Regev. According to him the thing that causes the crisis is the proposed law on conversion from MK David Rotam from Israel Beiteinu, chairman of the Knesset constitutional committee. "His proposed law is aimed, as it were, to increase the number of orthodox converts in Israel, but in fact it grants for the first time to the chief rabbinate the authority over conversion in Israel, and it is liable to cause Reform and Conservative converts ˆ who are the decisive majority of converts in the US ˆ not to be recognized as Jews even for the purpose of the Right of Return," Regev cautions.

MK Rotam, who landed in New York this week for a series of meetings with heads of Federations and Jewish communities about the proposed law of conversion, was sorry to hear that Jessica Fishman already left Israel. "She is correct," he said. "Her case is scandalous. It hurts me to hear that a young woman who contributed so much to Israel was forced to leave, and this is exactly what my law seeks to correct."

"How will your law correct the problem Fishman experienced?"

"If my law is passed, instead of going through a long process of conversion Jessica will be able to turn to the Rabbinical Court of the metropolitan rabbinate that we want to establish. The metropolitan rabbinate will examine her knowledge of Judaism, and in the worst case will convert her one more time in a swift way."

But Jessica Fishman does not want to go through another conversion, either long or short. According to her she is Jewish.

"This problem is beyond my law. It relates to the Chief Rabbinate which recognizes only orthodox conversion. Jessica can still get married in Israel with a reform Rabbi. If she fell in love with a young man who is not prepared to get married to a young woman whose mother went through reform conversion, she needs to address her reasoning to the young man with whom she fell in love. Not to me and not to the establishment. If my law is passed, Jessica would be able to register in the couples registry and get married. It is correct that with regard to orthodoxy there will be problems for her children, but she can say: "I am a Jewish woman and my children are Jewish like me, and hope that they will choose to marry Israelis who don't object to reform conversion."

Jessica is leaving and is very angry about it especially toward the rabbinical establishment. "This is not Jewish behavior, this is antisemitic behavior that causes discrimination. Everyone thinks that the proposed new law relates to Russians and foreign workers, and they don't understand the extent to which it is likely to influence people like me, Americans who came to Israel out of Judaism, Zionism and idealism. I came to Israel because I thought it is a country where everyone is Jewish, but this beautiful dream was shattered. It is finished. My case is already lost, but I agreed to tell my story in the hope that it will raise public consciousness about the matter. I intend to build a new life in the United States, and I have no doubt that I will only marry a Jewish man. What will happen when my children want to immigrate to Israel and get married to Jews here? God bless. I can only hope that by then they will solve the problem."

Translation by yonatan silverman zalman_8@013net.net

Chametz and Olam Haba

2010-04-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

I heard through the grapevine that a friend of a friend undertook this year's Pesach observance in an ultra-serious frame of mind, determined to be observant of every detail and not let one crumb of chametz get through the cracks. My first reaction was to admire this person's conscientiousness. Would that we go at all our undertakings in that serious, determined frame of mind! How much we would accomplish!

Then I heard of this friend's underlying motivation. If she were not to succeed in having her Pesach totally chametz-free, she might lose her personal immortality, her place in "Olam Ha-Ba" (the "World to Come"). My immediate reaction to this was: Superstition.

But the shared news got me thinking. How could someone have come up with an idea like that in the first place—that the God of the universe would respond to someone's failure to observe this ritual 100% by taking away their immortality [or to put it more bluntly, by killing them]?

How could anyone believe in a God that had those values?

As I thought about it more, it seemed there was a pretty reasonable explanation how this belief could have come about (which does not make the belief itself any more rational). Two factors interacted: the vague but imperious way in which certain commands of the Torah are expressed, and the psychological makeup of the person who is susceptible to certain kinds of appeals.

As to the first, the attentive reader is likely to be impressed by the dramatic way in which the Biblical text emphasizes the importance of certain mitzvot. It says that whoever transgresses X "v-nikhretah ha-nefesh ha-hi me-ameha"—"and that soul shall be cut off from its people."

That language occurs for a small number of mitzvot, among them:

Doing work on Shabbat
Not afflicting oneself on Yom Kippur
Failing to participate in the Paschal sacrifice
Eating chametz on Pesach
Violating the incest prohibitions of Leviticus Chapter 18
Eating the blood or fat of sacrificial animals, that ought to have been God's portion, offered on the altar

These were considered pretty serious violations. Eating pork, by comparison, suffered only the penalty that you became "unclean" (tamei) by doing so.

But in Biblical times people didn't have the evolved view of "olam ha-ba" that the rabbis developed. "Being cut off from your people" meant simply that — ostracism, being cut off from social and communal ties with the folk. We can infer from this the positive side of all these injunctions: identifying oneself with the Israelite people meant that one took these obligations seriously. They were singled out as core obligations that were central to identifying with the people of Israel. Defining these as core obligations was effective—it left an impress that lasted over the millenia. It is instructive that to this day, Yom Kippur and Pesach rank very high in broad-based participation among all kinds of Jews, as borne out by recent sociological surveys.

In post-Biblical times, the Jewish world-view underwent a transformation. "Olam Ha-Ba" (with its dual meaning of Messianic times and personal immortality) became a central belief, whereas in Biblical times it was unkown. Accordingly, the rabbis had to interpret the punishment of "karet" (being "cut off") in terms of the new world-view. According to one view, it meant that one was condemned to childlessness. According to another view, it meant that one got a lesser share of "Olam Ha-Ba"—or in the extreme case, none at all. But this dire fate was mitigated to a large extent by the prevailing doctrines of repentance and working off one's sins through punishment. Eventually, most people (who had not committed ax-murder or genocide) could gain forgiveness for infractions of their sins, even though the Bible specified "karet" as the ultimate penalty. It was presumed that most ordinary people meant well and were sincere in their wanting to repair their relationship with God, and this would be taken into account. A crumb of chametz on Pesach (or even a sandwich consumed in a rebellious moment, and later repented) was not enough, in the Jewish scheme of things, to forfeit one's personal immortality.

This should help put the first factor into its proper perspective. Yes, there are certain statements in the tradition that could lend themselves to be taken as forfeiting one's "Olam Ha-Ba" by violating the afore-mentioned injunctions. But no, it would take a lot more than that to really bring about such a radical personal undoing.

But then there's the second factor—the personal susceptibility of a lot of individuals (not just this one case) to obsessive and even fanatical religious commitment, as a defense against mortal anxiety. The big truth (the elephant in the room) is that we are mortal, and this is out of our control. We don't have any control over what happens to us when we die. If death is annihilation of our selves — or if there is an afterlife, for good or for bad — we don't get to say, either way. The world is the way it is; we are the way we are.

This brute and inconsiderate fact goes against the grain of those of us who like to be in control of everything — of what college we get into, what career we have, keeping in good health, etc. We don't want to admit that something as major as whether we live or die is out of our control. We are all potentially very susceptible to a program that comes our way and tells us with confidence and authority, "Do A, B, and C, and you are guaranteed immortality! Just sign up and do everything that it says in this book."

There is even something plausible in the view that if we single out just those mitzvot for which the Torah threatens "karet" as violation, and observe them scrupulously, that this is the central, most important part of the Immortality Deal. They are central to Jewish identity, and they also present a significant practical challenge—though not an insuperable one. When we knock ourselves out and are "perfect" in our observance of the Pesach dietary laws for 8 whole days, we feel we have earned something big — maybe even Eternity. Having gone through the 8 Pesach days (or the 25-hour Yom Kippur fast) according to the book, we can now turn to God with our shoulders thrown back and our head up high and tell God: "I've done it! I am truly deserving now. Surely you will grant me Olam Ha-Ba now, for all the sacrifices I have made!"

This is part (though not the whole) of the "Ba'al Teshuva" syndrome that some of us are familiar with—people whom we know, of ordinary background, who feel the strong attraction of an ultra-strict religious regimen for the personal security it offers. The same tendency is more selectively manifested when Jews decide to pick and choose certain observances and do them 200% or 500%. Pesach is very easy to adopt for this strategy. Go crazy-strict for 8 days, but in doing so, you are buying insurance for eternity. It's a very tempting proposition.

But does God really want this kind of extremism? When I look around the world and see the incredible variety that adds to the richness of existence, it seems to me that God is saying in all of this: Be yourself, the best you know how! Take what you do seriously, but don't go crazy over it! Excel in what you do best, but don't sacrifice what is inimitably "you" for a straitjacket of someone else's devising. Honor the traditions you grew up in, but be open to the richness of being around you and enrich yourself by it! And if you ever do come to a point of being judged, you will be judged for the totality of your life, not for this or that one detail.

As Rabbi Akiva said, "B'tuv ha-olam nidon, ve-hakol le-fi rov ha-ma'aseh" — the world is judged in goodness, and it is all according to the preponderance of the deeds (Pirkei Avot Chapter 3).

My Take on "Migdol Yeshuot" (II Samuel 22:51)

2010-04-06T20:14:00.000-07:00

Every year, come the 7th day of Passover, I am reminded of it again—how (in my view) an 8th-Century Jewish politician tried to ram something down the throats of his fellow-Jews and got the usual response of “two Jews, three opinions.”

