On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy 9781618114464

Citation preview

ON PERSONAL AND PUBLIC CONCERNS ESSAYS IN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

ON PERSONAL AND PUBLIC CONCERNS ESSAYS IN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

ELIEZER SCHWEID

Translated and Edited by LEONARD LEVIN

Boston 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-445-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-446-4 (electronic) Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014. 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is made to: • Magnes Press for permission to publish the essays “History in the Postmodern Age” and “The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village” in English translation; these were first published in Hebrew in Bikkoret ha-Tarbut ha-Ḥilonit (“Critique of Secular Culture”) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008). • Deborah Greniman for permission to republish her translation of “Judaism and the Lonely Jew” (originally: “Judaism and the Solitary Jew”), originally published in The Shefa Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 8 (1981): 38–53. • Haim (Howard) Kreisel for permission to publish “My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought” in English translation; this was first published in Hebrew in Limmud vaDa’at (Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought), Vol. 2, edited by Howard Kreisel (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2006).

Contents

Acknowledgements................................................................ v Editor’s Introduction by Leonard Levin................................ 1 A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay.....................9 My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought...................................................... 39 Judaism and the Lonely Jew.............................................. 59 Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness.................................................. 85 History in the Postmodern Age........................................109 The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village..........................................................157 Index................................................................................. 225

Editor’s Introduction

This volume represents another step in an ongoing project, to introduce the English-speaking reader to the thought of one of Israel’s leading scholars and public intellectuals of the past half-century. Academic Studies Press has already made available to the English reader Schweid’s seminal volumes The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture, The Philosophy of the Bible (Volume I: Philosophy of Biblical Narrative and Volume II: Philosophy of Biblical Law), and The Siddur of Prayer: Philosophy, Poetry and Mystery. The current volume will round out this effort by presenting some of Schweid’s most characteristic essays: some personal-autobiographical, others dealing with Jewish personal existence, theodicy, and critique of contemporary culture. The common thread of all these essays can be seen in Schweid’s unique eclectic Jewish stance, which is a blending of religious existentialism and secular Zionism: Judaism is a religious civilization (as Mordecai Kaplan put it) and thus a social entity, but in today’s individualistic society it can continue to be this only by virtue of the lonely individual’s personal choice to embrace it as a bulwark against the anomie of postmodern culture (shades of Rosenzweig and Soloveitchik). I will not rehearse Schweid’s biographical development here in detail, as he tells it best in his intimate way in his autobiographical essay “A Personal Viewpoint,” which is the first essay in this collection. In it, the reader will discover from Schweid himself how he grew up in Jerusalem in the period of the Yishuv, and came of age during Israel’s

2

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

War of Independence. Even as an adolescent, he was finding his own path amid the various ideological outlooks that shaped Israel in its inception—educated in the left-wing secular Zionist schools and youth movements, but looking to a deeper integration with the whole history of Judaism, including its religious foundations, than the extreme “negators of the Diaspora” provided. He absorbed and embodied the “spiritual Zionism” of Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, A. D. Gordon, and Buber, and would strive to apply their vision to the realities of Israeli existence for the succeeding decades. The second essay, “My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought,” tells the story of Schweid’s apprenticeship as a Jewish scholar under the aegis of the masters of Jewish thought at the Hebrew University—Shlomo Pines, Gershom Scholem, Yitzhak Baer, and Nathan Rotenstreich (with the then-recently deceased Julius Guttmann in the background as a formidable, formative presence). In it, he discusses the still-relevant issues of objectivity versus commitment in academic research. To what extent is it a scholar’s responsibility to seek the pure, unvarnished truth, while “bracketing” all personal values and commitments? On the other hand, to what extent is it his responsibility as educator to seek application of the values of the past for guidance to his students and general public in the present? As engaging as this personal memoir is in its own right, it is also important background for the fifth essay in the volume, which discusses the fate of history as an academic discipline in postmodern culture. The third essay, “Judaism and the Lonely Jew,” is both a representative of Schweid’s early mature phase as a commentator on contemporary Jewish existence, and the most existentialist of his writings. While in most of Schweid’s writing he analyzes Jewish existence as a group-cultural phenomenon, here he depicts the situation of the lonely Jewish individual who finds himself cut off from the Jewish group experience. The deracinated existence of the isolated Jew is intentionally offered as a negative counterpart to the positive experience of the Jew rooted in his people’s national culture, which is the theme of most of Schweid’s writing (and which he eventually arrives at by the end of the book The Lonely Jew and Judaism, of which the

Editor’s Introduction

3

selected essay is the introductory chapter). In effect, Schweid presents the reader with a choice. In the modern world, nobody is forcing you to be Jewish; you must choose it of your own free will. In today’s world (whether America, Europe, Israel, or elsewhere), one can choose to lead an individual existence, freely selecting whatever one wants from the cultural cafeteria that today’s world offers, without showing favoritism to any one people, religion, or tradition. But the downside of this existence is that it becomes progressively more difficult to define a coherent sense of one’s own identity, without a prior social and cultural tradition to which one belongs. The Jew in this situation may decide, in order to arrive at a positive sense of self, to reach back through one’s family and community to the values and models in the Jewish tradition, encountered in a spirit of free adaptation. Such an individual’s relation to the tradition will differ from the naïve acceptance of an unquestioned heritage, because the “lonely” individual will have passed through the stages of lost innocence, alienation, and return in order to establish an adult, freely-chosen relation to the tradition of one’s ancestors. The fourth essay, “Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness,” is taken from the introductory chapter of Schweid’s book To Declare that the Lord is Just: Theodicy in Jewish Thought from the Bible to Spinoza (1994). The book itself is a marvelous example of Schweid’s achievement as a historian of Jewish thought, which he approaches (as always) with a combination of intellectual objectivity and existential engagement. Both the original book and this introductory essay are also examples of how Schweid successfully crosses over from his core identity as secular Jew, operating with full freedom of thought and conscience, to dealing with the religious concerns that have animated Judaism as a religious tradition over the millennia. In doing so, he achieves a novel vantage point from which to examine the age-old problem of how people reformulate their faith in a just, compassionate God when faced with the whole gamut of human tragedies, from the everyday to the epoch-making and catastrophic. The final two essays in this collection are both taken from one of Schweid’s most recent books, Critique of Secular Culture (which could

4

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

alternatively be titled “Critique of Postmodernity”).1 The overall thesis of the book is that our postmodern world, in its political, socioeconomic, and intellectual-cultural aspects, is lacking in certain virtues and ideals that were staples in both pre-modern religious western culture and in the humanistic tradition that characterized early modernity from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. One of these virtues is the positive sense of history as a coherent narrative, bound up with the positive cultural tradition of the group to which one belongs. The “new history” deriving from the French postmodernists (especially Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault) is skeptical of metanarratives in general. This skepticism has good warrant both intellectually (there are always facts and points of view that stand outside any received narrative, which challenge its completeness and veracity) and morally (the catastrophes of twentieth-century Western civilization were animated by grandiose narratives that were accepted with fanatical faith and misplaced heroic loyalty). However, one should beware of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Taken to its logical conclusion, the dismantling of the historical narrative must lead to the death of culture in the positive sense cultivated by high modernism, for culture as we know it is built on a sense of participating in the historical narrative of one’s people as an ongoing reality transcending the individual. Deprived of this overarching reality, the individual is powerless to create the transcendent values necessary for living meaningfully as more than just a biological organism. In the final essay, “The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village,” Schweid gives us a bird’s-eye view of the history of modernity and its evolution into postmodernity. In doing so, he sharply questions whether cutting ties with the legacies of the past—especially the monotheism that undergirded Western culture’s sense of value well into the modern period—can truly be called progress. Without moral commitment to a common good, people are left to pursue their private interests in winner-take-all competitive arenas, ranging from the recreational 1 A third essay from A Critique of Secular Culture—“The Drama of Secular History: The Return to Nature and Exit from the Other Side”—has been published in Eliezer Schweid: The Responsibility of Jewish Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Editor’s Introduction

5

(where his description brings to mind American Idol, Twitter, and “The Hunger Games”) to the socioeconomic (as with the everincreasing disparity between the super-wealthy and the declining middle and working classes). Without transcendent value, Western culture has arguably devolved into a mindless consumerism, and the everlasting need of people to worship someone or something must necessarily take (and has taken) forms that can truly be called idolatrous. One walks away from this critique with a realization that there are values in the age-old legacies that are timeless in their validity and applicability.

Putting all these varied insights together, we can extrapolate the synthetic vision that guides Eliezer Schweid throughout all his intellectual pursuits and tasks together. Judaism is a historical culture that for most of its more than 3000year history has existed as a religious culture, but today has both religious and secular subcultures that must, for the sake of their common good, live together in a positive symbiotic relationship. A historical culture persists through time by transmitting a shared narrative, which it does both through formal educational procedures (transmitting oral lore and studying written canonical texts from a standpoint of collective ownership and reverence) and informal practices (liturgy, festival celebrations, folk art and music, as well as propagating family traditions). As long as the religious faith was generally accepted among the Jewish people, religious reverence served as a means of reinforcing the authority of the tradition and the incentives for the people to preserve it. The onset of modernity posed challenges to the integrity and survival of Jewish culture. From the Enlightenment onward, a fateful choice was posed: Should Judaism discard its national element, and survive purely as a religion, while amalgamating with the national cultures of Europe and America? Or should it maintain its national autonomy and seek to survive as a national culture, either in Diaspora

6

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

(à la Dubnow’s autonomism and early-twentieth century Yiddishism) or in Israel? Both options posed dangers. Defining Judaism religiously presupposed that religion itself was a viable institution in late-modern culture. The nationalist-Zionist solution raised the question: would a secular Jewish nation remain true to the historical legacy of Jewish culture, which for millennia was preserved within a religious rubric?2 Postmodernism throws an additional challenge at all the solutions for Jewish continuity developed in post-Enlightenment modernity. The possibility of assimilation, present as early as the Enlightenment period, takes on new ramifications. In the early modern period, it meant giving up one’s affiliation in the Jewish culture in order to affiliate in a different national culture—French, German, American, etc. Rejection by the host culture contributed to the phenomenon of the Jewish “rootless cosmopolitan”—Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Schönberg, Freud—who lived in the margins between cultures, calling into question the assumption of national culture as a rubric for personal identity and human existence. The “lonely Jew” described in the present collection has tried to live that mode of human existence bereft of cultural definition. In Schweid’s view, this is a tortured, inadequate mode of existence that should reawaken the individual to the need to connect to his/her cultural roots. Thus, in the postmodern situation, affirmation of one’s ties to Jewish culture is not an inevitable given, but a choice among alternatives—arguably, the best, healthiest choice. Schweid expresses genuine appreciation for the values of Enlightenment-era modernity. In effect, it had secularized many of the values of the biblical legacy—the universal brotherhood of humanity under the aegis of a benevolent God. It provided a matrix of value for the individual to live within the cultural narrative of his/her national group, embedded within the larger narrative of Western culture and universal humanity. Due to a variety of factors (Schweid cites Romanticism and industrial technology), these benign narratives morphed into the malignant 2 The dialectics of this last alternative are examined systematically in Schweid’s essay, “Judaism as a Culture,” in Eliezer Schweid, The Responsibility of Jewish Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Editor’s Introduction

7

narratives of right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism. The catastrophes of twentieth-century history shattered all narratives, ushering in an age of skeptical suspicion of all grandiose schemas of meaning, whether religious, national, or social-historical. At the same time, the revolutions in informational media fostered the growth of the “global village” in which national identities are flattened out and everyone is subject to the same flow of ephemeral information, addressed to the lowest common denominator of human appetites, lacking the depth of historical narrative, spiritual depth, and transcendent meaning. This is a threat to all culture as traditionally conceived, and to Jewish culture in particular. Against this backdrop, Schweid voices a counter-affirmation that draws on the best of the religious and modern-secular legacies, both Jewish and universal. It is necessary to proceed dialectically, to reaffirm those aspects of the past that the modern Enlightenment discarded, while subjecting the legacy of the past to the Enlightenment critique and the Enlightenment’s legacy to a critique based on timeless values from the ancient canon. The full title of Schweid’s book Philosophy of the Bible as Foundation of Jewish Culture3 is a clue to the total program of reformulation of Jewish values that Schweid recommends. The anomie of postmodernity can only be adequately overcome by a critical, informed appropriation of the whole of the Jewish tradition for the continuous process of rebuilding Jewish culture in today’s world. To that vision, the essays of this book are devoted.

3 Eliezer Schweid, Philosophy of the Bible as Foundation of Jewish Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008).

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay1

I

will endeavor to summarize here my reflections on Judaism as a personal identity—as faith, worldview, and way of life in our age. I do not aim at a definitive statement. A worldview is a process of reflection and self-examination within a changing environment. The process extends through one’s personal life and is continuous with it, changing as life changes. When a chapter is concluded, the need arises to stop and take in the view, as if standing on a hill overlooking the path that one has traversed from the beginning to the present point. I have already felt this need on several occasions. In the past, I would satisfy it through a systematic exposition, as long as a book or as short as an article. On those occasions I expressed my view as to the personal character of these matters. A person’s faith, worldview and way of life are the components of one’s personal identity. They are called into play at the many points of intersection between the course of the individual’s life and the community in which s/he lives and for which s/he bears responsibility. These are thus the topics of conversation between an individual with other individuals and with groups in his/her social-cultural environment. Indeed, my thoughts on these topics were always a response to an agenda that I did not set. The questions were posed to me by students or the organizers of public 1 From: Eliezer Schweid, Belonging to the Jewish People (Lihyot ben ha-am hayehudi) (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1992).

10

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

colloquia. Perhaps this was the reason why I did not feel the need to offer my readers my calling card. If they turned my way, they likely knew me according to the public image that I had shaped in the course of my appearances. I could assume that whatever was required for understanding the topics of public discussion was common knowledge, and whatever was not known was no business of the public. Better that it should remain within my private domain. Naturally, as long as I was speaking mainly to my contemporaries, I felt no expectation that I should present the personal background of the development of my views, to help them understand better, but in recent years I sensed this expectation. Almost imperceptibly, a transition took place by which I was faced with a generation gap, not through any change on my part, but through a change in my environment. When speaking to my students, I am no longer speaking to people my own age or of my own generation. The life-environment in which I grew up is quite familiar to me, but of course it is almost completely unknown to my listeners and readers. Their questions reveal this fact, and sometimes in the form of an explicit request. They want to know, who is this man who is speaking to them? What is the narrative that brought him to embrace these thoughts and these views? What is the personal life experience expressed in them? And so I depart from my previous practice and start out by presenting my personal viewpoint. Of course, I will only present what is relevant to the present purpose. There is a private domain that borders on the public domain, and there is another private domain farther removed. A person goes into his yard and looks out. But if he is asked to lay bare his yard to the outside world, he retreats to his living room and looks out to the yard adjoining the street, thus maintaining his privacy in a secret place preserving what he wants to keep to himself. Time and place: I was born in Jerusalem in 1929. I do not have to say anything about Jerusalem. I am speaking in Jerusalem to those who know it; though the city has grown considerably, its character has changed only a little. Concerning the time, I will say that 1929 was the year of terrible and bloody riots between the Jewish

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

11

“Yishuv”2 of Eretz Israel and its Arab neighbors. There had been such riots in the past, but they were getting steadily worse in extent and force. Every time they recurred, there was something unprecedented in the new occurrence. I was born toward the end of the Hebrew year 5689, on the second of Elul (September 7). If I am not mistaken, this was shortly after the riots’ frightful climax—the cruel slaughter of the Hebron Jewish community. Is it permitted to me to speak of that year and that event as if of a personal memory? Obviously not. I was only a newborn infant. Nevertheless, these riots are engraved in my personal memory. My family had relatives in Hebron, with whom I was closely connected throughout my childhood and adolescence. When we met them, the stories rose to the surface, and my mother would regularly tell how she came, in a state of advanced pregnancy, to spend time with her relatives, who were among the few who managed by the skin of their teeth to escape the slaughter. I felt that these matters involved me. Thus was formed the memory of the year of my birth, which took on a symbolic significance. Not long afterwards, I could form a concrete impression of what had occurred, based on my own direct experience, when the riots of 1935 and 1936 broke out. They were even worse, and they spread throughout the land. This time, the center of the conflagration was Jerusalem. I was then a student in first grade, and we lived in the “Nablus house,” on the border of the Arab neighborhoods. I remember well the disturbances in the street. They pushed close to our house. I remember that the road was littered with black nails that were supposed to puncture the tires of automotive vehicles—among them, the bus that took my brothers and me to school. I remember the Arab shopkeeper, Jamal, whose store closed its shutters facing us. In ordinary times he was a dear man who treated his Jewish customers with warmth and affection. Toward us children he was sweet, like the 2 Yishuv: the collective community of all Jews in the Land of Israel in the period 1881-1948, including the “old Yishuv” (the traditional/Orthodox Jewish communities which had existed continuously from previous centuries) and the “new Yishuv” (the Zionist immigrants who came in waves especially during the 1880s, 1900s, 1920s, etc.).

12

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

“kids’ delight” that he sold us in little bags of thick paper. Now the closed shutters bespoke iron hostility. I relate these things as the backdrop for understanding the national atmosphere that embraced me in my youth. This was a period of a struggle for survival of my people in its land. I felt this from my childhood on. The majority of my friends felt this, too, with the sense of direct experience. It is proper that I should highlight the distinctive general atmosphere that prevailed in those days in Jerusalem: a mixed city of Jews and Arabs. There were also many sharp tensions among the Jews themselves (between the “free-thinking3” Jews and those of the “old Yishuv,” who represented Exilic Jewry in their whole being), as well as between Jews and Arabs, to which was added the strong and emphatic presence of the British administration and Mandate Army with which we were not on friendliest terms (an understatement). Jerusalem was representative of the general situation of the Yishuv in the land. But it was also different. It was different in its rare beauty (the “mountains surrounding it,” and the special light of its skies, the like of which I have not seen anywhere else). It was different in the sense of Jewish history that accompanied its familiars on every street, in every alley, in every corner. It was different also in the sharp sense of exile in the innermost heart of the homeland. No one spoke of it in such words in my surroundings. On the contrary. We wanted to prove to everyone, and first of all to ourselves, that our homeland was here. Therefore we did not call the cruel murderous outbreaks of Arabs against Jews “pogrom” or “persecution,” but instead called them “riots” or “disturbances.” However, the feeling was more tangible. It distinguished the atmosphere of Jerusalem from that of Tel Aviv or the Jezreel or Jordan Valleys. When I later read Shai Agnon’s book Only Yesterday, I identified with Isaac Kumer in his Jerusalem period, and this definition, in its full sharpness, illuminated my heart and acquired a personal 3 “Free-thinking.” Ḥofshiyim, literally “free.” Schweid uses this term to denote those Jews who—just a little more to the conservative side than “secular”—had a positive attitude toward Jewish thought and practice but adopted it in a free spirit, not bound by either the intellectual or behavioral strictures of Orthodoxy.

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

13

identifying significance for me. I knew that as a “Jerusalemite” I would never feel like a “sabra4” in any respect. The “exile” that we negated5 was familiar to me through the cityscape of Jerusalem. I was proud to be a child of the generation of the struggle, defending itself and building its homeland. My friends and I saw ourselves in actuality as the “last generation of servitude and the first generation of redemption.” In any case, the years of maturation from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to young manhood took place for me during the period of the Yishuv, before the establishment of the State of Israel. The normal experiences of childhood and youth were accompanied by the resonances of historical events which directly affected the routines of daily living—riots, the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, the White Paper, World War II, echoes of the Holocaust, illegal immigration, and the struggle over Jewish settlement with the Mandate authorities. My participation in the Israeli War of Liberation was truly the grandest and (in a certain respect) the hardest test of maturity that I have ever undergone. I only entered into the full responsibility of an adult, in the social-communal sense (in a kibbutz), the personal-familial sense, and the national-public sense, after the establishment of the State, in the first stages of its established existence. Since from my first adolescent years I was called on to relate consciously and with a sense of obligation to the public reality surrounding me and to its historical processes, and since I responded willingly and enthusiastically to this calling, and since there were always rubrics at hand in which I was able to contribute my part, these facts had a direct influence on the selection of topics which I chose to 4 “Sabra”—native-born Israeli, especially, the first generation born in the Land of Israel, who differentiated themselves sharply from their Diaspora-born parents. 5 “Negating the exile” was a slogan of pioneering Zionism, which envisioned a new Jewish existence, freed of the negative qualities of exilic Judaism—passivity, servility, religious otherworldliness, economic “unproductivity” (whether as middleman, scholar, etc.), hyper-intellectualism, etc. But the traditional Jews displaying these characteristics were resident in Jerusalem from time immemorial and continued to make their presence felt there during the Zionist period and to this day.

14

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

discuss, the shaping of my views, my feelings, the decisions that determined to a great extent my path in life—and, necessarily, the traits of my personality. The education that I received in my house was Jewish (in a nationalist vein) and socialist. We regarded our home as “free-thinking.”6 We deliberately did not use the word “secular,” although it was quite in vogue. I emphasize first of all that this was not only a continually self-conscious identity, but a demonstrative one. In Jerusalem it was impossible not to be aware daily of a difference that was on display to the outside: in dress, in appearance, in conduct, in belonging to an organized community. But we should note that preference for the word “free-thinking” over “secular” expressed an attitude of independent choice, that is to say, a positive and loving attitude toward the Jewish foundational layer of my identity and that of my comrades. Moreover, it expressed a conscious refusal to forgo personally partaking of experiences of Shabbat, holidays, and sanctity. The “freethinking” Jew did not regard himself as slavishly bound to secularity. The nationalist message that I received in the house was at bottom a strong, unequivocal emotional message of “love of the Jewish people.”7 This was a feeling of loyalty out of pride to the ethical-spiritual distinctiveness of the people of Israel. It included profound participation in the pain of exile and yearnings for redemption. It also included a clearly religious overtone. My parents communicated it as a Jewish sensibility through the stories that they told us (folk stories and family stories), through the songs that they sang to us and with us, through the Yiddish language that they imparted to us by speaking it among themselves. Yiddish was the language in which they came to know each other. It was their home, to the point that when they wanted to say “home,” and to emphasize the distinctive quality of its essence, 6 See Note 3 above. 7 “Love of the Jewish people”—ahavat Yisrael. (The Hebrew has the double significance of “love of Israel” in the modern national sense of “Israel” as a political entity, and “love of Jewry” in the religious-ethnic sense, as the term “Israel” denotes that religious-national fellowship which in the 3300 years of its existence has carried sometimes the name “Israel” and sometimes the name “Jewry.”)

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

15

they would resort, even when speaking with us, to the Yiddish word “heim.” Yiddish was thus the language of the home, the mama-loshen. However, with us, the children of the native generation, Hebrew was the obvious language, even though when expressing her maternal feeling, our mother would always address us, in speech or in writing, with the Yiddish expression that recaptured in her soul the resonance of her own mother’s voice to her: mayn kind. Thus was created in me a double, bilingual connection, to the Jewish past and to the Eretz-Israel present. Together they concretized the continuity of the generations and the historical direction. The same message was transmitted also by way of the traditions that they maintained in the house in a freeform way: kashrut, Shabbat, holidays. What crystallized in my consciousness as a result from these legacies was the quintessence of the historical myth of the Jewish people. I have a concrete image of Jewish peoplehood, the image of a personal reality. I see it before my eyes when I think of it: a heroic historical character, possessed of an identity that took shape in the course of its history. It was a people that suffered endless persecutions, decrees, pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, and destructions, yet they knew not only how to survive but how to achieve great moral-spiritual triumphs. The faith of Israel was included in this image as a psycho-spiritual constituent of the people’s being. Even though my parents did not transmit a belief in God or a sense of obligation to keep the mitzvot, I received from them a feeling of appreciation of a people, for whom faith in God and fidelity to God’s commandments was the spirit that energized it and determined its course. The career of the people was a perpetual test “to sanctify God’s Name.” Without any connection to Orthodoxy or religion in the institutional sense, I formed a deep emotional attachment to the tradition and to the faith that is bound up with it. Truly, in my childhood and young adulthood I did not think of myself as a believer in the religious sense. At bottom, I did believe—in faith as a spiritual-moral power. Thus I identified with it. In the course of time I also understood that faith in the value of faith is its hidden root.

16

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

In any case, these feelings were not only concretized in gestures but were uttered in a simple, articulate way. My father was a religious poet (he was free in his observance of rituals but wrote liturgical poems, and at unscheduled times would visit the synagogue). My mother was not a believer but related with much nostalgia and admiration to the simple faith of her parents. This was also expressed in the fact that in the house they observed the dietary rules in a general way, not at all punctiliously, not rigorously but in substance; they fasted on Yom Kippur; they distinguished in a certain way the Sabbaths and holidays. They explained to us that all these were customs that our parents took on themselves, and they were signs of Jewish national identity. The fast of Yom Kippur and taking care to hear the prayer Kol Nidrei at the eve of the fast and Neilah at the end of the day were such signs. My parents related to this holiest of days in the Jewish calendar as a day of roll-call. All Jews would go on this day to the synagogue to be counted, and to give honor to the memory of their parents. Whoever was absent, it was as if he had resigned from the Jewish people. During my adolescence, they also provided us with guidance as to the direction of our studies. My parents felt that it was their obligation to teach their children beyond enrolling them in school. In particular, they reinforced reading and exploration in a direction that flowed from one’s spontaneous sensibility. In addition to knowledge of the Bible (and by “knowledge” they meant committing passages to memory, to be able to quote in the appropriate place), they stressed knowledge of modern Hebrew literature. There was much study of poetry, and much commitment of poetry to memory. The poems of Bialik and Raḥel enjoyed a special, honored status. My mother admired them, and we competed with each other in quoting them. I also memorized a lot of their poetry. I can say that the poetry of Bialik, and later his essays and his Book of Legends, had a formative spiritual influence on me. As a growing youth I relived the memories of my childhood through his poems of childhood. By so doing, I was able to internalize even his youthful struggles expressed in “On the Threshold of the House of Study,” even the rifts in his soul between

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

17

the “old” and the “new,” as if they were my own rifts, though in reality this spiritual experience was quite remote from my own. In any case, my Jewish worldview was nourished in a very special way from his creative work. Thanks to his influence, I turned later to several authors and thinkers among whom I found a similar spiritual world—to a certain extent Aḥad Ha-Am (though the ideological depths of his thought were too close to the surface), and to a greater extent—which proved formative for me over time—Aaron David Gordon. My deep connection to the creative work of Shai Agnon also developed on the foundation of what I had imbibed from Bialik. I should also say something of the variety of socialism that I absorbed from my parents’ house. My mother was a member of the left-wing Labor Zionists in her youth. However, she was repelled by the dogmatic party line of this movement, and when she came to Eretz Israel she no longer retained her membership. What she retained was the ethos of socialist egalitarianism. The Marxist ideology, like every ideology, was not rooted in her soul. She did not even make an effort to deal with it. Her socialism was a matter of feeling. It was nourished by a strong sense of justice, as well as by a feeling of compassion and identification with the exploited, suffering poor. To her mind, these were typical and characteristic Jewish feelings, and she was always astounded as if for the first time when she heard of Jews who were cruel and vicious. These for her were the traits of gentiles, not of Jews! My father, on the other hand, had a broad and sophisticated worldview. He was an enthusiastic socialist from the anti-Marxist school of Gustav Landauer, whom he knew personally in his youth, when he was a student in the University of Berlin. In honor of May Day he would write festive poems in which he expressed his ethical-socialist enthusiasm. (Some of them were published in the journal Davar under the pen-name Zvi Israel.) This influence, too, can explain why I was later responsive to the writings of A.D. Gordon. I found in him the same blend of populist ethical social feeling, not class-based, not Marxist, and a deep identification with Judaism through the distinctive experience of the Jewish people.

18

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

The education that I received at home was generally compatible with the message that I received at school and in the youth movement. It was my parents who sent me to school. They chose my schools, of course, because they identified with them—first, the “Ḥaim Arlozorov Educational Institute,” and later the high school. Both these institutions belonged to the Labor movement. Through school, I came in touch with the youth movement Hamaḥanot Haolim,8 and after this movement split and a part of it joined Gordonia, with the “Meuḥad” movement.9 My parents wholeheartedly supported my spirited activity in the movement. They identified with my desire to go into “practical work”10 and become a member of a kibbutz. They saw in this the fulfillment of a life goal in which they had not managed to participate as much as they wanted, for various personal reasons. Thus there was a large measure of complementarity between the message of the home and the Zionist-socialist-pioneering outlook of the school and the youth movement. But there was also a considerable tension of which my parents were unaware, perhaps because they had brought it about. In hindsight, I should remark first that this tension had a hidden social-class background. One was aware of it, but did not define it in this way. My peers in the school and in the youth movement grew up, mostly, in the homes of members of the Histadrut and the Labor parties. Ideologically and even professionally, they were counted among the workers. In practice, they belonged to the middle and uppermiddle class—that is to say, the civil service (whether working for the  8 Hamaḥanot Haolim: a major Socialist-Zionist youth group. Maḥanot means “camps,” and olim refers to participants in aliyah, the immigration to the Land of Israel conceived as a kind of “ascent.” It thus implies: the camps of those who participate in the ascent of the Jewish homeland from dream to reality, from small beginnings to larger achievements. Founded in the 1920s (and still in existence today), it founded forty-two kibbutzim in the course of its activities.  9 Meuḥad: A left-of-center kibbutz organization. 10 “Practical work” (hagshamah). Hagshamah [which may also be rendered “praxis”] is a key notion of Schweid’s outlook—that ideals need to be put into practice and achieve realization, or else they are useless. It was a key part of the pioneeringZionist outlook, and essential to achieving the goals of the Zionist movement, the building up of the land and later achieving the State of Israel.

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

19

Histadrut, the parties, or the Yishuv administration). I came from a poor home, literally. Deprivation was a fact of life. Our daily bread was modest and not always secure. Papa was sometimes unemployed. He never had employment that befitted his abilities and his rare education. When he finally received a regular position as an interpreter in the Mandatory Court of Equity in Jerusalem, it was a lowly position that paid poorly, even by the standards of those times, which are not those of today’s affluent society. Our living quarters were cramped, our food and clothing meager. Our parents were forced to stint on their own rations in order to provide their children with the minimum necessary for proper bodily growth and to educate their minds, which for them was a sacred (Jewish) value. The difference that was created between a youth who always felt want and knew that it was forbidden for him to request on his behalf from his parents anything more than what he was given (for what was given him already stretched his parents’ ability) and his fellow-youths who did not understand what it was to be in want; the humiliation bound up with this situation, which was felt especially when I was forced to ask them to have consideration of my limited means whenever it was necessary to chip in for a common expenditure; all these and the like constituted a real obstacle in my personal relations. Ideologically speaking, there need not have been any obstacle. The truth was that they were always considerate of me. There was mutual aid in the movement, and it was given to me “with no problem.” But the very fact that they had to “be considerate” of me whenever we went out on a hike, to camp, for recreation, highlighted the difference. Still, I always managed to grab my spot in the leadership cadre, in class or in the movement, by virtue of my abilities (especially by virtue of my facility of oral and written expression) and by virtue of my dedicated, enthusiastic social and cultural activity that was greatly appreciated. But from the social and personal aspect, in the framework of personal relations, there was this undefined obstacle, which was largely projected from my side, simply impassable. My close personal friends, who were few, were at any rate always among those who like me did not come from economically well-established families.

20

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

This circumstance had an effect on my feelings and views. I cannot deny the existence of a Marxist motif that I incorporated as a result of my personal experience, and it remains to this day a component of my worldview, although I see myself as a disciple of A.D. Gordon and am far from “materialism.” I felt myself to be a bystander, one who had to prove his standing in his peer-group by virtue of his intellectual contribution to the group. In terms of my ideational development, this feeling inclined me to identify with the group and its idealistic values, with what the group demands that it should become. But at the same time I tended toward independent judgment and a sharply critical bent, directed internally, at the very group with which I identified. It was as if I was at the same time of them yet beyond them, and my criticism was focused on the gaps that emerged between the principles and values that they embraced in school and in the movement, with which I identified and by virtue of which I belonged, and the degree to which they were actually carried out (on account of which I felt alienated). I assume that in my critical stance I also reflected the feeling of my parents, who while they identified fully with the Yishuv, its national and social values, and its struggle, nevertheless felt deprived and communicated a sense of bitterness. They expressed it regularly in their remarks about the leaders and the administrators of the parties and of the Yishuv. They spoke of the hypocritical gap between the social ideology—to which all pledged fidelity, pretending that it was fully practiced—and the actual praxis. There was, then, a background of “class” tension. But there were also differences in pedagogical content. The message of the school, and even more of the youth movement, contained a different conception than that of my parents, regarding both the Jewish people and socialism. The socialist approach of Hamaḥanot Haolim (who recruited me into the movement in fourth grade) tended in the Marxist direction, though not unequivocally (there were different views on this issue, especially after the merger with Gordonia). The major focus of tension revolved around the Jewish people and their heritage. In this respect, the message of the school and the youth movement (especially the latter) had a very strong element of “negation of the

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

21

Diaspora”11 along the lines of Berdyczewski and Brenner. In describing the image of the Jewish people, they emphasized the picture that came out of the stories of Mendele Mokher Seforim, Brenner, Berdyczewski, Bialik’s poem “City of Slaughter,” and Tchernichowsky’s poems “My sword! Where is my sword?” and “Before Apollo’s Statue.” This species of “negation of the Diaspora” went far beyond the simple recognition that exile was a misfortune and a trial for the Jewish people. It went far beyond a feeling of sympathy and compassion for the suffering people, who yearned to be redeemed from their exile. “Negation of the Diaspora,” as it was taught to us in the school and the youth movement, blamed the Jewish people for being exiled and remaining in exile. It branded all the creative output of the exilic period with the inferior brand: “Made in Exile.” It saddled the people with responsibility for its tragedy, and presented the new reality that must flower in Eretz Israel as the absolute antithesis of “exilic existence.” The new Jewish reality must draw only on the legacy of the ancient period, when the people dwelt on its land—that is to say, the legacy of the Biblical and Hasmonean periods. All the rest of the Jewish legacy, perhaps except for the legacy of activist Messianic movements, were portrayed in a negative light. Of course, the later religious Jewish tradition, with all its values, was disqualified out of hand as blatantly “exilic.” What they tried to constitute as Hebrew culture was an “earthy” (Eretz Israel/agricultural) synthesis of the most ancient and the most modern. I forged my Jewish and Zionist worldview through hard confrontation. I would not be faithful to the truth if I did not acknowledge the fact that a Brennerian “negation of the Diaspora,” with its existential power, speaking in the name of the “authenticity” and extremism that 11 See Note 5 above. As will become clear here, there were at least two different aspects and modes of “negation of the Diaspora,” one of which Schweid affirms (the need to overcome the passivity and weakness of Jewish Diaspora existence while building the new Jewish homeland), the other of which he sharply criticizes (the disparagement of 2000 years of Jewish Diaspora creativity and the heritage— ranging from rabbinic-Talmudic Judaism to Yiddish literature—created by Jews in Diaspora), though he admits that he identified partially with it and it influenced him to some extent.

22

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

befit youthful joie de vivre, captivated me. I was influenced by it, and a certain aspect of my views is still rooted in it to a certain extent. This did not fit well with the loving feeling that I imbibed in my parents’ home for the Jewish people and their heritage. It also did not fit well with the need that I felt to find in the mainstream Jewish heritage in which I had been raised the values that would nourish my worldview and way of life. I felt that there was something fundamentally distorted, even morally, in the Brennerian “negation of the Diaspora” that some of the leaders of Hamaḥanot Haolim tried to impart to us, with a zeal that bespoke a narrow party-line mentality. In any case, I already had enough critical sense to be alert to this. I rebelled and opposed them. To my good fortune, I found among the leaders one, a true intellectual, who encouraged my direction. He was a tragic man who fell ill at a young age and passed away before his time, leaving no literary legacy. His name was Shlomo Levi, a member of kibbutz Beit Arava. I must record his name because it is to him that I owe my success in standing up to the pressures that were brought to bear on me, especially during the split that tore Hamaḥanot Haolim into two opposing factions, in the debate over the merger with Gordonia. I was then sixteen years old, and very much in the eye of the storm. At the focal point were the political interests of parties, and in the fight for the souls of the youths, they were not very discriminating about the means they employed, but nobody spoke openly about party interests. They discussed questions of principle. The issues of socialism, “negation of the Diaspora,” and one’s relation to the Jewish heritage were topics of discussion, because of the proposal for merger with Gordonia, a group that was anti-Marxist and opposed as well to Brenner’s message of “negating the Diaspora.” To the exponents of the dogmatic, inflexible approach of Hakibbutz Hameuḥad, the message of the Gordonia movement, based on the legacy of A.D. Gordon, was regarded as fundamentally “treif.”12 It was clear, in any case, that after the merger with Gordonia it was easier for me to defend my 12 “Treif”—in religious Jewish dietary laws, not kosher, unfit for eating.

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

23

views regarding both Judaism and socialism. I was able to arrive formally at the position of head of the Department of Instruction of the movement, and by virtue of my role I composed several key programs of instruction in which I presented my views. I should emphasize that I arrived at that post after I had gone out for pioneering training (hakhsharah) in Kfar Blum in the Galilee, participated in the War of Liberation, and achieved praxis by participating in the founding of a new kibbutz—Tzar’ah. During the training period, and to a certain extent even during the very hard months of the war that we experienced during our training in all three major fronts—the Galilee, the “center” (Lydda, Ramleh, and the road to Jerusalem), and the Negev, I had a regular role that stuck to me and apparently expressed my comrades’ image of me: I was the tarbutnik (culture specialist) of the training platoon, and later of the kibbutz (and later of the movement). I cannot say that they agreed with my views, but they agreed that these were appropriate views for a culture specialist. A person should identify with his job, and these views seemed like a legitimate foundation for the duties of the job. Since no one disputed that the training group, the platoon, and the kibbutz required cultural activities (some theoretical studies, some discussion groups, some holiday and other celebrations with a bit of content), and all understood that for this purpose you needed somebody who was crazy about such things, there was nothing easier or simpler than to assign these responsibilities to the tarbutnik. He could “do culture,” if that was what he believed in. The comrades would benefit from the fact that they would be discharging their obligations through him, even if his views did not express theirs precisely. Thus they allowed me to do my own thing (without a great deal of participation on their part). Of course, the result was mutually frustrating, for my audience lacked the resources of knowledge as well as the ideological and emotional motivation to share in the message that I sought to transmit through my activity, and I lacked positive feedback. It seems that this frustration led me eventually to embark on my course of Judaic studies in the university, which had the eventual result of my leaving the kibbutz.

24

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Truly, I did not intend to leave the kibbutz. When I set out from Tzar’ah to study in Jerusalem, after about five years of active membership, I still believed in the social mission of the kibbutz. While even in the days of my membership in the kibbutz I maintained the status of a bystander in the middle of the action (for the role that I assumed was precisely fitting for such a status), the critical independence that characterized me in the movement did not wane when I became a kibbutz member. I had, by nature, “thoughts and protests” (the title of one of the articles that I published in “Niv Ha-Kevutzah” [“the Voice of the Group”], an organ of the kibbutz movement that elicited spirited response). I sensed the gaps between ideological pretensions and reality. I wondered to what extent the social action required after the establishment of the State and the initial arrival of the wave of mass immigration would continue to be compatible with the traits and principles of the kibbutz framework. I expressed my thoughts in additional articles in which I suggested new practical directions. I still believed in the way of the kibbutz, if it would adapt itself to changing life conditions. I set out in my university studies in 1952–53 intending to complete my courses; to gather knowledge especially in the area of Judaism, its heritage, its history and thought, in order to provide a basis for my worldview; to develop myself and to acquire tools for fulfilling my role in the kibbutz. I set out with the approval of the kibbutz, and I was sure that I would return. The dynamic of reality was different. I set out for my studies together with my girlfriend Sabina, who would soon become my wife.13 We were married a short time after our return to Jerusalem, my birth city, and we set up housekeeping there. The studies grabbed me. They quickly became a vocation and a way of life, an inseparable part of my Jewish identification and of the intellectual creativity in which I saw 13 Sabina Schweid (née Fuchs) grew up in Zborów, Ukraine, and survived the Holocaust by hiding with a farmer in the Ukraine. She arrived as a refugee in Palestine in 1947. Sabina would later become a professor of Art History at the Hebrew University and a celebrated author. See her autobiography, Milḥamah, milḥamah, gevirah nehedarah (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), translated by Naftali Greenwood, Consider Me Lucky: Childhood and Youth during the Holocaust in Zborow (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011).

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

25

my contribution. On the other hand, the social connection with the kibbutz quickly dwindled, on both sides. My friends did not maintain the connection, and I was drawn into new circles of socialization and new activity that satisfied my creative yearnings. Later our family grew; our children were born. Raising and educating them provided my life with new content, and gave me a sense of creative engagement. It would be stretching the truth if I were to say that I had already arrived at my current thinking concerning the kibbutz. From time to time I struggled over this. Like many of my friends who left, I felt guilty that I was not realizing the kibbutz vision, in which I had believed enthusiastically since my youth. But in practice, after two or three years had passed it became clear to me that I would not return to the kibbutz, and it was clear to me that from my perspective this was justified. I thought that in my own way I kept faith with the national, social, and personal values in which I believed. The kibbutz was not the exclusive way of praxis in all domains; there were different areas of praxis and different ways. Adaptation to the traits and requirements of every individual was needed. I had to realize my own contribution in the domains, frameworks, and methods that would be most fitting to my talents, creative vocation, family responsibilities, and personality. In any case, when I cut my ties with the kibbutz and with the social-collective idea as the center of gravity of my worldview and my activity, the emphasis shifted to the issue of Judaism: Jewish culture and its educational message in our time. However, I must stress that the social issue remained important in my view. What I received from the teaching of A. D. Gordon on the topic of the relation between nation and society, with respect to the obligation to social justice as the foundation of the nation’s existence, and with respect to the organic foundation of the community as the basis of a Jewish lifestyle, comprised an important part of my conception of Judaism. Moreover, the social aspect continued to be for me an essential perspective for analyzing cultural and intellectual processes, including faith and religion. The framing context of this enterprise was no longer “Zionism and socialism” but rather “Judaism and Zionism.”

26

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Thus I entered the formative stage of setting forth my worldview. The process developed in a directed fashion through two parallel experiences that complemented each other: (1) my academic studies, and the literary-intellectual creative work that accompanied them, and (2) devotion to my children. My academic-scholarly activity also involved devotion, especially the writing and teaching in which I had to engage in order to earn a living. At the start of my studies I began to work in schools and afterwards in a series of educational institutions that trained teachers (the Institute for Education and Research in Beit Berl, in whose planning and founding I participated; the Seminar for Teachers of the kibbutz movement; the Foundation for Higher Education in Tel Aviv, which became the nucleus of the University of Tel Aviv; the Foundation for Teachers’ Continuing Education in Beit Erdstein in Haifa, which became the nucleus of the University of Haifa; the Kerem Institute, among whose founders and guiders I became; and today, the (Masorti) Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies). It should be obvious that teaching in all these institutions, which departed from the framework of pure academic study in the direction of conveying a Jewish pedagogical message, filled a central role in fleshing out my worldview. In these institutions, I had to deal directly with the questions of Judaism in our age. Even more significant for developing my worldview was the task to which I was obligated as father of my children. The contribution of my university studies to formation of my worldview would seem a simple matter. It is obvious that the more that a person’s education broadens and deepens, the more he perfects his tools of research and inquiry, and the more that his discourse and dialogue with different worldviews deepens and broadens—his worldview becomes correspondingly deeper, broader, and richer. There were several factors that characterized my grappling with my academic studies within the Department of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University. First, I arrived at my university studies with my own personal baggage and an orientation that had already been set to a certain degree. My baggage was not manifested only as a “matriculation

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

27

certificate” that attested to my formal studies, nor just my formative and maturing experiences in the War of Liberation, my participation in founding a kibbutz and my educational activity in the movement. It was expressed also in the start of my extensive literary activity. When I enrolled in the university, I already had in my portfolio several articles that had been published in journals. In addition to the movement’s newspaper Shedemot and the publications of the leadership division of the movement, aside from the organs of the kibbutz movement Nivim and Niv Ha-Kevutzah, I had published theoretical articles on social and cultural-pedagogical topics, as well as literary criticism, in Molad and in Hapoel Hatzair.14 These articles already adumbrated the problems that engaged me and the direction in which I sought their solution. I pointed to how the youth growing in the country were becoming alienated from their Jewish roots. I argued that in the long term the question of the Jewish image of Israeli society and its culture would become the most difficult challenge that would determine the future of the country. The first article in which I expressed my fear was the spiritual self-examination of a young man returning from the War of Liberation. It was called “Between Fathers and Children,” and it was published in the collection Divrei Siaḥ [Dialogue] II: The Youth in Israel in 1951. Afterwards I wrote a major programmatic article on Jewish education in state public schools, which was published in several issues of Hapoel Hatzair in 1953. In the same year a new journal was founded that published authors and thinkers of my generation: Mevo’ot.15 It presented a Jewish-Israeli educational and cultural direction. I was among its initiators, and I participated in its editing and writing. I offered a broad summary analyzing the spiritual image of the members of my generation as Jews as it was reflected (in my view) in contemporary Israeli literature, in which I analyzed the writings of S. Yitzhar and Moshe Shamir. The title, “The Pain of Severed Roots,” declares its thesis. It was first published in “Collection of Israeli Authors” in 1962, and afterwards in my first book, Three Watches (1964). 14 Nivim = “Expressions.” Niv Ha-Kevutzah = “Voice of the Kibbutz.” Molad = “Birth.” Hapoel Hatzair = “Labor Youth.” 15 Mevo’ot = “Origins.”

