Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 9780226785059

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Cultural Disjunctions

Cultural Disjunctions Post-­Traditional Jewish Identities

p a u l m e n d e s -­f l o h r

The University of Chicago Press  ó Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­7 8486-­1 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­7 8505-­9 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago /9780226785059.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mendes-Flohr, Paul R., author. Title: Cultural disjunctions : post-traditional Jewish identities / Paul Mendes-Flohr. Other titles: Post-traditional Jewish identities Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020051327 | isbn 9780226784861 (cloth) | isbn 9780226785059 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Jews—Identity. Classification: lcc ds143 .m3834 2021 | ddc 305.892/4—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051327 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Shalom Ratzabi ‫أَنَا لِ َحبِيبِي َو َحبِيبِي ل‬

Contents

Introduction: Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables  1

1.

Post-­Traditional Jewish Identities  10

2.

Jewish Cultural Memory: Its Manifold Configurations  25

3.

Jewish Learning, Jewish Hope  47

4.

Post-­Traditional Faith  66

5.

Within and Beyond Borders  76

6.

In Praise of Discontent 88



Coda  103 Acknowledgments  105 Notes  109 Index  151

Introduction: Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned. —homer1

I am large . . . I contain multitudes. — wa l t w h i t m a n 2

I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of, having, a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. . . . I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day. —zadie smith3

With the dismantling of the ghettos of Europe in the late eighteenth century and their entrance into the modern world, Jews are no longer only Jews. They have acquired multiple identities. These identities are often discontinuous. One’s professional, social, political, associative, and cultural affiliations may engender an identity that might not overlap with one’s ancestral identity. And as much as they may enrich someone, this whirl of

2

Introduction

discontinuous identities might also yield a destabilizing tension with his or her self-­understanding as a Jew. In these opening pages, I consider such dialectical tension as it is manifest in the expansion of the Jew’s cultural horizons beyond those established by rabbinic tradition. Under the rubric of post-­traditional identities (which may still be informed by religious sensibilities and concerns, nor are they necessarily indifferent to traditional Jewish teachings and precepts),4 I explore the cognitive ramifications of the resulting cultural disjunctions. In the second chapter, I refer to the construction of the modern library as emblematic of this process. The libraries of post-­traditional Jews are not constituted exclusively by Jewish sacred literature. The volumes they assemble in their libraries embrace a broad and varied spectrum of accounts of the human experience and reflection. Moreover, although one may still have in one’s collection books of Jewish interest, these writings might or might not retain a particular salience. The post-­traditional Jew is thus not a mere bibliophilic tourist who reads the literary works—­and appreciates the art and music—­of non-­Jews out of mere intellectual curiosity or anthropological voyeurism. In the cultural expressions of communities other than her ancestral inheritance, she encounters testimonies of the universality of the human spirit, which Kwame Anthony Appiah aptly calls “the shared search for truth and justice.”5 We read the literature of ancient Greeks, Renaissance Italians, church fathers, Abyssinian monks, Confucian savants, Sufi mystics, African Americans, feminists, and LGBTQ+ individuals as integral to our humanity and self-­understanding. As we would say in Hebrew, shoresh ha-­nishamah, “the root of the soul,” is nourished by many and varied sources.6 This implicit cosmopolitan ontology7 enhances our sense of belonging to the larger human family. Hence, it is in accord with the promise of the Enlightenment—­echoed in the humanistic conception of the self as celebrated on the interpersonal level by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–­1892): “In all people, I see myself, not more and not one barleycorn less / and good or bad I say of myself I say of them.”8

Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables 3

The enlarged ambit of our respective cultural identities not only highlights our shared humanity but may also have the centrifugal effect of decentering our primordial, inherited sense of self, inducing what Richard Rorty labels a self-­critical irony. Being “impressed by [the] vocabularies” of other faith and cultural communities, which they take as “final,” engenders a cognitive and axiological dissonance, which cannot but cast a shadow of doubt about the truth of our inherited cultural sensibilities and values.9 The consequent epistemic modesty, as discussed in chapter 1, may also lead to a cultural ambivalence and deracination. In chapter 2, I draw from theories of the sociology of knowledge and cultural hermeneutics to explore what Simone Weil (1909–­ 1943) calls rootedness (l’enracinement), the need to participate in the life of a particular community but such that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders. “A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”10 And Weil laments that the “loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy.”11 Without referencing Weil, Appiah advocates a “rooted cosmopolitanism.”12 Our particular loyalties—­be they constituted by interpersonal, political, ethnic, or religious affiliations—­need not compromise our ethical compass. On the contrary: The realm of the ethical . . . encompasses what you must do as an embedded self with thick relations to others. The interests that entrain the “ethical self ” are those of specific, encumbered human beings who are members of particular communities. To create a life . . . is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you. Identity is always articulated through concepts (and practices) made available to you by religion, society, school, and state, mediated by family, peers, and friends.13

As this citation indicates, Appiah’s concern is primarily that of “the ethics of identity.”14 Although I share his—­and Weil’s15—­ wariness that as much as they are to be acknowledged and even affirmed, particularistic identities are prey to ethically myopic

4

Introduction

parochial fidelities, the overarching issues I wish to address are, as it were, from the opposite direction. I thus seek to fortify a Jewish identity as spiritually and intellectually engaging yet honoring an individual’s equally passionate affiliation with other cultural and cognitive communities.16 Accordingly, chapter 2—­“Jewish Cultural Memory: Its Manifold Configurations”—­argues that Judaism as a religious culture is in continuous, evolving conceptual and axiological revision. This ever-­spiraling process is illustrated by a famous midrash, which relates that word of a renowned rabbinic teacher, Rabbi Akiva (d. 135 CE), reached Moses in heaven. His interest was so piqued that he decided to leave his supernal abode, where he had resided for nigh on two millennia, and attend one of Rabbi Akiva’s classes in Jerusalem. Sitting quietly in the rear row, Moses listened attentively to the rabbi expatiate on an arcane exegetical issue of a biblical verse: “Moses did not understand the discussion and was dazed. When [Akiva] came to a certain point, his students asked him, ‘Whence, do you know this?’ Akiva replied, ‘[This is] a law [given] to Moses from Sinai’ ” (Halakhah l’Moshe miSinai).17 The midrash explains that Rabbi Akiva’s reply “calmed” Moses; his anxiety was further allayed when God reassured him that the teachings of the venerable rabbinic sage were in accord with God’s will. The point is that the Torah given to Moses at Sinai is subject to recurrent interpretation, refracting new experiences and insights.18 Employing the concept of cultural memory as expounded by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I consider the hermeneutic grammar that would allow for the integration of new intellectual and cultural experiences into Jewish tradition. These experiences are often in dialogue with non-­Jewish cultures. Indicative of this process is the intracultural diglossia, such as Judeo-­German (Yiddish) and Judeo-­Spanish (Ladino), and some dozen and more dialects Jews have spawned, especially in the Diaspora.19 Their interaction with other cultures was, to be sure, not purely linguistic but also symbolic and intellectual. Indeed, as the late Amos Funkenstein (1937–­1999) cogently argued, traditional Judaism is

Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables 5

intrinsically a hybrid culture.20 The literary critic and anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–­1919) extolled Diasporic Jewry’s ability to live symbiotically with multiple cultures as a unique virtue, which they should jealously nurture and thus resist the allure of a self-­ enclosed nationalism and ethnic identity: [Whereas other peoples] have drawn political boundaries about themselves and have neighbors beyond their borders who are their enemies, the Jewish nation has its neighbors in its breast, and this friendly neighborliness creates peace and unity with anyone who is complete within himself, and who acknowledges that this friendly neighborliness creates harmony and unity. Is not this a sign of the mission that Judaism ought to fulfill in its relation to humanity?21

Within the post-­traditional context, this hybridity—­its distinctive structure and dynamic—­warrants an adumbration of a strategy whereby Jews may reconfigure their cultural identity as Jews, an identity that would, to cite Simone Weil, not prevent them “from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of pure gold to be found in [other] civilizations.”22 Taking delight in those treasures need not lead to jettisoning the cultural and religious inheritance of one’s community; on the contrary, it may induce a critical revaluation of that legacy and its revalorization as an intellectually and spiritually engaging culture.23 The late Jerusalem rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (1937–­2020) spoke of Jewry as a meta-­mishpocha, a family bound by a divine covenant that renders them beholden to a transcendent reality, the God of Creation. Jewish ethnic particularity is thus grounded in a uni­ versal ontology. In a similar vein, the German-­Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–­1918) viewed the cosmopolitan conception of humanity as dialectically inherent in the vision of the biblical prophets and which constitutes the spiritual foundation of modern, post-­traditional Judaism. In consonance with his neo-­ Kantian presuppositions, Cohen spoke of “the oneness of humanity” as a transcendental (i.e., an a priori) ethical concept that should serve as a regulative principle, prompting society to strive continuously to realize this ideal (envisioned as the dominion of

6

Introduction

absolute justice) in its political and juridical institutions. Cohen associated this process toward the realization of the unity of hu­ manity—­corresponding to the unique oneness of God—­with being in accord with the “messianic” vision of the prophets. It is, said Cohen, the religious responsibility of the Jewish community to hold fast to this vision and proclaim it to all the nations.24 In the incremental pursuit of this asymptotic universal ideal, Israel is God’s Suffering Servant (Isa. 53).25 Cohen thus decried Jewry’s adoption of modernity’s eudaemonistic ethos. Accordingly, he regarded Zionism as betraying the very heart of Judaism’s covenantal vocation, exclaiming, “Those bums want to be happy”—­“Die Kerls wollen glücklich sein!”26 In the concluding chapter 6, “In Praise of Discontent,” I expound on Cohen’s anxiety about a facile adaptation of Judaism to pragmatic, this-­ worldly values, guided by personal ambition and success, material and professional. Both Rabbi Steinsaltz and Hermann Cohen were alert to the befuddled fortunes of post-­traditional Jews who either sever their ties with their ancestral community or who, in choosing to retain their affiliation to the community of their birth or by virtue of conversion, attend well-­nigh exclusively to the social and political needs of Jewry, thereby re­­ducing Judaism to an ethnic and national identity.27 Cohen was especially troubled that this tendency would fetter Jewish affirmation to a politics of identity, which could not but vitiate the fundamental religious values and calling of Judaism.28 Having died a decade and a half before the rise of Hitler, Cohen was spared the horrors of the Shoah. The surviving remnant of the Jewish people is understandably drawn to express communal solidarity and seek to secure the people’s pragmatic interests and dignity by political means. Nonetheless, we may question whether communal solidarity justifies ethnic patriotism, even when dressed in the garb of religious fidelity. Here I allow myself to be autobiographical: Born and raised in New York City, I am an Israeli by choice, having made my home and that of my family in the State of Israel, where I have lived for some fifty years. I am thus profoundly distressed that solidarity has been funneled

Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables 7

into an ethic of “my people, right or wrong,”29 blunting not only critical judgment but rendering us (often willfully) blind to the existential reality and political distress of our neighbors, the Palestinians. (Cf. “You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” [Deut. 10:19].30) Alas, ethnic patriotism can yield a defensive xenophobia and worse.31 As Appiah sagely notes, one’s particular communal and cultural affiliations need not—­nay, should not—­blur one’s vision of the Other.32 I am thus wary of the knee-­jerk dismissal of criticism of the policies of the government of the State of Israel as solely primed by anti-­Semitism or Jewish self-­hatred. To be sure, we must protest criticism embellished with opprobrious epitaphs, especially when drawn from the lexicon of anti-­Semitism. Nonetheless, criticism is legitimate and, I dare say, often called for. The lyrics of a ballad by Bob Dylan, as sung by the inimitable Joan Baez, inspired the generation of my youth. They still ring true. I cite the last stanza of “With God on Our Side”: So now as I’m leavin’ I’m weary as Hell The confusion I’m feelin’ Ain’t no tongue can tell The words fill my head And fall to the floor What if God’s on our side He’ll stop the next war.33

In the third chapter, “Jewish Learning, Jewish Hope,” I endorse Martin Buber’s philippic against embedding Zionism and Jewish solidarity in sacro egoismo, the view that the jealous pursuit of one’s community’s self-­interest is sacred and thus ethically self-­evident.34 I thus join Appiah in questioning whether a nation could at all be considered an ethical entity: “It could still be that special responsibilities make sense within truly thick relations (with lovers, family, friends) but not within the imaginary fraternity of our co-­nationals.”35 To be sure, a nation has legitimate political interests to secure the life and dignity of

8

Introduction

its members. Still, I share Appiah’s doubts about whether the policies designed to pursue those interests should be construed as intrinsically ethical and thus unimpeachable. Taking heed from Buber (1878–­1965) and his colleague Franz Rosenzweig (1886–­1929) that a post-­traditional Jewish identity must be neither political nor secular, I explore with them the possibility that Jews, who have expanded their cognitive and axio-­ normative vista to embrace other cultures, can ground their lives anew in Judaism as a spiritually and intellectually edifying faith community. Noting that as exemplified by the post-­traditional library, one’s cultural identity is constituted dialogically,36 Buber and Rosenzweig sought to re-­center the intellectual horizons of culturally deracinated Jews in Talmud Torah, the classical mode of Jewish learning. Talmud Torah, they observed, is a form of dialogical study whereby Jews gather communally, generally in the synagogue, to engage in a conversation with sacred texts and their interpretations that have evolved over the millennia.37 So pursued, Talmud Torah attains a sacramental aura. Although Bu­­ ber and Rosenzweig called on post-­traditional Jews to engage anew in the dialogical tradition of Jewish learning, they acknowledged that those who would heed the call will invariably bring into the dialogue their multicultural, cosmopolitan sensibilities. As Rosen­ zweig attested: All of us to whom Judaism, to whom being a Jew, has again become the pivot of our lives—­and I know that in saying this here I am not speaking for myself alone—­we all know that in being Jews we must not give up anything, not renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism. From the periphery back to the center, from the outside, in.38

Implicit in this commitment to Jewish learning was the recon­­fig­ uration of one’s library. Whereas the post-­traditional library may have been organized in a syncretistic skein, the post-­traditional Jewish library would be constituted as two separate, autonomous collections, the Jewish literature standing over and against the lit­­ erature gathered from other cultures, not as intellectual adversar-

Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables 9

ies but rather in an attentive dialogue. Yet the dialogue does not void cognitive dissonance. It cannot, certainly not if one is not to adopt a fideistic, doctrinal affirmation of the teachings and truth claims of the canonical texts of Jewish tradition. To be sure, these texts are cradled in a commentarial tradition, which has continually subjected them to questions and revision; what holds them together as a coherent process is the acceptance of their numinous authority. For the post-­traditional Jew, this faith is not self-­evident, however. In eschewing dogmatic faith, both Buber and Rosenzweig had contrasting approaches to revalorizing Jewish learning as a theocentric discourse. Hence, they are presented as two distinct representatives of post-­traditional Judaism. Though their biographies led them to navigate different paths to Jewish religious affirmation, they were both Jews by choice—­that is, religiously committed Jews by choice. They made a carefully charted decision, as Rosenzweig put it, to “grope” their way back to a spiritually and intellectually engaging Judaism that would resist the allure of a purely ethnic patriotism.39 They could not, of course, ignore the decree of history that they were willy-­nilly members of a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a community of a shared destiny and fate, a fate that would be ever increasingly horrific as the dark clouds of an apocalyptic anti-­Semitism gathered over Germany and Europe, culminating in the Nazi death camps. In this respect, as Jean-­Paul Sartre noted, the anti-­Semite defines the Jew.40 But the Jew also defines himself or herself as a Jew. Should that decision entail a choice to affirm one’s identity as a Jew, one must accept the responsibility such a choice entails, cognizant that identity establishes borders that are not only geographic, ideological, and sociological but also mental.

1 Post-­Traditional Jewish Identities Jews are a people who most widely differ among themselves. —elias canetti1

What have I in common with [my fellow] Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself. —franz kafka2

Contemporary Jews variously configure their Jewish identity. Since the Enlightenment and the Jewish emancipation, Jewish identity is no longer exclusively defined by observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, formal definitions of identity—­membership in a given community, acceptance of its norms, teachings, values, aspirations—­are no longer the self-­ evident criteria for Jewish identity.3 The ambiguities of Jewish identity in the modern period are, of course, well documented, indicatively often in fiction4 and cinema.5 In this chapter, I will seek both to compound and to celebrate these ambiguities by noting that as moderns, Jews continuously reconfigure their identity. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are often affiliated with numerous communities—­residential, vocational,

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 11

professional, political, recreational, cultural, and intellectual—­whose members and interests may not necessarily coincide with the community of their birth and their inherited culture. Moreover, the boundaries of these communities are fluid and permeable. The upshot is that a person is no longer exclusively Jewish. For someone who wishes to grant his or her Jewish identity salience without forfeiting a dedicated membership in other communities, the challenge is to define a Jewish identity that is engaging yet not exclusive. A preoccupation with the meaning of their existence as Jews is not unique to the Jews of modernity. Ever since the seventy-­ five-­year-­old Chaldean Abram, the son of Tirah, received the divine calling and the promise of nationhood (Gen. 12:1–­5), Jews have reflected on their identity. Buffeted by agonizing decisions and tests of faith, the founding patriarch of the Hebrew nation was recurrently obliged to question the meaning of his life before God. Thus it was also for his children and his children’s children. As the twentieth-­century German-­Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig observed, “With other nations, the birth of self-­consciousness is the beginning of the end; with us [ Jews] it was the beginning.”6 The problem of identity, Rosenzweig suggested, generally marks for a people the loss of innocence and thus the weakening if not the ultimate dissolution of identity’s primordial bonds. For Israel, however, it is different. From its inception as a people—­or rather a people-­faith—­Israel has “thematized” its existence. For as the patriarch Abraham already knew that the nation he sired was not merely the “anthropological means” (as the philosopher Hermann Cohen once put it)7 to promote the faith in the One God, Israel’s very existence and history have been flush with religious meaning. That meaning is suffused in the very substance and rhythms of Israel’s temporal life. Nineteenth-­century German biblical scholars coined the term Heilsgeschichte—­history of salvation—­to capture this fact. Traditional Jewry was wont to refer to the image of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob—­who was the first to bear the name Israel (Gen. 32:28), a name that God bestowed on him and his descendants after his

12

Chapter One

mysterious struggle with an angel (Gen. 32:28–­29).8 Jacob emerged from the episode blessed with a new name but also “limping on his hip” as a result of an injury acquired in his bout with the angel. The pain and blessing attendant to the struggle are embodied in the name Israel, thus marking Jewish self-­understanding throughout the ages. Recurrently tossed between the poles of injury and blessing, the Jews tended to view the trials and tribulations of their journey through mundane time as raising the question of theodicy, the justification—­and meaning—­of God’s rule as reflected in their history. As a mirror of the divine presence, Jewish existence thus became the focus of sustained metaphysical meditation and scrutiny.9 Yet, as the Hebrew publicist and Zionist Ahad Ha’am (1856–­ 1927) noted, before their passage into the modern world, it never occurred to Jews to ask why they were Jews. “Such questions would not only have been considered blasphemy but would have been seen as the highest level of stupidity.”10 Before they crossed the threshold into the realm of secular sensibility, the Jews did not question that they were Jews; despite their preoccupation with the meaning of their collective existence and troubled history, their identity was clear and unambiguous. The parameters of traditional Jewish identity were summarized by Ruth the Moabite when, upon her conversion to the faith of Israel, she declared: “Your people are my people, your God is my God, and where you die I shall die” (Ruth 1:6)—­being a Jew by birth or by choice entails “membership in a people, a religion, and in a Schicksalsgemeinschaft,”11 a community of a shared destiny. The pivotal element in this statement of allegiance is the faith in the God of Israel: remove it, and the other pillars of traditional Jewish identity begin to totter. For, as an eminent scholar of comparative religion has observed, “To describe Judaism as the religion of the Jewish people is slightly misrepresenting the situation. Judaism is the religious dimension of the Jewish people. Israel is a people born of, and with, religion.”12 Accordingly, it is the weakening, if not

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 13

utter eclipse, of religious faith and authority that creates the problem of post-traditional Jewish identity. Sundered from its religious moorings, Jewish peoplehood—­ its significance and meaning—­is befuddled with ambiguity. The perplexity of Jewish membership that is no longer defined by a shared spiritual destiny is compounded by the fact that the Jews of modernity are integrated into the social and political fabric of the various nations among whom they dwell. Indicatively, Jewish self-­reflection increasingly shifts from theology to sociology and even psychology. Whereas traditional Jews would ask, “What is the theological meaning of Jewish existence?” secularized Jews have other questions: “Why am I a Jew? Should I identify as a Jew? If so, how? With the loss of faith and a commitment to ful­fill the precepts of the Torah, what is the nature and what are appropriate expressions of my identity as a Jew?” To be sure, Jewish theologians and philosophers have not been unemployed, rendered irrelevant by the modern experience; since the Enlightenment, they have been a somewhat active breed. Their task, however, is decidedly different from that of their predecessors. Donning the robes of theologians, philosophers, and rabbis, they have sought to restore Israel’s religious faith, to revalorize it so that the edifice of Jewish identity and commitment will endure. These modern rabbis and religious philosophers have had to share the arena of Jewish self-­reflection with a battery of secular intellectuals who have formulated new paradigms of Jewish identity and commitment. Acknowledging the rupture in faith and religious practice brought on by secularization, they have sought to construct a Jewish identity without a belief in God; indeed, much of modern Jewish thought has been devoted to devising strategies to foster a Jewish identity simply as membership in the Jewish people and a Schicksalsgemeinschaft of a shared historical destiny. The two are not synonymous: Jews can feel they belong to the Jewish people but not necessarily accept or acknowledge that people’s fate as their own. The former may be characterized as a sense of ethnic identification,13 the latter an

14

Chapter One

acceptance of shared Jewish historical fate as an ideological affiliation.14 Competing secular ideologies—­Zionism, Bundism, Diaspora nationalism, Yiddishism—­have proffered various national and cultural conceptions of a Jewish ideological identity.15 Other intellectuals have appealed to what Theodor Herzl called negative pride: in the face of anti-­Semitism, otherwise assimilated Jews should defiantly affirm their Jewish identity—­a position somewhat ironically called in German Trotzjudentum, a Judaism out of spite. Jean-­Paul Sartre had such a position in mind when he stated that it is “the anti-­Semites who define the Jew.”16 In response to the Holocaust, the philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916–­2003) propounded a theologized Trotzjudentum. Employing theological language and its apodictic inflections, he spoke of the “revelatory voice of Auschwitz.” This voice “commands” contemporary Jews not to grant Hitler a “posthumous victory” by assimilating and undermining Judaism by critical, corrosive questions.17 Lest post-­Holocaust Jews help Hitler after his death and the defeat of the Third Reich achieve the objective of exterminating not only their people but also their religion and culture, they are to desist from all actions that might endanger the continued survival of Jewry as a distinctive people and religious culture. Fackenheim also regarded the commanding voice of Auschwitz as appertaining to the politics of the State of Israel, especially as pursued by those leaders most jealously concerned with promoting the Jewish state’s security. Should someone criticize the policies of the Israeli government with respect to the Palestinians and the Arab world, in Fackenheim’s judgment, that person would perforce endanger the state, thus unwittingly furthering Hitler’s diabolical project.18 By grounding his appeal to Jewish solidarity and defiant pride in quasi-­theological constructs, Fackenheim betrays not only what I regard as profoundly mistaken—­indeed, frightening—­ political judgment. His assignment of absolute, categorical obligations to the survivors of Auschwitz—­and all Jews, he argued, are honor-­bound to regard themselves as survivors—­also dis-

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 15

closes a fundamental predicament facing post-­traditional Jewry: namely, the difficulty of endowing Jewish identity with a compelling, indeed obligatory quality in the eclipse of the prescribed content and formal definitions of the Torah and rabbinic law—­ at least as a universally accepted content and definition.19 The difficulty of determining the content and definition of a post-­traditional Jewish identity is particularly manifest in the State of Israel. Having the legal obligation of providing a juridical definition of who is a Jew, the state encounters an intractable antinomy. Juridically bound to grant citizenship to Jewish immigrants (olim), the state must stipulate the formal criteria according to which the law would recognize an immigrant (oleh) as a Jew and ergo entitled to citizenship; yet as a secular institution, the state must also acknowledge the diverse and divergent expressions of Jewish identity that distinguish contemporary Jewish life. It is thus not surprising that since its founding, the State of Israel has recurrently failed to provide a universally satisfactory legal definition of who is a Jew. Although the representatives of Orthodox Judaism who dominate the religious discourse of the state advocate traditional Jewish definitions of who is a Jew based on rabbinic law (Halakhah), these stipulations invariably prove problematic because they fail to accommodate the contemporary social and demographic reality of the Jewish people as a community whose members are constituted by individuals whose mothers may not be Jewish (the principal criterion of Jew­­ ish membership according to Halakhah), or who have chosen to join the House of Israel through conversion under the auspices of Reform or Conservative Judaism. If one of the founding purposes of the State of Israel—­as specified by its Law of Return20—­ is to provide refuge for anyone who is persecuted as a Jew, then clearly the halachic definition would exclude the multitude of persons of partial Jewish descent who suffered as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws, or the hundreds of thousands of olim from the former Soviet Union who are not born of a Jewish mother. The traditional definition of who is a Jew is also incompatible with a contemporary Jewish sensibility.21

16

Chapter One

The inadequacy of the traditional definitions of Jewish identity is vividly highlighted by the case of  Brother Daniel and the Shalit affair, adjudicated by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1966 and 1970, respectively. A Jew by birth and a former partisan who fought in the forests of Poland with his fellow Jews against the Nazis, Brother Daniel (Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen) converted to Christianity during the Holocaust. As a Carmelite monk, he sought Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. His petition was supported by the Halakhah, which still recognizes him as a Jew despite his apostasy. The Supreme Court, however, ruled against Brother Daniel and, in effect, against the Halakhah, basing its decision on considerations of secular and national Jewish sensibilities. It argued that by converting to Christianity, he had removed himself from “the history and destiny of the Jewish community.”22 The Shalit affair involved an intermarried cou­­ple—­ an Israeli Jew, Nahum Shalit (who had a heroic battle record in defense of the country), and his non-­Jewish wife—­who despite their declaring themselves nonbelievers sought to have their children registered as Jews by nationality. When the Ministry of the Interior balked, the Shalits turned to the Supreme Court, which ruled that although technically their children were non-­Jews according to the Halakhah, they should be registered as Jews “as members of the Jewish nation without religion,” because they were being raised within the Jewish community of the State of Israel. As such, “they were indissolubly bound to its destiny.”23 The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, later passed legislation nullifying the Supreme Court’s decision and reaffirming the halakhic definition of Jewish identity. The then socialist-­dominated legislature argued that notwithstanding its sympathy for the Shalits and countless others in their situation, the Supreme Court’s secular definition of a Jew would endanger the unity of world Jewry, whose unity could only be assured by the formal definitions of Halakhah. This satisfied few but the minority of Orthodox Jews. Moreover, aside from the matter of the juridical definition of personal status under Israeli law, the Halakhah and Jewish tradition have

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 17

ceased to provide the framework by which the vast majority of contemporary Jews in the State of Israel and the Diaspora would identify themselves as Jews. Definitions of Jewish identity by other formal criteria, such as cultural and institutional af­­ filiation, also court ambiguity. Some Zionists fancied that the territorial and linguistic coding of Jewish identity alone would solve the problem. Restored to the Land of Israel and speaking Hebrew once again as the language of everyday discourse, it was reasoned, the Jews would be Jews just as the French are French—­ that is, they would be Hebrew-­speaking citizens of the Jewish state and, as some Zionists emphasized, irrespective of religious belief or disbelief.24 This position is likewise fraught with ambiguity when we consider that hundreds of thousands of Arabs, Christian and Muslim, speak Hebrew and are citizens of the Jewish state—­ethnic descent and religious affiliation being the only dis­­tinguishing variables. Within this context, we are reminded of the quip that Israelis are but Hebrew-­speaking Gentiles. This observation, of course, is crude, for it fails to consider the simple but incontrovertible fact that most secular Israeli Jews would regard themselves nonetheless as Jews. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs would understandably uphold their Arab or Palestinian identity.25 Beneath the veneer of a shared language and citizenship, Jewish and Arab Israelis are distinguished by ethnicity and distinctive cultural and historical memories (not to speak of a not-too-subtle sociological and political divide between these two sectors of Israeli society). Both in Israel and in the Diaspora, contemporary efforts to determine formal, concordant definitions of Jewish identity—­ independent of Halakha—­also continuously falter before the fact that as residents of the modern world, Jews have multiple cultural and social identities that may not be contiguous with their Jewish affiliation. As moderns, contemporary Jews are open to other cultures and contrasting axiological systems of knowledge. Also, their cultural and cognitive horizons are no longer exclusively Jewish. The multiple refractions of identity take hold of the Jews in the State of Israel, as it is in the Diaspora.