As we read the Haftarah from Chapter 22 of Second Samuel, we come again to that last verse where it says, “Migdol yeshu’ot malko”—“A tower of salvation is his King.” Only it wasn’t written that way. The consonants of the written text say “Magdil yeshu’ot malko”—He gives abundant salvation to His king [and deals graciously with His anointed, to David and his descendants forever.] It is written, in other words, the same way as the end of Psalm 18.

Why, then, did the Masoretes vocalize II Samuel 22:51 as “migdol” when the consonants read “magdil”?

Here is my pet theory.

Roll back the calendar to the centuries after the Moslem invasions. The Abbasids established a mighty empire—the Caliphate—with Baghdad as their capital. They forcibly converted to monotheism any pagans who stood in their way. They graciously made an exception of the Jews and Christians—the “peoples of the Book”—on condition that they governed themselves according to an approved religious regime of their own faith-community.

Under these circumstances, the rabbis of Babylonia rose to new heights of prestige. Their interpretation of the Talmud was authoritative for Jews throughout the Muslim realm. They also took care to establish an official liturgy—the first Authorized Jewish Prayer Book.

High in the prestige rankings of that time was the Exilarch, the secular head of the Jewish community, who thought he was a descendant of the Davidic line, and therefore could regard himself as the Messiah of his generation. Certain prayers were instituted in his behalf, such as the blessing “et tzemach David” in the Amidah, praying for the restoration of the Davidic lineage in the Jewish homeland.

In this context, it seems pretty clear that the verse “Magdil yeshu’ot malko ve-oseh chesed li-Meshicho, le-David u-lezar’o ad olam” was probably inserted into the Grace After Meals in this period, also as a token of glorification of the Exilarch. ("He increases the salvation of His king...")

But just as there are Jews in each generation who can’t stand the current political leadership, you can bet that there were Jews of that period who couldn’t stand the self-important stuffed shirt who bore the title of Exilarch. When it came time to say grace after meals, they were looking for a way to avoid this obsequious singing of his praises.

They found it.

Since the vocalization of the Hebrew Biblical text was still pretty fluid at that time (there were three competing traditions of vocalization just making their start), it was easy to claim that however so-and-so claimed the text should be read, wasn’t the correct way to read it. We have countless midrashim with the punch-line “al tikrei” — don’t read it X, read it Y.

So just because the consonants of a particular word read MGDYL didn’t mean you had to read it MaGDiYL. You could say that the Y and V are interchangeable, and read it MiGDoVL.

That profoundly changes the syntax of the phrase. Instead of “[God] Increases the Salvation of His king [= the Exilarch]”—glorifying the Exilarch— you could understand the phrase “A Tower of Salvation is his King [= God]. It is a Jewish truism that God is the one really worthy of glorification, not any flesh-and-blood mortal.

If the Exilarch-of-the-moment’s popularity rating was under 40%, then this stratagem probably caught on like wildfire and became the favored reading of the verse, especially at the public recitation of Grace After Meals. From then, it was a simple matter, when the last recension of the vocalization of the Bible was made, for this vocalization to be accepted as the “Kere” (vocalized version) overriding the “Ketiv” (written version) of II Samuel 22:51.

That’s my thought-for-the day for 7th day Pesah. Hope you enjoyed your holidays!

What Does It Mean to Say: The Categories of Work Are Torahitic?

2009-07-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

Rabbinic law is definite about the hierarchy of categories of Jewish law. The basic, fundamental law is “de-oraita” (= “of the Torah,” or “Torahitic”). The extension or penumbra of the law is “de-rabbanan” (= “of the rabbis,” or “rabbinic”).

For example, the categories of work. There are 39 categories of work prohibited on Shabbat, according to Mishnah Shabbat 7:2. A core violation of any of these categories is counted as violating the “Torahitic” command. But each category of work has extensions, the violation of which counts as violating a “rabbinic” command.

For example, “shearing” to obtain wool from a sheep is a core category of work. Derivatives of these, such as cutting one’s hair or nails with scissors for cosmetic reasons, are still considered within the “Torahitic” zone of the prohibition. But doing the latter by hand is considered within the “rabbinic” addendum to this law.

(See Dayan Isidor Grunfeld, The Sabbath: A Guide to Its Understanding and Observance, for a detailed summary of the “Torahitic” and “rabbinic” parameters of each of the 39 categories. A more concise summary is available on several websites, such as http://www.webshas.org/shabbos/melachos.htm or http://www.ou.org/publications/kaplan/shabbat.)

Now, what is the source of these 39 categories? The Torah is very sketchy as to what is prohibited on Shabbat. Among the guidelines it gives are:

“In plowing-season and reaping-season you shall rest.” (Exodus 34:21)

“[On the previous day] that which you would cook, cook; and that which you would bake, bake…let no man go out from his place on the Sabbath day” (Exodus 16:23-29)

“You shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath day.” (Exodus 35:3)

“They came upon a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day…” (Numbers 15:32-36)

“If you hold back your foot on the Sabbath, refrain from pursuing your affairs on My holy day—if you call the Sabbath ‘delight,’ the Lord’s holy day ‘honored,’ and if you honor it and go not your ways, nor look to your affairs, nor strike bargains…” (Isaiah 58:13)

“Take care not to carry burdens on the Sabbath day” (Jeremiah 17:21)

The 39 categories listed in Mishnah Shabbat 7:2 go far beyond these in specificity:

Sowing, plowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, selecting, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking.

Shearing wool, bleaching, hackling, dyeing, spinning, stretching, looping, weaving, separating, tying, untying, sewing, tearing [in order to sew].

Hunting (capturing) a deer, slaughtering, flaying, salting, curing, scraping, cutting it up, writing [two letters], erasing [in order to write].

Building, tearing down, extinguishing, kindling, striking with a hammer, carrying from one domain to another.

What is the source of these 39 categories? The Talmud gives two answers. The first is that the number of times the word melakhah occurs in the Torah is 39, though there is some discussion as to which passages needed to be included to come up to that number. The second is “corresponding to the labors in the Tabernacle.” What does this mean? The Jerusalem Talmud elaborates and says that the total occurrences of the words melakhah and avodah in the portion prescribing the building of the Tabernacle comes to 39. (JT Shabbat 9b; BT Shabbat 49b) Rashi says: “Those labors enumerated in Mishnah Shabbat were required for the Tabernacle, and the portion of Shabbat was written adjacent to the portion of the Tabernacle to draw this lesson.” But nowhere is there an extended argument of the rabbis, deriving the specific 39 categories of the Mishnah from the activities described in the Torah portion of the Tabernacle (Exodus Chapters 25 thru 40). In fact, some of the categories listed in the Mishnah are not mentioned in that Torah portion. Furthermore, the one rigorous demonstration of correspondence that we possess—in Israel Al-Nakawa’s Menorat Ha-Ma’or (14th century)—follows the simple procedure of counting up the occurrences of the words melakhah and avodah in the Tabernacle portion, which add up to 39, regardless of the contents of the passages in question. (Enelow, Menorat Ha-Maor, Bloch, 1931, Vol. 3, p. 603)

It would seem, then, that the sequence of development of these laws was as follows. First, the rabbis developed the specific list of categories (or, if you wish to believe, received the list by oral transmission from Moses through Joshua, etc.). They then sought Torahitic basis for this enumeration. The justifying arguments that they give are of a “paralogical” character, of the “wild-card” variety. The 39 mentions of melakhah and avodah are treated as so many wild-cards, to be played at the interpreter’s discretion: assign them to the corresponding number of work-categories, whatever they may be. This procedure puts the decision-making power squarely in the rabbis’ hands.

But if the specification of work-categories was developed by the rabbis, and is not found in the Torah, then how can one consistently maintain that transgressing one of them (for instance, cutting one’s hair or shaving, included in the category “shearing”—or even, for that matter, shearing wool off a sheep) is violating a Torahitic command? Would it not be more consistent, more “intellectually honest,” to say that one was violating a rabbinic command?

As paradoxical as it may seem, it is nevertheless entirely plausible to maintain that (1) the judgment that Action X is “work” was made by the rabbis, yet (2) “X is work” has the status of Torahitic law.

Consider: Reuben is trying to enjoy his Shabbat rest. His neighbor Simeon is fixing his house, as he has not found leisure to do so during his very busy work week. The sound of Simeon’s hammer is driving Reuben crazy. Reuben brings Simeon to Rabbi Yosi with a complaint: “Simeon is violating Shabbat.” Rabbi Yosi must now make a decision. The Torah declares: “The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You shall do no work.” What did the Torah mean by “work”? Does Simeon’s action fall under that intention? He performs an act of interpretation: “Work” as intended by the Torah includes striking with a hammer.

Rabbi Yosi has no escape. He must interpret the Torah’s vague term “work” either to include or to exclude “striking with a hammer.” But having made that interpretation, the action “striking with a hammer” is prohibited on Shabbat, not by an edict of Rabbi Yosi (which would make it clearly “derabbanan”) but by the Torah’s edict, as understood by Rabbi Yosi—and as henceforth understood by the community of Israel.

