Judaism

A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation

Lenn E. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138193352
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317273950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Judaism, as a religion and a way of life, has guided millions of lives and profoundly influenced its younger sisters, Christianity and Islam, as well as contributing major themes and norms to the liberal and humanistic traditions of the West. Not all Jews are religious, and not all of Judaism is philosophical; but at its core Judaism rests on a complex of values and ideas that address the abiding concerns of philosophy and perennial questions about the meaning and purpose of life, the nature of the universe, the roots and fruits of human responsibility, the character of justice, the worth of nature, and the dignity of persons. Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation examines some of the central questions that such ideas raise, drawing on the ancient and more recent sources of Jewish thought, as viewed from a contemporary philosophical standpoint. This book is an ideal introduction for students of religion and philosophy who want to gain an understanding of the key themes and values of Judaism.

1
Biblical Logic

Some find philosophy in a koan or a mandala. Others have trouble recognizing it out of uniform, without a syllogistic suit on, or the numbered garb of the analytic exercise yard. But even Aristotle rarely wore his syllogistic dress whites. And Plato hardly found it necessary to number the arguments tested by his Socrates in the theater of the mind—or to bar myth from the halls of reason. Still, it’s widely supposed that scripture simply announces its dicta and imposes its beliefs and practices. Rhyme is scant in the Torah, and reason must be too: To capture the hearts of the loyal and credulous, piety must bypass their heads, lest its pronouncements and prescriptions fall to critique, being beyond reason’s reach, or beneath its notice.

Many who love the Torah join hands with those who loathe it, fearing to lower religion into the realm of thought, even as their critics grow vertiginous at the notion that some ideas might nest higher than their feet can carry them. Yet Pascal’s dichotomy of head and heart is foreign to the Torah. Biblically, as Yoram Hazony and others have stressed, heart (lev) means mind.¹ Maimonides makes the same point, although he finds other biblical senses for heart as well, including those of ‘will’ and ‘intent.’² For the mind, biblically, is not the desiccated, calculative organ it’s sometimes cracked up to be. Biblical hearts embody sensibility—feeling as well as understanding; skill, insight, and care as well as planning and intent. The Torah does not ask us to crimp our minds but to open our hearts (Deuteronomy 10:16), appealing to moral and aesthetic values, joyous study and studious joy in nature, alongside sober recourse to historical memory. It does not wall off thought from value.

Scripture becomes estranged from philosophy when one imagines faith divorced from argument as the mainstay of religion.³ Faith will always need grounds and guidance. Anyone who says “trust me” should expect to hear some questions about just why and how—and how far. Even where trust is solid, inquiring minds will want to know what is asked and expected of them. Faith is never self-warranting, or self-defined. Belief is a species of trust—as the Hebrew root a-m-n makes clear. Trust presumes a relationship; it can’t establish one.

The life of the Torah is a case in point, confirming as it is lived the Torah’s value and veracity. In this way, that life is like the life of inquiry to which any scientist is committed. The metaphysical assumptions critical to scientific works are, like religious claims, not self-validating. The ongoing fruitfulness of inquiry is what, increasingly, confirms those assumptions. The moral, spiritual, and intellectual life of the religiously committed has a similar confirming effect. Ritual, music, and poetry all play their part here, along with study and practice, fostering intellectual insight as well as moral growth and strengthening commitment. “Masses and holy water,” Pascal confesses, do not magically induce faith. Still, he added, they do prepare the ground for it. Evidence, experience, reasoning, and practice remain essential to shape and guide a relationship with God. These are sea anchors; none is above critique—not even what we may take for reason, since so varied a cast of impostors can claim that title. Critique is always relevant. But critique misses its calling when bias makes it captious.

In a Judaic context, ancient ideas of faith can be somewhat misleading. Framed in personal and cognitive terms they may stress the affective but underrate the practical dimensions of commitment and perhaps miss the communal bonds and intergenerational links that give continuity to Israel’s experience as a people. Covenant is far more prominent than dogma in Jewish thinking about God’s relationship with Israel and the world. Faith itself, emunah, against that backdrop is viewed as trust in God’s words and acts, heed of His counsel, and acceptance of His commands. It does plead for exclusivity—no other gods. But the relationship of trust becomes cognitive only over time. Biblically, it is grounded in grace and love, as symbolized in the imagery of parent and child, or of lovers and spouses, fusing the symbols of kinship and consent.⁴ Small wonder that the lover of the Song of Songs calls his beloved my sister bride (4:9, 10, 12; 5:1; cf. 5:2). The imagery is not quite so shocking if one relaxes one’s guard against reading that text as an allegory of God’s romance with Israel.