18

Chapter One

This situation—­which in the past was typically called cosmopolitanism but nowadays is generally labeled cultural plural­ism26—­ Jews naturally share with all moderns, especially with the increasing globalization of culture. Yet the specifics of the Jews’ experience of modernity have colored their perceptions of the situation, inevitably confounding all efforts to configure a Jewish identity that accounts for the fact that the modern Jew is no longer exclusively Jewish. Since the Enlightenment, Jews have adopted the cultures of their host societies, drawn particularly to the so-­called high cultures of Europe and the Americas with their universal, cosmopolitan claims. To be an educated European meant to be at home in a variety of ancient and more contemporary cultures; it meant to know languages and disparate literary and artistic traditions, as well as to be open to new ideas, perspectives, and aesthetic expressions. The boundaries of high culture not only reached back to classical antiquity but also extended wide and afar across space and time, much of which remained uncharted. In German, this conception of high culture was known as Bildung, a continual process of intellectual and aesthetic cultivation. And the emancipated Jews of central and western Europe were among its most devoted adherents.27 Explanations abound as to why the Jews were so taken by this conception of culture; surely it has much to do with the dynamics of emancipation and the political and social conditions of their acceptance into the evolving liberal order. What is beyond debate, however, is that the Jews’ romance with Bildung often led to assimilation, to a serious attenuation if not loss of an affirmative Jewish identity. Hence, it was natural that the acculturation implied by Bildung would be regarded with profound suspicion by many guardians of Jewish tradition. Their apprehensions were evoked not necessarily by the secular inflections of Bildung—­for there were traditional Jews who consciously sought to wed Torah observance with Bildung;28 it was rather the blurring of the boundaries between Jewish and “alien” culture which Bildung seemed to promote that often aroused a militant opposition to an openness to the Other and non-­Jewish

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 19

cultures. Led by the renowned rabbinic sage Hatam Sofer (Moses Schreiber, 1762–­1839), this sizable community of traditional Jews was convinced that the erasure of cultural boundaries would lead to the demise of Judaism and Jewry. In his “last will and testament,” which to this very day is the vade mecum of ultra-­ Orthodox Jewry, Hatam Sofer beseeches all God-­fearing Jews to preserve the integrity of Torah-­true Judaism.29 He elaborates what he means by integrity by rendering the Hebrew for the term integrity (whole), shalem, as an acronym, sh (a)-­l-­(e)m. He notes that the first letter, shin, stands for Shemot, “names,” commenting that Jews are forbidden to have non-­Jewish names, so one must reject the practice initiated with the Enlightenment of calling oneself and one’s children by “Gentile” names—­Paul, Anthony, Klaus, Ivan, Gertrude, or Barbara. The second letter, lamed, stands for Leshonot, “languages”: it is forbidden for Jews to learn non-­Jewish languages other than for purely instrumental purposes; to learn the languages of the Other’s community is to enter his or her cognitive universe. The last letter of the acronym, mem, Hatam Sofer concludes, stands for Malbush, “sartorial codes”: Jews are forbidden to dress like non-­Jews; they must maintain a distinctively Jewish attire. Although pronounced by a learned rabbi and exegete of God’s revealed teachings, this conception of Jewish integrity is unabashedly sociological: by screening out the Other’s culture, Jews will secure the integrity of their national and religious identity. The scandal of assimilation could only be avoided by social and cultural insularity. Historical experience certainly seems to have vindicated Hatam Sofer. He has hundreds of descendants, whereas Moses Mendelssohn—­the first Jew to embrace the challenge of Bildung publicly, a distinction that earned for him this rabbi’s unbridled scorn—­has no contemporary Jewish descendants. From this per­ spective, ultra-­Orthodox Judaism must be viewed as a modern Jewish identity. Its dialectical twin is Zionism, the movement for Jewish national rebirth that has been equally obsessed with stemming the tide of assimilation. Rather than the cultural re-­ghettoization of the Jews, however, Zionism holds that the regathering of the

20

Chapter One

Jews in their ancestral homeland would allow them collectively30 not only to rejoin the family of nations but also to participate in world culture without courting a loss of ethnic dignity and self-­ esteem. By creating the sociological conditions for Jewish cultural autonomy—­the establishment of a society in which Jews would constitute the majority population, the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language embracing secular activity and experience, and the recasting of the sacred sources and memories of Judaism into a national literature and historical memory—­Zionism has sought to sponsor the possibility of the Jews’ uninhibited encounter with other cultures unfettered by the fear of assimilation.31 Cultural autonomy as envisioned by the Zionists, therefore, encourages the translation of the works of other cultures into Hebrew and hence their transformation into a Jewish cultural discourse, or at least their integration into the discourse of Jews such that these expressions of non-­Jewish experience are free of the structural antagonism to Jewish culture and identity prevailing in the Diaspora, where the Jews are a vulnerable cultural minority. Zionism assumed that under the aforementioned conditions, cultural autonomy would ipso facto spare the Jewish community reconstituted in Zion from the scourge of confused identities consequent to participation in various and even contrasting cognitive and axiological worldviews. The assumption governing the Zionists’ confidence is basically twofold: social and linguistic autonomy or separation—­a position Hatam Sofer and his ultra-­ Orthodox followers would endorse—­and a proud affirmation of national Jewish identity would protect the Jews from assimilation, even when open to Others and their cultural universe. While this assumption is in principle sound, the mechanism allowing—­also encouraging—­openness to a plurality of cultures and identities is far more complicated than that contemplated by the Zionists. Typical of other nationalist movements, Zionists sponsored the concept of one essential Jewish identity—­here I should note parenthetically that the term identity is somewhat of an anachronism in this context, for as a cultural and social-­

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 21

psychological category it entered both scholarly and popular discourse only after World War Two, primarily with the writings of Kurt Lewin32 and Erik Erikson,33 both incidentally but perhaps not fortuitously Jews. In Zionist discourse, one had previously spoken of national consciousness and continuity.34 Be that as it may, the Zionists held that there was one essential and enduring Jewish national identity, into which all one’s experiences are gathered and integrated. It was this identity that Zionism came to strengthen and adapt to the secular and political realities of the modern world. This premise, which continues to determine Zionist politics of identity, is undermined by the fact, rendered dramatically man­­ ifest with the “ingathering of the exiles” to the State of Israel, that the Zionist project is befuddled by multiple Jewish identities; the identity of Jews from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Poland, and Germany are not homologous. Indeed, they are often rather disparate.35 Furthermore, contrary to the essentialist view of identity, the various identities one may acquire need not be continuous. One’s evolving identities—­as well as experiences and social and ideological affiliations—­may be radically discontinuous.36 This fact has often engendered certain anxiety among Jews who feel that their Jewishness should retain a salience, lest it is swallowed up in a vortex of competing identities. Some hundred years ago, the philosopher and social critic Gustav Landauer (1870–­1919) published an essay, “Are These Heretical Thoughts?”37 in which he boldly challenged his fellow Jews. The latter felt that to overcome these perplexities, it would be best to retreat into a more exclusively Jewish cultural universe. Defending his simultaneous attachment to Judaism and other cultures, Landauer asserted, “I never felt the need to simplify myself or to create an artificial unity by way of denial; I accept my [cultural] complexity and hope to be an even more multifarious unity than I am now aware of being.”38 The Nobel laureate in literature Elias Canetti (1894–­ 1995) echoed similar sentiments when, during the dark years of the Holocaust, he protested, “Should I harden myself against the Russians because there are Jews, against the Chinese because

22

Chapter One

they are far away, against the Germans because they are possessed by the devil? Can’t I still belong to all of them, as before, and nevertheless be a Jew?”39 As moderns, Jews have adopted “other peoples’ myths,” notes the American Jewish Indologist Wendy Doniger in an autobiographical essay.40 As she poignantly relates, her journey into the spiritual world of the Indian continent is not to be construed as a mere act of scholarly empathy. Instead, it reflects a personal quest to expand her cultural sensibilities and humanity. But as Doniger acknowledges, her eager embrace of a multicultural ethos came at the expense of her Jewish cultural inheritance, which was relegated to select ethnic sentiments and culinary delights, and consciously modulated lest it becloud her “larger” universal commitments. The problematics of living with evolving and ever-­shifting identities, especially in the case of post-­traditional Jews, are the subject of  Woody Allen’s cinematographic satire Zelig (1983)41—­ pronounced with a distinctive Yiddish lilt, Tzhelig. The eponymous hero of the film, portrayed by Allen, is so adept at identifying with others that he merely needs to behold an Other to instantaneously take on his physiognomy, tonality of voice, and body language. Zelig thus becomes a Black person, a Frenchman, an Irishman, an Italian, an Indian, a Chinese, and even a Nazi. A cultural chameleon—­or, as some have punned, a shlemielon—­ he has access to all cultures but in effect belongs to none.42 An allegory on acculturation,43 Allen’s Zelig points to the predicament of syncretism: the multiplication of cultural identities leads to their amalgamation and confounding dilution. Here is the possible significance of Allen’s counterhero, whose name is Yiddish for “blessed,” an appellation usually reserved for the deceased. This suggests that the film is Allen’s eulogy for the Jews of modernity who in their mad, frenzied rush to be part of other peoples’ cultures have lost a firm grounding in their own culture and identity, thus bringing about spiritual death to both.44 Parenthetically, this is a fact that Allen does not mourn.

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities 23

Allen’s reflections, of course, extend beyond the specific plight of the modern Jew; they bear on the inescapably plural character of contemporary identity in general. The potential contradictory and centrifugal thrust of these identities threatens those who wish to secure the integrity of a particular cultural identity; it also troubles those who feel that a healthy ego identity should be cohesive, harmonious, and integrative. Postmodern critics of this conception of cultural and personal identity argue that it is not only out of kilter with the temper of the times but also fundamentally flawed, for identities are always multilayered and differentiated. Accordingly, as one critic put it, we need a concept of identity that tolerates “not only greater complexity, but confusion, chaos, and non-­sense.”45 The confusion and interminable chaos born of the multiplication of often contradictory identities have a moral fundament: the modern ethos calls on us to extend our imaginative and empathetic faculties to embrace the Other, and to integrate the Other into our souls, indeed to regard the Other as a treasured source of self-­knowledge. The nineteenth-­century American poet Walt Whitman gave a lyrical evocation of this ethos in his poem Song of Myself : I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child, as well as a man. . . . Through me many long dumb voices. Voices of interminable generations of slaves, Voices of prostitutes and deformed persons, Voices of the diseased and the despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs. . . . Do I contradict myself ? Very well, then . . . I contradict myself; I am large . . . I contain multitudes.46

24

Chapter One

From the Jewish perspective (as that of any particularistic culture), the epistemological and ethical challenge of plural identities would be to determine the mechanism that allows us to honor our bewildering and often chaotic—­some would say delectably chaotic—­mélange of ever-­multiplying (and subtracting) identities while providing a measure of Jewish continuity. In the following chapters, I will seek to elucidate such a mechanism.

2 Jewish Cultural Memory: Its Manifold Configurations My being a Jew and a German at the same time does not do me any harm, but actually a lot of good, just as two brothers, a first-­born and a Benjamin, are loved by their mother—­not in the same way but with equal intensity. And just as these two brothers can live in peace with one another whenever their paths cross and whenever they go in different ways—­just so I experience this strange and yet intimate unity in duality within myself as something precious and do not distinguish one element of this relationship as primary, and the other as secondary. I have never felt the need to simplify myself or to create an artificial unity by way of denial; I accept my complexity and hope to be an even more manifold unity than I am now aware of. — g u s tav l a n d a u e r 1

Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between Jew and Greek. . . . “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet!” —jacq ue s derrida2

Were we to cast anew Greek mythology, the god of diverse identi­ ties—­which we characterized in the previous chapter as the signa­ ture of the modern self—­would be Proteus. The son of Poseidon, the god of the seas, Proteus was reputedly the supreme source of knowledge past, present, and future. From afar and near, many

26

Chapter Two

would come to seek his sapient counsel, but he was reluctant to divulge what he knew. When approached, he would elude his importunate interlocutors by changing his form: now he was a lion, now a serpent, a leopard, a boar, a tree, fire, water. Proteus would change his shape and external identity, Homer tells us, much as the ever-­changing seas, together with his father and siblings.3 But Proteus was no chameleon such as Woody Allen’s Zelig. His sense of self remained firm; his shifting external identities were but strategies of dissimulation meant to protect the integrity of the wisdom with which he was blessed. In contrast, in changing his identity with the ease and celerity of a chameleon, Allen’s Zelig has no secure sense of self; his swiftly changing identities mask at best a withered self, shriveled by his desperate attempts to pass. Proteus, however, hid—­or rather protected—­his self behind the shifting persona he devised to fend off what he regarded as a hostile, intrusive world. Here our allegory breaks down. For we have argued that protean—­a term derived from Proteus—­ identities are a source of self-­knowledge and moral depth. As such, multiple cultural affiliations ennoble our humanity. But it is precisely in order to secure the ontological and moral dignity of the various identities we bear that the tale of Proteus takes on added, albeit paradoxical significance. As Homer relates, Proteus’s oscillating identities often followed the frenetic, unpredictable rhythms of the sea, and so Proteus serves to alert us to the danger that multiple identities might also lead to a schizoid frenzy of a persona that threatens the very integrity Proteus sought to secure. Indeed, a febrile multiplication of identities is liable to undermine the sta­bility of the self. Here it is important to note that although coterminous, the self and identity are not to be regarded as terminological synonyms.4 The self is the biographical and psychological center of an individual, whereas identity is a cultural, social, and political construct that enables the self to place its story in the context of a given community and its narrative. Accordingly, someone may have a weak sense of self and, correspondingly, a strong sense of social and communal identity, and vice versa. Indeed, the self and identity may be in tension. Proteus’s recurrent attempts

Jewish Cultural Memory 27

to evade his interlocutors by donning different identities suggest such tension. To be sure, the self cannot be facilely abstracted from one’s primordial historical and cultural identity, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us. Affirming what he holds to be the indisputable need for the self to be anchored in “the narrative unity of the human life,” he observes, “The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity [that is, my social, political, cultural and historical identity], and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide.”5 The self is born into a community, which provides it with a social identity initially through its family and in quick succession with a linguistic, cultural, religious, social, and political identity. We do not choose our primordial identities, although, to be sure, we may in time come to modify, jettison, or add to those identities. Indeed, that is the very heart of the problem addressed under the rubric of cultural disjunctions. To illustrate how this problematic appertains to the Jews of modernity, I should like to make a quick historical and sociological excursus. In doing so, I will argue that the liberation of the Jews from the ghettos of Europe may have enhanced the individual Jew’s sense of self with the furthering of opportunities of personal economic and professional advancement. Frequently, however, this enhancement came at the expense of a weakened Jewish identity or the rendering of one’s affiliation to Judaism as no longer merely a matter of birth and primordial inheritance but now one of choice.6 As Woody Allen ironically put it, “I am Jewish but with an explanation!”7 The explanation for affirming one’s Jewish affiliation is now buffeted between the claims of the “supernatural Jew”—­bound by the Torah and the divinely appointed covenant—­and the “natural Jew,” who attends to the mundane pragmatics of life.8 The secular, individualistic ethos of the modern world ever increasingly favors the natural Jew. Rather than simply seeing this process as one of assimilation,

28

Chapter Two

with an attendant loss of Jewish literacy and religious commitment, I should like to nuance our understanding of this process by viewing the Jews’ passage into the modern world as having taken place under the patronage of Proteus, the god of multiple identities, and to argue that the modern Jew’s adoption of the cultural and social identities of others need not compromise an attachment to the community of her birth and its cultural universe. However, that has often been the case. Anglican bishop Kenneth Cragg (1913–­2012), an eminent and sympathetic student of Islam, observed that we should study religion as a complex of distinctive but ultimately overlapping phenomena. Alluding to the three Rs of education—­Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic—­he spoke of the three Cs of religion: Creed, Cult, and Community.9 With respect to traditional Judaism, I would add some Cs. In addition to Creed, Cult, and Community, we may also speak of Code (namely, the Halakhah) and the Covenant (ha-­Brit), signified by the Circumcision of its male members (Brit Milah). And beyond the religious components constitutive of Judaism, we have the Cs of Cuisine and Comedy. We must not downplay the significance of the latter two Cs. Long after he converted to Christianity, the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–­1856), in a parody of Schiller’s celebrated “Ode to Joy,” waxed eloquently about his nostalgia for his mother’s Sabbath cholent: For today is the Sabbath. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At noon there shall steam for Thee a dish That is every truth divine—­ Thou eat cholent today! Cholent, a ray of light immortal Cholent, Daughter of Elysium! So had Schiller’s song resounded.10

This expression of a lingering Jewish sentiment,11 as Rosenzweig noted about his family’s withered Judaism, is akin to a souvenir.12 It may evoke feelings of nostalgia, a wistful affection for what

Jewish Cultural Memory 29

was, but merely as a fond memory, as it does not mark a present reality in one’s life. Yet, as in the case of Heine, these sentiments continued to percolate and, at a given existential juncture in his life, prompted teshuvah, a reawakening of an earnest and sustained engagement in matters Jewish.13 With their exit from the ghettos of Europe—­or rather their entrance into the modern world sponsored by the Enlightenment and their political emancipation, the Jews’ allegiance to these Cs began to totter. New, essentially (indeed aggressively) secular ways of thinking about the world often led to an eclipse of the Creed informing traditional Judaism. Consequently, fidelity to the Cult—­the religious practices enjoined by the Torah as the Word of God—­began to weaken; the comprehensive religious Code governing the interpersonal and communal life of a Jew was similarly compromised; a sense of community proved more enduring, although for an ever-­increasing number of Jews communal sentiment was no longer understood as marked and ruled by the Covenant. And a sense of Jewish community also began to attenuate as Jews bonded with other communities and cultural concerns. This process commenced in late eighteenth-­ century central and western Europe, which hosted relatively small Jewish populations. The greater part of the world Jewish population—­in 1880, an estimated 75 percent of all Jews—­then resided in eastern Europe, which lagged behind the rest of Europe in the march toward political and economic modernity. There the forces of Enlightenment and liberalism, which promoted the emancipation of central and western Jewry, were endorsed but in a sporadic and mostly half-­hearted manner, thus hardly affect­ ing the sad lot of eastern European Jewry. Ironically, it was instead the forces of reaction that thrust the Jews of eastern Europe into the modern world. In the 1880s, a ferocious wave of pogroms broke out in czarist Russia, and in their wake, a terrified Jewry began to flee, launching the great migration of millions of Jews. In the quest of what were hoped to be safe havens in the West, Russian Jews were soon joined by Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Galician, and Baltic Jews. The figures are well known: by 1914,

30

Chapter Two

nearly three million Jews had left eastern Europe, perhaps some three-­quarters of whom found refuge in the Americas; by 1930, the number had risen to four million Jewish emigrants, with nearly three million settling in the United States. In all, as much as one-­third, perhaps more, of eastern European Jewry fled to the West. The cultural and social consequence of this massive emigration was seismic.14 The Jews of eastern Europe had lived in huge demographic concentrations, which allowed them to maintain a large degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy. A census conducted by the czarist authorities in the late 1890s revealed that over 95 percent of the Jewish population spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue. Knowledge of Hebrew, both as a sacred language and increasingly as a vehicle of secular expression, was also widespread. Correspondingly, a vibrant and varied Jewish cultural life was being conducted in Yiddish and Hebrew. Hence, as late as the close of the nineteenth century, 75 percent of the Jewish people—­and if we factor in the Jews of the Near East, who at the time constituted just under 10 percent of world Jewry, the figure would be 85 percent—­still lived a distinctively Jewish way of life. The massive migration meant the demographic dispersion of the Jews into many different countries of the West, where their cultural and linguistic integrity would soon be undermined. Although initially they gathered in their new homes—­London, Buenos Aires, Paris, New York City—­in tight communities, where they maintained a semblance of the cultural and linguistic universe they had brought with them, within a generation the prevailing sociological and political realities would leave their mark. The Jews now adopted many different languages as their mother tongue, with a corresponding loss of knowledge of Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew—­and thus ready access to the literature that was the principal fount of what we will presently define as the cultural memory of Judaism. The overarching significance of this development, as the Zionist publicist Ahad Ha’am (1856–­1927) observed in well-­nigh Cassandran terms, was the fracturing of the cultural unity of the

Jewish Cultural Memory 31

Jewish people, and the unraveling of the fabric of the shared symbolic and cognitive universe that had sustained them throughout the millennia. He regarded the resulting cultural fragmentation as the most urgent problem facing the Jewish people, indeed more pressing than anti-­Semitism. His proffered solution is well known and need not detain us here, other than to note that he held that the reconstitution of the cultural unity of the Jewish people would require a radical accommodation of Judaism to the prevailing mod­­ ern humanistic and secular values. He and his colleagues in the Zionist movement—­among them A. D. Gordon, Haim Nachman Bialik, and Martin Buber—­made various suggestions for how this was to be achieved, but they were confronted by seemingly intractable antinomies consequent to the attempt to translate fundamentally religious categories and values into secular terms—­antinomies, if I may make an all too facile and apodictic observation, that Zionism, that is, Israeli culture, has yet to resolve. Here it will suffice to note a grand paradox of the Jewish experience of modernity. Although Jews have on the whole fared exceptionally well economically and professionally in the modern world, and have made seminal contributions to the shap­ ing of the cultural, social, and economic institutions of mod­ ernity,15 their participation in the new order was not prepared for by an immanent process within Judaism itself. As R. J. Zwi Wer­­blowsky somewhat whimsically put it, “Jewry did not enter modern European society in a long process of endogenous gestation and growth. Still, they plunged into it as the ghetto walls were being breached, with a bang, though not without prolonged whimpers.”16 Certainly, there are various theologies and ideologies—­Lib­­ eral, Reform, Conservative, Neo-­Orthodox, Religious Zionism—­ that seek to adjust Judaism culturally and theologically to modernity. No matter how we may assess these religious adjustments, they do not belie the fact that the origins of the modern world and the ethos that sustains it are not intrinsically a product of Judaism. Although some anti-­Semites—­such as Werner Som­­ bart17—­have argued otherwise, insisting that the modern world

32

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is a curse spun from the womb of that religion, no serious scholar has traced the origins of the founding attitudes and values of the modern economic and political order to Judaism, such as Max Weber had demonstrated with respect to certain developments in Protestantism as the source of the “spirit of capitalism.” Although the attitudes and values nurturing the modern ethos did not emerge from within Judaism, we may ask whether Judaism as a distinct system of religious knowledge and value nonetheless found a home in the modern world. Werblowsky’s quip that with the opening of the gates of the ghetto, where Jewish tradition reigned supreme, Jews rushed to embrace the modern world with “a bang, though not without prolonged whimpers,” implicitly suggests not. The whimpers express a certain sense of dislocation, a festering unease that raises a phenomenological and theological question whether Judaism finds itself—­or at least should find itself—­in tension with the metaphysical and axiol­ ogical presuppositions informing the modern world. I shall re­­ turn to this issue in chapter 5, “Within and Beyond Borders,” where I consider it from the perspective of the post-­traditional Jewish realities I have just adumbrated. For better or worse, post-­traditional Jewry finds itself in the modern world. It is a Jewry for which the Cs—­the Creed, Code, Cult, Community, and Covenant—­that had served to secure Jewish identity are no longer self-­evident. Post-­traditional Jews live without the protective insularity of a tradition grounded in a bounded cultural and linguistic space that ensures the continuity of Jewish identity. Post-­traditional Jews, especially in the Diaspora, belong to residential, professional, recreational, political, and cultural communities that are not necessarily contiguous with one another, not to say coterminous with the ethnic and religious community of their birth. Unlike their ancestors in the Old Country—­whether in Europe or the Near East—­they no longer live, play, and work exclusively with their fellow Jews. They read Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Darwin, Freud, Foucault, Wittgenstein—­and hence no longer read or are able to read the texts of Jewish tradition without the critical insights

Jewish Cultural Memory 33

of these and other savants of the modern world. They not only share the critical reflexes of their fellow moderns but also read the same books and newspapers, view the same TV programs, attend the same concerts and theater performances as do their non-­Jewish neighbors. In short, post-­traditional Jews do not occupy a cultural space restricted to their fellow Jews. As I have argued in the first chapter, they have multiple social and cultural identities—­identities that engage their passion and imagination. To be sure, we should not forget that the modern world has also wrought diabolic forces that have sought to keep the Jews socially and politically apart, but rarely have these succeeded in alienating the Jews from their new cultural universe. Their devotion to that universe was particularly manifest during the Third Reich, when the Nazis fiendishly rescinded the emancipation and pushed them back into a ghetto. Resisting spiritual degradation, the disinherited Jews of Hitler’s Europe affirmed their humanity through an abiding and defiant affirmation of “humanistic culture.”18 Nor does the Zionist project seek to modulate—­through the reconstruction of a circumscribed Jewish social space, secured not only by political sovereignty in the Land of Israel but also by the renewal of Hebrew as the country’s regnant vernacular—­ the Jews’ multicultural affiliations. In this respect, Zionism is consciously post-­traditional. From the very outset, there were Zionists who understood the task of the movement to be forging a cultural discourse that would, in the words of Martin Buber, acknowledge that modern Jews dwell in multiple cultures: “We [ Jews] need to be conscious of the fact that we are a cultural ad­­ mixture, in a more poignant sense than any other people.” But he hastened to add, “We do not, however, wish to be slaves to this admixture, but its masters.”19 From a theoretical perspective, the challenge posed by Buber could be formulated as the determination of a mode of cultural discourse that would allow Jews to honor their bewildering and chaotic assemblage of ever-­multiplying and shifting identities while providing a measure of Jewish or culture-­specific continuity.

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Such a mode of discourse is elucidated, I believe, by the concept of cultural memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis) proposed by Aleida and Jan Assmann.20 Cultural memory, as the Assmanns con­­ ceive of it, is a form of knowledge—­evolving across the genera­ tions21—­specific to a particular group, and by which a given com­­ munity “bases its consciousness of its unity and specificity,” in other words its self-­image and identity. Cultural memory has its terminus a quo in “fateful events in the past”—­historically or otherwise conceived—­the memory of which is maintained through a variety of mnemonic activities that constitute the cultural life specific to the group. The Assmanns emphasize that these mnemonic expressions are not confined to the written word but also have musical, pictorial, and ritual iterations. Hence, cultural memory may be embodied in art, architecture, monuments, ceremonies, historic and sacred landscapes, law, folklore, humor, literature, music, collective narratives, philosophy, poetry, ritual, song, symbols, theology, and so on. What is crucial is that all these mnemonic expressions have a canonical or semicanonical status in a specific society, thus serving “to stabilize” its cultural identity across the generations. By creating “memory spaces” within the context of everyday life, these activities and gestures constitute “islands of [transcendental] time.” They thus are also the focus of the structures of meaning, values, and norms that determine the conduct and self-­understanding of the group. The Assmanns highlight two moments characteristic of cultural memory that are especially significant for our discussion. The first is that the primary impulse that draws members of a particular group to its cultural memory is not a general “theoretical curiosity” to acquire knowledge but the desire to belong, “the need to identify.” Second, although canonical knowledge, cultural memory is continuously being reconstructed, revisited in light of present circumstances and perceptions. It is thus not a simple retrieval of knowledge—­as in a cybernetic system—­stored in the collective archives of a culture; it is rather the recontextualization of that knowledge, or, if you wish, a

Jewish Cultural Memory 35

Vergegenwärtigung (the rendering of the past as the present). As a contemporized past and a recontextualized knowledge, cultural memory is a process governed by given modes of response. These modes reflect varying attitudes and ideological postures toward the present that may be adapted from one’s encounter with other cultures and systems of knowledge. Following the Assmanns, we may delineate three essential modes of how the bearers of a cultural memory encounter and accommodate new configurations of reality, experiences, information, and sources of knowledge and meaning.22 One is a rigidly conservative posture that seeks to ensure the preeminence of the inherited cultural memory by veiling it in dogmatic garments, resisting all that might threaten its purported integrity. A second posture is that which, while still basically defensive, employs a hermeneutic strategy allowing for a constructive response to the challenge of alternative conceptions of reality and horizons of values. This mode of response fosters a dialectic ebb and flow between innovation and continuity. Yet when confronting fundamentally different positions, this posture of cultural encounter invariably falls prey to dogmatic self-­enclosure. The third mode of cultural memory is guided by a self-­reflective attitude, promoting a critical awareness of the presuppositions, prejudices, and blind spots, as it were, of one’s culture; most significantly, this mode acknowledges the polyphonic character of its evolution. By assuming a tolerant attitude toward the plural voices within their tradition, the custodians of cultural memory are implicitly aware that no culture is utterly insular and untouched by other, “alien” cultures. Indeed, as the Palestinian-­ American scholar Edward Said noted, virtually all cultures, undoubtedly so-­called high cultures, evolve in interaction with other cultures. “Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures assume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.”23 A self-­reflective, critical mode of cultural memory is thus undogmatic, pluralistic, and inclusive. To support the type of multicultural sensibility that I unapologetically celebrate, it would have to be augmented by a determination to

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minimize the “Othering” that any affirmative assumption of a cultural and thus political identity inevitably entails. The vectors of identity are many; it projects a society’s self-­image, but it also perforce defines social boundaries, excluding the Other who stands beyond those boundaries both cognitively and socially. Self-­image bears in its breast an image of the non-­self. This is the antinomy—­an irresolvable paradox—­faced by all those who are bound to a particular cultural memory, whose compassion and humanity also alert them to the dangers of a self-­insularity and exclusion. The ambiguities and challenges of a multicultural Jewish identity may be illustrated by how individuals organize their library and thus their spiritual and intellectual universe. In an autobiographical essay, Walter Benjamin tells of moving to a new apartment and unpacking his library from the crates that had transported his books to their new abode.24 While removing his books in the reverse order in which he had placed them in the crates, he reflects on the random, often fortuitous manner in which the books were acquired. But once they got placed on the shelves of his library, they gained an order, at least in Benjamin’s imagination. As constellated in his library, the tomes formed a distinctive bibliophilic and intellectual landscape, marking the by-­ways of his spiritual biography. To be sure, the order the books attained on the shelves of Benjamin’s library may not have been readily discerned by others, who may even have had difficulty in grasping the inner logic of his collection. This was the experience of a colleague at the University of Chicago, Wendy Doniger, whose housekeeper of many years once decided to express her affection for Wendy by rearrang­ing what she deemed her beloved employer’s chaotic library. With great care, she rearranged Wendy’s voluminous collection of books according to size and color. All volumes with an eleven-­inch spine, for instance, were placed next to one another, and then yellow ones were placed with yellow, black with black, red with red tomes . . . Naturally, upon returning home, Wendy was aghast. Her housekeeper’s aesthetic judgment, as charmingly naive

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as it was, did not correspond to the inner coherence the library had for Wendy. Clearly, the order or chaos of a personal library is in the eyes of the beholder. The image of unpacking and reordering one’s library may be viewed as an extended metaphor for the cultural journey—­and its ever-­shifting, protean cognitive and spiritual landscapes—­of the post-­traditional Jew. The eclectic and perhaps idiosyncratic principles by which post-­ traditional, secularized Jews25—­ secularized culturally but not necessarily nonreligious or bereft of traditional Jewish literacy—­ constellate their libraries may be compared with those determining the structure of the traditional Jewish library. In Hebrew, we would say, to compare the ‘aron ha-­sefarim ha-­yehudi (the Jewish bookcase) of the traditional Jew with the ‘aron ha-­sefarim shel ha-­yehudi ha-­khiluni (the bookcase of the secular Jew). Note the asymmetrical grammar of this proposed comparison. In the first part, the Jewish bookcase, Jewish is an adjective modifying or rather characterizing the bookcase of the traditional Jew; whereas in the second, the bookcase of the secular Jew, Jew is a noun and is in a genitive relation to that individual’s bookcase, and as such says nothing about the content or character of the secularized, post-­traditional Jew’s library. For indeed, the bookcase of the secular Jew need not necessarily be Jewish, certainly is not exclusively constituted by books of  Jewish content or interest. And should the secular Jew’s library contain books that may be classified as Jewish, they are not the only ones that occupy its shelves or even pride of place. Whatever Jewish books the secularized Jew may have, they may not per se be regarded as their owner’s most significant bibliographic possessions. But in referring to the bookcase of the secularized Jew—­as opposed simply to the secular Jew—­by virtue of the emphatic verb secularized, I wish to highlight this Jew’s consciousness of standing in an engaged relation to the canon of traditional Judaism, though perhaps critical while nonetheless a deeply felt relation. For the secularized Jew, Jewish books may indeed occupy pride of place in her library.26 Yet since they are not the only books in her library and in fact might constitute but a small

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portion of her collection, the question arises regarding their organization. How are the books to be cataloged? According to which principles, formal or otherwise, are they shelved? What are the criteria by which they are acquired? Who sets the acquisition policy? Does the collection reflect some conception of books that are de rigueur and thus must be included in one’s library and around which one’s collection is to be constructed? Does the library reflect some basic intellectual curriculum, and if so, does any one canon predominate, or perhaps the library contains multiple, competing canons? Finally, do the selection and ordering of the library reflect distinctive reading practices, guided by defined hermeneutic and epistemological presuppositions? The answer to the latter question, which is also the capstone of the others, may be garnered by considering Paul J. Griffiths’s study on religious reading practices.27 He argues that religious people, individuals who read religious text with a distinctive faith commitment, adopt reading practices that imply “an epistemology, a set of views about what [true] knowledge is and about the relations between reading and the acquisition and retention of knowledge” (64). Further, as a religious act, “religious reading presupposes a select list of works worth reading, things that must be read, and read religiously, as well as a concomitant (and much longer) list of works not worth reading. These things ought not to be read, or at least not religiously. The ideal type of such approved list is the canon; its complement is the index, in the sense of index librorum prohibitorum” (75). Acknowledging a heteronomous ecclesiological authority that determines both the canon and the ultimate meaning of what is to be read (and what is to be excluded from one’s bibliographic purview), religious readers yield to doxastic or belief-­forming practices that allow them to perceive the transcendent truth and meaning inscribed in the texts regarded as sacred. Accordingly, religious reading entails the assumption of a given epistemic attitude—­namely, a belief that what is to be read in the sacred writings of one’s faith community is incontestably true.