Over time, by hundreds of acts of interpretation by Hillel and Shammai and Rabbi Johanan and Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon and by hundreds of unnamed students, scholars, scribes, and authorities (and even by thousands of lay Jews), the vague terms such as “work” specified by the Torah took on specific meaning. The enumeration of 39 major categories of work in Mishnah Shabbat 7:2 was the summation of centuries of life-experience and interpretation of the meaning of Shabbat observance, compressed into one paragraph. It represents the content of the edict of the Torah, as understood by the Jewish people.

Consider the analogy of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

What is the content of this declaration? What does it permit and forbid?

As students of American constitutional law will attest, it has come to forbid such things as:

Instituting “separate but equal” educational systems based on racial differences.
Depriving mentally ill persons, who do not pose a danger to themselves or to others, of their freedom.
Forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Totally and absolutely disallowing a woman to abort her fetus.

The status of these applications is not that they are “federal statute law.” They are not simply the opinion of the Supreme Court of such-and-such a session. They possess, rather, the status of “constitutional law.” It is indeed constitutional law as interpreted by the Supreme Court, but it is constitutional law nonetheless—what the Constitution mandates, as officially interpreted by the Supreme Court. The “right of privacy” is nowhere written in the Constitution as such, but it is regarded as a constitutional right under American law, because of the history of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution—notably, the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

It is in the same sense that the 39 categories of work articulated in Mishnah Shabbat 7:2 have Torahitic status in Jewish law. The Torah’s term “work” had to mean something. The rabbis were empowered to interpret it. (By whom, let’s not ask here.) It is their interpretation that gives the Torah’s term “work” its traditional normative content.

Interpretations are not irreversible. As we saw, in Ketubot (3b-7a) the rabbis reversed themselves on the question whether consummating a marriage was permitted on Shabbat. Similarly, the Supreme Court in the early 20th century understood “due process” to forbid legislation restricting the freedom of contract between employers and employees—for instance, through labor laws forbidding contracts requiring workers to work over 60 hours per week. But in the 1930s the Supreme Court reversed its earlier understanding, declaring that such laws were in the interests of the public welfare and hence constitutional. The very substance of what was constitutional or unconstitutional under the “due process” clause of the 14th Amendment underwent change.

It is conceivable, therefore, that a future interpretation of “work” might modify or replace the interpretation of Mishnah Shabbat 7:2. Such a new interpretation would have a steep uphill road to climb, and a hard task gaining a foothold of acceptance. Practically the whole Jewish world is divided into three factions: (1) those who believe wholeheartedly that the traditional interpretation is God-given, and that to modify it, let alone revoke or replace it, would be blasphemy; (2) those who do believe that defining “work” in any formal, let alone legal or quasi-legal terms, is obsolete and counterproductive; and (3) those who do not observe Shabbat anyway, so for them the whole discussion is moot.

But if modern Jews—or even a small subset of them—are ever going to make Shabbat meaningful in their lives, they will have to take ownership of it and adapt it to their life-needs, which are different from the life-needs of Jews two millennia ago (although there is also a certain commonalty which is also of crucial importance). They will have to define what “work” and “rest” mean in the rhythm, and in the material circumstances, of their lives today.

Ahad Ha-Am, a modern Jewish secularist, said: “More than Israel has kept Shabbat, the Shabbat has kept Israel.” Though he did not believe that the Shabbat was divinely commanded, he believed in the enduring value of Shabbat, both individually for individual Jews, and collectively for the Jewish people.

What a renewed understanding of “work,” “rest,” and Shabbat might be for us today, I leave to some future blog posting.

Reflections on Ketubot (1): Nature of Oral Law

2009-07-08T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Talmudic tractate Ketubot has been called “Shas Katan” (the “little Talmud”) by Talmud aficionados, because the range of subject-matter in it is so broad as to cover aspects of most topics of the Talmud itself. An exploration of Tractate Ketubot is therefore a good way for me to structure my own interaction with the Talmud for purpose of a philosophical inquiry on what is distinctive about the Talmud’s logic and discourse.

An excellent study of the topic of marriage in Talmudic law exists in the form of Judith Hauptman’s Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice. I will be relying on the insights of this book, while using it as a starting-point for my own.

The tractate begins: “A virgin is married on Wednesday, and a widow on Thursday, for twice a week the courts are in session in the towns, on Monday and Thursday, so that if [the groom] should have a claim regarding her virginity, he would go early [the next morning] to court.”

Colleague Michael Pitkowsky has informed me that Joshua Kulp has recently completed a study on virginity claims in Talmudic times, epitomized in his HUCA article “Go Enjoy Your Acquisition: Virginity Claims in Rabbinic Literature Reexamined.” The upshot for our purposes is that in rabbinic times the whole issue of bringing virginity suits was declining and discouraged, but not totally dead, so that it was still able to influence such things as the customary day of the week to schedule a wedding, as announced in the opening to this tractate.

My chief focus for this comment, though, is in another direction. What was the “Oral Law”? We have here a striking instance of a central Mishnaic law that is of rabbinic (not Mosaic) origin, by universal consensus. The custom of having courts in session on Monday and Thursday is dated by the rabbis to Ezra’s time, and the day of the wedding is contingent on that.

A popular view of the “Oral Law” (fostered by Avot 1:1) is that it is a body of law, complementary to the written Torah, communicated by God to Moses and communicated by oral tradition from Moses to Joshua, to the elders, to the prophets, to the “Men of the Great Assembly” (in Second Temple times), thence to the rabbis, until it was finally codified by Rabbi Judah the Nasi in the 2nd century in the form of the Mishnah. The popular view assumes that it comprises the basic content of Mishnaic law, minus certain embellishments and rabbinic disagreements recorded in the Mishnah. Call this the “traditional view of the Oral Law.”

In contrast to this, we have the modern scholarly view, that the “Oral Law” was (in its entirety, or nearly so) developed by the rabbis, from Second Temple times through the first five centuries of the Common Era, producing the literary products of the Mishnah and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds.

Both views are reflected in Maimonides’ Introduction to his Commentary on the Misnhah. In one passage, he describes vividly how Moses would receive a law directly from God, transmit it to Aaron, then to Aaron and his sons, then to the seventy elders, then to the entire people. But in another passage, Maimonides dismisses the view (reflected in Talmud Yevamot) that the divergence of rabbinic opinion is due to the distortion of memory in transmission (the “telephone” game). Rather, different rabbis had different “sevarot” (rational considerations based on common experience) for judging that the law should be X rather than Y, or the reverse. So at least in those matters recording different opinions of rabbis, the substance of the disagreement was over matters rabbinic in origin.

Still, even for those of us who tend to hold the modern scholarly view, the question may rightly be asked: What did the rabbis have in mind by the “Oral Law” of Mosaic origin, according to the traditional view? What was included in it, by a conservative estimate?

It is clear, from our example here, that even on a conservative estimate, the “Mosaic Oral Law” could not have comprised all topics of the Mishnah. As Judith Hauptman reminds us in her book, the very ketubah itself was a rabbinic innovation, according to the rabbis themselves. Naturally, then, the tractate concerning “Ketubot” must have been on a topic itself rabbinic in origin. No surprise, therefore, that Ketubot begins with another law – the day of the wedding – that also (according to Rashi, who was no flaming modern scholar) was instituted by the rabbis!

There is a rabbinic recognition that the time-honored ancient stratum of law was a variable factor. Mishnah Chagigah 1:8 tells us: “The laws of release from vows hover in the air—they have nothing to support them. The laws about Shabbat, Chagigah, and sacrilege are as mountains hanging by a hair—little text, but many laws. The rules about civil law, the Temple service, purities and impurities, and forbidden liaisons have ample support; they are the essentials of Torah.”

The essentials of Jewish practice today – Shabbat, holidays, prayer, kashrut – contain many regulations, some of them (such as Shabbat and holiday) having much detail based on cursory statements in the Torah, others (such as prayer) absent in the Torah altogether. Clearly, most of Judaism falls into the category of the “Oral Law.”

But could that Oral Law be Mosaic in origin?

The continuation of the discussion in Ketubot links to the topic of Shabbat in an amusing way.

The question is raised: What about consummating the marriage on Friday night? To those familiar with the holy-erotic significance of Friday night in later Judaism, influenced by the kabbalah, this question should have an obvious answer: Of course! And in early-modern Ashkenazic Jewry, weddings on Friday were common. (One of Moses Isserles’s famous responsa stems from such a case, when the bargaining between the families forced postponement of the wedding ceremony until after sundown, causing a minor scandal. Isserles himself performed the wedding, and defended his action in his responsum.)

Why not consummate the marriage on Friday night? Because breaking the bride’s hymen would be inflicting a wound, a possible violation of Shabbat, under the category of “derivatives of shehitah [slaughter].” (A Baraita cited on page 3b indicates that in some localities it was actually the custom to separate the bride and groom in such a case.) But the counter-argument says: A melakhah she-eino mitkavvein – a work-action that is a secondary, unintended byproduct of one’s primary action – is not forbidden on Shabbat.