28

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

I return to the story of my studies. When I came to the university, my path was already marked, and I was known to a certain extent as an author and thinker. The advisors who directed my studies knew me. They devoted special attention to me and took my personal expectations into account. It was clear that enrolling in studies was not a reason for me to cease my creative writing or to reduce it, even temporarily. On the contrary, I felt the need to increase my literary activity. Besides Niv Ha-Kevutzah, Hapoel Hatzair, Shedemot, and Mevo’ot, I contributed regularly to Molad, Be-Terem, and afterwards also Massa, which was then the literary issue of La-Merḥav.16 The topics were literary criticism, Jewish thought, and Jewish education. I decided, after some hesitation, not to study in the department of Hebrew Literature (I thought that I would be reading and learning enough modern Hebrew literature, in my own way, by writing literary criticism, and formal study would not add much), but to study the Jewish sources of which I was ignorant, and their historical continuity (that is to say, Jewish history, Talmud, and later Jewish philosophy and kabbalah). Here was the major deficiency that I wished to fill, for the sake of my dealing with Hebrew literature as well. This decision forced me to expand my writing of literary criticism, and to write on the level and to the extent of a professional writer. I saw this as complementary, not opposed, to my engaging in Jewish thought of the past and the present. I saw higher literature as a direct and profound existential expression of Israeli Jewish thought in our generation (and I see it that way now as well). Therefore I felt that through regular engagement in literary criticism I would be keeping my hand on the pulse of everyday and intellectual experience in my surroundings and my age. If so, then both in the articles I wrote on literature and in my theoretical articles on topics of society, culture, and education, I was directly engaged in shaping my worldview. My creative writing influenced the shape of my studies. It directed them in many aspects. I sought, within the broad milieu of the field of instruction and research in Jewish disciplines, whatever was relevant 16 Hapoel Hatzair = “The Labor Youth.” Shedemot = “Plantations.” Be-Terem = “Harbinger.” Massa = “Burden/Essay.” La-Merḥav = “Open Spaces.”

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

29

to my own creative work and whatever responded to my present intellectual interests. This was my practice as a student, and all the more when I began to teach myself in the University (in 1961). The direction of my creative work drew me more and more from studying Jewish thought of the ancient and medieval periods to the study of Jewish thought in modern times, while the program of studies reflecting the field of research in the department of “Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah” focused on the medieval period and did not cross the boundary line of Spinoza. Thus I became the first teacher within the department who went beyond Spinoza in what I taught. I began teaching modern Jewish philosophy continuously, and thus I established synergy between my field of research and instruction in the university and the field of my own personal intellectual creativity. I thus come to a second issue that characterized my academic activity. The phenomenon of standing inside and outside at the same time characterized my career in this circle as well. I had need of academic research and instruction, not for yeshiva-style immersion in learning as a religious pursuit. At the same time, I stood in continual opposition to the tendency that characterizes the academy, to present itself as “pure science,” knowledge for its own sake, learning that concerns itself with objective knowledge, which maintains itself by the correct, precise employment of critical tools, by means of which the researcher distances himself from his motivations and his worldview. It follows that in the last analysis, trained professional employment of textual criticism as a philological-historical method required all of one’s attention, and was also supposed to elicit all one’s creative devotion. It was clear that the central question, from the perspective of one who sees himself as inheriting and imparting a heritage and shaping a worldview, was: what was the meaning of the process of study and the content one learned, in the general context of the personality of the student? What was its meaning in the here and now? This question appeared to my teachers in the university, at least at first sight, not only as superfluous but distracting. It was considered a kind of original sin against objective scholarship, for it was personal and subjective in

30

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

its essence. The subtext of this method of academic learning was, at least apparently, quite unequivocal, and some teachers proclaimed it quite baldly: academic learning required that we put the subject (the “I”) in brackets. The scholar’s own personal questions, as one holding a particular worldview, were out of bounds, even if they were of the same kind of issue as the one expressed in the texts under investigation. On the contrary—precisely because the scholar was dealing in texts that were relevant to the questions of his intellectual personality, he ought to ignore them as if they did not exist. He ought to understand the text “in itself.” He ought to examine its implications only within its own literary-historical context. As I said, when I came to the university I knew that I had to pursue my studies there, employing its methods of study, not in some religious “yeshivish” institution.17 The university provided a smooth continuation of the process of study that I had begun in school and continued on my own afterwards. It embodied the conception that was foundational and formative of the culture in which I lived and created, and to which I should continue to contribute. Therefore even if academic learning posed a difficulty, even if it embodied a major internal problem of secular culture, it was up to me to cope with it, in such place and with such methods as it was manifested. This was my challenge. Nevertheless, the challenge was without a doubt hard and perplexing. I could stand up to it only through a critique that proposed a change of direction, and the fruitful tension accompanied and still accompanies me throughout my career. I admit that at the start of my career it seemed impenetrable to me. To what may it be compared? To a thirsty traveler who seeks to drink the flowing water from a spring enclosed under a glass cover. The flowing stream does not admit of 17 As a yeshiva is frankly an institution of religious study, it proceeds on the assumption that the outlook of the teachers and students is congruent with the outlook presented in the texts, and that the purpose of studying these texts is to foster one’s own religious outlook—the opposite of the prevailing assumption in the academic institution (though the breach of this assumption of academic objectivity in practice has been significant, particularly in the study of political thought and ideologies). As to the possible hidden ideological motives of the practitioners of objective Jewish scholarship at the Hebrew University, see the next essay, “My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought.”

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

31

being touched. The studies drew one near, but pushed one away precisely at the point where one had apparently arrived at the essence. Only after some time, when I came in closer touch with some of my teachers and experienced the ambivalent tension in their approaches, the impenetrability turned into a creative challenge. My primary teachers were Professor Itzḥak Baer, Professor Gershom Scholem, and Professor Shlomo Pines. Personally, I felt a special closeness and freedom of relating with the last-mentioned. Professor Pines later became my doctoral advisor (I wrote my master’s thesis under the joint guidance of Professors Pines and Baer). I must admit that there was something paradoxical about this sense of closeness, because of the three, Professor Pines identified the most with scholarly research in the humanities for its own sake, divorced from any questions pertaining to the development of his own philosophy or faith. Professor Pines played with the amazing knowledge that he had accumulated in the history of philosophy and the history of religion (“play” was his own expression). In a certain respect, he exercised his curious approach on me, too. He played with me. This was a kind of game for him (serious, of course, for intellectual play was his deepest interest in life). Precisely in this way, it was easier to learn with him and from him in accord with my interests in my way. I was free to develop my thinking and deliberation with him and with the sources. I studied as I wished. As a teacher, he had no personal interest in imposing his own outlook or view on me. He allowed me to ask as I wished and to pursue the answers in my way. For that reason, I was able to feel that the scientific glass-cover had dissolved for a while, and that it was possible to wet my lips in the streaming water without being ashamed. However, Pines did not bend down to drink himself. He was not thirsty. He was satisfied with looking at the water and at the ripples generated in it when someone else drank. Later, he would indicate his suppressed view from the side. It did not bother him if someone else bent down to drink. On the contrary, he looked with appreciative curiosity, which was characteristic of him, both at the other’s thirst and his slaking of it. Thus he offered me, who stooped to drink, a vital element of critical self-examination.

32

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

I gave expression to my grappling with Pines’s approach in several notes and articles. This is especially addressed in the essay “Does an Independent Tradition of Jewish Philosophy Exist?,” published first in the journal The University in 1967, and later as an introduction to my book Faith and Logic. I recall also the note on his personality that was published after his death in the Jubilee Volume for Shlomo Pines, Part 2. I shall add to what I said there that I learned from him, by grappling with his many-sided, unbiased examination of my biases and those of others, how one may uncover the objective aspects that a subjective approach requires, in order that it may find validation for itself, and so that it may be intelligible and persuasive from the standpoint of other similar approaches, if they relate to the same questions and problems. In this way, I learned to relate to my own outlook in the same way that I related to the outlooks of others, externally, as it must appear to others, out of an aspiration to objectivity made possible in fact by comparative observation, encompassing everything within our circle of vision up to the horizon, to the limits of our abilities. All this was not to surrender the validity of my own outlook, arising out of my life-world and my situation. The uniqueness of one’s personal stance has objective status within the broader totality. I discovered that through this double observation, alternating between my own eyes and my teacher’s, understanding my own views from the inside and the outside, and the views of others from the outside and the inside, I could make my own views meaningful to my opponents and also regard my opponents’ views as holding a positive, complementary significance even for myself. Studying with Professor Baer and Professor Scholem was harder. It seemed to me that this was because behind the façade of scientific objectivity of their research, which they emphasized greatly, lurked questions of outlook and faith that motivated them to deal precisely with those texts, intellectual movements, and historical or theoretical issues to which they devoted their scholarly activity. I quickly became attuned to this. Each had his own conception of Judaism, from which he set out, and which he sought to substantiate through his research. Because this was their approach, they tended to set up the academic

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

33

dike around them. They had a kind of protective wall, concealing from the eye of the outsider what was “placed in brackets.” They did not admit that they had a strong personal bias from which their teaching developed. For that very reason, their claim to scientific objectivity was all the more stubborn, even dogmatic. In effect, they wanted to impose their own preconceived outlook of Judaism on their students as academic truth. Of course, this approach did not permit discussion past a certain limit. If you did not accept their views, you had to keep your reservations to yourself in order not to provoke them. Still, when I studied with Professor Scholem and Professor Baer, I imbibed not only information but also approaches worthy of adoption. From Professor Scholem I learned the manner of presentation characteristic of him: plumbing into the context and inner logic of the thought-systems that he taught, and expounding them from within as if he was creating them before our astonished eyes. This was the source of the magic that accompanied his lectures. At the climactic moments you could see the kabbalist generating ideas as if from his stream of consciousness. I sought to adapt his method for myself in the domain of Jewish philosophy, and I was always pleased when my students were seduced into thinking that my presentation of various thinkers, from Maimonides to Hermann Cohen, and from Judah Halevi to Rabbi Abraham Kook, was a presentation of my own views, and would start to argue with me and debate with me about the validity of their arguments. If truth be told, they were not entirely wrong. To a certain extent, they were right. I identified to a certain point with all the thought-systems that I presented, because I found in each a unique intellectual value, even when they disagreed with each other. In the last analysis, there was not a thinker or philosopher whom I was drawn to investigate, of whom I did not find something in his words that illuminated my world. Finally, I followed my teacher Professor Baer in adopting the requirement, which I try scrupulously to fulfill to the best of my ability, to present intellectual thought-systems not only in terms of their inner logic, but also with respect to their historical situation. From him I learned how to penetrate to the deeper meaning of intellectual

34

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

movements by reconstructing the foci of historical experience in the unique situations of the reality that they chose or to which they were forced to respond. These, then, were the fruitful tensions that characterized the period of my studies. It is natural in any case that a certain set of questions—the question of the cultural-pedagogical task of instruction; the question of mediation and mutual fertilization between the functions of imparting a legacy and articulating a personal worldview and the functions of research; and more generally the question of one’s relation to the “sources of Judaism,” in light of the transition from the traditional methods of instruction and transmission to the scientific methods of instruction representative of secular humanistic culture—all these became fundamental questions to which I returned periodically and reexamined as an important part of my own worldview. I must now tell of the part that my wife Sabina and my children— Michal, Yaakov, and Rachel—played in my journey “to understand and discern, to heed, learn and teach, to preserve, perform, and fulfill” the words of Torah. I did not understand the full implications of the famous rabbinic saying, “and I learned most of all from my students,” until I began to teach my children Torah. Each morning, every Shabbat. We began to study together when they were still of a tender age, and we began with the stories of the Bible. When they grew and their interests broadened, we moved on to sayings of the Mishnah and rabbinic lore and to ancient and modern thinkers. It was I who opened the discussion, but the main part was done by them: they responded. One might think that I was exposing them to the spiritual treasures that I knew from previous generations. I was soon convinced that it was they who were imparting to me the words of the ancients, which I was teaching when they were reflected in new eyes, clear and innocent, seeing them for the first time. We learned together, and I learned from what they were able to draw out from the words of Torah through an observation that expressed their primal, direct life experience. What happened in me through those

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

35

riveting conversations that we had on the basis of the narratives and ideas of the Torah, concerning matters that pertained to the everyday, was completely unanticipated and quite astonishing. My children made it possible for me to receive the same primal kind of faith transmission that a person should get from his parents in his childhood. I experienced these things with them in a way that permitted me to see them as a believer. I now understood that my parents, who imparted a great deal to me, left out something essential—the keys to the inner secret of faith, which is rooted in a primal observation, but guided by a teaching, directive surrounding environment. Could I then transmit to my children the keys that I had not myself received? To my surprise, the answer turned out to be yes. I was caught by their childish ability to receive. As a result, I received the ability to give. And see how wonderful this was: what I gave to them, came back to me and was absorbed in me. It seems that in a certain sense I relived my childhood with them, as a mature adult. As an adult—meaning, in my reflective observation of them, and of myself through their eyes. It was almost possible to say that through carrying out for them the duty of a father in a way that my parents had not done for me, I became father to myself. I recreated my heritage for myself. In the course of so doing, something was revealed to me that no academic learning could have revealed, which is perhaps one of the secrets of perpetuation and renewal of the Jewish heritage of Torah in every generation: the ability to generate anew not only the creation of the present that draws nourishment from the tradition, but also the tradition itself, from which present creativity is nourished. In the thinking of believers, the bifurcation between past and present is impossible: the whole heritage of the past becomes once more a living truth, a truth that sustains the present at the same time that it is continually updated within it. This is truly the deep secret of the midrashic literature: it creates its discovery in the depth of the sources and generates it afterwards from them. This secret was woven spontaneously between my children and me. Only after we had created midrash ourselves did I discover the secret of how it is made.

36

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Through learning with my children it became clarified to me that I had not received from my parents certain values without which I could not transmit to my children even what my parents had transmitted to me. These remarks apply first of all to what pertains to the foundation of faith with respect to feeling and knowledge. They extend to the main thing: maintenance of a way of life. I understood that for transmission of a way of life, something fuller was required than what I had received in my parents’ home. I was called on to create a life environment in which those things that were spoken and learned could be put into concrete practice. Thus I had to create anew the tradition that we would maintain together: the Sabbaths, festivals, and holidays. More than this: the whole being of the family. Here my wife stood at my right hand. She not only agreed with me and assisted me, but it was she who had the wisdom to translate the abstract ideas into actions and life patterns. Slowly and gradually we created the home tradition that extended as a stream from the tributaries of the broad river of tradition, but in the unique version that suited us. We sought a middle way that would connect us to the ancient-renewing tradition of our people, without distancing us from the broader society of our compatriots, who comprised religions and non-religious, believers and non-believers, or from their variegated culture that was open to modern Western culture. For this purpose we created several home rituals, rituals of preparing for the Sabbath and welcoming in the Sabbath, for the Passover Seder and the holidays of Shavuot and Sukkot, home rituals for Purim and Chanukah, as well as for birthdays and other festive or sad family events, each in its proper time. We thus fashioned our personal world, inspired by our emerging outlook, and the emerging and developing outlook took into account the existence of that world, and was reinforced and strengthened by it. What I experienced with my family members, with the State of Israel, and with the whole Jewish people in the period of the Six Day War, had an influence that I can only describe in hyperbolic language. It brought me back to the scenes of my primal memories, as well as scenes unknown to me until then—but they were mine. In a reflective

A Personal Viewpoint: Autobiographical Essay

37

and poetic essay that I started to write close to the end of the battles, which I published in the first issue of a new journal, Petaḥim [Openings], which played an important role in crystallizing my worldview in those days, I called this period “the days of return.” I examined the “return” from the historical perspective of the Jewish people in its land and in its state, and in the Diaspora—the return to the full extent of the Land of Israel and to its center—Jerusalem; the people’s return to grappling directly with their fate and destiny. At the same time, with the same force, this was for me a personal return to the scenes of my childhood and adolescence—the physical scenes of the Old City, which had been sealed off and made inaccessible after the 1948 War of Liberation, and with it the spiritual scenes that it symbolized. I relived it all. I relived the mortal fear of a small people standing face to face with the threat of extinction, and I re-experienced the force of its moral strength to fight back and prevail. The memories of the historical past and the memories of my childhood became synchronized in the focal-point of the mirror of the present, rising up and momentarily breaking out of the circle of ordinary time. This was the great experience whose power awakened me and even forced me to an accounting of the place and significance of faith in my connection to the Jewish people and to my individual way of life. In this connection, it becomes clear also the role that my friendship with Joseph Bentwich and his activity in the journal Petaḥim [Openings] played. I felt the personal need to rethink all the “old” issues. A circle of people emerged who felt as I did and took on themselves to delve together into all these questions. A vehicle was created which enabled us to express these matters and to form a feedback circle with a broader public. I was one of the founders of the journal Openings, which came into being through the persistent and passionate initiative of Joseph Bentwich. He himself became a close friend, both as a discussion partner and as a familiar of the family. He became like a relative, and influenced our ways of marking the Sabbaths and holidays. Out of this partnership were written many articles that were published in Openings. A special contribution was made by the editorial symposia that were conducted regularly on the topic of

38

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

a living Judaism. Following the course of these discussions, which were published continually in the issues of Openings, allows one to reconstruct the circles of discourse in which my thought continued to take shape during that period. The path that I trod with my family and my friends came to expression in my book, Judaism and the Lonely Jew, in its contents and its form.18 The idea to write the book was born in me when I felt that the various layers of my outlook, which had come together tangentially and unsystematically, in reaction to the successive demands of life, had started to consolidate, and the total structure was becoming visible to me. This was several years after the Six Day War, when my new thinking on the questions of faith was arriving at maturation. The new book was intended to bring to summary expression the progress I had made from the sense of “pain of severed roots” to the longing to replant them in the “days of return.” I remember the day in which I conceived the book and started to write it. This was on a Sabbath hike in the days of Jerusalem. It was a lovely spring day, immersed in the blue of the sky, the yellow of the sun and flowers. Our family climbed up through the dust of a broken wall, between rocks interlaced with green, to the summit of a mountain. The children ran forward, and their mother was hurrying to keep pace with them. I was lagging back, unlike my habit, immersed in my thoughts. The idea to write the book was born in me suddenly and seized me like a dybbuk. It stood complete before me, like the path on which my children were running to the top of the mountain. I thought of embodying in it the path that I had traversed in my studies, in my thoughts and in my way of life from the historical point of origin that had touched me, and I was able to reconstruct it as a personal memory, reaching out more broadly to my people’s history, up to the approaching summit that I could identify as the goal. When I arrived, plodding behind my jubilant family, at the summit, and we sat together to overlook the broad landscape encompassing us, the plan of the book was complete in my mind’s eye. 18 The title and introductory essay in the book is included in the present collection, pages 59–83.

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought1 Personal Reflections on the Social, Cultural, and Spiritual Value of the Academic Study of Judaism

I

shall divide my remarks into two parts. In the first part I shall describe the stages of development of my research and teaching in Jewish thought against the background of the development of the Department of Jewish Thought in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the second part I shall delve more into several biographical and historical aspects that were the deeper basis of these developments and from which it seems to me something can be learned about the development of research and teaching of Jewish thought in our age. The central axis of my research and teaching in Jewish thought is the history of Jewish religious philosophy in all ages, though only at the start of my career did I accept the restrictive definitions that were assumed as the basis of the discipline of the department that bore the strange name “Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah,” so named by its founder, Gershom Scholem. If truth be told, neither Scholem nor his colleague Julius Guttmann, who collaborated with him for several years in teaching “Hebrew philosophy,” complied with the restrictive disciplinary definitions that they set for themselves. Guttmann erased the boundary between philosophical thought in the exact methodological sense and moralistic literature; otherwise he would not have been 1 Previously published as “Darki be-Meḥkarah uve-Hora’atah shel Maḥshevet Yisrael” in Limmud va-Da’at (Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought), Vol. 2, ed. Howard Kreisel (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2006). Printed by permission of Howard Kreisel.

40

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

able to research and teach a considerable number of important works, in addition to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, which (as we know) is not a philosophical work in the precise academic definition. As for Scholem, who gathered up all his charisma to prove that kabbalah is the central core of the Jewish canonical literature in addition to halakha, whereas “Hebrew” philosophy is only a secondary accretion that adhered to Judaism from an outside source and remained foreign to it, he proved to his critical listeners that he himself was entangled by an inner contradiction in his thesis. He never stopped searching for a philosophical definition for mysticism, without which it would be difficult to justify his rational scientific research in supra-rational subjects, but he never found a definition that satisfied him. His struggle to do so always ended with the qualifying statement that only mystics understand mysticism; like himself, they did not find a way to define it for the benefit of those who were not privileged with their experience, but since he presented himself rather as a rationalistic scholar, it became clear to his audience that in actuality he was presenting the streams of theoretical kabbalah as varieties of Neoplatonic philosophy. Therefore it was possible, according to this view, to present the various streams of medieval Jewish philosophy as varieties of theoretical kabbalah. As evidence, he cited the thought of several of the great kabbalists who sought a synthesis of mysticism and philosophy and claimed Maimonides as one of their own. I was a critical student, and when I became self-consciously mature enough to take my own stand as a scholar and a teacher, I started to treat these definitions more broadly and flexibly in order to emphasize the basis of continuity, both in respect to the genres of Jewish thought in its broadest sense and its periods. This was the process that led in the end to renaming the Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah as the Department of Jewish Thought. After I completed my doctoral thesis, “Enlightened Criticism of Aristotelianism in Medieval Jewish Philosophy from Halevi to Crescas” in 1961, I started to research and teach the history of Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages. Several years later I proposed broadening the curriculum of the Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah to include Jewish philosophical and kabbalistic works of the modern

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

41

period. I should explain here that until the retirement of Professor Scholem and the appointment of Professor Shlomo Pines, the successor to Professor Guttmann, as head of the department, Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University was taught only up to Spinoza, and kabbalah only up to Nathan of Gaza, for in Guttmann’s and Scholem’s views, these thinkers marked a point of transition, the culmination of the Middle Ages and the start of the modern period. This was the strange situation: in the framework of the history of Jewish philosophy, they did not teach the philosophy of the founders of the Haskalah movement, though Guttmann researched the thought of Mendelssohn, Krochmal, and Cohen “on his own,” and within the history of kabbalah they did not teach the ideas that formed the basis of Hasidism, even though Scholem researched them “on his own” and even included a chapter about it in his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. In our day, these perverse boundaries seem very arbitrary and strange, but this evaluation only attests to the depth of the change that took place in the research and instruction of university-based Jewish scholarship between then and now: at that time they thought that objective research could only be done by scholars who were free of “biases” stemming from the subjective spiritual “interests” that formed their worldview. In order to be free of any suspicion, scholars had to have a long historical perspective, from which they could distinguish between what was presumed to be in the “closed past” and what was presumed still to be a living legacy directly nourishing the thought of the present, and therefore impossible for a scholar of the “present age” to relate to without prejudice. This distinction was applied both to the Haskalah movement and to the beginning of Hasidism, as all the Jewish movements active in our age are rooted in both these movements. You can figure out for yourselves that on the basis of this definition of the domains of research and instruction in Jewish studies, a clear distinction was needed between the research of philosophy and kabbalah, on the one hand, and independent philosophical and kabbalistic thought that uses the tools of philosophy or kabbalah to deal with the problems of the present, and offers its own new subjective insights,

42

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

on the other. A conscientious scholar should take a holy vow not to indulge in this temptation, which might (God forbid) seduce him from the pure search for truth! It is decreed on him that he must starve his originality-craving subjectivity in the tent of science, in order to invest all his intellectual-spiritual interest in the research of the past as “Torah for its own sake”; but if he is not able to conquer his temptation, he must dress in black, go incognito, slink away from his university chair and perform his shameful deeds in secret, outside its sacred precincts. Gershom Scholem went even further and decreed definitively that in our age, in which Judaism is undergoing its most serious crisis of all times, it is impossible to find any philosophical or kabbalistic thought that will grapple with the crisis while it is still in its throes, for such reflection can only come about after living history resolves the crisis. Therefore this will be a task for later generations, and we can only supply them with reliable scholarly knowledge of the past that may serve them as material for their creative thought. In the name of this assumption, which despaired in advance of the present, Scholem caustically attacked the projects of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and especially Martin Buber. He disqualified them from the outset as the “fallen fruits” of wisdom, that could never ripen into “first fruits of Torah,” even though on the other hand he attacked the founders of Jüdische Wissenschaft for the opposite reason, that they undertook their scholarly projects not for the present and the future of Jewish culture, but only to prepare a resplendent archival burial for it, and to erect a memorial for it and for themselves. Did my great teachers, who swore fealty to such scientific outlooks, comply with their own decree? I have my doubts, and I will say something more of this later. But this was the prevailing doctrine that shaped the program of studies and instruction in the Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah. With Professor Pines’s agreement, I thus was the first to break through the arbitrary boundary that had been set by Scholem and Guttmann, the keepers of the seals of the German academy in which we had been educated, and I started to research and teach the history of Jewish philosophy in the modern age, from the period of the Haskalah,

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

43

the age of Moses Mendelssohn, until the start of the twentieth century, the period of Hermann Cohen, and later I went as far as the middle of the twentieth century. Even then I did not neglect my research in the Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages. Just the opposite: I was quick to consider the centrality of the relation of modern Jewish philosophy to medieval Jewish philosophy, and I discovered the revolutionary scholarly and theoretical implications of this connection. I was thus convinced that from the standpoint of modern religious philosophy, medieval thought was revealed in a different and richer aspect than that of the “philological-historical” effort to reconstruct the medieval thinkers’ outlooks in their own terms. This was a heretical revolution that I was called on to defend, but its achievement turned out to be much easier than I had anticipated; the great modern Jewish thinkers, from Spinoza and Mendelssohn through Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Buber, had already done my work, though the Wissenschaft scholars did not acknowledge the value of their claims and their findings, and did not even bother to confront what they disqualified in advance from methodological considerations, for it is well known that mistaken methodology makes for mistaken scholarship. Incidentally, I then understood fully the reason for Scholem’s demonstrative disparagement of philosophers and philosophy: he projected on the medieval thinkers his own ambivalent attitude toward the great Jewish philosophers of his own generation, from whose influence he wanted to free himself in order to delve into the research of the kabbalah and set it at the center of Jewish studies. Thus I understood also how much his aggressive stance against the leading Jewish scholars who tended to philosophy betrayed more defensiveness than certainty; for he was thoroughly knowledgeable of the writings of the philosophers whom he disparaged, and whoever came to know them as well as he did saw what most of his listeners and readers did not— namely that he conducted a continuous secret dialogue with them, and he was not at all certain that he was right in the end. However, from my perspective this had an additional value. With the help of the modern Jewish philosophers whom I studied, I discovered their direct and indirect connections not only to the

44

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

medieval philosophers but also to the canonical sources with which they associated themselves: the Bible, the early sages, the later rabbinic literature of various ages. These sources were indeed counted as pre-philosophical, but they were nevertheless regarded as obligatory even in the eyes of the philosophers who interpreted them from their own vantage point, which was anchored in history as a developmental discipline. Maimonides “discovered” Aristotelian physics and metaphysics in the Bible, whereas modern philosophers discovered in the Bible and the rabbinic midrashim an original philosophy with the potential of development, or a doctrine that lacked only a systematic framework based on scientific epistemology in order for it to become philosophical in the full sense of the word. From this vantage point the Mosaic Torah, the words of the prophets, and the wisdom of the Sages were grasped as even more relevant to the movements of the modern Jewish renaissance than the medieval philosophy. From my perspective this discovery was a decisive step beyond the objective toward which I was striving as a scholar of my own age. First, I understood the root of the methodological polemic that had been joined between the academic scholars of Judaism and the Jewish philosophers, who violated with increasing audacity the older scholarly boundaries and definitions. I considered that at its basis the debate was being conducted between different methods of grappling with the problems of transmitting the age-old Jewish legacy and how it could be made relevant to the humanistic renaissance of Jewish culture. Second, it strengthened my desire to broaden and deepen my study of the Bible through modern literary and philosophical tools, for both the Haskalah and the movements that developed from it saw it as the source of the modern renaissance that they wished to achieve. I finally found the tools that were required for me to overcome the forced, impossible standoff that orthodox philological-historical scholarship generated between the interest of research into the treasures of the past and the interest of current grappling with the present-day philosophical-religious agenda. This agenda includes those problems with which we must grapple in the present in order to

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

45

continue the project, that is, to do what the best of Jewish philosophers—whether in the Middle Ages, from Saadia through Spinoza, or in the modern age, from Mendelssohn and Krochmal through Cohen, Rosenzweig and Buber—wished and succeeded in doing, each in his way: to unite research in the sources from the perspective of their continuity with creative thought that deals with the fundamental problems of Judaism in their ages.

In reflecting on what I have already told about the stages in my career, I now bring up the biographical fact on which I shall begin my personal account, which reveals the motivations and their background: I belong to the second generation of scholars and teachers of Judaism at the Hebrew University. When I arrived there as a student it was the only university in the young State of Israel, and it was then the only academic institution in the world that dedicated a special place to Jewish studies and viewed it as a central mission to develop the research and study of Judaism on the highest level. I was then a young man at the start of my career, but I had a certain preparation rooted in a certain experience of life, and it directed me to the Hebrew University and defined my expectations of it. At first it was not my intention to develop into a scholar and teacher at the university. I had a sense of mission that was based on my life experience as a student in the public high school of the Zionistsocialist “workers’ movement” and as a member of its youth movement: at the start of the movement of Hamaḥanot Haolim2 and afterwards Hakibbutz Hameuḥad. From my youth it was my objective to realize the Zionist-socialist vision that my school and my movement instilled in me, and to be an agricultural worker in a collective settlement. The transition to the university career path did not stem from disillusionment or change of heart, but the opposite. My life experience—in the agricultural training I received, and 2 A major Zionist youth group in Eretz Israel. See previous essay, page 18, Note 8.

46

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

afterwards as a soldier in the War of Independence, with my training-team that became a unit in the Palmach, and then as a member of a new kibbutz that was established on the border in the approach to Jerusalem and as an emissary of the youth movement—by all of which I attained maturity, pointed me towards the university. It was my goal to acquire the education and the intellectual tools necessary to fulfill my mission in my kibbutz. In my training team, I had the role of “cultural coordinator”; in the war I encountered serious ethical problems that resulted, in my view, from educational errors in the way that the Jewish heritage had been imparted in the Hebrew school and the pioneer youth movement, on the basis of a radical “negation of the Diaspora”; in my kibbutz I resumed the role of cultural specialist, and I encountered what appeared to me as a spiritual vacuum that hindered us in creating the living culture to fulfill the Zionist-socialist dream. All this became sharpened and focused when I was sent to two years of educational mission in Hakibbutz Hameuḥad. I served in this movement as the leader of a gar’in (cell) that was going to go out for training and as a member of a leadership-cadre. The “Meuḥad” movement—its name truly testified to its uniting objective—arose after a division in the Israeli labor movement, a division which revolved in part around the issue of the relation to the Jewish cultural legacy. My movement then stood at the critical stage of formation of new leadership programs, and it was my job to write a theoretical leadership program in the area of imparting Israeli culture and socialist Zionism. In the same framework I also wrote my first book, which was not published, about the idea of the kibbutz and the collective, and about its Jewish and general roots. I then published a long shelf of articles, most of them on the topics of Jewish education and Jewish culture, in some leading journals of the labor movement. This was thus the “pre-academic” framework in which I prepared myself for studies at the university. I came to my studies already set in my Jewish outlook, and I had Jewish knowledge that I had acquired mainly through independent study on the basis of primary sources and secondary works. My education had not been systematic, and was therefore riddled with gaps. In

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

47

particular, I was missing the general view that comes from the perspective of Western culture, and I was sure that at the Hebrew University I would find what I wanted. I knew that the university, with the Institute for Jewish Studies at its core, had been founded as the national university of the Jewish people, and in that role also as a beacon of the “spiritual center” that the Jewish people should establish in its land according to the vision of Aḥad Ha-Am, Ḥaim Naḥman Bialik, Martin Buber and A. D. Gordon. These were the masters I looked up to in school and in the youth movement, and with whose thought I had been indoctrinated. In order to explain the dialectic of the difficult and fruitful encounter that took place with my teachers in the university, I must now present their background. First I will list them all: my teacher in medieval Jewish philosophy, Professor Shlomo Pines; in Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, and Hasidism, Gershom Scholem; in medieval Jewish history, Professor Yitzhak Baer; in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Professor Dov Seden; and finally the teacher who helped me, with the aid of his pioneering book Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, to move on to the research and teaching of modern Jewish religious philosophy, Professor Nathan Rotenstreich. I ought on the one hand to explain in greater detail the educational-cultural crisis that pointed me toward the Hebrew University, and on the other hand to describe the spiritual crisis that brought my teachers first to engage in Jewish scholarship and second to make aliyah and come to teach at the Hebrew University. As will be made clear, we shared a common denominator with respect to the spiritual crisis with which we grappled, but the opposing personal viewpoints of the members of a generation that had been educated against the backdrop of Diaspora assimilation on the one side, and those that had been born and educated in the Land of Israel on the other, generated differences that at first seemed irreconcilable to me. I have spoken briefly of my own situation. I shall now tell their story: they came to Jewish scholarship, to “spiritual Zionism,” and to aliyah through a process of return from the assimilating culture into which they had been educated from their youth. This was a process of rebellion against the watered-down or compromised Judaism of their

48

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

parents, which developed against the backdrop of the crisis of humanism in German culture, which started in the 1880s and reached its peak in the period between the two world wars, in the first half of the twentieth century. The crisis of humanism was expressed, from their viewpoint, in a process of rebellion against the diluted pettybourgeois humanism of the generation of their parents, hoping for emancipation, who yearned to realize it through personal advancement in enlightened German society. When they returned to Judaism, the younger generation did not want to renounce the idealistic humanism that they had absorbed from their German education. On the contrary, they understood the crisis that was befalling this legacy as a result of the petty-bourgeois decadence that in their view had taken hold in all of enlightened German society, and not just assimilating Jewish society; as a result of the unwillingness to sacrifice something of their material prosperity in order to realize the lofty social and cultural ideals to which their parents had deceptively pledged their allegiance. The rebellious younger generation thus understood the crisis as a crisis of realization, and when they returned to halakhic Judaism, which their parents had abandoned with the claim that it was “ossified,” “isolationist,” and “backward,” they sought precisely the key not only to the distress of their Jewish identity in German society, which wanted to expel them from its midst, but also to their distress as German humanists faced with the failure of ideals that had not withstood the test of realization. As opposed to their parents, they discovered that in its original form, halakhic Jewish particularism is not “ossified” or “isolationist” and certainly not “backward,” but a devotion to actualization. Halakha is actualization, because there is no actualization of universal ideals except through implementation in the real, living existence of these particular human beings, these families, this people, observing these particular practices that are appropriate to the conditions and problems of realization specific to them. The return to Judaism-as-actualization thus brought these teachers to Jewish scholarship in the Hebrew University, to spiritual Zionism, and to the pioneering ideals of the Hebrew labor movement: by virtue of this return they made aliyah to the land, achieving “actualization” at

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

49

least in their own eyes. Like me, and even more than me, they stood aloof from revisionist nationalism to their right and from Marxist socialism to their left. Their exemplars among German Jews were Moses Hess, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig (their relation to Buber was ambivalent), but since Cohen and Rosenzweig were opposed to Zionism, they took hold of the vision of the spiritual center of Aḥad Ha-Am and Ḥaim Naḥman Bialik, as well as the vision of labor Zionism in the humanistic-Jewish version of A. D. Gordon. Indeed, in recalling the names of the great teachers of spiritual Zionism in the Land of Israel I have arrived at a chapter requiring a critical distinction: the authority of Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, and Gordon was decisive in the view of the Judaic scholars at the Hebrew University insofar as it related to their political, social, and cultural involvement in the life of the Yishuv. In addition to the lofty Jewish humanism that they represented, these thinkers were the authentic representatives of the Judaism of Eastern Europe, and they were greatly respected by those returning from assimilation to authentic Jewish affirmation in Germany. In the Land of Israel they were also the spokesmen closest to the heart of the rank and file of the Hebrew-speaking pioneering Jewish community, who themselves came from eastern Europe. However, in their capacity as scholars and teachers, the academics could not accept the outlooks of Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, and Gordon— all three educated in the traditional yeshivot, who acquired their general education as typical eastern-European autodidacts—concerning Jewish scholarship, for the outlooks of the latter were very much non-academic, expressing aloofness and scorn toward the German academy in everything pertaining to humanistic studies. Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, Gordon, and Buber looked to the Jüdische Wissenschaft for great accomplishments in enriching Jewish education, Hebrew literature and the reviving Hebrew culture in the Land of Israel, but they were bitterly disappointed. Therefore they did not hold back in criticizing the whole body of scholarship written in the German language for Germans according to the criteria of gentile scholarship in order to win favor among gentiles, and they compounded their sins when they chose only to research what would make a good impression on a

50

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

gentile audience and in a so-called objective scientific manner, which the yeshiva-educated autodidacts interpreted as a stance of neutrality, without any personal identification or responsibility. In their eyes, such a stance turns a living legacy that ought to be transmitted and imparted from generation to generation as a source of creative continuity into dead “knowledge” about a dead past that has no place in life but only in those cemeteries called libraries, archives, archeological museums, and universities, which derive their livelihood from all these dead sacrifices… I shall now spell out precisely the attitude of the university Judaic scholars to these views. On the one hand they participated, some enthusiastically, others with qualified agreement, in the attacks on the nineteenth-century founders of Jewish historical research. They also accepted the consequences: they did their research and teaching in Hebrew, they paid attention to the non-rational movements in Judaism, and they reformed their habits in order to teach in a manner that should arouse living interest. However, in no way could they accept the claim that the philological-historical disciplines, which strove for objective understanding of Judaism for its own sake, were killing Judaism and preparing a splendid archival funeral for it.3 Just the opposite: in their eyes philological-historical scholarship was the only way that enabled them, as German-Jewish humanists, to return to the Jewish sources in an authentic way, overcoming the prejudices of their parents and of the German-Christian society into which they had assimilated. Without these scientific tools, the sources of Judaism— Bible, Talmud, Midrash, rabbinic literature, kabbalah—were sealed books to them. However, they were sensitive to the difficulty of converting subject-matter that was acquired through objective scientific research into material for subjective spiritual creativity; they therefore established a limit to their role at this point. They were like Moses viewing the Promised Land from Mount Nebo outside its borders. They left 3 This was the critique leveled by eastern-European Jewish nationalists, especially Bialik and Aḥad Ha-Am, against the scholarly canons established by Zunz, Steinschneider, and Geiger in the period of 1820–60.

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

51

the task of new creation to the members of the next generation—the artists, thinkers, and educators; these would come after them, but would work outside the academy. As professional academics, they viewed the limits of their role in preparation of a well-ordered and accessible legacy that should on the one hand be authentic and on the other hand illuminated by the universal apparatus of critical humanistic studies, for only this, not the legacy of yeshiva-learning, was fitting to be the material for creating a new Jewish culture in the future. From their standpoint they thus viewed their devotion to Jewish scholarship and their approach to teaching it as objective knowledge a dedication to the value of truth, the supreme value in which Judaism and humanism met. There was thus an element of religious orthodoxy in the zealous adherence to the philological-historical discipline. It required them to rise above their subjective inclinations in order to devote themselves to the truth, which they must accept even if it was hard and required self-criticism, and in this respect they were indeed faithful successors to the nineteenth-century founders of Jüdische Wissenschaft, even though they attacked them. Even Gershom Scholem, whose acerbic attack on the assimilationist founders crossed the limits of propriety, acknowledged his unqualified admiration for their monumental achievements, especially those of Zunz and Steinschneider, without whom his own scholarly research enterprise in the kabbalah would not have been possible. What, then, motivated the founding scholars? Certainly they strove to realize the emancipation through their project. Certainly they wanted to legitimate the study of Judaism as a respectable discipline in the German academy, and in this way to legitimate Judaism as an important component of German culture (and of Western culture in general). However if we examine up close the motivations of their activity, as expressed in its deeper creative dimensions, we shall be persuaded of two things: first, in order to achieve integration in the German academy it was necessary for them to fight against the Christian and antisemitic-nationalist prejudices that had penetrated into the academy and through it into German culture; second, they had to discover in Judaism not only what was liable to find favor in the eyes of

52

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

gentiles but also what was uniquely original, contributing, and fruitful, what Judaism had given and could continue to give, in their view, to Western culture. These two objectives could not be achieved through the traditional yeshiva learning, but only through scientific study with the accepted tools of the German academy; only through these tools was it possible to be persuaded, and to persuade others, that Judaism was equal in value to the European national cultures, and maybe even superior to them in some respects (especially in its humane ethics and pure monotheism), and thus to overcome what appeared to the Jewish scholars as deserving of unprejudiced criticism, and afterwards also to be persuaded and persuade the gentiles that they ought to acknowledge the injustice that they caused to Jews and Judaism by means of their unfounded prejudices. The founders of Jewish scholarship were thus trapped in the throes of a dilemma that was both psychological-existential and methodological. They all were still originally the products of the traditional yeshiva. Without this legacy, which they had internalized in a living way, the Jewish sources would have been a sealed book to them as they were a sealed book to the German scholars, even those who had studied Hebrew and were able to read and understand the Hebrew Bible in the original, but not the Mishnah, the Talmud, the rabbinic literature or the kabbalah, for that required a yeshiva education and not only language-knowledge and philological method. In order to research the sources that they studied in the yeshiva, they had to liberate themselves from the methodology in which the literature of the Oral Torah that they studied had been written in order to acquire objective research tools and apply them in researching the literary and documentary material that resisted their approach, and in order to descend, as it were, into an objective depth of reality that was different from the subjective reality in which the sources were rooted. The worry that they might be misrepresenting the meaning of the sources through the transformation that they wrought from the traditional learning method to the philological-historical method bothered them a great deal, both on the methodological plane and on the psychological-existential plane, but their courage in taking this leap is key to the

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

53

creative and relevant, revolutionary and supremely innovative dimension in their work that was later defined by the great modern Jewish philosophers, from Krochmal to Buber. However, even harder from an existential and methodological standpoint was the problem of confronting the outside world; only Jews educated in the yeshiva could research their culture—and themselves as its products—objectively. This was a purely objective determination, for only they had the necessary tools for studying the sources of the Oral Law. The German scholars who were educated under Christian auspices, without a living relation to the tradition of Jewish learning that had imparted the Oral Torah from time immemorial, were not able to achieve objective understanding of the Jewish sources by their own method. Clearly for that reason the founders of Jewish scholarship were thrown into a strange apologetic situation, which could properly be evaluated only by rising above their apologetic interests: if they were taken as apologetes who appeared openly as their people’s advocates, their mission was doomed to failure; they could only succeed if they freed themselves of any taint of apologetics. From this situation followed their orthodox—even fundamentalistic—loyalty to the philological-historical discipline, by “putting themselves in brackets” to the point of complete alienation from their feelings as Jews and the legacy that they researched. To outside observers, and also to religious Jews who were whole in their Jewish belief, this all appeared as a tragicomic tightrope-balancing act that embodied the convoluted logic of assimilation—apologetics vying with self-hatred—which was the well-deserved punishment of assimilators. From the perspective of the pioneers of Jewish scholarship, who saw themselves as creating a scholarly foundation for modern Jewish culture, this appeared to be the only possible way, though supremely difficult. The teachers of the Hebrew University, who came to Judaism in the opposite way by returning to it,4 empathized with the tragic depth 4 From the 1820s through the 1860s, Jewish scholarship was created by individuals such as Leopold Zunz, who were raised in traditional Judaism and broke out into the secular academic world. Scholem especially typifies those who grew up in a

54

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

of the founding scholars’ outlook, first of all because without their enterprise, which was a product of the same process as their own parents’ assimilation, they would not have been able, as educated people who had never known a traditional yeshiva, and for whom German was their first cultural language, to return to the sources of Judaism in a scholarly way. Through their scholarly project they wanted to correct the distortion that they saw in their predecessors’ achievement, but by force of their opposite task they were thrown into the same psychological-methodological dilemma. Their situation was even more difficult: Hebrew was not their native language, their Jewish knowledge had not been acquired in the traditional yeshiva but in the institutions of movements that were based on the Jüdische Wissenschaft (such as the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau) or through selfinstruction, and they were able to delve into the deeper layers of Jewish sources only through the academic tools that their founding predecessors had fashioned, and that they acquired in the German academy, without the ability to assess them critically at least in the start of their careers. It is thus obvious that they could not accept the criticism of Aḥad Ha-Am and Bialik, products of the old yeshiva, directed against scientific methodology and the danger of assimilation connected with it. Let us not forget also the ethical aspect: they were accepted as scholars and teachers in the Hebrew University on the basis of academic titles and ranks they had achieved in the German universities. Furthermore, despite their love of Hebrew and their devotion to the research of Hebrew and Aramaic sources, German was the language in which they thought, wrote, and prepared their lessons, and afterwards they translated them into Hebrew, sometimes with great difficulty, and only in German could they express their deepest sentiments. Their mission at the Hebrew University was thus in retrospect to replant their German-Jewish heritage in a new land. Therefore the circle of academic discourse in which they participated, even after they made aliyah to Israel, was in effect in Germany, not in Israel. In all these respects they continued the project of the founding fathers of totally assimilated secular milieu and as adults worked their way painfully into the world of traditional Jewish learning.