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To highlight the nature of religious reading, Griffiths contrasts its epistemological assumptions with those of secular readers. Whereas secular readers assume the prerogative of determining what is true, meaningful, and valuable on the basis of their own “autonomous” reason and experience, Griffiths argues, religious readers are guided by criteria external to their self, criteria forged by tradition and the transcendent authority encoded in that tradition. “Indeed, as Augustine pointed out a long time ago, without the submission to the authoritative direction [informing] religious reading, you won’t even be able to comprehend what the epistemic and ethical benefits of such reading are, much less provide a justification for them” (75). We cannot, Grif­­ fiths explains, affirm the truth of sacred texts “without already assuming” that they do indeed bear the truth and thus intrinsic, sublime meaning (75). Bemoaning the eclipse of religious reading ushered in by the Enlightenment and the attendant ascendancy of the liberal ethos, “market economics,” and the ever-­intensifying onrush of con­ sumer culture, Griffiths derogatorily characterizes secular reading as “consumerist,” for in his judgment it is principally inspired by an instrumental and individualistic ethic (70). He likens secular reading practices, especially as sponsored by the university, to the accumulation of money as a means to maximize one’s purchasing power and choice; secular reading must thus be regarded as an “appendage of late capitalism” (68). Griffiths’s depiction does not exhaust the nature of secular reading, however. For one, secular readers would protest that not only religious reading offers “an endlessly nourishing garden of delights” (68). Secular reading is not confined to the instrumental and pragmatic, nor is it bereft of spiritual quest, of a passionate concern for the sublime and the ethical.28 Nonetheless, secularists would readily acknowledge that their reading practices and the epistemic stance that informs them radically diverge from those characterizing traditional religious reading. Moreover, this epistemological shift borne by new images of knowledge and

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conceptions of what constitutes knowledge and its acquisition also sponsors new conceptions of value, meaning, and human worth.29 But lest secularists beget the scandal of hubris, they must be quick to acknowledge that secular knowledge can be abused, can be rendered trivial, and at times can disfigure the image of the human by fanaticism, intolerance, and violence. To be sure, religious systems of knowledge are not immune to the venom of supercilious arrogance and meanness of spirit. Neither religious nor secular knowledge and values are impervious to human weakness and vile emotions. Both religionists and secularists must be ever vigilant to be on guard against these all-­too-­ human failings. The focus of my reflections is not evaluative and ethical, however. Rather, I wish to expound on the hermeneutical and phenomenological implications of the epistemological shift called secularization, specifically as exemplified by what I would characterize as the post-­traditional Jewish library. The epistemological shift characteristic of the secularization of knowledge has brought in its wake new ways of reading texts, including sacred texts. We need but invoke the name of Spinoza (1632–­1677), who in his Theological-­Political Treatise revisited the claims of biblical theocracy by recommending that scripture be read in “the light of reason” as one would read any other work of nature, that is, as giving expression to human reason and imagination.30 By bracketing if not utterly removing the providential personal God of theistic faith from his reading of Hebrew scripture, the sage of Amsterdam initiated what would in time be called Biblical Criticism. The principles by which secular scholars read scripture are not necessarily those deployed by Spinoza. Still, they share with him the premise that not only should the Bible be read exclusively in the light of human reason, but that its meaning need not be mediated by the commentarial tradition of the rabbis and Christian exegetes. The hermeneutical principles guiding the secular reading of scripture as those determining the reading of all texts are in constant flux. It is the very flux of secular hermeneutics that betrays in Griffiths’s eyes the putative axiological and existential shortcomings of consumer-

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ist reading. The virtue of religious reading is its grounding in an epistemological and hermeneutical “stability and givenness to the world” that secular epistemologies and hermeneutics cannot grant.31 One may add that secular readers may not be particularly interested in establishing or affirming stable epistemologies and hermeneutics; for it is the very nature of the secular epistemic attitude to question, refine, and, if deemed necessary, revise the fundamental premises on which truth and meaning are determined. The intrinsic tentativeness of the secular sensibility is also reflected in how secular readers construct and arrange their libraries. Secu­­ lar readers are continuously shuffling and reshelving their books, occasionally discarding some and placing others high out of ready reach, while making room for newly acquired books offering new and sometimes radically novel perspectives on given themes and subjects. New perspectives invariably lead to new questions, and new questions demand new perspectives. The secularists thus humbly concede that the quest for certain knowledge is Sisyphean. In formulating his program for the revalorization of Jewish learning, Franz Rosenzweig (1886–­1929) expressed appreciation for the secularist’s incorrigible penchant for recurrently posing new questions when he urged Jews alienated from their ancestral tradition to come study at his Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (the Free Jewish House of Study). There they could bring their questions, no matter how heretical or heterodox they may be, and pose them against the sacred texts of classical Judaism. As a result, they would be conducting a dialogue with those texts—­a dialogue driven by their secular questions and their openness to listen to the divine voice resonating in the writings held to be holy.32 In addressing their questions, formulated on the anvil of secular experience, to the sacred literary sources of the tradition, they were to assume an unbiased attentiveness to the primordial answers (Urantworte) inscribed in the texts—­namely, that the world and human existence are ultimately governed by the God of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. But Rosenzweig also knew that for a consistent secularist, no answers could be ultimate; in posing new questions, the secularist resists the temptation to

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find comfort in firm, absolute answers. One is reminded of the words of the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner (1918–­1987), the socialist leader and hero of the Vilna Ghetto uprising, who on his deathbed wrote: Another question. One more. Answers don’t count. Only questions Are allotted to man. And do not conclude. Do not conclude. For God’s sake!33

Toward the end of his tragically brief life, Rosenzweig came to appreciate that not all secular Jews were deracinated souls, lost to the Jewish people and their cultural and religious heritage.34 Some of the most serious Jews he encountered were fundamentally secular in orientation. Associated mainly with cultural Zionism, they were committed to constructing and sustaining Judaism as a national culture consistent with European humanistic values. To capture the full dialectic nuance of their vision of a secularized Jewish culture—­and its relation to the legacy of traditional Judaism—­we should perhaps best speak of their project as the secularization of Jewish cultural memory. Aleida and Jan Assmann deploy the concept of cultural memory to nuance the more prevalent notion of collective memory with a historical and spiritual depth. Weaving this concept back into the image of the bookcase of the secularized Jew—­that is, the secular Jew whose active engagement in if not unquestioned commitment to Judaism is reflected in the significance she attaches to Jewish books that have found a place in her library—­ will facilitate an analysis of its continuities with the traditional Jewish bookcase, despite patent bibliographic and thus cognitive disjunctions between the two. Although the Assmanns do not say so explicitly, the concept of cultural memory is modeled on what literary historians call intertextuality—­namely, the observation that texts are a weave (in Latin, textus) of references to and even citations from other texts. Analogously, cultures develop and gain

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a distinctive identity by, as it were, mutual citation; but citation that is transformative absorbs new meanings and reflects new experiences.35 The Assmanns characterize this process by drawing a term from classical Greek rhetoric, hypolepsis: a speech act of relating to that which the previous speaker has said. In citing others, hypoleptic speech is also an occasion to say something new, building on what others have said, perhaps even inflecting their very words with new meaning. Hypolepsis thus endows dis­­ course with a dialectic dynamic of continuity and development. The hypoleptic character of cultural memory functions in a similarly reflexive fashion. As the Assmanns put it, cultural memory “is self-­reflexive,” for “it draws upon itself to explain, distinguish, reinterpret, censure, control, surpass, and receive hypoleptically.”36 By virtue of its self-­reflexive, hypoleptic nature, cultural memory is hardly a mere static historical repository of memories, literary texts, symbols, and values; it is constantly unfolding and re­ constructing itself, cumulatively and dialectically. Furthermore, it should be underscored, cultural memory is not about giving testimony to past events, nor is it about ensuring cultural continuity per se; rather, it functions as the grammar of a living, dynamic culture. To be sure, hypoleptic discourse is true of both reli­­gious and secular reading. What would distinguish post-­traditional reading is that it honors the concerns—­what the eminent Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886–­1965) called matters of ultimate concern—­that inform the religious texts the secularized, post-­traditional Jew, in our case, regards as her inheritance, and in doing so builds on those texts hypoleptically, drawing from perspectives and reflexes of the imagination of other cultures, indeed of universal human experience. Post-­traditional reading practices so understood imply a dis­­ tinction between cultural heritage and religious tradition. Whereas a cultural heritage embraces the cumulative memories, narratives, folkways, customs, music, dance, and poetry as well as literature of a particular community, a religious tradition attests to the primordial fons et origo of a community’s ultimate, transcendent concerns as they have been refracted hypoleptically over time. In

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this respect, the cultural memory of post-­traditional Jews is not to be subsumed into what is broadly called civil religion, which mobilizes classical Jewish “figures of memory”—­rituals, liturgy ceremonies, festivals, monuments, and symbols—­as well as newly coined figures of memory—­commemorating recent historical events such as the Shoah and the founding of the State of Israel—­to quicken a sense of community. But if I may be allowed a fast and admittedly presumptuous apodictic observation, the figures of memory mediated by civil religion are hardly as compelling as those nurtured by traditional religious practice, not only because civil religion cannot engender the aura—­not to say sensus numinus—­of theistic religion, but also because it is affiliated with inherently evanescent political and ideological postures.37 With the epistemological distinction between a cultural heritage and a religious tradition in mind, we may return to consider the library of the secularized Jew and the cultural memory it reflects and supports. Such a library is indeed constituted by books of heterogeneous traditions and cultural perspectives. And the books of Jewish interest among them may or may not occupy pride of place in the secularized Jew’s library. I underline “interest,” for what constitutes a Jewish book is problematic, at least with respect to a Jewish cultural memory that enjoys a semblance of continuity with traditional Judaism. Are novels dealing with the experience of Jews as lovers, as tormented by an irresolvable Oedipus complex, as Israeli war heroes, as Jewish celebrities of baseball and film, or as persecuted by tyrants and anti-­Semites to be deemed part of Jewish cultural memory, or are they to be understood as a distinctive form of Jewish expression and identity that does not necessarily bespeak of a Jewish cultural identity, at least in the sense honored by Jewish religious tradition? One may demur and challenge my single focus on the religious character of Jewish cultural memory, arguing that what joins these modern expressions of Jewish experience with traditional Judaism is a shared narrative. This is incontestable, but only up to a point—­indeed, only in a limited sense, certainly if

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the terminus a quo of Jewish cultural memory is held to be the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel, or even the trials and tribulations of adjusting to modernity that have marked Jewish experience since the Enlightenment and emancipation. Surely Jewish cultural memory of the secularized Jew must have a greater depth and reach back to the foundational fount of Israel’s—­the Jewish people’s—­memories. These memories are both diachronic and synchronic; historical and transgenerational time certainly blend and establish what I have called, inspired by the musings of Aleida and Jan Assmann, Jewish cultural memory, and the making of a vibrant, ongoing, and spiritually engag­ ing culture. A secularized version of  Jewish cultural memory, I would sub­ mit by way of conclusion, should be constructed on the basis of a Jewish library that lays claim to both the diachronic and the synchronic dimensions of Judaism as a distinctive cultural community. At the same time, secularized Jews would have to acknowledge without apology the cognitive and phenomenological ambiguities that secularization has wrought concerning their relation to a cultural and spiritual heritage that is grounded in religious faith and epistemology. I know of no recipe for living with these ambiguities, other than to embrace them with intellectual and existential integrity. These ambiguities are compounded by the fact that the secularized Jew’s library—­and spiritual landscape—­is no longer exclusively Jewish. As a consequence, the secularized Jew is no longer bonded solely to his or her fellow Jews. By assembling books from diverse cultures, boundaries are lowered and erased; one’s intellectual, imaginative, and emotive gaze reaches beyond the precincts of primordial particularities to embrace all humanity. Thus, the humanistic project that began with the Renaissance to expand one’s library and cultural horizons to include the cultural (and religious) expressions of other communities necessarily has a moral compass and perforce centrifugal impulse. How to accommodate one’s bonds to the larger human family with one’s commitment to Jewish cultural memory remains the supreme challenge facing the secularized, post-­traditional Jew.

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Postscript: Franz Rosenzweig’s Library The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig fastidiously kept his Jewish books apart from the other works that he assembled in his personal library.38 He would object in principle to the placement of Jewish books, particularly those of a sacred nature, within the syncretistic whirl of one’s library.39 Jewish writings thus occu­ pied separate shelves in his library and were not withdrawn to a different room, where they would, in effect, constitute an autonomous library. They, the Jewish sacred writings, essentially stood against his other writings of philosophical and religious interest in a dialogue. Mounted on separate shelves, these works would maintain their distinctive voice as they engaged the other systems of knowledge inscribed in the other volumes in Rosenzweig’s commanding library. Indeed, what Rosenzweig sought was a dialogue between his Jewish bookshelf self—­grounded in a sacred reality of a divine covenant—­and that of his worldly universe of culture, buttressed as it were for him primarily by German literature. The next chapter will be devoted to exploring two alternative but complementary strategies for constituting a post-­traditional Jew­­ish library and cultural memory.

3 Jewish Learning, Jewish Hope The Demise and Renewal of  Talmud Torah Challenged to defend his “dual loyalty” to his ancestral faith and the rational precepts of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn (1724–­1783) penned his duly famous Jerusalem (1783).1 Explaining that Jewish religious observance allows for intellectual freedom, he cited the traditional Jewish reading practice as promoting a cognitive orientation that fosters a critical, rational discourse at the heart of the Enlightenment project. Noting that study of the Torah and its commentaries—­Talmud Torah—­is integral to Jew­­ ish communal worship, he presented it as a means to resist the “idolatry” of the word. Generally, immediately preceding or following the liturgical prayer of the community, Talmud Torah is conducted as a symposium in which members of the community—­be they learned or not—­read together given sacred texts, freely debating their meaning. (The synagogue thus also serves as a Bet Midrash, a House of Learning, which may be in a separate room or even the same space in which the worship service takes place; hence, the synagogue in Yiddish is often simply referred to as a shul, a school.)2

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The standard layout of the texts that are studied—­with the core text in the middle of the page, surrounded by two or more commentaries by different authors and schools of thought from various historical periods—­ encourages questioning and even disagreement. Accordingly, Mendelssohn noted, Talmud Torah complements the “ceremonial laws”—­the mitzvoth—­as “a kind of living script, rousing the mind and heart, full of meaning, never ceasing to inspire contemplation and to provide the occasion and opportunity for oral instruction.”3 The traditional Jewish reading practice was, alas, threatened by the invention of the printing press in the mid-­fifteenth century, because, as Mendelssohn observed, the diffusion of writings and books which, through the invention of the printing press, has been infinitely multiplied in our days, has entirely transformed man. The great upheaval in the whole system of human knowledge and convictions, which it has produced has, indeed, had, on the one hand, advantageous consequences for the improvement of humankind, for which we cannot thank beneficent Providence enough. However, like every good, which can come to man here below, it has also had, incidentally, many evil consequences, which are to be attributed partly to its abuse, and partially even to the necessary condition of human nature. (103)

The sociological implications of the burgeoning of printed books—­ within two decades of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press circa 1449, twenty million had been published—­were far reaching. For Jews, the ever-­increasing availability of printed books served to shift the site of knowledge from the synagogue to the privacy of one’s home, thus undermining the bonds of community forged by Talmud Torah as a communal activity. Far more significantly, it transformed the very nature of knowledge: We teach and instruct one another only through writings; we learn to know nature and man only from writings. We work and relax, edify, and amuse ourselves through excessive writing. The preacher does not converse with his congregation; he reads or declaims to it a written treatise. The professor reads his written lectures from the

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lectern. Everything is a dead letter; the spirit of living conversation has vanished. We express our love and anger in letters, quarrel, and become reconciled in letters; all our personal relations are by corre­­ spondence; and when we get together, we know of no other entertainment than playing or reading aloud. Hence, it has come to pass that man has almost lost his value for his fellow man. (103)

The published author eclipsed the reverence formally paid to the traditional Torah sage (Talmid Chakham), whose wisdom was shared by oral instruction and conversational exchange: Intercourse with the wise man is not sought, for we find his wisdom in writings. All we do is encourage him to write, in case we should believe he has not yet published enough. Hoary age has lost its venerability, for the beardless youth [sic] knows more from books than the old man knows from experience. Whether he understood correctly or incorrectly does not matter; it is enough that he knows it, bears it upon his lips. (103)

The epistemological consequence of the printed word and its ele­­ vated cultural status, Mendelssohn contended, engenders an idola­ trous conception of knowledge. We have seen how difficult it is to preserve the abstract ideas “of religion among men by means of permanent signs. Images and hieroglyphics lead to superstition and idolatry, and our alphabetical script makes a man too speculative. It displays the symbolic knowledge of things and their relations too openly on the surface; it spares us the effort of penetrating and searching and creates too deep a division between doctrine and life” (103). Mendelssohn bemoaned the severing of the intimate bond between the performance of the mitzvoth (ritual commandments) and Talmud Torah ( Jewish learning), both of which in tandem were to “induce” the pious Jew “to engage in reflection” on the extensive meaning of the mitzvoth and the life of  Torah. For each of the “prescribed actions” of  Torah is “closely related to the speculative knowledge of religion and the teachings of morality, and was the occasion for a person in search of truth to reflect on these sacred matters or to seek instruction from wise men [to lead them in Talmud Torah].” To be

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sure, the life of mitzvoth and Jewish learning could also “lead to idolatry through abuse or misunderstanding.” But these also have an “advantage over” the printed word “of not isolating man, of not making him be a solitary creature, poring over writings and books. They impel him rather to social intercourse, to imitation, and oral, living instruction” (103). Mendelssohn’s diagnosis of the desiccation of Jewish spiritual life consequent to the displacement of oral discourse by the writ­­ ten word—­ and the waning of the traditional reading prac­­ tice—­would resurface a century and a half later with the Jewish Renaissance inspired by Franz Rosenzweig (1886–­1929). The contemporary synagogue, Rosenzweig lamented, “no longer acts as a member completing the body of living life. The beadle no longer knocks at house doors to summon us to shul.” He thus ruefully asked, “How many synagogues still have a study room with the heavy folios of the Talmud and its commentaries right next to the room of worship?”4 Although there is no evidence that he drew from Mendelssohn’s analysis, Rosenzweig envisioned renewal of Jewish spiritual life as first and foremost the reestablishment of Jewish learn­­ ing—­learning as a communal activity of shared reading of sacred texts as opposed to the individual study of texts. The immediate inspiration for his vision of re-­centering Judaism in Talmud To­­ rah may have been drawn from the philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–­1918), with whom he discussed at length the need to restructure Jewish education in Germany.5 In a lecture on the need to reform the curriculum of rabbinical seminaries, Cohen noted that the traditional ideal of study was integral to the religious life of the Jew: Worship without the extensive, well-­grounded study of Torah was, in principle, unthinkable. The difference in intellectual capacity would seem to have been the only excuse allowing for a separation of divine worship and Torah study; social differences were, in general, not capable of making such differences, for even a peddler [Hausierjude] could be a great scholar.6

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Cohen attributed the demise of Talmud Torah to a regrettable change in the values of contemporary Judaism to the modern di­­ vision of life and teaching, and concomitantly the separation of worship and study. “So it transpired that since . . . we entered the world of German and general culture, the serious study of Jewish literature among us extensively diminished.”7 It was toward the renewal of Jewish learning as the fulcrum of Jewish spiritual life that Rosenzweig founded the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus—­the Free Jewish House of Study—­a Bet Midrash, in August 1920 in Frankfurt am Main. Although translated as “study,” Lehren in German connotes instruction, teaching, as opposed to Studium, study. In his inaugural address opening the first semester of the Lehrhaus, Rosenzweig underlined this distinction: “Learning—­there are by now, I should say, very few among you unable to catch the curious note the word sounds, even today when it is used in a Jewish context. It is to a book, the Book, that we owe our survival. . . .  The learning of this book became an affair of the people, filling the bounds of Jewish life, completely.”8 Alas, with “one blow,” the traditional manner of Jewish learning came to an end. For in the wake of the emancipation, Jews left the ghetto to enlarge their intellectual horizons. What was new, however, was “not so much the collapse of the outer barriers; even previously, while the ghetto had certainly sheltered the Jew, it had not shut him off. He moved beyond its bounds [intellectually], and what the ghetto gave him was only peace, a home, a home for his spirit. . . . The new feature is that the wanderer no longer returns [home to the ghetto] at dusk.” The Jew now “finds his spiritual and intellectual home outside the Jewish world. The old style of learning is helpless before this spiritual emigration.”9 What is therefore required is a new form of  Jewish learning: “Learning”—­the old form of maintaining the relationship between life and the Book—­has failed. Has it? No, only in the old form. For down at heel as we are, we should not be a sign and a wonder among the peoples, we should not be the eternal people, if our very illness did not beget its own cure. . . . We draw new strength from the very

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circumstances that seemed to deal the deathblow to “learning,” from the desertion of our scholars to realms of the alien knowledge . . . , from the transformation of our erstwhile talmide chachamim into the instructors and professors of modern European universities.10

Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus—­bet ha-­Midrash—­would revive Jewish learning by welcoming Jewish university professors, not as professors but instead merely as Jews to engage in Talmud Torah with their fellow Jews. Indeed, the Lehrhaus welcomed all Jews finding their spiritual and intellectual home beyond the gates of the ghetto and Jewish tradition to engage in Jewish learning—­ and to do so without jettisoning their libraries and the knowledge they acquired in a post-­Enlightenment universe. They would bring this knowledge—­its insights, judgments, concerns, questions—­ to bear on their encounter with traditional Jewish texts. The new “learning” would perforce not start from the Torah and [lead] into life, but the other way around: from life, from the world that knows nothing of the Law [Lehre, i.e., divine teaching], or pretends to know nothing, back to the Torah. That is the sign of the time. It is the sign of the time because it is the mark of the men of the time. There is no one today who is not alienated, or who does not contain within himself some small fraction of alienation [from Judaism]. . . . We all know that in being Jews, we must not give up anything, not to renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism. From the periphery back to the center, from the outside, in.11

Accordingly, the adjective free in the name of Rosenzweig’s House of Study designated its new mode of Jewish learning: all questions and perspectives brought from the “periphery” of the Jewish world would be freely entertained in a dialogical encounter with traditional Jewish texts. (Registration in the courses of the Lehrhaus was not free but rather expensive. Rosenzweig felt that costly tuition would both ensure a serious learning commitment and prevent the Lehrhaus from being construed as mere intellectual entertainment, as was generally the character of institutes of adult education.)12

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What was crucial was that someone who was “groping his way home”13 sought to participate in a dialogue with the sacred texts of the traditional Jewish library. Agreement or endorsement of the views expressed in these writings was not the objective. As Rosenzweig wrote to Martin Buber, “The very fact that you engage me in debate over the issue of observance is what is crucial. You would be parting ways with me only if you were to feel it necessary for you being a Jew to say yes or no.”14 For the inspiration leading to his conception of Talmud Torah for post-­traditional Jews, Rosenzweig credited Orthodox Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel (1871–­1922), learned in both Talmud and Kabbalah.15 Together with many other young intellectuals—­among them Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Nahum Glatzer, and Ernst Akiba Simon—­Rosenzweig would attend Rabbi Nobel’s daily Talmud Torah, which preceded the morning prayers. What impressed him was the rabbi’s openness to questions and reflections drawn from the participants’ worldly culture, particularly as inflected by modern German letters.16 In the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power in January 1933, Buber surrendered his professorship at the University of Frankfurt and assumed the directorship of the Lehrhaus, which had been effectively dormant since Rosenzweig’s death in December 1929. He was determined to have the Lehrhaus serve as the inspirational center for a “spiritual resistance” to the Nazi program of depriving German Jewry of their human dignity, not to say civil rights. Under the circumstances, the renewal of Jewish learning took on a new urgency to restore self-­esteem (amour de soi) that was inner directed and not dependent on what others might think of them.17 Accordingly, Buber launched a program to quicken Jewish learning throughout Germany—­Jewish learning as a spiritual process.18 In contrast to the Socratic conception of knowledge, he told an audience at the Lehrhaus, Jewish learning does not regard cognition and the mere acquisition of knowledge as supreme values. For “Mosaic man . . . is informed with the profound experience that cognition is never enough, that the deepest part of him must be seized by the teachings [of Jewish tradition], that for [their]

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realization to take place his elemental totality must submit to the spirit as clay to the potter.”19 So conceived, Jewish learning is not “the preservation of the old, but the ceaseless begetting and giving birth to the same single spirit, and its continuous integration into life.”20 Buber first articulated his conception of Jewish learning in an essay of 1918 addressed to youth, whose “quest for knowledge knows no limits.”21 In it, he acknowledges the vitality of youth’s “total openness sympathetically . . . to the world’s variegated abundance.” Giving itself to “life’s boundlessness, [youth] has not yet sworn allegiance to any one truth for whose sake it would have to close its eyes to all other perspectives; [nor has] it obligated itself to abide by any norm that would silence all its other aspirations” (149). Buber thus cautions Jewish educators that they would labor in vain to try to “impose” religion on contemporary Jewish youth, seeking to close “all but one of the thousand windows of the circular building in which youth dwells, all but one of the thousands leading into the world” (150). Moreover, Jewish educators are ill advised to present religion as “a dispenser of fixed orientations and norms, or a sum of dogmas and rules” (150). To be sure, Judaism does have a normative structure. Still, it reflects the ongoing endeavor of the “human mind” to render comprehensible the experience of “the effects of the Unconditional” through symbolic expressions of the “knowable and doable” (150). Because this endeavor is ongoing, the symbolic meaning of the dogmas and rules is continuously subject to debate and change. Indeed, as attested to in the sacred literature of Israel, it is a “process of religious struggle and religious creativity” (160), a process by its very nature that is never “finished and unequivocal” (164). For Buber,  Jewish learning provides an entry into the symbolic discourse by which the Jews have traditionally sought to articulate and comprehend the experience of being beckoned by the Unconditional—­the Infinite, the All, God, whom Buber would later call the Eternal Thou. This quest, he contends, is a universal experience. “At some time or other, be it ever so fleeting and

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dim, every person is affected by the power of the Unconditional. The time of life this happens to all, we call youth. . . . What the total openness of youth signifies is that its mind is open not merely to all, but the All” (151). Jewish educators should not be “concerned, then, with imposing religion on youth, or forcing it into a system of the knowable and the doable, but with awakening youth’s own latent religiosity; that means: its willingness to confront, unwaveringly, the impact of the Unconditional” (152). As recorded in the library of classical Jewish texts, Buber continues, the impact of the Unconditional is experienced as a calling, beckoning a response to be manifest by deeds. As a calling, the experience of the Infinite is thus not a so-­called religious experience. “But it may happen, by some odd perversity, that an individual entertains the illusion that he has surrendered himself to the unconditional. . . . He does not know the response; he knows only a mood [Stimmung]. He has psychologized God” (153). Herein lies the significance of joining a community grounded in a tradition of shared learning, and drawing from sources “deeper than of [one’s] private existence.” The person “who is truly bound to his people cannot go wrong, not only because he has at his disposal the symbols and forms that the millennia of his people’s existence have been creating for envisioning as well as serving the unconditional, but because the faculty to create images and forms flows into him from this bond to his people” (154). Turning to his fellow Zionists, Buber gently admonishes them by noting that “solidarity with one’s people” is at most a precondition for Jewish spiritual renewal (159). Accordingly, for post-­traditional Jews, Judaism is not to be conceived as a catalog of abstract concepts selectively garnered from the tradition to resonate as salonfähig (socially acceptable) and contemporary. Instead, “our religious literature” is to be embraced in all its expressions without any a priori judgment of relevance; it “must become the object of reverent and unbiased knowledge” (172). Jews are to immerse themselves in the primordial flow of Jewish learning, “all of it, from its beginnings, through all its ups and downs, conflicts and reconciliations, up

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to ourselves—­the lowly but God-­inspired sons of a transitional generation” who are at the cusp of what Buber envisioned as a renewal of Jewish spiritual life (162). The renewal of Jewish learning, Buber held, should also be the principal mission of the academic study of Judaism. In January 1924, he hurriedly wrote a letter to the executive of the Zionist Organization, which had convened in London to discuss the organization of the soon-­to-­be-­established faculty of the humanities at the Hebrew University.22 In his letter, he appeals to the executive not to follow the European model of higher education, which to maintain “scientific objectivity” divorces scholarship from any didactic, moral, or utilitarian function. Rather, Buber passionately argues, at the nascent university in Jerusalem, the humanities should be taught to serve the cultural and spiritual needs of the yishuv, the Jewish community of  Palestine. What the yishuv —­especially the pioneer youth (chalutzim) who have come to Palestine to realize the Zionist settlement proj­ect23—­needs is not university education. Instead, what is urgently needed is to ensure that the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland, particularly the labor of the youthful chalutzim, be aligned with the renewal of the spiritual life of Jewry (das Geistesleben des Judentums).24 The Hebrew University should assume the responsibility to address this desideratum by teaching contemporary, post-­traditional Jewry how to read Jewish texts. This pedagogical objective would require a radical reconceptualization of the academic study of Judaism as a purely philological and historiograph­ical discipline. Correspondingly, the university would be tasked with “develop[ing] out of the old-­Jewish ‘learning’ ” hermeneu­tical and exegetical principles to facilitate for the modern reader the rediscovery of “the inner aspect of texts and the exploration of their context of meaning [Innenaspekt der Texte und Ihrer Sinn­zusammenhänge].”25 In conjunction with a School for Adult Education (Volkshochschule) adjoined to the university, a program should be developed to transmit “the inner-­Jewish method” to the chalutzim and other members of the Zionist movement in the yishuv.

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In its post-­traditional instantiation, Talmud Torah need not be located only in the synagogue as a complement to the prayer service, but it nonetheless remains the sine qua non for Jewish spiritual life. Buber duly cites a midrash from Genesis Rabbah: Concerning the words of Isaac, the patriarch, “The voice is the voice of  Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Essau” (Gen. 27:22), the Mid­ rash tells this story: Delegates of the other nations were once dispatched to a Greek sage to ask him how the Jews could be subjugated. This is what he said to them: “Go and walk past their houses of prayer and of study. . . . So long as the voice of Jacob rings from their houses of prayer and study, they will not be surrendered into the hand of Esau. But if not, the hands are Esau’s and you will over­­ come them [that is, not be disarmed by their prayers and study of the Torah].”26

The evocation of this midrash carries an implied warning: without “a Jewish house of study,” the reconstruction of Jewish life in Palestine and, indeed, in the Diaspora would lead to the spiritual demise of the Jewish people.27 For “the teachings cannot be severed from the deed, but neither can the deeds be severed from the teachings!”28 The call to revalorize the tradition of Jewish learning in order to nurture and sustain the spiritual and communal rebirth of Jewry would ultimately be met with a measure of ambivalence. For as envisioned by both Buber and Rosenzweig, the renewal of Talmud Torah was neither a mere intellectual exercise nor even an act of cultural memory per se. Rather, it was a call to enter a spiritual discourse that posits the existence of a personal God whose voice is being heard anew in the sacred literary sources of the tradition. But a generation that had gone through the purgatory of secularization and adopted a post-­Kantian metaphysical skepticism would understandably find it difficult to marshal the requisite religious faith to relate to texts other than as documents attesting to Israel’s cultural heritage. But Buber maintained that those who are “alienated” from the Torah and “refuse to adhere

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to its commandments are unable to withstand the impact of the Unconditional and therefore evade it.”29 Surely the affirmation of Talmud Torah as a distinctive religious discourse “requires something more creative than mere commitment” (168). A commitment is, at most, a necessary precondition to experience the divine presence inscribed in the sacred literature. But what remains uncertain is how one is to access the numinous experience. Buber finds the proposition that deed precedes enlightenment (cf. Exod. 24:7: na’aseh ve’nishma) with respect to the Law (the mitzvoth)—­and analogously also the teachings—­to be, at the bottom, fideistic, in that it grants preeminence to religious faith and renders the faith experience independent of reason. “It behooves us . . . to grasp the old, with our hearts and minds, but not to lose our hearts and minds to it” (166). The faith experience cannot, then, be accessed “solely with our emotions” (171), nor can it be feigned as an expression of national solidarity or as a gesture primed by sentiment. Rosenzweig, too, abjured fideistic conceptions of faith and in­­ troduced a pragmatic principle whereby Jewish deeds and learning, the mitzvoth and Talmud Torah, are to be possibly experienced as encounters with the divine presence through their performance. Concerning the Law, Rosenzweig subscribes to the biblical dictum of na’aseh ve’nishma,30 which reads literally as “We shall do and listen,” and which he inflects as a subjunctive: Only in performing the Law can one possibly hear the commanding voice of God.31 One listens with the heart: Truth is a sea into which only he may dive whose heart has a specific gravity greater than “truth,” that is, a heart full of irreducible reality. If a person consists entirely of the brain, that is, of substance with the same specific gravity as the water of truth, he will always remain on the surface no matter how he kicks and thrashes.32

Through Jewish learning, one “gropes” one’s way “back to the heart of our life” with an existential “confidence”—­note, not fideis­ tic, doctrinal faith—­“that this heart is a Jewish heart.”33

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Faith as a Second Innocence Were in my soul. O Heav’n! what bliss Did I enjoy and feel! What powerful delight did this Inspire! for this I daily kneel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So early: or that ’twas one day, Wherein this happiness I found; Whose strength and brightness so do ray, That still it seems me to surround; What ere it is, it is a light So endless unto me That I a world of true delight Did then and to this day do see. That prospect was the gate of Heav’n, that day The ancient light of Eden did convey Into my soul: I was an Adam there A little Adam in a sphere Of joys! O there my ravish’d sense Was entertain’d in Paradise, And had a sight of innocence Which was beyond all bound and price. An antepast of Heaven sure! I on the earth did reign; Within, without me, all was pure; I must become a child again. — t h o m a s t r a h e r n e , “Innocence”34

But how was one to achieve the openness to the divine presence as manifest in sacred texts, while eschewing fideism and a retreat to dogmatic faith? Buber and Rosenzweig’s contemporary Peter Wust (1884–­1940), a Catholic philosopher, formulated the question of how one was to return to the “innocence” of faith before it was dislodged by the rational scruples of the Enlightenment.35

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In his widely acclaimed book of 1925 on the phenomenology of faith, Naivität und Pietät, Wust shared Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s conviction that one cannot retrieve the primal, existential ground of faith—­what he called a “second innocence”—­by fideistic affirmations.36 “The fideist is at the antipodes of the simple faith of the child; his faith is the faith of despair.”37 Can we descendants of Descartes and Kant, not to speak of Nietzsche and Freud, re­­ cover the simple faith of a child? The faith of a child, Wust observes, is unencumbered neither by doctrinal confessions of faith nor by theological and metaphysical affirmations. It is instead primed by an innocent Daseinsfreude—­a pristine delight in existence.38 Wust attests to this non-­confessional, innocent faith in a poem he presents as a motto introducing Naivität und Pietät: Alle Gedanken münden In tiefe Ruh. Und alle Wünsche suchen Ein ewiges Du-­ Tief drinnen bebt es leise: Zeit, stehe still! Weil ich Eins ewig halten Und lieben will.39 (All thoughts flow in deep repose And all wishes seek an Eternal Thou Deep within quivers softly: Time, stand still! For I wish to hold eternally on the One and love.)