So we ask: Is the principle of melakhah she-eino mitkavvein (the secondary, unintended byproduct) of Mosaic origin? The very principle is the subject of dispute between Rabbi Judah (who prohibits it) and Rabbi Simeon (who permits it). Rabbi Judah (not the Nasi) and Rabbi Simeon were of the generation after Rabbi Akiba, in the middle of the second century. By all evidence, this point of law was not even theoretically raised prior to then. And it would fall under Maimonides’ principle, that issues debated by the rabbis on the basis of sevara were themselves of rabbinic origin.

But what of the 39 “principal categories of work” themselves – were they of Mosaic origin, or of rabbinic origin? And is it possible to maintain that even though the articulation of the 39 categories was rabbinic, they can still be regarded as de-oraita (of Torahitic status) for purpose of determining the law? To these issues we will turn in our next posting.

An Exploration in Talmudic Method

2009-06-25T06:25:00.000-07:00

I will undertake to illustrate, by discussing some topics from Chapter 2 of Tractate Kiddushin, some pervasive issues that have concerned me in grappling with the Talmud and rabbinic thought for as long as I have studied in this area.

It is commonplace in the Jewish law of marriage and divorce, as well as Jewish commercial law, that many transactions can be effected by an appointed agent, who acts on behalf of the principal party. Betrothal and divorce may be done directly by the man and woman involved, or either may be represented by an agent who acts on their behalf.

In Chapter 2 of Kiddushin, the rabbis seek to find a basis for the principle of “shelihut” (agency) in the written Torah. They adduce three possible sources:

(1) In the law of the Paschal sacrifice, the Torah stipulates that a company shall collaborate, obtaining a single lamb which is slaughtered, roasted and eaten by all members communally. But the act of slaughtering can only be performed by an individual. In such a case, the individual is therefore acting on behalf of all members of the group, and they are performing the “mitzvah” of slaughtering by implicitly designating him as their agent.

(2) In the law of Terumah, every farmer is responsible for designating a certain portion of his produce as a gift to the priests. But a landowner may (according to common practice, codified in rabbinic law) assign one of his servants or workers to separate the “terumah” from the crop. This servant or worker is then operating as an agent on behalf of the landowner. The rabbis deduce this provision from the text of the law: “You—even you (gam attem)—shall raise up from your produce a portion and give it to the priest.” The redundant words gam attem are interpreted to refer to doing it through an agent.

(3) In the law of divorce, the Torah uses the word ve-shillach in designating the act by which the husband “sends forth” his wife to be free, no longer married to him. It also uses the term ve-shillechah (“and he shall send her forth”), where the final “hei” with the aspirative mappik indicates grammatically the direct object of the verb (“her”). But one can also creatively read the word ve-shillecha (without the mappik), whereby the final “hei” would refer to a feminine subject (“and she shall send”). Though this is not the standard reading of the text, the rabbis nevertheless derive from this the principle that the woman, as well as the man, is entitled to act through appointing an agent to act on her behalf. (Indeed, taking the term ve-shillach meaning "he shall send forth [his wife to be free]" in the sense of "he shall send [an agent to perform the handing-over of the get on his behalf]" is another act of creative interpretation that would send a peshat reader of the text into a panic!)

The second and third arguments are representative of a kind of rabbinic argumentation that bothered me greatly when I was young, and stood in the way of my accepting rabbinic Judaism in its standard, received form as authoritative at that point in my development. How is one to know, in the case of a textual redundancy, what “additional” legal stipulation is to be taken as implied by the text? Maybe (in the case mentioned) gam attem is to be understood as referring to some other member of the household? Maybe it is emphatic, and meant to restrict who can perform the action (“you, yes you, nobody else”)? If there is a secret meaning not expressed directly by the words, how on earth can anyone presume to know what that meaning is? Many secret meanings are possible, not all of them in accord with rabbinic law!

And the third case was even more offensive to my critical young mind. Any word can be creatively read in any number of possible ways to suggest other meanings. But this is implicit in language itself. If such creative reading is permitted, nobody can ever speak or write unambiguously to rule out such readings if they are not intended. But then no text is determinate in its meaning. If God wanted to say X and not Y, then given this feature of language, it would be impossible for Him to do so, for some rabbi would take it in his head to read Y into the text anyway, and the divine intention would be frustrated.

The first argument is far more plausible. The law of the Paschal lamb clearly implies that several people will eat together, but only one will perform the crucial act of slaughtering on behalf of the group. Agency is built into the situation. There is indeed an additional step of generalization (called binyan av in rabbinic methodology) in inferring that if agency is allowed here, it is allowed in other situations as well. But this is not nearly so offensive to reason as the procedures in #2 and #3.

I will speak generally of “paralogic” as referring to arguments of Type #2 and Type #3, where the rabbis use procedures of inference that would not be allowed in normal logic.

In Heschel’s book Heavenly Torah, which I helped to translate, he distinguishes between the methods of Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva in interpreting the laws of the Torah. #1 is characteristic of Rabbi Ishmael’s method. #2-3 are characteristic of Rabbi Akiva’s.

This whole argument is related to the question of whether the law of agency is to be regarded as de-oraita (legislated by the written Torah, and therefore attributable to God directly) or de-rabbanan (legislated by the rabbis). All three arguments seek to prove that the law of agency is de-oraita, and is therefore a fundamental, unalterable category of Jewish law.

I must mention at this point a book by Jay Harris: How Do We Know This? The central argument of his book is that the rabbis of the Talmudic period used “paralogical” methods as part of the organic style of their thought, without it occurring to them that such interpretation of text was unnatural. The medieval commentators were more logical in their approach. Especially the peshat (plain-sense) commentators of the Torah, such as Abraham Ibn Ezra and Rashbam, would say in a case such as this that the rabbis made their own laws, but used paralogical arguments from the written Torah text as asmakhta (casual support). By doing so, they were performing a symbolic gesture, affirming that though the law evolves through addition, it is to be regarded as a single legal tradition, and the later developments have their roots in the ancient precedents.

If Jay Harris’s book had been available when I was younger, it might have spared me some of my agonizing and ambivalence toward the tradition.

I have another angle, however, to contribute to the issue just presented. There is a point of view from which such basic laws as that of “agency” can be regarded as de-oraita despite the spuriousness of the rabbinic “proofs” offered for them. Talmudic law knows of a category of laws derived from sevara (reason or common sense). The 19th-century Talmudist Zvi Chajes (in The Student's Guide Through the Talmud [Mebo Ha-Talmud, East and West Library, London, 1952], Chapter 4) argued that laws based on sevara were on a par with laws specified in the Written Torah. They are thus similar (though not identical) to those in the category halakha le-Moshe mi-Sinai. But whereas those in the category halakha le-Moshe mi-Sinai are often arbitrary (example: tefillin should be black in square boxes), those based on sevara are so common-sensical that the alternative is less reasonable by comparison. (Example: “the burden of proof falls on the claimant.”)

This is not to say that a sevara rule is so universal that no society is thinkable without it. In the case of the rule of agency, the Encyclopedia Judaica [article: "Agency"] maintains that Talmudic law was in advance of contemporary Roman law. Whether a particular transaction may be done through an agent is a specific, contingent fact of the legal custom of a given society. But any society, at any point in time, must have an accepted practice in such matters, whether X is customarily allowed or not. If effecting commercial transactions through agents was accepted practice by the 2nd century, it did not require a specific rabbinic enactment to bring it about. Once the conveniences of such a practice are established, it is hard to turn the clock back and disallow it. It then becomes, naturally, part of the accepted fabric of social practice and thus naturally gets ratified when statutory law is codified (as it was in the Mishnah).

But from an intellectual standpoint, rabbinic thought strove for unification. The Written Torah was considered to be the primary authoritative legal document. Wherever possible, accepted legal practices ought to be justified by “finding” their sources in the written text. (The Talmudic question “Minayin? From whence?” is the source of the title of Harris’s book How Do We Know This?”)

If we were to write a “Logic” of the Talmud, based on this argumentative practice, it would have to be along the following lines:

Whatever is written in the Torah, is law.
Whatever can be derived from the written Torah by strictly logical methods, is law.
Whatever can be derived from the written Torah by “paralogical” methods is not necessarily law. (How could it be? This method proves too much!) However, paralogical methods are a permitted move in order to justify a law that has independent authority on other grounds. (“Other grounds” can be: a Mishnaic statement, or sevara, or universal common practice.) Typically, rabbis will disagree on the derivation of a law from the Written Torah, while agreeing on the basic law itself (though the difference of derivation may be connected with differences on detail of understanding the basic law).

One more caveat: The rabbis did not tell us everything that was on their minds. We may be rightly suspicious of the presentation of a law, whose only support is a “paralogical” derivation. A good rule of thumb in such cases is: Accept the paralogical derivation as a decorative embellishment, and ask: What could have been the real reason for this law?

The rabbis were no fools. They knew what they were doing. They were well aware that the paralogical methods, pushed to their extremes, could be abused. But those methods gave them freedom, to make their best considered judgment of what was necessary and just, given the social reality of their time, and present that judgment, cloaked in the time-honored garb of interpretation of the Written Torah.