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

55

Jewish scholarship, despite and in virtue of their attack on them, and in order to escape the shameful apologetic approach in which they were caught up despite themselves, their orthodox adherence to the philological-historical methodology became a prop of which they could not rid themselves while defending their authority as scholars and teachers: this was their outstanding advantage over their attackers, products of the old yeshiva. That is why they were so much in fear of the temptation to be caught up in the problems of the hour; they could not exorcise this temptation but they contained it, and they could not forgive their one exceptional comrade, Martin Buber, who set this demon free in the public square without any qualms or anxiety. I return to my story: while I was pursuing my path to the university, Buber’s way of relating to the issues of the day facing the Zionist community was dear to my heart, and I did not hide this fact from my teachers. It is self-evident that in this way I triggered the same opposition that he encountered, and I had to deal with it in the course of my early career efforts. I was only able to understand the soul-struggles of my great teachers—who honored me out of their objectivity but opposed me out of subjectivity that they represented as objectivity—when I had advanced in the study of the history of Jewish thought, and especially in the study of Jewish thought in the modern age. In doing so, I reflected on how I was drawn to them as exemplars, by their return to Jewish sources against the backdrop of the crisis of humanism, and by the fruitful challenge of their scholarly approach. For when they approached the sources of Judaism with a view to integrating Jewish culture with general modern culture, they enabled me to see and internalize what it was possible to see in the traditional and modern sources of Judaism only from the vantage point of a cultural ambience that was both influencing and influenced, and only with the aid of their linguistic and scholarly tools. It is clear that from the outset I was conscious of the obstacles and limitations inherent in their stance. Their advantage over me was manifest in their mastery of European languages, their general education, and their proficiency in philological research, and they inhibited me from giving full expression to my own advantages: Hebrew was my mother-tongue, and the

56

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

sources of Judaism—the Bible, the Oral Torah, Hebrew literature of historical and modern times—were the sources I grew up on, though I was a product not of the old yeshiva but of the new Hebrew-cultural school in the spirit of Aḥad Ha-Am and Bialik. I also needed to return to the sources of traditional Judaism, not against a backdrop of assimilation in gentile culture but against the backdrop of my feeling that the radical negation of the Diaspora in the Marxist worker’s movement, which became more extreme in the time of my experience and turned Leninist and even Stalinist, was causing spiritual alienation from the natural sources of the people’s identity, and would end in total destruction. The idea that it is possible to create a new Hebrew culture from nothing only on the basis of the Hebrew language as a secular national language, the connection to the land of Israel as a secular national homeland, and general responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people, and the idea that one must draw on and “translate” all the rest from “normal” modern cultures of peoples who have already completed the national and social revolution that is required in the modern age, appeared to me as liable to bring upon us the spiritual equivalent of the destruction of the Third Temple. Against the backdrop of this struggle I was able to internalize without difficulty all the messages of spiritual Zionism of Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, and Gordon, including their negative view of the Jüdische Wissenschaft. Like them I sensed the pitfall in the process of transmitting the legacy through the scholarly project of the founders of Jewish studies, and I accepted their suggestions, which called for balance between “archeological” research and transmitting values through creative philosophical interpretation, as well as between research as the foundation of imparting the legacy of the past and direct grappling with the problems of the present and the future, just as Jews have done throughout their history. I shall not deny that my career as a scholar and teacher at the Hebrew University was fraught with great difficulties even with respect to my progress along the track of academic advancement, but in retrospect I have no regrets: all in all, the encounter was positive and productive from my perspective as well. Today I see my achievements as a scholar and thinker as a

My Way in the Research and Teaching of Jewish Thought

57

continuation of the project of my great teachers, both in what I received from them and what I added and changed. I see the need to emphasize this for two reasons: first of all because with the ongoing change of generations at the Hebrew University—and other universities where Jewish studies are taught, both in Israel and Diaspora—the demands for which I struggled have received academic institutional legitimization, and today very few know that there was a need to fight stubbornly for them; second, it is all the more worth noting because it appears to me that today, on the heels of “postmodernism,” the academy has been infiltrated by a generous measure of arbitrary subjectivity and light-mindedness bordering on irresponsibility, from the standpoint of the aspiration to objective knowledge in the study of the humanities.5 Thus today we need a correction in the opposite direction: re-grounding and implantation of the philological-historical method striving for objectivity, especially in the study of history as a tool for imparting a cultural legacy.

5 See the essay “History in the Postmodern Age” in this collection (pages 109–55).

Judaism and the Lonely Jew1

From Judaism to Solitude

T

he Jew who is open to the contemporary world finds that he is alone. This is his distinguishing characteristic, and sets him apart from earlier generations of Jews. Though the last few generations of Jews did experience growing solitude, it was never so acute or so deeply imprinted in their consciousness as at present. Not only does this feeling of loneliness condition the intensity of the modern Jew’s relationship to Judaism, it also determines its nature, how he interprets and evaluates his Jewishness, and his actions. Of course, the contemporary Jew, like his predecessors, has ties with his family, his congregation or his Jewish community, his people or his state; and at times he feels 1

Translation by Deborah Greniman. Originally published in: The Shefa Quarterly: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Study (Jonathan Omer-Man, managing editor), Vol. 2, No. 4 (8) (1981): 38–53. Indexed in the Index to Jewish Periodicals ISSN 03342611. Copyright 1981 by Shefa Press. This article, excerpted from my 1973 book of the same title, seeks to examine certain aspects of the problem of Jewish identity in modern times, and sets it in the context of modern European Jewish religious and intellectual history. This background is common to Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora, as is the existential loneliness that, as I have attempted to show, has come to pervade their inner lives. I have, of course, portrayed what I experience and observe as an Israeli Jew, and this will be apparent in some of the perspectives and opinions that 1 have brought to bear on the subject. Despite these differences in outlook, I hope that this article will focus attention on some of the pressing spiritual difficulties faced by Jews both in Israel and abroad, and will contribute to a dialogue out of which a new understanding of these problems may grow (ES, 1981).

60

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

himself to be a citizen of the world, bound up with mankind as a whole. At least insofar as they are felt and enter consciousness, however, these are ties of external dependence; they are perceived as being determined by circumstance, and not as functions of one’s personal inner life. This does not necessarily mean that the solitary Jew resists them; on the contrary, at times he desires, cherishes and reinforces them. Sometimes he tries to use them as a means to forget his solitude, and there are occasions, historic moments of confrontation with the destiny of an entire people that stands alone, of war for survival itself, when his life is totally committed to the Jewish people—even unto death. Yet even this is conditioned by his isolation: it is external pressure, or the stress that builds up within him as a result of his isolated existence, that pushes him in with the Jewish mass—a solitary mass of solitary souls. But when he stands back and asks himself, Who am I? Where did I come from? and: What is the purpose of my life?—he finds that he is alone. Let us be more precise. At, first he sees himself as an individual— one among many—and he affirms his individuality. In his own eyes, he began with himself, and he is entirely self-sufficient. He does not regard the circumstances of his birth and education, such as cast him into a particular framework of family, people and culture, as obligating him in any way. Having attained self-awareness, he has chosen to lead a life of independent individualism, free of any a priori ties that might limit him or claim his loyalty. In practice, he will appropriate from the community into which he was born and the culture to which he was educated those things that he finds helpful or enjoyable, and some things, too, that are forced upon him despite himself—and he may feel that, having received, he is somehow obligated to reciprocate. But at the outset, in his view, everything comes to him as his right; he has a right to live, a right to be loved, a right to freedom, a right to happiness, a right to express himself. It is all his due; he is a claimant who, by his very existence, holds a promissory note from the entire world. He, on the other hand, is master of his own volitions, and he values nothing, not even life itself, except by his own choice. He is an atom, existing by and for himself, the center of his own

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

61

world. This self-image is, of course, entirely unfounded: no one can be a perfect individual in this sense. No one begins with himself and is an end unto himself; no one is entirely his own master. But this false image can form the basis of a way of life, if one so chooses. One can act as though it were possible to live in this way; one can make it a goal and even approach it, if only in the negative sense, by removing limitations and casting off obligations. In our time, indeed, people are tending more and more to take this route. This is of course by no means unique to the Jews, although the Jews are very active in certain spheres in which this image may appear more attainable, and possibly they are more strongly attracted and influenced by it than others are. We find an indication of this in that, insofar as they move in this direction, they do not regard themselves as Jews, or at least do not behave as Jews. This does not apply only to assimilated Jews living in the Diaspora. In Israel, too, many Jews tend to deny their Jewish identity, and this points to a phenomenon that may indeed be unique to the Jews; people of other nations, even as they opt for individualism, do not go to the extreme of denying their identity, for there is no special pressure upon them to do so; their nationality makes no extraordinary demands upon them. The Jew, however, finds his identity as a Jew problematic and demanding, and he expresses his individuality through indifference to, or denial of, his Jewishness. One might say that the very essence of the secularism by which so many Jews, especially in Israel, describe themselves lies in this choice of individualism, and the Jew interprets it to mean, in addition, that he must live like any other individual, stripped of his Jewish distinctiveness, with no a priori commitment or obligation to his Judaism. Only when his self-image of proud individuality is shaken does the contemporary Jew realize that his Jewishness does determine his personal identity, and it is at that moment that his isolation is revealed. How does this come about? Here, each person will answer with his own story. The story need not be dramatic, neither is it necessarily one of crisis. Usually it is that of a lengthy process, difficult to communicate because many of its most significant details seem small and

62

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

unimportant at the time, and are not preserved by memory: decisive moments in one’s relations with others, or with society at large, the influence of a book or of a person. We can be fairly certain, however, that this change in the individual’s outlook usually matures at the time in one’s life when, as a parent, one sees one’s children grow beyond infancy and faces the task of educating them to become full, wellrounded human beings. If a person takes this task seriously, he or she has come to know a primary obligation that does not follow from rights, but precedes them, and he realizes that as his life does not end with himself, but continues in his children; so he did not begin with himself; he, too, perpetuates what he received from his forebears, and, furthermore, he cannot perpetuate himself in his children without perpetuating the life of his forebears in himself. Quite simply, it is impossible to be a parent in the full sense of the word: to raise a child to spiritual as well as physical maturity—without being a child in the full and apposite sense: one who receives a spiritual heritage. A person who is not conscious of having received such a heritage cannot consciously pass on his own heritage to his offspring. At this time in his life, therefore, a person asks himself: “Who am I in relation to my forebears, and what have I to pass on to my children?” In adopting this perspective, he has already moved beyond viewing himself as an individual whose life is encapsulated in his closed, personal world. He has discovered that detachment from his family, his people, his culture and his history denies him true freedom, creative potential and selfesteem. True freedom—for this finds expression not in satisfying one’s internal drives or in reacting to external stimuli, but in the independent pursuit of that which ought to be; the context of true freedom is the framework of demands and responsibilities into which a person has been cast and the purpose that transcends him, and not his private “rights.” Creative potential—for creativity, if it is to bear fruit, must draw upon the cultural heritage that one receives from one’s forebears and, reformulating it in one’s own way, passes on. Self-esteem—the source of which is creative work accomplished in true freedom. These, of course, are sweeping generalizations, and they demand further development, but this is not the place for it. Here, we seek to describe

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

63

the process by which a person moves beyond viewing himself as a self-sufficient individual to seeking to confirm and sustain a bond that has been revealed in retrospect, through the events and circumstances of his life, to exist within him. As these ties reveal themselves within a person, they appear, as it were, on the far side of a barrier of alienation and estrangement, and even then they are partial and fragmentary. This explains the feeling of solitude that wells up as one begins to break out of the closed circle of individuality. Loneliness is a state in which reciprocal relationships between man and man, between man and society, and between man and his natural environment are lacking; it is the absence of the other who responds to one, and, complementing one’s life with his own, makes one whole. Without this kind of relationship, a person’s life lacks fulfillment and meaning. The individual, sufficient unto himself, does not feel isolated; he is even quite proud of being, as it were, “unaffiliated.” Once he moves beyond individualism, he finds that he has always been alone. Solitude has conditioned his whole life, from the beginning of consciousness. Had he not been alone, he could never have considered himself unattached and self-sufficient; the bond of living relationship, involving the full power of mutual commitment and responsibility, would have been dominant from the outset. It would seem, therefore, that the mutual relationships that had once existed for him were terminated, or at least interrupted, at some point in the past, and the individual, in his quest for belonging, now finds that that to which he does belong is vague and distant. Its very existence is uncertain, for even while he realizes that it is this sphere of influence that has determined his identity, he cannot relate to it; he may long for it, but it is not yet a living reality for him. Coming to terms with this vague sense of belonging is problematic, first of all, because there is no Jewish community in which the lonely, alienated Jew can find a full communal life. There is a Jewish community—the trouble, in fact, is that there are many Jewish communities, each with its own particular approach to Judaism, which are at best estranged from, and at worst opposed to, one another. They may still be aware of their shared history and destiny, but the

64

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

common ground, which could provide the basis for positive cooperation, is too narrow and too weak to bear so sharp a clash of ideologies and trends. Furthermore, each of these groups has developed around a single element of the historical Jewish heritage it has received and which, consciously or not, it perpetuates. Its Judaism is, therefore, partial or even secondary, and, since it sees its approach to Judaism as being incompatible with those elements of the tradition that have been adopted by other groups, it compensates for their absence by drawing on the influence of the surrounding non-Jewish society and culture. Some have confined Judaism to religion, others have reduced it to nationality, and each of these major trends has been further divided and subdivided into various opposing factions. The ordinary Jew, wishing to live a full Jewish life as part of a single, united Jewish community, finds that he is distant from all of these groups that cleave zealously to their part as if it were the whole. He is neither “Orthodox” nor “Reform,” neither a “secular nationalist” nor a “religious nationalist,” for he cannot reduce his Judaism to any of these; he is just a Jew seeking a way of being Jewish that will relate to all aspects of his being. As such, he cannot find a community, for there is no single, defined Jewish community from which he does not feel alienated in some way, and if he should try to synthesize their various approaches to create a Jewish way of life for himself, he will find all the more that he cannot agree or fit in with any particular group. Let me not be misunderstood on this point: the lonely Jew is not the same as the Jew who has no ties at all with any defined, organized Jewish community. With regard to certain matters relating to a person’s behavior as a Jew, it seems impossible to avoid joining or at least being considered a member of one of these groups, unless assimilation is so complete that there is no longer any relationship to Judaism at all. The lonely Jew’s problem, then, is not that he does not belong to any Jewish group, but that there is no one Jewish group within which he can find sufficient expression for his Jewishness, and so, within the group, he feels alien and restricted. Indeed, these isolated Jewish communities, cut off from one another, are for the most part made up of “independent,” isolated individuals, whose desire to belong to the Jewish

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

65

people as a whole is not fulfilled by their belonging to a particular group, with its specific ideology or approach. The alienation and estrangement of the various parts of the community from one another are reflected in the spiritual life of the individual as well: he too is divided and alienated from parts of himself. If he finds himself, however unwillingly, attached to one group rather than another, it is because his education and experience have drawn him closer to that particular element of the Jewish heritage and distanced him from others. He may regret the absence of these other elements, but it is extremely difficult for him to approach them on his own; for, while he may be enticed by the possibility of fulfilling the functions they represent, and which are missing in his life, he often finds their particular content repellent or meaningless. Thus, the Jew living in a secular nationalist community may be aware of his need for tradition, but he is disturbed by the particular commandments that Jewish tradition prescribes. Should he carry them out even so, merely because he is unhappy about the absence of traditional elements in his way of life, or because he feels the need for a commanding Authority? Thus, on a deeper level, the lonely Jew of our time is isolated in relation to the Jewish heritage within which he might express himself fully as a person. This, in fact, is the root of his isolation on the social and even the interpersonal level. People live together and relate to one another through sharing in particular patterns of behavior and creativity. Their relationships are given form and expression by this framework of patterns which, taken together, constitutes culture. Thus, alienation from one’s cultural heritage affects the quality of interpersonal relationships in society at their most intimate, fragile and vital level: the family, the circle of friends, the dialogue of intimates, the dialogue of man with himself. Such relationships, such dialogue, must speak the language and share the substance of a living culture; otherwise they remain mute. The deepest yearnings of man end in frustration. Beyond the isolation that has infiltrated the most sensitive areas of the individual’s personal life looms the ultimate solitude: the isolation of man from God. At times, contemporary man says that he

66

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

would like to believe: He believes that were he to believe, he would be delivered from his anguish—and yet he is unable to believe. There is an internal contradiction here, which stems from an imperfect understanding of the nature of faith; for faith is an act of will. Thus, a person who wants to believe already does believe in a certain sense, or at least he has shown that he is capable of believing, for this desire is in itself the beginning of will: it is will that has not yet been yoked to a purpose. But it is true that faith so aroused remains unspoken and undirected, and so is never experienced as such. The will is called to action, but never reaches the point of decision. It is halted with the first awakening, and takes the form of desire of hope, of yearning. It seeks a response from without—but none is forthcoming. This is solitude. As long as one remains isolated in the interpersonal sense, there is no escaping this ultimate solitude. Faith is indeed a personal matter, but it can only be maintained—and it can only be answered— in the company of other believers, whose faith is expressed in every area of the life they share. In the community, and with it, the will of the person transcends its block and, by being expressed, is fulfilled. Only when it is expressed in a way of life, in prayer, in worship and service, will faith, now complete, find its response, through its own inner working. The Jew who remains isolated from his community is perforce isolated from his God.

How the Jew Came to Be a Lonely Individual The state of solitude that we have described is the outcome of a dual historical process; that which has taken place within the Jewish people, within that which has transpired in Europe in the modern era. The history of the Jewish people, from the beginning of the period of emancipation up to the present day, seems almost an arithmetic product of European history, and the fate of the Jew to be at once symbolic of that of European man in the modern age and its victim. In the following paragraphs we shall confine ourselves to a very brief summary of this process. In later chapters we shall have need to refer to certain aspects of it, and we shall then describe them in greater detail.

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

67

European culture in the modern era held out the challenge of secularism, which at the outset offered a call to freedom and a broad scope for creativity, but in retrospect contained the seeds of a growing process of isolation. The theme of secularism is the sovereignty of man in his world; over himself as an individual, over his social and political life, and over the natural environment that conditions his existence. This idea of the sovereignty of man found its initial expression in the political sphere: in opposition to the intervention of religion, as an ecclesiastical institution, as a world-view or as a way of life, in political affairs, and in the development of the centralized nationstate to represent the will of the people. Thereafter, conclusions were also drawn with regard to society. The idea of the sovereignty of the people led to that of democracy, which demands equal rights for all the people—if only in a formalistic, legal sense. Once the demand for equality had arisen, however, it did not stop at a legal formulation. Its fulfillment required social equality on an economic basis. And so from the initial idea of sovereignty, by way of the centralized nation-state, we have arrived at democracy and socialism. On the other hand, however, the idea of the sovereignty of man also led to liberalism, which is concerned with protecting the rights and liberties of the individual against the encroachments of state and society. Tension was thus created between state and society, and between society and the individual. Although their claims sprang from a single source, these three sovereignties were in a struggle that could only end in disaster; this struggle led to the disintegration of European society, and it set states and peoples, classes, societies, and individuals against one another in the isolation of enmity. The idea of sovereignty also found expression in the realm of the material culture of Europe, an essential feature of which is the aspiration for growing economic prosperity; the aim of this economic growth is not only to provide for man’s basic needs, but also to satisfy his need to liberate himself from the limitations of human nature and the natural environment within which he lives. He who would aspire to sovereignty must strive, therefore, to master nature.

68

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

However, this mastery becomes an end in itself, seeking not only to extract from nature more than it can offer, but to impress it into serving as a function of human interest. This is the presumptuous significance of modern science and technology, which appear to have surpassed the various political and social systems in realizing the idea of sovereignty. This remarkable achievement, however, contained the seeds of failure. It seems that in his desire to master nature, man came to enslave his own nature to his drive for domination and also to destroy the natural basis of his civilization, so that the latter now stands in danger of collapse, from the point of view both of the external conditions within which it functions and its internal relations. A third expression of the idea of sovereignty is to be found in the relationships between man and his fellows, between man and himself, and between man and society as a whole. To be sure, it would not be permissible to present the drive to dominate others and to relate to them as objects that can be used to derive certain benefits as the sole logical outcome of the idea of sovereignty. Initially, indeed, the idea of sovereignty found expression in ethical thought, which anchored man’s obligation to himself, to his fellows and to society in the autonomy of human reason. Despite these ideological expressions, however, it seems that the urge to dominate and to exploit men was the product of a psychological drive which, in the event, molded European culture. This is a fact to which the spiritual creativity of Europe, in thought, art, and religion, bears witness, for it accurately reflects the disintegrating fabric of society and its tottering psychological balance, whose end result is the vitiation of the capacity for spiritual creativity itself. When secularism came to be the dominant way of life, its internal contradiction stood revealed. Secularism elevated man beyond human limits, making him heir to the throne of the God it had expelled, while denying him his human value. It granted man dominion, and subjugated him to its own mastery; it promised him prosperity, and undermined the foundations of his natural existence; and it shook the balance of his personal life in the name of autonomy. The nation-state

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

69

transformed the idea of sovereignty into a form of chauvinism seeking dominion over others. The movement for social equality gave rise to oppressive regimes; industrialized, democratic society dismantled traditional structures and replaced them with the masses. Even spiritualintellectual creativity, which was flooded with new forms of expression, is declining; its depleted content expresses an impoverishment of human relations, which are, ultimately, its subject matter. The fate and the inner experience of the Jewish people were integrally linked with this process. The secular idea of sovereignty held out a great promise to the Jew: emancipation. It is implicit in the concept of the centralized, democratic state that there cannot be different sets of laws for the various groups within the population. All individuals are obligated to the state, and all, as its citizens, are equal—if only in terms of the law. The Jew who understood this fact knew that he could struggle for the fulfillment of its promise, that he had a chance, though it might require great effort, to achieve equality of rights. To be sure, the very need to struggle for the realization of something that derived directly from this basic principle testified to an internal contradiction. The European nation-state did not grant the Jews equality immediately or as a matter of course, and even when civil rights were achieved, society persisted in closing its doors to the Jew, rejecting him anew each time he succeeded in penetrating them. The outstanding expression of this tendency in European society is modern anti-Semitism, which sought to deny the Jew what the state had reluctantly been forced to grant him. Moreover, even the invitation to participate in the political and social life of Europe, when it came, contained an element of rejection, for the principle of sovereignty demanded that the Jew forgo his Jewish distinctiveness. That is to say, only if the Jew agreed to relinquish his unique social framework, way of life, and culture could he be accepted as an equal among equals. True, he might be permitted to preserve his religious distinctiveness, but this was conceived in Christian terms as a church affiliation, so in fact the Jew was asked to give up the peculiar non-ecclesiastical character of his religion. The Jew thus had to enslave himself for the sake of freedom (as Aḥad Ha-Am put it), and when he finally attained the emancipation he sought, he found

70

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

himself disappointed both by the achievement itself and by the European culture into which he had so recently arrived. Alienated from his own tradition, he faced the dried-up wells of European culture, which was in a deep crisis; not only had it failed to keep its promises to the Jews, it could not even honor those it had made to its own progenitors. Although in the present “post-Emancipation” period the Jew has successfully integrated into western culture, become a citizen of its states and even penetrated its society, he has again become its victim— of an unparalleled destruction, and also of unprecedented self-denial. Step by step his heritage has disintegrated. Step by step the community of the faithful has ceased to exist. Internal relationships have been replaced by external stipulations, and positive identification by recognition of the burden of fate. It is this step-by-step historical process of increasing involvement with society at large, coupled with increasing alienation from Jewish tradition and community, that has brought the Jew to the state of solitude and internal crisis described above. By examining the thought of representative figures of each of these stages and the problems with which they struggled, we may come to a better understanding of the pass at which the modern Jew has arrived. The first stage in this process may be represented by thinkers such as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677) on the one hand and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) on the other. Spinoza was educated in an organized and authoritative Jewish community. He was brought up in a family that followed the way of life of Torah and mitzvot, and his education involved continuous and profound study of the traditional sources. However, he discovered the possibility of breaking out of the narrow framework of the community and embarking upon intellectual activity of European dimensions, which appeared universal. Up to then, the only such route open before the Jew had been conversion, and even then, acceptance into non-Jewish society had been doubtful. Spinoza discovered that, in the circumstances of his time and place, in which the political conditions of the modern era had already begun to prevail, the Jew could leave his community without converting,

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

71

and be accepted—if only as an individual and on account of his peculiar talents—into the society of non-Jewish intellectuals. He confronted this alternative and decided to sever his ties with Judaism, which he saw as a confining prison. He despised and rejected it, for it seemed to him a restrictive way of life and a limited worldview that had long since passed its time, and he attacked it with a harsh and bitter critique that has posed a serious challenge to Jewish thought to this very day. Did he succeed in breaking completely with Judaism? Did he not continue to bear within him a sizeable burden of Jewish heritage? On the other hand, did he really succeed in gaining unqualified acceptance into his new environment? These are questions of great import, but however we answer them, it is clear that Spinoza embodied the negative alternative. The positive alternative at this stage took shape in the personality of Moses Mendelssohn, who was initially in a personal situation similar to that of Spinoza. Even without converting, Mendelssohn could have been absorbed into the surrounding German cultural world, as a writer of some importance. He was drawn to this possibility and attempted to realize it, but he refused to do so at the expense of his Judaism. Mendelssohn chose to be a full Jew in his faith and way of life, but at the same time to enjoy the full range of creativity offered by the new European society. In so doing, however, he was obliged to redefine his relationship to Judaism, even if only with regard to its most superficial layer—the organizational structure and legal jurisdiction which he encountered on his outward path. Spinoza rejected the authority of the community and, displaying his contempt, invited his excommunication, a measure that could do him no harm, since he had already made himself independent of Jewish society. Mendelssohn, however, throughout his life defended the traditional way of life and the faith that sustained him, desiring at the same time neither to throw off the communal framework nor to acquiesce to it where it hindered him. Indeed, his relationship to the communal framework and its powers was clearly ambivalent. He held that every Jew was obligated by halakha; what God had commanded, only He could undo. However, he saw this as a moral obligation only;

72

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

that is to say, it was voluntary and not subject to political authority. No human institution had the authority, in his opinion, to coerce the Jew to keep the commandments. The community thus needed autonomy, but it had no right to force itself upon its members. It must give them complete freedom to live within it or to leave it. Mendelssohn, it seems, experienced the problem of his Jewish identity, even on its deepest levels, in its relation to the political aspect of the community. He favored the existence of the communal framework, but he drew its boundaries inward, to the domain of the free decision of each Jewish individual, and he thereby endowed it with a different power and status. By doing no more than this, he became a solitary individual within it, isolated among both the members of his own people and among his enlightened German colleagues, and the anguish of his isolation pursued him until the end of his days. The second stage in our historical pattern can be represented by thinkers such as Saul Ascher (1767-1822), David Friedlander (17501834), and Gabriel Riesser (1806-1863), on the one hand, and Samuel Hirsch (1815-1889), Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), and Zechariah Frankel (1801-1875) on the other. Common to all of them was their education within a Jewish community whose authority had already been weakened, and a foreign enlightenment that competed on an equal basis with or even seemed preferable to their study of Torah. That is to say, from this time onward the alternative in its social and also its cultural-intellectual sense is no longer only the affair of unusually gifted individuals, but it becomes that of a whole class of intellectuals. The first three thinkers noted above saw Judaism as an unnecessary burden that hindered them in their way to civil equality of rights and participation in the cultural creativity of the ambient world; it should be noted, however, that what disturbed them was no longer the same thing as troubled Mendelssohn. The community had been so weakened as an authoritative organizational framework that it no longer had the power to present a serious obstacle. What disturbed Saul Ascher, David Friedlander, and Gabriel Riesser was the Jewish way of life as formulated and determined by the halakha, to which Mendelssohn had remained faithful to the end of his life, for they had tasted assimilation

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

73

in German society and wanted to complete the process. They rejected Judaism as Spinoza had in his day. It is instructive, however, that these rejectionists who felt a need to account for their action (in contrast to ordinary assimilationists whose outward path involved no intellectual struggle or social conflict) avoided a radical, unequivocal negation. They felt a responsibility towards the Jewish community within which they had grown up, and they knew that this community as a whole was not ready for the step that they as individuals had been able to take, both in terms of the spiritual willingness of its members and in terms of the disposition of the ambient society to accept them. Thus Saul Ascher charted an indirect route of exit from Judaism and entrance into European culture and society: step by step, the Jewish community would free itself of the burden of halakha and approach Kantian humanism. David Friedlander became one of the forerunners of the Reform movement. Gabriel Riesser, who achieved a prominent position in German political life, refused to convert and remained Jewish, though he neither believed in the basic tenets of Judaism nor observed the commandments, and his sympathies in fact lay more with the ethics of Stoicism. He refused both because Christianity was even more alien to his spirit than was Judaism, and he did not wish to gain his freedom at the price of a lie; and because he saw in the solution of his personal problem on an individual level a betrayal of his moral responsibility for the community as a whole, which could not yet follow in his path. Even the negative option, then, was freighted with skepticism regarding the possibility and moral acceptability of immediate assimilation. If the negative option was approached ambivalently and indecisively, how much more so the positive. The Jewish thinker who opted for Judaism at this stage had to redefine not only his relationship to the authoritative organizational framework of the community, but also his relationship to the traditional, observant way of life. This way of life was no longer “self-evident,” as it had been for Mendelssohn, and he could not disregard his doubts. This ambivalence stands out clearly and explicitly in the reasoning of Samuel Hirsch, who in our scheme represents the most positive and most faithful to Judaism of the trends

74

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

within Reform thinking. He sharply criticized those Reform leaders who measured Judaism by external standards and who sought to adapt it arbitrarily to European cultural tastes. To him, Reform had to be faithful to the pure inner ideal of Judaism and to seek its full realization in every sphere of the life of every Jew; however, he too felt that far-reaching changes would have to take place within Judaism for the Jew to be able to live as a Jew and, as such, bring his influence to bear on an open society. This approach is no less apparent in the ideas of Zechariah Frankel, the precursor of the Conservative Movement. Although he rejected reforms initiated by those who had arrogated authority to themselves, he recognized the vital need for changes that would flow directly from the life of the Jewish community in its new historical circumstances. This trend, moreover, can be seen even in the teachings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy. To be sure, he was a powerful opponent of the Reform movement. To him, Judaism meant life according to halakha, as it had been observed for generations, and once it became clear to him that the halakhic way of life cannot exist without a strong and authoritative community, he separated his own congregation from the Jewish community at large and renewed its authoritative organization. It would seem, therefore, that he had returned to a pre-Emancipation position. He could not, however, disregard the fact that the process of Emancipation was already quite advanced, and he also could not dismiss its positive aspects. Samson Raphael Hirsch favored equality of rights and viewed the European Enlightenment positively; he had, therefore, to reinterpret the meaning of the Halakha and to redefine its scope in order to make it possible for the Neo-Orthodox Jew to live as both a Jew and a citizen of his country. Each of these three men, then, experienced the problem of his Jewish identity, on its political and theological levels as well, in terms of the Halakha. They desired, each according to his own way of thinking, a traditional, observant way of life, but they drew its borders inward, from a social and personal point of view, and in so doing gave it an interpretation.

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

75

The next stage in the historical process was given forthright literary expression in Samson Raphael Hirsch’s well-known work, The Nineteen Letters, which is written in the form of an exchange of letters between a Rabbi, Naphtali, and a student, Benjamin, who has turned to him for advice. The Rabbi has been able to surmount the difficulties he has encountered as a Jew of the second generation of the Emancipation. Benjamin, on the other hand, belongs to the third generation, educated in homes where the parents were closer to the path chosen by Ascher, Friedlander, and Riesser. In his home, Benjamin has known only a few meaningless, lifeless remnants of the traditional way of life. He has absorbed the German intellectual and cultural world, and he experiences his Jewishness only insofar as it limits his freedom and burdens him with the fate of being different and disliked. It is not surprising that Judaism appears to him a kind of unhappy destiny, a restricting mode of existence; the questions he must confront as he stands at the point decision (he intends to marry and set up a home, and he must decide whether his home is to be Jewish and how he will raise his children) are: Should he, in principle, continue this fate and this mode of existence? Would it not better, for the sake of his children, if he were to decide to break away completely? The limit has been reached. Up to this point, the Jew, as he turned more and more towards the option of emancipation, had been borne along by the impetus of a traditional Jewish education, which was, however, rapidly dwindling. From here on, should he decide to return, he would have to gather momentum on his own. Benjamin, honestly considering the nature of Judaism while standing on its threshold, reaches precisely such a decision. Once he has done so, the nature of his identity is manifest in his relationship to the traditional way of life. However, we must raise the question: what would have happened had he decided to cut the ties and set up a home with no Jewish content? Would this necessarily be the end of the line? The answer provided by history is that this still need not be so. Even after breaking away from Judaism as a way of life, and also as a faith, the Jew (and he still is a Jew!) still faces an alternative.

76

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Two thinkers who represent this stage in our historical scheme are Karl Marx and Moses Hess (1812-1875). Marx reiterates Spinoza’s total rejection of Judaism, with even greater ferocity. Furthermore, the crude simplicity with which he does this absolves us from the need to relate to the theoretical content of his writings on this subject; in this, he differs remarkably from Spinoza, whose system presents an ongoing challenge to modern Jewish thought. Nevertheless, Marx’s position is important on account of its personal-psychological and social-political significance. It lends support to our claim that even after breaking with Judaism the Jew is confronted not with a simple fact but with a real alternative: he must choose himself even as a non-Jew. He is called upon to affirm his negative decision, and this affirmation—and herein lies the striking contrast between Marx and Spinoza, both emotionally and intellectually—finds expression in self-hatred. The Jew who breaks away from his Judaism and chooses not to be Jewish emotionally hates and intellectually negates the Judaism within himself, because he wishes to identify with a milieu that persists in rejecting the Jew. This phenomenon must not be taken lightly. In the twentieth century, it has become one of the fundamental expressions of the crisis of Jewish identity—an identity which, in the post-Emancipation period, has come to be perceived more and more negatively. Of course, if the Jew does not feel rejected by his environment, the path to assimilation need not necessarily lead through self-hatred, at least not in the strong sense characterized by Marx. Even so, he is still making an active decision to reject those aspects of his personality that are still Jewish, or to relate to them as unimportant to his personality. In describing this phenomenon, we are also touching upon the background to the choice for the positive alternative. The education received by Moses Hess may be seen as exemplifying the gradual process of departure from Judaism, as men like Saul Ascher and Gabriel Riesser might have described it. He picked up in his grandfather’s house and received from his mother something of the atmosphere of a traditional Jewish home, but his education and intellectual

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

77

culture were basically non-Jewish, and once he had entered public life as a socialist, he felt that he had nothing more to do with Judaism. Not that he negated Judaism as a historical phenomenon; on the contrary, he respected it. However, its importance to him was historical and without any immediate significance. In his view, Judaism had fulfilled its function, and the time had come for it to bow honorably off the stage. We must note here that in this period, socialist activity enlarged the distance between the modern Jew and his heritage. As opposed to the Jewish liberal, who identifies with the social and political order of his day, the socialist identifies with the order of the future and a culture that is yet to arise, and so he is less sensitive to the fact that European culture of the present has not yet accepted the Jew. He lives in anticipation of the future—as long, of course, as he believes in it with unshaken certainty. However this may be, Hess is a Benjamin who has made the step out, apparently without a crisis. Nevertheless, he remained a Jew, and when this became clear to him, he realized that it was necessary for him to choose himself. In contrast to Marx, he made a positive choice. Clearly, however, he had at this stage to define everything anew: his relationship to the Jewish community as a social and political entity; his relationship to the traditional way of life; his relationship to Judaism as a faith. We have, of course, to take into consideration the factors which led him to return to Judaism—the split with Marx, the eruption of anti-Semitism in Germany, the success of the nationalist movements in Europe. One important motif stands out in all of these; their indication of the continued uniqueness of the Jew even after his break with the Jewish community and way of life. So far, and no further. In fact, the positive step presents the real alternative. Hess had to define what had been preserved within him as a hard core of Judaism, from which he might be able to develop a new relationship. The answer was very simple: he was born a Jew. That is all. However, the circumstances within which this simple fact becomes manifest are very important, for the biographical detail may come to determine the life of the adult, his fate and his way of thinking. Initially, Hess discovered the power of the Jewish family. Following

78

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

the weakening of the authoritarian framework of the community, the life of the Jew—even one who has distanced himself from the tradition—focuses on the family; at the very least, his relationship to his parents still binds him with such force that it may restrain him from converting. One cannot do this to one’s parents, and one may not profane their memory! Hess, returning to Judaism, experienced in it a relationship with his mother and grandfather, and through them with the people as a biological entity. It seems no exaggeration to state that Hess’s biological conception of nationhood is a reflection of the experience of the family as a social unit within which Judaism was preserved. However this may be, we see before us in the understanding of someone returning to Judaism after having broken away from it the development of a national definition of Judaism, as opposed to the earlier religious definitions. The pendulum has reached one extreme and is now slowly turning back. For Hess, Judaism is a nationality, characterized by a particular physio-spiritual quality. The traditional way of life and the various dogmas are transient, historical expressions of this fixed quality. Earlier, then, as we saw with Mendelssohn’s conception, the bond of nationhood had retreated into the traditional way of life, and the latter had then been confined within the realm of religion and faith. Now, in the direction that Hess was taking, the converse was occurring: religion was drawing back into the traditional way of life, and the traditional way of life into the experience of nationhood embodied in the primary relationship of birth. For Hess, however, this was only the beginning. His regaining of the bond of nationhood by way of the family also brought him to a re-appropriation, by way of a new interpretation, of the traditional way of life and the faith that underlies it. Each of the stages we have described above was the beginning of a movement, or even several, in modern Judaism. In the first stage: the Jewish Enlightenment, with its various streams; in the second: Reform, Neo-Orthodoxy, and Conservatism; and in the third: Zionism, which split up into political, cultural, and pioneering streams, and was further diversified, within this broad division, by the influences of liberalism, socialism and religion. Each of these movements followed its own

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

79

historical development, and each of them also influenced the development of the others. The appearance of the nationalist movement at the end of the nineteenth century had a great influence upon the development of the various religious movements from the beginning of our own century. They were forced to redefine their views on Judaism as a faith and way of life over against the nationalist alternative that was receiving a more and more clearly defined social and political expression, finally crystallizing in political form. Thus new alternatives were created for affirming parts of the Jewish heritage while rejecting others. Reform and Neo-Orthodoxy, each in its own way, rejected the nationalist alternative, even as they derived certain benefits from the political achievements of Zionism. Conservatism, which from the beginning was closer to the nationalist outlook, sought ways of acting and influencing alongside Zionism without competing with it. Even within Zionism, however, various alternatives emerged, regarding both the relationship between Eretz Israel and the Diaspora and the relationship of the Jew to his heritage. Within Zionism there is a significant stream of Jews who have rejected Judaism as a faith and as a way of life, but have affirmed it as a national framework. In their quest for normalization, they reject Judaism as a heritage. The Jews will be “a people like all other peoples,” united by a political framework and nothing more. The most outstanding and outspoken representative of this approach is Jacob Klatzkin. In contrast to this, one also finds within Zionism a considerable number of Jews who are religious in the traditional sense and seek to make of Zionism’s political accomplishment the basis for a spiritual-religious achievement: the Jews shall not be a people like any other, but a chosen people. The most profound representative of this style of religious Zionism is Rav Abraham Isaac Ha-Cohen Kook. Between these two poles, there is a very broad range of approaches that partake of various modifications of the cultural and religious contents of Judaism in a national framework: Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, Yehezkel Kaufmann, A. D. Gordon, Martin Buber—these are the outstanding representatives of these differing approaches, some of them perceiving religion as a cultural value (Aḥad Ha-Am, Bialik, and Kaufmann) and others seeking a new

80

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

definition of the inner substance of religion beyond the dogmatic and normative expressions of latter-day traditional Judaism (Gordon and Buber). The splintered cultural reality within which the Jewish people lives today is the product of the varied and changing responses to these complex alternatives. The process we have described is not unequivocally one of the destruction of the Jewish community, the cessation of its creativity, or the breakup of the continuity of its historical existence. From each outward step there emerged a movement of renewal, and against the great divisions within the community were created new frameworks for national unity. Possibilities for creativity multiplied, and the will for historical continuity persisted. Clearly, however, we see an ambivalent relationship to Judaism on the part of all the currents at work in it, and so ambivalent and complex a relationship is obviously a problem in itself. The following paradox serves to illustrate this problem: in the twentieth century the sense that belonging to Judaism is a matter of fate, something that is forced upon one, has gathered a great deal of strength. One has no choice but to be a Jew. This feeling has found very explicit expression in the nationalist movement, and in this framework it sharpens insofar as the nationalist conception tends towards a political definition. To a political Zionist of the nature of a Pinsker, Herzl, Borochov, or Klatzkin, it is antisemitism that forces his relationship to Judaism upon the Jew. At the same time, however, the feeling that belonging to Judaism in the sense of relating to its content is a matter of entirely free personal choice has also been greatly reinforced, for the possibility of assimilation stands open to the Jew, if not within a non-Jewish environment, then at least in the independent political framework that he has created for himself. This feeling of freedom, too, finds most explicit expression in the nationalist movement, and grows stronger insofar as the nationalist conception tends toward a political definition. We can easily see that this paradox is but the juxtaposition of two aspects of the same mode of relating to Judaism. Neither he whose Judaism is forced upon him nor he who is free to choose it feel themselves obligated towards Judaism. The consciousness of a moral

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

81

obligation, which still informed nineteenth-century thought, is steadily diminishing. This is the background to the state of affairs described in our opening section. Ex post facto, the Jewish individual is located within family and people, culture and history; even so, he feels himself distant from all these. He does not see himself as being determined by them a priori, and in any case there is nothing in the historical heritage, which he still carries on to a certain degree, that seems to him to be self-evident from the outset. At each of the stages of removal that we have surveyed, we have found that the Jew assumed some things to be self-evident, but certain aspects of Jewish life had become problematic for him, and he redefined his relationship to Judaism while giving the contents in question a new interpretation. Mendelssohn accepted the traditional way of life as self-evident, but doubted the propriety of a political framework whose authority was binding; while those who followed him had come to doubt the propriety of the traditional way of life. In our day, this process has reached a new level. Nothing is assumed to be self-evident; everything demands a redefinition of one’s relationship and a new interpretation; everything including those factors on whose account the Jew does not renounce his Judaism, even though he has grown distant from it: religion and tradition, culture and history, people, nation and family. When the individual realizes that he is isolated, that his freedom as an individual is only apparent, because it has been imposed upon him as a result of the historical transformations undergone by his people, it becomes incumbent upon him to set out on a very long route of selfchoice and self-definition, in the course of which he must relate to the entire process leading up to his present pass; and he must start out alone from its very beginning—although it is doubtful that he will be able to cover much distance before he emerges from his solitude.

The Predicament of Loneliness as a Predicament of Identity The predicament of the lonely Jew is a predicament of identity. The individual defines himself, as it were, from within. He is an “I” understandable as such to himself, and so long as he is thus understood to

82

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

himself, the question “Who am I?” has no meaning for him. Another will perhaps ask about him, and it is doubtful if one can answer him. In any case, he does not ask, because the answer is given in advance: “I.” What meaning does this answer have, beyond the immediate awareness of the individual himself? But the lonely person knows that no “I” exists for himself without some transcending relationship, and there is no meaning to the “I”’s existence without such a relationship. For him, then, there is thus a meaning to the question, “Who am I?” It is shouted out from the predicament of his loneliness, as long as he does not know the answer. But the answer to a question asked in this way is necessarily unavailable. The fact that the “I” does not exist self-sufficiently without a relation to what is beyond him has two aspects. On the one hand, the “I” is not an independently given entity. He finds himself already given, and at the same moment that he knows how to say “I” there has somehow commenced, somehow arisen from hidden depths. From this side, the question “Who am I?” is the question, “Where do I come from?” It directs him to the past and redirects him again to yet a deeper past, for at every moment man is what he has already been. His past subsists within his present. On the other hand, the “I” is not complete within himself, and he is never given as complete. He is open to be in relation to a fellow-person, to society, to his environment, and at the same time that he knows how to say “I.” He is not yet whole, but he stands before himself as a goal. In this respect, the question “Who am I?” is the question, “To where am I going? What do I want to become?” It directs him to the future, and redirects him again to yet a more distant future, for at every moment a person is what he can become. His future subsists within his present. In short: the question of identity is the question of one’s relation to the past and the present. A person chooses himself in relation to his past. When he does this knowingly, he creates a biography that is connected to a history, and a family that is connected to a people, and he perpetuates the legacy of the culture, which is the creation of a people’s life and the meaning of history. He can arrive through them also to faith. But he cannot embark on this path from the final stage. When he is asked about his relation to the Jewish faith, to the Jewish

Judaism and the Lonely Jew

83

heritage, to Jewish history, and even to the Jewish people, he says, as an individual, that they are “irrelevant” to him. As a solitary person he can only respond in confusion and in pain. If Judaism is a faith—he does not believe; if it is a cultural heritage created out of faith, it has no hold on him; if Judaism is the connection to a people—the people is not unified, and its collective life does not touch him directly, except in moments of crisis imposed from outside. In his eyes, nothing is self-evident or axiomatic. Therefore the lonely Jew must start his path from the beginning-point prior to all of these, from the particular point where he is still in direct contact with what is beyond himself.