Inspired by Wust, Ernst Akiba Simon (1899–­1987), a post-­ traditional, utterly deracinated Jew who found his way back to Jewish religious faith and practice at the Lehrhaus, illustrated the horizons of a recovered, second innocence by relating an account of Franz Kafka’s (1883–­1924) last days before his death from pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of forty.40 Kafka’s companion, Dora Diamant (1898–­1952), had lived with him in Ber-

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lin. She recalled that due to his illness, he was instructed to take daily walks in the city’s botanical garden.41 On one of his morning strolls accompanied by Dora in the lush garden, Dora recounted, the pair encountered a little girl weeping over the loss of her doll. Kafka sought to comfort the child by explaining that her doll had merely gone on an unexpected but urgent business trip to distant lands. As the doll was rushing out of the botanical garden to make the journey, she came upon Dora and Kafka and asked them to apologize on her behalf to the girl, explaining that she had no time to bid her farewell. The doll also asked them to tell her young friend that she would write her a letter from time to time. But since the doll did not have the girl’s address, she would post the letters to Kafka, who in turn would come to the garden to bring them to the child. And so he did. Every morning for weeks on end, he would come to the garden and hand-­deliver to the little girl a missive from her itinerant doll. The daily correspondence continued until Kafka’s increasingly grave illness obliged him to leave Berlin and enter a sanatorium outside Vienna, where he would die several months later (in Dora’s arms). Before departing, he sent the girl a new doll, but—­heaven forbid—­not as a replacement, because her beloved doll could have no replacement. Though the new doll was markedly different in appearance, Kafka explained to the forlorn girl in an accompanying letter, the new doll was the same as the one she had lost. For consequent to the experiences the doll had during her travels in distant and strange lands, she bears the marks of her peregrinations etched on her countenance. Nonetheless, she remained in essence the same. Upon reading Kafka’s letter, the girl gratefully and lovingly welcomed her lost companion back home. Simon relates this tale of Kafka’s efforts to comfort the child over the loss of her doll as a parable of Wust’s “second naiveté.” The doll—­the original innocence—­is lost, and what eventually comes in its place is not a replacement. The doll redivivus—­the second innocence—­has a different appearance because she can­­ not—­and perhaps does not wish to—­rid herself of the experiences and all that she has learned during her journeys. Kafka’s

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assumption of a playful attitude to transcend the anguish of loss and transform it into a Daseinsfreude (akin to that of the girl’s fanciful relation to her doll), according to Simon, represents the challenge to children of the Enlightenment to affirm an innocent faith. This faith bears in its bosom the doubts, uncertainties, and skepticism attendant to secular experience. Faith, to Simon, is achieved not by denying or rejecting the insights and sensibilities of modern, secular culture; instead, these are honored and, as a Hegelian would say, aufgehoben, sublated and integrated into a new cognitive posture, a second innocence. While remaining beholden to the critical reflexes of post-­Enlightenment culture, a second naiveté allows someone to enter a cognitive and symbolic universe in which that person is open to a possible encounter with the presence of God. The question remains, however, whether faith conceived as a second innocence is merely fanciful play—­as it seemed to have been for Kafka, and perhaps also for the little girl. After all, in order to comfort the girl at the loss of her doll, Kafka created a narrative play in which he bid the girl perform together with him. Wust, however, would argue that Kafka’s gesture was no mere thespian fantasy. With his characteristic empathetic intuition, he responded to the girl’s manifest distress by recreating her cognitive universe, primed by an imaginative but existentially no less a genuine Daseinsfreude. To enter that universe, Kafka in effect assumed a “second innocence.” For Wust, a “second innocence” marks a retrieval of the true origins of the philosophical imagination, wonder—­along with “an Uraffect,” a primal emotion—­to which children in their innocence are indebted, but which since Descartes is viewed as but subjective, an emotion that by its very nature is antithetical to disciplined, rational discourse. In celebrating the rational maturation of the human mind, the votaries of the Enlightenment regarded wonder (thaumazein), which Socrates held to be the beginning of philosophy,42 as a childish, naive sentiment. As a student of the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874–­1928), who attributed cognitive significance to emotions, Wust sought to

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rehabilitate wonder as what his teacher would call a Geisteshaltung, a disposition or posture of the spirit—­“an attitude of spiritual seeing . . . something which otherwise remains hidden.”43 Such seeing is an intentional act, in which one participates in essential or primal reality before it is fixed in logical and rational categories. Buber and Rosenzweig conceived of their Bible translation as revalorizing the reading of scripture as a performative act, as a Geisteshaltung in which the reader is prompted to listen to the voice resonating in the text.  Jewish learning is a preeminent act of listening rather than mere reading. Accordingly, reading sacred texts, particularly Scripture, requires the “art of reading slowly” (die Kunst langsam zu lessen) and with particular attention to the biblical word in the context of its spokenness (Gesprochenheit), “which endows it with a concreteness, [existential] embodiment. The commanding word of the Bible is not a [written] sentence, but an address.”44 It is a personal address. As the director of the Lehrhaus and the spiritus rector of the “spiritual resistance” to National Socialism’s incremental deprivation of German Jewry’s human rights and assault on their self-­esteem, Buber organized Lernzeiten (periods of learning), retreats over the course of a few days. Usually opened with lectures by Buber and the core staff of the Lehrhaus on various themes in Jewish cultural history, the retreats—­held in bucolic settings throughout Germany—­ were devoted to the reading of principally biblical texts, which for many was their first encounter with the Hebrew scriptures. Hence, Buber emphasized that “in discussing a text from Jewish literature, such as the Bible, I acknowledge that no interpretation, including my own, coincides with the original meaning and that my interpretation is conditioned by my being [Sein].”45 But, as he held: If I attend as faithfully as I can to what it contains of word and tex­­ ture ([Gefüge], of sound and rhythmic structure, of evident and hid­­ den connections, my interpretation would not have been made in vain, for I find something, have found something. And if I show

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what I have found, I guide one who lets oneself be guided to the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of the text. I place the one whom I teach before the effective powers [wirkende Kräfte] of the texts, the effect [Wirken] of which I have experienced.46

No one reading is, therefore, authoritative. Nonetheless, fostering diversity is not a question of “tolerance” (that is, a “formal pretense of understanding”) and “neutrality” but rather “making present the roots of the community [Gemeinsamkeit47] and its branches” and “solidarity, living mutual support and living mutual action.” Sharing in “common service” to the voice of scripture constitutes a “model of the great community,” which is not an “amalgamation of like-­minded individuals” but rather a community that “masters otherness in a lived unity” (  gelebten Einheit).48 Buber’s son-­in-­law, the poet Ludwig Strauss (1892–­1953), referred to faith as transporting the believer to “islands of messianic time” (Inseln der messianiachen im Meer der unerlösten Zeit), where he or she periodically sojourns to behold a future as a blessed reality—­a reality that for Strauss was disclosed by a faith experienced in the numinous act of writing poetry.49 For Buber, dialogue—­interpersonal as well as the act of reading sacred texts50—­also has the proleptic power of allowing for a redemptive encounter with the Eternal Thou: “In every sphere [of life], through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the hem of the eternal Thou; in each, we are aware of breath from the eternal Thou; in each Thou, we address of the eternal Thou, in each sphere according to its manner.”51 To meet the Other—­also as embodied in texts—­in dialogue is an act of faith; for dialogue is guided by an existential trust, which, he points out (as had Moses Mendelssohn),52 is the biblical meaning of faith53: that in turning to another and thus opening oneself to the voice (the Thou) of the another one will not be rebuffed, misunderstood, or hurt. Dialogical faith thus reaches beyond the precincts of secular, everyday experience and assumes or anticipates an alternative, “redemptive” reality. So conceived, dialogical faith may also be the path to a “second innocence” and a Daseinsfreude,

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sustaining an affirmation of life as a joyous gift—­a gift that bears the aura of divine grace. To be sure, from the shores of the Messianic Islands (to return to Strauss’s image) where faith brings us, we do not, indeed cannot, forget the surrounding and raging waters of unredeemed time. Yet, emboldened by the glimpse of the Eternal Thou, we view quotidian realities with what Ernst Simon calls an “optimistic skepticism”—­a skepticism that does not yield to despair, for it is buoyed by a hope borne by the proleptic experience of faith.54 Both Buber and Rosenzweig presented their respective conceptions of the renewal of Jewish learning as the ground of a community of faith that would be an alternative to “a phantom of community”55 proffered by nationalism and identity politics.56 Rather than the solidarity of shared pride and sentiment—­emo­­ tions notoriously mercurial and often defined over and against the Other, who is not a member of one’s community—­they raised for a post-­traditional  Jewry a vision of a homeward journey forged by listening with the heart.

4 Post-­Traditional Faith The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart. — a n t o i n e d e s a i n t - ­e x u p é r y, The Little Prince1

Ostensibly a children’s book, The Little Prince (Le petit prince)2 may be read as an allegory of second innocence, or rather as a challenge to grown-­ups whose fantasy—­to see with the heart—­ has been numbed by the bourgeois ethos ruled by rationality and instrumental calculations and computations.3 Exasperated that the grown-­ups have forgotten that they “were once children,” le petit prince, a diminutive child, exclaims, “In the course of my life I have had a great many encounters with a great many [adults] who have not been concerned with matters of consequence. I have seen them intimately close at hand. And that hasn’t changed my opinion of them.”4 And with a measure of ironic condescension, he notes that he had no choice but “to bring me down to [their] level. I would talk to [them] about bridge, golf, and politics and neckties.” Alas, “grown-­ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” (Les grandes personnes ne

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comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c’est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours et toujours leur donner des explications).5 Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry’s little prince challenges his adult interlocutor to critical self-­reflection. He does not cajole him to return to the fanciful innocence of childhood, however. The Lilliputian child questions the prevailing bourgeois conception of adulthood, which may be traced back to Kant’s call for Enlightenment and man’s emergence from his “self-­imposed immaturity [Unmündigkeit], and to dare use one’s reason without the guidance of others. Sapere aude! ”6 The little prince’s interlocutor, a pilot stranded in the African desert—­far from the heartbeat of post-­Enlightenment civilization—­is brought to reflect on what it means to be an adult: être homme, être responsable—­to be a responsible individual. Inspired by this exchange, the little prince returns to his abode among the stars, Asteroid B612. This minuscule planet is so tiny that it hardly has room for him; it is a space that he alone inhabits, other than a single rose for which he now assumes a nurturing, caring responsibility rather than a mere adoration of its beauty. The little prince resides in a world bereft of other people; thus, the meaning of life he seeks lacks any concrete reality other than what his imagination seizes. The pilot, on the other hand, dwells in a world that he shares with innumerable others, and thus with the coming of age he understands that he bears responsibility for them, guided by the promptings of the heart and not by the dictates of reason and pragmatic considerations. Although the little prince and the adult pilot inhabit distinctively different ontological frameworks, between them they can conduct a dialogue in which they are both educated by the realization that the meaning of life lies in an agapeic responsibility for others: for the little prince, his rose; for the pilot, his fellow human beings. So are we to understand the ultimate significance of the story of Franz Kafka and the young girl distressed at the loss of her doll. Though his body was being consumed by ever-­aggressive tuberculosis, Kafka’s heart—­the seat of loving emotions—­remained strong. He reached out to the grief-­stricken

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child and entered the ontological space determined by her relationship with the doll. By empathetic attunement to the symbolic discourse that inflected the girl’s inner perception of reality, he acknowledged that her attachment to the doll was not merely a fanciful construct, to be dismissed as the naiveté of a child, but constituted a world that was existentially real and allowed her to love and care (as had the little prince for the rose, his lone co-­ inhabitant on Asteroid B612). As a tale of second innocence—­of an imaginative assumption of a child’s pristine innocence, untarnished by the rational pretense of the adult world7—­the tale of Kafka and the forlorn girl illustrates the maxim of the little prince: “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”8 The tale also serves to unlock the mystery of faith. Saint-­Exupéry and Kafka teach us that the Daseinsfreude of what Peter Wust celebrates as the hallmark of innocent faith is indeed determined by the promptings of the heart, a perception of reality constructed by the inner eye of agapeic love, a love attentive to the presence of the other—­the subjective, inner reality of another human being. Love is, as Martin Buber instructs, “responsibility of an I for a Thou.”9 The exhortations of the heart are attitudinal, and not in essence feelings. “Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in love. . . . Love is between Thou and me.”10 Taking his lead from Buber, who identifies I-­Thou relations as an act of faith that aspires to mutual existential trust, Nathan Rotenstreich, in a monograph on the phenomenology of faith, examines faith as a specific attitude (Haltung).11 Faith, he argues, is not to be reduced to given experiences and emotions, for those that accompany faith are multiple and often radically different.12 Faith must be understood on its own terms, independent of its various and varied historical, emotional, and experiential expressions. Rotenstreich thus adapts Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method to distinguish between faith as a mental act of intending to perceive something (noesis) and the intended object of this act (noema). Within the ambit of its noesis and noema, Rotenstreich observes, faith has a paradoxical nature. In its noetic

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or intentional moment, it makes implicit and explicit cognitive claims that our apprehension of the empirical realm is not the ultimate reality. In contrast, faith’s noematic moment affirms something be­ yond perceptual observation and rational argument. Faith, there­ fore, indeed is inherently paradoxical: it makes cognitive claims that transcend the limits of perceived reality, and hence are epistemic affirmations that cannot be deemed “knowledge proper.” Faith, Rotenstreich concludes, is thus to be understood as a unique attitude (Haltung) or orientation toward the world and reality. He further elaborates this defining attitude of faith with reference to what Husserl calls Anschauung, a seeing or intuition of the “essences” of phenomena. The phenomenological distinction between noesis and noema, and its focus on the former, allows us to identify the essence, ergo the universal nature, of faith. In practice, both moments are one. Accordingly, religious faith, as Michael Fishbane reminds us, is not merely a type of thinking but preeminently a way of living in the world.13 Expressing a similar caveat that religious truth is to be regarded not as “a maxim” but as “a way,”14 Buber had the following to say to German-­Jewish youth, who in groping their way back to a spiritually engaging Judaism were befuddled by competing theories of religion: “The originators of such theories overlook the fact that religious truth is not a conceptual abstraction but has existential relevance; that is, words can only point the way, and that religious truth can be made adequately manifest only in the individual’s or community’s life of religious actualization [Bewährung].”15 It is, therefore, profoundly mistaken to assess religious truths as epistemological claims; their existential significance can only be understood as they are actualized in the cognitive universe they instantiate.16 The “essence” of religion, as underscored by Max Scheler (1874–­1928) in his commanding writings of the phenomenology of religion, is never given to an “outside” observer. He, too, held that it is necessary to enter the inner world of religion as it is practiced by assuming what he calls a Geisteshaltung, a “disposition of the spirit” or a “spiritual

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posture”—­“an attitude of spiritual seeing . . . something which otherwise remains hidden.”17 Hence, just as Kafka attuned himself to the imaginative universe of the disconsolate girl who lost her cherished playmate, so in the study of the classical texts of Jewish tradition—­Talmud Torah—­we are to attune ourselves to their apprehension of a transcendent reality. As an act of “sacred attunement,” Fishbane notes, Talmud Torah is a hermeneutic practice of meditative reflection.18 As citizens of a cosmopolitan, multicultural universe, the hermeneutic reflexes of post-­traditional Jews are informed by knowledge of analogous or even alternative perceptions of the sacred attested by other faith traditions.19 While premodern Judaism tended to regard the practices and theologies of other religions as inherently idolatrous and thus as a forbidden terrain to be kept at a disdainful distance, post-­traditional Judaism resists a parochial pull engendered by the fear of the Other. The threat to the spiritual and cultural integrity posed by competing truth claims is lifted when they are viewed not as epistemological and historical challenges but as alternative ontological perspectives.20 Because these perspectives may be considered culturally specific and existentially incommensurable, they need not threaten and destabilize a commitment to one’s cultural patrimony. Moreover, the acknowledgment of their incommensurability, the appreciation of alternative ontological perspectives, obviates a facile syncretism, thereby securing, in effect, the ontological integrity of each.21 Further, as incommensurable and thus noncompetitive, cultural ontologies, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say, are in a rhizomatic, nonhierarchical relation to one another. Just as rhizomes develop horizontally as botanical growths, so also do cultures flourish and thus are not to be conceived as “arborescent” or treelike vertical, hierarchical developments.22 A rhizomatic conception of cultural multiplicities eschews supersessionism—the bane of an intercultural and interreligious dialogue that seeks to honor difference, the essence of which is, as the little prince affirms, “invisible to the eye.”23

Post-Traditional Faith 71

Primed by a “disposition of the spirit” (Geisteshaltung) to honor transcendent Otherness, dialogue is an act of faith, indeed is the very ground of faith. Hence, one person may profess belief and yet be godless, whereas another is wary of God-­talk but nonetheless affirms theological teachings, as expressed in one’s life with others.24 Professions of faith are often but a cloak for ideological and sentimental allegiance to a religious community. One thus speaks of “belonging without believing.”25 Such a posture was expressly sponsored by what was in Germany called Kulturprotestantismus, maintaining the culture and values associated with Protestant communal affiliation although belief in God and the authority of scripture may now be in doubt.26 The Protestant way of life —­its culture—­is upheld “as if ” one believed. The Kantian scholar Hans Vaihinger (1852–­1933) gave a philosophical formulation to this conception of Protestantism as a culture: “I act as if the existence of God were a reality. My theoretical reason prohibits me from accepting a moral law. Still, I act as if such a moral law existed because my practical reason commands me to do the good. . . . Thus, also the theoretical atheist who acts in accordance with ethics ‘believes’ in God—­practically.”27 A Jewish analog to Protestant “as if ” theology is reconstructionism as formulated by its founder, Mordecai Kaplan (1881–­1983). Drawing from sociological theory and American pragmatism, he sponsored the reconstruction of Judaism as a “civilization” of which religion was but one component of a comprehensive array of cultural and social institutions serving to enhance the life of  Jews as individuals and as members of the historical and spiritual community of Israel. Since contem­ porary Jews on the whole no longer regard the founding beliefs of traditional Judaism as intellectually plausible, especially the notion of a supernatural, personal God, these beliefs would have to be redefined in terms of their function, by their overall effect and the effect they have on the life of the Jewish people, whom Kaplan unapologetically held to be principally an ethnic community. Accordingly, Kaplan taught, “religion is rooted in human nature, and . . . the belief in the existence of God, and the attributes ascribed to God, must be derived from and be made to refer to

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the experience of the average man and woman.”28 The standards by which Jews are to conduct their lives as individuals and communally, spiritually, and ethically are to be defined by the Jewish people, not Sinai.29 There are in the State of Israel expressions of Jewish religious affiliation that also subscribe to an “as if ” theology, albeit implicitly and by the very nature of their commitment to traditional forms of Judaism. Whereas Kaplan wedded the reconstruction of Judaism to American liberal democratic values, in the Jewish state “as if ” Judaism is increasingly under the tutelage of political and religious nationalism. In this context, we must distinguish between tradition and traditionalism. Tradition is a living, evolving faith nurtured by the cumulative teachings and perceptions of the divine presence, which each generation elaborates hermeneutically in light of its own understanding and spiritual sensibilities. Tradition, as bound to Torah, to cite Rabbi Ismar Schorsch’s compendious definition, is a “canon without closure.”30 In contrast, traditionalism is governed by normative images of tradition. As the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan puts it somewhat ironically, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”31 To be sure, one may be drawn to given images of a religious tradition by filial and nostalgic sentiment. In Israel, where there is a sharp, nigh political divide between secular and religious Jews, there is, in fact, many who cross this divide and selectively observe certain traditional practices; they might attend Orthodox Shabbat services and afterward attend a soccer match or drive to the beach. Their attachment to select religious practices may be said to be a form of traditionalism, governed by nostalgia, filial piety, or what may be termed vestigial religiosity. There is yet another expression of traditionalism that has gained a hold in the Israeli spiritual and political landscape. It was fanned by the messianic exuberance that inspired religious Zionism with the repossession of the biblical lands of Judah and Samaria in the wake of the Six-­Day War of 1967.32 Referred to in the neutral geopolitical lexicon as the West Bank, these

Post-Traditional Faith 73

territories, which are claimed by its more than two million Arab residents as the basis of a future State of Palestine, have been the crux of Israel’s seemingly intractable conflict with the Arab world. Some of the more extreme advocates of a Greater Israel—­the inalienable right of the Jews to all the lands of biblical Israel—­cloak their demands with a militant religiosity and a demonstrative display of peyot (side curls) and other sartorial accoutrements of a given image of traditional Judaism. They don this attire, frequently accompanied by a holstered pistol, as if that would presumably attest to the authenticity of their Judaism and thereby validate their political agenda to reclaim Israel’s territorial patrimony and establish Jewish sovereignty over Judah and Samaria. Regarding the Arabs of the West Bank impeding their vision, they either treat them scornfully as “alien residents” (see Gen. 23:4) or encourage their “transfer” from the Land of Israel. This flagrant disregard of the human and political rights of the Arabs flies in the face of this biblical injunction: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen [in biblical Hebrew, ezrach, native born] among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:34). It is also in blatant disaccord with the humanistic ethos that sired Zionism, although the Zionist settlement project inevitably put a strain on the moral fiber of the movement.33 In a remarkably prescient essay, “Truth from Eretz Israel” (1891), Ahad Ha’am (1856–­1927) warned the early Zionist settlers in Palestine not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong. . . . We should be cautious in our dealings with the people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect, and with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite! They were slaves in their Dias­ poras, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only a country like Turkey [the Ottoman Empire] can offer. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves [‘even ki yimlokh—­when a slave becomes king—­Prov. 30:22]. They deal with the Arabs with

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hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. . . . When these people feel that the law is on their rival’s side and, even more so, if they are right to think their rival’s actions are unjust and oppressive, then, even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other.34

“The land of tears,” as the little prince muses, “is a mysterious land.”35 It is especially difficult to understand the tears of another when one also weeps. With their attention focused on addressing the misery of Jewry in the face of ever-­mounting anti-­Semitism, Zionists, with a few notable exceptions, gave little thought to the affliction that their settlement project exacted on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. It was indeed a lachrymose tragedy for both peoples. And so it remains. Neither the Zionists nor the Arabs, each tending to their own pain, are given to understand the pain of the other. To be sure, bent on usurping sovereignty over the Land of Israel, Zionists bear the greater burden of reaching out to the Palestinians. The Land of Israel was, alas, not empty, waiting for the Jews to return from their exile of two thousand years. At the beginning of the Zionist settlement project, the Arabs were the overwhelming majority population of Palestine. And they remain a significant demographic presence there. To overcome this adversarial situation, we may heed the advice a fox proffers the little prince: “One only understands whom one tames,” said the fox. “If you want a friend, tame me.” “What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince. “You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First, you will sit down at a little distance from me—­like that—­in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me every day . . .”36

Upon returning to Asteroid B612, the little prince soon learns that he failed to assume genuine care and responsibility for his

Post-Traditional Faith 75

rose, his one and only companion on his planetary abode: “I was too young to know how to love . . .”37 His interlocutor, the pilot stranded in the African desert, is destined to learn from the little prince a similar lesson: to meet the Other, to behold in the Other that which the eye cannot see.38 Both individuals must grow up to be responsible, caring human beings: to meet their fellow humans at an intersubjective space forged by the heart. In the space thus opened up between the two, the little prince and the pilot, transcends and clears the invidious divide that has muddled their relations with interpersonal and intercultural adversarial perceptions. In the agapeic space that they now inhabit, a dialogue unfolds, which restores a primal innocence free of the social, cultural, and political encrustations acquired during their self-­centered life journeys. They are both aware that dialogue entails risk, trust, and faith in crossing the boundaries, which puta­ tively provide security from the Other. As addressed to Jewry, as Emmanuel Levinas would say, Judaism is a “religion for adults,”39 as long as they have not forgotten that they were once children.40

5 Within and Beyond Borders I Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . . — r o b e r t f r o s t, “ Mending Wall  ”

The passage to modernity entails the crossing of boundaries and the traversing of once forbidding, impermeable barriers that kept communities and individuals apart and alien to one another. The cosmopolitan, centrifugal thrust of the modern sensibility perforce transcends borders—­primordial, political, and cultural. The divisive nature of such partitions is now recognized. Taught to embrace all human experience as one’s own, the modern imagination and ethical compass resonate with Robert Frost’s poetic admonishment to be wary of the potentially inimical nature of borders. Yet boundaries do persist. Residential neighborhoods are bounded by class distinctions and social, religious, and ethnic affiliations. Language is often in­

Within and Beyond Borders

flected overtly or covertly to assert gender and hierarchical difference. The boundary between public space and private space, the latter celebrated by Hannah Arendt as “the realm of intimacy, warmth, and authenticity,”1 is jealously maintained as existentially compelling. Political borders also continue to be zealously guarded, if only as prophylactic shields securing ethnic and cultural identities, and thus not infrequently bitterly contested. And in subtle ways, as Michel Foucault reminds us, the ontological tension between sacred and profane space endures even in our secularized culture: Despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely de-­sanctified. . . . To be sure, a certain theoretical de-­sanctification of space . . . has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical de-­sanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example, between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.2

Space is bounded, to be sure, not only by the dictates of nature but also the constructions by human fiat. We inhabit a world constricted by political and historical demarcations. The inherent ambiguity of borders has commanded the attention of the photographer Alan B. Cohen, who since the late 1990s has photographed “improbable borders” around the world. He focuses his camera on the texture of bounded spaces. By zooming in on the microscopic detail of these spaces, he reveals borders to be abrupt, jarring disruptions of what would otherwise be a continuous, seamless flow of terrestrial landscapes.3 Cohen’s photographs deconstruct but not to erase boundaries and dismiss them as out of sync with our modern, global vision. Through his lens, he instead highlights the constructed nature of borders, thereby

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prodding the viewer to reflect on their ethical and existential significance. His photos echo Foucault’s observation that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space.”4 Globalization of consumer culture as well as the cybernetic shrinkage of communication, both in time and in content, often seems to entail a rash erasure of cultural differences and experiential nuance. The ever-­increasing homogenization of space threatens to overwhelm our cognitive and spiritual lives with a culture that knows only “the Narcissism of Now,”5 thus erasing historical and cultural memory.6 This is manifestly the message of Cohen’s photos of the fault lines of Auschwitz, of the Berlin Wall, of the meandering wall separating the State of Israel from the Palestinian-­Arab territory, and of the reservations assigned to the dispossessed Native Americans. These borders are lacerations that cut deep into our collective soul and sear our conscience with festering scars of fear—­and guilt. In assuming the burden of the memories of civilization’s past crimes, we are, as Walter Benjamin instructs us, to pause and “brush history against the grain,” thereby exploding “the continuum of history” to rescue the victims of our ancestors’ maleficence from oblivion.7 Remembrance, as Benjamin reminds us, is not mere commemoration; we are to honor the memory of those who were prey to human evil by bearing responsibility for the potential victims of our present deeds, and we are to query with Robert Frost, whom we are likely to offend by the construction of walls large and small. The psychic and cultural landscape of the Jews abounds in borders. Beholden to the divine precepts enjoining cultic purity, biblical and rabbinic law is obsessed with drawing boundaries between the holy and profane, the pure and impure, Jew and heathen. But as strict as the boundaries are, they are permeable, open to the world beyond; rabbinic law is laced with innumerable Greek juridical lexica and concepts. Indeed, the overarching paradox of Jewish life is that although Jews were by biblical injunction to remain a people apart (cf. Num. 23:9), they were passionately at home in the cultures of the world.8 Since ancient times, the Jews have been a preeminently cosmopolitan people. This paradox is typically related by a whimsical anecdote: A Eu-

Within and Beyond Borders

Alan B. Cohen, NOW (Berlin Wall) 37-­01, 1994.

ropean tourist went to a Chinese restaurant in New York City and was served by an African American waiter. As was his wont, the tourist asked the waiter whether there were any specials on the menu. The waiter gingerly replied, “Yes, pizza!” Startled, the tourist exclaimed, “Wait a minute! No offense intended, but you are a Black waiter in a Chinese restaurant, and you say that pizza is the spécialité de la maison. I don’t get it!” And the waiter cordially replied, “Look, man, this is a Jewish neighborhood.” Jews, of course, have also experienced the brutality of borders, of coercive spatial enclosures from the ghettos of medieval times to the concentration and death camps of the twentieth century. They certainly know to the very marrow of their being the cruel capriciousness of walls, of being bound and confined as contemptible

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pariahs behind boundaries erected by their fellow human beings. Hence the bitter irony of the wall constructed by the Israeli government to fence out potential Palestinian terrorists but which also, in effect, ghettoizes the entire Palestinian population.9

II The Talmud reports that the name of God was known only to the high priest of the Temple of Jerusalem.10 He would utter it with utmost reverence only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. With the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion of the Jews, the name of God has been forgotten, entombed with the last of the Temple’s high priests. God is, however, referred to by many descriptive circumlocutions. One of them is ha-­Makom: the Place (cf. Mishnah Avot, 14, 11). God is meta-­spatial; God is, above all, tellurian, worldly space, for God encompasses all of space. As the twelfth-­century Spanish-­ Jewish sage Maimonides observes, “He [God] doesn’t have a place, rather He is The Place of the Universe” (Commentary on the Mishnah, Tractate Sanhedrin, chap.10, principle 3). God is thus the ontological ground of all earthly space. Hence, although all mundane borders are real, they are ultimately not. Jewry thus abides in this ontological tension; they are bounded by the divine precepts of the Torah and bonded to a land promised to them by God, while they are enjoined to affirm that their God is the Lord “of all the families on earth” (Amos 3:2): To me, O Israelites, you are Just like the Ethiopians—­declares the Lord, True, I brought Israel up From the Land of Egypt, But also the Philistines from Caphtor And the Arameans from Kir. (Amos 9:7)

With Jewry’s passage into the modern world, the tension that had defined the spiritual and spatial boundaries of traditional Judaism began to buckle and weaken; the boundaries were ever

Within and Beyond Borders

increasingly questioned by Jews who invested their hopes to emerge from the indignities of the ghetto by adopting the liberal ethos and its cosmopolitan cultural and ethical vision. This vision of universal fraternity of enlightened humanity attained a compelling voice in Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” (1785), adapted by Beethoven as a hymn, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere. Freude! Freude! Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum! Deine Zauber binden wieder Was die Mode streng geteilt; Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt. O friends, no more of these sounds! Let us sing more cheerful songs, More songs full of joy! Joy! Joy! Joy, bright spark of divinity, Daughter of Elysium, Fire-­inspired we tread Within thy sanctuary. Thy magic power reunites All that custom has divided, All men become brothers, Under the sway of thy gentle wings.

Disheartened by what he perceived to be Europe’s retreat from this vision and the rise of racial and political anti-­Semitism, the Yiddish poet Judah Leib Peretz (1852–­1915) was incensed that although Schiller’s hymn was still being sung, in practice it was callously

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flouted. His Yiddish translation of the “Ode to Joy” sarcastically highlights the hypocrisy of presumably enlightened humanists: ‫ברידער‬ —‫ געלבע‬,‫ שווארצע‬,‫ ברוינע‬,‫ווייסע‬ !‫מישט די פארבן אויס צוזאמען‬ . . . ‫ַאלע מענטשן זיינען ברידער‬ !‫מאמען‬ ַ ‫ פון איין‬,‫טאטן‬ ַ ‫פון איין‬ ,‫שאפן‬ ַ ‫בא‬ ַ ‫האט זיי‬ ָ ‫גאט‬ ָ ‫אויך—איין‬ —‫טערלאנד די וועלט‬ ַ ‫פא‬ ָ ,‫און—איין‬ ,‫אלע מענטשן זיינען ברידער‬ !‫איינמאל פעסטגעשטעלט‬ ָ ‫דאס איז‬ ָ

“ brothers ” White, Brown, Black, Yellow—­ Mix the colors all together! All people are brothers, From the same father, from the same mother! And one God has created them all, and one homeland: the world! All people are brothers, that is certain!

*** ,‫אלע מענטשן זיינען ברידער‬ . . . ‫ געלבע‬,‫ ברוינע‬,‫ ווייסע‬,‫שווארצע‬ ,‫פארבן‬ ַ ‫נאר די‬ ָ ‫ַאנדערש זיינען‬ :‫נאטור איז—די זעלבע‬ ַ ‫די‬

All people are brothers Black, White, Brown, Yellow . . . only the colors are different—­ But their Nature is the same!

,‫ּפראלן‬ ַ ‫דאס זעלבע‬ ָ ‫אומעטום‬ !‫מאל געהערט‬ ָ ‫כ׳האב עס טויזנט‬ ָ —‫טראגן‬ ָ ‫און פון ָזאגן ביז צו‬ !‫איז פון הימל ביז צו דר׳ערד‬

Everywhere the same bluster, I’ve heard it thousands of times! And from talking to bearing (fruit)—­ It’s (as distant as) heaven to earth!

:‫אלע מענטשן זיינען ברידער‬ . . . ‫ װײסע‬,‫שווארצע‬ ַ ,‫ ברוינע‬,‫געלבע‬ —‫קלימאטן‬ ַ ‫ראסן און‬ ַ ,‫פעלקער‬ .‫ס׳איז אן אויסגעקלערטע מעשה‬

All human beings are “brothers”: Yellow, Brown, Black, White . . . nations, races, and climates—­ It’s all an Enlightenment fiction!

,‫אומעטום דער זעלבער מוסר‬ —‫לײגן‬ ַ ‫דאס זעלבע‬ ָ ‫אומעטום‬ ‫מיטן מויל דער גאנצער עולם‬ !‫שווײגן‬ ַ ‫ּפאליטיקער מיט‬ ָ ‫די‬

Everywhere the same musar,11 everywhere the same lie—­ the whole world with their mouth, the politician with their silence!