Often brought under the canopy of metaphors of marriage, Israel’s covenant idea projects bonds of love and reads history itself as the story of a romance—courtship, marriage, estrangement, bereavement, reconciliation, and recovery—reflecting Israel’s experience seeking, encountering, losing, and living with God. The covenant that binds Israel together as a people, a bond of mutual responsibility, as it is traditionally put (B. Shevuot 39a), is both familial and contractual, as Alan Mittleman has put it.⁵ It reflects a common history and destiny, shared loyalty and ideals—and a growing, maturing, waxing and waning awakening to God and awareness of God’s expectations. The commitment is both personal and communal, practical and emotional—and cognitive: of course, informed by experience.

Discovery

Value gives sinew to any act of understanding. And an appeal to value sets the spring of any argument. Patterns are made out by the senses and our sensibilities to structure in reasoning, or in music. But whether we confront the rhythms and symmetries of natural or artistic form or the seeming simplicity of a rational or sensuous intuition, exploration and examination hold the keys to truth. Argument is the test of truth, but caring fuels the search for it. Conversation is the natural home of argument. Yet every thinker knows that dialogue goes on not just among speakers and listeners but in the never wholly private chambers of the mind, where the elements of thought are weighed and tested to see what makes them elemental. Philosophy is born when conversations seek credibility, trying thought against thought not just for fit to some familiar pattern but for worth and candor.

Biblically, philosophy takes many forms. There are the wise, if sometimes veiled, apothegms of Proverbs, the existential probings of Ecclesiastes, the poetic dramas of Job and Jonah,⁶ the dream sequences of the Song of Songs. Many biblical arguments are enthymemes, for just the reasons Aristotle calls out: Inferences are left to those addressed. Theses, premises, questions addressed may remain unstated. Indirection is the high road to conviction, for the Socratic reason that we take ownership of truths we’ve seen for ourselves. Explicitness too often courts a captious comeback rather than reflection.

The story of Joseph moots a providential theme when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers:

“I am Joseph. Does my father yet live?” His brothers could not answer, stunned at facing him. Joseph said to his brothers, “Come here to me—please.” They approached, and he said, “I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Do not grieve or blame yourselves for selling me into this place. It was to save lives that God sent me here before you.”

(Genesis 45:3–5)

Joseph embeds a providential thesis in the excuse he opens to his brothers: There was a higher plan behind their now regretted treachery; God’s plan was to save Egyptian lives—and, as readers know, God had a larger plan for Israel. Thus, Joseph’s glance into the future: “God sent me ahead of you to ensure that you have survivors on earth and to save your lives for a marvelous deliverance” (45:7). But the foreshadowing of the Exodus is masked by the limits of Joseph’s prophetic gift, and his appeal to providence is sheathed in referential opacity. Only hindsight will know of it.⁷

Compare Mordecai’s appeal to Esther, at another fraught moment. Esther has informed him of the mortal risk she faces should she approach the king unbidden. Mordecai steels himself in trust of providence, but his reply is severe in tone:

“Do not fancy yourself in the palace surviving every Jew. If you keep silent now, relief and rescue for the Jews will arise elsewhere, but you and your father’s house will perish—And who knows if it was for a time like this that you reached royal rank.”

(Esther 4:13–14)

Again a figure in the drama voices thoughts of providence. And, despite Mordecai’s bravado, his trusting words are hedged. He cannot know if Esther’s presence in the palace was indeed part of God’s plan, and he has not yet seen his lovely ward tested at so grave a crisis. She herself does not yet know what she will do. She does not echo Mordecai’s bluff assurance that somehow God will act but makes her choice not knowing if she will be God’s instrument or just another victim in the maw of tyranny. She chooses in uncertainty, her character forming as she chooses. God’s plan here is more a casting call than a script, His active presence, unrevealed. The future remains open, preserving the liberty that renders Esther’s choice heroic as she composes her reply to Mordecai: The Jews of Shushan must fast with her. She will intercede for her people—and if I die, I die (4:16).

Mordecai too faced momentous choices. He needed to think through his options and shoulder their risks. Both he and Esther made choices of lasting impact on Israel’s survival, but also on themselves. Their situation, made prominent by its outcome, is a paradigm of many choices, most of them too close, familiar, or routine to dominate awareness, let alone to count as history. Yet every action leaves its mark. God set the stage, as Mordecai suggests when he sees an opportunity in the midst of danger. But Esther and Mordecai are not marionettes. They own their actions. For God created subjects, real beings: Creation imparts more than bare existence—as if anything had bare existence with no character or powers of its own.