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing— The Question of God’s Righteousness1

The Historical Dimension of the Question and Its Origin in the Bible

W

e are accustomed to say that the question of theodicy is awakened by the encounter with reality on the basis of faith. However, it is truly found in faith from the outset, as its premise. Faith itself is already an answer to the question, though in its primal, innocent formulation, faith comes as a pre-emptive answer, to prevent raising the question. Biblical scholars generally maintain that biblical literature in its various periods and genres contains no theoretical discussions in matters of faith. In the Bible, they say, there is no theology or religious philosophy, though various theologies and religious philosophies can find support in it. They are probably right. However, even those scholars with the strictest methodological definitions of theological and religious-philosophical concepts will be forced to admit that there is 1 Originally published in Eliezer Schweid, To Declare that the Lord is Just: Theodicy in Jewish Thought From the Bible to Spinoza (Hebrew) (Bat Yam: Tag Publishing, 1994). Tzedakah = righteousness, rightness, justice, merit (related to hatzdakah [justification] as in hatzdakat elohim [justification of God, i.e. theodicy]. It will be important to trace the various senses in which Schweid uses this key word in the context of his argument. God’s tzedakah (righteousness, justice) and the human’s tzedakah (righteousness, merit) support each other in the divine-human relationship, but each is finite and imperfect. “Faith” (emunah) is used to bolster both and to supplement the deficiency in both.

86

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

one exception to their general conclusion: the question of God’s justice. At least one book, relatively broad in scope in the Biblical context, presents an explicit, many-sided wrestling with this issue—the book of Job. Moreover, the question is raised repeatedly, in its general or particular aspects, in every book of the Bible. It seems we will not exaggerate if we claim that in a certain respect the unity of the Bible is to be found around the axis of ceaseless engagement with this central theme. The reason is simple. It is clear from what we said above: faith is first of all an answer to the question of God’s justice. Consider—to the extent that faith is a kind of knowledge, outlook, or interpretation of the world, i.e. a variety of man’s thinking about himself and his environment, it is the recurring and ever-examined answer to the question of the lack of justice in the world, an answer that is provoked on the basis of a prior expectation, which originates in the depths of the human soul. Indeed, the Bible is the book of testimony to the lives of believing individuals and a believing people. If we wish to understand the question of theodicy and the standard ways of dealing with it in the past and the present, we should thus start with a phenomenological investigation into the substance of faith within the broader historical context of belief in God, and to base this discussion on the Bible. The first assertion is fully grounded on the preceding. The second also follows logically: the Bible is the foundational source of the problem. Faith is a living process. It is the story of human beings and the generations of a people or religious community through the ages. It follows that the testimony of the primal formation of faith as a life-form of the people, the testimony of those individuals who led the people and those who were raised in it, is the testimony that comprises the source. It remains always relevant, even for those whose life-experiences were very remote from the life-experiences of the believers in Biblical times. As long as they are believers, they perpetuate the relation to the source through all its interpretative transformations. From the preceding assertions we can infer another: the question of faith-based theodicy is intrinsically historical. One cannot reckon with it properly in any present except against the background of its

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

87

development in the life-stories of individuals and the people. This follows from the explanation to the second assertion: the question of theodicy arises from the continuous life-experience of individuals and the nation. Faith is reconstituted in each generation as a transmitted core of values passed down from one generation to the next, on the basis of the prior culture or established religion, containing or embodying that faith as it was crystallized in the people throughout its history. It follows that the starting-point is a certain conception of theodicy, which was already crystallized and embodied in a message that formed the faith of its recipients. Thus whenever the question is raised again in the depths of a new crisis, it is raised on the basis of the previous solutions, out of a sense that the warrant that was the basis of that faith is no longer sufficient. From this it is clear that the new solution, if it exists, will not be considered a true solution unless it is based on its predecessors, derives from them, and reaffirms them while repairing the flaw that they suffered. Only in confronting the prior solutions that were disrupted, and in basing oneself on them even though they were disrupted, will it be possible to grapple with the question in order to reaffirm the sense of the first founding faith. Therefore every contemporary theoretical grappling with the question of theodicy is a perspectival grappling with the problem through its stages of development. It raises a question about the whole path traveled; it bases itself on it; and if it succeeds, it justifies the continuous engagement from the present standpoint by reaffirming the previous solutions, but from a more inclusive viewpoint.

Faith as a Form of Moral Relationship Between God and Humanity We seek to deal with the question as it is raised today. Therefore we start from the beginning: how was faith conceived as an outlook, a will and an existential stance in the Bible? In the most general sense, faith is a kind of relationship between the person and God.2 In the Bible this is the original and primary 2 See Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1951).

88

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

relationship, but we must qualify at once and say that it is not the only one. The Bible depicts a variety of intellectual, emotional and practical relationships between God and man. Some of them are comprised within faith as different aspects of its being both an emotional stance and a form of practical conduct (reverence of God, love of God, acceptance of God’s will, obedience to His will as an obligation of service), while others are not included in it (admiration, wonder, ecstatic enthusiasm, fear and trembling). Those forms of relation that are not comprised within faith also rely on it and shed light on it. Therefore, faith is the primary form of relation. What distinguished it, then, in such a role from the other forms of relationship to God? The answer that we can find in the Bible is: emphasis on the moral quality, a kind of interpersonal relationship. As a moral relation between individuals, faith is absolute certainty in the feelings, will, and anticipated actions of the other as directed at us, and of ourselves as directed at him. This is a certainty whose source is in voluntary mutual obligation, based on choice and rooted in a sense of value, not in compulsion or egoistic interest. To believe means to place one’s confidence: to believe in God means to place absolute confidence. To place absolute confidence means to trust that God’s feelings and actions towards those who believe in Him will be the morally appropriate response to the believer’s feelings and actions. It is possible to formulate the train of thought of the believer before God thus: “Since I act rightly and in accord with the moral obligation that I have to You, inasmuch as You are God, and since I know with complete certainty that You are just and act in accord with the moral obligation that You took on Yourself towards me as a human being, then if I act toward You in faith, I rely and trust that You will act towards me in accord with the moral expectation that I have on the basis of my actions. This is so, even though I know that You are not necessitated to act thus because of external causes or inner motives. Furthermore, even when I know that a reasonable projection from the events around me in nature and society demonstrates, as it were, that the fulfillment of my expectations is very unlikely or even impossible, I know that from Your perspective there is absolute

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

89

preference for what is morally proper over what follows from the reasonable outcome of natural motivators. As God, You are supreme and Your will overcomes all opposition and obstacles. Therefore I rely as a person of faith only on my uprightness towards You and Your uprightness towards me. My uprightness towards You is my righteousness before You. Your uprightness vouches for me that my righteousness will persevere.” We bring as a representative example the story of the man the course of whose life is presented in the Bible as the first paradigm of a man of faith—the story of Abraham. The account in Genesis 15, in the portion of the covenant “between the pieces,” is especially important, because there the concept of faith is articulated directly and with utter clarity. Abram is then already an old man who “continues childless.” God is manifested to him in a vision and promises him that his reward is great. He further promises him that “none but your very own issue shall be your heir.” This promise has already been repeated many times in the past, but it has not yet been fulfilled. By now there is no longer any reasonable, natural probability that it will be fulfilled at all, for in the natural course of things an old man like Abraham does not have progeny, nor does an old woman like Sarah bear children. Nevertheless, the text tells us, “He had faith in the Lord, and H/he reckoned it to h/Him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). These two words, “faith” (emunah) and “righteousness” (tzedakah), coming in close proximity, are filled with meaning from our perspective: Abram placed absolute confidence in God’s promise even though it had not been fulfilled in the past, and now its fulfillment seemed unlikely in natural reality. So why did Abraham have faith? The word “righteousness” comes to answer this. No matter whether it was Abram who considered fulfillment of the promise as “righteousness” on God’s part, or whether it was God who considered Abraham’s faith as “righteousness,” the meaning is very clear. “Righteousness” is moral merit, and by “merit” we mean that one is worthy of something in accord with justice (tzedek, related to tzedakah). Thus Abraham had faith in God because he considered fulfillment of the promise that a son would be born to him as “righteousness.” He was worthy of it, and God was obligated to

90

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

make good that to which he was morally entitled, even if it went against the grain of nature. However, the continuation of the story also sheds light on understanding the concept of faith in the Bible. After the first promise comes a second promise: to give to Abram and his seed possession of “this land.” But this time Abram does not have faith. He seeks to know: “How shall I know that I am to possess it?” (Genesis 15:8). Knowledge is mentioned in parallel and in contrast to faith. It connotes factual certainty, which has force by virtue of some kind of existing reality. Such knowledge is indeed given to Abram in the covenant that is enacted immediately afterwards. It has the sense of absolute necessity, which bestows entitlement of the land to Abram and his seed immediately, even though practical sovereignty will be actualized a long time in the future. Why does Abram not have faith this time? Why does he seek binding factual knowledge? The answer is given in the short but clear explanation with which God combines the deferral of realization of the sovereignty bestowed by the covenant. This is required, for realization in such a distant future still requires faith that the promise will be fulfilled: “And they shall return here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (15:16). This short sentence that God imparts to Abram is an answer to the doubt that is blatantly present in Abram’s desire to know that the land belongs to him. It stands to reason that Abram did not “have faith in the Lord” this time, because he did not consider possession of the land as his “righteousness.” He had not yet acquired moral right to it for himself and his seed. The reason for this is also clear from the full narrative context of the episode of the covenant: those who already dwelt in the land at that time enjoyed the rights that God bestowed to them. They dwelt in the land by their “righteousness,” and they had not yet forfeited that righteousness. On the contrary, their deeds perpetuated it. Abram is convinced of this in all his encounters with the inhabitants of the land up to the covenant, and especially with the encounter with Melchizedek, the king of Salem, which is described just before the covenant. It is therefore likely that, impressed with Melchizedek’s righteousness, Abram is not able to believe that his children will inherit

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

91

the land, until the knowledge is vouchsafed him that will bolster his faith. The words of God are indeed the added knowledge that he is waiting for: “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs…” (Genesis 16:13)—in other words, the possession of the land is not yet in the status of “righteousness” for Abram and his seed, but it will surely be counted as his righteousness in the future. Its current inhabitants will forfeit their righteousness through their sins. The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete, but God knows that the iniquity that is already embodied in their idolatry will come to fruition in the future, while the oppressed Israelites earn their righteousness through remaining faithful in their suffering. This, then, is the knowledge-basis of the moral faith that the inheritance of the land will pass to Abram’s seed in the future. Is the same conception of faith manifested in the story that is thought to be the greatest of the paradigms of faith—namely the story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac? Does Abraham’s faith in that story have a basis of righteousness and morality? Those interpreters who tend to accept Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Akedah will answer in the negative: Abraham was required to perform a deed that in fact was not ethical, and he responded to the demand with unhesitating acquiescence. However, this interpretation in fact contradicts both the general thrust of the story and its particulars. The general thrust of the story is to teach that sacrificing children on the altar before God is absolutely forbidden, although the story of the Akedah embodies a truth worthy of emulation. It is true that the believer is required to surrender himself completely, even to the point of giving his life, to do the will of God. However, precisely from the story of the Akedah we learn that dedicating one’s life to God will not come to expression in the way that idolaters sacrifice their children to their gods. What desire does God have in such a sacrifice? Indeed, for carrying out His will in the world he has need of living believers, not of dead victims! Sacrificing children is thus absolutely opposed to God’s will that is directed toward the goal of the rule of justice and morality in the world. If human beings feel nevertheless the need to

92

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

express their devotion by means of a sacrifice, let them offer a ram on the altar, as substitute for themselves, and thus symbolize not God’s “need” for sacrifices, but their own desire to draw near to God and to dedicate themselves to His service. In order to teach all these things, which are opposed to the idolatrous outlook that held sway in that time, Abraham was required to perform that deed that he himself regarded as the “righteousness” that God demanded of him. He responded to the command. We note that Abraham responded to this command wholeheartedly, because he did not think, up until the moment that God’s angel told him to desist, that this deed was unethical. On the contrary, he trusted that the requirement to do this was the “righteousness” due to God from him. God is permitted to demand that he return that which was given to him. In his situation, Abraham had to believe that in a paradoxical way, only through his complete readiness to return to God what He had given him directly, outside the way of nature, would be fulfilled the promise that he received from God very close to the time of the Akedah, namely, “it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you” (21:12). There is no doubt that according to the story, Abraham believed with perfect faith that God had the right to require from him the sacrifice of his son, just as there was no doubt that he believed that his son would be restored to him for his own righteousness, though he did not know how. We, the readers, know after the prevention of Isaac’s sacrifice, immediately after completion of the expression of readiness to sacrifice him, that complete surrender to God’s will is not expressed through the believer’s sacrificing himself or his son who is dearer than himself, and not through sacrificing an animal from his possessions, but through fulfilling his God’s commandments wholeheartedly in all his walks of life. In this way the story of the Akedah has indeed become a story that explains the place and significance of animal sacrifice in Israel: God Himself has no need of a sacrifice. He needs devotion and human closeness, which come to symbolic expression in sacrificial ritual. Precisely for this reason the prophets of Israel expressed their view that sacrifices, when offered on the altar without

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

93

being preceded by the practice of justice and equity, have no value to God.

Knowledge as Basis of Faith We have learned that faith is moral certainty. However, from reading the chapters discussed above we have learned also that faith is based on certain kinds of knowledge that pertain on the one hand to the nature of reality in which people are immersed, and on the other hand to the desires of God, which come to expression in deeds attributed to Him and in commandments that He imparts directly to human beings. In this context, let us note first of all that according to the biblical conception, God’s existence, as well as the attribution of the creation of the world and its order as they exist to God, plus the attribution of certain deeds conceived as intervention in the course of events of the lives of individuals, groups and peoples directly to God (in this category are God’s appearance to individuals chosen by Him to reveal His commandments and to warn them of the consequences of disobedience to them)—all these are considered knowledge, not faith. In other words, in the Bible we find only the phraseology of “faith in God,” not “faith that God….” Everything that later belief calls “faith that…” is considered in the Hebrew Bible to be certain knowledge, rooted in immediate experience, which by its nature removes all cause for doubt. This, then, is our knowledge about God, which is assumed as the basis of faith in Him. However, in order to consider the full depth of faith as an intellectual and volitional stance and existential gesture, we must also examine the knowledge that pertains to the worldly and social reality in which the person of faith is immersed. In this context it will indeed become clear to us that the believer who assumes as the basis of his faith the knowledge that God is the Creator who wills good for His creatures, that He performs deeds of justice and commands justice, assumes also the knowledge that there is a certain gap, felt keenly in every time of trial in the reality around him, between what the believer expects from reality on the basis of his righteousness, and what he actually experiences.

94

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Only very rarely is justice manifested directly through unique events that are considered direct divine intervention (“miracles”). Generally the believer must struggle a great deal and wait a long time, even when he is deserving because of his righteousness. On the other hand, he is not always so deserving; surely he is not always perfectly deserving of it. Quite simply, were this gap not manifest, there would be no difference between faith and knowledge. We already said that faith is moral certainty that justice will be manifested in the future even though there is no external necessity of it, and even if it appears impossible in the present. Abram “had faith in the Lord” on the basis of his “righteousness” even though the promise was not fulfilled for a long time, even though at that very time its fulfillment seemed impossible. It follows that faith itself is a form of activity at once spiritual, intellectual, volitional, and emotional, by means of which the believer closes the gap that is visible to his eyes between his expectations that are based on his righteousness on the one hand, and reality on the other hand. In this sense, faith contains from the outset a thought that justifies God despite the gap that exists between expectation and reality, and is also a form of conduct that comes to express the force of that thought. Since we have here the primal point of origin for the question of theodicy, and of the ways of engagement with it in the very innards of the phenomenon of faith, we will have to delve deeper into it later. However, it is first required that we consider theoretical “justification” in its own right. What does the Bible present in terms of knowledge of the source of the gap that is manifest between our expectations and reality as we actually experience it? Consideration of the Biblical narrative, especially the narrative of the books of the Torah, emphasizes in this connection a literary-structural phenomenon that embodies this very gap. The story of creation, especially the creation of man, the story of humanity’s destiny, the story of the patriarchs’ activity, and the story of the career of the people of Israel all appear as if they are depicted twice, from two contradictory points of view: the one ideal, reflecting what God desires of His creatures at the time that He establishes the reality that He desires (which is at

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

95

the same time the expectation that the believer has of reality), and the second—unvarnished, soberly reflecting reality as it shows itself in fact after the trials of experience (which is at the same time what the believer discovers in reality as it actually is). This gap is manifested first, and in its most striking form, in the story of creation. The first chapter of Genesis presents the ideal viewpoint: God commands, and reality responds to His command. He examines what He has created and sees that it is “good.” He considers the human being and sees that it is “very good.” He blesses all His creatures including man, and thus imbues them with perpetual existence, because they are found worthy of it. But we need only read two or three chapters more to be convinced that the first look reflects nothing more than a vision or expectation. We see in fact that the world as it was actually created carries within it a tendency to destruction. We see in fact that this tendency is manifest especially in that “very good” human being, on whom it is incumbent to watch over creation and maintain its order. It is he, created “in the image of God,” who corrupts his ways more than any other creature; he then goes on to corrupt his whole environment, until God “repents” that He created man and can find no other recourse than the destruction of the whole world in the waters of the Flood. Only one man—Noah—is found worthy of trust. By his merit, God reverses Himself again and renews the world that was destroyed. We note the fact that this time, in order to preserve the world, God requires of Himself to compromise, to tolerate and make His peace with the unavoidable gap in the reality that He has created, in other words, to make His peace with the unavoidable consequences of the fact that “the devisings of man’s heart are evil from his youth.” We must thus recognize that according to the Bible there exist in the world that was created by God’s will certain qualities that do not reflect the Creator’s ideal wishes, but rather the factual reality of this world, which apparently cannot be any more perfect than it is. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion that God Himself could not have known in advance the factual quality of the world that He created. Like an artist at his workbench, he examines the characteristics of his product. Even if the product appears fine

96

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

enough, he cannot be certain that it has come close enough to his standard of perfection until he tests it. There is no escaping the conclusion that at the basis of created substances is included something that may be defined as “accidental” or “arbitrary” or “brute matter.” Something that is not susceptible to perfect formation or exact prediction, because it is only able to retain the formation or qualities required of it approximately and for a limited time. Only after the fact, on the basis of repeated experience, can one determine more exactly the measure and direction of deviation between what was intended in the act of creation and what was actually created. Only then can repair be made. Note—repair, not elimination of the deficiency. In other words, there is no escape from forgoing the ideal in order to achieve the best possible by putting a stop to further corruption and by cyclical reconstitution of the order, for one cannot avoid the process of corruption entirely. So it happened in creation, so too afterwards when the human family was reconstituted by Noah and his children, so too throughout the history of Israel. We dwell here especially on the fact that the Torah, too, was given twice. The first tablets, given to an ideal people, were shattered by Moses, and the second tablets are the Torah for a less-than-ideal people as was manifested in reality after the test of experience. This is a Torah that contains within itself legal defenses, whose goal is to prevent unchecked corruption insofar as is possible, and from time to time to reconstitute the original order, because despite all his efforts, the legislator of the Torah knows in advance that corruption is unavoidable. We are unable to offer a “scientific” explanation, on the Bible’s assumptions, for the phenomenon of moral corruption. As is known, the Bible contains no science. All that we can add to what has already been said is what the Bible points out: first, a phenomenon that may be defined as the weakness of created beings on account of their material composition. Since they are established through a delicate balance of opposite components, they are liable to be disrupted. Substances age, they grow old and wither, fall apart and perish by their nature. Only through a process of renewal, of which God is the direct source (in this respect, indeed God renews each day, each week,

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

97

each month, each season and each year the work of creation), the natural terrestrial realm is renewed in each succeeding generation. In other words, God does not prevent the natural processes of deterioration and decay. That is not possible within the nature of the created things themselves. God only renews the creation perpetually. Second, the Bible points out the phenomenon, that can be defined as selfsubsistent evil: the evil yetzer3 that is manifested as an egoistic urge that pulsates in created beings, especially human beings, to exist by themselves and for themselves alone. This urge is manifested—especially in mankind—as an instinctual egotism, the craving for power, for possessions, for the satisfaction of physical appetites and exploitation of his environment. In this way man disturbs—not only because of the limitations of his physical nature, but also because of the willful assertion of his personal lusts—the order that sustains his society and maybe even his terrestrial environment. It stands to reason that God does not succeed—or maybe does not want to?—in uprooting this inclination from His creatures. On the contrary, in the end He makes His peace with man’s congenital evil urge, gives consideration to it, and maybe even makes cunning use of it to sustain the world that He has created, though not on the level of its ideal conception. This, then, is the picture of the reality into which man fits, and the picture of man himself within it. Faith is conceived against this background as an intellectual, emotional and behavioral stance that seeks to bridge the gap, that is manifest and known to the believer from the outset, between the reality that God and the believers would very much desire and expect from its creation, and reality as it can be. If so, despite the gap, they trust that divine justice will be actually manifest in reality. The future will prove finally that the “righteousness” acquired by them, especially by their good deeds, will find fulfillment. We will 3 In its original Biblical context, the term yetzer probably has a passive, dependent sense: “The devisings of man’s heart are evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). However, from rabbinic times onward, the term yetzer has been understood by the Jewish tradition in terms similar to the psychoanalytic “libido”: a powerfully active, irrational component of the personality that, though ultimately creative in potential if properly channeled, can wreak havoc if left to run amok. In a classic Talmudic passage, the evil yetzer is equated with Satan and the Angel of Death (Bava Batra 16a).

98

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

consider carefully the exact meaning of these terms: it can be inferred from them that faith is not only a kind of expectation, relying on observation of reality and a feeling of being deserving, but developing from that it is also a kind of human activity—the very kind of activity that the Creator-God intends, and that He is entitled to require of His human creatures. Its concern is with overcoming the gap that exists between man’s evil urge and the deeds that proceed from it, on the one hand, and the characteristics and ways of life that are appointed for the human being in the vision of the Creator. We can now say more precisely that while the human being has a certain “righteousness” before his Creator the same as any creature by virtue of its createdness, nevertheless he achieves his special “righteousness” through his stance and deeds in response to the gap between his evil yetzer and his faith, and the moral certainty in faith has its source in the truth that is proved through that very activity, in the ethical good that it itself creates, in the righteousness that it perpetuates if it succeeds in closing from time to time the gap between ideal and reality, and at least in coming closer to that perfection of “good” of which he is deserving as a result of his cumulative spiritual and practical effort.

Faith as a Form of Fulfilling Activity If so, faith in itself is not to be conceived as a passive expectation. It is to be conceived as a bridging activity, one that creates more “righteousness” in addition to that which the creature has before his Creator. Faith itself intends to repair and perfect the deficiencies of creation as much as possible. It strives to produce the desired perfection on its own from within itself. Along with this, it is self-evident that the believer carries in his heart the expectation to make a lasting achievement within the natural and human life-environment within which he is active. If he carries in his heart the expectation of a just recompense for his deeds, and if he fulfills his God’s commandments and performs His will, he has the “right” to expect that God will assist him by “establishing” the work of his hands, i.e. by giving them a foothold, force and permanence in the reality which He creates and governs. Furthermore, he has the “right” to expect that the outcome

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

99

of his good deeds that he performs in accord with God’s commandment will itself be good, for those around him and for himself. This is the reward and recompense for his deeds. This conception of faith deepens our understanding of the sources of its effectiveness and of the factors that are liable to disrupt it. On the one hand, it is clear that faith, as a form of foundational, intentional, and formative activity, has its own inner power. It maintains itself and “proves” its truth through its own activity. In other words, the believer can bestow the force of truth to his faith retroactively, through the inner and outer reality that he creates in himself and in his environment. Still, he sets up realistic-objective criteria for verification of his faith. He expects that it will be validated by achieving at least some of its objectives. In this way, faith is defined more exactly as the moral certainty that God will assist those who fulfill His commandments, will “establish” the work of their hands, and will give them force in the world that He creates and governs. This is their righteousness before Him and their recompense. We emphasize again: there is no doubt that a portion of the recompense that the believer expects is found in the joy of fulfilling the commandments and feeling the closeness of God Who accompanies him. These are internal values, rich in meaning, which the believer will not give up even in the face of great disappointments in his external life-destiny. But the believer cannot content himself with just this. He must see the “righteousness” of faith perpetuated, otherwise both the joy of fulfilling the commandment and the feeling of God’s presence that it brings will be deceptive. In the last analysis, the test will be in the question of whether the governance of God Who commands His loyal followers achieves in their life environment the same “righteousness” that He demands of them. We summarize briefly the argument to this point: Faith as moral certainty in God’s righteous governance of His world is based on two kinds of knowledge, rooted in direct experience and imparted values that have tangible existence in the pattern of living. On the one hand, there is a body of knowledge that establishes, validates and strengthens faith, such as a person’s sense of God’s presence from the renewal of

100

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

creation in oneself and one’s surroundings, and one’s self-knowledge as a spiritual creature created by God, as well as the memories of foundational events in which God revealed Himself directly to an individual or one’s people, redeemed them from oppressors and guided them, and the perpetuation of proper orders of life in the society that observes God’s commandments. On the other hand, there is a body of knowledge that documents the perpetual gap between what is to be expected on the basis of the merit of the believing person and reality as it actually exists, in man himself, in the surrounding world, and in human society. Faith itself is a kind of intellectual, volitional, emotional, and practical activity, supported by the first kind of knowledge in order to grapple with the second kind of knowledge. It strives to bridge the gap by means of its own resources. Thus it becomes in itself a primary mode of “justification of God.” It is a justification that is expressed in internal and external reality, generated by its very reliance on God and fulfillment of His commandments. At the same time, this faith creates additional “righteousness”: the righteousness of the believer before God his Creator and commander, the righteousness whose source is in deeds intended to bridge the gap in reality and justify his Creator. This “righteousness” is thus subject to perpetual testing. It is a test in which faith is tested against reality, for which the believer bears responsibility together with his God. Here, then, is the simple but wonderful paradox embodied in faith: on the strength of the knowledge on which it is based, and on the strength of its essential character as a kind of activity, it starts from a position of absolute certainty. It is its own reward. In the long run, it is continually tested and re-tested by the measure of its success in overcoming the gap and justifying God as Creator and governor. In that respect, the answer embodied in faith itself to the question of God’s justice is neither sufficient nor absolute. It is conditional on the event that the expectation that starts out as certain will indeed be fulfilled in the long run, and in any case will not be totally falsified by a contradictory outcome. For if that happens, if the gap between expectation and reality is in fact widened, the believer will not be

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

101

able to find meaning in the joy of fulfilling the mitzvah and in feeling God’s presence. These, too, will ring hollow in the falsification of his faith that his deeds should attain their goal in reality. Or else the question of God’s justice will return in sharper fashion, requiring the mobilization of additional resources of faith in order to overcome it. As we come to inquire how the question of God’s justice becomes raised explicitly in the long run, on the foundation of the prior faith that responded to the question originally, we must again emphasize the fact that was so prominent earlier: faith is maintained by a delicate, fluctuating balance between the knowledge rooted in the original experience that constitutes and validates it, and the knowledge that subjects it to the test of actualization. This being so, the question of theodicy as dealt with in the Bible and other sources of religious thought has a presupposition of faith, rooted in formative and supporting experiential knowledge. Without that presupposition, the question of God’s justice would never see the light of day. This should be self-evident. However, we must emphasize it in the face of the incomprehension characteristic among our contemporaries, who tend to assume that a convincing answer to this question ought to be a prior condition of faith. On the contrary, faith is a prior condition that this question, which is part and parcel of faith itself, should be raised in the first place, and that the believer should find the resources necessary to answer it. Furthermore, it is clear that the question is raised within the shifting balance between the experiential knowledge that constitutes and maintains faith and the experiential knowledge that challenges and undermines it, not outside this process. In other words, the question is not rooted only in the absolute weight of the anomalous event that signals the deep and growing gap between the believer’s expectation based on his righteousness and actual reality, but in the relative weight of the pain and injustice in the disturbing event compared with that of the experiences that constitute and strengthen faith in the soul of the believer. We should thus emphasize that when we speak of grappling with the question of God’s justice, we are speaking of emotional fluctuation and a struggle of the will and the mind on both sides of the threshold

102

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

of personal tolerance. In this respect, the big question is: “What is the magnitude of the disruption, pain, and disappointment that the believer is able to bear on the basis of the certainty that was generated in him by the experience, knowledge, and formative values that established his faith?” It is clear that the corresponding question (“When does the challenge of an event that appears unjust in fact— a painful event that disappoints the expectation of the believer on the basis of his righteousness—exceed the threshold of his tolerance?”) has no single, predictable answer. The threshold of tolerance of different believers is an individual matter. It can change even with the fluctuating circumstances of a single individual’s life. Much is dependent on an individual’s fortitude, will-power, vitality, and activity. Much is dependent, too, on personal sensitivity to various kinds of physical and emotional suffering. No less than these, the height of the threshold is dependent on the power and relative extent of the events that put the individual to the test, within the flow of the events of his life. The question is whether he will receive and bear the personal and national calamities that come to him as “trials,” or whether he will see them as a refutation that can only be dealt with through discovering some new justifying truth, will depend in decisive measure on the difference between the magnitude of suffering and disappointment that he was already prepared to accept on the basis of his previous life-experience, and the magnitude of suffering and disappointment that the present calamity brings, whether it in fact deviates significantly to what he was accustomed to expect in actuality. First, we deduce from this the desired conclusion, that there is no ground for the sophistical argument raised by ultra-religious theologians,4 especially in our day, after the Holocaust: “From the standpoint of divine justice, there is no difference between what we experience as a great evil or a small evil. Divine justice must always be absolute. Therefore, an explanation that enables us to bear minor suffering is sufficient for major suffering as well: we have no right to 4 But also negatively, by skeptics (LL).

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

103

criticize the ways of God in His world!” On the contrary, since faith originally comes to bridge a given gap between expectation and reality, and from the very outset it balances confirming experiences against disconfirming experiences, the distinctions that the believer draws, from his subjective standpoint, among those experiences that tend to disconfirm his faith in divine justice, with respect to their magnitude and the degree of calamity, pain and injustice that they represent, is of decisive importance. Note that we are speaking of the tolerance-capacity of the believer, a tolerance that is part and parcel of the emotional and volitional power of his conviction, and not only the logical force of the justifying argument that he can recite as an incantation over his wound. But it seems that from what we said above we can also derive an essential conclusion that is relevant to the outbreak of the question of God’s justice from the recesses of primal faith to the visible plane where we see faith challenged: when and how does such an outbreak take place? As we said, the threshold of toleration varies from one believer to another and from one period of life to another; nevertheless, we can determine that this primal certainty will generally be called into question when the believer encounters dimensions of evil that appear to exceed in extent, magnitude, and quality everything that he has seen and suffered in the past, when something happens for which he is totally unprepared, something that embodies new and astonishing dimensions of evil. In the presence of “trials” that embody evil of such dimensions, the expectation of affirmation of his “justice” by God is not only disappointed, but is overturned and utterly falsified: in place of the good that ought to have taken place as the ethical consequence of his life-pattern and deeds, comes a “punishment” that stands in no conceivable relation to sins that the believer can attribute to himself. In such situations, the believer will harbor in his heart feelings of bitterness and rage. He will rebel against his fate. He will rebel involuntarily against his God. He will rail and scream against him. He will vehemently demand justice. This is the moment of crisis when faith is in danger of collapsing. The anomalous experiences, in their searing immediacy, may overpower the force of conviction of the positive experiential

104

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

knowledge that was the basis of faith, and the believer’s absolute reliance on God will then sink into an abyss of despair and disillusionment—unless the believer can succeed in finding in the depths of his will, mind, and feelings a response that is a kind of discovery of new resources of strength, previously unknown, to reconstitute his faith on a stronger basis.

Summary 1. At the start of this discussion we stated as a given that “if we wish to understand the question of theodicy and the standard ways of dealing with it in the past and present, we should start with an investigation of the substance of faith within the broader historical context of belief in God.” In summary, there is thus required a quintessence of this theoretical issue to provide a general context for re-examining the question. 2. We emphasize again the historical character of the question: “Every contemporary theoretical grappling with the question of theodicy is a perspectival grappling with the problem through its stages of development. It raises a question about the whole path traveled, it bases itself on it, and if it succeeds, it justifies in the present the continued engagement by reaffirming the previous solutions, but from a more inclusive viewpoint.” 3. Faith is a kind of moral relation, a relation of absolute mutual certainty, relying on values of justice as criteria for proper conduct before God, based on two kinds of basic knowledge: revealed and observed knowledge of God, or experience of God, and knowledge of the nature of created reality as given, including the gap within it between what it ought to be according to the divine vision, and what really is. 4. Since faith has its basis in recognizing the gap between the ideal and reality, whether on account of the shortcomings in the nature of the world or because of the egoistic human yetzer, one can see it not only as a theoretical interpretation of reality, and not only as a kind of principled desire, but also as a kind of spiritual and practical activity, designed to bridge the ideal and the real through a reality

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

105

that is itself creative. In this way, it produces, in addition to the righteousness that all creatures—including human beings—have before God (to live in goodness) an additional kind of “righteousness,” that the believer hopes to have ratified by God: a righteousness based on deeds that are intended to bridge the gap in creation by the will and command of God. This faith is not only a relation of mutual reliance based on absolute trust, but (starting through that) a relation of mutual testing. The believer recognizes that God tests him in fulfillment of His commandments, but the believer also “tests” his God through his absolute expectation that justice should prevail. His faith is not conditional at the outset; however, if his expectations are falsified, it becomes conditional in the long run. Since faith is continually tested, it is also liable to collapse. 5. It follows from this that the question of theodicy, which assumes perfect knowledge of God as a precondition, is generated out of conflict. We are speaking of emotional volatility and struggles of will and thought from both sides of the threshold of personal tolerance. On the one hand, the big question is: what is the magnitude of disturbance, pain, and disappointment that the believer can bear on the basis of the life-experiences, knowledge, and transmitted values that are the basis of his faith? In other words, the question of whether he can absorb and bear the personal and national tragedies that come to him as trials, or see them as a refutation of faith that can only be dealt with through the revelation of some new justifying truth, will be dependent on the critical measure of the difference between the magnitude of suffering and disappointment that he was previously ready to tolerate, on the basis of his previous life experience, and the magnitude of suffering and disappointment that comes to him now, whether it truly seems to exceed what was anticipated in the reality to which he had been accustomed. There is thus no basis for the argument that in the relation between the believer and his God there need not be difference in gravity between a smaller or greater evil. From a logical standpoint, both indeed impugn the divine justice, which should be

106

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

absolute. Logically, the same reason that excuses a small evil should excuse a greater evil as well. Thus logic dictates, but this is not the logic to apply to the question as it arises in the experience of the believer, in the tension that he experiences between the knowledge that supports his faith and the knowledge that refutes it. A “small” evil—i.e. an evil that is not out of the order in the life experience within which his faith was formed, an evil that one is ready to accept on the basis of the consciousness of the gap between real and ideal in creation—does not disturb the certainty of faith whose source is in a powerful revelatory experience or values that are strongly instilled and experienced. It is not so with a major evil, that the believer was not ready to accept on the basis of previous awareness. We can conclude that in general the primal certainty may be disrupted when the believer encounters dimensions of evil that appear to him to exceed in scope, power, and substance everything that he had seen in the past, when something occurs for which he was not prepared, something that embodies new and surprising dimensions of evil. Confronted with trials that embody such massive evil, the expectation for affirmation of his righteousness by God is not only disappointed, but it is overturned and falsified. In such situations the believer will harbor feelings of bitterness and rage in his heart. He will rebel against his fate—unless he can succeed in finding in the depths of his will, his mind, and his emotions a response that is a kind of discovery of new resources of strength, unknown to him previously, which enable him to strengthen his faith even more. 6. The question is raised in the course of encountering extraordinary suffering in two domains of experience: (a) experience in the fate of an individual as a material, natural being, and (b) experience in a person’s social, historical-biographical destiny. 7. The Biblical grappling with the problem in the first domain is focused in the book of Job. Its solution is found in discovery of the absolute, eternal value of the human individual, from immediate experience of God’s love. It seems that despite the many varieties

Faith: Its Trusting and Testing—The Question of God’s Righteousness

107

of this answer, the problem remains essentially the same, and it recurs and is expressed repeatedly from the internal resources of faith itself: raising the knowledge of God’s presence that is at the foundation of faith to the level of an absolute value. The fear of God becomes the love of God, which is answered with love. 8. The engagement in the second domain is connected to that in the first, maybe following from it by necessity, or maybe graver because here is focused not only the expectation of a loving divine presence that endows human existence with absolute value, but also the expectation of a tangible revelation of divine sovereignty in the world, especially in human affairs. Here the believer runs up against not just the disappointment of a hope, but the phenomenon of intentional opposition to the divine will, and extreme suffering that is inflicted on him on account of his faith in God and on account of his performing God’s will. 9. The ways of justifying God in the Bible in the historical domain are all rooted in the conception of God as world-ruler, sovereign over all humanity, and especially over His people Israel. The essential idea is that the fate of individuals, groups, and peoples, especially Israel, are determined by the principle of reward and punishment. But we must emphasize that punishment is conceived as an educational tool. Its essential objective is to deter sin in advance if possible, and to bring about amendment of the sinner if deterrence is not possible. Therefore, it assumes a substantive connection between the character and degree of the sin and the character and degree of the punishment, and only when it is possible to discover such a connection can the painful event be considered a just punishment. 10. God is indeed described in the Bible as a jealous and vengeful God. These are kingly qualities. However, they are justified in two ways, first in recognizing the necessity of harsh deterrence, and secondly inasmuch as jealousy is an expression of love. Even punishment is a manifestation of love, from which kindness and mercy will then follow.

108

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

11. Justification of God by the doctrine of “hiding God’s face” is part of the same educational outlook in relation to God and His people. When the people rely on other powers than God, and are caught in the unavoidable consequences of their error and lack of faith, God abandons them to learn their lesson—up to a certain point. It follows that this is the appropriate punishment for the nature of the sin, and a prerequisite for reform. 12. The Bible generally articulated the same approach to theodicy that is originally found in the first conception of the faith idea. However, it also offers us the first instances in which the threshold of toleration, both personal and national, is exceeded. Faced with the anomaly of social injustice in the Israelite body politic, and with the equal anomaly of the dolorous fate of the chosen people Israel among the idolatrous nations, the later prophets cried out to Heaven in protest. 13. Their utopian messianic solution (which differed from the Torah’s idea of redemption, directed at restoration of the original ideal state of affairs) exemplifies the primary characteristics of the response that this question demanded: revelation of a consoling truth that could outweigh the anomalous suffering, which had challenged faith and threatened to refute it. It did so by exalting the expectation of the future proportionately. But to do so, one required revelation of previously hidden knowledge in the very throes of the calamity—a knowledge that justified the anomalous evil itself as a necessary means to attaining the vision that would guarantee the reward. The added good must therefore be found to lie potentially in the depths of the abnormal evil itself. Only thus could it be justified by God’s judgment. 14. All these ideas comprised, and still comprise to this day, the background and context for knowing how to grapple with the question of God’s justice, as it grew more acute from one period of Jewish history to the next. They can also be found at the basis of raising the hard question and grappling with it in the face of the most extreme challenge of absolute evil, as manifested in the Holocaust.

History in the Postmodern Age

The “End” of History in World War II

T

he philosophies and ideologies that shaped Western civilization with respect to its economic, social, cultural, and political development, in the age dubbed “modern” by its ruling elite, were all stamped by the concepts of historical thought. The duration of existence of any civilization—that is to say, its cultural existence, which establishes its physical imprint on its natural environment and is preserved in the collective memory of the people that creates it and the neighboring peoples influenced by it—can be defined as the history of the civilization and of the people that lived their collective life through it. This corresponds to the definition of the cultural life of any person as his biography. History was thus conceived as a physical-spiritual entity that extended in space and time, and one assumed that it had its own proper regular pattern, whose material source was in nature and whose spiritual source was in human reason—that is to say, in the political institutions, processes, and events that occurred in its history and shaped its existence. In this sense, the collective consciousness and memory of the creators and maintainers of a civilization are to be identified with its historical existence. The documented record of that civilization—its historiography—is the instrument intended to preserve its memory and to transmit it from generation to generation.

110

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

The “modernity” of this age (which began in the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment) signifies a change that occurred in the understanding of history, namely, the tendency to discern its developmental character and to identify the source of its inner law in man himself, not in divine inspiration as the source of his reason. The elite that guided the formation of civilization in this age defined its autonomous, rational regularity as “progress,” referring to the perpetual process of correction, improvement, and perfection: the increase of material and spiritual abundance that would be expressed in the good life of the majority of citizens of the state, ready to contribute to the elevation of moral relations and the enrichment of spiritual creativity. In all these respects, the idea of modernity resonated with the aspiration for realizing an ideal of perfection toward which humanity was approaching gradually by virtue of a causal, teleological necessity. The matter in which the project of civilization was embodied did not indeed allow the achievement of perfection as a final, permanent state, but history attested to the effort for overall approximation of the ordained goal, for this was humanity’s mission in the world. Consciousness of rational progress dawned in the Renaissance and survived until the Second World War. It was strongly entrenched in institutions that outlined this path, despite the disturbances that awakened criticism, dissent, and doubts. Of course there was no consensus on the details of its description, the structure, definitions of the principles, the proper direction, and its overall meaning. Despite this, consensus was achieved regarding the method of writing history. It was this method that guided the vision of investigation, description, and interpretation, and that shaped the discourse of historical writers and philosophers who defined and interpreted its values, its inherent regularity and its goals throughout this period. Major controversies took place in this period, but they reinforced and did not upset the consciousness of an all-embracing and continuous historical flow. The following evaluation also enjoyed broad agreement: World War II undermined and destroyed the project of modern civilization both physically and spiritually, and it therefore undermined the

History in the Postmodern Age

111

consensus of professional historical scholars and writers regarding the tools, principles, and methods of research. The circle of discourse that the founders of the Enlightenment movement had created was rent asunder and split into several competing camps. In the process, a battlefront was formed in which the warring camps confronted each other over the substantive question: Was history, in the sense that the modern age gave to the term, a real entity or imaginary? Did the organized social life of human beings take place in their own specially defined time, or only in the physical and biological time of nature itself? Was there a time that embraced the duration of the being and functioning of civilization? Was there any kind of regularity that distinguished cultural existence from physical or biological existence? If so, was it possible to speak of “ages” that occurred objectively, outside the theories of historians who depicted them, or outside the thoughts of the leaders? Was there indeed a period of Antiquity, of the Middle Ages, of Modernity? Or were these perhaps nothing more than the fancies of court historians, who served the political interests of nations and their leaders?1 This critical misgiving did not prevent the nay-sayers from arguing that the age in which humanity was living from the end of the Second World War onward was a new age, to be defined—why not?—by its demarcation from the previous age, the leaders-inventors of which had defined as the “modern” age. Clearly, then, the succeeding age should be called “postmodern.” We may deduce from this forced terminology that the scholars and writers of history could neither desist from their work nor depart from the most general frameworks 1 These skeptical doubts had their roots in Marx’s analysis of “false consciousness” and Nietzsche’s general skepticism (applied to history in his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”). They simmered in postwar historiography but came to acute expression in the “hermeneutic of suspicion” of the French deconstructionist writers, especially Jean-François Lyotard (who in The Postmodern Condition defined postmodernity as “incredulity regarding metanarratives”) and Michel Foucault. From these writers these attitudes were then recirculated among a whole generation of historians, in the United States, in Europe, and in Israel (especially among the “post-Zionists”). Among these, the importance of Edward Said (especially his critique of Western-centric attitudes in his groundbreaking Orientalism) deserves special mention (LL).

112

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

of cultural consciousness that had shaped their enterprise previously, even when they sought to deny its application to the reality of their times. Paradoxically, the denial of written history’s reality entered into the writing of history. In any case, it seems that this fact permits the continued polemical dialogue between those historians who believe that history exists and those who deny its reality.