!‫אלע מענטשן זיינען ברידער‬ ,‫און—זיי שּפילן זיך אין פלישקעס‬

All people are brothers! And they amuse themselves with frivolities. Their souls are (as) little worms—­ in pinecone snuff.12

—‫די נשמות זיינען ווערעמלעך‬ . . . ‫טאבעק פון די שישקעס‬ ַ ‫אינעם‬

Within and Beyond Borders

Peretz’s parody of Schiller’s joyous hymn reflects his anguished concern for the fate of Russian Jewry in the wake of the pogroms that erupted in the early 1880s. More than two hundred Jewish communities were savaged by hate-­driven marauders in these massacres, which periodically continued to scourge the czarist Pale of Jewish Settlement. Universal ideals were of little avail. Jews would have to give priority to the exigencies of their own people. The drift to ethnic nationalism was set in motion. The rabbinic adage “Kol Yisrael aravim zeh ba-­zeh” (All of Israel is responsible for one another) (BT Shevuot 39a)—­namely, steer one another from sin—­was given a secular meaning of national responsibility and solidarity. But what constitutes national solidarity and responsibility? Postmodern scruples question the epistemological and ideological hubris engendered by the Enlightenment and which had determined the collective and political strategies of solidarity. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, “Solidarity cannot draw its confidence from anything remotely as solid and thereby as comforting as social structures, laws of history or the destinations of nations and races from which modern projects derived their optimism, self-­confidence, and determination.”13 But the loss of the universal scope of the Enlightenment courts the prospect of narrowing the ethical horizons of solidarity to the group of one’s immediate concern. For Judaism, this would entail the attenuation of its defining ontological tension of attending to the specifics of its religious and cultural identity while affirming the God of Creation embracing “all the families on earth.” Since the Enlightenment and the protracted struggle for political emancipation, the modern world has led to the lessening of this tension by granting salience to the needs and quotidian aspirations of the “natural Jew,” the Jew whose existence is defined by the secular parameters of history, economics, and politics. In pursuit of earthly happiness and well-­being, the transcendent calling of the “supernatural Jew” has been ever increasingly muffled or defiantly ignored.14 The Shoah and the founding of the State of Israel have understandably further fortified the preeminence of the “natural

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Jew.” Emerging from the horror of Hitler’s chambers of death, Jewry has evolved into a culture of mourning, collective grief, and commemoration. The remembrance of the Shoah implores all Jews, wherever they may dwell and whenever they were born, to regard themselves as survivors of Auschwitz.15 Established in the grim shadow of the Shoah, the State of Israel has also commanded the emotional identification of world Jewry. The dictates of Jewish solidarity are, however, confounded by the political realities of the state. On the one hand, the Jewish state, especially in its first decades, required massive financial support to absorb the surviving remnant of the Nazi death camps and the influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries and more recently the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. On the other hand, the state faces a seemingly intractable conflict with the Palestinians and their Arab brethren. The conflict is exacerbated by the fact that consequent to the war with the Arabs that greeted the proclamation in 1948 of the State of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from the territory that would constitute the Jewish state. The Arabs of Palestine were rendered refugees, having fled and abandoned more than 460 villages and towns,16 and by no small measure were driven from their homes through the actions of the Israeli armed forces.17 The Arabs of Palestine thus found themselves exiled from a land they had inhabited for many centuries and more. The failure to—­and determined reluctance not to—­acknowledge the role Israel played in the creation of the Arab refugee problem is a stain not only on the state but also on all Jewry. As the philosopher Martin Buber held, just as the so-­called Jewish Question in Europe was a test of the ethical sources and resolve of Christianity—­which it failed to the very depths of its soul—­the Arab Question of Palestine is a test of the ethical and religious integrity of Jewry.18 To ignore this challenge and obfuscate it by artful spin doctors in the service of Jewish solidarity and national patriotism is disingenuous and would but only serve to perpetuate the conflict with our neighbors, our ancestral cousins.

Within and Beyond Borders

With its founding in 1948, the State of Israel came to address the tragic betrayal of Europe to realize the ideals of the Enlightenment and the attendant promise to provide the Jews with a dignified and inviolate place within the modern social and political order. Europe’s failure to honor this promise mandated the State of Israel to provide a forlorn Jewry with a refuge and a secure home. Alas, in seeking to redress the failure of post-­Enlightenment Europe to heal the scourge of anti-­Semitism attendant to Israel’s bi-­ millennial exile, the establishment of the Jewish state yielded the exile of the Arab population of Palestine. As Edward Said observed, it was “a tragic irony” that his people, the Palestinians, were “exiled by the proverbial people of exile.”19 The challenge that this poignant aperçu poses to the conscience of Jewry—­in the State of Israel and the Diaspora—­and the ethical principles inscribed at the very core of our religious patrimony20 is given clarion expression in a poem by the poet laureate of Palestine, Mahmud Darwish (1941–­2008), translated from his mellifluous Arabic: But I am the exile. Seal me with your eyes. Take me wherever you are—­ Take me whatever you are. Restore to me the color of the face And the warmth of a body, The light of heart and eye, The salt of bread and rhythm, The taste of earth . . . the Motherland. Shield me with your eyes. Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow; Take me as a verse from my tragedy; Take me as a toy, a brick from the house So that our children will remember to return.21

To ignore this cry is a blasphemous betrayal of the foundational principle of  Judaism: we are beholden to a supernal tribunal, what the late literary critic George Steiner called “the blackmail of

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transcendence,”22 for it does not allow us to forget that we are accountable to a transcendent, universal God. The Israeli poet Shalom Ratzabi, to whom this volume is dedicated, notes that we can bluff ourselves and others—­but not God. A retreat from both the primal Judaic ethics of transcendence and the yielding to the dictates of a politics of identity by many otherwise thoughtful and caring Jews—­as understandable as it may be as a defensive response to the continued defamation of the State of  Israel, often bordering on anti-­Semitism—­has prompted others to maintain a studied distance from what they regard as the lamentable turn of the Jewish community to sequester itself in a parochial, ethnocentric cocoon. Determined to resist the pull to self-­centered realpolitik, these Jews may be said to have assumed the mantle of Judaism’s prophetic message to humanity at large, beleaguered as it is by the ambiguities of modernity. Perhaps most emblematic of these “meta-­ rabbis,”23 as Steiner affectionately named them, is Franz Kafka, who “was Jewish even in the way of not being Jewish.”24 Bereft of a sure mooring in Jewish tradition and community, Kafka found himself in uncharted waters with a blank navigational map. With no fixed coordinates to guide him, he was adrift, at the mercy of the turbulent crosscurrents of the sea. With Kafka and his fellow meta-­rabbis, “Jewish particularity turned into the modern universality.” Kafka’s nameless protagonists proceed to “usher [us] into the modern world; one in which names are not received but made, fail to offer a fixed date and a settled place and abrogate the very hope of such an offer.”25 The meta-­rabbis grope their way forward into what the Egyptian-­ Jewish poet Edmond Jabés (1912–­1991) called the “land propitious to silence and infinite listening.”26 What they experience serves as a map of the modern world for all to use. Now, as Jacques Derrida (1930–­2004) comments, “anyone or no one may be Jewish.”27 Meta-­ rabbis need not be deracinated pathfinders, however. Their multilayered, cosmopolitan allegiance need not constitute a fractured identity that confounds and vitiates Jewish identity and commitment. A post-­traditional Jewish identity, inflected by voices from both the Jewish and the rest of the human chorus, may cer-

Within and Beyond Borders

tainly be an integrated, dialectical whole. The dialect sways in an ontological tension between the God of Creation and the God of Israel. The dialectic undulations continuously destabilize any fixed gaze at either of these two poles of Israel’s covenant. Post-­traditional Jews, who have lost or have attenuating moorings in rabbinic traditions, find themselves without the gyroscopic guidance of the Halakhah in navigating the dialectical pendulum that defines the spiritual universe of Judaism. Without that guidance, post-­traditional Jews face the prospect of a “shipwreck,” to borrow a metaphor employed by Hans Blumenberg (1920–­1996) to characterize life’s journey, particularly in the uncharted waters of the modern world:28 We are embarked [as Pascal wrote] always at sea, with no harbor in sight. . . . Solid ground is the appropriate place for men to live. . . . But beware of the crash. There are thousands who wrecked in port. It will be one of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment that shipwreck is the price to be paid to avoid the complete calming of the sea winds that would make all worldly commerce impossible. . . . Being calmed is lethal to life; the sail must be filled with passions. . . . This life is, in fact kept going only by means that can also be fatal for it. . . . The harbor is no alternative to shipwreck.29

As we set sail, according to Blumenberg, we should be mindful that “the ship must already have been built on the high seas, not by us, but by our ancestors. Our ancestors, then, were able to swim, and no doubt—­using the scraps of wood floating around—­somehow initially put together a raft, and then continually improved it, until today it has become such a comfortable ship.”30 We are indeed indebted to our ancestors, for one “who relies on a straw will sink, where a solid plank has saved many a human life.”31 Blumenberg’s allegorical meditation on “shipwreck” as a “metaphor for [contemporary] existence” may also serve as a midrash on the journey that faces post-­traditional Jews.32 This journey is perhaps captained by meta-­rabbis charged with steering their ship—­ and Jewry at large—­from seeking refuge from the turbulent waters of modernity by docking in false harbors, from the Scylla of ethnic nationalism and the Charybdis of despair and jumping ship.33

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6 In Praise of Discontent Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century and century, Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality: Egypt and Greece, good-­bye, and good-­bye Rome! Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest; Caverned in the night under the drifted snow, Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast Beat down upon their naked bodies, know That day brings round the night, that before dawn His glory and his monuments are gone. — w i l l i a m b u t l e r y e a t s , “Meru”

Viewed from the heights beyond the whirl of history, the image of civilization evokes ambivalence. Projecting a glorious sense of power, stability, perhaps even a “semblance of peace,” it also engenders, as Yeats bitingly notes, a sense of terror, miasmic anxiety assuaged only when one realizes that civilizations come and go. “Egypt and Greece, good-­bye, and good-­bye Rome!”1

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Surely the grandeur of the great civilizations of yore is not what the likes of Mordecai Kaplan (1881–­1983) had in mind when he recommended that contemporary Jewry recast itself as a civilization. His project was humbler, innocent of any grand de­ signs other than to render the life of Jews in the modern world as unproblematic as possible. Nonetheless, the image of Judaism as a civilization, or more precisely the thought of Jewry understanding itself as a civilization, should cause some unease: Unbehagen, as Freud would put it in the German title of perhaps his most notable opus, Civilization and Its Discontents—­namely, a feeling that disturbs one’s sense of well-­being.2 Although addressed to American Jewry, Kaplan’s project is to be viewed more broadly as indicative of a radical transformation of contemporary Jewish self-­understanding. Drawn to the promise of the modern world to enhance material well-­being and political liberty, Jews increasingly sought what in Zionist parlance is called normalization: the reconfiguration of the Jewish people as a nation, which like other nations is attentive, first and foremost, to the imperatives of its this-­worldly social, economic, and political well-­being. The theocentric values and horizons of the imagination of traditional Judaism would recede before the emphatically anthropocentric interests of the Jews seeking a place in the modern order. Judaism was now to be conceived as an ethnically based cultural civilization constituted by popular as well as literary cultural codes, of which religious beliefs and practices are but one, and for many Jews not necessarily the most commanding. In expressly calling for the “reconstruction” of  Judaism, Kaplan gave the project its most comprehensive formulation. Kaplan presented to a generation of American Jewish immigrants and their children a conception of Judaism or rather of a Jewish affiliation that was conducive to one’s sense of well-­being, a Judaism that was—­citing a manifesto of his reconstructionist movement—­“convenient.”3 His program was thus meant to ease the Jew’s adjustment to modernity, particularly as sponsored by the open, pluralistic, down-­to-­earth, pragmatic America.4 The

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common denominator of Jewish life would be neither belief nor tenet nor practice but rather the fostering of the continuation and wholesome life of the Jewish people. Kaplan’s program to shift the axis of Jewish self-­understanding from a theocentric re­ ligious vocation to ethnicity or peoplehood was emblematic of an overarching trend that would characterize American Jewry, irre­ spective of formal denominational affiliation: Orthodox, Con­ servative, or Reform.5 Indicatively, his vision of reconstructing Judaism as a civilization was inspired by Zionism. Indeed, he held that Jewish civilization could only be realized to its fullest within the framework of the Zionist project to renew Jewish national and cultural life in the Land of Israel: “Without Eretz Yisrael, there would be no motive for reconstructing Jewish life anywhere. Jewish life would lack the basic content which only Eretz Yisrael can supply—­a living history which only in the struggle to take root in a land, can create a collective consciousness, which only a living language can beget, and common folkways which only the sharing of common practical concerns can evolve.”6 With his eyes set on American Jewry, where institutional life was still primarily centered in the synagogue, Kaplan’s resolve to reconstruct Judaism as a civilization was focused on the reconceptualization of religion within the life of Jewry. In consonance with his anthropocentric pragmatism, he insisted that the Jewish religion exist for the Jewish people, not the Jewish people for the Jewish religion. Years later, the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–­1994) would characterize such a view as nothing less than idolatry. Jews are to serve God, c’est tout.7 The notion that Judaism is a cultural and social construct meant to facilitate the Jew’s well-­being, Leibowitz averred, is a grave distortion, clearly an idolatrous perversion of Israel’s theocentric faith. But a radical “transvaluation of Jewish values”8 is precisely what Kaplan unabashedly advocated. Judaism—­preeminently its notion of a supernatural God of Creation—­must be “re-­interpreted,” distilling those values that adumbrate “what we consider an adequate spiritual adjustment to life.”9 If theology takes as its point of departure God’s transcendent, supernatural reality and thus,

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as it were, God’s point of view, then Kaplan’s reinterpreted Juda­ ism assumes the point of view of the Jew, the living Jew in the “here and now” bound to ever-­quotidian pragmatic needs and, most surely also, ideals. But these ideals, Kaplan cautions, should not inculcate any sense of uniqueness or supercilious ethnic pride, for ultimately they are shared with all caring and morally alert human beings. What distinguishes Judaism is that it is “lived by Jews,” and as such, the criterion by which one is to adjudge Judaism is its enduring functional value in enhancing the Jews’ dignity and terrestrial well-­being. Hence, there is no source external to the Jewish people themselves. Certainly, there is no transcendent reality determining why they should be Jews: “The will to maintain and perpetuate Jewish life as something desirable in and of itself ”10—­the will simply to exist as a Jew, to be a Jew and affiliate with the Jewish community, requires no apology, justification, or explanation. (We recall from chapter 2 Woody Allen’s quip in response to being asked about his ethnic identity: “I am Jewish but with an explanation!”) In Zionist parlance, one speaks of the “normalization of the Jewish people,” their liberation from the defensive, apologetic reflexes of galut (exile).11 The institutions of Judaism should be adjusted to reflect this new—­Kaplan would say healthy—­self-­understanding. Like all other civilizations, Judaism must at the outset attend to the needs of its members, and these needs are not only spiritual but also social. Thus arose the notion of a shul with a pool, which, to be sure, is preferable to a pool without a shul. The Jewish Center, with its sports and recreational facilities, was integral to Kaplan’s program of reconstructing American Jewry as a civilization in which religion was but one (optional) component. Judaism is the civilization of the Jewish people. Like any other civilization, it has a history, literature, language, social organization, folkways, norms, social and spiritual ideals, aesthetics, values, and religion. The salience that religion had in traditional Judaism was not unique, however. Indeed, all societies tend to endow the “object of their collective concern . . . with traits of a religion”; religion holds up “to the individual the worth of the group and the

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importance of his complete identification with it.”12 Yet, Kaplan conceded, modern epistemologies pose a serious challenge to any religion such as Judaism grounded in a supernatural conception of God. On the one hand, in honoring those Jews whose metaphysical skepticism does not allow them to identify with Judaism as religious faith, he insisted that institutions of Jewish life be extended to embrace all expressions of Jewish civilization, such that nonbelievers and secular Jews would feel at home in the Jewish community. Hence the shul with a pool: if one cannot pray with one’s fellow Jews, certainly one may swim with them—­or together attend a lecture or music recital. But Kaplan also contended that Judaism should also be adjusted in accord with modern sensibilities. As a faith, it must free itself of an anachronistic conception of a supernatural God, and with it any notion of revelation, miracle, and divine redemption. He would, however, continue to speak of salvation as setting the spiritual horizons of Judaism, but salvation was no longer to be conceived as a divine promise to be realized beyond history, and certainly not beyond death. Redefined according to this-­worldly, pragmatic criteria, the hope of salvation bespeaks “the progressive perfection of the human personality and the establishment of a free, just and cooperative social order.”13 In the language of contemporary social science, we may say that Kaplan’s non-­eschatological vision of sal­ vation is compatible with American civil religion. His response would probably be, “And why not?” If the primary social function of religion is to enhance its members’ adjustment to the world they live in, and should the civil religion of the society in which they live (namely, the United States) be compatible with the values of that religion, then it is perfectly reasonable that the respective axiological affirmations would be in fundamental accord. We may ignore the tautology of such an assumption—­ namely, if the values of one’s social world are to be reflected in one’s religious life, one’s social and religious fidelities are by definition compatible—­were we not to argue or rather appeal, as I will, that religion must serve as a dissonant, critical power in our

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lives, a sentry at the gates of the city warning us of the follies of unbridled secular ambition and mundane aspirations. To forge an easy consensus, Kaplan taught, public Jewish religious discourse should bracket questions of ultimate meaning. Although he was not indifferent to the question of meaning and the problems posed by inexplicable suffering and evil, he deemed it prudent “to transcend [these issues] by focusing our attention on the reality of happiness and virtue rather than on that of misery and vice, and thinking of the [issues of the meaning] not in terms of speculative thought but of ethical action.”14 Paradoxically, he continued to write about God, constantly reformulating his conception of a non-­supernatural God. Upon being introduced to Kaplan, Gershom Scholem—­who was not known to be inhibited or for that matter discreet—­is reported to have said, “I never met an atheist so obsessed with God.”15 Kaplan was no atheist, but he surely had his problems with traditional theism, not least because its otherworldliness conflicted with the modern Jew’s quest to achieve mundane happiness. Consequently, he regarded it as the order of the day to expunge supernaturalism from the Jewish religious imagination. The recasting of Judaism as a religion shorn of the supernatural and its attendant reconstruction as a civilization was necessary “to help Jews attain this-­worldly salvation,” he concluded.16 The German-­ Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–­ 1918), an inveterate disciple of Immanuel Kant and his anti-­ eudaemonistic rejection of happiness as the highest human good, is reported to have derisively dismissed Zionists as “bums” who “want to be happy” (Die Kerle wollen glücklich sein!).17 He surely would have said the same of Kaplan and his votaries. The association of Kaplan’s vision with Zionism is not coincidental, of course. As already noted, Kaplan expressly drew inspiration from Zionism and its project to normalize the Jewish people, to render them a people like any other: a normal people pursuing, as the American Declaration of Independence has it, life, liberty, and happiness in their land. If peace and security are deemed part of the vision of normalization, then Zionism has tragically

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failed. Or perhaps we could say—­borrowing from Freud’s sober if a bit impish assessment of psychoanalysis as transforming neurosis into ordinary misery—­that normalcy entails misery. As a normal people enjoying political sovereignty in their ancient homeland, the Jews are destined to have a fate as miserable as most other political nations. For, as Freud realized, temporal hap­piness inexorably eludes all mortals, individuals, and nations alike. Noting the similarity in titles between Kaplan’s book Judaism as a Civilization and Freud’s volume of 1930, Civilization and its Discontents, is purposefully ironic, albeit not without heuristic value. The resemblance between the title of Freud’s book and Kaplan’s project of 1934 to reconstruct Judaism as a civilization is somewhat misleading, but not utterly. A quick look at the German title of Freud’s book should be enough to give us pause. It bespeaks “culture,” not “civilization”: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur—­literally, “The Unease or Discontent within Culture.” Since Kant, German intellectuals tended to distinguish between Kultur and Zivilization; the former term marked the elevated province of the human spirit, and the latter the material precincts, or what Max Weber derisively characterized as the realm of instrumental reason (Zweckrationalität).18 Kultur was said to be mediated by the arts and sciences, Zivilization by the pursuit of material well-­being, power, and worldly ambition. Freud was, of course, aware of the distinction. In his day, Oswald Spengler gave the distinction new currency by arguing that Kultur refers to the spiritual state of youthful, creative societies, whereas Zivilization denotes spiritually vapid, rigid, decaying communities.19 But Kultur, Freud contended, cannot spare us from the tribulations of civilization. Ultimately, culture and civilization cannot but dialectically intersect. Accordingly, Freud vehemently rejected the distinction as artificial and an insidious self-­deception of the bourgeoisie. As he said in his earlier work, The Future of an Illusion, “I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization.”20 For him, neither culture nor civilization can overcome the irreconcilable antagonism

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between the demands of instinctual drives and the repression of those drives demanded by civilization-­cum-­culture. The resulting psychic discontent works itself out in an aggressive, destructive drive. Incidentally, Freud interpreted religion as a palliative, akin to “intoxicating substances” that numb us to our fundamental misery. In this vein, he pointed to Goethe: “Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene nicht beide besitz, der habe Religion!” (He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possess neither of those two, let him have religion!)21 In the end, however, art and science, “the two highest achievements of mankind,” are also illusory palliatives. Despite the satisfaction that surely the creative act—­be it that of the artist, the musician, the dancer, or the scholar—­may give, it “creates no impenetrable armor against the arrows of fortune.”22 Neither religion nor science nor art can help extricate us from our malaise. As my late father would say, gornisht helfen! (nothing helps; it’s hopeless). A theist, an adherent of a supernatural, personal God—­the God of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, as the religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–­1929) would put it—­would concur: gornisht helfen! Earthly well-­ being is indeed elusive, fragile at best, and uncertain. Moreover, a theist would argue, the point of biblical faith is not to induce satisfaction with our selves and our worldly attainments. On the contrary, biblical faith encourages, nay, commands us to a “sacred discontent.”23 From the perspective of God’s transcendent or “sacred” reality and uncompromising righteousness, justice, and compassion, we are religiously obliged, “commanded,” to adjudge and examine ourselves to the innermost reaches of our souls, to scrutinize our conduct and censure our sins, our conceits and those of our society.24 To be sure, we are to rejoice in the works of Creation—­ nature, family, friendship, and love in all its various and glorious manifestations—­but always to behold them as a blessing, as a divine and thus conditional gift. That condition is our being bound to God by a covenant—­ha brit—­to affirm life, but life as

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under the signature of divine Creation and our co-­responsibility with the Creator to ensure its holiness. This responsibility demands an a priori discontent not only with our selves (as a check on hubris and self-­content) but also with civilization, the social and political order. The prophets exemplify the sacred discontent with civilization. Although a prophet is often dismissed as a kvetch, an incorrigible complainer, there is a fundamental, we may even say ontological, difference between a kvetch and a prophet. The kvetch bewails his or her woe; the prophet identifies with the woe of others. Suffice it to cite random selections of prophetic admonitions. Jeremiah, the angry seer of the tribe of Benjamin, was instructed by God to stand at the gate of the Temple and proclaim: Hear the word of the Lord, all you of Judah, who enters these gates to worship the Lord! Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place. Don’t put your trust in illusions, and say, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these [buildings].” No, if you mend your ways and your actions; if you execute justice between one [person] and another; if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place; if you do not follow other gods . . . then only will I let you dwell in this place. ( Jer. 7:1–­7)

Similarly, the shepherd from Tekoa, Amos, excoriates Israel for its false piety: Spare Me the sound of your hymns, And let Me not hear the music of your lutes. But let justice well up like water, Righteousness like an unfailing stream. (Amos 6:23–­24)

Isaiah states this demand in even stronger terms: I am sated with burnt offerings . . . Bringing oblations is futile, Incense is offensive to Me.

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New moon and sabbaths, Proclaiming of solemnities, Assemblies with iniquity, I cannot abide. . . . And when you lift up your hands, I will turn My eyes away from you; Though you pray at length, I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime—­ Wash clean; Put your evil doings Away from sight. Cease to do evil; Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice; Aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan; Defend the cause of the widow. (Isa. 1:11–­17)

The prophet’s rebuke moves along two vectors. In chastising the children of Israel, it calls them to contrition, and at the same time it draws their attention to the suffering and needs of others. The prophet’s discontent is not personal but social and political. It expresses a passionate concern for his society’s moral and religious integrity—­which are, in fact, homologous and thus one.25 His cause is justice and compassion; his concern is for the Other.26 But as an emblem of true piety, the prophet does not stand apart from ordinary men and women. Instead, he is—­certainly as he is presented in Jewish tradition—­what the philosopher Max Scheler called a Vorbild, one who projects a picture (Bild ) before us in which we are to behold the values and attitudes for determining our ethos and the responsibility we are to assume for the Other.27 Biblical faith thus does not understand itself as a palliative meant to soften the pain of life or culture. Whereas for Freud, discontent is the sad lot of our psychic existence, for Judaism it is a religious obligation. One may say that Freud’s discontent is pathological, whereas biblical discontent is moral and axiological.

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To be sure, the sacred discontent enjoined by biblical faith presupposes the very conception of God that Mordecai Kaplan sought to revise. Biblical faith affirms a transcendent God whose will is expressed through the gracious act we call revelation. As biblical historians such as Yehezkiel Kaufman (1889–­1963) have pointed out, it is not God’s transcendence that distinguished biblical monotheism; it is the fact that God as the transcendent, supernatural deity of the Israelites was said to reveal His Presence and will and thereby establish a just relationship with them.28 And it is precisely the claim that God reveals God’s will and not God’s transcendence per se that disturbed Kaplan. His rejection of supernaturalism was directed at the idea of revelation, which he regarded as the source of the “theurgic” or magical conception of God that befuddles traditional Judaism and that modern Jews find objectionable. Kaplan, of course, is not alone among modern thinkers who have found the revelation to be an intellectually untenable concept. Starting with the deists of the seventeenth century, a whole battery of thinkers, many of whom even fashioned themselves as theologians, have sought to refashion the concept of God without resorting to the biblical notion of divine revelation. But to delete revelation from our understanding of God is to court what Franz Rosenzweig called “atheistic theology.”29 The oxymoron is intentionally ironic. Eliminate revelation, Rosenzweig held, and the biblical concept of God is emptied of all meaning. A transcendent God bereft of a revelatory voice and presence is unintelligible. Indeed, the jettisoning of revelation renders God’s transcendence a vacuous notion. With his focus on the German intellectual landscape, Rosenzweig observed that in endeavoring to render the “difficult concept [of revelation] unobjectionable,” Christian and Jewish thinkers alike transposed God’s transcendence into the language of philosophical idealism, rendering God an edifying emblem of humanity’s loftiest ideals. Thereby they not only overcame the “hard” fact that “the divine . . . actually entered into history” but also “blurred” the cardinal biblical precept that God is “distinct from all other actuality.” In other words,

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God’s transcendence—­ and correspondingly the experience of God’s miraculous presence in one’s life—­was effectively denied. Put simply, knowledge of God is granted us by revelation, by God’s gracious self-­disclosure; knowledge of God’s existence and God’s revealed will are coterminous. Although the Bible opens with the book of Genesis, its historical beginning is with the Sin­ aitic revelation, the point when the biblical kerygma enters human consciousness. At Sinai, God is revealed to be the Creator, the source of life that is beyond life; although God enters history, God is beyond space and time, which sets the coordinates of finite, earthly existence. God is thus eternal, or in the language of philosophy, God is absolute, uncompromised by the contingencies of time and space. The Bible prefers to speak of God as “the Holy One, may He be blessed”—­“ha-­Kadosh Barukh hu.” The ethical implications flowing from God’s unique ontological station, from God’s holiness, are succinctly delineated by the Dutch-­Jewish historian of the ancient Near East, Henri Frankfort (1897–­1954): The God of the Hebrews is pure being, unqualified, ineffable. That means that he is sui generis. It does not say that he is taboo, or he is power. It means that all values are ultimately [revealed] attributes of God alone. [And these attributes are made known to us through his self-­disclosure, through revelation.] Hence, all concrete [human and historical] phenomena are devalued. It may be true that in Hebrew, though man and nature are not necessarily corrupt, but both are necessarily valueless before God. . . . “We are all as an unclean thing, and all our virtues are as filthy rags” [Isa. 64:5]. Even man’s righteousness, his highest virtue, is devaluated by comparison with the absolute.30

Because God is holy, all that is human, no matter how exalted, is not. Biblical faith may thus be said to desacralize culture. In a philosophical meditation on religion, Jacques Derrida (1930–­2004) finds the term desacralization inordinately Christian. He prefers the Hebrew Kadosh, a power residing in the Absolute (which for him, of course, is beyond being itself ).

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He continues to explain (in his inimitably turgid manner) that “this interruptive disjunction enjoins a sort of incommensurable equality within absolute dissymmetry. The law of this untimeliness interrupts and makes history; it undoes all contemporaneity and opens the very space of faith. It designates disenchantment as the very resource of the religious.”31 In a similar vein, the late Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903–­1993) observes that “faith is born of the intrusion of eternity upon temporality. . . . [And] its primal goal is redemption from the inadequacies of finitude and, mainly, from the flux of temporality.”32 Not surprisingly, the Hebrew Bible is suspicious of the city, the axis of all civilizations, ancient and modern. Cain, a rogue and the first murderer, is the founder of the city. After he slayed his brother, Abel, the Bible says, “Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden . . . and he built a city,” the first city to blot the face of the world (Gen. 4:26). The biblical wariness of the city is further expressed in the portrayal of Babel as a metropolis whose power and material success led its citizens to self-­deification. Indeed, biblical faith induces “nagging guilt about power and success,” symbolized by the city.33 Parenthetically, the biblical sensibility reappears in muted secular expression in the comical figure of the schlemiel, the antihero of modernity.34 For the hapless schlemiel—as cast by Heinrich Heine to Charlie Chaplin35—­ success in the modern world, primed by the machinery and ethos of urban civilization, is unattainable, and for that matter ultimately not respectable. Through the schlemiel’s comical mishaps, we learn to share in his mistrust of power and the promise of success. The schlemiel also reminds us that the Jew is a real person with real, earthly needs. Alongside the “supernatural Jew,” as Arthur A. Cohen put it, there is the “natural Jew”—­the Jew facing the raw need to survive in the terrestrial, natural order and to endure with a maximum of material and political dignity.36 The supernatural and the natural are, of course, one. Jews are to move continuously, Cohen argued, between the two constitutive

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moments of their being. Soloveitchik detects these two dimensions of humanity already in the book of Genesis. There we have two distinct descriptions of the Creation of Adam.37 Adam the first, as related in the first chapter of Genesis, is created in the image of God. As such, he is mandated to subdue the world, to seek a home in the world, to create culture. He was created together with Eve, and from their community arises society. As Soloveitchik explains, Adam the first is “a social being, gregarious, communicative, emphasizing the artistic aspect of life . . . [and] practical accomplishment” (9–­11). In the second chapter of Genesis, Adam is created alone and is to cultivate the garden and to keep it; he is to dwell apart from culture; he seeks the solitude of faith. Adam the first and Adam the second mirror each other; together, they constitute the soul of the Jew, a natural being with a supernatural vocation. Adam the second does not allow Adam the first to overestimate his achievement in the natural world. He instructs Adam the first to mistrust his deeds, necessary deeds to promote his physical and cultural well-­being. Adam the second is not to look askance at Adam the first and his practical and cultural activities; Adam the second is not to sequester himself in spiritual solitude. There must be, Soloveitchik implores, a continuous dialogue between these two aspects of our soul. “[The] man of faith must bring to the attention of the man of culture the kerygma of original faith in all its singularity and pristine purity despite the incompatibility of this message with the fundamental credo of the man of culture” (25). How staggering this incompatibility is! “This unique message speaks of defeat instead of success, of accepting a higher will instead of commanding, of giving instead of conquering, of retreating instead of advancing” (25). Through this dialogue, the person of culture—­who ideally is also a person of faith—­realizes that all cultural endeavors, notwithstanding their potentially “majestic,” blessed quality, are bound to a finite, transient reality. Yet this very mistrust of culture paradoxically makes for a culture that is truly dynamic, critical of itself, and thus forever “restless

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and unfulfilled.”38 It is this “sacred discontent” that quickens the self-­transcendence that is the fulcrum of all genuine creativity and inspired human endeavor. One last word on the transvaluation of Judaism as a culture: To be sure, Judaism is a culture or, as Kaplan held, a civilization with multiple expressions, one of which is religious faith. Yet it must also be acknowledged that Judaism is eminently more than a culture. To restrict it to its cultural expressions alone—­at least from the perspective of biblical faith—­is thus a theological scandal. For, as Franz Rosenzweig reminds us, “God created the world, not religion.”39 For ultimately, religion is indeed a cultural artifact, a human construct. Biblical faith, however, induces a sacred discontent as an ontological mistrust of all that is of human making. God’s word is thus not merely an ethical injunction. Beholden to God as the transcendent ground of life, we resist the myopic pull of human hubris, individual and collective. Biblical faith thus demythologize[s] the limitless aspirations and pretensions of man and his culture, and their quest for permanence. In these, even in their most noble form, the Bible sees an inevitable end: man building a Babel or seizing the fruit, “making himself a god.” History deflates expectations, telling us that failure is the end of human action; paternity makes us aware of how vulnerable we are, how enmeshed in each other, no matter how masterfully we manipulate our lives. It teaches us that no man can erect metaphysical barriers against the contingencies of the world. We are conceived in them just as surely we are born inter urinam et feces [We are born between urine and feces (St. Augustine of Hippo)].40

The late Daniel Bell cast this founding sensibility of biblical faith as defining the vocation of post-­traditional Jews, who are to serve as a “parable of alienation.” Paradoxically affirming life yet ever alert to one’s inadequacies and the inequities that abound about them, they are destined never to be fully at home in the world.41

Coda Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in — l e o n a r d c o h e n , “ Anthem”

In a letter to his brothers, the twenty-­one-­year-­old poet John Keats (1795–­1821) described a heated conversation he recently had, in which he concluded that what distinguishes intellectual achievement, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” is the resolve to live with “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”1 Martin Buber expressed similar thoughts in urging us to meet the Other as a Thou, as a unique presence unmediated by the imperious categories of the It-­world of predetermined factual and rational categories of social convention and regnant epistemological presuppositions. Similarly, Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry’s little prince greets life with the “innocent” wonder of a child, unencumbered by the pragmatic and rational calculations of “adult” civilization. But, as the little prince was to learn, we must nonetheless accept the responsibilities of adulthood. With what Buber calls