Old News: Netanyahu Speech

2009-06-18T03:45:00.000-07:00

This is old news (with the Iranian clerics in secret conclave in Qum to decide the fate of Iran, who's thinking any more about the Netanyahu speech endorsing a demilitarized Palestinian state while demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state? But for the sake of keeping the record complete, I'm transcribing here the discussion that we had on Facebook in response to the news earlier this week.

Lenny Levin thinks Netanyahu has found the center. Yasher koach!

David Stolow at 11:38 on 15 June
Netanyahu returns to what was his position when he was last PM and all the usual suspects have all the usual reactions. The difference between Bibi and Obama now is that Bibi figures he won't really have to do anything since the Pals will give him and out while Obama means it. As for the natural growth nonsense, suppose someone wanted to pass a zoning law in Maplewood that gave the legal right, ahead of any other buyer, to the children of Maplewood residents to buy or build in Maplewood?

Lenny Levin at 14:58 on 15 June
Obama's strategy is "behavioral modification" through "rewarding successive approximations." It is strategically correct for us to play ball positively -- let the other side put themselves in the wrong (as Abba Eban said, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity). As for the current difference between Obama and Netanyahu on the settlements, it is within the realm of the negotiable. The more important point was to red-line unbridled settlement expansion as unacceptable, and even Netanyahu's remarks concede this position.

David Stolow at 15:09 on 15 June
To agree with you I would have to believe that Bibi is actually prepared to negotiate and stop some settlement activity as a show of good faith. I fear that neither is the case. Olmert and Barak spent the last 4 years talking about how they are going to get out of settlements that even Israel has labeled "illegal." Instead they kept expanding settlements. Why Bib would try to do less is a mystery. In sum, Obama speaks the truth and Bibi, as they said on the campaign posters, lies.

Lori Lippitz at 15:24 on 15 June
It does seem that Bibi is motivated by visceral distrust of Arabs, and his base is driven by a similar mistrust, disgust, hatred or just cynicism. This is a tough guy for Obama to cut a deal with unless he gets the whole Congress to make a paradigm shift and make support of Israel more conditional. Az och un vey.

Lenny Levin at 10:31 on 16 June
In diplomacy, it matters more what words you say than what mental reservations you have about them. The words commit. Yes, and actions commit too. Meanwhile, events in Iran make the Israel-Palestinian impasse look like a tempest in a teapot.

David Stolow at 13:20 on 16 June
Maybe in the polite diplomacy of the French about 150 years ago. But in the Middle East words are merely a cover for what you are really thinking and doing. And what Israel is doing is to continue to expand the settlements while occassionally taking their foot off the oxygen hose of West Bank businesses provided that the owners act like "our kind of Arabs."

What Kind of God Do We Need to Guarantee Ethics?

2009-06-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

What Kind of God Do We Need to Guarantee Ethics?

I am a proponent of the proposition: “Our ethics is more firmly grounded if it sees itself as grounded in God’s will.”

I am also a proponent of the proposition: “Our belief in God is more rational if it takes into account our advances of the picture of reality provided by modern science.”

But there is a tension between these two viewpoints. The more our God-picture collapses into affirming the world-as-it-is, described by modern science, the less it stands as separate from that world, drawing us upward to the world-as-it-ought-to-be. Yet some accommodation of these two viewpoints is necessary for a modern rationalist theologian like myself.

I can illustrate these views by extreme examples. A literal adherence to Genesis, unencumbered by modern science, puts God squarely in charge. God created the world and God created us. We are obligated to do as God tells us (or—more elegantly—to see our destiny as congruous with the destiny of the world as God has intended it to be—see our early discussion of the Euthyphro-problem).

Fast-forward to Spinoza’s Ethics (1677). God equals Nature. God’s perfect governance of the world equals Nature’s law. But there is no “purpose” on the scale of the world, beyond its own perfection. To project human motives and purposes on God or on the world is an intellectual and moral error. It is up to us to find our happiness in the realistic acceptance of our nature the way it is, within the world’s nature the way it is, without confusing the two. For Spinoza, God has no “will,” and thus to see the ethics as following “God’s will” has only metaphorical-poetical significance, not philosophic truth.

One may posit a spectrum of God-concepts, with the Genesis-God at one end, and Spinoza’s God at the other. Points along this spectrum might be:

Biblical theism (taking Genesis literally, with a minimum of commentary)
Medieval classical theism (taking Genesis as true in its essentials, while accommodating it to Greek philosophical theism à la Plato or Aristotle)
Early modern Deism (God created the world, but left it to operate according to physical law à la Newton)
Panentheism (God created the world and is involved in the world, but God’s involvement is within the constraints of physical law)
Pantheism (God is the world)

The theologian speaks of God’s “transcendence” as the degree to which God is “other” than the world, “separate” from the world, “standing back” from the world.

God’s “immanence” is the degree to which God is involved with the world—an involvement whose maximum-point is being strictly identical with the world (as in Pantheism).

Despite what I have said about Spinoza’s denial of “purpose” in God, I would maintain that a certain kind of Pantheist might be able to argue that God can be the criterion of value for the world even while being identical with the world. Such an argument might maintain, for instance, that value is immanent in every thing, that (for instance) the excellence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be entirely intuited by direct experience of the music itself, and does not require any reference of this piece of music to any outside standard (such as a general theory of music or music appreciation). By the same token, the perfection of the world can be intuited from encounter with the world itself, and what we should do to be in harmony with that perfection would follow directly from that experience.

Having said that, the kind of ethical valuation with which I am more comfortable sees the perception of value in transcendent terms. In that vein, the value of any thing is indeed to be considered in its relation to what is outside itself. My own value is at least to a large extent contingent on my relations with other persons, with the world outside me, with the history of the groups to which I belong (the group of Jews, of Americans, of Western man, of humanity as a whole, of life as a whole, etc.). The world is the limiting-term of these transcendent relations in so far as we can determine them with scientific validity. The religious faith carries this transcendence a step farther and says that the world itself derives its value from its relation to God. But this assertion makes sense only insofar as we conceive God as transcendent—as transcending the world.

My student Paul Steiner raised the intriguing objection: Does not panentheism (a step before pantheism in this progression) constrain the power of God to give value to the world, by affirming that God is immanent and therefore invested in the world-as-it-is? An analogy would be a certain political executive who had a large financial or career investment with a certain private company. The ability of the executive to stand back and act objectively in matters concerning that company might be tainted by that investment. We call this “conflict of interest” on the human-political scale.

My brief answer to Paul is that precisely the dual transcendent-immanent character of panentheism saves it from this trap. Panentheism sees God as containing the world, being “in” the world but also “beyond” the world at the same time. This is expressed also in my metaphor of the artist, who expresses herself in the work-of-art, then stands back and appraises it, judging it to see if it adequately expressed her creative intention.

Similarly, the immanent God of panentheism is invested in the world, and the world is thus rightly perceived as “godly” or “invested with the divine.” But in the contrary motion, God-as-transcendent steps back and sees the world in comparison with the pure ideal (in the “divine mind,” as it were). In the tension between the two, God (and we) can chart a course whereby the real world strives to become closer to the ideal.

Further Discussion on Israel and the Middle East (from Facebook)

2009-06-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

Deborah Auerbach referred me to Edgar Bronfman’s posting on The Huffington Post: “A Real Two-State Solution” – not necessarily because she agreed with it wholly, but because she thought it contributed additional insights to the discussion.

I posted this with appreciation on my website. Deborah then offered her criticism, which led to another round of comments which I post here:

Deborah Auerbach at 19:32 on 10 June
We all want peace but as Mel Brooks said, Hitler also wants piece, a piece of Poland, a piece of Russia.... The settlements which you causually negate with a wave of the hand are what keeps the rockets far away from the fancy office suites of Tel Aviv.

Lenny Levin at 19:43 on 10 June
"If I am not for me, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?" The Zionist self-assertion that produced Israel was the necessary Step 1. Now we need to proceed to Step 2: to listen to the other side and engage in constructive dialogue until we achieve a consensus that affirms the legitimate needs and interests of all parties. It's great we have achieved what we have to this point. But the next steps have to be taken in concert, not alone.

Ephraim T. Jerchower at 06:42 on 11 June
The hostility directed at Jews by the other side of the equation will never be abated. It is the essence of being a Jew that inflames the other side. There is no constructive dialogue to be had with those who deny and dismiss one's existence. The dispute was never about borders.

Susan Zwillenberg at 10:12 on 11 June
Unfortunately, in order to have peace one has to talk to one's enemies and establish at least a minimum of trust.

Lenny Levin at 13:12 on 11 June
Ruling those who hate you does not work in the long run--whether they hate you for ruling them, or for who you are (or both). Occupation is a source of security in some respects and of insecurity in others. Disengagement with preservation of security will not be simple, but Rabin thought it was the best course, and I (who know a lot less about these matters than he did) trust his judgment in the matter.

Ephraim T. Jerchower at 00:15 on 12 June
The idea of "ruling those..." that you posit troubles me. I don't see that phenomenon as the case in Israel nor do I accept the notion of Israel as occupiers. Your position pre-supposes the existance of a people, to wit, Palestinians, that, somehow were displaced by the several wars started by their bretheren. In point of fact, there was no "Palestinian people" prior to the '67 war.
I take no issue with Rabin but the hatred of the existence of the Jew and the denial of the Jewish state remains the cornerstone ideology of those folks you believe Israel should disengage from. With the utmost respect, it's not about occupation or borders. It's about what its always been about: anihilation...of Jews.

