Jewish Thought

An Introduction

Oliver Leaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134190010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This fresh and contemporary introduction to the Jewish faith, its philosophies and worldviews, explores debates which have preoccupied Jewish thinkers over the centuries and examines their continuing influence in contemporary Judaism.

Written by Oliver Leaman, a leading figure in the field, the book surveys the central controversies in Judaism, including the protracted arguments within the religion itself. Topics range from the relations between Judaism and other religions, such as Islam and Christianity, to contemporary issues such as sex, gender and modernity. Central themes such as authority and obedience, the relations between Jewish and Greek thought, and the position and status of the State of Israel are also considered. The debates are further illustrated by reference to the Bible, as a profoundly realistic text in describing the long interaction between the Jews, their ancestors and God, as well as discussions about major thinkers, and passages from the ancient texts: The Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash.

Oliver Leaman's lively approach and light touch makes Jewish Thought ideal reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the Jewish faith and its outlook, past and present.

Chapter 1
Jews and the Bible

The obvious place to start a discussion of Jewish thought is the Jewish Bible, a book in which Jews take the leading role. But it is not a book in which they necessarily come off well. There are many instances in the Bible where the Jews, both as individuals and as a group, behave badly. They certainly do not obey God always and often seem to have a rather problematic relationship with him. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore some of the issues that arise through these varying degrees of obedience. Other themes could have been highlighted, and are also very important, but obedience is particularly useful in that it brings out the relationship between an authority and those subject to that authority. This issue, of how far God’s commands ought to be obeyed and how they should be understood, is a constant in Jewish life and thought.

Jews have a complex relationship with the Bible. They are in it, and it constantly addresses them, and others also, but the text often leads to problems of interpretation. For one thing, what is the relationship of Jews today, the apparent descendants of those who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai waiting for Moses to return, to those who witnessed such events? The whole notion of covenant is implausible, in the sense that an agreement made between God and Abraham many millennia ago can hardly bind the descendants of Abraham today. Or can it? When God promised not to send a flood again to destroy the world we are supposed to see in the rainbow a sign of his promise (Gen 9:13–16), but the promise is made to all humanity, and God is quite clear that he does not make it because we have got any better. We are still capable of evil, yet God has committed himself not to punish us in this way ever again, however beastly we might become. One might think this is a case of God tying one hand behind his back, and diminishing his deterrent capacity, but of course there are other ways in which the world could be destroyed apart from flooding. (It may though be that the promise not to send a huge flood again is meant to cover all the natural disasters that could occur.) This sort of covenant is at the heart of much Judaism, in that relationships are established between what happens today and what happened in the past. One might think that this is not true of all Jews, since many do not believe in the historical truth of the account given in the Bible, nor do they think it comes from heaven. Some Jews reject the supernatural as a category and adopt an entirely humanist and secular approach to both themselves and the history of their people. Other Jews not only reject the supernatural but act positively to break the rules of the Torah whenever they can and speak critically of it and Judaism in general. Even in the case of these Jews the notion of the past forms part of their self-identity, since in order to reject a role one has to at least acknowledge it as significant enough to be rejected.

Who is a Jew?

A good deal has been written on the Jewish sense of identity, on who is a Jew, and on the ways in which Jewishness is constructed often in tandem with antisemitism. This issue revolves throughout the Bible also in prescient ways. The distinctive feature of the Bible, to my mind, is that many of the characters in it are taken to be heroes and yet are also deeply flawed. Many religious works present their main characters in an entirely positive or negative light, so this feature of the Jewish Bible is rather unusual. Even the great hero, Moses, the person who can be said to have established the Israelites as a political community for the first time, the person who took them out of Egypt, the house of bondage, and the person who is said to have had contact with God “face to face,” the only person in the Bible to enjoy such a relationship with God, even he had faults. He was not allowed to enter the Land of Israel, yet everything in his career was building up to precisely that moment. It is not like the case of Abraham who was told to sacrifice his son to God, as God reminds him several times “his only son,” the son whom he never expected to have and for whom he had to wait so long, the son that he loves. In this case, God changes his mind, or at least he changes what he wants to happen, so Abraham does not suffer the pain of actually sacrificing his son. Yet poor Moses does not manage to enter the Land, and this seems cruel, just like asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It is worth noting how ambivalent the Bible is about its heroes and indeed how ambivalent its heroes often are about their heroic roles.