The Historical Background to Denial of the Idea of Progress Even the deniers of the concept of the “history of the modern age” open their inquiry by presenting the question in view of its historical background. It is as if History in her majestic glory arose and started to wonder whether she existed in her own right. Or perhaps this took place only in the feverish brains of historians, who invented her for the sake of their chauvinist regimes! In any case, why and how did the Second World War undermine the consensus that united the writers and students of history during the age that it brought to an end? We find that both the believers and deniers of history agree fundamentally on the same answer. World War II was an ideological war. It broke out against the background of a double crisis—social and national—that had been going on in Western civilization from the start of the industrial revolution, on whose economic basis arose the centralized nation-state (also called “the modern state”). The war was the initiative of the leaders of the revolutionary mass movements that had come to power in the first decades of the century. These movements conscripted their masses in the name of two contradictory ideologies that represented the material and spiritual interests of competing social classes and warring nation-states. The conflict-laden conflation of social interests and national interests awakened the aspiration to impose a comprehensive, uniform order that would unite humanity throughout the world. In this way the problems that frustrate progress could find their solution. Thus, two contradictory ideologies arose that strove to achieve the same goal in two different ways, based in competing geographical centers. The Fascist-Nazi camp and the Communists were at odds with each other, but they made common cause against the liberals and the Social

History in the Postmodern Age

113

Democrats, in an effort to lead history to its final goal, namely an ideal world order, even though it was clear that the definition of the values that would define that ideal remained the subject of deep debate. The result of the war was the absolute failure of the mass movements and the political organizations that strove for supremacy and fought each other under the banners of the competing ideologies. It was thus possible to say that the ideologies in whose name they fought refuted each other through their apocalyptic confrontation. By the end of the war it became clear that none of them solved, or was able to solve, the problems that had brought about the double socialnational crisis in Western civilization. In the wake of their failure, none of them could serve the task of reconstruction from the physical and spiritual destruction that the war inflicted on all European civilization—that is to say, on all the nations, classes, and ideological movements that had participated in it. The proponents of the Communist ideology continued to hold onto power in the Soviet Union and its satellites for another generation, whereas the proponents of another branch of that ideology assumed power in China just at that time. However, it was clear to all that the Communist government survived only by its shameful betrayal of the idealism for whose sake it had been established, not from any success in realizing its ideology. Thus reconstruction of the nations from the terrible destruction could not occur until the totalitarian regime had been replaced by one whose values, policies, and methods were opposite in character. In order to understand the connection between discrediting the ideologies of the war and the crisis in the historic consciousness of postmodernism, we must re-emphasize the connection between all the competing ideologies and the modern conception of history. All the ideologies tried to prove their correctness by basing themselves on the methodological foundations of “historicism,” that is to say, the assumption that history has an inherent teleological regularity that is manifested in its global processes and can be studied by scientific methods. On such a basis it should be possible to establish a forecast of the future and to deduce conclusions pertaining to the means by which designated objectives can be realized. Moreover, each of the

114

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

ideologies was based on a comprehensive “historiosophy,” at whose core was the faith in the inevitability of progress, though without ignoring the pitfalls along the way. These historiosophies were marked by dialectic, according to which the march of progress was not a simple, absolute process but the weighted result of the struggles between opposing forces operating in history in order to develop and complete opposing aspects of the civilization that was intended to supply the many complex needs of human beings. The conflicts, wars, and revolutions were necessary, and despite the suffering and destruction that they caused, they were overall positive. By overcoming the problems they pushed humanity forward through complex syntheses that balanced the opposing forces in a harmony that would be achieved at the end of the long way. Of course, most of these historiosophies assumed that Western civilization—the highest achievement of all humanity—had completed most of its journey. The severity of the revolutions and wars were proof of this. In the very near future, the vision of peace would be realized, and all nations would rally under the banner of the correct ideology. The results of the war discredited these ideologies unequivocally, and showed not only that these particular competing ideologies had failed, but that ideology itself, as a methodology and political tool, was by its nature an erroneous way of thinking.2 It was not a proper basis for describing, analyzing, and directing historical processes. It was clear that if ideology as such had failed, then the philosophies of history that had lent it support were also discredited. Clearly, then, the historiography that had been written on those assumptions was erroneous or distorted. These conclusions became crystallized as a consensus among the ruling elites of the countries of the Free World. They had achieved military victory in the war, but the price was so great and painful that it placed in doubt (except in the United States) the political, social, and economic meaning of the victory. One should recall 2 See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

History in the Postmodern Age

115

especially that none of them (again, excepting the United States) achieved their goals. The social and national crisis that occurred in western civilization in modern times had not been solved. In point of fact, it continues to this day, in increasing severity. It was clear that the problematic military victory had not been achieved by virtue of the ideologies of the victorious nations, but despite them—maybe because they were less extreme, less dogmatic, more open to pragmatic considerations, and more responsive to the general interests of the peoples than the ideologies of their totalitarian opponents. The conclusion was emphatic: for the sake of reconstruction and true progress, one required a different policy, based on a different way of thinking, that did not impose forced dictates on reality but was responsive to its needs and capabilities.

A New Point of Departure: Scientific Technological Progress Is Certain For the governments that remained in place, the victory provided a point of departure that had stood at the basis of the historical thought of the prior age. The idea of progress of the dialectical historiosophies and ideologies had indeed failed in its predictions for society, the economy, ethics, and nationalism. However, a non-dialectical progress— a continuous evolution—was manifest in the domains of experimental science, technology, communication, organization, governance, and control of the masses. This progress was based on achievements in natural sciences and in the social sciences (sociology, economics, and psychology) and could be demonstrated by objective measuring tools. In the productive processes of material civilization, it was this kind of progress that decided the outcome of the war. Paradoxically, this demonstration was rooted in the power of destruction that modern armaments had unleashed, in the organization of their mighty armed forces and in the efficient conduct of war. The extent and elemental character of the war’s destruction demonstrated that since the industrial revolution science and technology had progressed by leaps and bounds, and during the war the technology of armaments, transportation, and communication had made a quantum jump. It was therefore

116

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

possible to see in them a promise for the future, if these achievements could only be directed to positive, desirable goals. In short, scientific, technological, administrative, communicative, productive, and commercial progress overcame the ideologies that had reigned before the war and took their place. The true victors in the war were the scientists, the technicians, the administrators, the experts in transportation and communication, the sociologists, the economists, and the politicians who availed themselves of these experts. They, the “technocrats,” became the leaders who designed and realized the programs of recovery and reconstruction from the war’s destruction. At first they followed the guidelines of the liberal and social-democratic regimes of the nations that won the war, but they quickly went beyond those guidelines and directed economic, social, and political progress in other directions, toward other institutional structures, working for the entrenchment of private capitalism, the free-market corporate economy, and the other characteristics of the “global village,” the framework for conceiving present-day history, representing itself as “postmodern.” It is natural that the assumptions and theories that the new scientific and technocratic elites invented in order to establish their control and policies in the domains of economy, society, state, and culture were no longer called “ideology.” They wished to speak instead of the sciences of society, politics, and culture (especially economics, sociology, political science, jurisprudence, and theory of management). It was clear that the scientific theories supplanted ideology in order to realize the idea of progress that had shaped modernity from its inception. The paradox that is implied by the definition of the era that began after the war—that is, the postmodern era—can be explained on this basis. After the failed ideologically-tainted modernity would begin a different modernity, more realistic, more reliable— scientific modernity, or postmodernity. The assumption was that science and technology, which had emerged victorious from the war, would guarantee the success of a perfected civilization that would arise, by means of tools whose effectiveness had been proved beyond a doubt.

History in the Postmodern Age

117

Therefore the first critique that was directed at the principal ideologies that had reigned before the war, and at the conception of history that underlay them, did not immediately undermine the conception of history as a comprehensive cultural entity that manifested various rules of progress. (In this vein we should remark that there were intellectuals outside the institutions who criticized historicism and the ideologies that resorted to it. They refuted it before World War I but did not succeed in convincing the academic institutions and political leadership that relied on it because the leadership did not wish to give up the proven utility of ideology as a tool for leading the masses.) The idea of progress, the motor that determined the goal of history, did not collapse immediately. In academic institutions they only arrived at the conclusion that the realization of the “correct” ideologies was indeed not a foregone necessity. They recognized that there were setbacks and defeats in history, and that progress was possible only through major, well-considered efforts, and its realization was conditional on democratic choice and on pragmatic policies. In any case, it was still possible to distinguish between the prior era that was conducted on the basis of the conception of history of the previous generation, and the age that started to conduct itself on the basis of the new generation’s conception of history, with concepts of different kinds of progress: the old progress that failed, and the new progress that had a chance to succeed if it would be examined scrupulously with the help of scientific tools.

The Flaws in Pragmatism, and the Appearance of Postmodernism as an Alternative Ideology The consistent methodological and philosophical undermining of the historicist concept of progress and of the concept of history underlying it started after the war, once it became clear that the pragmatic liberal and social-democratic policy of the countries of Europe after the war also stood under the threat of empirical refutation. It appeared that pragmatism, too, was liable to turn into another ideology, disguised as science. Looking past the impressive achievements of the countries of the Free World, in the process of their reconstruction from the war’s

118

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

destruction, one saw looming dangers—ethical, social, and political, both internal and external. Not only did scientific and technological progress fail in repairing the social and national crisis that had begun before the war, but it intensified the crisis through its successes, which left the strong stronger and the weak weaker. One needed a consistent critique that should uncover the root-source of the new ideologies that came disguised as scientific theories, prescribing a mistaken policy, despite the honest effort to overcome them. One therefore needed a deeper, more detailed perspective, and in the course of expounding it one felt the need to lay an appropriate foundation for truly pragmatic decisions, so that it should be possible to overcome the new crises. The postmodern theory also had a philosophical foundation, the fruit of innovative developments in the theory of hermeneutics of literary texts and documents.3 The “new historians” who have recourse to these methods do not represent themselves as academics interested in pure research, especially because in light of their critique they no longer believe in pure research. In their view, manifest or concealed interests lie at the basis of any kind of research, and therefore they proclaim their interests proudly. They are motivated to provide a social or political critique of the institutions that govern their countries. They identify with exploited classes, deprived groups or oppressed peoples. They see themselves as representing also those individuals who feel that the ruling institutions do not permit them to develop their personalities or express them through free creative activity. Let us emphasize that this identification with the aspiration of the independent personality to innovative originality and full freedom of expression stands at the root of their critical rebellion and dissent from the official consensus. It applies also to their identification with those who are exploited and oppressed by all manner of institutions. This is the most important and prominent motive for their critical attitude toward all institutions, including the academic institution that dictates its own accepted methodological rules. It motivates the critique that the new historians 3 The reference here is to Jacques Derrida and the Yale school of literary criticism in the 1970s and 1980s.

History in the Postmodern Age

119

address to the liberal society—the society that nurtured them— because it promised full freedom, but does not deliver it in actuality. Their identification with deprived social strata and with deprived minorities in their country expresses the basic personal stance of the revisionist scholar, who highlights his anti-institutional originality by taking a position opposed to what is accepted in his country, his society, or even in his academic institution.

The Change in the Status of History in Public Consciousness: “Instant History” In order to understand the essence of the crisis taking place in the community of historical scholars and writers, one must first consider a change that occurs in the status of history in the consciousness of the ruling elites of the present age in western countries and Israel, as well as in the organized collective consciousness that is expressed in the curricula of the educational establishment on all levels, in the deliberation of those who shape policy in various areas of the cultural life, and thus in the circles of discourse in communications and literature. In all these areas, we see a marginalization of the study and interest in history compared to the status that it had in the past— when it was an integrating humanistic discipline that shaped the image of the culture in the eyes of its students and creators. Today, one generally appreciates history as a remote perspectival view of things, arousing curiosity and contributing to broadening one’s knowledge, but no longer a discipline that shapes cultural consciousness, and certainly not a discipline on which one bases official policy even in the social and cultural domains. To put it more sharply, one can say that the leaders of the “post” age are no longer interested so much in the temporal significance of their age, despite the differences and connections between it and the ages prior to it. The quantity of information pertaining to all ages continues to increase in our time in no less measure than the increase of all kinds of information in all areas. If professional historians today know far more than their colleagues in prior ages knew, the public interest in the accumulated information and research is less, in direct

120

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

proportion to the rhythm of our culture. As for most of the ruling elites, history, in its broad and inclusive sense, is a marginal topic that does not pertain to their daily concerns. The members of the present elites do not consult history, they do not examine its lessons, nor do they analyze the present reality in its broad historical contexts. Even if they learned history in school (usually in a superficial and truncated way), they do not remember it or bring it to mind when they deal with the questions of the present. To be precise, we are speaking here of historiography in the broad, comprehensive sense, not in the restricted sense of what is called “instant history.” But it would seem that the very appearance of the discipline that goes by this name after World War II illustrates what we have just said. “Instant history” concerns itself with the scope of the present, namely the duration of time from the start of an action to its completion, but not on the past that is no longer directly relevant to the present. Every perceived present in an individual’s or group’s existence is measured by an activity that extends from a beginning point that is preserved in current memory to an ending point that is anticipated by current projection. In this sense, every present carries the past and future with it, and takes place between them. This is the minimum of historical memory without which it is impossible to begin or complete any cultural activity, for a cultural activity is voluntary and directed to objectives defined in advance on the basis of evaluating a situation. Of course, the minimum required quota of history will increase or decrease in keeping with the length of time needed to complete the activity, its social extent and importance in the view of its national or international audience. Instant history is interested in the broadest extent of social, economic, and political activities, or in creative cultural processes of national or international importance. It is vitally relevant and serves as a basis for dealing systematically with current challenges.4 4 The plethora of books generated by sensational events—the Kennedy assassination, the Six-Day War, Watergate, 9/11, and the like—are legion. Every reader will be able to point to other similar examples in recent memory.

History in the Postmodern Age

121

Interest in this necessary minimum of historical knowledge persists in our time, and is increasingly widespread. This progress occurs at the minimum level, including information that pertains only to the recent past that has direct influence on current events and has bearing on the forecast of the immediate future, toward which current activity is directed, unlike the utopian future of the old historicism. All this is evidence of the decline of interest in history in the classic sense, whose concern extended to the entire past by virtue of its being “the past,” and to the entire future by virtue of its being “the future.” It appears today that interest in that legacy and its transmission is neglected, in favor of focusing on the challenges of the present and the objectives it embodies.

The Change in Functioning of the Social Sciences and Its Implications for Understanding History The most important expression of the phenomenon that I have described pertains to the functioning of the social sciences, and consequently that of the humanities. A comparative examination of the methods of research, description, and interpretation of these sciences in our time and in the period before World War II will demonstrate that historicism based itself on the social and humanistic sciences as these developed in the modern period. It is natural that it relied on the methodologies of these sciences in order to fashion a credible historical picture. Before the war the social and humanistic sciences were grounded in historical research and on a philosophical view of the process of evolution of the state, civilization, and culture. On this basis they sought to explain the general trends that shaped the face of the present with respect to the realization of certain visions of the future. The social sciences combined broad anthropological and historiographic knowledge with statistical research of present conditions. By contrast, after the war the social sciences became reconstituted as disciplines whose domain of research was limited to the present, based primarily on statistical surveys of various sectors of reality, as well as the dynamic that transforms it in the course of its evolution in time. The declared rationale of this tendency was the desire to emulate

122

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

the exact natural sciences, based on experiment and measurement, in order to achieve the same degree of reliability and authority. It should be obvious that the methodologies of the social and humanistic sciences cannot be identical to those of the natural sciences. They can only approximate or imitate them. More precisely, the social and humanistic sciences can adopt the method of the natural sciences to the degree that their different subject-matters permit. For the difference between the subject-matters of nature and society is substantive, and the manner of their relation to time and space is qualitatively different. The natural sciences study objects of nature that exist in physical or biological space and time, whereas the social sciences (and even more, the humanities) study the actions and creations of human beings that express their desires and values as thinking, feeling subjects, and their products are measured in the artificial space of civilization and in the volitional-teleological time of history. These are dimensions of space and time that bump up against physical space and physical time. They comprise space and time, but they are different by virtue of being an internal space and time that describe and measure the experiences of human beings, which have their origin in their encounters with nature, with fellow-persons, and with groups, within creative processes that are not dictated by the causal determinism that rules in nature, but by the free choice by which human beings are endowed, in a certain arena that indeed is defined and delimited by physical time and space. As we said, these differences are substantive. Ignoring them brings one to ignore the distinctive subject-matters of the social and humanistic sciences (emotions, thoughts, aspirations, volitions, and relationships). Therefore the gap between the social-humanistic sciences and the natural sciences cannot be bridged. It can be reduced to a certain degree by the methods of instant history, that is, by isolating different narratives, and measuring the speed and directional change of social or political processes and the mutual influence of such processes on each other. These perspectives are external to the human beings who cause these processes and live them.

History in the Postmodern Age

123

It thus appears that the methodological shift in the social sciences brought about not only the waning of interest in history in the broad sense, but also a change in the conception of history and the disciplines through which it is studied. Under these circumstances, it is natural that the question arose whether history, as an inclusive timespan or an inclusive civilizational-cultural activity, exists outside the subjective thought and memory of its writers. If so, is history a proper subject for scientific study? Or is it perhaps only a metaphor or myth invented out of the subjective memories of those who seek to shape it as a commanding legacy to satisfy various established interests— religious, political, socio-economic, or educational? It is no wonder that the new historians argue both these claims side by side. It appears to them that the historical methodologies of the new social sciences are not fit for objective study of long time spans, comprehensive political processes, or broad cultural phenomena. It is no wonder, then, that they can no longer see with their mind’s eye or produce from their memories the history of which the classic modern historians spoke in the past. Since they do not see it, it is clear to them that it never existed, except as a fable.

Adapting Modern Historiography to the Challenge of the Social Sciences Not all today’s historians agree with this radical critique. Only those who style themselves the “new historians” espouse it.5 But their critique poses a challenge that cannot be ignored. All who engage in 5 “The New Historians” is a term specifically applied to a school of Israeli historians (Benny Morris, Tom Segev, and others) who since 1988 have proposed a narrative of the Israeli-Arab conflict diverging significantly from the traditional Zionist narrative. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historians. These remarks apply equally to contemporary revisionist historians in many other countries and other fields of study, as well as historical studies that do not have a particular ideological axe to grind but are nevertheless characterized by the specialization, micro-analysis, and loss of broad perspective that Schweid describes here. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism and http://www.historians. org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2003/revisionist-historians (LL).

124

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

history and do not want to give up its universal scope must deal with this challenge. After the collapse of historicism, there was no escape from methodological adaptation to the claim that the totality of historical events accrues gradually. Arbitrary chance played a major role, and one could not determine general rules defined as the “laws of history” and argue that they determined the general shape of historical development. Different perspectives revealed different pictures and explanations, even for those sequences of events that were well-documented and seemed to present a continuous narrative. At this stage of the discussion one can examine three kinds of methodological adaptation: (1) piling on more detailed information; (2) narrowing the fields of research; (3) developing objective criteria.

1. There was first of all a redoubling of the effort to discover more information of all kinds about the past under investigation, by perfecting the methods of extracting historical information from all kinds of documentation. This effort was quite productive. Historical researchers discovered new sources of information and learned to wrest more information from existing sources, whether intentionally reported or unwittingly revealed. It was nevertheless clear that this method of gathering data was an interpretative procedure, for the more such information grew, so grew the controversies on how to interpret it and combine it into the overall picture. 2. The topics of historical research were reduced to the smallest possible temporal-spatial units, seeking lines of demarcation in time and space that would appear most defensible with respect to the logic of construction or development of the cultural-historical activity under research. In other words, the past should be divided into small parcels of “present” in order that the historical researcher could draw a sequence of snapshot pictures, then measure them and the changes that took place between them with statistical tools that could claim objectivity, and even conjecture with a high degree of probability what factors motivated the changes in terms of human decisions.

History in the Postmodern Age

125

3. Criteria of objective judgment were developed. Interpretation had to square with all known factual data. One had to pay attention to the context of the time being studied, while studiously rejecting explanations that borrowed from the present reality of the researcher and his own life experience. The meaning of words had to be examined comparatively with respect to the time in which documents were composed. One had to make an effort to decipher the worldview and motivations of the author of the document.

We should stress that some of these methodological approaches were not unknown to traditional learning, much less to modern philological scholarship. The difference in their application in the previous era versus their application in the present era was expressed not only in the broader, more systematic, and more detailed compilation of information within narrower fields of research and abstaining from sweeping generalizations embracing entire cultures and periods, but principally in defining the horizon of one’s historical perspective. Classical and modern history sought to encompass a broad horizon within which to establish continuously applicable norms, that is, a vision of the overarching goals and rational pattern representing the “national spirit” of the creators of a civilization. By contrast, postmodern historiographical research preferred the specialization of historians in delineated periods, concentrating on different aspects, in order to create a panorama describing just the causality within each domain by itself (society, economy, politics, or religion), rejecting the assumption that there is a teleological causal pattern of history in general, for the whole must necessarily be heterogeneous, many-sided, stemming from different ideological tendencies and conflicting wills. After World War II, even before postmodern thought had crystallized as a result of reflecting on the preceding period, there remained only the assumption that history was a construct defined by the political, social, and cultural establishment. A country was characterized by the nation that looked to it for its government, by a civilization, a language, and a spiritual legacy that was passed down from generation to generation by an educational system, as well as the

126

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

network of relations with the neighboring cultures. This common framework generated complex mutual connections among the social strata, intellectual movements, and functions and creations that expressed it. As to regularity, one could speak only of the particular institutional interrelationships studied by the respective disciplines— the sciences, economy, and society. The historian was thus called on to depict the totality and the relations that were formed after the fact, and to investigate the causes and declared motivations that brought about these results, some of which were rooted in the necessity of conditions and others in the informed or uninformed choices of leaderships that guided their nations in various directions and created parallels and balancings of forces and tendencies. We are certainly not speaking here of the inner law of progress in the various domains. History exhibits various kinds of progress and retrogression that occur simultaneously. Many factors conflict with, apply pressure to, delimit, and sometimes support and complement each other. Out of a precise examination of the majority of prominent forces, the historian can paint a general picture from which one can draw identity-forming lessons, or derive the materials of memory needed for continuity in creating the culture in its various areas, even to extract moral, social, and political lessons.

Radical Undermining of Historicism: Postmodernism and Counter-Ideology This pragmatic conception of history is compatible with the historical methodology of the social sciences, even though it is not identical with it. Aside from statistical measurement, it adds a unifying overview and a narrative that ties together events that occurred consecutively in order to reveal lines of continuity, transitions, breaks and new beginnings, developments and regressions. Postmodernism seeks to undermine this limited continuity that conceives history as a holistic cultural entity that exhibits a tendency, meaning, and movement in the direction of development. The new historians reject pragmatic history as well, for in their view it resorts to the historicist myth. It stands to reason that there is a connection between this

History in the Postmodern Age

127

recurrent criticism and the discrediting of the statistical methods of the social sciences, in seeking solutions to the ethical, psychological, and spiritual dilemmas that were aroused by the great achievements of modern science and technology, administration and communication. Amid the intoxication from the great achievements in the post-war period, protests started to break out on account of the high costs borne by the exploited and deprived, those who had hoped to benefit from these achievements but were bitterly disappointed. The connection was obvious. If we want to recount, describe, and analyze the historical development of the post-war period using the criteria of the individualistic-egoistic interests that guided the policies of the liberal governments; if we define the task of history as describing all the innumerable events from all the innumerable perspectives of the individuals striving for leadership and all the groups contending over their existential interests; if we see, in the strivings and particular objectives of all individuals, societies and peoples searching for their place in history and see in them the forces that move history—then the forest will be hidden from view, and we will only see the isolated trees, clumps, and bare spots, evidence of the conflagrations of war. Who can focus his view on every detail of an infinite set of details that combine with each other, and in this way arrive at a vision of the whole? Who can tell the stories of every individual and group, and by combining them arrive at the general narrative of the nation? Is it possible, perhaps, to arrive at a balanced narrative by choosing a representative example? It is clear that every individual and every unique group perceive their narratives and evaluate the transactions between themselves and others from their own perspective.6 Even 6 Even after one concedes the force of Edward Said’s critique of western perceptions of non-western peoples in Orientalism, which has been one of the formative influences on the “new historians” of all countries and stripes, this does not establish the “truth” of the contrary perspective but only the incommensurability of all opposing perspectives on all such issues—which is exactly what all the historical skeptics, from Nietzsche through the French postmodernists and their disciples have been arguing. For an alternative to this relativism one may turn to Jürgen Habermas and his vision of an ideal conversation in which proponents of different

128

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

with respect to a single event, involving many actors, each will form his own impression, centered on himself! From such considerations, can we assume the existence of a historical totality, inclusive of the facet that we see from our limited viewpoint? Perhaps. If such a totality exists, it is doubtless bereft of order and structure, full of conflicts and oppositions, riddled with vortices around various axes, replete with contradictory tendencies which may be extrapolated in all different directions. Some are transparent to each other, but none of them is transparent to all. At best, a researcher who has devoted all his career to the infinite details within a relatively small slice of historical reality closest to him will be able to form a partial, truncated picture that changes every time he returns to examine it from another of its many angles. He will never see a complete picture, even of the slice of reality that surrounds him. Nor will he gain orientation from contemplating such an arbitrary sample, but he will return to his own private and societal motivations and will define on their basis the path in which he chooses to travel. This is the picture offered by our experience in the present, and there is no basis for assuming that the eras of the near or distant past would appear differently, if we were able to observe them in the same way that the new historians observe the reality of our time. Would we have been able—like the classical and modern historians—to ascribe an overall structure to them? Could we give unequivocal preference to a single perspective—be it that of an all-embracing establishment, or of God in His majestic glory? Could we assume from the outset that historical development has a structure that is manifest in stages? Could we uncover in history or in any of its segments a formative inner law? If we choose to look at history based on its definition as the combination of the individual experiences of masses of human beings, we shall see that only the religious historian, who presumes to describe it from the perspective of God (who revealed Himself to him and disclosed a small part of His intentions) can lay claim to objectivity— of course, without convincing those who do not believe as he does. perspectives can perhaps start listening to each other sympathetically and arrive at least tentatively and partially at some kind of consensual agreement.

History in the Postmodern Age

129

Not so the scientific historian, who finds himself within the flux of historical occurrences (of which his own life is a part) and can only rely on the evidence of his own eyes, as long as his time is not past and he is not displaced by something new! If we continue this line of thought according to our logic, we shall have to go further. We shall have to quibble over the empirical validity of every historical study, even a partial one, even one devoted to the history of a single group in the present. In any such study, the historian must rely on documented memory, not direct observation of social and cultural events. If one takes account of the many facets of every fact that one experiences through direct observation, as narrated from the points of view of all its participants and observers from different distances and perspectives, one must come to question the objectivity of the one-dimensional factual descriptions that one finds in the documentation amassed in archives, even if the documentation itself passes tests of reliability. Every report is reliable only from the perspective of that particular reporter, no more. If the ingenuous historian attends to the varying subjective quality of human memory, he must despair of the possibility of reconstructing reality exactly as it was, or even a schematic bird’s-eye view of it. He will be forced to admit that history as documented and written was always what the historians imagined, estimated, and surmised in their own private, personal present, guided by the interests and expectations taken from a reality that no longer exists for us. Thus the historian cannot replicate or research it by himself, in the way that a scientist can replicate experiments in his laboratory in order to verify another scientist’s conclusions. It follows necessarily from all this that the methods of history that seek to depict and analyze the dynamic of the total cultural reality do not allow one to arrive at reliable generalizations that meet the standards of objectivity of the natural sciences. If we add the fact that today instant history as well, studying the present with the statistical tools of social science, has difficulty differentiating between subjective and objective observations, inasmuch as its researchers are unable to dissociate themselves from the cultural-political reality that they are

130

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

studying from within, there is no escaping the conclusion that the historian is at best an artist creating a special kind of literature, not a scientist. It is not possible to verify facts that were preserved only in documented memory, and the researcher cannot reproduce their actual occurrence in the manner of a laboratory scientist. It is impossible to reconstitute and reflect the events of reality from contracts and documents, or even from archeological remains. It is impossible to depict with certainty events that pertain to actions ensuing from the intentions of diverse individuals. It is impossible to depict the actions of an institution on the basis of its official documents because its officers wrote them from the perspective of their own policies, and so at best they indicate what they wished to accomplish, or imagined they had accomplished, but not the actions themselves. Therefore, it is not only impossible to arrive at historical truth, but it is highly doubtful whether it exists at all! If so, what do historians describe in fact? The only answer we can give to this question is that through their objective methods historians find the “historical truth” as various memoirists and witnesses present it from their various perspectives. It is indeed their truth. Thus the objective historian—who has no special interests of his own—has only these versions of the truth, and no way to adjudicate among them. Each individual has his own truth about himself and his counterpart. So, too, does each community, each movement, each party, each social class, and each nation. There is thus no universal, consensual historical truth. Therefore, the objective historian completes his task by presenting the various truths whose documentation has come down to him, and he records the identity and background of their authors. The readers, too, must respect the various presentations of the truth objectively. A decision-point arises only when there is a contemporary dispute about the background of the past. In order to resolve it, all parties to the dispute must respect each other’s truths and find a compromise that they all are willing to live with. This last provision applies, of course, to instant history, whose prime task is to arbitrate such conflicts.

History in the Postmodern Age

131

Radical postmodernism adopts these tenets. It is based on the subjectivist theories of literary textual hermeneutics that were developed in the subjective fields of the humanities, in contrast to the detail-oriented objective theories of sociology, economics, behavioral sciences, jurisprudence, and ethics. This is because the documentation of historical memory is in the main literary and subjective. In this way, we can distinguish between arbitrary subjective hermeneutics and authentic hermeneutics that are legitimate, and in this way one can salvage the scientific status of a historiography that recognizes the polysemic aspect of historical truth. It is thus spared the destructive criticism of the classic and modern conception of history, for the new historians concede that cultural life is historical in essence, while they see in every causal sequence of events a narrative in its own right, occurring in parallel to others, though not necessarily in unison with them.

The Postmodernist Solution: Narratives and Counter-Narratives, But No Totality We have thus arrived at the forced way out that radical postmodernism leaves for history—which society, state, and culture still need, and cannot do without, as one cannot educate without imparting a cultural legacy, which must be historical in substance. The question is thus raised whether its methodology allows an objective depiction based on the documentation of various subjective historical truths around the axes of events the fact of whose occurrence is nevertheless objective, confirmed by all of them. We first establish the point of departure. The historian is pledged to scientific objectivity. However, since no one can escape the subjectivity of his perspective, based on the cultural memory in which he was raised and his life environment, he must not only acknowledge that he is subjective insofar as he is human, he must also present his subjectivity honestly, i.e. by objectively reflecting on himself. He must define and specify his personal point of view as a historian who belongs to a particular people, state, community, movement, and defined ideology, all of which shape the motivation that brought him

132

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

to engage in the enterprise of research and writing. He wishes to plunge himself into the study of particular problems that he, his community and his people are facing, or to understand particular pressing situations in order to map out his orientation out of the aspiration to realize personal, communal, movement, or national objectives. Or he wants to impart the historical memory that shaped his personality and crystallized his worldview and way of life to his children, students, and people so that they may continue in the same path. One can say that defining the motivation and the goal establishes the personal or collective vantage point—the fixed reference-point on which he is positioned, from which he observes and researches a particular historical memory, in other words, the cultural and political stance, together with the interests that flow from this stance and the aspects that are important from its perspective. In all these senses, we have an objective effort to define the reference-point and the subjective interest that it entails. Indeed, it is impossible to defend the claim that one must accept every subjective apperception as incumbent on all other subjects in their relation to the same events and in relation to each other, except on the basis of this proposed assumption. Without agreement on it, communication among people is impossible; with it, people can live together in a society, and societies can live with each other. In other words, only if we agree that whatever one sees from one’s subjective viewpoint is a truth that is incumbent on all subjects dealing with the same issue to take into consideration, can we then enter into serious discussion with our opponent, to understand the other, persuade him, and arrive at agreement with him.7 Only on the basis of this assumption can we arrive at a historical account whose factual infrastructure— though open to different interpretations—can be agreed on by all. On the basis of all these considerations, we can thus define the historical enterprise that the postmodern historiographer envisions, seeing in it a partial and truncated combination of inter-subjective experiences that relate to each other and can confirm each other while 7 Compare the central thesis of Jürgen Habermas Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

History in the Postmodern Age

133

coming into contact with each other, without implying a defined totality in which this heterogeneous encounter takes place. Of course, we must note that this odd variety of contact does not turn the separate experiences into a common experience that the two sides shape into a unified circle of reciprocal bonds. We are speaking of groups that grapple with each other conflictually, contesting each other’s claims, and only thus entering into the other’s domain, then deciding whether to continue to fight or rather to seek a path of consensus that would change reality for both of them in the future. This means that such an approach excludes the possibility of a description of a constructed totality that would encompass the whole scope of events within a horizon of observation of individuals representing the different groups. One assumes that there is no universal plenitude of historical memory, but only series of events around which the competing parties conduct their endless controversies. The result is the writing of history in the form of diverse narratives from the differential perspectives of individuals within their respective societies. If we combine these narratives and examine their outlooks and their mutual influences, we shall obtain an anthology of historiographies that complement each other from different points of view, without comprising a totality. From the postmodern viewpoint, this is the closest substitute we can achieve for the missing totality.

Critique of the Theory of Narratives Does this solution withstand examination of the assumptions underlying the theory that necessitates it? Does a conglomerate of conflicting narratives establish an objective history capable of fulfilling the social, political, and especially cultural tasks that history is supposed to fulfill? If everything that was said above about the quantity and quality of documented historical memory is truly all that can be said scientifically; if the subjective historical narratives are objective only from the perspective of those who tell their story to others, and the others are called on to accept them by virtue of the other’s testimony as a rubric that calls for a respectful attitude, which is a condition for

134

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

dialogue, but not by virtue of the account applying to a realistic field of study for which the subjective stances are to be taken as parts of one universal objective truth; if it is impossible to examine each subjective stance from a position external to itself in order to determine its measure of objectivity comparative to other stances; if it is impossible to unite all the narratives into a single history that tells the story of all human beings who participated in it, each from his own partial, truncated perspective—then the proposed solution is only a scientific justification for every description and argument that bases itself on personal memory, to which all others are outsiders, and they can neither refute nor confirm it. A legitimation that is not based on an objective critical stance has no validity, and claims that do not stand up to criticism are not worthy of being passed on to others. They generate an imaginary dialogue of the deaf, in which each one says whatever he wants on the basis of his own interests, and hears from the other only what he wants to hear. A historiography written in this way is thus liable to serve only those who find it useful for expressing their own imagined image of themselves, or their stereotype of the other. The benefit that they derive from it will be the venting of their feelings, or the megaphone through which they will proclaim and broadcast their ideology, in the hope of enlisting to their banner anyone who defines their outlook from the same interested perspective and causes as the mentioned scholars, so that they can fight together and attempt to impose their views on their opponents by electoral or violent means. In other words: this kind of historiography does not create a circle of discourse, but defines a battlefront of a war whose outcome will be decided by superior force—not by the force of superior argument. Thus far I have dealt with the political task of history in the present age. As for its cultural task, inasmuch as it is a form of dialogue between the generations and a necessary tool for imparting a cultural heritage, we have here an abdication that can be interpreted only as denying its proper task or the desire to rebel against it. If there exists no collective entity that individuals not only comprise but live within

History in the Postmodern Age

135

it, then the “heritage” is nothing but a superfluous burden, and there is clearly no way to transmit it. It is not impossible that this description lays bare the primary motivation for the new historians’ critique of their predecessors. The traditional historiographers, both the classical and the modern, were based in their cultural heritages and saw in them the matrix of their historical enterprise. The lessons that could be derived from history appeared secondary in significance, for most of the historians knew that there was no exact recurrence of historical situations. Their primary motivation for writing history was to impart the sense of memory in which was embodied the fundamental orientation that guided a nation and its members from the past into the future, all the while accumulating those materials that would nourish their creativity. It thus appears that the motivation for denying historical reality in its allinclusive sense is the desire to cut oneself off from the legacy of the past, when the children of the present feel that the memory of their past imposes on them a cultural identity that they no longer want, while inhibiting them from their search for a different identity. The past demands continuity. Those who reject its yoke express through their rebellion their unwillingness to continue that path, and their preference to make a clean break, in a way that will respond to their own personal interest, which departs from the national interest of their people and their country.

The Essence of History: Fashioning a Social-Cultural Existence and Perpetuating It in Time It is clear that everyone knows that it is impossible to forgo history as an idea that defines the existence in time of societies possessed of a cultural memory that experiences transmission, growth, and renewal. Thus one must examine from the ground up the essence of the human life-world that persists in space and time, and the ways in which one forms an objective construct of this collective communicative entity, in order to crystallize and formulate a critically vetted memory with which the society—embracing its members as a collective entity—can

136

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

identify, seeing in it a memory that unites it in geographic space and across the generations. I will open with the most elementary assertion, seemingly banal. The self-conscious existence of a personal self in time includes by its nature the memory of a past that sets a direction and carries expectations and prospects for the future. The identity of that person, as long as he lives by himself in his own environment, comes from within (if that individual is conscious of himself and the surroundings that he inhabits, even if he is not similarly aware of other conscious selves with whom he shares a common definition of place).8 His memory is identical to his essence, that is to say, his components and qualities that are reflected in the consciousness of the “I” or the “we” within which they exist, from his perspective. This assertion applies even to entities that human beings define as “inanimate,” without their own self-consciousness and self-determination, for external and internal processes condition them in the course of time. Inanimate entities remain themselves despite change, as long as they retain the same composition, qualities, and structures that identify them and differentiate them from their environment, and as long as they continue to exist in place and in time. Conscious creatures, who observe them from outside and see in these entities objects for reaction or research, are permitted to assume (though one cannot know this with certainty) that these entities which do not move of their own volition are not conscious of themselves and do not exist for themselves—which have no reflexive, conscious memory apart from the mere memory-trace of their temporal identity—have nevertheless an internal continuity that unites them and is identical to their essence. It is thus clear that only entities possessed of developed consciousness or self-awareness can research the history of inanimate objects and reflect on it by 8 Can such a self-subsistent self, without a community, exist in theory? One may object, from a Wittgensteinian point of view, that a person’s sense of self is determined by interaction with significant others, and is thus socially determined, not (just) self-consciously produced. Even so, the essential point remains valid, for the notion of the self as a being in time with past, present, and future is an integral part also of the social definition of the individual, as much as it is a part of one’s internal sense of living in the present between past and future.

History in the Postmodern Age

137

deciphering the memory-traces engraved in them and in the environment they influence, as is indeed practiced by geologists, chemists, and physicists, each one in terms of the categories of his own discipline. Thus inanimate objects, from the perspective of the natural scientist who investigates them, have an objective history. We should mention that every scientific study begins with a “historical” survey, in the original sense of this Greek word, which connotes comparative inquiry that orders and organizes the totality of objects identified as the objects of the scientific discipline in question in order to gather it in a collective memory and arrive at primary definitions that will later allow one to examine their composition, their process of becoming and transformation in accordance with the record embodied in them and in their surroundings. Aristotle, who used the term historia (“inquiry”) in connection with natural sciences, developed his researches by this method and presented “histories” dealing with various kinds of entities and natural beings, the study of each of which comprised its own “discipline.” As we said, the history of inanimate beings is carried out from the perspective of the researcher, whereas living beings have in addition to their natural history—inasmuch as they are bodies that “remember” their composition, their physical qualities and organic functions—also a subjective history expressed in their activities, their sensations and emotions. This history is generated through the conscious awareness that living beings have of themselves, at least on the level of sensory and emotional feedback. By their own estimate, living beings are not only objects of observation to outsiders, but also of self-reflection. Their observation can rise to the level of objective awareness of themselves as well as of their surroundings. We recall in this situation that such scientific observation is of fundamental interest to every subject who seeks to survive in his environment. It behooves him to know it as it really is. In any case, this fact necessitates a relationship between scientific researchers and the living creatures whom they study, because it [i.e., this need for objective orientation] is expressed in the behavior of the objects of their study,

138

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

and for the sake of their research they are required to anticipate and record properly the flow of the actions of their scientific subjects, including the intentional relation of living creatures to themselves and their environment. It is reasonable to assume that at every level of life (which is the phenomenon of intentional self-motivated action to goals in the environment), there is a certain level of consciousness. To be sure, animals do not register their consciousness either to themselves or to their environment, except to the extent that they form their influence on their environment and attempt to shape and adapt it to their needs. The scientific researcher can detect this creative effect through concentrated observations of animal behavior, with attention to the impress they make on their environment. This is the beginning of history in its cultural sense, especially when speaking of the study of social animals that adapt their environment to their daily needs, through the kind of action in which it is possible to discern a certain level of organized and established thinking. One more step leads us from the natural history of animals to human history. Man became a unique creature in his natural environment by creating an artificial life-world that he achieved by conscious effort and free volition. This life-world is intended to provide for him the special conditions without which he cannot develop the human (especially intellectual) potential unique to him and maintain himself at that level. In creating his life-world, man became a creature able to develop towards the achievement of objectives of his own choice, in ways that he chooses and creates for himself (tools and technology). All this occurred within the framework of the limitations of his biological nature and the limitations of nature around him, but also with a consistent effort to liberate himself from these limitations, to fortify and expand his capabilities, to shape his environment in accord with his preferences, and to transform his dependence on nature into another dependence, dependence on civilization, which itself could prove a harsh taskmaster in different ways than the limitations of nature in a previous age. If history, which documents the development of human civilization, has its own regular pattern, it is based on the dialectic of expanding

History in the Postmodern Age

139

the power of human choice while creating an enslaving dependence on the technological and social infrastructure that makes this possible. The cultures that human beings created remember and document the stages of development, the challenges, the deliberations, the decisions, and the results that drove the development from one stage to the next. This memory leaves its traces through both material and spiritual creations, each conditioning the emergence of the other. Thus is created a history unique to human beings, held in reflective memory, that along with the transformations in the life-world itself preserves humanity’s ideas, organizations, structures, institutions, tools, emotions, values, and ideals. Creation of culture out of reflective (voluntary) choice depends on the functioning of this kind of memory, which can be created and preserved only by developing the instrument by whose means human consciousness knows itself in imaginative and conceptual awareness—namely, symbolic language. In the narrow personal sense, reflective memory shows the life experience of individuals, and their self-knowledge with respect to the development of their self-identity as members of a culture (their biography). However, it turns out that their reflective biographical memory is conditioned by the prior reflective memory of their society and its culture, for only within that memory can these individuals develop their cultural personalities, to know and remember this totality and to add their contribution to the collective memory that they will transmit to their children after them. We have here the reflective collective memory, created and documented in the spiritual creations of every cultured society. This distinction is important for defining the task of the historian, called on by the social establishment to document the historical formation of his establishment in a way that reflects its events and creative processes as they happened. The connection between personal memory and the collective memory that the historian depicts determines the vantage point from which he can see the cultural formation in its full extent and with the greatest clarity. It is up to him to shape the national memory entrusted in the hands of his institutions of research and higher learning, which

140

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

authorized him to perform his task, and not his personal cultural memory that he shaped for himself according to his private worldview. He must shape this memory out of the knowledge that the function that he realizes—that of reflective memory—must stand up to the criticism and confirmation of the national research establishment, and to persuade his nation’s enlightened elite of its truth so that this memory will gain acceptance and become the picture judged worthy for the educational-cultural task of imparting the legacy—a task that it is up to him to fulfill. This is a prime institutional matter with decisive implications for the problem of objectivity of the research and narrative. From it follows a great difficulty necessitating a critical attitude. The professional historian narrates occurrences from within, as if he lives them himself, and it is therefore incumbent on him to be a critical observer from outside, seeing the events from different angles and from the perspectives of people who have different stakes in the matter—the leaders as against the people, the attackers as against the defenders, the victors as against the vanquished. All these determine the parameters and criteria for judging his objectivity. It is clear that objectivity based on empathetic participation is an idealistic requirement to which one can only aspire and approximate but never achieve perfectly—neither in terms of the empathic dimension which is self-critical subjectivity, nor in terms of the external judgment, which is self-critical objectivity. Even a trained professional cannot detach himself completely from the subjectivity of his personal worldview which was inculcated from his cultural upbringing. Before we come to develop what follows from this recognition, we should recall that the reflective narrative of historical memory and its transmission in writing is itself culture-forming. As such, it is a central component of the heritage, crucial to its transmission. Therefore if the reflective narrative has passed the institutional and communal test and has been accepted by the scientific establishment, it is identified with the heritage itself in the process of its formation and crystallization. We must nevertheless caution against erroneously identifying the cultural memory, which is the subject of narrative historiography,

History in the Postmodern Age

141

with the primeval memory that it is called on to reflect. Out of the cultural formation, garnered in material relics from the past, in libraries, archives, and museums, it is always possible to draw additional data that will enrich and broaden the reflective memory that historiography documents, but it is impossible to exhaust historical memory through reflective memory. It will always remain incomplete and selective. Thus there never was, nor will there ever be, a complete historiography. No reflection can ever be identical with the memory embodied in the events themselves, or re-enact them in their full detail and aspects, in the sense of reality of the fateful experience as it happened from the perspective of those who recorded it in its original time and place. The professional historian must rest content with narrating in a reliable fashion the events and developments that the society, through its leading institutions, considers vital knowledge for transmitting its heritage, for understanding its meaning in the present, and for weighing what is possible and desirable for the future. It is clear that in this respect the narrative of collective memory is contingent on various institutions and worldviews that managed to become institutionalized in order to guide the leadership whose authority is recognized by the people, in whole or in part, so that its history is written from their point of view. A society and culture is in need of two different kinds of memory, each built on the other and complementing the other. It conducts its life, acts, and creates within a given cultural-historical formation, and at the same time it creates, through reflective recollection, a historiographical memory whose task is to perpetuate its self-consciousness and continuity of identity, in conformity with the traits and functional characteristics of its institutions, in order to direct it to deal with new challenges and to realize its objectives in the future.