The warp of history is given, but the weft is woven by our choices—not only the rare threads lit up by torchlight or full sun but those that seem more drably colored. Unlike the threads spun and cut by Hesiod’s fates, these fibers are not untouched by human hands. Hence the quiet irony in Esther’s Scroll: Haman’s lots fell as they would, but history reversed his plans, not simply by God’s judgment but by Esther’s choice. Plato, similarly, recasting an old myth, gives choice its say, putting into the mouth of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity, a speech at odds with fatalism:

No divinity shall cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own deity. Let him to whom falls the first lot first select a life to which he must cleave. But virtue has no master over her, and each shall have more or less of her as he honors or despites her. The blame is his who chooses. God is blameless.

(Republic X 617e)

Each day observant Jews bless God multiple times. They do so prominently in the ‘Amidah, the Standing Prayer, called the Prayer Talmudically, and known as the Shemoneh Esreh or Eighteen, for its original eighteen blessings. In the first of these, called Avot, the Forefathers, the worshiper blesses God for His active role in Israel’s history, as God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—

great, mighty, and awesome, supernal God, who requites acts of kindness, sovereign Creator of all, who recalls the good done by of our ancestors and lovingly brings a redeemer to their children’s children, for His name’s sake—O helping, saving, shielding King, blessed be Thou, O Lord, Shield of Abraham!

It’s a long reach from the stories of Joseph or Esther with their muted hints that history might have a meaning, let alone a plan, to the hopeful trust of the ‘Amidah. The Torah lets outcomes make that case, deferring to the long durée. But the moral vision that steadies a prophet’s gaze affords a fuller view.

Recalling his countrymen’s summer homes and ivory inlaid bedsteads, Amos hears the lion’s roar (3:15, 5:4–6). Past triumphs, he warns, promise no comfort to complacency. God saved Ethiopians too, and Philistines, and Aramaeans (9:7). But where there’s rescue judgment too may come, the rough work of history (1–2, 4:7–11). The fat cattle of Bashan (4:1), as Amos calls his people, are as readily ruined as Sodom and Gomorrah (4:11). Logicians may cavil at appeals to analogy, but there’s nothing limp or flaccid in this reasoning. Amos tells Amatzia, the priest who sought to ban his protests at the pagan shrine in Bethel, no prophet am I and no prophet’s son. I’m a herdsman, a sycamore dresser. But the Lord took me from following my flock and told me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel” (7:14–15). Moral certitude gave that call its rigor:

Do two walk together if they have not agreed?
Does a lion roar in the forest if it has no prey—
The maned beast, give voice from its lair if it’s caught nothing?
Does a trapped bird fall to earth without a snare?
Does a net spring from the ground when nothing’s caught? …
Does ill befall a city that the Lord did not bring on?
My Lord God does nothing without revealing His counsel to His prophet servants.
The lion has roared. Who will not fear?
My Lord God has spoken. Who will not prophesy?

(3:3–5, 8)

Amos rails at the war crimes of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, and Edom, the atrocities of Ammon and Moab. But the sins of Israel and Judah parallel those enormities: luxuries extracted by grinding the poor. The case is clear. Actions have consequences. Decadence invites destruction.

Biblical reasoning often trades in irony, letting moral truths shine through appearances. Prophetic irony highlights outcomes by calling them intentions⁸—or unwitting forecasts. When Barak tells Deborah that she should accompany him if she’s so keen for battle, she takes the dare: I will go with you. But there will be no glory for you on the path you’re taking. The Lord will deliver Sisera into a woman’s hand (Judges 4:9). Deborah’s words gain an unexpected resonance when Jael, a metic’s wife, slays Sisera, driving a tent peg through his temple, and Deborah’s words come true more literally than she thought (4:17–21, 5:24–27).

A larger discovery awaits when Abraham tells Isaac that God will “see to” (yir’eh) the lamb for his intended sacrifice (Genesis 22:8). His words will acquire unexpected meaning in the end. Forced to choose, with no guidance but his conscience, between heeding the voice demanding Isaac’s sacrifice or listening to the angel who pleads urgently to stay his hand, Abraham chooses life. Having passed God’s test, he names the site: the Lord will see (yir’eh). Genesis adds, as it is said to this day, On the mount is the Lord seen (22:14). What was revealed was not Abraham’s faithfulness but God’s.

Did Abraham discover God’s true character, or did God reveal it? The alternatives fuse as the voice of the verb reverses: God reveals Himself when His true character is seen. So Abraham names the place Moriah—the Mount of Vision, named for his theophany: The ultimate God demands no ultimate violation. Piety will mean ḥesed—as it does in the ‘Amidah— love and favor, grace and generosity. Prophetic irony marks the discovery: Abraham may not have known that he really would return to his servants with Isaac, as he promised (22:5). But, as the midrash in Genesis Rabbah remarks, we humans may ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Biblical Logic
• 2 Two Epiphanies
• 3 Mosaic Liberalism
• 4 Holiness
• 5 God and Israel as Lovers
• 6 Regrouping
• Abbreviations
• Dramatis Personae
• Bibliography
• Index