Lenny Levin at 06:42 on 12 June
(1) As long as "denial of the Jewish state remains [their] cornerstone ideology," they shall have no state. Acceptance of Israel is sine qua non to their getting one (as Obama made clear in his speech). But "they" lumps together Hamas and the other factions-- not quite accurate.
(2) Not occupiers? If all the inhabitants of the West Bank were given the vote and representation in the Knesset, this would regularize their status -- but at the cost of making Israel truly a bi-national state, even more unstable than Czechoslovakia or the USSR, which could not survive the internal dissension of their competing nationalities-- not a good way to go. But as long as Israel maintains right of passage through the territories and other forms of control without enfranchising its inhabitants. this is occupation. You or I wouldn't want to live under the condition of West Bank "Palestinians/Arabs," subject to those controls. We should get out of this business as soon as we can safely do so.

A Friendly Debate over Settlements

2009-06-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

[A break from philosophical theology, to respond to current events.]

The Obama speech caught us all like deer in the headlights. Our instinctive reactions to it revealed where we stood on the whole large complex of issues of Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East.

My own reaction, reflected in my Facebook status, revealed me for who I have been for most of my life—the child of suburban Jewish liberals, with a Socialist-Zionist grandfather, who got my first intellectual imprint in maturity from Maurice Samuel, who in his Zionist books combined romantic attachment to the millennial Jewish dream of Zion with a social-democratic egalitarianism reflecting the ethos of A.D. Gordon and the middle-of-the-road kibbutzim. Maurice Samuel exposed the feudal-fascistic roots of the Arab anti-Zionist crusade as early as the 1920s and 1930s, while holding out hope that Israel would hold true to her social and internationalist ideals and come to a just, peaceable reconciliation with the mainstream of the Arab populace. I am sure he would have expressed sentiments similar to those in the Ha-aretz editorial endorsement of Obama’s speech that I posted approvingly on my Facebook page.

I also have a cousin who was raised in an American Conservadox family and settled in Gush Etzion with the first returnees after the Six Day War in the late 1960s. I know from my discussions with him the perceptions on the other side of this debate—that a two-state solution is an invitation to disaster, that Israeli rule of the Palestinians is as humane as can be expected given their underlying hostility and frequent outbreaks of violence, and that the best we can hope for is to consolidate our grip on all of our ancestral homeland and maintain stability through judicious, humane and consistent exercise of strength.

It is with these credentials that I address the issue, as focused by the Charles Krauthammer article that a Facebook friend posted on her wall.

I will respond to two assertions in the Krauthammer article:

(1) That Obama makes a pretense of “not dictating” to any outside nations—except Israel.

(2) That the United States call to Israel to freeze settlements is unjust, and means “strangling [them] to death.” (Really? Then Manhattan must be strangling to death, and not allowing babies to be born in it, because it is incapable of territorial expansion due to certain facts of geography!)

The first assertion is defensible only if Krauthammer excludes from “dicatating” the remarks that Obama made addressed to the Palestinians: that “it is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus”; that “Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist. He would also have to exclude Obama’s remarks directed at Ahmadinejab: that “denying [the Holocaust] is baseless, ignorant, and hateful; threatening Israel with destruction—or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews—is deeply wrong…while preventing…peace.”

So a more balanced assessment would be: Obama calls on Palestinians to end rocket-shooting, bus-bombing, and violence generally, and he calls on Israel to freeze settlements. Still, one is entitled to ask: what do these two have in common?

It depends on one’s larger perspective and assumptions. We have to factor in the fact that the growth of the settlements on the West Bank has grown steadily over four decades, from zero in 1967 to 275,000 settlers by recent count, and has doubled since the Oslo accords—in number of settlements, as well as population. We recall that throughout the growth of the Yishuv, land-settlement was correctly considered a crucial part of staking claims to territory; that from 1933 to 1948 the “tower-and-wall” method was used dramatically and effectively to expand the Jewish area of Palestine from the meager strips that one sees in the 1936 Peel Commission partition recommendation to the “green line” that was fixed in the Armistice of 1949. The viability of Israel today is possible because of the effectiveness of that strategy in the past.

The settlers of today rightly see a continuity of historical pattern between their actions and those of the Zionists of the 1930s—only the context has changed dramatically. If one extends the pattern of proliferation-by-settlement beyond the three blocs discussed in Camp David and Taba, one strikes at the territorial integrity—such as it is—of a projected Palestinian state, whether unwittingly or by design. Even a minor adjustment—addition of a neighborhood or a street to an existing settlement—revises the extent of current Jewish settlement, and therefore has bearing on where a borderline might be drawn in final-status negotiations, if these were ever to take place.

Picture two adjoining houses—the Bernsteins and the Abduls living side-by-side. The Abdul teenager shoots a rocket onto the Bernsteins’ front lawn. Mr. Bernstein builds an addition to his house, extending over the boundary into the Abduls’ side yard, to accommodate a nursery for the Bernsteins’ newborn child. The one action is violent, the other is not. Yet they have something in common. Each is a boundary-violation, and (given a context analogous to the current Israeli-Palestinian state of relations) may correctly be perceived by the other as an act of aggression.

The majority of Israelis do not build or live in settlements. And the majority of Palestinians do not shoot rockets or blow up buses or commit other acts of violence against Israelis. In the best of times, over 50% of Israelis desire peace with Palestinians and are willing to entertain a 2-state solution, and over 50% of Palestinians reciprocate. When things fall apart, these numbers must be revised downward on both sides. Extremists in each camp know how to push the buttons of those in the opposite camp, to be sure that things fall apart and that peace is never realized. We only have to recall the actions of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir to remind us that the button-pushers are not exclusively to be found on the Palestinian side.

The uncomfortable fact that those of us on the Jewish side often do not wish to realize is that the incessant growth of settlements, encroaching into the heartland of the West Bank, is pushing the buttons of the moderate Palestinians, eroding their belief in our good faith and their will to negotiate a genuine peace.

Mr. Obama is right to call (in my view, even-handedly) for a moratorium on button-pushing on both sides, in the hope of advancing negotiations to the point where agreement is possible. Though rocket-launching and settlement-expansion are not morally equivalent in general, they serve similar functions in this diplomatic context, in impeding the chances of progress toward rapprochement.

Mishnah Bava Metzia begins: “If two persons are holding onto a garment, each one saying ‘it is all mine,’ they must divide it.” Not necessarily equally —but in proportion to the strength and circumstances of each one’s claim, as determined by the court.

The land in the West Bank is similarly on the table for negotiation, for a final settlement of the “partition” that was proposed throughout the history of the Yishuv and finally effected in its first take in the events of 1947–49. The process is not complete. Therefore, if one believes in principle in a 2-state solution based on partition, the land is not (right now) ours to do with what we want. It is, if you will, in escrow, awaiting the outcome of judicial process. It is therefore legitimate to call on us to refrain from taking more of the disputed land, to demonstrate our good faith as a condition of negotiations.

Granted, negotiations cannot proceed unless the other side shows good faith, too, by refraining from acts of violence and provocation. It is not in our power to accomplish that. We can only accomplish what is in our own power.

Of course, all this becomes irrelevant if (like my cousin in Gush Etzion) one does not believe in a 2-state solution to begin with; or if one is positive in advance that the other side will never control their provocateurs enough to demonstrate good faith (or are purposely using their provocateurs to sabotage the process at every step). This is possible. But those who reject the Obama initiative for these reasons should be forthright in stating their principles. Protestation of unfairness or unreasonableness is insufficient ground for rejecting Obama’s request.

In peace to my Jewish brethren (and to all readers—Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, atheists, etc.),

Lenny Levin

Agenda Going Forward

2009-06-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

I haven’t a lot of time to post now (not enough to do a complex idea justice) but will anyway outline the course of thinking that I plan to pursue in greater detail in the coming blog-posts:

(1) Correlation of divine will and human will

We have already quoted a classic dictum from Ethics of the Fathers: “Do God’s will as if it were your will.” I believe this to be the central meta-ethical idea characteristic of the majority of the mainstream of the Jewish tradition. (The difference between meta-ethics and ethics can be summarized: “Ethics” deals with “what is good (concretely)?” Meta-ethics deals with “what makes the ‘good’ good? -- What determines the good?” The Euthyphro problem (God <—?—>good) is a meta-ethical problem. We need to explore: What are the deeper implications of this idea?

(2) The nature of “will” and “purposive action”

By speaking of “God’s will” (as in the creation of the universe) or “human will” (as in our performing an ordinary action freely), we are speaking of a particular modality of action. What is the nature of this modality?

(3) “Purposive action” compared with “physical causality” and “random event”

I maintain that there are three kinds of action affirmed in our current basic scientific model of the universe and/or in everyday life. The scientific model recognizes absolute causality (as when one billiard ball bounces off another as described in Newtonian mechanics) and random events (as when a particular radium atom emits an alpha-particle at a particular time). It does not recognize “purposive action” as I understand it. Is “purposive action” then reducible to a combination of absolute causality and random events? Or does a third modality of action really exist?