The Ontological Condition for Creating a Historical Entity: The Collective Being Is Prior to Its Members If the foregoing argument is accepted, then the ontological condition for creating a culture, whose formation is recorded by historiography, is the presence of linguistic and symbolic communication forming a

142

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

common consciousness, within which there is a sense of a collective “I” uniting the many individuals into a society that has its own existence. In other words, it must be a society that is united on the level that establishes it as a collective entity, not an accidental mechanical juxtaposition of many isolated individuals who are alien to each other. Only a society that possesses such solidarity is equipped to form in its collective memory a historical myth that unites within it an infinity of biographies of individuals and sub-groups that constitute a people, and with it to live as a unique, independent culture, that is to say, to create it, to renew it in every generation, and to deploy it for achieving its success and happiness. On the other hand, only a society that possesses such solidarity has the status of a nation exerting its powerful presence in its designated space (as a country) and time (as a historical actor). The creators of a culture are individuals endowed with striking talents in various areas, striving to achieve personal success and happiness as individuals. They cannot create only by virtue of the natural genetic potential embodied in them. Their cultural creativity is contingent on what they have imbibed from the culture of their group, imparted by their parents and teachers, with whatever tools and equipment were at their disposal. In other words, only after they have absorbed the lessons of their environment and taken it on themselves to respond to its dictates and guidance can they then develop as human beings, draw on their creativity and responsibility to grow beyond the limits of their interests and objectives as individuals, and give back to the collective entity that raised them the fruit of their genius, the principal with interest, transforming the received legacy by writing a new chapter in the historical myth, to perpetuate it for the next generation. This means that the creation of a culture requires as a precondition a high level of integration of individuals into the collective entity, including their identification with its foundational values and the goals that the group aspires to realize. If such a consciousness of unity—albeit on a mythic level—has not been achieved, or if it is

History in the Postmodern Age

143

disintegrating, then a historical cultural entity cannot be formed. If a historical cultural entity has not been formed, then neither can there be a reflective narrative of the historical memory that would be objective from the perspective of those for whom it is formed, as well as from the perspective of those who would be forced (or would want) to deal with them, by receiving influence or because the identity shaped through the memory and the heritage embodied in it broadcasts itself to its surroundings and leaves its impress on it. These theses have decisive importance for understanding, and perhaps for resolving, the web of problems raised in the earlier parts of our discussion. The points at issue between the traditional and classical-modern historians versus the new historians are rooted in the question of accepting or rejecting these theses. Traditional and classical-modern historiography is based on these assertions and sees them as fundamental assumptions that have been accepted since the dawn of humanity. Their methodologies reflect these assumptions. The objectivity for which they strive is rooted in them. The historiographic project was based on the prior recognition that its source was the internalization of a historical-cultural memory by that person who would someday research it—implanted in him throughout all the stages of the education that prepared him for his task, received from the established institutions of his society (his family, community, nation). We see now that when a culture disintegrates, it loses the sense of responsibility to maintain this condition, and thus it obliterates the myth that represents the collective consciousness that unites all its members. We saw that the postmodern revolution took place against the backdrop of such disintegration. One may rightly conclude that if it documents a historical reality, it is the very process of disintegration of the culture and its underlying myth, as a product of the effort to work an individualistic transformation in the image of the civilization, turning it into an organized mob bereft of collective consciousness and acting within a mechanical framework that works (like all artificial technology) by the principles of necessity and utility, alienated and lacking the bonds of social reciprocity.

144

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Postmodernism, and the Assumption that Individual Memory is Prior to Collective Memory

The new historians’ critique of traditional historians and modern humanists starts with their stand against the tyranny of the academic establishment, which preserves its assumptions and methods and forces them on its students by virtue of its official pedagogic authority. It is clear that this tyranny serves the interests of the academic establishment, which serves in turn the interests of the ruling powers. World War II proved the extent to which the ideologies that were the basis of the research methodologies in the social and humanistic sciences served the interests of dictatorial cliques, rather than the truth that was sensed and felt by the nation itself and the nations surrounding it. The results of the war exposed the ideological deceptions by which the structure of history had been defined as an allinclusive entity, and how its so-called inner law served the interests of the regime (whether vis-à-vis other countries or vis-à-vis the oppressed classes of the nation itself). Here, clearly, is the motivation for denying the assumption that every nation is a collective entity whose native linguistic medium (the mother tongue), land (the homeland), cultural-historical memory (the tradition), and independent political framework (the state) impart a unified super-consciousness, a kind of collective “I” to which each of its members forms a direct bond with his individual consciousness, inasmuch as the legacy that he internalized built and shaped his personality. Denying a sense of belonging to such a familial-communal national entity, which follows from the undemocratic character of the regime that prevailed through violence and pretended to represent the people, expresses an urgent desire to be liberated not only from the false ideology and the myth that supported it, but from the entire nationalcultural legacy, in order to create another more individualistic mode of social organization, in order to carry out the necessary functions for maintaining, running, and bolstering an advanced civilization. After World War II it was necessary to start anew and to build a civilization that would not repeat its previous mistakes. The legacy of the past seemed to be no longer helpful but counter-productive. To be sure, the

History in the Postmodern Age

145

most extreme course expressed a complete severance from the totality of its spiritual creativity and memory. If something positive is to be found in this legacy, from the perspective of future civilization, present-day people see themselves as free to choose it and interpret it in their own way, without being bound to it. The essential task is to build directly from the resources of nature, with the help of free creative intelligence, a workable scientific technological civilization that should provide a high level of human living conditions to all individuals and to all peoples. This is the conception of life that is focused on the present, the basis of natural resources, the talents and abilities of organized individuals, and the natural motivation common to all of them: the desire for life and happiness. Education must develop these abilities. But the notion of education was redefined not as the process of imparting and imbibing a legacy that shapes one’s personality, but rather as the process of acquiring information and training appropriate to the needs of effective functioning as an individual in a civilization that promises a high standard of living and a certain definition of success— self-actualization embodied in competitive achievement. This is the point of view that is defined for the personal development of every individual, and all the more for developing the civilization and the corporations of private individuals who build this view. From here it is clear why the conception of history has been constricted to one that is appropriate for all these individuals, in order to document the major activities of civilization and cope with its problems in the present term, in the form of instant history. In any case, one may surmise that the new historians, in the desire to be liberated from the burdensome legacy of the past that contributes nothing to the present, undermined the assumption that there are (or once were) nations that serve as organic collective entities that unite their members by embracing them. On this basis they undermined the assumption that society and culture are prior in point of reality9 (and not merely as an organized institution) to the personal 9 Ontologically prior, not temporally prior. There is a chicken-and-egg dependency here: there is no culture without individuals, and no individuals without culture.

146

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

development of its members. They pointed to the truth that collective consciousness bears a myth within it by which it is maintained. However, they argued that collective consciousness itself is a myth, and in so doing, they turned the historic myth from a subjective truth into a hollow fiction, a deceptive illusion and even a fraud pure and simple. It is clear that in this way they render history in its broad sense a dead field, and what remains in effect is no more than the personal biographies of themselves and their opponents.

The Intellectual Error: The Personality Comes into Being by Internalizing the Culture of the Group It would appear that the course of “postmodern” thought was a natural response to the failure of the despotic collectivism of Communism and Fascism, as well as a reponse to the failure of the oppressive vulgarity of postmodern civil society. Indeed, the convincing element in this way of thinking is the negation and rejection of the intellectual errors and distortions to be found at the basis of the modern ideologies that led to the war. Does it necessarily follow, from the just critique of Communism and Fascism and of the oppressive commercialism of the succeeding era, that one should shake free of all elements of national humanism rooted in a liberal democratic thought that is not purely individualistic but recognizes the collective reality of peoples and their creative cultural spirit, while respecting the individuality of each member and his personal autonomy? As we saw, the new historians would argue that the idea of a collective, supra-individualistic entity is a myth, in the sense of an invention—a political fiction with the purpose of serving the interests of a particular ruling leadership. The assumptions that are the basis of the corporate individualistic society are no less oppressive with respect to the autonomy of the atomized individual, because there is no way to escape being swallowed up in the mass. Moreover, anthropologically From a temporal standpoint, they are on a par. Nevertheless, Schweid asserts that the group is the dominant factor in creating this complex reality, and the “new historians” assert the opposite, that only the individual truly exists and that the group or culture is a convenient fiction (LL).

History in the Postmodern Age

147

speaking, the concept of corporate society is based on the fictive assumption that every individual is sovereign master of himself, generating his own personality and acting only from his own autonomous motives. This is an unrealistic assumption, just as much as the faith in the monolithic solidarity of the national collective, on which the totalitarian regimes were based. The fiction of the sovereignty of the individual is just as one-sided and superficial, a one-size-fits-all garment that instead of emphasizing an individual’s uniqueness suppresses it, equating him to everyone else on the basis of his egoistic, competitive nature. It is convenient to study social reality on the basis of fictive stereotypes like these, because they lend themselves to statistical measurement on the basis of the lowest common denominator, identifying people with components of an aggregate. To be sure, the trend toward statistical information is useful for the needs of marketing all kinds of commodities (including the political kind), but not for description and explanation of the processes of cultural creativity in the broad sense in space and in time. The basis of this claim is experiential. Indeed in every slice of the present every society—small or large, entire or partial—appears as an aggregate of many individuals, motivated by their private desire for their own survival and happiness. However, when we examine their development into individuals and persons throughout their biographical and historical time, we see that their existence and conduct as creatures of nature and members of a culture is conditional on both their genetic endowment and the legacy of their upbringing. Just as the genetic endowment of their species is a prior condition of their physical existence, so is the cultural legacy of their family, their community and their people a prior condition of their personal individuation. A comprehensive conception of the development of individuals within their society, and of a society through its individuals, must therefore see a reciprocal relation between the individual and collective aspects of personality, society, and culture in order to achieve a proper balance between the two. To appreciate the role of cultural legacy in shaping personality, we should emphasize that individual self-consciousness is created through

148

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

language, and that acquisition of language is a gift of a society to its members. The newborn infant comes to recognize the society around him, and particularly the caretaker addressing him, before he comes to know himself as “I.” He recognizes himself as “I” only because the “you” and “he/she” addressing him present themselves to him as “I.” Indeed, when they start to speak, children identify themselves as “he/ she” and “you,” not as “I.” Only at the next stage of development they understand that everyone is an “I,” and that the other person addressing him is his “you” or “he/she.” This is the response of the emerging individual to his awareness of himself, as subject, to those other persons who are raising him and caring for his future. Their calling him arouses him to project outward an image of himself that will please the other, but that will also be separate from him and will be the basis for a covenant between equals who are committed to a life together in the family, the community and the people. The distinction between a subjective or inter-subjective relationship and an objective or inter-objective relationship towards other persons, toward society and nature, follows also from this foundational insight; it differentiates between the “I” and the “not-I,” after which it recombines them in a reciprocal social bond. These considerations have repercussions for the processes of cultural creativity on all its levels, including one’s understanding of the essence and shaping of historical memory. Since linguistic communication is imparted from the group to the individual and not the reverse, and since the consciousness of one’s self comes from the other and the group and not the reverse, it follows that reflective collective memory must come from the group to the individuals and not the reverse. Collective memory precedes individual memory. History precedes biography. And myth precedes history, both in its primeval origin and in the comprehensive narrative flow that gives it its unity.

Historiography: Creative Reflection on the Cultural Memory in a Circle of Discourse Striving for Consensus among Scholars On the basis of these assumptions one can examine the way in which reflective historical memory is activated in its relation to the memory

History in the Postmodern Age

149

embodied in cultural creativity itself. Internalizing the cultural memory through the process of education, which transmits it as a legacy, is the first step. The writers of history prepare themselves for their vocation through their own educational biography. This identification brings them to the second stage, namely research, which is a deliberate process of recollection around defined axes of interest so that it will be possible to build around them a comprehensive historical picture in which to orient oneself. Education in its broadest sense is cultural socialization. From the perspective of education, a person’s maturation into a cultured person is the product of the deliberate encounter between one’s personal biography and the history of the culture that raises its children, in order that they should continue its activities and bear responsibility for its continuity. The task of the professional historian is principally to prepare the textbooks for transmitting the cultural historical memory of his people. However, one should always remember that this professionalized activity is a critical rendition of the process of internalization that is performed by primary education. The professional historian finds his starting point in the legacy that came to him through his education. On the basis of what was known to him already from that source, he broadens his horizon of vision, tests whether he understands correctly what he has already learned, and accumulates additional information, more detailed and more encompassing. The gathering of additional material is also driven by his desire to internalize it. The professional historian experiences the content of his learning and transforms it into a part of that memory which makes it come alive, for only in this way can he present this history both from an inside view as well as from a variety of outside perspectives. Historical reflection begins with the learning process, and the more it is broadened vis-à-vis the past, the more it helps the investigator to understand his own situation in his generation. The more he deepens his knowledge of the past, the better able he is to understand the present at which he has arrived after the efforts of many generations. This is a recursive process: the historical investigator seeks to understand himself and the place where he stands in his people’s

150

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

history in the present generation. From this understanding, he returns to the past in order to study it in greater depth, building on his received picture of it in order to arrive at a fuller and more comprehensive picture of the dynamic of developments from the past to the future. The double perspective of reflective historical memory from the present to the past and vice versa must therefore undergo transformation on the axis of time striving towards the future. In the contexts of every new present, new aspects will be revealed, eclipsing the aspects that were revealed in the past. The knowledge of the past is continually broadened, the historical picture changes, and even its lessons and messages change. From the vantage point of every present on the axis of time, every generation is called on to make a new distinction between those data that are meaningful to the investigator and his readers and the data that are meaningless to them. Moreover, the controversies among different movements and tendencies in the culture lead to different directions of investigation, and these are projected from the present into the past, in which they seek roots and justifications. Controversies among historians within a single generation (and all the more so, between different generations) is not only inevitable, but it is a vital component in the process of fleshing out the historical picture, as they debate the causes, motivations, and consequences of past events, and often even the facts of the events themselves. In dealing with human actions and occurrences, it is impossible to separate a description of the event from an understanding of its causes, motivations, and consequences. In any definition that seeks to characterize historical facts, one needs more than a statistical or mechanical description of events. One needs to characterize them, and this requires viewing them from within and from without simultaneously. A historian needs to have empathy in order to understand the feelings, motivations, and rationales of the individuals, institutions, and social bodies that acted, created, struggled, won, or lost. Empathy is achieved only by imaginatively participating in the described reality on all levels—experientially, graphically, emotionally, and intellectually. The historian must develop his picture of the past by projecting his own subjectivity onto the people acting in the described reality, and by

History in the Postmodern Age

151

involving himself in the events he describes, while at the same time remaining outside in order to appraise them from different angles. In other words, the reflective recollection of the life-processes that occurred in the past is a process of reflective re-experiencing, arrived at through an imagination that strives for as much precision as possible. The historian can re-live the events that he is narrating from within, and can describe them as they would appear to various parties from outside. This means that he does not only present the past as a recent or remote context of the present in which he is living, but he imports the past imaginatively into the present as an influential and formative factor. Do all these controversies undermine the reliability of reflective historical memory? Do they contradict the claim of the disputing scholars that their depictions withstand the test of scientific objectivity? On the contrary. When the controversy stands on the foundation of agreement as to critical method, one should see in the totality of disputing positions (but not in a single one taken in isolation) the extended process of shaping the reflective memory. For seeing the events in various ways from their respective viewpoints is the prerogative not only of the historian who views them from afar, but also of the original participants in the events, and of those who perpetuate their memory in their time. Reflective historical memory is thus the totality of historical research in the process of its creation and accumulation. Students of history are called on to accept the conclusion that no individual historical account is an adequate summary of the reflective memory of the culture that it narrates. The striving for objectivity draws closer to its goal with every additional work of critical research, but it is never completely achieved. One should draw the conclusion that the reflective memory of every culture, in every period, is to be identified with the historiographical circle of discourse, or (if you prefer) with the history of its historiography.

In What Sense Is Historiography a Science? In the end, we arrive at the question of the validity and precision of one’s research tools. Is historiography an exact empirical science in the same sense as the natural sciences?

152

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

This question is discussed a great deal. The methodological premises that shape historiography as a discipline were formulated by generations of historians who debated these issues. Each generation arrived at its own consensual agreement on them, and some have been agreed on across the generations of historians to our own day. The general definition of science—the systematic accumulation of objective knowledge in the various domains of reality that human beings experience—applies to the documentary foundation on which historiography is based, especially to culture as a physical technological complex (“civilization”). Indeed, physical civilization is directed at efficiency, and its objective is not subject to controversy but is implicit in its functioning. This is generally agreed. Civilization is an artificial environment created from natural resources, and it is attested by its relics (archeological findings, the realia collected in museums, documents and books in archives) and as such is open to scientific research that is comparable to natural scientific research, by similar methods. This holds true up to a certain limit, namely the point at which one discusses the technical functioning of vessels, tools, and institutions. We should emphasize that beyond this limit the historian must give his opinion as to the quality of industrial production methods, and the kind of special memory embodied in it, whether as to the engineering of the vessels or their intended employment, on the basis of knowledge and for general social purposes, at which one can arrive only by internalizing a prior cultural legacy and independent reflection on the methods of cultural transmission and the processes of crystallizing ideational structures in every generation. When speaking of the study of physical artifacts—which human beings create by availing themselves of natural resources and processes, and through imitations whose objective is to serve esthetic or intellectual goals, or to express one’s emotions and desires—one needs complex consideration on the relation between external and internal experience. One must classify the physical objects through science, and their use for human purposes through craft or art. In order to identify their material quality and their formative potential, one requires a quasinatural-scientific investigation of the material qualities of the tools and

History in the Postmodern Age

153

vessels and their methods of construction. It is clear that it is impossible to arrive at the functional meaning of tools, or the ideas and feelings that they express, without reflection on the spiritual processes and their expression in signs and symbols, which characterizes humanistic studies. We therefore have a continual transition from the research methodology of the natural sciences to the reflective, philosophical methodology of the humanities. In this way, historiography turns from an experiential science into a narrative creation, from factual research into theoretical interpretation. These are the two dimensions of a wisdom that has science at its foundation but needs to fill it in with emotional empathy, contemplative thought, and imitative, vivifying imagination. Through these it fulfills its essential task as an educating message, shaping the consciousness of belonging and responsibility for an inherited culture.

The Monumental Task of Historiography From this we may infer the answer to the question, what is the task of historiography? The relation to historiography as science would be sufficient, assuming that one could derive from it practical lessons that would further progress in coping with the fundamental problems of social, political, and cultural life, such as foreseeing consequences, avoiding mistakes, pursuing goals intelligently, and identifying cultural and political processes in which one can discern developmental regularity or some other pattern. This would indeed be the case if we were talking of disciplines such as sociology, political science, and anthropology, based on historical research and contributing their scientific perspectives to it. However, when speaking of the general shaping of historical memory, it would seem that the practical aspect of deriving lessons from history is peripheral and limited. There can never be an exact repetition of historical situations and causes, and it is clear that the whole enterprise of “deriving lessons” depends on one’s values and goals. Thus, if historical experience is enlisted to assist shaping policy in the present, it will be only one component in the process of appraisal that is liable to arrive at contradictory conclusions from different points of view.

154

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

It follows from this that eliciting “lessons” is a secondary task from the perspective of every broad-minded historian. The principal motivation for fleshing out reflective memory into a comprehensive historical narrative is the need rooted in cultural life itself. The memory of what happened and what was created answers to the need of a cultural society, and of every one of the members comprising it, to identify itself, to flesh out the historical myth that unites it, and to orient itself in the expanse of place and time in which it struggles for survival and happiness, in terms of ideas and values. In other words: history, inasmuch as it is the reflective cultural memory, raises the cultural identity to a conscious level, in the process of transmitting and creatively renewing it. In this sense, history is not a means, but a reflection of the end and the destiny of human cultural living. Its primary task is to provide that education that transmits a legacy and fosters ever-renewing spiritual creativity. On this subject, I would emphasize the simple assumption that in every age—including our age—is continually borne out: a culture does not develop from a vacuum or from nothing. A culture develops only from a prior culture. The same is the case with all its individual components: language comes from a prior language; art comes from prior art; science comes from prior science—to be sure, with a different scope, in other forms, on another level. The same applies to historiography, as to all the other domains of material and spiritual creativity that it remembers and transmits. Historiography comes from a prior historiography. No matter how much it develops, renews itself, and changes, it is rooted in myth, which is an artistic creation, sanctified by a primal religious-political establishment, through which it gave compelling expression to its philosophy of life, its values, its laws, its destiny, and the symbols in whose light it educated and shaped the culture of the people that it ruled. This was the historical truth embodied in it, as long as the people used it to shape its collective consciousness and strove to realize its values and goals. It thus seems that the reflective history of the postmodern era will not be able to rid itself of the foundational myths of national cultures. If the general history of this era should be written on the

History in the Postmodern Age

155

basis of the rich documentation that it is creating, it will have to rise to a “post” beyond “postmodernism” and to write the history that will connect it to the prior eras. For this purpose it will have to renew and adapt the research tools, deepen the analysis, and change the perspectives and evaluations, but in the end it will be a continuation of an enterprise at whose foundation rest the same ontological assumptions that were assumed as the basis of writing national histories from the dawn of the creation of culture up to our present day.

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

The Difference Between Monotheism and Paganism: Introduction

M

onotheistic religion is the belief in God as Creator of the universe, ruling over the forces that He implanted in it, reigning over it, legislating, judging, rewarding and punishing—the compassionate Father, educating and bestowing good on His creatures. According to monotheism, God is the true sovereign also over the civilizations that mankind builds by exploiting the forces of nature, which flesh-and-blood mortal kings establish and rule. God reigns over the kingdoms and their realms in two ways: He enacts a covenant with their peoples and their kings, and He establishes the immanent laws of the forces of nature (on which the prosperity of kings depends) and rules over them. From acknowledging God’s sovereignty and the covenant, it follows that mankind must serve God, who is sovereign, by observing God’s laws and morality in the relations “between one person and another” (including his relation to his society and his people), and by carrying out symbolic rituals that embody the relations “between the person and God.” Through these rituals, people express their love and fear of God and atone for their sins, in order to merit forgiveness and blessing. Forgiveness maintains the ethical basis of the divine-human regime, and blessing is the fruitful encounter between God and man who serves Him. This is the basic idea-structure of monotheism. It defines the relation of love

158

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

between man and woman, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends, members of the community, the members of a people or citizens of a state, and human beings and God. Love is the relation of fructification between the active partner who desires to impart fertility and the passive partner who desires to receive fertilization in order to be fertile in him/herself. God is the source of all fertility. God is fertile and fructifying, and the blessing is the fertilizing flow. When one is speaking of earthly creatures in general, the primary sense is that of physical-biological fertility: each creature procreating in its image and likeness, the multiplication and thriving of progeny. When one is speaking of human beings, the sense is also that of psycho-spiritual fertility, which comes to expression in building civilizations and in the life of the spirit that is inscribed in them. Again, God is the king Who rules over the whole world. Nevertheless, in comparing the God-creature relationship and the relationship of human beings to each other and to lower creatures, monotheism does not undermine the authority of legislation, justice, enforcement, and governance exercised by human beings in those domains designated for their governance according to God’s law. On the contrary, God’s law supports and reinforces this authority, on the condition that it should not exceed its proper limits or turn into tyranny. Man, who was created “in the image of God,” was blessed by the spirit that God breathed into him. The spirit that emanates to him imposes a mission on him. He is commanded to carry it out willingly, by devoting himself to being fertile and making fertile. In this, mankind completes the project of creation that flowed from the divine fructification. For this purpose, mankind is graced with the power of rational choice (based on values). God commands humanity and expects that they will carry out His commandment. If they obey, they will merit God’s good reward; and if they sin, they will be punished. However, as we said, God expects that they will obey willingly, out of the knowledge that God’s command is just and true, and that His bestowing it is not compulsion but kindness. Human beings are thus commanded to establish their kingdoms out of free readiness to bear responsibility

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

159

for their deeds. Nevertheless, it is clear that freedom of choice gives an opening to sin, whether out of proud refusal to fulfill God’s command and to realize one’s freedom in the opposite sense of egoistic caprice, or out of error or the failure to overcome temptation. Man’s bestial lusts incline him to sin, and from this inclination is born idolatry, which at its root is man’s aspiration to follow the caprice of his selfish lusts. Monotheism and idolatry see themselves as opposite religions, posing two opposing alternatives. In this way, the religions wrestle with each other, but also define each other. There can therefore be various attempts to arrive at compromise between them, to serve both God and the gods, or to fashion a mixture of different degrees of inclination to one extreme or the other. In popular religiosity one always finds idolatrous tendencies. In the eyes of the official establishment of the monotheistic religions, the choice between willing obedience to God and being swept away by one’s lustful urges is a substantive choice that a person is called on to choose again, day after day and hour after hour, and this is his true freedom. In order to distinguish between monotheistic and idolatrous religion, one should pay attention to the personal bond fashioned between God and the individual, which is a central religious value. God loves His creation. He especially loves the human being, created in His “image.” This is an intimate relation like that of the parent and child. It has intrinsic importance for both of them: without the relation to God, the human being does not arrive at the spiritual rank that differentiates him or her from other creatures of nature; without the relation to the human being, God is not known in His Godhood on earth, for the human being is the only creature on earth that is endowed with the intellectual faculty to intuit and know. From this follows a reciprocal obligation: for the sake of God’s glory He commands man, and for the sake of man’s glory, he is commanded by God. The reward is the love expressed in man’s cleaving to God, Who is the source of the blessing that gives him life, and that fertilizes him physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

160

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

The Unique Bond Between God and Humanity Explains the Meaning of Humanity’s Creation “In God’s Image”

The human being is a creature in whom two worlds meet. Physically, he is one of the animals, born of nature. Spiritually he is the child of God, an extension of his Father’s life. The meeting of the two worlds is a challenge and a mission. God creates mankind from the dust of the earth and breathes into him His spirit, in order that he may help God complete His desire in creating and governing the world. We find here embodied one of the difficult problems with which monotheism struggles: why did the Creator-God have need of the help of a creature weaker than Himself, whom He Himself created? The Biblical monotheistic answer is double: the forces of chaos preceded creation, but there is also a bond of love between God and man. 1. God realized His desire perfectly when He created the heavenly part of the universe, and made it all by Himself. However, God could not achieve perfect realization of His desire when He created the earthly part of the universe, mired in primal chaos. This distinction is extremely important in understanding the concept of “nature” in monotheistic religion, which does not disagree with the idea, which is a true element in idolatry, according to which terrestrial nature has an independent existence, and an activity that follows from this existence.1 In the act of creation, God finds primal chaos before him. Nothing is said of its source, but it appears that God did not create it. God only uncovers it and brings it out into the light of first knowledge that He created (“And there was light”). This means that the “darkness”—the lack of self-awareness—of the primal chaos is the movement-of-becoming of blind organic matter, which is yearning to be, but on account of its instinctual blindness it is not able to generate on its own the set laws and stable forms, and to 1 It can be found, for instance, in addition to Genesis 1:2, in Maimonides’s Guide (chapters 8 and 15 of Part III) and in Gersonides’s theory of creation (Book 6 of Wars of the Lord). See also Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, documenting the prevalence of this idea in many books of the Hebrew Bible, especially Psalms and Isaiah.

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village



161

obey them. Thus, it would seem that in God’s act of creation in the earthly realm, God performs a kindness for the forces of chaos and comes to redeem them from their fateful blindness. For this purpose, He must fight them. He must force forms and laws on them. God bends down over the chaos with His spirit in order to fructify it. He sows the seed of His wisdom (His logos or commandment) in the bosom of chaos; He begets, brings forth, creates, and makes forms that contain within them, like vessels, the turbulent energy of the chaos. Thus appear the independent creatures, which give the turbulent energy contained in them an identity, movement, fertility, and positive destiny. But the forces of chaos, which made the creatures born of it into beings separate from God and existing for themselves, were not fully vanquished. The energies of chaos continue to oppose the bonds of form and the fetters of laws that were forced on them for their good. If in the youth of each creature they acted as a positive, fertilizing force, after maturity they become his undoing and destruction. From this follows the cyclicality of nature, which renews itself through birth to death and repeats itself. The pain, want, and evil that nature’s creatures experience in their struggle for existence flow from the confrontation between the will of God, enforcing forms and laws, and the fateful, blind, instinctual power of the forces of chaos. Earthly nature thus has a basic imperfection, inasmuch as it is fundamentally incapable of being perfected through God’s forcible imposition of His law and forms. In order to govern chaos, one must act from within it, implant in it the desire to be redeemed from the contradiction, and integrate its power into the project of creation. This is the stratagem at the basis of creating man as a natural creature in which pulsates the spirit of God. In his struggle with his instincts, which draw on primal chaos, he strives to vanquish them not by suppressing them, but rather by integrating the positive energy embodied in them into the civilization that he establishes, in order to live in it a life of sanctification to God’s ethical-spiritual service. This is the solution that follows from the positive response of the chthonian energy to God’s will. However, it is clear that we are

162

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

speaking of a protracted process, a series of trials and failures. Man is singled out by virtue of the spirit that God breathed in him, so that he should do God’s will voluntarily. His life is a continual struggle between bestial corporeality and his divine spirit, and between him and the other creatures of nature surrounding him. When he keeps faith with his God, he overcomes his lusts, but not easily, and it is obvious why after each achievement in the direction of accomplishment and perfection comes weariness, seduction by pleasures that follow from satisfaction of the bodily lusts. From the monotheistic perspective, pleasure as a goal of life is betrayal of God and of the destiny set for man. Man resorts to the spirit that God endowed on him in order to achieve a goal opposite to it—namely, satisfaction of his selfish bodily pleasures for their own sake. Sin leads to sin. For the sake of his pleasures, man exploits other creatures who are just as much entitled to happiness as he. He exploits his fellow human beings and forces them into slavery, and in the end he exploits himself by becoming enslaved to his lusts to the point of extinguishing the divine image in which he was created. 2. Man’s spiritual ability creates a bond of love between him and God—a reciprocal love between king and faithful servant, teacher and student, parent and child. This love is a fructifying bond between them, a bond of receiving born of giving, and giving born of receiving. This is a mutual connection of separate individuals, not a mystical unity in which the lovers merge into one being. Mystical love, striving for merger, is idolatrous. It amounts in practice to self-deification of man, when he ignores the ineradicable barrier between the divine and the human. Monotheistic love of God is expressed in seeking nearness and inspiration, and in walking in man’s ways, in order to shower and fructify all humanity and all creation with the blessing that the servant of God receives from his God.

How, then, is the difference between monotheistic and idolatrous religiosity expressed? The scholars generally emphasize the difference between the belief in one God and the belief in many gods (monotheism versus polytheism), and similarly the difference between a

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

163

spiritual God that is separate from the forces of nature, versus gods that are personifications of the forces of nature and responsible for its fertility. According to this conception, the gods are similar to human beings, who differ only in their size, their power, their beauty, their abilities, their might, their health, and their eternal nature. They have the needs of animal creatures, and find their happiness through satisfying them. The gods enjoy eating and drinking. The copulation of the gods with goddesses and with the beautiful daughters of humans is at the top of the gods’ interests. In order to satisfy these pleasures in unstinting abundance, they require services that only human beings can offer them. It follows that the gods are ruled by their desires just as human beings are. The tyrannical nature of the gods is their blind fate. They, too, are powerless against it. Therefore the human beings who serve them can exploit the gods’ dependence on their services in order to seduce them, outwit them, earn great reward, and even join their society. For the kings and heroes, who imitate the gods, become their allies, and when they excel they join the society of the gods and enjoy the eating and drinking that affords them immortality. It is clear that according to this idolatrous outlook, man’s becoming a god is the peak of success and happiness. We return to the difference between monotheism and idolatry. According to the monotheistic belief, God is one and unique, sanctified by His spirituality above physical nature. He obligates mankind to imitate Him, to see his happiness in his spiritual fertility and in what he gives to another, and to see himself as a flow of kindness. Happiness does not lie in taking for its own sake. Taking is necessary in order to satisfy the needs that condition man’s ability to create in order to return to nature more than he received from it. Man is therefore destined to enrich his environment, not to deplete it. The same applies to man’s spiritual creativity. He draws from the Source from which the spirit emanates—the inexhaustible powers of creativity with which the Creator-God blesses creation. Man, too, needs to be blessed by God and to emanate the blessing to the other creatures. This is the essence of the love between God and humanity, and this is also the secret of man’s forming a connection to the world through

164

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

the civilization that he establishes for himself. Not in order to take for himself, but in order to give blessing to his fellows and to the creatures of nature that aid him. By contrast, idolatry is egotism, tyranny, enslaving, exploitative, and wicked. According to the Biblical outlook, the monotheistic religion was founded in a primal covenant between the Creator-God and all humanity (the covenant of Noah and his sons). This was the first step of God, not of man. Early humanity’s inclination toward idolatry was manifested in their sins. Only rare individuals passed the test that the covenant presented to the human animal. The majority acted as if forced and rebelled when they could. If we read the Biblical narrative from the standpoint of the development of human civilization, we shall see that idolatry was the first stage in the religious development of human history. Only a few individuals kept faith with the original covenant, and the struggle for humanity to return to the early covenant that was enacted with their ancestors extended throughout the generations, with small successes and many continual reverses and failures. It follows that idolatry is closer than monotheism to the inclinations of man’s heart and mind as he struggles for existence in the world in which the forces of chaos pulsate. At the first stage of the awakening of consciousness and its focus on knowledge, every child of humanity sees himself as one of the creatures of nature fighting for their lives and their happiness. At the stage that man lived in nature without the aid of a protecting civilization, man too had to conquer for himself whatever his hand could grasp in order to satisfy his needs. This is the law of nature for all creatures, and it was especially cruel for man, who was in need of special, rare conditions for his upbringing. Man thus needed to use his spiritual gifts as a means to insure his survival, for they were his only advantage over the other animals of his kind. He could unite, make tools, exercise mastery over the earth and its treasures, and extract from them the satisfaction of his needs in increasing quantities. Being an egocentric animal, he continued to take whatever his hand could reach, without consideration for others. Only when it became clear that by doing so he was enfeebling himself and injuring

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

165

his environment, he understood that the laws of the primeval covenant were enacted for his benefit. The spread of this idea depended on the faith in divine governance, and it became clear that faith required strength of spirit to withstand hard trials. Therefore, even when monotheism spread and became a state religion, the struggle with idolatry did not cease. According to the Biblical narrative, this was not only the evidence of the beginning of the cultural history of the human species, but also of the unfolding culture of each generation. Everyone born in each generation starts at the beginning. In his infancy and childhood he re-experiences the primal experience recorded in the Bible. When he matures, he is convinced that the tempting serpent lies in wait for him at every corner, even in his family and community. A Garden of Eden without a snake is a vision for a remote future. One must labor much in order to attain it. In maturity man is awakened to knowledge of himself and recognition of his responsibility, but all his days he is forced to struggle with the temptations of his lust and his idolatrous urges. The truth is that idolatry embodies the consciousness of man’s dependence on nature, and the necessity that follows from it to search out the secrets of activating its powers in order to control them, insofar as control is possible, and to satisfy his needs on the level necessary for human existence: air, water, food, clothing, ammunition, servants and slaves. As we said, monotheistic religion does not ignore this necessity, but it addresses it with a wisdom that embraces the totality of existence from the perspective of its creator, which is the perspective of the good of all the creatures of the world together. Monotheistic religion teaches that the idolatrous relation to nature is natural and as such is necessary to all nature’s creatures, except for man! Man’s spirit draws on a divine source, and strives to rule nature not only for man’s sake alone, but in the name of God, which obligates him to the good of all creatures over which man was commanded to rule. Spiritual creativity demands that one take much from nature, but it enables man to live in a supra-natural cultural sphere. Therefore the natural relation to nature is a stumbling block for him. It

166

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

contradicts the moral tendency that God strives to imprint in creation through him. Indeed, man’s spiritual-ethical faculty is the advantage that affords him the power to rule without his having to be the tyrannical exploiter of his environment. The animals are not aware of the moral purpose of creation, and their egoistic behavior protects them from each other. They do indeed injure each other, but their power is limited. Every creature is granted an equal chance for survival, through which it realizes itself and procreates in its image; thus a positive balance of give and take is established among them. By contrast, man, who is conscious of a moral purpose and builds his society on it, runs up against the contradiction between his bestial inclinations and the demands of his spiritual nature, and becomes its victim. This is his existential dilemma. His egoistic nature and his observation of the egoistic behavior of the natural creatures around him make it hard for him to give credence to the divine promise, that if he restrains his egotism and acts according to the creative logic of giving to the world out of the abundance that he draws from it, indeed he will be able to realize his destiny and achieve his happiness. To the idolater, this principle appears irrational and unnatural. He cannot believe that if he acts according to what God’s teaching instructs him, which runs counter to nature in general and counter to his nature as an animal, he will merit happiness, even though his life experience teaches him again and again that his egoistic lusts get him into trouble. He looks for confirmation from his life experience that the way of righteousness leads to happiness. Such confirmation is rare and is considered a miracle, because most people prefer the immediate feeling of security that their egoistic action is good for them and benefits them in the present. The monotheistic religion does not ignore the primal life experience that produces idolatry, but it deals with it in an opposite way. Idolatry in its development strives to penetrate the secrets of nature in order to control it, subdue it, and extract from it forcibly whatever nature withholds from man, as it were, but permits to be extracted from the energies stored in its materials. The primal relation of the idolater toward nature is anthropomorphic. Nature is perceived by him

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

167

as if it is filled with gods, that is to say, filled with good and evil spirits that operate within it, each one for the sake of his or her own egoistic interests. Idolaters attribute to the spirits that pulsate in nature traits of a fateful character, and they come to expression in their names. The sages of the generation, who know how to decipher these traits, know how to use the names that activate these traits in order to seduce and force the gods to use their power for the benefit of the human beings who serve them. This is the concern of magic and the other methods of idolatrous worship. However, in-depth observation of nature and the ways that it operates transforms magic into experimental science, whose utility can be ascertained through rational methods of measurement. We should note that monotheistic religion never denied the limited usefulness of magic, and certainly never denied that of science. The royal road to ruling over nature is according to its own teaching, namely, keeping God’s law and ethics in human society because of the faith that God, who rules over the forces of nature, will reward those who fulfill his commands with blessings that shall rest on all the works of their hands, without forcing the creatures of nature to change their form and their natural traits that are good for them. We find that there is a scientific basis for both monotheistic religion and idolatry. Each of them is rooted in man’s physical-spiritual nature, and both of them answer to the needs and existential problems with which man is forced to deal because of his exceptional status in nature inasmuch as he is a spiritual being. The deeper problem is that religion is based on faith, and faith is based on acknowledging a supranatural truth, which from the perspective of man, ensconced in nature, is also suprarational. In this respect, ethics is not the essence of faith, but what conditions it even more: the faith in God’s existence, and seeking His nearness and love. In this respect, when idolatry fulfills its full task as religion, its essence is the faith in the existence of the gods, which have in their power to help man or hinder him, and the yearning to become like the gods, and if possible even to take their place. If we compare the monotheistic religion to advanced idolatry, we can show that at a certain stage of development science, law, and ethics appeared both in monotheistic and idolatrous

168

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

religion. Indeed, in this respect the difference between monotheistic religion and idolatry is reduced to the questions: what takes priority and is more important? What is the means and what is the end? Monotheistic religion sees in law, justice and ethics the end-goal to be realized in a good human society, while idolatry sees the end-goal in natural science, which facilitates man’s effective control over the forces of nature. Furthermore, religiosity is the inter-subjective connection between God and man (a connection of ethical love), whereas the connection between the gods and man is objective, exploitative, utilitarian, and competitive. Is there then an objective element for faith in the reality of a supernatural God or natural gods? In their maturity, believers too arrive at the recognition that their experiential encounter with God or with the gods is mediated by their creative faculties of imagination and intellect, for in the subjective dimension of their emotional response to their senses, the panoramas of life appear as symbols that embody in them a meaningful message, and in this sense they are like expressive faces, encountering the expressive faces of human beings, behind which one senses a manifest-yet-hidden soul that feels, thinks, desires, and intends. It follows from this that faith in God or in gods is a subjective response, interpreting a presence that is at once objective and subjective. The objective presence can be seen in terms of the utility that can be derived from it or the damage that it is liable to cause through its physical characteristics. The subjective presence can be seen according to the emotional significance that it embodies within it. Even this is in accord with man’s awareness of himself within his natural environment, of which this presence is a part. Both these aspects of man’s relation to nature, which is also nature’s relation to him, have vital importance. It is forbidden to one who lives a life of reflective selfawareness to ignore either one, because the meaning of man’s selfreflective life is important for his survival no less than the satisfaction of his bodily needs. The meaning of the emotional-intellectual response called “faith” follows from this recognition. Faith is subjective certainty, proved by its experiential power, that God, or gods, relate to man from behind the

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

169

unmediated presence of the creatures of nature with which one lives and on which one is dependent. Continuous with this is the certainty that man, who is a part of nature, is important to these powers—that is to say, that they relate to him and expect him to render good to them, therefore his behavior is apt to influence them for good or for bad. On what does this faith rely? What is the source of its certainty? The answer is found in two elements, in the reflective quality that distinguishes human consciousness from the sensory-emotional consciousness of animals, and the political educational function that religion fulfills. The first element, the reflective consciousness, is the examined knowledge whose source is in a double reflection: reflection on reflection. Every conscious sensation is a first-order reflection. When consciousness, which collects sensory impressions and shapes from them a certain picture, goes back and observes itself, a mental act occurs making the objective determination that thus-and-such is the picture of reality that the senses have observed. A person is not only conscious of things in his environment, including himself—as all animals are—but he is conscious of being conscious. In doing so, he renders judgment concerning the observing “I” that it is a separate “I,” and that as such it is a subject to itself and not just an object to others, and also concerning the identity and qualities of the things that it sees. This is knowledge on another level. Among several kinds of creatures in nature one can discern the beginning of this distinction, but none of these creatures has arrived at the level of knowledge that man has arrived at, which is a level of forming an abstract concept that follows from observation of an image. A human being knows how to signify an object that he has grasped conceptually using a word whose sound and rhythm imitate them; he keeps them in his memory, transmits them in communication with another person, and combines them into specific or general thoughts. This spiritual ability has implications for man’s methods of communication with other persons like himself, his orientation, his ability to measure, to evaluate, to choose, to plan, and to act wisely. We should note that the deployment of verbal-conceptual communication is in and of itself the formation of a political connection. It establishes a collective entity with a collective “I” that as such has knowledge

170

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

and will that transcend the knowledge and will of the individuals. The connection between the consciousness of being rooted in a collective “I” with its own will, and the consciousness that above all these there are many gods, or a single God Who rules the world, is quite clear. The linguistic capability thus creates a spectrum of objective and subjective ways of relating to reality, and the faith in God or gods is one of them. First, we should note that human beings are inclined by their unique faculty of knowledge and will to think of themselves as creatures with special importance and significance among the creatures of their environment. Their awareness of the various forms and aspects of their dependence on these entities seems to them like the awareness of all the creatures and entities in their environment around them. And since a person, possessed of awareness, knows that he did not create himself, even though from his perspective he is unique, necessary, and without substitute, he inclines to think that his existence attests to someone of unique ability who intended him because he is important to Him. A person knows that his parents begat him, just as he will beget his progeny; but all this would not be possible unless some being possessed of power intended them and implanted the same ability in them. In this respect, one can say that man’s being a creature with consciousness and self-awareness makes him into a religious creature, a believer by nature. It is easy to see that disappointments and suffering do not contradict this tendency, for the believer feels that despite his disappointments, God is present to him through the appearances of nature and the wisdom that he discovers in them, as well as from the inwardness of his soul and the wisdom that he discovers in it. The second element, which grounds and confirms faith and sees in it a part of the experience of human life, is the vital political function that religion fulfills. “Man is a political creature by nature,” Aristotle said. Monotheism asserts that man is political from his creation. All animals belong to groups of their own species in order to survive and procreate. But man cannot rest content with a herd existence on this level. In order for human nature to be actualized, he needs civilization, and this can be formed only in large groups bound together by

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

171

linguistic-conceptual communication, which makes possible economic and social institutions based on consensual rules, laws, norms, and levels of authority. In order for a thought-out and planned arrangement as this to achieve stability and function, each member of the group must recognize in general that as a rational being he is subject to the rational authority over him. As a self-conscious “I” he knows that he did not create himself, nor did he create his reason by himself. It does not seem likely that this advantageous trait, which attests to his chosenness, is accidental. Such a train of thought leads naturally to the conclusion that a supremely rational Being created nature, with him at the center, and that he is subject to this Being’s authority. This awareness becomes a fundamental principle of the collective political consciousness. The king is the person chosen to rule, and was chosen by God (or by “the gods”). As long as he functions successfully and demonstrates that he is good in God’s (or the gods’) eyes, his authority is valid. The happiness of the citizens of the kingdom is dependent on their obedience, and therefore all the rewards of a well-ordered state and advanced civilization provide for their believers the feeling that their life-experience confirms their faith, even if their direct expectations from God (or the gods), as private individuals, are not always (or even mostly) fulfilled as they would wish. As long as the life of the culture proceeds properly, they continue to believe that if God (or the gods) did not help them this time—probably because they sinned— they will help them after they mend their ways and act more righteously or wisely. Religion’s political-existential function is thus the secret of its persistence over time. At a certain stage of development of civilization, man’s self-reliance is apt to displace his religiosity. The great kings who conquered territories and subjugated nations saw themselves as sovereign. The legitimacy of their rule was rooted in their people and the advanced civilization that it controlled. A deeper examination reveals that this process is a kind of idolatry that worships the powers of civilization. Idolatry has not disappeared. It has exchanged one form for another. Monotheistic religion, which has also undergone major transformations in response to its

172

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

challenges, must reevaluate how it should cope with the idolatry that is its rival.