Bargaining with God

When Abraham is told by God that the latter is going to destroy the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah Abraham starts to haggle with him about the number of good people in those cities that would prevent him from destroying them. This is hardly a very respectful attitude, rather like Moses pointing out to God that he is not much of a speaker and so probably would not do well trying to persuade the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. The Bible does not take a dim view of their apparent criticism of God’s plan; on the contrary, it presents their disagreements with him as entirely reasonable. And they are entirely reasonable, even Moses’ impatience at the tardiness of the divine response in the desert to the thirst of the community is reasonable. Moses strikes the rock and water appears, but God did not tell him to do this and in fact told him not to do it. This is the immense crime for which entry into the Land is apparently denied him. One might think that God is particularly cruel here to deny Moses the culmination that his entire life had up to that point led up to, something worth bearing in mind when we look at the akeda, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham, and the apparent willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son (his only son, whom he loves, as God, twisting the knife, reminds him). It is sometimes said that Abraham knew that God would intervene eventually, but we know from Jewish history that God often does not intervene in this way eventually or otherwise. Waiting for God is not something that the Jews got much out of during their history.

Other Jewish stories do not treat challenging God as a crime at all. There is the story of a rabbi who on the Day of Atonement had led his congregation through the long and fervent prayers for forgiveness. It was coming to the conclusion of the service, the Neila session, which brings the long fast to an end. The rabbi was transported to heaven to discuss issues of importance with the Almighty, and during the discussion, the rabbi looks down and sees a member of his congregation looking faint. He apologizes to God and asks to be sent back so he can complete the service and the man can eat. God agrees but says that had the rabbi only argued a bit longer for the Messiah to be sent, God would have done it. This is similar to the Moses situation. The rabbi wanted to respond to the simple needs of a member of the community and rejected abandoning those needs under the broad label of doing what God wants or would expect. Yet the story seems to approve of the rabbi. Instead of ignoring the petty concerns of his congregation, he might have concentrated on bringing about the Messiah by continuing to argue with God. These stories tend to disapprove of such a strategy, they imply that it is the little things of life that are important, maybe more important than the big things like the coming of the Messiah. Can we really believe that God would have sent the Messiah had the rabbi argued a bit longer? After all he has had plenty of opportunities to send him in the last few thousand years and has steadfastly withheld him. It might then be better for us to concentrate on doing good in so far as we can and avoid speculation about what God is going to do.

Yet when Moses did this, albeit on just a few occasions, he was punished for it and severely punished at that. Is this because the Bible takes a much harder line on disobedience than later Jewish texts? Toward the end of the Five Books of Moses when Moses gives his final address to the Israelites, he threatens them with the consequences of disobedience, and these are severe. One of the entertaining aspects of this long passage is that a phrase from it, “it is not in heaven” (Deut 30:12), referring to justice, was later used in the Talmud to suggest that in later times it is not God who establishes the Law but the rabbis (Bava Metzia 59a–b). God points out that it is not difficult to behave well; justice is not in heaven nor is it over the sea but its performance is all about us and knowing how to perform it is readily available. It is also worth remembering a line of Jeremiah, referring to King Josiah, one of the few people in authority of whom Jeremiah approved, that “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; so it was well. Is this not to know me? says the Lord” (Jer. 22:16). Before we conclude that the Bible takes a stricter line than later writings we should acknowledge the existence of all those parts of the Bible where disobedience is readily excused or brushed over.

Running away from God

Jonah provides an excellent example, he is told to go east to Nineveh to warn them of their imminent destruction and instead goes west in the opposite direction to avoid the task. The sinking of the boat on which he is traveling does no more than inconvenience him, he is saved, unlike presumably his unfortunate companions, and then he becomes the most successful prophet in human history. All he has to do is say “In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed” and everyone repents. So his disobedience is rewarded by complete success, something for which he continues to be bad-tempered, since toward the end of the book he regrets that Nineveh accepted his message and saved themselves. One might have expected God to have been disgusted with Jonah, yet this book is the haftorah reading on the Day of Atonement afternoon service. The haftorah is the reading from the Prophets that comes after the reading of the Five Books of Moses in the synagogue, a different reading being selected to accompany each portion from the Pentateuch. It is often taken to show that God will forgive anyone and that no one can escape him. Yet it might be taken to show also that even extreme disobedience will be excused by God and indeed used by him.