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the “sublime melancholy” of having encountered the presence, beholding the mystery of the Other, we perforce—­as we must—­ return to the world of It.2 The return to the concrete realities of existence is not a “fall,” a congenital human weakness; it is indeed “sublime,” for it graces mundane, everyday experience with knowledge of the mystery of existence. Simone Weil identifies this knowledge, denied by the purported secure footing in objective truths, as the heartbeat of religious faith in all its cultural permutations and experience. In a letter to a priest explaining why in her view it is unnecessary to evangelize and bring the word of Christ to non-­Christians, she says: Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light—­and in the best of cases the fullness of light—­in the heart of that same religious tradition. . . . It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa, or Oceania to enter the Church.3

We need not be “uprooted” from our ancestral faith community and absorbed—­or “sublated” (aufgehoben), as Hegel would have it—­into a universal ecclesia, a spiritual fraternity in which cultural and “particularistic” differences are amalgamated to be celebrated as one universal truth. An exemplar of a “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Martin Buber concurred that “rootedness” in a distinctive tradition need not vitiate an individual’s ethical and cultural bond to the universal fraternity of humanity: It has often been suggested to me that I should liberate this [Hasidic teaching] from its “confessional limitations,” as people like to put it and proclaim it as an unfettered teaching of humankind. Taking such a “universal” path would have been for me pure arbitrariness. To speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral home: here too the word that is uttered does not go astray.4

Acknowledgments The origins of this volume reach back to the spring of 2001, when I delivered the annual Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. In preparing them for publication here, I have thoroughly reworked the three lectures, which constitute the book’s first three chapters. During my visit at the university, I was warmly and graciously hosted by its Jewish studies faculty, Professors Martin Jaffee, Joel Migdal, and Naomi Sokoloff, along with a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Jonathan Decter, and his wife. In revising the Stroum Lectures, I revisited the comments by Professor Bruce Lincoln on an earlier paper, “Images of Knowledge in Modern Jewish Thought,”1 which I delivered as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the autumn of 1996. With a gentle and respectful voice, Professor Lincoln brought to my attention the need to develop with greater nuance my conception of tradition and its relation to cultural memory, especially my reading of a Kafka vignette, which I draw from to consider the phenomenological horizons of post-­traditional faith.2 I dedicate this book to Shalom Ratzabi, with whom I discuss nigh daily the issues raised in its pages. In response to our conversations,

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Shalom would often write a Hebrew poem, each eloquently bearing the stamp of the lexical and theological registers of his rabbinic education. He deploys a finely spun weave of biblical, Talmudic, and liturgical tropes to probe post-­traditional perplexities as inflected by cosmopolitan sensibilities. My indebtedness to Sha­ lom is reflected on the dedication page. Its Arabic inscription—­a paraphrase of Song of Songs 6:3 that reads: “I am to my friend, and my friend is to me”—­expresses a friendship grounded in our shared spiritual patrimony, which, unbounded by restrictive fidelities, seeks to embrace the Other. The poet Heinrich Heine remarked that in the world of Geist (spirit-­cum-­intellect), there is no plagiarism. Ideas float freely, mediated by the written and the spoken word, fructifying one another as pollen seeding the efflorescence of new ideas. Hence, it is difficult to unravel my indebtedness to the many voices that have inspired and nurtured the musings which gave birth to this book. However, I must acknowledge with gratitude three students who read drafts of the manuscript and prompted me to refine the articulation of my thoughts on post-­traditional Jewish identities: Jessica S. Brown, Sierra Meszaros, and Joel Swanson. In posing the question, Who is wise?, the rabbis instruct us “to learn from every person” (The Ethics of the Fathers 4:1). Especially from our­stu­dents, I would add. I was graced by my enjoyable collaboration with the staff of the University of Chicago Press who shepherded this book throughout the publication process. Associate editor Kyle Wagner reviewed my manuscript with a uniquely critical intelligence, offering sage suggestions to enhance the coherence of my text before sending it for peer evaluations. Copy editor Sandra Hazel contributed to the text’s expository lucidity. With impeccable stylistic judgment, she would propose syntactic and lexical reformulations in a kindly, dialogical spirit. I am indebted as well to the team working behind the scenes to produce the book: Joseph Claude, the production controller; Erin DeWitt, senior manuscript editor; and Ryan Li, who designed both the interior and the cover of the book. I also wish to express my gratitude to my dear friend Alan B. Cohen, whose photograph graces chapter 5. Parenthetically, I

Acknowledgments

am beholden to the Press, editorial director Alan Thomas in par­ ticular, for introducing me to Cohen some fifteen years ago in con­ junction with one of his photographic projects in Israel; the rela­ tion quickly blossomed into the affectionate warmth of a gen­uine friendship. I thank the library staff of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute for its unfailing bibliographic assistance: director Bayla Pasikov and her assistants, Gil Cohen, Doron Gavison, and Pinchas Maurer. With judicious care and wisdom, Jessica Brown prepared the in­dex. Her work was financially underwritten by a gracious sub­ ven­tion facilitated by David Nirenberg, Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I can no other answer make but thanks, And thanks. — w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e , Twelfth Night; or, What You Will

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Unless otherwise indicated, translations from German and Hebrew are my own. Translated quotations from the Hebrew Bible are taken from The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 1. “Pollon anthropon noon gnonai ”: Homer, Odyssey bk. 1, lines 3–­4. 2. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, sec. 51. 3. Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019. 4. Cf. “Growing up as culturally Jewish, not religiously a Jew, [was] rather liberating because it meant that I could explore what it meant to be a Jew religiously.” Vincent Lloyd, “Interview with Gillian Rose,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, nos. 7–­8 (December 2008): 212. This dialectic is, of course, not limited to Jewry. Indeed, it is intrinsic to the European modernity, where it also has extensive sociocultural significance. Cf. “Hätten nicht die neuen Generationen unaufhörlich gegen erlebte Tradition revoltiert, würden wir noch heute in Höhlen leben; wenn die Revolte gegen erlebte Tradition einmal universell würde, werden wir uns wieder in den Höhlen befinden.” [Had recent generations not ceaselessly revolted against inherited tradition, we would find ourselves in hell; if the revolt against inherited tradition were to be universal, we would once again find ourselves in hell.] Leszek Kolakowski, “Der Anspruch

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auf die selbstversschulte Unmüdikeit,” in Von Sinn der Tradition, ed. Leonhard Reinisch (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck,1970), 1. 5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 250. 6. A similar observation is made by the Syrian poet Adonis (b. 1930) in a lecture on translation as shaping human identity. “Translation lays at the foundations of the European Renaissance,” he noted, “and was the first building block in the open-­mindedness of that age.” As a “second form of creation, translation expands one’s cultural horizons in which the Other becomes an element of one’s own identity. . . . People understand themselves well only to the extent that they understand others well, so translating other people is an ideal way to discover one’s self. . . . The Other is no longer simply someone to converse, interact and reciprocate with. It goes beyond that, to become one of the elements that make up one’s self.” Adonis, “Translation, A Second Act of Creation,” the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature’s Said Ghobash Banipal Prize Lecture for Arabic Literary Translation, Knowledge Center, British Library, London, November 9, 2018; delivered in Arabic. The lecture is summarized in English by Susannah Tarbush, “The Merits and Challenges of  Translation according to Adonis,” Arab Weekly, November 25, 2018, 22. 7. A cosmopolitan ontology is, in fact, constituted by multiple ontological perspectives, inflected as they are by a distinctive conceptual idiom and distinctive experiences, which may be culturally incommensurable. They thus resist a facile syncretism, thereby, in effect, securing the cultural autonomy and integrity of particular communities. The apparent paradox of multiple ontological perspectives of reality as the universal ground of being, and yet as culturally incommensurable, may be elucidated by Karl Mannheim’s notion of relationalism (as opposed to relativism). One’s understanding of reality, he taught, is determined by one’s “social location” and attendant difference in the “modes of expressing the ‘same’ reality.” Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 98. On the basis of this heuristic supposition, I will elaborate a dialogical hermeneutic that would allow for the unfolding of a post-­traditional Judaism that abides and flourishes in a cosmopolitan cultural universe. See chapter 5, “Within and Beyond Borders.”

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8. Whitman, Song of Myself, sec. 20. The recognition of the Other as a mirror of oneself begets a cultural humility, as Appiah duly notes by citing the Irish novelist Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. The narrator of this novel of 1768, an “old French officer,” observes that “the advantage of travel, as it regarded the savoir vivre, was by seeing a great deal of men and manners; it taught us mutual tolerance; and mutual tolerance, concluded he, making me bow, taught us mutual love.” Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), cited in Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 62–­63. 9. Richard Rorty, “Justice Is a Larger Loyalty,” in Cosmopolitics, ed. Phengh Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1998), 73. Cf. “To human beings, who, as hitherto educated, can scarcely cultivate even a good quality without running it into a fault, it is indispensable to be perpetually comparing their own notions and customs with the experience and example of persons in different circumstances from themselves: and there is no nation which does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular arts of practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior.” John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University Toronto Press, 1963), cited in Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 271. 10. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills, with a preface by T. S. Elliot (London: Routledge, 1952; reprint, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), 41. 11. Weil, 119. 12. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 222. 13. Appiah, 231. 14. In light of globalization and the growing, often desperate migration of masses from less fortunate so-­called Third World countries, cosmopolitanism as a political ethic has increasingly commanded the attention of public intellectuals. See Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dolley and Michael Hughes, with a preface by Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney (New York: Routledge, 2002); Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, ed. Robert Post, with commentaries by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Martha C. Nussbaum,

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The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). 15. Cf. patriotism “acts invisibly as a dissolvent of morality.” Weil, The Need for Roots, 143. 16. Jews as cosmopolitan Grenzgänger—­as crossing cultural and political borders—­evoke both laudatory fascination and ambivalence, if not downright contempt. Isaac Deutscher celebrates them as “non-­ Jewish Jews,” who in transcending their inherited religious and communal bonds herald a new human order of universal social justice: The Non-­Jewish Jew, and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968; reprint, London: Verso, 2017). Frederic V. Grunfeld hails the Grenzjuden in his Prophets without Honor (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979). In a historical and “detailed analysis of [German-­ Jewish] cultural products—­novels, plays, poetry, philosophical essays,” Cathy S. Gilbin and Sander L. Gilman trace the emergence of the “rootless” cosmopolitan Jew as a malleable, protean symbol of various transgressive modern social and political phenomena: Cosmopolitanism and the Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). Natan Sznaider also considers the “Jew” a preeminent symbol of cosmopolitanism. At least until the establishment of the State of Israel, he exultantly argues, following Hannah Arendt, that the Jews lived in a uniquely creative tension between particularism and universalism. Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). At the same time, he is critical of contemporary European cosmopolitanism in universalizing “memories of the Holocaust that leave out the particular experiences of the Jewish victims. By excluding the memories of Jews, Europeans inevitably fall back on a Kantian conception of cosmopolitanism rooted in a universalism that has no conceptual or actual space for the persistence of particular attachments” (Sznaider, 17). 17. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Menachot, 29b. 18. In this respect, we should distinguish tradition from traditionalism. The latter is beholden to an image of “authentic” expressions of a given religious community, dogmatically setting the boundaries of thought (and practice). In contrast, tradition is characterized by continuous reflection on the meaning of inherited beliefs and teachings. As the late Christian scholar Jaroslav Pelikan (1923–­2006) noted, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of

Notes to Pages 4–5 113

the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are, and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.” Joseph Carey, “Christianity as an Enfolding Circle: Conversation with Jaroslav Pelikan,” U.S. News and World Report, June 26, 1989. Cf. Avi Sagi, Tradition versus Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). 19. Yiddish-­speaking Ashkenazim from eastern Europe began to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the late eighteenth century. As a result of the ensuing contact with the indigenous Arab population, there arose a distinctive Arabic-­inflected Yiddish. See Mordecai Kosover, Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish: The Old Ashkenazic Jewish Community in Palestine, Its History and Its Language ( Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1966). 20. Amos Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 1–­14. The Italian-­Jewish historian of Hellenistic and Roman history Arnaldo D. Momigliano also argues that Jewish culture was invariably shaped by its non-­Jewish setting. As an example, he states that the Jewish ideal of study—­Talmud Torah, which will be the subject of chapter 3—­was inspired by the Greek educational concept of paedeia. Arnaldo D. Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, ed. Silvia Berti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10–­28. See also his essay, “Greek Culture and the Jews,” in The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal, ed. Moses I. Finley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 325–­46. Nonetheless, the guardians of rabbinic tradition were wary of the influence of “Greek wisdom.” Cf. “Cursed be a man who raises pig; cursed be the man who teaches his son Greek wisdom” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sotah 49b). Yet the revered Rabbi Gamaliel II (d. 114 CE) was said to have had a school in which five hundred pupils studied Talmud and five hundred others Greek literature and philosophy (Sotah 49b). This ambivalence about “Greek wisdom” or “external wisdom” marks rabbinic tradition to this day. 21. Gustav Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedenken?,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Verein Jüdischer Hochschuler Bar Kochba in Prag (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 255. 22. Weil, The Need for Roots, 92. I have taken some liberty in citing Weil’s text in order to render it as pertinent to our concerns. The original

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citation reads: “We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity, which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of pure gold to be found in non-­Christian civilizations.” 23. As inspired by an encounter with other religious and cultural communities, the revalorization of one’s primordial community’s religious and cultural inheritance may be guided by what the Catholic theologian David Tracy calls the “analogical imagination”: in the face of what he takes to be the undeniable pluralism of the contemporary intellectual landscape, church theologians are challenged to acknowledge the historicity of Catholic theology yet uphold its normative status, though it is to be affirmed, as he paradoxically puts it, as a nonauthoritarian authority. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 100. By invoking an “analogical imagination,” Catholic theologians should be able to encounter uninhibitedly the world beyond the church—­as represented by books, persons, works of art, and music—­and to acknowledge “real-­ similarities-­in-­real difference of meaning or analogies to the foundational or normative faith of the Church” (Tracy, 101–­7). Cf. “It is not only difference we find in others but also sameness.” Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 245. Bernard Wasserstein voices concern that cultural hybridity may ultimately be a one-­way bridge. In a detailed historical survey of “hybrid” Jewish cultures, he thus concludes that we should exercise “a measure of caution as we enter the exciting but possibly dangerous territory of hybridity. We may recognize its utility as a heuristic device. We may grant that syncretism and cross-­fertilization can be indicators of renewal and vigorous growth rather than signs of decline. But let us bear in mind that these are, for the most part, just metaphors and that evolutionary process can lead, in fact always does lead ultimately to species distinction. I would suggest that such concepts as cultural integrity and authenticity cannot be lightly dismissed. The Jews may not yet be about to trace the trajectory of the dinosaur or the dodo. But Alice [in Wonderland], you may recall, comments that she has often seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat?” Bernard Wasserstein, “The Smile of the Cheshire Cat: Reflections on Jewish Cultural Crossings in the 58th Century,” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (2014): 27. 24. Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope: Selected Essays, trans. Eva Jospe (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1998), passim.

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25. The Jewish people are to serve as “an eternal witness to pure monotheism, to be the martyr, to be the suffering servant of the Lord. The misery of Jewish history is grounded in messianism, which demands humble submission to suffering and hence the rejection of the state as the protector against suffering. . . . The freely accepted suffering makes manifest the historic worthiness of the sufferer.” Leo Strauss, “Introductory Essay” to “Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, with an introduction by Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 242 (italics in the original). Rabbinic opinion is divided on whether the passages in Isaiah on the Suffering Servant refer to the Messiah or Israel. The medieval French rabbi Rashi (1040–­1150) consistently interprets these passages as referring to Israel (cf. his commentaries on Isaiah 42:1 and 53:11). The Spanish rabbi Ibn-­Ezra (1089–­1167) comments on Isaiah 53:11, “Israel will be rewarded for its suffering, for Israel will teach the Gentiles Torah; because of the Gentiles’ sins Israel will suffer and share in their travails; Israel will pray for the Gentiles.” Ibn-­Ezra, however, understands other passages in Isaiah as referring to “the prophet,” i.e., the Messiah. Cf. his commentary on Isaiah 42:1, 42:19, and 53:1. Ibn-­Ezra’s reading of these passages is endorsed by Radak (David Kimchi, 1160–­1235) and Isaac Abarbanel (1437–­1508). 26. Hermann Cohen, from a conversation with Franz Rosenzweig, cited in Rosenzweig’s introduction to Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1924), lx. 27. Hermann Cohen, “Zionismus und Religion” (1916), in Strauss, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, 2:319–­27. 28. For a trenchant critique of identity politics, see Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017). For a sympathetic appraisal of marginalized communities, not necessarily ethnic, such as women and homosexuals, which adopt an identity-­specific political agenda, see Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). While sharing Fukuyama’s appeal to accommodate the existential ground of collective identities within a universal ethic of toleration, Ingrid Creppell notes the perils of a supercilious political privileging of identity: “No person is reducible to a single identity and any politics that privileges identity above all tends to harden the lines about the ones that have been politicized. If that

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nature of identity politics varies, as historical and anthropological studies make obvious that they do, then a politics that takes given identities as privileged limits human potential.” Ingrid Creppell, Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought (London: Routledge, 2003), xi. 29. Cf. Leopold Sonnemann, “No loyalty can exist at the expense of truth,” editorial, Frankfurter Zeitung, December 1, 1876, cited in Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A Portrait of Jews in Germany, 1743–­1933 (New York: Metropolitan, 2002), 201. Sonnemann (1831–­1909) was the publisher and editor of this influential German liberal newspaper. 30. This commandment appears no less than thirty-­six times in the Torah. See especially Leviticus 19:18 (“You should love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”) and Exodus 22:21 (“You shall not wrong a stranger, nor oppress him; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”). 31. As Simone Weil cautions, “Fascism is always intimately connected with a certain variety of patriotic feeling” (Weil, The Need for Roots, 148). On the other hand, she acknowledges that patriotism may be inspired by a compassion for one’s country, a “watchful and tender concern to keep it out of harm’s way” (Weil, 179). 32. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 219. 33. Dylan, “With God on Our Side,” www.bobdylan.com/songs /god-­our-­side/, accessed September 8, 2020. 34. Franz Rosenzweig had similar concerns but attributed the alliance of religion with nationalism to a nineteenth-­century Christian and Jewish retreat from the concept and affirmation of divine revelation. In an essay he penned in 1914 but was published posthumously, he observed, “In recent decades a change has come about. A notion of peoplehood emerged, which, although it was related to the older notion of peoplehood in German Idealism, was essentially new. This new notion of peoplehood gained the status of eternal existence. He who is capable of penetrating the pseudo-­naturalistic veils of the race-­ idea . . . recognizes here the attempt to transform the notion of peoplehood so that it finds justification within itself rather than in its achievements. . . . The people, which no longer lives or dies for the sake of supranational purposes, finds within itself the right to live. . . . We see this happening in our midst. Now, instead of showing—­in the eternity of the philosophical thought or in the temporality of the historical

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process—­the human under the power of the divine, the divine is shown to be the self-­projection of the human against a sky of myth. . . . In Judaism the rationalistic deification of the people developed into the Jewish-­People theology. . . . The distinction between God and man, which was a stumbling block for all new and old paganism, appears to be abolished; the offensive notion of revelation as the pouring forth of a superior content into an unworthy vessel is silenced.” Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Paul W. Franks, with Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 10–­24. 35. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 237. 36. See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31. 37. On Judaism as a text-­centered community, see Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 38. Franz Rosenzweig, “Upon Opening the Jüdisches Lehrhaus,” in On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 98. 39. Rosenzweig, 99. Paul Sartre, Anti-­Semite and the Jew, trans. George J. 40. Jean-­ Becker, with a preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). chapter one

1. Elias Canetti, Crowd and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 178. 2. Franz Kafka, The Diaries, 1910–­1923, trans. Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin, 1964), entry of January 8, 1914. 3. For a nuanced historical survey of the issue, see Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 1990). Various conceptual issues raised with what constitutes a modern Jewish identity are considered in the collection of essays edited by David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krauz, Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). The wide variety of modern expressions of Jewish identity is attested through thirty-­six autobiographical statements in “Jewish Identity: Challenged and Redefined,”

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chap. 12 in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-­F lohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 796–­878. 4. See, e.g., Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature (Albany: SUNY, 1992); and Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). The Jewish déraciné serves as a trope in modern European literature for post-­traditional ethnic identities. Cf. Neil R. Davison, James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and “the Jew” in Modernist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). “Although an apostate from Judaism, Bloom’s ethnicity parallels Joyce’s view of his own anti-­Catholic Irishness. To be born a Catholic Irishman, reject the Church, and then call oneself the great Irish writer of his own ear appears to have been parallel in Joyce’s mind to being uncircumcised, unkosher, agonistic, and still thinking of oneself as a Jew” (Davison, 201). The figure of the deracinated, assimilated Jew plays a similar role in postmodern philosophical discourse. See Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 5. See David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American-­Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 6. Franz Rosenzweig to his parents, December 18, 1917, in Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, with a foreword by Paul Mendes-­F lohr, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 63 (italics added). 7. See Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen, “A Debate on Zionism and Messianism,” in Mendes-­F lohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 651–­55, esp. n1. 8. See Arthur Green, Devotion and Commandment: The Faith of Abraham in the Hasidic Imagination (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1989). 9. See Amos Funkenstein, Perspectives on Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), passim. 10. Ahad Ha’am, Collected Writings (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947), 150 (in Hebrew). 11. Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism, Religion and Death: Essays (New York: New American Library, 1976), 167.

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12. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World, Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion (London: Athlone Press, 1976), 49. 13. Review of Jonathan M. Hall, “Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture” (2002), International History Review (September 2003): 36–­39. Cf. “Ethnic identity is distinct from other group identities in that it must include at least the fiction of shared ancestry” (Hall, 36). On Jewish ethnicity, see A. Epstein, Ethos and Ethnicity: Three Studies in Ethnicity, with an introduction by Athena S. Leussi (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2009), xx. 14. Ben Halpern, “Myth and Ideology in Modern Usage,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 1, no. 11 (1961): 129–­49. Mythology deals with beliefs originating in historical experience, value integration, and establishment of consensus, whereas ideology deals with beliefs originating in competitive social situations and their communication and segregation. Irrational mythologies spark historical dynamism, rational ideologies extend it. Ben Halpern, “Ethnic and Religious Minorities: Subcultures and Subcommunities,” in “Papers and Proceedings of a Conference on Negro-­Jewish Relations in the United States,” special issue, Jewish Social Studies 27, no. 1 ( January 1965): 37–­44. 15. Felix Gross and Basil Vlavianos, eds., Struggle for Tomorrow: Modern Political Ideologies for the Jewish People (New York: Arts, 1954). 16. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Anti-­Semite and the Jew, trans. George J. Becker, with a preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). 17. Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 67–­98. 18. In an extensive essay, Fackenheim argues that the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel are related events, historically and existentially. Hence, they “confer” on Jews the twin duties of heeding the “Commanding Voice of Auschwitz” and acknowledging the “centrality” of the State of Israel to contemporary Jewish life. See Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of the Holocaust and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). 19. See Manfred Vogel, “Some Reflections on the Question of Jewish Identity,” Journal of Reform Judaism 30, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 1–­33. 20. Enacted on July 5,1950, the Law of Return stipulates that “every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh. . . . An oleh’s visa

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shall be granted to every Jew who has expressed a desire to settle in Israel. . . . The Minister of Immigration is charged with the implementation of this Law and may make regulations as to any matter relating to such implementation and also as to the grant of oleh’s visas and oleh’s certificates to minors up to the age of 18 years.” Signed by David Ben-­Gurion, Prime Minister; Moshe Shapira, Minister of Immigration; and Yosef Sprinzak, Acting President of the State, Chairman of the Knesset (Parliament). Sefer ha-­Chukkim no. 51 of 5710, p. 159 (in Hebrew). Although the Law of Return does not specify “who is a Jew,” in practice the state has distinguished between membership in the “nation” and religion. One can thus be a Jew by nationality but not by religion. Whereas nationality is defined by ethnicity (and thus inclusive of individuals of Jewish descent and intermarriage), religious membership is determined by rabbinic law to be one born of Jewish mother or conversion. 21. The distinction between national and religious membership was increasingly challenged by rabbinic authorities. Faced with the issue whether individuals whose mothers were not Jewish or had not converted could be recognized as Jewish, Prime Minister Ben-­Gurion wrote to fifty-­one Jewish scholars in Israel and in the Diaspora, soliciting their opinion whether children of mixed marriages could be registered as Jews. At the end of his letter, Ben-­Gurion revealed his own vision of Israeli Jewish identity: “The principle of freedom of conscience and religion has been guaranteed in Israel both in the Proclamation of Independence and in the Basic Principles of the governments that have held office until now, which have included both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ [political] parties. All religious and anti-­religious coercion is forbidden in Israel, and a Jew is entitled to be either religious or non-­religious. Israel serves in our time as a center for the ingathering of the exiles. . . . The merging of the various communities and their integration into one nation is one of Israel’s most vital and difficult tasks. Every effort must be made to increase shared and unifying properties and eliminate as far as possible those that separate and alienate.” Ben-­Gurion went on to contrast the Diaspora, where marriages with non-­Jews were considered a threat to Jewish continuity, and the State of Israel, where these marriages could lead “in practice to the complete merging with the Jewish people.” Baruch Litvin, Jewish Identity: Modern Responsa and Opinions on the Registration of Children of Mixed Marriages; David Ben-­Gurion’s

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Query to Leaders of World Jewry, ed. Sidney B. Hoening ( Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1970), 14ff. 22. Nechama Tec, In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230. 23. Yigal Elam, Judaism as a Status Quo: The Who Is a Jew Controversy of 1958 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), 125. 24. Jacob Klatzkin, “A Nation Must Have Its Own Land and Language” (ca. 1914), in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 318–­20. 25. Yoav Peled, “Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the State of Israel,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 ( June 1992): 434–­43. 26. Though often used interchangeably, cosmopolitanism denotes a philosophical conception of “world citizenship,” whereas multiculturalism is a descriptive sociological denotation. 27. Georg Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), chap. 1; Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1993); and Paul Mendes-­Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), passim. 28. This position is most prominently associated with Rabbi Samuel Raphael Hirsch (1808–­1888), whose followers are most often referred to as Neo-­Orthodox, although they by and large would regard themselves as Torah-­True. 29. A somewhat abridged version of Hatam Sofer’s testament is translated in Ethical Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury, ed. and annot. Jack Riemer and Nathaniel Stampfer (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 18–­21. 30. That the Jews were welcome into the liberal social and political order as individuals and not as a collective was expressly stated in the debates of the French Assembly on whether the Jews were eligible for citizenship within the terms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Count Stanislas de Clermont Tonnerre voiced the principle that governed the emancipation of the Jews in all the emerging European democracies: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals. They must be citizens. . . . It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually

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become a citizen. . . . The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.” Minutes of the French National Assembly debate of December 23, 1798, in M. Diogenes Tama, Transactions of the Parisian Sanhendrin, trans. F. D. Kirwan (London, 1807), 50–­55; cited in Mendes-­F lohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 124. 31. See Ben-­Gurion’s letter of October 27, 1958, inviting Jewish scholars in Israel and in the Diaspora to address the question, Who is a Jew? “The Jewish community in Israel does not resemble a Jewish community in the Diaspora. We in this country are not a minority subject to the pressure of a foreign culture, and there is [thus] no need here to fear the assimilation of Jews among non-­Jews which takes place in many prosperous and free countries.” Litvin, Jewish Identity, 14ff. 32. Kurt Lewin, “Erhaltung, Identität und Veränderung in Physik und Psychologie,” in Werkausgabe, ed. Carl-­Friedrich Craumann (Stutt­ gart: Klett-­Cotta, 1981), 1:87–­110. 33. Erik H. Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity” (1956), in Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society, ed. M. R. Stein, A. J. Vidich, and D. M. White (New York: Free Press, 1960), 37–­87. On the cultural genealogy of the concept of identity, see Lewis D. Wurgaft, “Identity in World History: A Postmodern Perspective,” History and Theory 34 (1995): 67–­85. 34. For a general discussion of the language of national “identity” avant la lettre, see Walter Sulzbach, National Consciousness, with an introduction by Hans Kohn (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943); David Bell, “Recent Works on Early French Identity.” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 84–­113; Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993). 35. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 249–­85; Virginia Domingues, People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn, eds., The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Among contemporary Israeli historians there is a debate, initiated by the late Amos Funkenstein, regarding the applicability of the “master narrative,” which has hitherto dominated Jewish historiography, especially as inspired by Zionism, to the

Notes to Pages 21–22 123

various subcommunities of the Jewish people. See Amos Funkenstein, “The History of Israel among the Thorn Bush: History in the Light of Other Disciplines,” Zion: The Journal of the Israeli Historical Association, vol. 61: 92–­111 (in Hebrew); Shulamit Volkov, “The Jews among the Nations: National Narrative or a Chapter within an Integrated History,” Zion: The Journal of the Israeli Historical Association, vol. 61: 91–­111 (in Hebrew); and Dan Diner, “Cumulative Contingency: Historicizing Legitimacy in Israeli Discourse,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (Spring/ Summer 1995): 147–­70. 36. Paul Mendes-­F lohr, “Jewish Continuity in an Age of Discontinuity: Reflections from the Perspective of Jewish Intellectual History,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1991), 54–­66. 37. Gustav Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedenken?,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Verein Jüdischer Hochschuler Bar Kochba in Prag (Leipzig: Kurt Wolf Verlag, 1913), 250ff. 38. Landauer, 251. 39. Elias Conetti, The Human Province, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 51. 40. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 4. 41. See “Woody Allen: The Schlemiel as Modern Philosopher,” in American-­Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends, by David Desser and Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 36–­104, esp. 44ff. 42. Cf. “Zelig . . . focuses on a man with no personality, no meaning, of his own.” Desser and Friedman, 66. 43. Cf. “Zelig, the clearest expression of Jewish fear and paranoia ever produced in the cinema, reveals a desperate desire to fit in and achieve total assimilation within mainstream society.” Desser and Friedman, 88. 44. Among the cameo celebrities in Zelig—­each of whom is a high-­ profile American Jewish intellectual—­Irving Howe (1920–­1993), a noted authority on Jewish immigrant literature, states before the camera, “When I think about it, it seems to me that his [Zelig’s] story reflected a lot of the Jewish experience in America; the great urge to push in, and to find one’s place and then to assimilate into the culture.” Cited in Desser and Friedman, 73. The citation is apparently Howe’s own words, but clearly said with Allen’s editorial approval.

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45. Humphrey Morris, introduction to Telling Fact: History and Narration in Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph H. Smith and Humphrey Morris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xiv. 46. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in Complete Poetry (London: Nonesuch Press, 1971), 41, 49, 84. chapter two

1. Gustav Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Verein Jüdischer Hochschuler Bar Kochba in Prag (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 225. 2. Jacques Derrida, Writing in Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 153. The citation “Jewgreek is greekjew” is from James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922), 477. Evoking this oft cited aperçu from Joyce, John D. Caputo affirms it as endorsing a cosmopolitan syncretism: “In writing jewgreek I am speaking of miscegenation, polygenesis and heteromorphic pluralism.” John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 216n21. The problematic I address in this chapter is whether a celebration of the cosmopolitan ethos need entail a syncretism that vitiates the possibility of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity. 3. Homer, Odyssey 4.412; see also 4.355. 4. Cf. identities “create forms of solidarity: if I think of myself as an X, then, sometimes, the mere fact that somebody else is an X, too, may incline me to do something with or for them; where X might be a ‘woman,’ ‘black,’ or ‘American.’ ” Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 24. 5. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 205. 6. On Judaism as a deliberate choice by post-­traditional Jews, see Arthur A. Cohen, “Why I Chose to Be a Jew,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1959; reprinted in An Arthur A. Cohen Reader, ed. David Stern and Paul Mendes-­Flohr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 32–­41. 7. Cited in Jeffrey Salkin, “Woody Allen, Jewish despite Himself,” Religiousnews.com, December 3, 2015, https://religionnews.com /2015/12/03/woody-­allen-­jewish/. In reflecting on her decision to convert to Christianity, Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–­1833) observed that “the misery of being Jewish is to have to justify oneself continually.”