Faith in Idols and Faith in God in Modern Times Christianity vanquished ancient paganism in the Western countries, and similarly Islam in the neighboring lands to the south and east. However, idolatry did not perish. One may indeed argue the opposite. The paganism of European nations, over which Christianity ruled in the Middle Ages, infiltrated Christianity itself. Hellenistic idolatry penetrated into dogma and Christian ritual, while the pagan religions of central, northern, and eastern Europe left their mark on the local folk rituals of each country. The Christian churches that developed in the Middle Ages and drew on the Hebrew Bible adapted monotheism to Western paganism more than they adapted paganism to monotheism. The ancient European pagan religions vanished from the world only in the late Middle Ages, and even then they left a deep lode of cultural memory that has nourished Western literature, art, philosophy, and political thought down to the present day. The extinction of ancient idolatrous faith and ritual as a living force was brought about by the victory of two major movements that helped shape the modern world in many ways: idealistic humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the Protestant (especially Lutheran) Reformation. Secular idealistic humanism founded its modern cultural project on experimental natural science, on technology that used exact science, on rational division of labor, on universal ethics, on democracy (rule by the popular will), and a liberalism that assumed equality before the law, tolerance, and rationalist critique of those prejudices and superstitions on which idolatry depended. Armed with these tools, the Enlightenment fought a fight to the death against the psycho-social relics of ancient idolatry, whether within Christianity or the folk culture. It heaped mockery and contempt on them, because it saw in them the greatest spiritual obstacle to the spread of the rational idea of progress that was its banner. Protestantism pursued a similar course of action within the Christian religion. It fostered a positive attitude toward worldly life,

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

173

respect for science, respect for the secular regime and democracy, and the aspiration to purify Christianity from the pagan elements that had crept into its dogma and ritual. Humanism and Protestantism still opposed each other on the matter of religion’s standing in the national life, but both had internalized the values of ethical monotheism to the extent that they could cooperate in establishing the liberal state based on separation of church from state, the idea of a state based on law, striving for idealistic morality, and recognizing the supremacy of spirit over matter. This was the principal social-political and spiritual message of the Enlightenment. It was implemented in its greatest practical achievement, namely, the modern educational curriculum, from kindergarten to the university, which prepared the citizens of the modern state to contribute intelligently in all areas of life—society, community, and nation. All this proceeded according to consensual norms, whose observance was considered a condition for proper social and cultural participation—economic, military, administrative, and judicial—and at a high intellectual level. The Enlightenment movement was institutionalized in the national educational systems of modern Western countries. Though it underwent major changes over the years, it is substantially the same system as is in place today. Through these educational structures, supported by laws mandating compulsory universal education, the Enlightenment fundamentally shaped Western national cultures. Its curricula represented the totality of the national culture and its hierarchy of values. These were implemented with a liberal educational philosophy, which placed emphasis on comprehensive development of the personality, rooted in its cultural heritage. The university education placed the emphasis on advanced research and creative expression in all areas of science and intellectual life. The positive results from this approach brought about a swift revolution in the prevailing outlook of broad strata of the people. The Enlightenment succeeded in broadening the economic infrastructure of the civilization, enhancing productivity of all kinds, fostering a respectable standard of living for a larger portion of the population, improving medicine, and developing and facilitating public services.

174

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

The people were convinced that the Enlightenment was more helpful to them than religion in dealing with the difficulties of daily living. This fact gave support to the Enlightenment’s war against prejudices, superstitions, and the other relics of idolatry that were embedded in popular culture. The radical Enlighteners thought that in this way they could succeed in displacing monotheistic religion entirely and setting up in its place rational philosophy and its symbolic rituals,2 expressed in the patterns of social, political, esthetic and artistic education. This project failed. It became clear that the modern Enlightenment was more effective than religion in improving man’s material condition, but it did not provide an answer for his psychological, spiritual, ethical, and religious concerns. On the contrary—in these respects, science raised problems and doubts without being able to find a constructive solution. Liberal Protestant Christianity was based on this insight. Following its lead, modern Catholicism was also able to reconstruct itself by adapting to modernity. And for its part, philosophical humanism adopted for itself the values and transcendental fideistic ideals of prophetic monotheism. What was the monotheistic element that was embodied in the humanism and scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment? It was expressed in two assumptions that the humanists assumed from the start, and which they saw as following necessarily from man’s uniqueness as a rational creature in nature. In his intellect and reason, man represented nature’s highest achievement, and in this sense he could be called “created in God’s image.” From this it followed that nature was rational, and in its unity it created itself, knew itself, and strove for perfection and eternity. The rationality of nature could be examined scientifically, inasmuch as it manifested predetermined causal relations, or rather, necessary relations among its component parts, through which it presented an ordered totality within a system of hierarchical 2 See, for instance, the role of Masonic ritual in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, an operatic expression of the anti-Christian, pro-Enlightenment ethos, and the French Revolution’s “cult of the Goddess Reason.” More broadly, the arts generally may be viewed as ritual celebrations of Enlightenment values (LL).

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

175

relations, in the same way that an organic body comprises a totality of this kind. These totalities undergo regular cycles of self-renewal. In the process, they develop in the direction of ever-ascending perfection: from inanimate to vegetative, from vegetative to animal, and from animal to human. In mankind, this teleological tendency rises to individual and collective consciousness. This is the decisive step toward perfection. It expresses the achievement of nature as a whole, for civilization brings the creative powers latent in nature to full fruition, generating a higher unified sphere in which the values of truth, goodness, and beauty are all realized together. This humanistic vision shows a similarity to Plato’s holistic rational philosophy, as well as to the Bible’s account of creation. However, humanistic thought identified the rational pattern with the inner law of nature, and did not see it as the emanation of a transcendental divine Intellect. The far-reaching implication of this difference is the denial of evil as a substantive active power in nature. Modern humanism strove to break free from the outlook that the world is the scene of a perpetual war between the forces of creation and the forces of chaos, and from the Christian outlook, according to which corporeal life is bound up necessarily with impurity and sin. According to humanism, the lusts of the body are not negative in themselves. They serve the needs of survival in nature, and they represent unconscious rationality in the lower strata of evolution. The march of progress is therefore evolving, and as such one should see in it a universal biological law, analogous to the physical law of the preservation of matter. Nature develops of itself, thus expressing its will to ascend from the simple to the composite, from the particular to the general, from the primal to the developed, from the plain to the sophisticated, and from the material to the spiritual and abstract embodied in the storehouse of science and the human cultural legacy. According to this outlook, the phenomena that human beings define as “evils,” because they cause them pain, sickness, and death, are not the consequence of bad intentions, but the consequence of objective deficiencies and limitations, which every self-perfecting process must undergo. Nature is continually improving. Every failure

176

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

presents a problem that nature deals with and eventually solves on its own. One cannot arrive at perfection in a single step, but in the modern age we are approaching it. The prophets’ visions of redemption will be realized—not through the miraculous intervention of a transcendent God Who will draw the creation towards Him, but rather in the way of nature, according to its teleological laws, and with the help of man who achieves through his tools what nature itself could not achieve by itself. According to the first philosophy of the modern Enlightenment, there is thus no active factor of evil either in nature or in man. The positive aspiration to life, to creativity, to power and happiness motivates all the processes of nature. Every creature strives to achieve them for its own sake, but not at others’ expense, for inasmuch as it is an organic part of the hierarchy of being, its happiness is contingent on the happiness of other creatures, and therefore its aspiration to its own good contributes to the whole without detracting from it. In human beings, this aspiration—to one’s own private good and the general good—rises to consciousness. It is transformed from blind instinct to reasoned will, applied in a creative, intentional way to the practical arts of civilization and the purposive spiritual life of culture, embodying man’s open-ended aspiration to ideal perfection. When the enlightened human being considers the history of nature, which started with the formation of the earth and continued in the deposits of minerals, the development of the plethora first of plant life, then animal life in all its varieties, and finally the emergence of man as a rational creature, or when he studies the history of culture, he finds that existential being, in all its broad extent and inexhaustible variety, flows from one principle—the will to be, to live with all one’s power and to be complete in one’s self-identity. Thus the Enlightenment philosophers understood the monotheistic idea in its deeper meaning—not only the belief that there is one God Who is the cause of all being, but the aspiration to unity that is implanted in the world. This, in their view, was the aspiration that maintained every creature in his unique self-identity. Thus he wanted to be for himself, and at the same time to be united with all existence

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

177

surrounding him, on which he was dependent. The idea of unity is thus represented in every creature, and is expressed in the infinite aspiration pulsating in all creatures, to live a unified life and to unite with the totality. According to the Enlightenment philosophy, this is true religiosity, raised to the level of reason. It is not organized in a church, but in the all-embracing framework of the unified collective life of mankind, from the family to the community, and thence to the nation established in its state. Thus, too, the rational service of God is expressed in all man’s labor—material, industrial, ethical, and spiritual—in building his civilization, indeed for his own sake, but through his ascension and contribution to the totality, for its broadening, enrichment, and elevation. The humanistic philosophers believe that nature is positive. It prefers existence to nothingness, life to death, health to sickness, plenitude to deficiency, unity to contradiction and opposition, peace to conflict, happiness to suffering. From this followed the conclusion that with respect to their primary, overall intentions, human beings were good. Their objectives were good, their motivations were good, and their will was good. Only the conditions of deprivation brought it about that their desire for life and happiness should turn into the cause of confrontation with others, who at bottom were their partners in life, but thereby turned into hostile competitors. It followed that if they did not need to fight for their survival needs, and were not threatened, the perceived evil would disappear from those civilizations that were unjustly governed. On the basis of this assumption, the Enlightenment philosophers formulated the law of progress. The world, and the civilization that keeps it going, find themselves on a course of perpetual development and perfection. Just as the arrow of time has only one direction—from the past to the future—so progress has only one direction, toward greater perfection. There is no retreat in nature, just as there is no return to past time. It follows that every innovation in nature and in civilization is for the better, for they follow from the aspiration to perfection, even though people do not always know in advance the good that lies in store for them through these innovations. Clinging to tradition causes the result that when

178

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

historical development jumps to a higher level, a conflict breaks out between the old and the new. Until the developmental continuity that connects them becomes apparent to all, wars break out, bringing much suffering. Philosophical consideration teaches, on the basis of past experience, that this suffering is the necessary price, and in this sense it is not evil, but only the circumstance of progress that will lead in the end of days to peace and perfection. Progress in the enlightenment is thus a necessary development. However, it flows from within and is not imposed from outside by an arbitrary will. This is true freedom and true happiness. The Enlightenment thinkers believed that these were objective predictions based on solid experiential knowledge—on exact science. Historical experience has proved in retrospect that these were enlightened articles of faith that were developed by human reason. They conformed to human ethical expectations but did not follow from the inner law of existence in nature. Historical experience has demonstrated that the original outlook of the Bible was more realistic, even with respect to modern civilization. Alongside the rational tendency, a destructive causality also operates in nature. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and reason, also display ill will. Man is as likely to use his intelligence to harm other people, and in the end himself, as to act for his good. Progress is not guaranteed. One must choose it; one must struggle over it, sacrifice and suffer for its sake. Only then does the substantive connection between the humanistic idea of progress and the monotheisticprophetic idea of redemption become manifest. But if we draw the general conclusion that derived from the Enlightenment outlook at its inception, we may arrive at the view of Baruch Spinoza. In Spinoza’s conception, there is a daring convergence between pure monotheism (absolute aspiration to unity) and idolatry (identification of God with nature). According to this conception, the one God, absolute and eternal, is not supreme over nature and separated from it, but internal to it and identical with it. Nature’s self-knowledge is reflected in man’s knowledge of himself as a mirror of nature, “the intellectual love of God.” In retrospect, this exaltation of man from his particularity in order to live the totality appears as pagan mysticism. However, when

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

179

Spinoza researched the divine nature, as a scientist who seeks to know how to activate its powers to his benefit, he opened the door to idolatry of the scientist. This new idolatry consists in the faith that science is able to release humanity from all suffering and from all evil, by establishing a civilization that will exchange bestial instincts and urges for purely rational and utilitarian considerations. In other words, modern civilization can raise nature to the level of reason. Spinoza applied his scientific faith by proposing an ethical and political way of life based on science. He believed (more exactly: he thought that he knew) that when all human beings rise to the level of knowledge of the inner ethical and political law that defines the sphere of human life in nature, this will be the necessary causality that will shape all domains of creation, production, and action in civilization. Then wars, revolutions, and quarrels will cease; human beings will devote themselves to scientific, technological, and spiritual creativity, and they will be blessed with individual and collective happiness. Humanity will become united, and the earthly world will be united under it. This is a vision parallel to the vision of the prophets, not a supernatural gospel, but natural evolution. The irony that lurked in the depths of this news was revealed at a later stage of modern history: the wars, revolutions, violence, cruelty, bloodshed and destruction did not bring about progress but devolution from one tragedy to another more tragic than the previous. It was demonstrated that ethical and political progress may be possible, if human beings succeed in overcoming their ill will, but it is clearly not necessary. If the states that people establish for their utility and happiness do not rise up to realize the morality that they embody in their laws, then scientific and technological progress will spell ethical and spiritual disaster, descending to the depths of wickedness. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that faith in science and technology as supreme values whose implementation will guarantee a solution to the problems of man in nature, is worse than a delusion. It carries the power of evil, because it expresses exploitative egotism presented as good and proper. In this sense, the faith in the necessity of progress was a rationalistic excuse for the schemes and abominations of modern

180

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

despotic states, which surpassed in their cruel efficiency all their predecessors in ancient and medieval times. Wherein, then, lies the difference between a monotheistic understanding of humanism and an idolatrous understanding of the same science and the same ethical reason? The comparison between the ancient monotheism of the Biblical covenant and ancient idolatry holds good here as well. It can be discerned in the distinction between means and ends, and in the universal ethical definition of the end-goal: self-serving flattery of the strong, versus the good of the whole and the good of all individuals comprising the whole. The liberal humanistic state was established on the foundation of the scientific and technological enlightenment. It proclaimed its aspiration to arrive at happiness that was not identified with material achievements, but that subordinated them to ethical and spiritual achievements. In retrospect, it became clear that it bestowed happiness only on the strong property-holders, the wealthy, and those who excelled in the scientific and technological professions that fit the needs of their developing market. The rest of the citizens of the state were exploited as workers, received low pay, and worked under inhuman conditions; they were impoverished and cruelly exploited. At the same time, vicious wars broke out between modern armies who competed to conquer resources and markets. Masses of farmers and workers were drafted into the national armies and became cannon fodder for the national idol: the centralized state. The state became a bloodthirsty idol, and it led humanity into two catastrophic world wars, while on the horizon we can foresee a third world war, the most frightful of all. In the modern idolatrous regimes, democracy was turned on its head. Instead of the rule by the people for the people, it turned into rule of the abstract collective will, attributed to the people, but in truth the will of the dictators who exercised it. They were indeed elected in official elections, but in fact they forced their election with the help of the army and maintained their rule with the help of the police and its efficient, compulsory technological administration. Thus they shaped the regime that was called “totalitarian democracy.” This was an idolatrous regime that continued to pride itself on democratic

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

181

ideals—the self-rule of the people, equality, freedom, brotherhood— but only as slogans that would be realized through forcible imposition of the collective will (the nation or the class, or both together), and came to expression in the apotheosized personality of the sole ruler. The movement toward the rise of totalitarian democracy began with the French Revolution. It featured the horrible bloodshed of the struggle to establish republican rule through imperial conquest through tyrannical force. At the middle of the nineteenth century (1848), there was an attempt to correct the perversion and to realize the idea of the liberal national state with more consistency, but enthusiasm waned quickly. The conflicts between classes and nations did not cease but became intensified, and to them were added the problems of national and religious minorities, which had been suppressed on account of radical nationalism. The wars became the safety valves of national regimes against the social revolutions that threatened from within, but in the end they exacerbated the revolutionary anger that had been building up in the people, especially in the exploited and betrayed working class, and thus they led to the violent social revolutions of the early twentieth century. The disappointed expectations of progress begat two kinds of idolatry carried out by two opposing movements. The first was the faith that science and technology were the predominant forces, and that they would save humanity from all their troubles, guarantee happiness through a democratic regime embodying the necessity of progress in its authoritarian structure. The second was the Romantic faith in the saving power of nature, which industrial man—the man of the big cities and mass collectivities—had betrayed. Scientific-based idolatry was institutionalized on the philosophical and political level by the historical materialism established by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the organizers and original leaders of the International Communist Party. Its idolatrous character was expressed in several aspects. First, in its absolute rejection of monotheism, whether in its religious or humanistic formulation. Historical materialism saw in the belief in God a malicious deception that was intended to provide an “opiate of the masses” in order to sedate them and

182

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

prevent them from rebelling against their exploitation by the capitalist class. Second, in the assumption that material existence determines consciousness, not the opposite. This meant that man invents God in his image to serve him, man, and not the reverse. In fact, man is governed by material interests, not by ethical ideals. Third, in the human animal, instinctual drives take precedence. Inasmuch as human beings are able to realize their selfish interests only by consolidating into societies, this translates into precedence of the collective egotism of the organized group of producers or marketers. Fourth, the party denied free choice based on values. Material existence operates according to physical laws; at the same time, the existence of industrial civilization operates according to the laws of production and the market, adapted to the level of technological development. The economy has a deterministic law-governed causality, just as physical reality does. It follows from this that there is one way to happiness, whose expression is in satisfying the interests of all producers-consumers equally, eliminating destructive conflicts. This is the way of cooperation: compulsory collective ownership of the means of production. Whoever opposes this inner law or strays from it is a traitor, and will be punished decisively by the collectivity. According to the materialistic outlook, cooperation is the final stage toward which civilization evolves through the inner law of progress. Just as existence in nature took shape through a protracted process of evolution, so too civilization, which man builds in nature, undergoes a gradual process of evolution, from time to time through revolutionary leaps. National capitalism is the penultimate stage in the process of revolutionary evolution. At first it creates a conflict between the propertied class and its beneficiaries on the one hand, and the exploited proletariat on the other. This is a contradiction, and it must bring about a world revolution through a world war. The working class will rise to power, and the contradiction will be resolved by the disappearance of class society. The problem, however, is how to bring the exploited working class, sunken in poverty and ignorance and drugged by religion, to understand the reasons for its misery—to recognize the power centralized in its hand and embodied in the great energy of

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

183

production, and its being the greatest collective consumer—and to know that the solution is the society of a united humanity acting as a single person (the dictatorship of the proletariat). In order to arrive at this realization, one needs propaganda as effective as the religious propaganda that draws the hearts of the masses. One must imprint on the consciousness of the masses the principles of the communistic faith, to arouse their opposition and anger, and to direct the anger through the organizational channels of the party in order to destroy the capitalistic order, conquer power, centralize it in the hands of the dictatorial leader who serves the interests of the masses, and establish a complete economic-social-political arrangement that will continue to function by virtue of its consistent and effective inner causal law. In the language of Marx, at the end of the Communist Manifesto, this will be “the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom,” and in it history will arrive at its conclusion. This ideology spoke to the heart of the masses of exploited workers. The kernel of historical truth that was in it was the description of the despairing situation of the exploited working class, which motivated the revolutionary process that was decided in the Russian Revolution. In its wake, there arose despotic communist regimes in the Soviet Union and in the countries that followed in its path. The establishment of these regimes in power completed their transformation into idolatrous states: the party functioned as a church; the dictator functioned as a divine being, representing the will of the people by his personality. Rituals of adoration were conducted around his person and his pictures: military formations, cavalcades, parades, folk celebrations (especially on May Day). All these ceremonies were conducted with a view to ideological brainwashing and indoctrination of the articles of faith of the regime: historical necessity, supremacy of the state over the individual, supremacy of the party over the state, and supremacy of the dictator over the party. It was proclaimed that belief in these principles would guarantee realization of the vision of equality, freedom, and brotherhood. The vision would be realized when the state, that is to say the dictator at its head, would rule over all humanity, and when he would have no enemy, internal or external. Until then, all individuals are

184

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

commanded to serve together as a disciplined army, to work for the sake of the Leader, to obey his orders without murmur, out of certainty that he knows better than them the right way to happiness. They must sacrifice their lives for his sake, fight his battles, and work for his sake. Thus they will merit the supreme happiness that lay in identification with the victorious class and national collective. The other idolatrous ideology, which prided itself on spiritual subjectivity, appeared in several intellectual versions, which had in common a romantic infatuation with “Nature.” According to Romanticism, man had been corrupted by withdrawing from primeval nature. He had become alienated from his surroundings and himself. He did not live an authentic life in keeping with his intrinsic nature, and this was the root of his suffering. This intellectual fashion was like a counter-Renaissance. It came to correct what the first “misguided” Renaissance had spoiled, for it had not returned mankind to nature but taken him out of it through industrialization and urbanization. It was forbidden to continue in this path, which was not the way of progress but of decadence. The only way to redemption was a return to the situation that preceded the historical error—to return to nature and to live a natural life in accord with man’s original nature. Several types of those who were disillusioned with humanism and the idea of progress converged to this way of thinking, resulting in different versions. There were fellow-travelers of the Enlightenment who nevertheless remained faithful to the Catholic church and the mystique of its metaphysical rituals. There were the die-hards of the medieval landed nobility, who still fought for their status. And there were several members of the creative secular intellectual class, who felt out of place among the philistine materialistic bourgeoisie. To these corresponded three tendencies in Romanticism: (a) the tendency to return to myth and the mystique of monasticism and devotion to Heaven in the bosom of Nature; (b) the tendency to return to Paradise pure and simple, identified with life in the bosom of bountiful nature before it was subdued and suffocated by civilization, in primeval landscapes, out of the expressive spontaneity of man, bursting forth from his natural self; (c) the tendency to return to the original tribal

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

185

idolatrous culture of the European peoples, from the period before Christianity, at whose head reigned a king of divine charisma, who was the choice of the nation, its leader and commander. The political character of this kind of Romanticism enabled it to become a mass movement. Materialism had presented itself as a scientific theory, and not without some basis. Economic theory indeed was based on scientific research, but on the foundation of that research an ideology was developed that synthesized several cultural domains, putting their spiritual content at the service of its materialist message. It used one-sided interpretations of natural and social scientific findings, based on an economic framework, to support its solution of all social problems, including those that were the result of subjective spiritual factors not susceptible of a scientific solution. By contrast, the Romantic-inspired movements were unapologetically subjective, intentionally irrational, and self-consciously pagan. They proclaimed their disillusionment with progress, rationalism, and reason itself, and from this disillusion they drew their ethical, social, political, and cultural conclusions. Their solution was to liberate man from the restraints of civilization in order to give authentic expression to one’s natural “self”—living and creative, beyond good and evil, for this was the only way to happiness through self-expression. The desirable course (here speaks the core of Romanticism) was thus retreat from the ideas of rational progress of humanism, and a restoration of the natural state that preceded it. The Romantic way of return began with the first disappointments from the fruits of the Enlightenment among circles of individualistic intellectual elites: poets, musicians, artists, and philosophers. It spread to the masses only after the organization of revolutionary workers’ movements, which threatened the status quo that they saw as antiquated. Indeed, in turning to the masses, Romanticism revealed its reactionary idolatrous character. We recall that materialism had defined the dark situation of the working class and analyzed its causes, but it did this from an optimistic perspective, rooted in the modern idea of progress. From the working-class perspective, every stage in the unfolding of modernity was necessary in its time and in this sense good

186

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

for its time. It followed from this that uncovering the deficiencies and pitfalls laid bare the challenge which, when one overcame it, would lead to a higher level of progress. On the basis of this principle, Marx thought that the working class would accumulate an awesome strength that would enable it to overcome and ascend at the next stage (which he believed would be the last stage) of the ladder of progress. In counterpart to this optimism, Romanticism expressed a pessimism, which congealed into a force of reaction. Progress was nothing but corruption and decadence. Every step forward was another step towards decay and death. The only escape was to go back to the natural state that had preceded the industrial revolution. It was clear to the eye that this was a reaction of the cultured classes, who feared that the proletarian revolution wanted to confiscate their treasures, deprive them of their freedom, and hijack their creative energies—for the sake of material achievements equal for all, enthroning gray mediocrity as the criterion of the good and the beautiful. Their pessimism was expressed in their conviction that every step forward in realizing the ideals of the Enlightenment was a step backward as measured by the ideals of Romanticism. The only way that remained open was to return to the point of origin. But was it possible to reverse the achievements of the industrial revolution? Was it possible to return to a life of the labor of one’s hands in the bosom of nature? Did the dandified Romantics indeed want to return to a life of manual labor in nature? The Romantics knew full well that this was impossible, for in practical terms they did not want to give up their standard of living and their comforts. The first Romanticism was not a political but a cultural-intellectual movement. It did not involve itself in economic matters, nor did it fight against the sciences or advanced technology. It expressed its ideals through spectacular artistic creativity—in poetry, music, dance, theater, and architecture. Ideal nature was reimagined, and artistic re-workings of ancient pagan myths were experienced, emphasizing their expressive and esthetic value. On the social-political plane, Romantic mass movements appeared at a later stage, and in response to the challenge of revolutionary workers’ movements; one then saw

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

187

a massive return, laden with kitsch, to the political forms of pagan kingdoms with their armies of knights. It started with the resurrection of the myth of the war of the powers of good against the powers of evil in the world. The organized and enlisted national collectivity was sanctified as an army fighting for the fatherland. At its head stood the sole ruler and dictator, endowed with divine charisma, the Leader, the hero, the “higher man,” representing in his personality the will of the united people, who served him by wearing their army uniforms, through their parades, their demonstrations of strength, carrying the flags of their nation and the banners of their army together with the pictures of their leader who was exalted above the people. Through these tools they brought about the transformation of the unruly masses into an organized, disciplined collective, motivated by a single will, by the command of the exalted leader. In summary, there was complete symmetry between the communistic idolatry and the fascist idolatry. These two opposing movements fought with each other, and each also fought against the liberalnational movements for world rule. They used the same idolatrous means of rule and differed only in their definition of their selfish idolatrous ideals: a class ideal versus a nationalist ideal. In this way they realized their idolatrous myth, until they destroyed the whole habitat of industrial civilization from which they had drawn their strength.

The Turn of Events After World War II The humanistic historians who researched the background for the outbreak of World War I had trouble understanding the economic interests and political realities that generated it. For World War II, the explanation is clearer. This was an ideological war. The preparations for its outbreak began with the Russian Revolution and continued in the fascist revolutions that took place later in several European countries. Communism and fascism strove for globalization in terms of sole centralized rule over the world. They were characterized by zealous radicalism that was expressed in their determination to realize their goals, and in their methods in which efficiency, with no moral bounds, was their sole criterion: “the end justifies the

188

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

means.” Unlike the pragmatic compromise and moderation that characterized humanistic liberalism, the leaders of these movements said openly what they intended to do, meant what they said, and proved it through their actions. This was the charisma that attracted the confused and terrified masses to them, who yearned for strong, self-assured leaders, who knew their way and were convinced of it, who spoke to their lusts and aroused them. They were willing to follow them blindly to the final war that would redeem them from all their troubles, hatred, and fears. After communism came to power in one major country, and fascism came to power in several countries, the outbreak of an all-inclusive world war was only a matter of time, for this was the only possible logic of the action both of the communists and the fascists. One should note that the liberal countries, especially England, also bore responsibility for the war, whether because they did not stop Hitler and Mussolini in time, or because they were the first who succeeded in achieving colonial-imperial rule, or even because they betrayed their liberal principles and created the background for the rise of communism and fascism to power in various European countries. They now had to defend their empires and regimes and to prevent the danger that communism or fascism could come to power within them. It turned out that all European countries had a common ideological and material stake. They fought with each other, but they could also forge temporary alliances against a common enemy, and afterwards break them in order to destroy each other. In all these respects, it appeared that World War II would be the last battle in the great world war, of which the workers’ class anthem the “Internationale” sang. In this battle would be decided the question: which ideology would emerge victorious and prove its redeeming truth? To understand the total dimensions of World War II, one must mention the size of the contending armies, the advanced technology of war, and the obliteration of the distinction between front and rear. The result was a total war between men who were good in their own eyes and evil in their opponents.’ It was a war in which every side fought for its absolute righteousness against the wickedness of the

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

189

opponents. They fought for final victory and for world rule. It was a war that instantiated in modern reality, with its scientific tools, the myth of the war of the gods that in previous times had only taken place in the imagination of deranged rulers. Fire and brimstone rained on earth from heaven, and left after them a land scorched like Sodom and Gomorra, not only in the Fascist countries that were vanquished because of the temporary cooperation between the Communist countries and the liberal countries (which afterwards conducted a “Cold War” between them), but also in the victorious countries that paid the same price as the defeated. World War II realized in history the respective idolatrous myths of the communists and the fascists, but its results were anti-mythic. With respect to the peoples who fought each other to the verge of mutual destruction, and to the regimes that carried out the war, there was no real difference between victors and vanquished. In the deeper sense, with respect to the vision for whose realization they fought, no country, no nation, no social class realized its objectives, except perhaps for the scientists and technicians who celebrated their impressive achievements through the mythic dimensions of destruction they wrought. On the contrary, the hopes of all nations, all regimes and ideological movements were not only refuted but came to an end through realization of all their fears. This was the final refutation of the two idolatrous ideologies—fascism, which was defeated in war, and communism, which vanquished the fascist enemy at the price of total betrayal of communistic ideals, and at the price of destruction and cruel oppression of the people who fought on behalf of the communist regime, but already ceased to identify with it and believe in it. The liberal regimes, too, won in a way that contradicted their values and shattered their hopes. The war was a catastrophe for them as well. Nevertheless, one must not ignore the difference between the liberal countries and their vanquished foes, whether in respect to the responsibility for the war or its results. Through their victory they atoned in a certain measure for their guilt, and with the close of the war, victory provided them with a second chance to realize the liberal ideology more consistently, through the process of reconstructing the ruins.

190

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

There was therefore a basis to hope that the liberal and socialdemocratic regimes would undertake their own spiritual accounting after the war, and would attempt to rebuild their ruins while correcting the errors and omissions that caused them. This taking-stock began toward the end of the war in all the countries that had been liberal from the outset (and in Germany and Italy after their defeat). The result was expressed in the course of the reconstructive efforts in the first decades after the war. Several countries established socialdemocratic welfare states. The colonial empires were dismantled. The right of self-determination and political independence was granted to countries that were liberated from colonialism. (That, for instance, is how the Jewish people achieved its state in its own land.) The United Nations organization was established, to serve as a tool to fight for honoring human rights according to international law, and to resolve international conflicts peacefully. The advance of reform proceeded for two decades and collapsed in mid-course in most of the liberal countries of Europe. It appears that there was a generational transition in the leadership of these countries. The generation that grew up against the backdrop of the results of World War II and learned its lessons changed the direction of its thinking. The liberal humanistic legacy, in which the generation that conducted the war had been brought up, appeared impractical to the younger generation, on the basis of its life experience—hypocritical and utopian. It did not answer to its fears and expectations. A more extreme course seemed better to its taste, better equipped to correct the errors and shortcomings of the past. To use a military metaphor, a strategic and not merely tactical change was required, based on man’s egoistic-lustful nature and on the norms of happiness to which most human beings aspire, not on definition of ethical and normative requirements proper for political man, on which idealistic humanism had been based. One should undertake an objective assessment to determine, in which areas had definite progress been achieved in modern times, allowing for further progress, and in which domains had it not been achieved, and clearly could not be achieved. The only answer that could

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

191

be positively validated, even after the destructive results of the war, was that definite progress—quantitative and qualitative—had been achieved in the sciences and technology, in organization and administration, in controlling and deploying an army and police force. By contrast, in the area of morality, in relations among human individuals, family and community, no progress had been made. On the contrary— it became clear that science in the sciences and technology had put the personal and collective morality of human beings to tests that the majority of them could not pass. This signified decline, not progress. The conclusion could thus be drawn that advanced technological civilization could not rely on religious or humanistic moral education that demanded striving for the good and beautiful for its own sake, but only on the motivation of the given natural instincts of the human animal. Efficient legal administration that will insure consequences for the human individual’s urge to happiness, in accord with objectively evaluated outcomes, could also insure observance of the necessary principles, laws, and behavioral norms for maintaining an organized society for the sake of the functioning of an efficient technological civilization. It could not impose them. But the strong and the weak alike would recognize their necessity. This outlook was presented in the Western countries of the Free World as an updated and improved version (from the standpoint of practical application) of the liberal humanism that had established these countries. Philosophically, one can see this course of thinking as a return to the rationalistic ethical and political theory of Spinoza, which was based on a causal determinism beyond good and evil. This comparison applies only if one ignores an additional essential aspect of Spinoza. Spinoza saw the world in its unity as one substance which as such was God, and whose purpose was inherent in itself. According to Spinoza, the intrinsic (not egoistic) good of the particular was at the same time the good of the commonality, and vice versa. Therefore, rational behavior was necessarily behavior according to an ideal norm of good for its own sake. Postmodern psychological behaviorism was based on a heterogeneous, not unified, conception of nature, and on a heterogeneous conception of society. Also the large

192

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

collectivities, the nations that are organized into states, are not unified entities but rather organizations of many particulars for the purpose of common utility. If so, the causal necessity that establishes political collectives stems from individual egotisms and is intended to serve them. This is a revolutionary assumption also from the perspective of modern liberalism: the instinctual egotism of every individual forces them to band together and function efficiently, and they impose on each other observance of the laws necessary for this purpose, by means of the state which they establish consensually. It is clear that Spinoza’s rationalism was here being interpreted not in the humanisticmonotheistic direction, featuring the intellectual love of God as man’s purpose, but rather in the egoistic, materialistic, idolatrous direction which is presented as an objective scientific norm. This intellectual trend started in the United States. An individualistic, competitive capitalistic economy had developed there already before the war. It also developed advanced technology in all areas of production. By virtue of these, the United States won the war and also reaped the rich rewards of victory without having to pay an exorbitant price, for the war was fought far from her shores. Through the aid that America extended to European countries to reconstruct their ruins after the war, it became the leader of the free world. In this way it essentially forced the free countries of the west to follow its way in economics, culture, and politics, and it was the first to shape the guiding ideology of the global village. This was a fundamental and broad conceptual revolution. It took shape in the universities of the United States, and afterwards in the universities of Europe, and it was expressed especially in the social sciences. From philosophical-humanistic disciplines, they turned into sciences that imitated the natural sciences, with the claim that they were based on controlled experiment and statistical measurement. This revolution led to specialization of disciplines. Several secondary disciplines were created—sociology, economics, jurisprudence, behavioral psychology, political science—and these also began to develop subspecialties, as in the natural sciences. All social theories in the various

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

193

domains underwent a process of quasi-scientific statistical objectification. Their definition of purpose also underwent change, from a comprehensive vision on the development of civilization throughout its history, to specialized analysis of a narrow present for the sake of solving practical problems.3 From the perspective of humanism in the modern age, this was a revolution that dethroned philosophy and history from the leading status that they enjoyed in the universities. In the heyday of modernity, philosophy had striven for a unified, allembracing vision of man as creator of culture, while history had presented an integrated vision of the development of civilization and human culture. By sidelining these two disciplines, one was essentially rejecting the ideology of the age of classic modernity, which was based on philosophy and history. The new social sciences disqualified them, taking the place of philosophy and history in the academy, and of ideology in the political parties. In this way they began to lead the institutions of liberal society and state in the direction of the specialized competitive market economy that laid the foundation for the global village. This was an intellectual movement that later fostered the professional revolution toward an ideal that shaped the ethos of a specialized civil society, geared for the efficient functioning of a technological civilization. The scientists developed it and drew the practical conclusions that followed from it in the areas of education and social-political policy. They presented it as objective scientific theory, not to be confused with ideologies based on subjective philosophies. Science is objective in the sense that it is not dictated by the subjective interests of one nation or another, by one social class or another, by men versus women or by women versus men, and the like, but by nature itself. The great new insight of the postmodern age is thus that social sciences, which examine inter-subjective human relations, can nevertheless be objective and determine what is correct or incorrect, what is necessary or unnecessary in defining the interests of individuals and groups, and in defining the correct or incorrect ways for their optimal realization, 3

See the previous essay, “History in the Postmodern Age,” for a more thorough analysis of this deformation in the study of history.

194

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

which transcend everyone’s subjective views. The authority of the developed sciences in academia thus trumps the authority of ideologies that reflect the subjective preferences of individuals and groups, because they do not speak in the name of individual scholars but in the name of objective truth, which is binding on all of them. The conclusion is that efficient government should be based on these sciences, and everyone should accept them for the sake of their happiness. It is clear that if the need arose, all citizens who choose happiness would impose these laws on themselves, for they are a necessary condition for their happiness. This is the general scientific theory that justifies the specialized disciplinary theories. In its name, the ideologies that guided political parties in the modern age were disqualified. But when we examine this claim, it becomes clear that it is remarkably similar to the Marxist claim. It, too, presents itself as exact social, economic and political science. The difference is that instead of basing itself on the priority of collective egotism over private egotism, the capitalistic theory assumes the priority of private egotism over collective egotism, and the superiority of the unbridled competition of the free market over compulsory planning. It assumes that achievement-driven competitiveness is the physics of the efficient market, which balances the forces of supply and demand, accumulates profits, encourages investment, and continually improves the standard of living. On such principles one can build a network of communication, transportation, marketing, and administration that will emulate and reflect the technological efficiency of production, marketing, and services. From a broad philosophical perspective (which the new social scientists regard as superfluous), the meaning of this course of thought, like the meaning of the Communist theory at the stage when people still believed in its scientific status, is the unequivocal subordination of the values of morality and spiritual creativity to material values, or in other words, foisting the values of material civilization (efficient production of the goods to supply man’s bodily needs) on the values of spiritual culture. One can see here the foundation-stone of a scientific-technological idolatry, whose purpose (from the professional perspective of the scientists of society, psychology

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

195

and law) is to shape the ethos and patterns of behavior—that is to say, the image of man—who strives to control a technocratic society, devoted to serving it and believing with complete faith that it will provide him with its bounteous rewards.

The Idolatry of the Age of the Postmodern Global Village The idolatry of the global village is expressed in the extreme subjectivity that characterizes the creative intellectual culture that is defined as “postmodern,” in striking opposition to the postmodern natural and social scientists who pride themselves on strict objectivity. It would seem at first sight that there is a polar opposition between the scientific and technical objectivity that underlies the civilization and its administration, and the absolute subjectivity that characterizes the intellectual culture produced in it. It is instructive that the scientifictechnical elite and the elite of culture-creators (literature, thought, and the various arts) respect and support each other. The elite of social scientists, who shape the ideology that science and technology are the source for solving all the problems that scientific-technological civilization produces, gives support to this mutual admiration by defining the special tasks of every kind of creativity in its own proper domain. In this way the scientific-technological civilization provides themes and resources for creative culture, and creative culture answers the subjective needs of members of the objective professions, who serve the civilization. They serve it by making themselves functional objects, and the concession to happiness-driven subjectivity in the pleasures derived from consumption is to be found in the richly varied and interdisciplinary cultural experiences that postmodern culture provides. The common denominator is their private egotism. In the material civilization, egotism is the objective motivating force of all its component members acting in unison, while in the intellectual culture, egotism is the subjective goal of each individual acting for himself. What does the postmodern idolatry of the global village worship? The difficulty the investigator encounters in trying to clarify this question is that the secular individuals, who belong to the society that expresses itself through the heterogeneous culture of the

196

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

postmodern era, do not define themselves as either monotheists or pagans. From the perspective of postmodern secularism, these two terms seem equally inappropriate. In this age, secular people define their values and lifestyles without regard to any religion, whether monotheistic or pagan. This situation requires that we open our inquiry into the characteristics of postmodern idolatry with the concept of “secularism,” defined as the common denominator of the spectrum of ideologies that people in this age who define themselves as “secular” subscribe to. The meaning of the concept “secularism” in daily discourse, in the media or common conversation, is rooted in the most general distinction between people called “religious,” who are affiliated with organized religious movements, and those called “free-thinking” or “unaffiliated,” who are not bound to any religious institution or established theology, even if as individuals they have an inclination to certain religious beliefs or practices in which they see a tradition that beautifies and enriches their lives, without obligating them. Postmodern secularism has given up, however, the positive ideological definitions that secularism had in the previous era. It maintains only a negative definition: secularism is the opposite of religiosity. The official meaning that follows from this negative relation to religion is that one belongs, without separation or mediation, to a civil society defined by one’s obligation to the state, its people, its society, its culture, and its laws and administration. One may say that in the postmodern era, the sole ideological differentiation of secularism from religion is that the secularist rejects religion as an onerous obligation, unjustified and unnecessary, without counter-proposing an alternative system of ideas, behaviors, and belonging. People who identify themselves as secular are saying only this: they are not religious. Is it enough to be “not religious” in order to define the identity of a person or a group of people? Aren’t some kind of positive components necessary for defining a personal or collective identity? If we seek the positive content to be inferred from one’s saying “not religious,” we must inquire: What are the secularists defending, by separating themselves from it? Why do they feel

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

197

the need to proclaim that they are not religious, and see in this the essential element in their spiritual identity? The answer to these questions is rooted in the traditional attitude of organized religion to secularism and secular people—namely, the inquisitorial criticism of a domineering institution, which claimed to possess a truth that required all mankind (or at least all one’s compatriots) to know it. In the not-too-distant past, all people were beholden to a religion that ruled with a high hand. Today it only rules its loyal believers. It has no real chance to return to its prior status as the religion of the people, the state, or all humanity. The religions of the west were forced to make their peace with this fact, but they did not give up on their central demand. They yearn to return to their prior estate; they gather their strength and fight with the intellectual and political tools at their disposal. Secularism was born of the religion to oppose the rule of religion, in the name of freedom of thought. Secularists define themselves as freethinkers. They are ready to pledge allegiance only to those norms that the democratic state imposes on its citizens for the sake of the proper functioning of a civilization that serves the objectives of worldly happiness. This is a representative human authority. The citizens accept it upon themselves because they recognize its necessity. This is how the line between the religious and the secular is most clearly drawn: Those people who identify themselves as religious belong to one of the monotheistic religions—one of the many forms of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—and find in it the most intimate expression of their spirituality. They also identify with their people and their state, but their belonging to their religious community takes priority, and with it also an obligation to what their religion commands of them. Moreover, the religious believe that their religion is the religion of all human beings, especially of their compatriots. Since most of the citizens of western nations no longer believe on this level of official obligation, religion creates a problematic tension in its relation to the state and in its relation to the secular citizens. It gives rise to a conflicted ambivalence, in which national love and political belonging vie with a sense of spiritual-ethical alienation.

198

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

This tension fosters polarization. It creates a rift, which tends to separate and combine at the same time, because the confrontation becomes a central common component in the two competing identities. Here is the source of the recognition that to be not-religious from the secular perspective, and to be not-secular from the religious perspective, characterizes each of the parties not merely in a negative way. The secularist is involved in religion when he looks at it and rejects it, and the religionist is involved in secularism in the same way. Therefore they cannot separate from each other. If they separate, they lose the mirror that reflects them to themselves and identifies them in relation to their distinctive “other.” It is clear that this relationship is expressed not only in thought but also in a cultural existence that is divided and nevertheless held in common. We recall in this context that the state is the framework of the space in which both the secular and the religious realize their aspirations, and they are forced to do this together. A deeper look at the interdependency between the monotheistic religions and modern western countries reveals another substantive dimension that separates secularism from religion, namely conceiving the relation between the person’s innate natural self and the identity that he acquires and internalizes through his upbringing. Religion sees every human being as a creature created in God’s image and likeness. It attributes to him, in addition to the components of his natural psychophysical self, a separate supernatural component whose source is in divine emanation, which is therefore eternal and will exist also after death. The sense of spiritual emanation is the deepest kernel of the religious experience that shapes the identity of believers, and from it flows a sense of absolute obligation to God. The secular conception of identity does not differentiate the human being from other animals in this substantive way. His innate psychophysical self—including his instinctual, emotional, and intellectual faculties—comprises the whole person. It follows that the spiritual and intellectual content of the national culture is an additional layer that individuals take on in the course of their cultural and political socialization, but this addition is viewed not as an integral part of the personality, but as an accretion

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

199

superimposed on it, like a tight-fitting garment—the body is hidden beneath it and reveals itself through it, and so it is possible to wear it or to exchange it with another garment rather easily. This difference in identifying the different layers of experiencing the “I” is first of all the difference in the strength of identification with the spiritual layers of the personality, which is shaped through education and integration in the national civilization and culture. The secular spiritual identity is changed fairly easily. From the physical transition between one society and another, between one organization and another, or between one country and another—and the adaptive learning that such a transition requires—a new identity is forged, as if one has taken off one garment and put on another, fitted to the previous size, for the psychophysical identity is the sole unchanging core of the personality. By contrast, one’s religious identity cannot be changed so easily. It is also a product of education, but it strikes deeper roots in the psychophysical personality and raises the soul, clothed in the body, to a spiritual sphere that expresses the aspiration to an eternal transcendental identity. Therefore, exchanging one’s religious identity for a secular identity (and all the more so, exchanging one religious identity for another religious identity) is not a technical transition but rather like a rebirth. This is a creative process, and it lasts a long time. For the most part it is not completed in a single generation, and it is fraught with struggles and much pain. It is clear that at the biographical or historical point of origin, the difference between the secular and religious person is spiritual in a substantive way. In religion, the person conceives herself as a spiritual, supra-natural creature whose essential life extends even after death, whereas in the secular realm of thought a person conceives herself as having a psychophysical life, with a certain intellectual superiority, but concluding the cycle of her life on earth like other animals. Only the memory that one leaves after oneself among one’s people and culture continues to live after one’s death. Religion is distinguished from secularism also in the extent of its obligating authority and the power of the truth that animates it. Believers will acknowledge that their religious truth is subjective with

200

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

respect to the interpersonal connection through which alone it can be made known to other people. (No person has objective knowledge concerning God, who is above our human understanding, and even our soul, which we understand to be a spiritual reality, is a mystery for us.) However, this subjective knowledge has objective validity, because it flows from God, who created the world by His will, and mankind within it, and emanated His objective existence to beings who exist for themselves, both as objects for God and as subjects for themselves. In God, the subjectivity of the divine will is identified with the objectivity of the world that God created, and from God’s perspective human subjectivity is imbued with objective validity. From here follows the absolute validity of God’s teaching and commandment. The subjectivity of secular consciousness necessarily lacks this objective anchor. It has a foothold only in the objectivity of the natural and social sciences, which is limited and liable to change, for scientific objectivity cannot overcome the limitations of the subjective, partial nature of human consciousness. Of course, each person’s knowledge of herself as subject is objective from the perspective of her identification with herself. She understands that she must attribute objective validity to the selfidentification of the human subjects with whom she forms a connection, but the objectivity attributed to the inter-subjective connections resting on universal assumptions do not possess absolute validity. This includes every person and that person’s knowledge of herself and the selfhood of the other persons with whom one is connected. On the basis of inter-subjective truth that is not anchored in the belief in a Creator-God and in the absolute obligation to His commandment, it is impossible to establish an indubitable and obligating ethical and spiritual-teleological orientation. These distinctions between the religious position, which rests on divine revelation, and the secular position—which rests partly on science, partly on inter-subjective common sense—are expressed in the etymology of the Hebrew word ḥiloni (“secular”). Ḥol (“profane”) is the opposite of kodesh (“sacred”). Secularity is outside the sphere of

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

201

divine holiness, which is the manifestation of God’s absolute and obligating power to the human being who feels she stands in the face of it. From the perspective of secularism, all reciprocal relations between man and his natural and social environment are conducted on the plane of scientific truth, which is known from causal necessity. This is a reality that is imposed on us as long as we do not know how to change it. However, the ability and the possibility to change it exist. Therefore, scientific necessity does not have the force of an obligating norm, and as such it lacks ethical power and spiritual meaning. These can flow only from a sphere of divine sanctity. On this difference, the religious and the secular agree fully. Secular man gives up the dimension of normative sanctity that is rooted in absolute authority. By doing so he acquires the sense of freedom to act by his will, as his abilities and opportunities allow. He is liable to discover quickly that in so doing he gives up the dimension of teleological meaning of his existence in the world, and thus to sink into the sense of disillusion and despair that come to expression in the “vanity of vanities” of Ecclesiastes. It is thus clear that the differences between religion and secularism, rooted in the substance of human consciousness in its relation to itself and the world, do not negate their oppositional-complementary interdependence. Secularism continues to define itself in relation to religion, and vice versa. Between the secular and the religious, a wall of intellectual and emotional alienation is erected. The religious person has difficulty understanding the existential self-concept of a person who has no dimension of normative sanctity in his life, just as the secular person has difficulty understanding the existential self-concept of a person who has in his life a dimension of sanctity that determines— with absolute doctrinal authority—a life regimen, the direction of activity, orientation in nature and society, destiny, meaning, and connection with eternity. Religious and secular individuals both aspire to happiness, and their conceptions of happiness share some of the same material-bodily and psychological components. Happiness itself— as expressing an all-embracing conception of life—is defined differently by each, and its realization in the sphere of life is different.