It can hardly be argued that Jonah carried out his task adequately despite his total success. We do not think of him as having the stature of some of the great prophets like Isaiah or Jeremiah, but actually Jonah was much more successful than they were, which perhaps reflects the fact that gentiles are much easier targets for prophecy than Jews. His stock phrase “Nineveh will be destroyed in forty days” looks like the sort of thing that a child would say if it was coerced to recite some formula. It almost sounds as though Jonah put no effort or thought into his task, hardly surprising since he did his best to avoid it. Yet the message was very successful, perhaps illustrating the principle that less is more in the Bible as elsewhere. There is a tradition that Moses’ prayer for his sister Miriam when she was ill (O God, heal her please) in Hebrew, just the words El na refa na la, was instantly answered since God was so delighted by its brevity. Yet a prayer that something that presumably God brought about should be reversed might be questionable, smacking of disobedience itself. On the other hand, one might see divine action as a process of testing and inviting prayer as an appropriate response.

Suffering and slander

Why was Miriam punished? There is a rabbinic discussion which says her sin was slander or lashon ha-ra. To a degree this is because of the similarity between the terms metzora (leper) and motze sham ra (defamation) in Lev Rabbah 16:1 and the report in Num 12:10 of Miriam’s leprosy. Jewish law takes a very dim view of slander or speaking ill of someone, although we need to remind ourselves that slander is not only speaking ill of someone, it includes the idea that this attribution of evil is misapplied. In some religious circles the avoidance of speaking ill of someone is interpreted as never criticizing those in authority, which is surely off target. On the other hand, a general intention to criticize is designed to undermine the authority of the authority and perhaps it is for this that Miriam was punished. Our close relatives are prime agents of evil reports, they have seen us at our worst and enjoy a familiarity with us that can make them frank.

This still does not help us explain why Jonah seems to be constantly helped and supported by God, while Moses who very occasionally lapsed from the very highest standards of behavior was punished. Even right at the end of the book when Jonah is annoyed at the inhabitants of Nineveh and regrets their having been saved, God chides him with his attitude, but there is no sense that he is going to be punished. We shall see later on in the book how important slander is in Judaism and how seriously it is treated as an offence. It certainly takes us a long way from the ideal of truth telling and frankness. On the other hand, it is something for which we may be forgiven by God, should he choose to do so. God realizes why Jonah feels aggrieved, it is after all God who has made him hot through killing what was sheltering him, a plant that had until then kept him out of the heat of the day. Yet when Jonah reacts angrily to his circumstances and is intemperate, as we often do and are, God is quite mild in his response, and throughout the book he is very forbearing in his dealings with an obviously recalcitrant prophet. We shall come to see later, when we look at the details of the book, how the account brings out the complexity of God’s interaction with us, but at this stage it is worth highlighting that there is not just one attitude that God has to our failures to act as he would wish. It is these differences in what we do and in what God then does that lead to a whole tradition of commentary, since we need to work out some reasons for these differences and an account of the text that makes it more than a random collection of perplexing stories.

Complaining to God

Perhaps the most puzzling case of all is that of Job. He spends most of the book complaining about the lack of justice in the world and moaning about God’s role in all this. He calls for God to answer his charges, often intemperate charges, and in the end God does. While this is going on, Job’s friends present a variety of explanations for what is happening to Job, and these all vindicate God to some extent or another. His friends present the normal range of religious responses to suffering; that is, he must have done something wrong, God organizes everything justly whether we understand it or not, we cannot question God, and so on. Yet at the end of the book it is Job who is rewarded, getting everything back and doubled at that, while his friends are only forgiven by God because Job intercedes on their behalf. Yet it is they who one might well expect should be rewarded and Job punished for his boldness and lack of respect toward God. Although he certainly does not ever deny God, which his wife raises as an option, he hardly speaks of God with what might be considered as the necessary respect.

Contrast Job with Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu, who use strange fire in their ritual and are rewarded by being destroyed by God (Lev 10:1–2). All they did, as far as we know, is use fire that they should not have used, yet everything else was as it ought to have been. There is a suggestion that they were drunk, which certainly would explain a good deal of what happened, but that is not actually what the text says, it refers to strange fire. It is a case apparently in which a ritual is carried out not entirely as it ought to be, and swift retribution follows. Yet as Job points out time after time, our experience suggests that God does not punish the wicked and reward the vir...