Notes to Pages 27–31 125

Cited in Hannah Arendt, “Rahel Varnhagen and Goethe” (1934), trans. from the French in Critical Inquiry 40, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): 17. 8. See Arthur A. Cohen, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: An Historical and Theological Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). 9. Bishop Kenneth Cragg, in a lecture held at the Tantur Ecumenical Center, Jerusalem, in May 1990. 10. Heinrich Heine, “Prinzessin Sabbat” (1851), trans. Margret Armour, in The Works of Heinrich Heine, vol. 12, Romancero: Book III, Last Poems (London: W. Heinemann, 1905), 7. 11. For Heine, “Jewish heritage was love of freedom and good cooking,” see Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-­Jewish Epoch, 1743–­1933 (New York: Picador, 2003), 8. 12. In his diary entry from September 29, 1906, Rosenzweig likened Judaism to a family souvenir, an inherited piece of jewelry that it discards because it is no longer in fashion: “Wenn eine Frau ein ererbtes Schmuckstück, wie es heut [sic] kein Juwelier mehr anfertigen kann, wegwürfe, weil ihr Mann Geld genug hat, um ihr ein womöglich noch üppigeres neue zu kaufen, würde man sei auslachen.—­Die eine ererbte Religion fortwerfen, am Ende gar ohne eine neue sich erwarten zu können, oder meinetwegen auch in der Sicherheit, sich eine neumodische kaufen zu können, gelten nicht für dumm! Dann und wann kann man doch—­, und wenn man noch so viel neue Schmuckstücke hat—­auch mal das Erbstück tragen, (Nota bene: natürlich, wenn man es ererbt hat); ‘gnädige Frau, Sie tragen ja heute eine ganz entzückende Brosche’ und wenn dann gnädige Frau lächelnd erwidern kann: ‘Ja, ein Familienerbstück!’ das ist doch was!” Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1: Briefe und Tagebücher:1900–­1918, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-­Scheinmann, with the assistance of Bernard Casper (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 57. 13. See David P. Goodman, “Faustian Bargains,” Tablet, December 14, 2010, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/faustian-­bargains. 14. See Paul Mendes-­F lohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), appendix, “The Demography of Modern Jewish History,” 871–­91, esp. tables 2, 5, and 7. 15. Yuri Skelzine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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16. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Religion beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World, Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion (London: Athlone Press, 1976), 42. 17. See Paul Mendes-­F lohr, “Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism: An Analysis of Its Ideological Premises,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 21 (1976): 87–­107. 18. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Deutsche Menschen (Lucerne: Vita Nova, 1936). In this short volume, appearing under the pseudonym Detlef Holz in defiance of National Socialism, Benjamin sought to affirm the humanistic tradition of Germany by publishing twenty-­seven letters from 1783 to 1883 by the likes of Kant and Goethe. The volume’s epigraph, which also appeared on the cover, reads, “Von Ehre ohne Ruhm / Von Grösse ohne Glanz / Von Würde ohne Sold” [Honor without Fame / Greatness without Glory / Dignity without Reward]. 19. Martin Buber, “Judaism and Jews,” in On Judaism, ed. N. N. Gla­ tzer, trans. Eva Jospe (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 19. 20. In a series of coauthored as well as separately penned studies, Jan and Aleida Assmann have developed the concept of cultural memory from the perspective of their respective scholarly disciplines: Jan, Egyptology; Aleida, comparative literature. The purview of the concept, however, is universal and is meant to revise and give nuance to the concepts of collective and historical memory. See Aleida and Jan Assmann, Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archälogie der literarischen Kommunication (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1987); and Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in föhren Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1992); Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingston (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 21. Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, no. 25 (Summer 1995): 132. Subsequent references are given in the text. 22. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, chap. 3, “Kulturelle Identität und politische Imagination,” 130–­44. 23. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012), 11. 24. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 59–­67.

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25. Accordingly, the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–­1918) advanced a distinction between religion and religiosity. The former designates affiliation to institutional religion and practice, the latter an abiding religious sensibility, which may find expression in a variety of cultural pursuits, such as music, art, and science. See Dominika Motak, “Georg Simmel’s Concept of Religion and Religiosity,” Studia Religiologica 45, no. 2 (2012): 109–­15. One may also have religious faith that is not satisfied by institutional affiliation, “believing without belonging.” Jonathan Benthall, “Just the Ordinary God: How Faith and ‘British Values’ Intersect,” Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2017, 10. 26. The novelist Norman Mailer had a rather large collection of Judaica, for which he apparently allocated a special shelf in his large library of seven thousand volumes. See J. Michael Lennon, “The Naked and the Read: Inside Norman Mailer’s Library,” Times Literary Supplement, March 9, 2018, 7. 27. Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40. Subsequent references are given in the text. 28. On the sublime, see Hans-­Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker, ed. R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 29. On the concept of images of knowledge and its applicability to the study of the cognitive contours of modern Judaism, see my essay “Wissensbilder im modernen jüdischen Denken,” in Wissensbilder: Strategien der Überliefung, ed. Ulrich Raulff and Gary Smith (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 221–­39. 30. Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise: Gebhardt Edition, 1925, trans. Samuel Shirley, with a new introduction by Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 53ff. 31. Griffiths, Religious Reading, 74ff. 32. Franz Rosenzweig, “Upon the Opening of the Jüdisches Lehrhaus,” in On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 95–­102. 33. Abba Kovner, Sloan Kettering: Poema (Tel Aviv: Ha-­Kibbutz ha-­ Me’uhad, 1987), 73 (in Hebrew). 34. Stephane Moses, “Franz Rosenzweig in Perspective: Reflections on His Last Diaries,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-­F lohr, Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry 8

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Notes to Pages 43–50

(Hanover, NH: Published for Brandeis University Press by the University Press of New England, 1988), 185–­201. 35. On the hermeneutics of citation, see Benjamin E. Sax, “Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus: Negation, Citation, and Jewish Identity,” Shofar (Drew University) 32, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 1–­29. 36. Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 131. 37. See Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 38. Rosenzweig’s widow Edith (1895–­1979) and their son Rafael (1922–­2001) emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in the summer of 1939. With the Gestapo’s approval, they were permitted to ship three thousand books to Palestine. En route, the boat transporting Rosenzweig’s library docked in Tunis. It was impounded by the Tunisian authorities, who transferred the books to the municipal library, where they are still housed. See Rosenzweig’s Library from 1939 with a Report on the Current State of the Tunisian National Library, with an introduction and notes, ed. Norbert Waszek (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2017). 39. The organizing principle of Rosenzweig’s library was related to me by Nahum N. Glatzer (1903–­1991), who served Rosenzweig as his research assistant at the Lehrhaus. chapter three

1. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush, with an introduction and commentary by Alexander Altmann (Hanover, NH: Published by University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1983). 2. For a synoptic review of the place of Talmud Torah in Judaism, see Aharon Lichtenstein, “Study,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essay on Critical Concepts; Movements and Beliefs, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-­Flohr (New York: Charles Scrib­ ner’s Sons, 1987), 931–­37. Lichtenstein concludes the essay with the observation that “the axiological and historical centrality of Talmud Torah is a cardinal fact of Jewish spirituality” (Lichtenstein, 937). 3. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 102–­3. Subsequent references are given in the text. 4. Franz Rosenzweig, “Towards a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” in On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken

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Books, 1955), 63. Cf. “The mezuzah may have greeted one at the door [of the modern Orthodox synagogue], but the bookcase had, at best, a single Jewish corner.” Rosenzweig, “On Jewish Learning,” in On Jewish Learning, 229. 5. See Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, presented by Nahum N. Glatzer, with a new foreword by Paul Mendes-­F lohr, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 65. Also see Franz Rosenzweig, “It Is Time: Concerning the Study of Judaism,” dedicated to Hermann Cohen, in On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 27–­54. 6. Hermann Cohen, “Die Einrichtung von Lehrstühlen für Ethik theologischen Lehransund Religinsphilosophie an den jüdischen-­ talten,“ in Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1924), 2:112–­13. 7. Cohen, 2:113. 8. Franz Rosenzweig, “On Jewish Learning,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 228. 9. Rosenzweig, 229. Jacob Katz notes that Jewish assimilation began when individual Jews, such as Moses Mendelssohn’s daughters, found “intellectual and social gratification” beyond the traditional precincts of Judaism with non-­Jews. Jacob Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnsborough, Hants, UK: Gregg International, 1972). 10. Rosenzweig, “On Jewish Learning,” 230. 11. Rosenzweig, 230. 12. Reported to me in a personal conversation by Nahum N. Glatzer (1903–­1991), who served as Rosenzweig’s research assistant at the Lehrhaus. 13. Rosenzweig, “On Jewish Learning,” 231. 14. Franz Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, July 16, 1924, in The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-­F lohr (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 318. 15. Rachel Heuberger, Rabbiner Nehemias Anton Nobel: Die jüdische Renaissance in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt: Societäts-­Verlag, 2005). 16. The German poet and savant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was at the forefront of their deliberations. Rabbi Nobel also prized himself as a Goethekenner. See previous note.

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17. As opposed to amour propre (self-­love), amour de soi (love of self ) is not contingent on the approval of others. 18. Buber’s Mittelstelle für Jüdische Erwachsenenbildung (Center for Jewish Adult Education), active from 1934 to 1938, conducted Lernzeiten, study retreats, which took place in the countryside over several days. The retreats were most often led by Buber himself. See Ernst Akiba Simon, Aufbau im Untergang: Jüdische Erwachsenenbildung im na­ tionalsozialistischen Deutschland als geistiger Widerstand (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1959). 19. Martin Buber, “Teaching and Deed” (1934), trans. Olga Marx, in Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 141. 20. Buber, 143. 21. Martin Buber, “Herut: On Youth and Religion” (1918), in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 149. Subsequent references are given in the text. 22. Martin Buber, “Universität und Volkshochschule,” letter dated January 22, 1922, in Kampf um Israel: Reden und Schriften (1921–­1932) (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1933), 303–­8. 23. See Ernst Akiba Simon, Talmid Chacham und Chalutz (Hamburg: Zeirea Misrachi, 1934). 24. Buber, “Universität und Volkshochshule, ” 306. 25. Buber, 307. 26. Midrash from Genesis Rabbah, cited in Buber, “Teaching and Deed,” 144. 27. Buber, 143. Cf. The call for “a Jewish house of study . . . is a declaration of war upon all those you imagine they can be Jews and have a Jewish life outside the teachings, who think by cutting off the propa­ gation of values is to accomplish something salutary for Jewry” (ibid.). 28. Buber, 144. For a comprehensive review of Buber’s conception of Jewish learning, see Judah Levine, “ ‘ The Holy Spark’: Martin Buber and the New Jewish Learning,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 57 (2012): 163–­86. 29. Buber, “Herut,” 151. Subsequent references are given in the text. 30. Rendered in The Jewish Study Bible, following traditional rabbinic understanding of the verse, as “We will faithfully do” (Exod. 24:7). 31. Franz Rosenzweig, “The Builders: Concerning the Law,” in On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 84–­86.

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32. Franz Rosenzweig to his parents, January 23, 1917, in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, presented by Nahum N. Glatzer, with a new foreword by Paul Mendes-­F lohr, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 47. 33. Franz Rosenzweig, “Upon Opening the Jüdisches Lehrhaus,” in On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 99. 34. Thomas Traherne (ca. 1636–­1674), “Innocence,” in Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgiving, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 2:18. 35. This imponderable of faith was already addressed by the eleventh-­ century Sufi sage Abu Hamid al-­Ghazālī. Cf. “There is certainly no point in trying to return to the level of naïve and derivative belief [taglid ] once it has been left, since a condition of belief at such a level comes to know that, the glass of his naïve beliefs, is broken. This is a breakage not to be prepared by patching or by assembling of fragments. The glass must be melted once again in the furnace for a new start, and out of it another fresh vessel formed.” Abu Hamid al-­Ghazālī, Munqidh min al-­Dalal [Deliverance from Error] (3rd Damascus ed., 1358), translated in W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of Al-­ Ghazali (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), 27. 36. Peter Wust, Naivität und Pietät (Tübingen, 1925), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Münster: Verlag Regensberg, 1964), 25–­352; introduction by Albinus Leenhouwers, 5–­22. 37. Wust, 2:184. 38. Wust, 2:189. See Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. A. and C. Beck (London: Collins/The Fontana Library, 1965), pt. 2, sec. 3, “Peter Wust on the Nature of Piety,” 232–­55; and Ernst Akiba Simon, “Die zweite Naivität,” in Brücken: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1965), 246–­79. 39. Wust, Naivität und Pietät, 2:2. The poem’s reference to the “Eternal Thou” suggests an affinity to Buber’s dialogical religiosity, which he introduced with the publication of Ich und Du in 1923, two years before Wust’s Naivität und Pietät. 40. Ernst Akiba Simon, “On the Second Naiveté,” in Are We Still Jews? Essays (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Po’alim, 1982), 164 (in Hebrew). 41. Dora Diamant shared this reminiscence with Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and first biographer. Brod published it in the New York

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German-­Jewish journal Der Aufbau (August 19, 1963) and later included it in his Über Franz Kafka, eine Biographie: Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehr; Verzweiflung und Erlösung im Werk Franz Kafkas (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1966), 339. 42. Plato, Theatetus 155. 43. Max Scheler, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. and introduced by David R. Lachterman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 137. 44. Martin Buber, “Ein Hinweis für Bibelkurse,” Rundbrief, January 1936, cited in Ernst Akiba Simon, Aufbau im Untergang: Jüdische Erwachsenenbildung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland als geistiger Widerstand (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1959), 67. 45. Martin Buber, “Bildung und Weltanschauung,” Der Morgen, February 1935; reprinted in Schriften zu Jugend, Erziehung und Bildung, ed. and with an introduction and commentary by Juliane Jacobi, in Martin Buber-­Werkausgabe, ed. Paul Mendes-­F lohr and Peter Schäfer (Güetersloh, Germany: Güetersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 8:282. 46. Buber, 8:282. 47. Gemeinsamkeit denotes a community of shared concerns. 48. Buber, “Bildung und Weltanschauung,” 8:283. 49. Ludwig Strauss, Wintersaat: Ein Buch aus Sätzen, with a foreword by Martin Buber (Zürich: Manesee Verlag, 1953), 58. 50. See Steven Kepnis, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 51. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 57 (I have modified the translation). 52. Cf. “In fact, the [biblical] term which is usually translated as faith actually means, in most cases, trust [Vertauen], confidence, and a firm reliance on pledge and promise. Abraham trusted in the Eternal and it was accounted to him for piety (Gen. 15:6); the Israelites saw and trusted in the Eternal and in Moses, his servant (Ex. 14:31). Whenever it is a question of the eternal truths of reason, it does not say believe, but understand and know. . . . Nowhere does it say: Believe, O Israel, and you will be blessed.” Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 100. 53. “[The] ‘existential’ characteristic of [the Hebrew term] Emunah is not sufficiently expressed in the translation ‘faith.’ . . . It must further be noticed that the conception includes the two aspects of a reciproc-

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ity of permanence: the active, ‘fidelity,’ and the receptive, ‘trust.’ If we wish to do justice to the intention of the spirit of the [biblical Hebrew], which is so expressed, then we ought not to understand ‘trust’ merely in a psychical sense, as we do not with ‘fidelity.’ The soul is as fundamentally concerned in the one as in the other, but it is decisive for both that the disposition of the soul should become an attitude of life. Both, fidelity and trust, exist in the actual realm of relationship between two persons. Only in the full actuality of such a relationship can one be both loyal and trusting.” Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman Goldhawk, with an afterword by David Flusser (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 28. 54. Simon, “Die zweite Naivität,” 275. 55. Buber, “Herut,” 159. 56. Buber, 156. chapter four

1. Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. from the French by Richard Howard (San Diego: Harcourt, 2000), chap. 21. 2. Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry, Le petit prince, with drawings by the author (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). First published in the United States, when France was still under German occupation (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1943). 3. Saint-­Exupéry, The Little Prince, chap. 13. 4. Saint-­Exupéry, chap. 1. 5. Saint-­Exupéry, chap. 1. 6. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals” and “What Is Enlightenment,” trans. with an introduction by Lewis White Beck, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 83–­90. 7. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–­1935) also found in the imaginary of children an antidote to the vanities of adults: “Children know that the doll isn’t real, but they treat it as if it were, to the point of crying with grief when it breaks. . . . How blessed is that deluded age, when life is neglected by the absence of sex, and reality negated by the act of playing, unreal things standing in for the real ones! . . . The child obscurely senses the absurdity of wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren’t all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd? O divinely absurd intuition of children! True vision of things,

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which we [adults] always dress with convictions, however nakedly we see them, and always blur with our ideas, however directly we look at them!” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2001), 406. 8. Saint-­Exupéry, The Little Prince, chap. 21. 9. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 15. 10. Buber, 14ff. 11. Nathan Rotenstreich, On Faith, ed. with an introduction by Paul Mendes-­F lohr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 12. Rotenstreich would thus question, for instance, Max Scheler’s contention that the essence of faith is the emotive experience of love. Rotenstreich, 146. For a phenomenological exposition of faith requires its “isolation from other cognate phenomena, even from religion, in spite of the established connection and affinity between the two. . . . Therefore, faith can be considered an attitude that cannot be subsumed under attitudes like cognition or perception, though these attitudes inform faith.” Rotenstreich, 1. Accordingly, “it is necessary to consider the historical variations of faith.” Rotenstreich, 130. 13. Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunements: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xii. Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 14. Martin Buber, “Herut: On Youth and Religion” (1918), in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 162. 15. Buber, 161. William James makes a similar observation: “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. What it verifies is, in fact, an event, a process: the process of its verifying itself, its veri-­fication. Its validity is the process of its validation.” William James, Pragmatism. A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (London, 1907; reprint, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 201; italics in the original. 16. Clifford Geertz pointed to the “cognitive fallacy” of presenting religion as if it were merely a catalog of elevated ideas and doctrinal propositions. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Book, 1973), chap. 1, sec. 3. 17. Max Scheler, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. and introduced by David R. Lachterman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 137.

Notes to Page 70 135

18. Fishbane’s conception of sacred attunement is consonant with Rotenstreich’s phenomenological explication that given its intentional, noetic character, faith is a “conscious act and thus self-­reflective and self-­interpretative.” Rotenstreich, On Faith, 117–­29. 19. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1998). 20. Inspired by the increasing philosophical attention to alterity, anthropologists have shifted their focus from cultural differences, constituted by distinctive epistemologies and worldviews, to “being.” Consonant with this “ontological turn,” anthropology views worldviews not simply as different representations of the same world. Rather, cultures are now said to have different ontological perspectives on the meaning of existence and thus see the world in different ways, although the world remains one. (On this latter point, see the following note and note 7 in the introduction on Karl Mannheim’s notion of relationalism.) Therefore, the ontological turn refers to a change in perspective suggesting that cultural differences can be understood, not in terms of a difference in worldviews, but in terms of differences in the world ontologies. Therefore, all these worlds are deemed of equal validity. See M. Holbraad and M. Pedersen, eds., The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For a comprehensive review of the burgeoning literature on the subject, including critiques, see Paolo Heywood, “The Ontological Turn,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez, and R. Stasch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 21. When the truth claims that distinguish different religious cultures are not understood as epistemological propositions but rather as expressions of their distinctive ontologies, they neither affirm nor negate the universal ground of empirical and ethical truths. Science and Justice are indivisible. See Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, trans. from the French by M. E. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). In his foreword to this volume, Alexander Nehemas succinctly summarizes Renaut’s thesis: “Our ability, our need, to occupy various roles, to belong to various groups, to accept various standards of description and evaluation, to be, in a word, complex, is sufficient to allow us to criticize and ‘transcend’ particular roles, groups and standards.”

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Nehamas significantly adds, “What we cannot do is to criticize them, and thus abandon them, all together and currently. We can indeed pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps—­but only one boot at a time. And this view that individuals are a combination of standards as complex as the world to which each is related . . . is not anti-­humanist in any objectionable sense.” Renaut, xvii. As Renaut himself underscores, “The integration of the subject of finitude with the principle of autonomy . . . supplies proof that the end of the period of monologues can indeed be made to lead on to a re-­appropriation of subjectivity and the humanistic values from which it is inseparable.” Renaut, 199. 22. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and with a foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). As an “image of thought”(6), they argue, the botanical concept of the rhizome allows for a nonhierarchical, heterogeneous alignment of “multiplicities” (4), which are not to be considered fragmented parts of a greater whole and thus cannot be considered manifold expressions of a single concept of transcendent unity. 23. A dialogue between two autonomous subjects posits an ontological “primal distance” between the two. Martin Buber, Urdistanz und Beziehung: Beiträge zu einer philosophischen Anthropologie (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1978). Sections of this essay are translated as Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation,” in The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. and with an introduction by Maurice Friedman, trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 59–­7 1. 24. Cf. “But when he, too, who abhors the name [God], and believes himself to be godless, gives his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life, as a Thou that cannot be limited by another, he addresses God.” Buber, I and Thou, 76. 25. Jonathan Benthall, “Just the Ordinary God: How Faith and ‘British Values’ Still Intersect,” Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2007, 10. 26. George Rupp, Culture-­P rotestantism: German Liberal Theology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press of the American Academy of Religion, 1977). 27. Hans Vaihinger, Philosophie des Als-­Ob: System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1911), 684ff. Nota bene: Vaihinger speaks of the “religious fictions of humankind.” This

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passage is cited as paraphrased by Nahum N. Glatzer in his introduction to Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), 14. 28. Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-­Jewish Life (1957; reprint, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994), 306. 29. For arguably the most intellectually nuanced and comprehensive sociological study of reconstructionism, see Charles S. Liebman, “Reconstructionism in American Jewish Life,” American Jewish Year Book 71 (1970): 3–­99. Liebman significantly concludes, “It may be argued that the other groups in American Judaism—­Orthodoxy, Reform, and especially Conservatism—­also embody most, if not all, these values. However, none has articulated them so explicitly as Reconstructionism, so elevated them to the status of basic principles, or so incorporated them into ideology and prayer. Only Reconstructionism really has made them into a religion,” that is, a non-­supernatural religion (Liebman, 70). 30. Ismar Schorsch, Canon without Closure: Torah Commentaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 31. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 65. 32. See Janet Aviad, Return to Judaism: Religious Renewal in Israel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Aviezer Ravitsky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, eds., Zionism and Religion (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). 33. See Ehud Luz, Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality, and Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 34. Ahad Ha’am, “The Truth from Palestine” (1891), in At the Crossroads: Collected Essays, ed. Ruth Chaim Yehuda (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1949), pt. 1, p. 24 (in Hebrew). For a perceptive commentary on this text, see Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 104. 35. Saint-­Exupéry, The Little Prince, chap. 21. 36. Saint-­Exupéry, chap. 21. 37. Saint-­Exupéry, chap. 8. 38. Overcome with concern for his beloved “rose,” the little prince begins choking with tears. In response, the pilot, hitherto preoccupied

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with repairing his plane, tells us: “I had let my tools drop from my hands. Of what moment now was my hammer, my bolt, or thirst, or death? On one star, one planet, my planet, the Earth, there was a little prince to be comforted. I took him in my arms and rocked him. I said to him: ‘The flower that you love is not in danger. I will draw you a muzzle for your sheep. I will draw you a railing to put around your flower. . . . I did not know what to say to him. I felt awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more. It is such a secret place, the land of tears.’ ” Saint-­Exupéry, chap. 7. 39. Emmanuel Levinas, “Religion for Adults,” in Difficult Freedom: Selected Essays, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). Cf. “The rigorous affirmation of human independence, of its intelligent presence to an intelligible reality . . . entails the risk of atheism. That risk must be run. Only through it can man be raised to the spiritual notion of the Transcendent. . . . Monotheism surpasses and incorporates atheism, but it is impossible unless you attain the age of doubt, solitude and revolt. . . . From this point on, jealously guarding its independence but thirsting after God, how does Judaism conceive of humanity? How will it integrate the need for a virtually vertiginous freedom into its desire for transcendence? By experiencing the presence of God through one’s relation to man. The ethical relation will appear to Judaism as an exceptional relation: in it, contact with an external being, instead of compromising human sovereignty, institutes and invests it. . . . Self-­consciousness is not an inoffensive action in which the self takes note of its being; it is inseparable from a consciousness of justice and injustice. The consciousness of any natural injustice, of the harm caused to the Other, by my ego structure, is contemporaneous with my consciousness as a man. The two coincide. . . . The fact that the relationship with the Divine crosses the relationship with men and coincides with social justice is therefore what epitomizes the entire spirit of the Jewish Bible. Moses and the Jewish wisdom teach that He Who has created and Who supports the whole universe cannot support or pardon the crime that man commits against man. Evil is not a mystical principle that can be effaced by a ritual, it is an offence perpetrated on man by man. No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim. The world in which pardon is all-­powerful becomes inhuman. . . . We are familiar with the admirable passages from Ezekiel in which

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man’s responsibility extends to the actions of his neighbor. Among men, each responds to the faults of the Other. We even respond to the just man who risks being corrupted. We cannot push the idea of soli­ darity any further.” Levinas, 15, 16, 20. 40. Accordingly, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872–­1945) argued that the instinct to play—­imaginative non-­instrumental activity—­is a fundamental element of culture. Cf. “ ‘Child’s play was what he called all human opinions,’ says late Greek tradition of Heraclitus. As a pendant to this lapidary saying let us quote at greater length the profound words of Plato which we introduced into our first chapter: ‘Though human affairs are not worthy of great seriousness it is yet necessary to be serious; happiness is another thing. . . . I say that a man must be serious with the serious, and not the other way about. God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games, and be of another mind from what they are at present. For they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name, which are the things we deem most serious. Hence all must live in peace as well as they possibly can. What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.’ ” Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 211ff. chapter five

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 39. 2. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 23. 3. See my essay “The Binding of Space,” in Alan B. Cohen: Earth with Meaning, ed. Mary Jane Jacob (Durham, NC: Gregg Museum of Arts and Design, 2011), 212–­15. 4. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23. 5. Christopher Talbot, “The Narcissism of Now,” Helwys Society Forum, September 8, 2013, http://www.helwyssocietyforum.com/the-­nar cissism-­of-­now/.

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6. See Ruthie Abeliovich and Edwin Seroussi, eds., Borderlines: Essays on the Mapping and the Logic of Place (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), a collection of fifteen essays that address, according to the description on the jacket, “the cultural, artistic, conceptual, and performative mapping of place.” Noting the pervasiveness of “border lines” as an intellectual, artistic, and political concept, the volume interrogates the prevailing “normative” conception of “border lines” as allegedly irreversible. To highlight what they hold to be the “plasticity” of borders, the editors coin the term borderlines. On sealed, impermeable political boundaries as the topography of trauma, see the essays by Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017). 7. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on History,” in Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 257. 8. For a comprehensive review of rabbinic interpretations of the biblical injunction, whether it is to be understood as a curse or a blessing, see Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, A People that Dwells Alone: Balak (Numbers 22:2–­25:9), June 25, 2018, in “Covenant and Conversation” (addressing the weekly readings of the Hebrew Bible), web page of Aish Ha Torah, https://www.aish.com/tp/i/sacks/486387531.html. 9. On the Zionist politics of space, reaching back to the beginning of the movement’s settlement of Palestine, see the Hebrew collection, numbering seventeen essays in all, in Yehouda Shenav, ed., Space, Land, Home ( Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003). 10. Mishna Yoma 6; TB Chagigah 16a; also see Maimonides, Hilkot Yesodei Torah, chap. 6, halakhah 6. 11. The term musar is from the biblical book of Proverbs 1:2, where it denotes moral conduct, instruction, or discipline. Peretz is ironically referring to the nineteenth-­century Lithuanian Musar movement, which promoted the ethical renewal of Jewry. The appeal to ethical ideals, Peretz implies, is but a vacuous imploration. Y. L. Peretz’s Contrarian Rejoinder to Friedrich 12. “ ‘Brothers’—­ Schiller’s Paean to Universal Enlightenment, ‘Ad die Freude (Ode to Joy),’ ” transcr. Aharon N. Varady, trans. Refoyl Finkl and Yitshok Leybush Peretz, https://opensiddur.org/prayers/lunisolar/commemorative -­days/purim/brothers-­y-­l-­peretzs-­yiddish-­critique-­of-­friedrich-­schil lers-­ode-­to-­joy/, accessed September 9, 2020.

Notes to Pages 82–84 141

13. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 257. 14. I have adapted these binary categories from Arthur A. Cohen, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: An Historical and Theological Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). 15. Cf. “We are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place, which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler’s victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.” Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-­ Holocaust Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 213. 16. Walid Khaladi, ed., All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). This volume places the number of “depopulated” Palestinian villages and towns at 418; other scholars claim as many as 472. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and _villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus, accessed September 9, 2020. The dolorous saga of the Palestinians exiled from their homes in the wake of the war of 1948 is captured in a luminous portrait of the Palestinian poet Taba Muhammad Ali (1931–­2011) by the Israeli-­American author Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Born in 1931 in the Galilean village of Saffuriyya, Ali fled to Lebanon in 1948 during the war. He returned a year later to find his village destroyed. In relating his story, Hoffman deftly provides a biography of the Palestinian exile. 17. This sad fact, long denied, is now well documented. See Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-­Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Also see S. Yizhar’s novella, Khirbet Khizeh (1949), trans. from the Hebrew by Nicholas Lange and Yaacob Dweck, with an afterword by David Shulman ( Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2008). Cf. “S. Yizhar . . . was the first major [Hebrew] writer

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to describe in credible, unforgettable detail one emblematic example of the expulsion of Palestinian villagers from their homes by Israeli soldiers, acting under orders, in the last months of the 1948–­1949 war.” Shulman, afterword, 115. The calculated expulsions of the Palestinians continued after the establishment of the State of Israel with the founding of a Transfer Committee. See Dan Tsahor, “Post-­War Nakba: A Micro-­History of the Depopulation of Zakariyya, 1950,” Journal of Palestinian Studies 49, no. 1 (Autumn 2019): 47–­63. (Named for the prophet Zechariah, Zakariyya was a Palestinian village of close to two thousand residents.) In the aftermath of the Six-­Day War, the State of Israel pursued once again its rapine policies. Just three days after the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem, it razed the eight-­hundred-­ year-­old Moroccan Quarter to make room for a large plaza adjacent to the Western Wall. The Muslim inhabitants were forcibly evicted from the quarter, and its 135 houses bulldozed along with the ancient Sheik Eid Mosque. A few days later, three Palestinian villages adjacent to the Tel Aviv–­Jerusalem highway were seized, some 10,000 inhabitants expelled, and 1,464 homes demolished to clear the grounds for a national park. However justified these actions may have been from a political and security perspective, they should not blur our consideration of their humanitarian consequence. The revolutionary Jewish-­Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–­1917) once declared that she had “no room in my heart for Jewish suffering.” But one may have room in one’s heart for both Jewish and Palestinian suffering. This is the overarching message of an anthology of Jewish and Arab intellectuals: Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, with a foreword by Elias Khoury and an afterword by Jacqueline Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Without blurring the fundamental differences between the Holocaust and the exile of the Palestinians in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the essays in this volume seek to adumbrate the possibility of a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating convoluted intersections of the Palestinian-­Israeli conflict. 18. Paul Mendes-­F lohr, ed., A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, with commentary and a new preface by Paul Mendes-­F lohr, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Also see the Hebrew volume edited by Adi Gordon, Brit Shalom and

Notes to Pages 84–85

Bi-­National Zionism: “The Arab Question” as a Jewish Question ( Jerusalem: Carmel, 2008). 19. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 178. 20. See especially the so-­called Holiness Code, Leviticus 17–­26, in which ethical commandments, such as to love one’s neighbor and to love the stranger, are to be observed as a religious practice, a modus operandi to partake in divine holiness. 21. Mahmud Darwish, “A Lover of Palestine,” trans. B. M. Bennani, Palestine-­Israel Journal 6, no. 2 (1999): 114–­15. Darwish died in 2008 at the age of sixty-­seven. Displacement and exile continue to haunt the soul of a younger generation of Palestinians. Cf. the lyrics of a Haifa-­ based Arabic singer and songwriter, Haya Zaatry (b. 1991), about her longing for her betrothed. He is near yet far, apparently because he lives in the Gaza Strip, whose borders are sealed by both Israel and Egypt. “Hdoud ou Woud” (Borders and Promises): So far no matter how close So far no matter how close The same sea and shore The same air and wind Not exactly the same cage But the same wounded bird Borders and promises, And the hope is near Yet far away I repeat, words that aren’t certain I repeat, words that aren’t certain: I will see you one day You will fall in love with me again You will be able to come here And we’ll walk hand in hand Borders and promises, And the hope is near Yet far away.

143

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English translation of the Arabic is taken from the description section of Haya Zaatry, “Borders and Promises,” YouTube video, 3:58, published by IndigenousOne, June 4, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y5ox4eab, accessed October 15, 2020. For a nuanced account of Palestinian poets’ ruminations about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, see Khalidi Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms of Palestinian Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 22. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Re-­ definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 41. 23. George Steiner, “Some Meta-­Rabbis,” in New Year in Jerusalem: Portraits of Jews in the Twentieth Century, ed. Douglas Villiers (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 64–­76. 24. Martha Robert, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 31. 25. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 184. 26. Cited in Bauman, 184. 27. Cited in Bauman, 184. For an extended study of the meta-­rabbis within French thought, see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 28. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with a Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 29. Blumenberg, 3, 15, 29, 64, 34, 35 (italics added). Cf. “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2001), 468ff. 30. Blumenberg, Shipwreck with a Spectator, 77–­78. 31. Blumenberg, 74. 32. Blumenberg, 3. 33. Cf. “Men? . . . They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult.” Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. from the French by Richard Howard (San Diego: Harcourt, 2000), chap. 18. chapter six

1. Emerging from the world war that convulsed Europe, Franz Rosenzweig ruminated on the folly of political nationalism, echoing

Notes to Pages 89–91 145

Yeats’s admonition. Cf. “Whenever a people loves the soil of its native land more than its own life, it is in danger—­as all the peoples of the world are—­that though nine times out of ten this love will save the native soil from the foe, and along with it, the life of the people, in the end the soil will persist as that which was loved more strongly, and the people will have left their lifeblood upon it.” Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 299. 2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 2005); Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930). For Freud, discontent, engendering as it does repression and sublimation of our libido, is the necessary price we are to pay for civilization. 3. Ira Eisenstein, A Guide to Jewish Ritual (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1962). Kaplan himself insisted that the rituals and folkways of Judaism should not inconvenience one and should thus be introduced in the ritual life of reconstructionist congregations “whenever they do not involve unreasonable amount of time, effort and expense [sic].” Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-­Jewish Life (1957; reprint, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994), 439. 4. Charles S. Liebman, “Reconstructionism in American Jewish Life,” American Jewish Year Book 71 (1970): 3–­99. 5. In consonance with Kaplan’s premise, “American Jews no doubt are more ethnic, or people-­oriented than religion-­oriented.” Liebman, 95. 6. Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 141 (emphasis in the original). 7. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman, Yoram Navon, Zvi Jacobson, Gershon Levi, and Raphael Levy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 8. Inspired by Nietzsche, early Zionists called for a “transvaluation of values” toward the creation of a “new Jew,” affirming this worldly life. See Ahad Ha’am, “The Transvaluation of Life,” in Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, ed. Hans Kohn, trans. Leon Simon (New York: Schocken Books, 1962). 9. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 463.