(4) The correlation of two problems: divine creation of the world, and human free will

I will further maintain that it makes sense to affirm “purposive action” in the universe only if we affirm it on two levels: that the universe is purposive (i.e., God created/creates the world) and that the self is purposive (i.e., we act by free will).

(5) Back to ethics

This leads back to a reaffirmation of my resolution of the Euthyphro dilemma, based on a contemporary cosmological perspective: The “good” can be identified with “God’s will” as expressed through the creation of the universe, if and only if we maintain the existence of “purposive action” on the cosmic and individual level. If we view the cosmos as purposive, then we ought to see our own lives as framed by that cosmic purpose, and act for the advancement of all existence and all life, as the expression of God’s cosmic creative will.

Further Discussion

2009-05-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

Lee Price at 09:11 on 27 May
The situations of Cain and Abraham are different in many respects, but I see one major similarity. Abraham is attached to his son in a way which is by definition "selfish." That is to say, he loves his son particularly and specifically; it is a strong feeling emanating from Abraham's individuality, from his "self." (Contrast this with the respect he showed the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah because they were human.) Cain hates his brother, also a strong feeling emanating from the individual on a particular and specific basis. I am suggesting that the move away from these strong "self"-ish feelings is the same in both cases: would light up the same neurons in the same parts of the brain. Then one is freer to see either God's will and/or the good more clearly.

Lenny Levin at 09:30 on 27 May
Now we are getting to the bottom of the issue! The conflict you are describing is the conflict between one's selfish interest and what one perceives as one's moral obligation. Conscience commands Abraham to overcome his love for his son; conscience similarly commands Cain to overcome his hatred for his brother.

But the distinction "autonomous/heteronomous" cuts differently: Is the basis of the moral command itself in the human being's own moral sense (whether reason or empathy), or in a divine command that contradicts the human-based moral sense? In this respect, the divine command that Abraham must contend with is heteronomous, whereas the call of conscience (that he is his brother's keeper, despite his disclaimer) -- the basis for which God holds him responsible -- is the universal innate moral sense that is autonomous.

Lenny Levin at 09:35 on 27 May
I will also dissociate WTC 9/11 from the other cases (qualifying my previous comment). Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atta were false prophets, because they mistakenly projected their hatred for the United States onto God, thus generating a false commandment to kill the infidels. We must go deeper into religious-ethical psychology whether to classify the command "kill the infidel" as autonomous (because it reflects the human hatred for the enemy) or heteronomous (because it contradicts the universal rational ethical dictate not to murder). My previous comment assumes the latter position, but I will leave the matter on the table for now.

Comments on the Last Post (from Facebook)

2009-05-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

I am sharing here a discussion of my last post that occurred on Facebook:

Susan Elkodsi at 20:18 on 24 May
I like your approach. But WWMS? What would Maimonides say?

Lenny Levin at 10:06 on 25 May
Maimonides never resolved the tension between a perfect God (I:50-60, III:16) and an imperfect world (III, 8-12). Modern process theology, affirming the fact-map of modern physics and the spirit of the Bible, avoids the perfection of "Being" in favor of the messiness of "becoming." But the attempt to integrate the fact-assertions of science with the value-assertions of the Bible is very Maimonidean.

Mel Scult at 10:11 on 25 May
Len is a scholar, translator, writer thinker and a very good person. Because his deeds match his wisdom , his wisdom will endure. [ Mel Scult, speaking for the universe]

Lenny Levin at 10:26 on 25 May
Aw, shucks! Enough flattery. But does the argument hold water?

Lee Price at 14:57 on 25 May
From your blog:“'Autonomous' refers to the view that human beings can perceive the good through their own reason, precisely because the good is an independent quality."
I would want to pause right there to question whether reason is the best instrument for perceiving the good.

Lenny Levin at 15:57 on 25 May
Right-brain, left-brain, empathy -- as long as it is determined from the human side, these all count as "autonomous." Philosophers stress reason, but we can include these other factors as well. As opposed to: "Abraham conquered his fatherly love in order to serve You (at the Akeda)" which would be the extreme of heteronomy.

Susan Elkodsi at 08:29 on 25 May
So can I quote that in my (late) paper? It seems to me that Halevi did a better job of synthesizing faith and reason. Good may be perceived through reason, but it is also often a leap of faith that we behave the way we do. (IMHO)

Lee Price at 20:27 on 25 May
How does one conquer a fatherly love, especially "in order to serve" God? Seems to me before the hand reaches the knife in any way Jewish tradition would accept, the heteronomous must become equivalent to the autonomous. The very same movement of the soul, if you will, would apply to Cain were he actually to overcome sin. He too would have to conquer a strong emotion. Wherever the energy to make the change is perceived to emanate from (God outside, the better person within) I'm not sure there's an essntial difference.

Lenny Levin at 09:45 on 26 May
"The heteronomous must become equivalent to the autonomous." Hmm. You realize this is all based on the notion expressed in Pirkei Avot 2:4 "Make His will your will...Annul your will in favor of His will..."—ultimately, adopt God's will as your will. So God's will does become your will. But it becomes your will because you have accepted God's will, not because your innate criterion of the good led you to adopt that specific course of action or principle on its own merits. The example of the Akeda—as Kierkegaard correctly picked up—is supposed to shock us into the realization of how contradictory the heteronomous and autonomous viewpoints can actually be in practice. The analogue today is the WTC attack on 9/11. The case of Cain is fundamentally different, because even as his selfish will moves him to kill Abel, his own conscience (expressing true autonomous peception of the good) knows that to kill Abel would be wrong.

What Does the Bible Say?

2009-05-25T03:34:00.000-07:00

God <—?—> good

Does God dictate the good? Or does God instruct us in the good because it is good? Which is the mainstream view of the Bible on this question we have been pursuing?

In all frankness, both views are present in the Bible. Precisely because the writers and editors of the Bible were not philosophers, and did not leave anything out of their compendium, they did not see as clearly as a philosopher would to the core of this question or present a clearly unified view on it. But they did have strong intuitions on it, which they expressed through the literary means at their disposal—narrative, poetry, and exhortation. These intuitions cut in both directions, as we have seen. Had they been philosophically aware, they might have declared the problem to be an “antinomy”—a dilemma between two opposing views, in which equally cogent arguments can be brought for each side.

The terms “autonomous” and “heteronomous” were introduced into this discussion by the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, and also pervade the discussion of Isaac Heinemann in The Reasons for the Commandments to which I have already referred. “Autonomous” refers to the view that human beings can perceive the good through their own reason, precisely because the good is an independent quality. “Heteronomous” refers to the view that we need to rely on an external authority—such as God, a parent, or a political ruler—to tell us what is good.

Some people have a negative stereotype of the Bible that it is thoroughly heteronomous in its presentation of the good and why we should obey it. Following Heinemann, we shall here portray Jewish thought on the subject—from the Bible through the rabbis and the medieval and modern thinkers—as a dialectic of the autonomous and heteronomous. We shall go further and ask, what different forms did this dialectic take through the ages, and what options does this history offer us for our own understanding of the problem?

We review the examples we have already cited. Abraham challenging God before Sodom “Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?” was clearly expressing the autonomous perspective. God, warning Cain “Sin crouches at the door, its urge is toward you but you may master it,” was encouraging Cain to act on his autonomous moral insight, without having to be told specifically “Do not murder.” But God commanding Adam and Eve “Do not eat of it,” and demanding that Abraham present Isaac as a sacrifice, was taking the heteronomous stance, laying down commands without justifying them by reasons.

The early 20th century Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen detected a difference in tone in the two presentations of the Ten Commandments — in Exodus Chapters 19–20 and 24, and in Deuteronomy Chapters 4–5. In Exodus, God stuns the people with the impressive spectacle of a desert thunderstorm; they are overwhelmed by God’s show of power and accept without reservation anything God will say to them. But in Deuteronomy, Moses stresses the rational aspect of the commandments: “What nation has such righteous laws and judgments as all this Torah that I give you today?” The nations, on hearing it, will say, “Surely this is a wise and understanding nation!”

Indeed, at least one modern Orthodox Jewish thinker has asserted that from a traditional Jewish point of view, even the ethical dictates of the Torah should be accepted in a spirit of passive obedience, as if they were hukkim (divine dictates without reasons). This is heteronomy with a vengeance. If this were Judaism, it would not be a teaching that I could accept. I also maintain (with Heinemann) that this betrays the spirit of the tradition itself, which is far more complex and nuanced in its approach.

The World As God’s Creative Project

The editor of the Biblical narrative in Genesis and Exodus presents us with a view that is neither precisely autonomous nor heteronomous in its implications. The term “theonomous” which David Novak has proposed is useful in indicating this dialectical synthesis, but we must go further. An “ethic of creation” (a term Lawrence Troster proposes) is here combined with the familiar “ethic of revelation.”

The historical narrative is framed by the creation narrative of the opening chapters. God creates. God declares in various stages of creation, “Let there be…” and it was so. And at each stage God examines the result, “and it was good.”