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Notes to Pages 91–96

10. Kaplan, 47. 11. See A. B. Yehoshua, “The Meaning of Homeland,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-­F lohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 866–­70. 12. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 47. 13. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, xvii. 14. Kaplan, 242. 15. Gershom Scholem, obiter dictum related to me by Scholem’s colleague at the Hebrew University, Nathan Rotenstreich (1914–­1993). 16. Mordecai Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (New York: Behrman, 1937), viii. 17. Franz Rosenzweig, introduction to Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauß (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn / Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1924), 1: lx. 18. See Franz Rauhut, “Der Herkunft der Worte und Begriffe ‘Kultur,’ ‘Civilization,’ und ‘Bildung,’ ” Germanische-­Romanische Monats­ schrift 3 (1953): 89–­91. 19. Cf. “For every culture has its civilization. In this work for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a necessary organic succession. Civilization is the inevitable destiny of culture. . . . Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable.” Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Arthur Helps and Helmut Werner, trans. Charles F. Atkinson, with a preface by H. Stuart Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31 (emphasis in the original). 20. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-­ Scott (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 5–­6. 21. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 21. 22. Freud, 27. 23. Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1976): “The Bible insists that man is answerable not to his culture but to a being who transcends all culture” (3). “The point may be put most simply in terms of ambivalence. We love and hate our culture, and the resultant force is toward change” (2). 24. Schneidau, 10, 34, 43–­49.

Notes to Pages 96–101

25. See the “Holiness Code,” Leviticus 17–­26. 26. For Emmanuel Levinas, the moral “authority” of the face of the Other is felt in my “infinite responsibility” for the Other. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 74. 27. Max Scheler, “Vorbilder und Führer” (1914), in Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 1, Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1957), 255–­344. 28. Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. from the Hebrew by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 29. Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology” (1914), in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed., with notes and commentary, by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 10–­24. 30. Henri Frankfort, “The Emergence of Thought from Myth,” in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East, by H. and H. A. Frankfort et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 367–­68. 31. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 1998), 65. 32. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, with a foreword by David Schatz (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 99–­100. 33. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent, 39. 34. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (1944): 99–­122. Also see Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 35. Like many, Arendt regarded Chaplin as Jewish, although in fact he was not. See Holly A. Pearce, “Charlie Chaplin: Jewish or Goyish?,” Jewish Quarterly 57/2 (2010): 38–­42. “Most important than birth records and names was that he looked and ‘felt’ Jewish. To Jewish eyes, Chaplin told Jewish stories. . . . [Chaplin’s] tramp, small and powerless, was taunted and hounded.” Pearce, 39. 36. Arthur A. Cohen, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: An Historical and Theological Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). 37. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, 9ff. Subsequent references are given in the text. 38. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent, 43.

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Notes to Pages 102–105

39. Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, presented by Nahum N. Glatzer, with a foreword by Paul Mendes-­F lohr, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 201. 40. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent, 242. 41. Daniel Bell, “A Parable of Alienation,” Jewish Frontier 13, no. 11 (November 1946), 12–­19. Reprinted in Mendes-­F lohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 851–­53. coda

1. John Keats, letter dated 1818, in The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition, ed. Horace Elisha Scudde (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 277. 2. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 68. Simone Weil enjoined a similar principle to explain her social activism as religious duty. “There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time [as is the I-­ thou encounter for Buber], outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the center of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world. . . . That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all orders, and all human behavior that is mindful of obligations.” Simone Weil, Two Moral Essays: Draft for a Statement of a Statement on Human Obligations, and Human Personality, ed. Ronald Hathaway (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1981), 1–­2. 3. Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest, trans. A. F. Wills (London: Routledge, 2013), sec. 8 (italics in the original). 4. Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 42. In an essay he penned a year before his death in 1965, Buber echoed the sentiments of a transconfessional journal, Die Kreatur (published from 1926 to 1929), which he found and edited together with a Christian and a Catholic colleague: “Each religion is a house of the human soul longing for God, a house with windows and without a door; I need only open a window and God’s light penetrates; but if I make a hole and break out, then I have not only become homeless but a cold light surrounds me that is not the light of the living God.” To be sure, these houses are often

Notes to Page 107 149

invidious structures that create barriers and mutual suspicion between them. “Each religion is in exile into which man is driven; here he is in exile more clearly than elsewhere because in his relationship to God he is separated from the men of other communities; and not sooner than the redemption of the world can we be liberated from exiles and be brought into a common world of God. But the religions that know that they are bound together in common expectation, they can call to one another greetings from exile to exile, from house to house through the open windows.” Martin Buber, “Fragments of Revelation,” in A Believing Humanism: My Testament, 1902–­1965, trans. and ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 115. acknowledgments

1. Paul Mendes-­F lohr, “Images of Knowledge in Modern Jewish Thought,” Trumah: Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg 4 (1997): 93–­106. 2. While writing this book, I recurrently returned to reading Professor Lincoln’s perspicacious and elegantly formulated comments: “Response to Paul Mendes-­Flohr, ‘Images of Knowledge in Modern Jewish Thought.’ Faculty Retreat, 25 October 1996,” unpublished seven-­page paper.

Index Abraham, 11, 132n52 acculturation, 18, 22 Adam, 59, 101 adult education, 52, 56, 130n18, 133–­ 34n7. See also Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus adulthood, 66–­68, 75, 103 Akiva, Rabbi, 4 Allen, Woody, 22–­23, 26–­27, 91 Amos (book of ), 80, 96 Amos (prophet), 96 ancestry, 2, 32, 78, 85, 88; “ancestral community,” 2, 6, 104; and ethnicity, 5–­6, 20, 119n13 anti-­Semitism, 7, 9, 14, 74, 83–­84, 85 Appiah, Anthony, 2–­3, 8, 114n23, 124n4; the Other and, 7, 111nn8–­9 “Arab Question,” 84 Arabs, 113n19; displacement and exile of, 73–­74, 84–­85; Israeli, 17; Israeli policies toward, 14, 17, 78, 85–­86. See also Palestinians Arendt, Hannah, 77, 112n16, 124n7, 147n35

assimilation, 18–­19, 27, 118n4, 122n31, 123nn43–­44, 129n9; and Bildung, 18; and Zionism, 14, 20, 122n31 Assmann, Aleida and Jan, 4, 34–­35, 42–­43, 45, 126n20 atheism, 116–­17n34, 138n39; of Mordecai Kaplan, 71, 93, 98 attunement, 70; empathetic, 68; sacred, 18, 70, 135n18 Augustine, Saint, 39, 102 Auschwitz, 14, 78, 84, 141n15. See also Holocaust authority: ecclesiological, 38, 120n21; lack of, 64; of the Other, 147n26; religious, 12–­13, 63–­64, 114n23; of scripture, 71; transcendent, 39 Bauman, Zygmunt, 83 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81 Ben-­Gurion, David, 119–­20n20, 120n21, 122n31 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 78, 126n18 Bet Midrash, 47, 51–­52. See also Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Bildung, 18–­19

152

Index Blumenberg, Hans, 87–­88 bookcase. See library borders, 9, 76–­80, 112n16, 140n6, 143n21. See also boundaries boundaries, 11, 36, 75, 76–­81, 112n18; political, 5, 77, 140n6 Buber, Martin: on the “Arab Question,” 7, 84; on faith and religion, 9, 69, 132–­33n53, 148–­49n4; on I-­Thou relations, 68, 103–­4, 131n39, 132–­33n53, 136n23, 148n2; on Jewish identity and Zionism, 8, 31, 33, 69, 130n37; on Jewish learning, 8–­9, 53–­58, 63, 65, 69, 130n18 Cain, 100 canon, 34, 35, 38, 72; textual 9, 38. See also sacred texts capitalism, 39. See also consumer culture Christianity, 84, 104, 148n4; conversion to, 16, 28, 114n22, 124n7 Christians, 17, 40, 98, 116n34. See also specific names circumcision (Brit Milah), 28, 118n4 citizenship, 70, 73, 100, 121n26, 121–­ 22n30; Israeli, 15–­17, 73 civilization, 88, 95, 96, 100, 103, 146n19; Judaism as a, 5, 71, 89–­94, 102 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 89, 94 civil religion, 44, 92 cognitive disjunction, 42, 100 cognitive dissonance, 3, 9 Cohen, Alan B., 77–­79, 106 Cohen, Arthur A., 100 Cohen, Hermann, 5–­6, 11, 50–­51, 93 compassion, 36, 95, 97, 116n31 communities, 3, 5, 7, 9; ancestral/of birth, 11, 27–­28, 32, 64, 104, 114n23; identity and, 10–­11, 26–­27; Jewish, 6, 8, 15–­16, 29–­30, 32, 43–­45, 47–­48,

55, 64–­65; of a shared fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), 9, 12–­13 consumer culture, 39, 78 cosmopolitanism, 5, 8, 78, 87, 104, 112n16; concept of, 18, 121n26, 124n2; modernity and, 70, 76, 81, 106, 110n7, 111n14; ontology of, 2, 110n7; “rooted,” 3, 104, 112n16; in Rosenzweig, 46, 95. See also pluralism, cultural covenant (ha-­Brit), 5, 6, 27, 28, 29, 32, 87; in Rosenzweig, 46, 95 Cragg, Kenneth, 28 Creation, 95–­96, 101, 110n6; “God of,” 5, 83, 87, 90, 96–­97 creed, 28, 29, 32 cultural autonomy, 20, 30, 35, 110n7. See also insularity cultural disjunction, 2, 27 cultural heritage, 22, 42–­45, 57, 125n12 cultural memory (kulturelles Ge­dächtnis), 4, 34–­36, 42–­46, 78, 126n20 culture: “alien,” 18, 35; “hybrid,” 5, 114n23; inherited, 2, 3, 5, 11, 22, 35, 43, 44, 114n23; Judaism as a, 4–­5, 14, 19–­20, 42, 45, 94–­95, 102; and language, 17–­19, 20, 30, 32, 33 (see also insularity); of the Other, 19, 23, 36, 75, 97, 104, 110n6, 111n8, 114n23 Darwish, Mahmud, 85, 143–­44n21 Daseinsfreude, 60, 62, 64, 68. See also second innocence; second naiveté; Wust, Peter Deleuze, Gilles, 70, 136n22 deracination, 3, 8, 42, 60, 87, 104, 112n16, 118n4, 144n33. See also rootedness Derrida, Jacques, 25, 87, 99–­100, 111n14

Index Descartes, René, 60, 62 dialectic, 19, 35, 42–­43, 87, 94, 131n39 dialogue, 8–­9, 64, 67, 71, 75, 101; as an act of faith, 64, 71, 75; in Buber, 8, 64, 111n39, 136n23; dialogical encounter, 52; dialogical faith, 64; interreligious, 70; in The Little Prince, 67, 75; in Rosenzweig, 8, 41, 46, 52–­53 Diamant, Dora, 60–­61 Diaspora, 4–­5, 17, 20, 32, 57, 91, 120n21, 122n31. See also exile diglossia, 4 discourse, 43, 50; in Hebrew, 17, 20; rational, 47, 62; religious, 58, 93; theocentric, 9, 57 dogma, 9, 35, 54, 59, 112–­13n18 Doniger, Wendy, 22, 36

ethnicity, 13, 76–­77, 86, 119n13, 120n20; Arab and Israeli conflict and, 17, 20, 85; diasporic Jews and, 5, 32, 82, 89–­91, 118n4; ethnic nationalism, 5, 6, 83, 88; ethnic patriotism, 6, 7, 9; Kaplan’s project and, 71, 89–­91, 145n5 ethos, 97; bourgeois, 66; humanistic, 73; individualistic, 6, 27; liberal, 39, 81; modern, 31–­32, 100; multicultural, 22, 23 Europe, 9, 18, 30, 31, 82, 85, 112n16, 121n30 evil, 78, 93, 97, 138n39 exile (galut), 148–­49n4; Jewish, 21, 74, 91; Palestinian, 73–­74, 84–­85, 141n16, 141–­42n17, 143n21. See also Diaspora

education. See adult education; learning, Jewish; Talmud Torah educators, 48–­49, 52, 54–­55 emancipation, Jewish, 10, 18, 29, 33, 51, 83, 121n30 emotions, 40, 55, 57–­58, 62, 65, 67, 134n12. See also specific emotions Enlightenment, 10, 18, 29, 47, 59, 62, 67, 83, 84, 85 epistemologies, 3, 44, 49; challenges to, 24, 40, 70, 83, 92; and religious reading, 38–­41; religious or sacred, 45, 69 Erikson, Erik, 21 “Eternal Thou,” 54, 60, 64–­65, 68, 131n39, 136n24. See also Buber, Martin; God ethics, 3, 5, 24, 39, 71, 72, 78, 85, 93, 99, 115n28, 135n21, 138n39, 140n11, 143n20; in Appiah, 3, 8; in Buber, 104; of modernity, 39, 76, 81; and the State of Israel, 7, 85; of transcendence, 86

Fackenheim, Emil L., 14, 119n18, 141n15 faith, 59–­60, 67–­69, 71–­72, 101, 131n35, 135n18; biblical, 11–­12, 90, 92, 95, 97–­101, 102, 132n52, 132–­33n53; in everyday experience, 58, 64, 68–­ 69, 11–­13n18, 134n12; innocent, 55, 59–­62, 68 (see also Daseinsfreude); post-­traditional, 8–­9, 11, 13, 45, 57–­58, 60–­62, 64–­65, 68–­72, 90, 92, 95, 102, 104, 105; religious, 13, 38, 45, 57, 58, 104, 114n23, 127n25; religious reading, Jewish learning and, 9, 35, 38, 40, 58, 64–­65; amid secularization, 13, 40, 57, 62, 64, 92–­93, 102 (see also secularization) fear, 78, 88, 133n7; assimilation and, 20, 122n31, 123n43; of the Other, 70. See also emotions fideism, 9, 58–­60 Fishbane, Michael, 69–­70, 135n18 Foucault, Michel, 77–­7 8 Frankfort, Henri, 99

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Index Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (the Free Jewish House of Study), 41, 51–­53, 60 Freud, Sigmund, 89, 94–­95, 97, 145n2 friendships, 3, 61, 74, 95, 106; befriending the stranger, 7; friendly neighborliness, 5 Frost, Robert, 76, 78 Funkenstein, Amos, 4, 122n35 galut. See exile Geist, 106 Geisteshaltung (disposition of the spirit), 63, 69–­70, 71. See also faith; Haltung Genesis (book of ), 99, 101 Genesis Rabbah, 57 Glatzer, Nahum N., 53, 128n39, 129n12 globalization, 18, 77, 111n14 God, 11–­12, 40, 62, 71, 80–­81, 86–­87, 90, 92, 95–­99, 102, 136n24, 141n15; accessed via reading Jewish texts, 40–­41, 54–­55, 57–­58, 63–­64; belief in, 13, 71–­72, 96–­102, 131n35, 136n24, 141n15 (see also faith); biblical, 11–­12, 40, 73, 95–­96, 98–­99, 102; as “divine presence,” 12, 41, 58, 59, 117n34, 138n39; as “Eternal Thou,” 54, 58, 63, 64, 132n52; “God of Creation,” 5, 84, 87, 90, 96–­97; personal and supernatural, 40, 57, 71, 95, 97–­98; as universal, 5, 84–­87, 95–­96 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95, 126n18, 129n16 Griffiths, Paul J., 38–­40 Guattari, Félix, 70 Ha’am, Ahad, 12, 30, 73 Halakhah (rabbinic law), 4, 15, 16, 28, 78, 87 Haltung, 68, 69, 71. See also faith; Geisteshaltung

Hatam Sofer, 19–­20 Hebrew (language). See under language Hebrew Bible, 40, 63, 99–­100, 138n39. See also sacred texts; specific books Hebrews (nation), 11, 99 Heine, Heinrich, 28–­29, 106 hermeneutics, 3, 4, 35, 38, 40, 72, 110n7; and religious reading, 41, 70 Herzl, Theodor, 14 historiography, 56 history, 17, 77–­7 8, 83, 88, 102; God, in and out of, 92, 98–­99, 100; historical memory, 19–­20, 34, 42, 43, 45, 78; Jews and Israelites in, 11, 12, 13–­14, 20, 63, 71, 90, 92, 115n25 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 14, 33, 53, 84, 141n15. See also Auschwitz; Holocaust Holocaust (Shoah), 14, 44, 45, 84–­85, 112n16, 119n18, 141n15 humanists, 2, 31, 33, 42, 45, 73, 81, 126n18, 135–­36n2 humanity, 2, 3, 5, 22, 26, 33, 36, 45, 81, 98, 101, 104; human beings, 3, 68, 75, 80, 83, 91, 111n9; human experience, 2, 43, 76; human family, 2, 45; human nature, 48, 71, 82; universality of, 2, 80, 104, 112n16 (see also universalism) Husserl, Edmund, 68–­69 hypolepsis, 43 I and Thou (Buber), 68, 103–­4, 131n39, 132–­33n53, 136n23, 148n2 identity: ancestral, 1, 6; Arab and Palestinian, 17; concept of, 3, 21, 23–­24, 26–­27, 34, 35–­36, 42–­43, 76–­ 77, 110n6, 115–­17n28; cultural, 3, 23, 27, 34, 35–­36, 76–­7 7, 124n2; politics of, 6, 65, 85, 115–­17n28; primordial, 11, 27; and the self, 23, 26–­27

Index identity, Jewish: cultural, 5, 8, 14, 17, 22, 28, 33, 44, 84; ethnic, 5, 6, 13, 32, 76–­7 7, 91, 115n28, 118n4, 119n13; post-­traditional, 2, 8–­9, 13–­15, 17–­18, 21–­24, 32–­33, 43–­44, 86; secularized, 8, 12–­14, 21, 43–­44 (see also Jews: secular and secularized); traditional, 2, 6, 10, 11–­13, 15, 19, 43–­44; and Zionism, 15–­17, 19–­21, 33, 84, 91, 120n21 idolatry, 70, 90; of language, 47, 49–­50 immigration, 15, 119–­20n20 inheritance, 2, 27, 125n12; binding to, 35; decentering, 3, 11, 22, 112n16; religious, 5, 43, 112n16; revaluation of, 5, 43, 109n4, 114n23 insularity, 19, 32, 35–­35. See also assimilation intertextuality, 42 Isaac (book of ), 6, 97, 99 Isaac (prophet), 57 Isaiah (book of ), 6, 97, 99, 115n25 Israel (people), 11, 13, 45, 57, 81, 83, 87, 97–­98, 121n52 Israel, State of, 6–­7, 14–­17, 21, 72–­73, 78; founding, 44, 84–­85; land of, 33, 73–­74, 90; secularism and, 14–­16, 17, 72; society and culture, 17, 31, 71, 90 Jabés, Edmond, 87 Jacob (Israel), 11–­12, 57, 96 Jesus Christ, 104 Jewish learning. See learning, Jewish Jewish State. See Israel, State of Jews: American, 72, 89–­91; deracinated, 8, 42, 60, 87, 112n16, 118n4; Diasporic, 5, 17, 32–­33, 57, 73, 83, 120n21; Israeli, 6, 16–­17, 120n21; with multiple community affiliations, as multicultural, 3–­5, 10–­11, 18, 22–­24, 27–­29, 32–­36, 70, 87–­88;

“natural,” 27, 83–­84, 100–­101, 137n29; post-­traditional, 8–­9, 15, 22, 32–­33, 37, 55, 65, 70–­7 1, 87–­88, 102; secular and secularized, 13, 17, 28, 30–­31, 37–­45, 72, 82–­83, 92–­93, 102; “supernatural,” 27, 83–­84, 90, 92, 100–­101; traditional, 11–­13, 18–­ 19, 29–­30, 37, 47–­50, 72–­73, 95–­98. See also identity, Jewish; Judaism; particular topics of interest Judaism: “as if,” 72–­73; as a civilization, 71, 88–­91, 94–­96; as a culture, 4–­5, 14, 19–­20, 42, 45, 94–­95, 102; as a nation, 7–­8, 11, 19–­21, 42, 72, 85, 89, 94 (see also nationalism); Orthodox, 29, 53, 72, 90; post-­ traditional, 2, 12–­13, 28–­29, 55–­56, 70; Reconstructionist, 71–­72, 89–­ 91, 94, 137n29, 145n3; Reform and Conservative, 15, 31, 90, 137n29; traditional, 4, 19, 27, 37, 44, 50, 70, 71–­73, 81, 89, 98; Ultra-­Orthodox, 19–­20. See also identity, Jewish; Jews; particular topics of interest justice, 5–­6, 92, 95–­97, 98, 112n16, 138n39; unjust, 73–­74 Kadosh, 99 Kafka, Franz, 10, 60–­62, 67–­68, 70, 105; as a Jew, 86–­87 Kant, Immanuel, 67, 93, 94 Kantian, post-­Kantian or neo-­ Kantian philosophies, 5, 32, 57, 71, 93, 112n16 Kaplan, Mordecai, 71, 72, 89–­94, 98, 145n3 Kaufman, Yehezkiel, 98 Kultur, 94, 145n2 Landauer, Gustav, 5, 21, 25 language, 18, 19, 77–­7 8, 90, 91; German, 53, 98; Hebrew, 17, 20, 30, 33;

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Index language (cont.) of philosophy, 98; Yiddish, 4, 22, 30, 113n19 law, 34, 82; moral, 71; religious, 4, 15, 48, 52, 58, 78 (see also Halakhah); of Return, 16, 120n20 learning, Jewish: renewal of and Buber, 3, 53–­58, 63, 65; renewal of and Rosenzweig 8–­9, 41, 50–­53, 57, 58, 63; traditional, 8–­9, 48–­51. See also Talmud Torah Lehrhaus. See Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 90 Levinas, Emmanuel, 75, 138–­39n39, 147n26 Leviticus (book of ), 73, 116n30, 143n20 liberalism, 18, 29, 39, 81, 121n30; in United States, 72, 93 library, 2, 8, 37–­38, 40, 42, 44–­45; of Benjamin, 37; of Doniger, 36–­37; of a post-­traditional Jew, 2, 37, 40, 42, 44–­45, 53; of Rosenzweig, 46, 128n38; of a traditional Jew, 37, 53, 55 literature, 30, 34, 51; sacred, 54–­55, 58, 63 little prince (character), 66–­68, 70, 74–­75, 103, 138–­39n38 love, 67–­68, 73, 95, 111n8, 130n17, 134n12, 143nn19–­20; agapeic love, 67–­68, 75 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 27 Maimonides, 80 Mendelssohn, Moses: Christian descendants of, 19, 129n9; on faith, 64, 132n52; Jerusalem, 47, 132n52; on Talmud Torah, 47–­50 messianism, 6, 64, 72, 115n75 “meta-­mishpocha,” 5 “meta-­rabbis,” 86–­88 mitzvoth, 48–­50, 58

modernity, 10, 76; ethos of, 6, 23, 31–­32, 100; Jews of, 10–­11, 13, 17–­19, 22–­23, 27–­28, 31–­33, 76–­77, 86–­87, 89, 109n4, 117n3 (see also Jews: post-­ traditional); sensibilities of, 92 morality, 26, 45, 48–­49, 56, 71, 97, 140n11, 147n26; incompatible with nationalism, 73, 14, 91 Moses, 4, 132n52 multiculturalism, 8, 22, 26, 33, 35, 70, 121n26 myth, 22, 25, 119n14 narratives, 26–­27, 34, 43–­44, 122n35 nationalism, 5, 6, 14, 16, 19–­21, 58, 65, 72, 83, 85, 89, 94, 116n34, 119–­ 20n20, 120n21, 145n1; and ethnic identity, 5–­6, 83–­84, 88 National Socialism, 63, 116n18. See also Nazis “natural Jew.” See Jew: natural Nazis, 9, 33, 53, 84. See also Holocaust; National Socialism nishamah (soul), 2, 101. See also soul Nobel, Rabbi Nehemiah, 53 noesis and noema, 68–­69, 135n18. See also phenomenology normalization, 89, 91, 93–­94 numen: numinous experience, 58, 64; sensus numinus, 44 ontologies, 5, 26, 67–­68, 70, 80–­81, 84, 87, 99, 135nn20–­21, 136n23; cosmopolitan, 2, 110n7 Other, the, 7, 18, 19, 23, 64–­65, 70–­7 1, 75, 97, 103–­4, 110n6, 111n8, 138n39, 147n26; othering, 36 Palestine (State of ), 73 Palestinians, 7, 17, 14, 74, 78, 80, 84–­85; exile of, 73–­74, 84–­85, 141–­ 42n16, 143n21

Index particularism, 3, 5, 15, 23–­24, 34, 45, 84–­85, 87, 104, 112n16 patriotism, 6–­7, 9, 85, 112n15, 116n31 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 72, 112–­13n18 Peretz, Judah Leib, 82–­83, 140n11 phenomenology, 32, 40, 45, 60, 68–­ 69, 134n12, 135n18 piety: of biblical figures, 96, 97, 132n52; filial, 72 pluralism, cultural, 18–­19, 20, 22, 35, 89, 114n23, 124n2. See also cosmopolitanism poetry, 34, 43, 64; writing of, 64 poets: American, 2, 23, 76; Egyptian, 87; European, 28, 60, 103; Jewish, 42, 64, 82, 86, 87, 105–­6; Palestinian, 85–­86, 141n16, 143–­44n29; Syrian, 110n6 politics: of identity, 6, 65, 86, 115–­ 17n28; of Israel, 14, 21, 140n9; political sovereignty, 33, 94 postmodernism, 23, 82, 118n4 prayer, 92, 97, 137n29; liturgical, 53, 57, 78 printed word, 48–­50. See also idolatry prophets, biblical, 5–­6, 86, 96–­97, 115n25. See also specific prophets Proteus, 25–­26, 28 rabbis, 13, 50; rabbinic interpretation, 40, 115n25, 120n21, 140n8; rabbinic law (see Halakhah); rabbinic tradition, 2, 40, 113n20. See also specific names rationality, 47, 62–­63, 66, 68, 69, 103, 119n14 Ratzabi, Shalom, v, 86–­87, 105–­6 reading, 28, 63; Buber on, 63–­64; The Little Prince, 66; post-­traditional, 2, 32–­33, 56, 63; secular, 39–­43; traditional Jewish, 47–­50 (see also Talmud Torah)

reality, 35, 65, 67–­69, 91, 104; transcendent or sacred, 5, 46, 58, 63, 64, 70, 71, 95, 101, 110n7, 133n7, 148n2 reason, 39–­40, 58, 67, 71, 94, 132n52. See also rationality redemption, 41, 64, 92, 100, 148–­49n4 religion, 28, 32, 49, 69, 95, 99, 102, 25 134n12; civil, 44, 92; critical capacities of, 6–­7, 24, 92–­93; Judaism as a, 12, 69, 71, 75, 90–­92, 120n20, 137n29, 145n5; religious education, 54–­55 religionists, 40 religious experience, 54–­55, 58, 65, 99, 104; everyday experience as, 62, 68, 104, 134n12 religious practice, 29, 44, 72, 89–­90, 112n18, 127n25, 143n20; in Buber, 56–­57; religious reading as, 35, 38–­39, 70 responsibility, 6, 9, 83, 96, 97, 103; nationalism and, 7, 83; for the Other, 67–­68, 75, 78, 97, 139n39, 144n26 revelation, 19, 41, 92, 98–­99, 116n34; revelatory voice of Auschwitz, 14 rights: civil and political, 53, 97; denied to Israeli Arabs, 73; human, 63, 73 ritual, 34, 44, 49, 138n39, 145n3. See also mitzvoth rootedness (l’enracinement), 3, 64, 104, 112n16, 144n33. See also deracination Rorty, Richard, 3, 111n9 Rosenzweig, Franz, 8–­9, 116–­17n34, 125n12; bibliographic identity of, 46, 128n38; on Jewish learning, 41, 50–­53, 57–­58, 63, 65, 102; on political nationalism, 116–­18n34, 145n1; on post-­traditional Judaism, 11, 28, 41, 42; on theology, 95, 98, 102

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Index Rotenstreich, Nathan, 68–­69, 134n12, 135n18 Ruth, 12 “sacred discontent,” 95–­98, 102 sacred texts, 8, 20, 38–­42, 50, 57, 59, 63–­64; Jewish, 8, 9, 32, 41, 47–­48, 50, 52–­53, 55–­56, 70, 117n37. See also canon; specific texts Said, Edward, 35, 85 Saint-­Exupéry, Antoine de, 66–­68, 103, 133n2; The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), 66, 70. See also little prince (character) salvation, 11, 92; this-­worldly, 93 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 9, 14 Scheler, Max, 62, 69, 97, 134n12 Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of a shared fate), 9, 12–­13 Schiller, Friedrich, 28, 81–­83 Scholem, Gershom, 93, 146n15 Schreiber, Moses. See Hatam Sofer second innocence, 59–­62, 64, 66, 68; faith and, 59. See also Daseinsfreude; Wust, Peter second naiveté, 61, 62, 68. See also Daseinsfreude; little prince (character); second innocence secularization, 13–­14, 39–­45, 57, 77; in a Jewish state, 14, 16–­17, 20–­21, 31, 72, 83–­84, 120n21; and Judaism, 8, 12–­13, 27, 29, 31, 92–­93; secularist, 40–­41; to secularize, 37 the self, 2, 3, 23, 26–­27, 39, 46, 110n6; self-­esteem (amour de soi), 20, 53, 54, 63, 130n17; self-­imposed immaturity, 67; self-­reflection, 13, 35, 43, 67, 135n18 Shoah. See Holocaust shul. See synagogue Simon, Ernst Akiba, 60–­62, 65, 130n18, 131n38

society, 5, 18, 36, 92, 94 sociology, 3, 9, 13, 19–­20, 30, 48, 71 Socrates, 62 Socratic conception of knowledge, 53 Soloveitchik, Rabbi Joseph Ber, 100–­101 Sombart, Werner, 31 soul, 23, 42, 59, 78, 83, 85, 95, 101, 132–­ 33n53, 148–­49n4 sovereignty, 73, 74, 138n39 Spinoza, Baruch, 40 spiritual lives, 78; Jewish, 50–­51, 56, 57 spiritual renewal, 55–­56, 57 spiritual resistance, 53, 63 State of Israel. See Israel, State of Steiner, George, 86 Steinsaltz, Rabbi Adin, 5–­6, stories, 26–­27, 67, 147n35. See also narrative Strauss, Leo, 115n25 Strauss, Ludwig, 64–­65 “supernatural Jew.” See Jew: “supernatural” synagogue, 47, 48, 50, 57, 90 syncretism, 22, 46, 70, 110n7, 114n23, 124n2 Talmid Chakham (Torah Sage), 49, 52 Talmud, 48, 50, 80, 113n20 Talmud Torah, 8, 47–­53, 57–­58, 113n20, 128n2 teshuvah, 29 thaumazein (wonder), 62–­63, 103. See also Daseinsfreude; second innocence; second naiveté theodicy, 12 theology, 13, 31–­32, 70–­72, 98, 102, 114n23, 116–­17n34 Tillich, Paul, 43 time: historical/transgenerational, 45; messianic, 64; mundane, 12, 60, 65, 99, 100; transcendental, 34, 148n2

Index Torah, 4, 13, 15, 18, 49, 72; rigid fidelity to, 19, 27, 29, 81, 121n28. See also Hebrew Bible; specific books Torah study. See Talmud Torah traditionalism, 72, 112–­13n18 Traherne, Thomas, 59 translation, 20, 63, 110n5 Trotzjudentum, 14 truth, 2, 4, 58, 104, 116n29, 132n52, 148n2; multiple, 3, 41, 54, 70, 134n15, 135n21; religious, 69, 135n21; in sacred texts, 9, 38–­39, 49 unity: and cultural memory, 34; of humanity, 6, 64, 136n22; of an individual, 21, 25, 27; of Jewry, 5, 16, 30–­31 universalism, 2, 18, 43, 83, 86, 104, 112n16 universities, 39, 52, 56; Hebrew University, 56. See also reading: secular Vaihinger, Hans, 71, 136–­37n27 values, 10, 31–­32, 34, 35, 40, 43, 71, 92, 97; humanistic, 31, 42, 136n21 (see

also ethos: humanistic; humanists); of Jewish renewal, 6, 35, 53, 97, 99, 130n7; modern, 7, 51; of the “natural Jew,” 6, 42, 51, 71–­72, 89–­92, 137n29 Weil, Simone, 112n15, 116n31, 148n2; on rootedness, 3, 5, 104, 113–­14n22 Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi, 31–­32 West Bank, 72–­73 Whitman, Walt, 1, 2, 23, 111n8; “Song of Myself,” 1–­2, 23 wonder. See thaumazein worship, 47, 50–­51. See also prayer Wust, Peter, 59–­62, 68, 131n39 xenophobia, 7. See also ethnicity Yeats, William Butler, 88, 145n1 Zionism, 6, 7, 14, 17, 19–­21, 31, 33, 56, 89, 140n6, 145n8; in Buber, 7, 31, 33, 55–­56; in Kaplan, 89–­91, 93; Palestinian discrimination and, 6–­7, 14, 17, 72–­74, 78–­80, 84–­85

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