What means “and God saw that it was good”? Does it mean God declared it to be good, and thus legislated it to be good? Or did God, knowing what “good” was, judge that this product conformed to the outside criterion of good? If we adopt either of these views, we are back at our original problem. But I do not think either is satisfactory, and wish to propose a third view.

God (as portrayed in Genesis—admittedly anthropomorphically) is an artist. God has a creative intention, but cannot express it except through the act of creation itself. When an artist creates, s/he does not know in advance what will eventuate, but feels intuitively an impulse to arrive at a certain X. The artist produces something, then stands back and appraises it. Does the product (still half-formed) measure up to the inarticulate creative intention? Sometimes yes, sometimes not at all, and most often yes in part, but still needs improvement.

“God saw that it was good” expresses: God judged, yes, this fulfills my creative intention, at least up to this point. “God saw that it was very good” expresses: Now I have it! Now it is a complete and adequate expression of what I intended, or nearly so—needs just a crowning touch (maybe a Sabbath, to put the icing on the cake).

What does this imply in terms of human knowledge of the good? We do not need God to tell us in words “Do this, don’t do that”—or do we? It depends how good we are at intuiting God’s intention from experiencing God’s work. God apparently wanted humanity to read His mind, so He left them alone without explicit instructions for ten generations. The result was a disaster. People were clueless. They didn’t know which way to turn, and so they turned on each other. God gave in to despair for the first and last time, and wiped the slate clean, to start over. After the Flood, He gave Noah’s family a basic operating guide to living decently in the world. When that wasn’t enough, He gave the Israelites, fourteen generations later, more detailed instructions at Sinai.

But the instructions were not constitutive of the good. The good is constituted by God’s creative act. It is implicit in the world God made. The explicit instructions are a commentary on creation, to help those of us who cannot “get it” otherwise.

God gave us reason, to figure out the meaning of creation by contemplating it. God also (to anticipate Saadia Gaon’s view) gave us revelation, to inform us of the answers in case we could not figure them out for ourselves. Ultimately, the truths arrived at by reason and those offered by revelation should be in agreement. That would be the mature Jewish view, expressed by the leading Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides.

What, then, is good? Good is a dynamic function of the world created by God. Good can be intuited from contemplating the world itself. But the most profound understanding of the good comes from viewing the world as the ongoing expression of God’s will. Embracing the good is thus guided by reason, but it aims at compliance with God’s will as apprehended by reason (and hopefully confirmed by the purported account of God’s revelation of God’s will).

From this point of view, the dilemma of the Euthyphro (is good perceived by reason? Or is it compliance with God’s will?) is overcome in mature Jewish thought.

Euthyphro in Genesis? (2)

2009-05-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

Merrymarymarry’s comments are to the point – thank you!

We can discern the two approaches to our basic question already in the first few chapters of Genesis. God’s first command to Adam and Eve appears arbitrary – do it because I say so! (God determines the good.) But Cain’s sin was not against statutory law, but against moral common sense: he was expected to know murder was wrong without being explicitly told. (The good is independently defined.) This distinction would later be elaborated by the rabbis into the difference between hukkim (arbitrary laws) and mishpatim (laws expressing the dictates of reason). The history of these two approaches in later Jewish thought is elaborated by Isaac Heinemann in The Reasons for the Commandments.

Merrymarymarry touches on another possibility—to transcend this dichotomy and merge God (or God’s dictates) and the good into one. I agree that this is the highest wisdom that we hopefully get to in the end. But I think it’s important to go through all the intermediate steps of thought that tilt toward one or the other side, to appreciate all the nuances of truth that each has to offer.

Take today’s debates on public policy — whether on abortion, global politics, or the place of religion in public life. The evangelicals hold by Euthyphro’s position, that the Word of God ought to determine what we do. The secular liberals hold that invoking God has no place in these debates, that we should decide what is good on the basis of reason alone.

Each of these contemporary positions has its roots in recent history, especially the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment and its aftermath. The Enlightenment had its roots in the religious wars from the Reformation through the Thirty Years’ War (ending in 1648). In those wars, oceans of blood were shed over who had the right version or interpretation of God’s word. Progressive anti-clerical thinkers such as Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire and Diderot drew the moral that it is all too easy to invent spurious claims of God’s word to support one’s own interested position. Only objective reason could be trusted as a guide in human affairs.

But using reason as a guide was far more complicated in practice than in theory. The French Revolution started in a promising fashion but culminated in the Terror of 1793. The Russian Revolution similarly promised to implement reason in human affairs, but it ended up in the Gulag of Stalinism. Each of these produced a religious reaction, among those who drew the moral that religion was a better guide to right living than human reason on its own.

I just want to add one more wrinkle at this point: Does “determining the good by reason” mean the same thing if one considers the moral problem in purely human terms, or in a world governed by God? How do we justify our moral logic if we assume that we are legislating morals just for humanity, in a godless universe? Is the equation appreciably changed if we assume, instead of a godless universe, a universe guided by divine purpose?

In my next post, I will address how the question “God —? — good” was addressed in Biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish thought.

Euthyphro in Genesis — Sodom or the Akedah?

2009-05-20T03:11:00.000-07:00

God <–?–> good

Is there philosophy in the Bible? A parallel between a Platonic dialogue and two Biblical stories will shed light on this question.

Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro is named for a brash young man who thinks he has all the answers, and that the gods agree with him. He has decided to prosecute his father for murder. His father had shackled a laborer who in a drunken rage had slit a domestic’s throat; while he went to inquire what to do with him, the laborer died in the shackles. The son, ignoring the extenuating circumstances—as well as the honor he owes his father—is bringing murder charges against his father. His kin tell him that to prosecute his father in this case (maybe in any case) is unholy. How little do they know about what is holy, Euthyphro protests!

Socrates asks him: What, then, is holy? Euthyphro answers: The holy is what the gods desire. Socrates and Euthyphro go on to debate the merits of two opposing positions: (1) X is holy because the gods desire it, or (2) The gods desire X because it is holy in and of itself. Socrates’ view prevails: the good or holy is an independent variable, independent of the desire of the gods, and the gods love it because it is good or holy.

Two stories of Genesis seem to present the two sides of the argument of the Euthyphro. In the story of Abraham arguing before God about the fate of Sodom and Gommorah, Abraham proposes that God should spare the cities if there are fifty—or forty-five, forty, thirty…even ten righteous in the city. “Shall the judge of the earth not do justice?” Yet a few chapters later, God commands Abraham: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to Mount Moriah and offer him as a sacrifice on one of the hills that I shall show you.”

In the first case, Abraham points out the good to God and says, “See, that is the good! You, God, are bound by it!” In the second case, God says to Abraham: “I’ll show you what’s good—it’s whatever I ask of you!”

In comparing Plato and Genesis, we notice similarities and differences. Each is concerned about God, the good, and the relation between them. What is God? What is the good? Which drives which?

But there is a difference in the method of treatment. The conceptual tool-kit of Plato’s Euthyphro is predominantly left-brain: definitions, abstractions, deductions, long trains of arguments striving for consistency. The conceptual tool-kit of the Genesis stories (and of the Bible generally) is predominantly right-brain: narrative (in which the universal ideas are implicit), poetry, illuminations of insight in which the logical preparation (if any) remains hidden from view.

There is also a difference in the final stated (or implied) position. In Euthyphro (and in philosophy generally), reason is the arbiter: we know the good from reason, and even a purported “word of God” that tells us differently is regarded with suspicion. In the Bible, obedience to the “word of God” predominates. Yet there are important passages (such as Abraham’s colloquy with God before Sodom) where the human ability to perceive the good independently of God’s word is given significant weight.

Are the Bible and philosophy in conflict, or complementary? As a great deal of Western thought springs from the extended conversation between these two, a lot hinges on how we perceive the answer to this question.

(To be continued)

Inaugurating "Reblen: The Blog"

2009-05-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

As I embark on the next chapter of my life devoted to pursuit and sharing of wisdom, I invite my teachers, friends, and students ("from all my teachers I have gained insight!") to join me in this forum for that purpose.

I will be presenting ideas that I have developed in my teaching for the past decade, and some for much longer than that, along with relatively new ideas that have just come to me. In all these cases, I welcome friendly, constructive criticism. If I have overlooked important learning or other insights (ranging from complementary to challenging), by all means let me know — I want to learn from you too!

There will be references along the way to books that I have published or translated, to books that I am currently working on, and to books that may grow out of the postings and discussions on these blogs. If you wish to serve as a test-reader of my books-in-progress, let me know by e-mail and I will communicate with you to facilitate that.

I hope to recreate in this blog the ambience that I have strived to create in my classroom over the years: brave searching for broad vision, grappling with the big ideas, based on serious learning and critical thinking. All viewpoints are welcome. Mutual respect is a basic given. My viewpoint is my own; I welcome yours!

Ben Bag-bag said: "Turn it and turn it over, for everything is in it. Study it; grow old and grey in it, for you will find no better resource than it!" I have universalized the "it" in his statement to refer to the whole Western tradition of learning — religious and philosophical (and let's include the literary and artistic tradition as well).

In that spirit, let us begin once more to learn!