202

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

Especially different is the meaning of coping with suffering in human existence. More precisely: only the religious person is able to discover ethical and teleological meaning in suffering, while from the perspective of secular man suffering is a fated imposition without meaning. Religious and secular individuals live together in the same common social, economic, cultural, political, and worldly structures. Technological civilization dominates all domains of worldly creative activity, and the sciences are the source of objective truth, necessarily defined by causal laws, according to which are determined the “rational” (read: efficient from a utilitarian-material perspective) orders of society. Religious people are bound to the same necessities of nature and civilization as are secular people. Even if they want to live outside of the laws and orders of the secular state, they can realize their desire only on the plane of application of their subjective values, within family and community, and only through symbolic gestures that express their devotion to the service of God and their protest against the orders of secular civilization, which cannot be reconciled with their outlook. These gestures have influence on the plane of inter-subjective relations. They foster an unending quarrel and create feelings of hostility and alienation between kinfolk within the same people and citizens within the same state. The language of the quarrel is indeed shared in common and unites all participants as members of the same people and citizens of the same state, but with respect to the positive ethical and spiritual discourse, it breeds an increasing sense of distance which ends in total separation, attacking the quarreling brothers and threatening to undermine their identity. These considerations return the discussion to the question of the identity of postmodern secularism as an idolatrous worldview. It is clear that secularism appears that way from the religious perspective. The monotheistic worldview does not recognize a human existence that is not subordinate to a creating and guiding Power who stands over it. According to this substantive logic, denial of a supernatural God is in and of itself belief in the forces of nature and the intellectual power of man who is dependent on nature. From the monotheistic perspective, this is idolatry, even if the people who hold to it do

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

203

not attribute to the forces of nature the status of gods with intelligent wills and purposive intentions. From the monotheistic perspective, the belief in blind forces, which intelligent man can control or exploit at least in part, is idolatrous in its original sense, for from the monotheistic perspective, the gods whom the idolaters worshipped were always a deceptive illusion, a product of wood and stone that were the work of man’s own hands. The question is thus whether this religious interpretation is simply subjective, or whether it has objective validity? Can one define the reliance of secular man on the powers of nature and his own natural powers, on a scientific basis, as a kind of religion? Can one say that from the subjective perspective of people with a secular outlook, the forces of nature, which they study through science and exploit through technology, function as the gods of the idolatry in times gone by? It would seem that the answer to this question is positive. This can be demonstrated by a comparative observation of the behavior, values, and experiences of the creators of the high idolatrous cultures in ancient times (especially Greece and Rome), and those of the creators of postmodern culture, as they are reflected in literature and art. Postmodern intellectuals and artists draw heavily on the ideational, mythological, symbolic and experiential motifs of Greco-Roman paganism. The use is associative and metaphorical. In addition, in the developed idolatrous cultures of ancient times, the anthropomorphic personification of the gods functioned as metaphor, and the religious dimension came to tangible expression in the artistic shaping of the life-reality in a sophisticated human civilization, which was complementary to the tangible achievements which they realized in the high culture of the ancient world in the science and technology of their time. As we said, the religious worldviews take the divine revelation as sacred and see in it an absolute objective truth, not a subjective faith. Against this, the postmodern secular worldview holds up the right of every individual to live according to his subjective beliefs, as long as he does not harm other citizens who aspire to the same happiness as he does, but in a different way than his. Therefore this worldview sees the fundamentalist version of monotheistic religion—creating its fortress

204

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

in the past, which is a fixture and a preserve, seeing in the foundational revelation of its Scripture an eternal objective event obligating all mankind—either a transparent deception or the product of boorish ignorance of any scientific knowledge. Consistent secularism is seen through the fundamentalist’s eyes as an expression of moral corruption and satanic malice. Such a standoff cannot be decided by science. In cultural and political reality it is decided only through power struggles, which tend to slide into idolatry. This is a danger from both perspectives. Is there any positive way out of this trap, which threatens to destroy western culture? The answer can be positive only if one overcomes the onesidedness of scientific positivism and returns to the dialectical philosophy, which seeks to bring the different planes of reality—objective and subjective—into encounter with each other, as opposing and complementary aspects of a single reality, and to see a reciprocal relation between the two planes of human experience. Dialectical thought does not forge consensus, nor does it make conflicting interests go away. The achievement that it pursues is more important—creative dialogue, nourished by empathic understanding between disputants, who can see the kernel of truth in their opponents’ outlooks and preserve a common arena of give-and-take in which they create a many-faceted culture. If we examine the confrontation between religion and secularism with the tools of historical dialectic, we shall discover that we have here an additional round of a debate that has persisted for many generations. The monotheistic religions have changed in the postmodern era, and the idolatries have changed as well. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are influenced today by the deposits of modern culture and by the challenges of postmodern culture. The influence is mainly negative with respect to the (hostile) attitude of religion to the modern and postmodern cultures, as well as the religious outlook itself, which has become more zealous, dogmatic, imbued with hatred of its opponents and bent more on destroying the hated, hostile reality facing it than on positive building of an ethical civilization. One must admit, when religions arrive at this situation in their war against idolatry they become

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

205

zealous, dogmatic, and intolerant, and in this respect worse than their opponent even by their own original ethical and spiritual criteria. The same process of fixation, zealotry, and corruption occurs in modern and postmodern idolatry, in the course of defending against the religious fundamentalism that attacks it while using its own technological weapons (terror) against it. We have a new cycle, more bitter and dangerous for the future of civilization than the ancient struggle between monotheism and idolatry for the control of mankind’s minds, feelings, and creative activities.

The Objects of Worship of Postmodern Idolatry The self-definitions of monotheistic religiosity in the postmodern age are fanatically faithful to their canonical and traditional sources. To the outside observer there appears no change, and they need not be re-examined afresh. The most striking difference between monotheism of the era of humanistic modernity and the monotheism of the postmodern age, which has wandered far from idealistic humanism, is rooted in the “return” of modern religious movements to orthodoxy, and the “return” of the orthodox movements to fundamentalism. These movements are influenced by postmodernism in their use of its scientific, technological, and philosophical achievements in order to wage war against it and destroy to the foundation the sinful civilization that it has fostered. Postmodern civilization strives to unite humanity in a single civilization. Religious fundamentalism also strives for world rule, which should arise after the civilization that has sinned against God shall be totally destroyed. There is nothing new here. However, postmodern idolatry is substantially different from modern idolatries, and therefore it requires definition, description, and reinterpretation. What are the objects of worship of the masses who gather in the public squares of postmodern civilization? What powers do these objects of worship represent, on which the postmodern secularists rely for the happiness that their state promises them as its citizens? At first sight one cannot offer a sole answer to this question, for postmodern civilization is based on social atomization. The sociality of previous ages, including the modern,

206

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

was based on the assumption that human beings are social by nature, and that they comprise, through common participation of all members, holistic collective entities possessed of collective consciousness. By contrast, postmodern sociality is based on the opposite assumption. Every human individual is a particular ego, isolated by nature. Therefore his collective group is not an organic entity but an aggregate brought together by common interests. It is clear from this that the collective “I,” or what was defined by modernity as the “spirit of the people” expressed in its culture, is only a misguiding fiction that was invented to justify political despotism. What explains and justifies the collective activity of communities and peoples? It is the organizational framework, whose goal is to realize private interests through its efficiency. According to this view, collective political behavior does not appear as a choice based on values that express man’s social nature, but rather as a product of causal necessity, of the war for survival that continues through civilization and forces on people principles and norms that are the conditions for realizing their private interests. At first sight, the result is that every individual worships himself and chooses a model for imitation that seems to reflect his character. The awareness of the necessity to unite for realization of their private interests sets them in competition for the same achievements that represent the basic common needs of human beings with respect to their psychophysical being. Happy is he who secures for himself and takes more from all the others, thus arousing their envy and admiration. The egoistic individuals therefore measure themselves against each other; they contend and unite, unite and contend around the same booty. The striving for the same kind of happiness in the same ways elevates the objects of worship that they have in common. These are the “stars,” the “winners,” the “celebrities,” who have realized in the eyes of all the aspiration to success, spectacular performance, talented and effective in the leading fields of development, action, leadership satisfaction and pleasure of the advanced technological civilization. The stars who shine in the heavens of the media are presented as models for emulation, objects of envy and competition, encouraging

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

207

and offering hope to every gifted and industrious citizen, and serving as a source of pride in the passive achievement of enjoying them. The idolatrous character of the fabric of relations between the worshipped “stars” and their worshippers is obvious. The worshipped and worshippers satisfy in each other an existential need that creates an addictive dependence. The stars are in need of confirmation, renewed on a daily and hourly basis, that they are stars. If they are unrecognized even for a moment, their success vanishes and their light goes out; and if that happens, it will be as if they never were. The worship of their fans energizes them, gets the adrenaline flowing in their blood, puffs up their expansive ego, and confirms their exaggerated egocentricity, which results from the stars’ use of the talents of their body, soul, and intellect as a tool that they exploit to the limit to achieve their success. Therefore deep down amid their happiness they sense their great sacrifice and seek compensation, for which they must invest more and more. Their worshippers, who recognize the dependence of their idols on their adoration, feel that the stars must give them their success, so it is forbidden for the stars to disappoint them; they must continue to succeed, that is to say, to deserve the acclaim of their public, to radiate their presence upon them, to please them with their spectacular abilities, to inflate them with pride in being partners to their success through their determination, their responsiveness, and their admiration. The postmodern mass media, which have developed to an amazing degree, supply the mechanism for selecting the stars who officiate in the sanctuary, for publicizing them and shaping their “divine” images (to this, the superlatives used to celebrate their achievements attest: “spectacular,” “intoxicating,” “marvelous,” “awesome”). Thus they personally represent the mighty forces that ground and animate a powerful civilization. I will dwell first on the central function of communication, with respect to the efficient conduct of civilization and the creation and functioning of the idolatrous hierarchy. The ancient mythological image will serve as metaphor. The visible and invisible networks of communication in the air, on land, and in the sea are like Mount Olympus, on which sat and from which were sent forth the blessed

208

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

gods of civilization. Let us not ignore the importance of communication, which is regarded as a power pulsating with a marvelous divine force. Its high priests represent it, and it is the main desire of every citizen to be privileged, even if only once, that his picture should be broadcast on television and his words will be carried on the airwaves. How does postmodern communication surpass traditional and modern communication? What gives it its divine attribute? The answer is: its extent, effectiveness, and totality. First, its global extent gives the whole globe of the earth the aspect of a single village, to every country the aspect of a single neighborhood, to every metropolis the aspect of one skyscraper. Second, we look at its effectiveness, its crowdedness, its incessantness, and the multiplicity of its representative dimensions. Postmodern mass communication takes the place of the function of the private imagination for anyone who tunes in to it. It presents its message visually, audibly, through the senses and through words and concepts. In this way it transmits, gathers, catalogs, interprets, and updates information, and does so to excess, as if bringing a whole shopping mall of goods into the quasi-reality that it not only reports on but also reconstructs itself. The audience feel as if they live inside the reported reality and see it as if from within. As if. In their deeper consciousness they know that it is only “as if,” but the illusion becomes a reality which they try to live, instead of the near-at-hand tangible reality where they are actually situated. Second, the detailed totality of its represented reality. As we said, the “as if real” (the “virtual reality”) pretends to be an exact and more vivid presentation than reality itself, for virtual reality has no thickness and no depth, and there is no more than meets the eye, as is the case in our drab private lives. If we add to this the ability to include in the communicative web whoever wants to join in, without limit, even if he is found in the most remote and isolated places on earth, we understand the meaning of the illusion. Through communication, all individuals who are hooked up, together with their families and communities, can participate in the representative wealth and happiness of the shining stars in the heavens

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

209

of television and cinema. Virtual reality appears as realistic as real life, only more so. Of course, this is an illusion that offers a vacuous experience, like blowing colored soap bubbles, so that disappointment waits in store and must eventually come. It is impossible to eat an image of food or enjoy making love to an image of a woman or a man! This generates psychological conditioning, where people are endlessly excited and so become subject to addiction, whether on the part of the admired stars, who are the source of the imaginary glamour, or from the side of the worshipping throngs, who take it in and let it out with their enthusiastic applause and cheering. An ecstasy of happiness? Or maybe sinking into perpetual servitude, whose captives will not be able to liberate themselves from it even when they realize their dire condition? No matter what may be the answer to this question, this kind of addiction to communications media and their messages, which excite but do not satisfy, is the secret of its effectiveness in mass education, and of its propagation of the values, traits, and views of postmodern idolatry to all its domains. Communication shapes the ethos of mass society. It defines happiness as self-gratification of the individual, whether of his instinctual needs or his consumer needs, though they serve each other as motivations and goals. In the spirit of technological civilization, one speaks of happiness that can be measured and evaluated, quantitatively and qualitatively. Functional success is measured by salary, profit and status. Success in consumption is measured in the quantitative bulk and the graded qualities of the material pleasures and psychological satisfactions. The high performers, crowned as stars, float and ascend as if of themselves, and the ruling institutions that hide behind them use them until they fade and wilt and others take their place. Who are the worshipped? Are these “divine” established powers that represent occult elements in the eyes of the laity? As we said, the public media choose, crown, publicize, shape the image, and orchestrate the praise of the shining examples. They also exhibit with great publicity the prostration and acknowledgement of the masses. From time to time

210

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

they set aside a moment to honor an occasional individual from the crowd of admirers, and s/he bows and enjoys the grace of the spotlight with the great ones who thank him or her for exalting them. The criteria of the media are the professional criteria of utility and efficiency in the essential realms of the civilization’s functioning—wealth (the idolatry of money as represented by its priests: the stars of the stock exchange and the CEOs of the banks and corporations); the technology of production and communication and its sophisticated administration (the idolatry of efficiency and ingenuity as represented by its priests: the inventors and developers of new technology, the captains of industry, commerce, and the important officers of state); research and instruction, which provide the scientific basis for technology and management (the idolatry of science as represented by its priests: the stars of academia, the famous scholars crowned with the Nobel Prize and other international and national honors); communication (the idols of circulation, advertising and the manufacture of public opinion, as represented by its priests: the journalists, the editors, image managers, publishers and broadcasters); politics (the idolatry of government power and leadership as represented by its priests: the ministers, members of Parliament, and partyheads); the judiciary (the idolatry of law and order, as represented by its priests: the leading judges and lawyers). Professionalized sports (the idolatry of competition and victory, as represented by its priests: the victors crowned with laurel wreaths and holders of the cups and trophies in international and national competitions, especially the football or soccer stars who extend to the audience of their fans the feeling of participation in the victory of the company, the town, the state with which they identify), and finally the mass culture which offers a sense of purification (catharsis), release and compensatory entertainment, symbolizing happiness in a gesture of intense and sweeping sensory enjoyment (the gods of sensual happiness, as represented by its priests: the stars of pop singing, dancing, drama and popular literature). Many are the priests who represent the divine, civilization-building powers worshipped by postmodern idolatry. The civilization sets aside

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

211

a space for each and builds for it an organized institution, palaces and temples (campuses, malls, markets, stadiums, theaters, and nightclubs). Each one has a connection to the Internet, and each one has an audience of admirers who serve them by buying their products, by conspicuous consumption (that is, consumption for its own sake, in excess of what is needed for satisfying life’s functions), and by singing their praises with gushing enthusiasm and declamatory proclamations that smack of perpetual confession, as well as vehement body language (clapping hands, roaring, responsive chants and dancing), to fulfill the verse: “with all your soul and with all your might.”

Worshipping the Creative and Moving Powers of Technological Civilization The difference between ancient and modern idolatry versus the idolatry of the postmodern era is obvious. Ancient and modern idolatry worshipped the forces of nature that were responsible for fertility and power, whereas in postmodern idolatry the forces of nature are the vanquished sources of materials and energies that man knows how to exploit for his benefit with great efficiency. As such, they are no longer objects of worship. Man does not serve them, but he uses them. The worshipped powers are the powers of creativity that pour forth from the talents of individuals when they are gathered together in giant think tanks, and as such their power is greater than that of any individual, even if he is a genius, for they all draw on it and pour back their creativity into it, to revere it more than themselves. These are the powers that create, build, develop, run, and manage the technological civilization that man creates for himself out of the materials of nature and his own energies, but they are beyond nature, like an ultimate superstructure. In the ancient monotheistic and pagan outlooks, civilization seemed a direct expression of the deterministic forces of creation embodied in nature. In the postmodern age, nature is not regarded as a creative power. It is bound to a deterministic inner law, which maintains it but also consumes it; and whatever evolution it undergoes results mechanically and randomly from adaptation to uncontrolled conditions of existence.

212

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

From man’s perspective, nature is thus a given material energy that is not governed by any moral norm. Man’s science and skill enable him to liberate the developmental potential latent in nature and to direct it to his goals—namely, his survival, empowerment, enjoyment, and happiness. Therefore postmodern idolatry no longer deifies nature itself, but the forces glimmering in it, which can be extracted from it through the help of the tools that man himself shapes, imbuing them with a life greater than him. He is not bowing down to his spirit (the natural intelligence with which he was endowed), but rather to the fruit of his spirit, the works of his hands that embellish and reinforce the natural intelligence, which appears in its embodiment as on a higher level than the scientist who invented it. Thus it appears that man created civilization in order that it should serve him as its master, but it became his master and he serves it and sees his happiness in it. There is an essential difference between the postmodern idolater and the monotheistic God-worshipper in modern and postmodern civilization. The monotheistic God-worshipper believes that there must be an ultimate reason for the existence of the world and the inner law that shapes its image and the image of all its parts and creatures within it. The scientist solves step by step the secrets of the natural compositions and processes on the macro- and micro-levels, but he does not arrive and cannot arrive at an ultimate cause, and if he arrived at a reasonable guess about the originating event, he would still be unable to explain it. Inasmuch as man is possessed of self-consciousness and acts out of intention, choice, and will that are motivated by values, he cannot accept that his existence, and the existence of the world of which he is one of its components, is accidental. He tends to believe that his existence and the existence of the world are directed by a supreme willing consciousness, and he attributes evaluative meaning to the existence of the world in general and the existence of self-conscious man in the world in particular. It is clear that man’s consciousness is not rooted in himself, because he does not beget himself and he is not eternal. There thus remains a dimension of mystery enveloping the existence of the universe, and all the more

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

213

the existence of consciousness, before which man stands, and which he contemplates on the subjective plane of his life. This is the source of monotheistic religion. By contrast, the postmodern idolater indeed admits that he is far from solving all the secrets of nature. Behind each secret that he succeeds in solving are uncovered other secrets. But he is determined in his will to solve everything, and he trusts in his talents to solve everything with the help of his ever-improving tools. These tools enable him to overcome the subjectivity of every private researcher, who even if he strives for universality, still bases himself on the subjectivity of human consciousness. How does the idolater overcome this? Through tools which are exact measuring tools of quantity and quality, which enable him to create theories which represent in his knowledge existence as it is in itself, and to exploit the theoretical knowledge for technology that proves it. As a scientist, the postmodern idolater does not see a hidden God in the unknown. This unknown for him is a challenge, and he certainly does not see in the mystery a barrier after and beyond which is revealed the divine power that is the willing cause of the world’s existence. The mystery in nature does not arouse in him a sense of awe and majesty, and does not impose responsibility on him. It clearly does not hold an answer to the question of the meaning of man’s life in nature. The scientist and secular enlightened thinker is sure that each person must create his own life’s meaning, and that he does this by realizing his talents, by his achievement, and by the admiration that he arouses in others. Is this not a subjective ideology? To be sure, it is. However, the scientist who aspires to consistency tends to base it on experimental science, which he calls “psychology.” Similarly, he tries to solve the problems that arise in the area of inter-subjective relations among human beings through the experimental science of sociology, to which he ascribes the status of exact science (on the model of physical science), ascribing to universal subjective evaluations the validity of truth following necessarily from its inner necessity. The debate between different schools in human sciences and social sciences is confrontational and quarrelsome, no less than the debate

214

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

that was once waged between ideological systems in philosophy and religion. This is the proof that the claim of psychology and sociology to scientific status is arbitrary and illusory. These are ideologies intended to change the reality of the modern world and to shape it a different way. They claim scientific status for the same reason that religion claims a source in revelation, in order to give their evaluations the force of necessary truth. Thus it is possible to claim that they are true, at the same time that the scientists are succeeding in putting them into practice with the help of the government. In other words, the theories of the social scientists are systems of subjective ideas rooted in faith, expressing volitional choice, and the study of history on which they rest the various theories is a process of mythologization which stems from subjective experiences of the development of the processes of civilization. From this it follows that like capitalism and Marxism in their times, postmodern scientific positivism is an ideology that is intended to serve interests—this time, of the technocratic elite, which sees in the sciences and technology means for reinforcing the position of the leadership, out of full faith that this will benefit all citizens of the state. Comparing this position with the position of the idolaters in the developed countries of the ancient world can show that both are based on the same logic. In order to weigh the deeper claim that postmodernism, by broadening the scope of application of scientific research beyond its proper domain, is idolatrous, we need to distinguish the respective disciplinary functions of the divisions of civilization—monetary, economic, administrative, political, judicial, police-force, government, service-sector, and entertainment—which are indeed objective and rational (utilitarian), and the belief that undergirds the motivation to fulfill these functions with fidelity and devotion. The belief in the sciences is indeed justified by their objective achievements. However, the belief itself is not a part of them, nor does it follow necessarily from them. It is subjective, not objective. It is not knowledge but rather faith, whose content is an unfounded confidence that the sciences and technology will guarantee human happiness, because

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

215

they redeem man from the distresses of nature and will eventually solve all problems, remove all troubles and turn advanced civilization (to use the formulation of Leibnitz’s Theodicy) into the best of all possible worlds. It is not hard to show that this is a blind and deaf faith, cut off from reality. It ignores the severe and worsening ethical and existential problems that postmodern civilization generates without being able to solve them through its science and technology, because these problems are the result of science and technology themselves. The belief that the sciences and technology are salvific forces ignores the destruction, damage, and suffering that result from knowledge making possible unlimited intervention and manipulation in the lives of human beings. As a result of postmodern technology, man’s power to do outruns his power to bear ethical responsibility for the results of his actions. Technological development ignores the fact that while it is possible to use it for good, by the same token it is possible to use it for evil, as well as the fact that the partial good achieved in the present is liable to be revealed as bad, and even very bad, from other perspectives in the future. It also ignores the fact that man’s nature, as an animal like all animals, inclines him to use his scientific and technological achievements for his own good to the detriment of others, which is to say in the end it will be to his own detriment and that of the natural biosphere. Technological man exploits the biosphere to the limit, pollutes it by the toxic waste of his industries and destroys it, along with the conditions of his own existence in it. Scientists realize the seriousness of the problem, and the political leadership is aware of it. So, too, the majority of the private citizens. However, the absolute majority continue to live according to the dictates of technological civilization; they develop it and accelerate it in the same direction, as long as it serves its masters who exert control and rule in the present, because this is the egoistic interest of the stronger, in keeping with the logic of the system. The communications media, which serve the faith and myth of scientific-technological postmodernism, go along with the refusal to see and to draw the conclusions before catastrophe strikes.

216

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

As with the idolatry of ancient times, postmodern idolatry celebrates the successes of the present, which attest to the layer of scientific truth at its foundation, as long as they continue, and it conceals the deception in the faith in science under the curtain of pleasures for their own sake. As long as they last, they dull the senses, distract one’s attention, and create the illusion that it will be possible to continue further along the same road, in the hope that in the mean time technology will come up with the solutions to the pitfalls that it creates. Today this is already a conscious flight into the imaginary refuge of virtual reality in which postmodernism is so expert. It uses an illusionary art-form, rich in technology, in order to trick the senses and convince them that the sensation of reality is reality, that virtual satiety satiates, and that virtual happiness makes one happy. This is the same opiate effect that the Marxists once ascribed to religion: a hallucination to which people devote themselves knowingly, and from which only a few are able to awaken before the end comes.

The Five Divine Powers of Technological Civilization On the basis of this theory of “stardom,” we may define the following five “divine” powers by which technological civilization operates: 1. Mammon (money).4 Marx did well to analyze the divine status of money in the capitalist regime, and his analysis also holds good for the specialized capitalism of the free market economy in the age of the global village. The presidents of the banks and directors of the stock exchange regularly describe money with the metaphor of the blood flowing in the arteries of the economy and the oxygen in its lungs. Its practical functions are: investment, profit, wages, purchase of goods (including possessions, consumables, and services that a person requires in his life, whether real, perceived, or existential). Every person who lives within the civilization experiences 4 Not by coincidence, the common modern Hebrew name for money (mammon) goes back to ancient times, where it was invoked in a personified sense to represent wealth as a divine-diabolical power, giving this discussion the resonance of a perennial, timeless issue (LL).

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

217

them, and therefore whether voluntarily or involuntarily they attribute to it an importance that symbolizes life itself. Nevertheless, money is only a tool on which civilized life depends, and when one takes into account its general ruling function it turns into an abstract mathematical trans-civilizational idea. Coins and pieces of paper do not embody it, because there is no relation between their material value and their symbolic value. Only the standing of social-political institutions that issue money gives it its value, determining it according to their computations and guaranteeing it. One therefore needs management by a bank, which is a regulative function embodied in the movement of money by way of all the functions of civilization, and this requires both sophisticated professional expertise and a recognized position of institutional control. We posit before our eyes the ultimate symbolically-applied totality in its abstract movements: investment for the sake of production and functional activities; production and functional activities for the sake of profits; profits for the sake of control; control for the sake of functional activity expressed in investments; and so continuing circularly. The whole cycle of life in a civilization, in which people carry out their lives for the sake of their happiness, appears as if they are nothing but functions maintaining the civilization itself. When we consider money in this way, it embodies the idea of trans-civilizational divine power, which from the perspective of its professional priests appears as the primal source of the life-energy of human beings who through their bodily and spiritual labor create and activate the civilization for the sake of their lives and happiness, even though all know that this is a domineering aberration that turns the means into end and the end into means. In truth, money is not a divine power, but an idolatrous power, the work of man’s hands. 2. The intelligence that creates science. Intelligence is centralized in the institutions of higher education, where one acquires all the professional degrees requiring expertise, without which it is impossible to become integrated in the society based on the profit-driven economic marketplace, which is its basis and purpose.

218

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

3. The intelligence that creates technology. The intelligence that generates the specialized professional structure in order to support and activate the economy. 4. Knowledge and skills. Exercising control, to insure the necessary framework for managing the prosperous technological economy. 5. Expressive and inspirational knowledge and talent. The knowledge which enables expression of pleasure from all the products of civilization achieved through investment of bodily, intellectual, and spiritual labor, in which one sees a self-rewarding value which is greater than simply satisfying the needs on account of their functional necessity.

Every citizen who aspires to success and happiness has need of these powers. He is called on to acquire them, or at least to make believe he has acquired them. This applies first of all to money, for it is the key to all. With its help one can purchase scientific education and technical professional skills, or at least a document certifying that one possesses them. We understand from this the power of the “stars” who stand between the gods and the people. These are the ones who demonstrate in actuality that they have internalized the scientific, technical, and administrative intelligence that they have acquired, and have thus been blessed with the money that enables them to learn and take the measure of their great prosperity through their profits. If postmodern idolatry has a divine power that appears in its abstraction as if it is a supernatural power, even though it is not heavenly but artificial, this is the divinity of money. Indeed, dealing with money requires a rational professional approach. However, even the professional economists know that one cannot underrate man’s instinctual connection with it (the lust for money and for the power that money can buy, which is more than one can produce and consume with it when one has it in hand), and the emotional connection that reveres it and regards its very accumulation as conferring self-actualization, happiness, and meaning, for it turns its owner into the object of superlative admiration and fame that will last, if not forever, then at least for a long time.

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

219

The divine status of money is given definition by modern and postmodern economic and political theories that have become intertwined: free-market economic theory and extreme individualistic social and political liberalism. This composite mix of ideas comprises the ideology by which the technological civilization striving for global dominance is planned and established, developed and managed. A quite absurd paradox is embodied in this ideology, which pretends to be scientific. Is it possible to define liberalism based on the equality of all human beings before the law and legal-judicial defense of the rights of every individual as tyranny? One would think not. Yet the drive for all-embracing power is tyrannical. It requires uniform equating of all individuals and all groups, parties, and states for the sake of their efficient functioning. Defining happiness in conformist terms is also a kind of tyranny, implemented by persuasion and seduction, not by force. The pressure of the developed system is sufficient, for it does not tolerate deviation. Whoever seeks to exempt himself from the yardstick of “the common wisdom” and “established operating procedures” in any field and to follow his own destiny will be crushed by the system, unless he succeeds in converting the creation of his spirit into a marketable commodity and sharing it with everyone.

The Cultural and Ethical Aspects of Faith in the Gods of Civilization Let us examine the cultural aspects of implementing these powers of civilization. The fundamental principle of the technological market economy as it strives for globalization is competitive egotism. Along with conformity, it imposes ever-growing social rifts on the basis of division of labor, wages, and profits. In free competition, each individual enlists all his power in the struggle. The call to regard this as the epitome of self-realization brings about dissolution of the moral sense, which properly regarded should be the responsibility incumbent on every person toward the other, whether toward another person, an animal, or any other natural resource. Concerted action between each individual and others, on whose functioning he is dependent, is expressed in mutual exploitation, and whoever knows better how to

220

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

exploit, rightly earns more. If so, it is clear that whoever is stronger, smarter, or luckier than the next person can exploit more and take more for himself, while claiming that when he sells more in order to invest more and profit more, he is contributing to the others with whom he competes, and thereby he enlists their support which he needs. Of course, the individualistic capitalist market economy does not disparage exploitation, but justifies it from the perspective of the greater good. The only limitation stems from extending the right to mutual exploitation to all the members of society who need to cooperate in order to do this efficiently. This demands “fairness,” which the law, enforced by the power of governmental necessity, guarantees. It is forbidden to disturb or prevent any individual in any way from exploiting to the best of his power his talents and the resources that stand at his disposal, including his fellow human beings. But against the right to exploit there does not stand any ethical obligation that is the foundation of the monotheistic idea of justice: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is the breakdown of covenantal morality, whose necessary consequence is the ascendancy of the libidinal egotism of the individuals (and consequently also of their corporate bodies) until they become the primal source of the competitive energy that motivates and activates the wheels of production, marketing, organization, and management of civilization; making the strong stronger (making the rich richer) and making the weak weaker (making the poor poorer); creating giant social gaps; fostering the corruption of the rich who rule in the economy and the state and who take for themselves the higher pleasures, while the poor descend to the world of crime as the only competitive way out that offers them an equal opportunity. This is the internal picture within a country. As for the international picture—the developed countries exploit the undeveloped countries, creating further gaps, with the same alternative solutions to the relations between them. The ideology that pretends to be science justifies these results with the conclusion that they are objectively necessary, and thus it displays its idolatrous nature. The question of what and who determine the fate of every individual within the functioning system according to the principle of

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

221

greater efficiency is answered in a simplistic manner: his luck or fate. His luck or fate with respect to the talents with which nature endowed him, his luck or fate with respect to the social class into which he was born and the success that shone or did not shine its face on him, while in the last analysis all is dependent on the “market forces” expressed in the fateful relations that in essence cannot be planned or predicted. A systematic combination of these elements presents the quasitheological ideology of postmodern idolatry. As we said, it is presented as a scientific theory based on empirical research and applied with its help. The research that conceives and applies the theory (the ideology) is an academic task. In our modern and postmodern social life it has taken the place of the seminaries and rabbinical academies of the medieval monotheistic religions. The claim that one is speaking not of ideology but of objective science comes to imbue the ideology (called “theory”) with the force of objective truth, which imposes itself on the democratic governing system. One should note that its application by the government and private corporations is not put to the test of the voters. One speaks of one “correct” economic theory, despite all its errors; with one “correct” legal system despite all its injustices; and so forth. Thus one cannot say that the political scientists, economists, and sociologists force their views on the society through the state, but that the truth forces itself because it is necessary. This is the same claim to authority by which the religious Church spoke in terms of an absolute truth that God Himself revealed to it, except that this is not the revealed authority of God, but rather the authority of the idols that human beings fashioned with their own hands and enthroned over themselves. The ideology claims that it reflects the given “reality.” This is how things are in actuality, and whoever tries to change them in the name of the old ethical ideals is like a man who tries to break through a wall by hitting his head against it. Whoever has intelligence does not hit the walls that stand in his way, but he seeks a way to use them by obeying the laws of economics and society in civilization, which are like the laws of physics in nature. Is it mere coincidence that this argument fits in with the interests of the managing and ruling classes of the civilization?

222

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

The Results As long as the theory of the free market economy and the individualistic liberal state succeeded in raising the standard of living of many private individuals in the developed countries, it enjoyed the credence of many, even in the undeveloped countries, who hoped to imitate their exploiters and exploit them. Today, it is being undermined. This is because its long-term results, which are the price of success, have been uncovered and are starting to be realized: the problems of poverty, exploitation, corruption, crime, violence, terror, and the opposition of economic and political interests that have brought about instability and dissatisfaction from within, and wars fraught with destruction from without. The formation process of the global village has effectively stopped. The national conflicts that were suppressed have resurfaced, and mankind again faces the threat of a world war that may be conducted with technological weapons destructive enough to wipe technological civilization itself off the face of the earth, and even to destroy the natural preserves from which it could be renewed in the future. Now the skeptics of global-village idolatry are beginning to multiply, but power is still centralized in the hands of its priests, who claim that if their ideology is more consistently applied, the problems will be solved, and the best of all possible civilizations will rise again.

The Idolatrous Rituals of the Postmodern Era The ideology described above shapes the materialistic, competitive, and hedonistic ethos of postmodern idolatry, on the basis of which are established the orders of worship with their commandments, texts and rituals. These are the three interrelated varieties of idolatrous worship: 1. Each person’s worship of the profession in which he specializes, with full sincerity, identifying with carrying out its tasks efficiently. 2. The Pilgrimage of Consumption, expressed in two kinds of rituals. First, there are the rituals of shopping in the great Temples of Consumption (the markets, the palatial malls, and the super-stores). In these temples, all possible consumables are set out on display. This

The Idolatrous Values and Rituals of the Global Village

223

display of eye-candy is a symbol of the idea of abundance, encouraging consuming for its own sake, as much as possible anticipating in the imagination the pleasure that the extravagant consumer hopes to enjoy if he buys it. (Experience, alas, will show that the vision of anticipated enjoyment is always inestimably greater than the enjoyment in fact. In the end, most of the purchases are not consumed, but with gusto thrown into the dumpsters, from which they are later distributed to the poor.) To these we must add the ceremonies of sumptuous indulgence: the cocktail- and dinner-parties. 3. Last but not least, the symbolic rituals that supremely express the happiness implicit in the whole array of values. The stars, representing the divine forces, appear before masses of viewers, exuding their radiance and receiving applause and shouts of acclaim. I am referring to the sports competitions in the giant stadiums, the enormous concerts of performance artists (singers, dancers, and live theater actors), the overflowing parades of the army, and the great festivals arranged to celebrate the arts that speak to the heart of the masses. In all these productions and occasions, which the communications media turn into national and international events, one sees enacted symbolic rituals to the worship of the gods of money poured out like water, but returned immediately to their reservoirs in the banks via the profits raised from the tickets, the betting, and the lavish concession stands at these events. Science, technology, power, and pleasure are united together through their service, and the capable experience their returns, although the vast majority know that they are experiencing an image, and that in their real daily lives in their families, communities, parties, and states there are still troubles, unsolved problems, empty voids, suffering, frustration, and feelings of exploitation and being deprived of pleasures, of radiance, of self-realization, and of the sense of ethical value and spiritual meaning in their lives.

As we said, postmodern idolatry celebrates its great achievements. It tries very hard to persuade its believers that they have a good reason to continue and devote to it their energy, talents, determination, and

224

On Personal and Public Concerns: Essays in Jewish Philosophy

readiness for sacrifice. However, the scientific-technological capitalist civilization now produces more ethical, social, political, and spiritual problems than solutions. The distress grows and accumulates at a threatening rate. After a half-century, during which postmodern civilization celebrated its victory and achievements, it stands facing its severe prices with respect to human morality, with respect to its chances of giving a life of freedom, dignity, and happiness through self-actualization to all its children. There is an increase in frustration and the great fear, which give fodder to the fanatical reaction of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalism competes with idolatry and even exceeds it in cruelty, for it has turned terrorist and learned to use the means of idolatrous civilization only for evil and not for good, in order to wipe it off the face of the earth. The only chance for salvation is found therefore in returning to humanistic monotheism and to the ethic of justice and mutual responsibility, which can restore to advanced technological civilization the will and ability to find the right balance between the welfare of a few individuals and the welfare of the whole, between man’s rights and his obligations, between taking for the sake of his ego and giving to the other, between self-love and neighborly love. This is still the same calling-out voice that was first heard at Sinai. It still echoes in the space of the global village and calls for the same repentance for which the prophet Jonah called at Nineveh, in order to save its poor, and the animals that grazed there. Is there a chance that it will be answered, even if only in part, this time before the next world war explodes?

Index

A

C

academic studies, 25–38 creative writing, 28–29 engagement in literary criticism, 28 foundational and formative of the culture, 30 intellectual thought-systems, 31–34 literary activities, 26–27 modern Jewish philosophy, teaching and research of, 29 relations with teachers, 31–32 Arab–Jew conflict, 11–12 Ascher, Saul, 72, 75

Catholicism, 174 Christianity, 172–173, 197

B Baer, Yitzhak, 31–33, 47 Bentwich, Joseph, 37 Bialik, Haim Nahman, 16, 47, 49, 54, 56 Book of Legends (Bialik), 16 Brennerian “negation of the Diaspora,” 21 Buber, Martin, 42, 47, 49, 55

Cohen, Hermann, 42, 49 collective “I,” 141–144, 169–170, 206 communism, 187–188 Conservative Movement, 74

D divine justice, 102–103

E enlightened human being, 176 Enlightenment movement, 173–174 Enlightenment philosophy, 176–178 European culture in modern era, 67 European Enlightenment, 74 exile, 12–14, 21

F faith, 168–169 basis of righteousness and morality, 91–92, 94–98, 104–105 Biblical context, 85–98, 107–108

226

communistic, 183 cultural and ethical aspects of, 219–221 divine justice, 102–103 doctrine of “hiding God’s face,” 108 embodiment of, 87 as a form of foundational, intentional, and formative activity, 98–104 as a form of moral relationship between God and humanity, 87–93 humanistic vision, 175 in idols and God, 172–187 knowledge as basis of, 93–98 moral relation between individuals, 88 as necessity of progress, 179– 180 perfect knowledge of God as a precondition, 105–106 question of God’s justice, 101–102, 107–108 story of Abraham, 89–92 thought of believer before God, 88–89 utopian messianic solution, 108 Faith and Logic, 32 fascism, 187–188 Frankel, Zechariah, 72, 74 Friedlander, David, 72–73, 75

G generation gap, 10 global village, 116 God concept, 157–158 bond of love between man and, 160–162 Gordon, Aaron David, 17, 20, 25, 47, 49 Guide of the Perplexed, 40

Index

Guttmann, Julius, 39, 41–42

H Ha-Am, Ahad, 17, 47, 54, 56, 69 Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 45–46, See also Meuhad movement halakhic Judaism, 48 Hamahanot Haolim, 18, 20, 22, 45 Hapoel Hatzair, 27 Haskalah movement, 41 Hess, Moses, 49, 76–78 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 72, 74 The Nineteen Letters, 75 Hirsch, Samuel, 72–73 historical experience, 178 history/historical thought believers and deniers of history, 112–115 collective “I,” 141–144 as a combination of the individual experiences of masses, 127 conscious creatures, 136 creation of culture, 139–141 critique of theory of narratives, 133–135 development of human civilization, 138–139 essence of history, 135–141 functioning of social sciences and its implications on, 121–123 historical-cultural memory, 143, 148–151, 153–154 historical knowledge, 121 historical truth, 130 historiography as a science, 151–155 history in public consciousness, status of, 119–121 inanimate entities, 136–137 individualistic-egoistic interests, 127

Index

instant history, 119–121 intellectual error and distortions, 146–148 modern historiography, 123–126 narratives and counternarratives, 131–133 ontological condition for creating a culture, 141–143 personal memory and collective memory, 44–146 political task of history in present age, 134–135 postmodernism, 118–119, 144–146, 155 post World War II, 109–112, 144–145 pragmatism, 117–118 radical postmodernism, 126–131 reflective memory, 141 role of cultural legacy in shaping personality, 147–148 scientific objectivity, 131–132 scientific technological progress and, 115–117 self-conscious existence of a personal self, 136 subjective historical truths, 131

I idolatrous religion, 159, 203–204 ancient, 172, 180 convergence between pure monotheism and, 178 democracy and, 180–181 difference between monotheism and, 159, 163–164 of the global village, 195–205 humanity’s inclination toward, 164–165 ideologies, 183–184, 189 Marxist ideology and, 183 materialistic outlook, 182–185

227

at philosophical and political level, 181–182 postmodern, 205–209 rituals, 222–223 scientific-based, 181–182 worshipping of creative and moving powers of technological civilization, 211–216 inanimate beings, history of, 136– 137 instant history, 119–121 inter-subjective connections, 200 Israeli War of Liberation, 13

J Jerusalem, during the period of Yishuv, 10–13 Jewish Diaspora, 20–22 Jewish Enlightenment, 78 Jewish history, 12 Jewish image of Israeli society, 27 Jewish peoplehood, image of, 15, 21, 37 alienation, 70 creative potential, 62 emancipation, 69 expression of Jewishness, 64–65 faith, nature of, 65–66 idea of sovereignty, 67–69 Jewish distinctiveness, 69 Jewish identity, 61 post-Emancipation period, 76–77 problems with Jewish identity, 72–74 self-esteem, 62–63 self-image of proud individuality, 61–62 sense of belonging, 63–64 solitary Jew, 60–61, 63–66 true freedom, 62 Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, 47 Jewish worldview, 17

228

Jubilee Volume for Shlomo Pines, 32 Judaism, 83, 197 approach to, 64 contrast between Marx and Spinoza, 76–78 feeling of freedom in, 80–81 as a heritage, 79 as a historical phenomenon, 77 Jew, relationship to, 59–60, 81 Jewish communities and, 64 modern, 59–60, 78 modifications of cultural and religious contents of, 79–80 national definition of, 78–79 as personal identity, 9 views of intellectuals, 72–74 Judaism and the Lonely Jew, 38 Jüdische Wissenschaft, 42, 54, 56

K Klatzkin, Jacob, 79 knowledge about God, 93–98 Kook, Rav Abraham Isaac HaCohen, 79 Kumer, Isaac, 12

L leadership programs, 46 Liberal Protestant Christianity, 174

M Marx, Karl, 76 material culture of Europe, 67–68 Mendelssohn, Moses, 70–72 Messianic movements, 21 Meuhad movement, 18, 46 modern Enlightenment, 174, 176 modern historiography, 123–126 Molad, 27 monotheism, 157–159 ancient, 180 Biblical viewpoint, 164, 180

Index

difference between idolatry, 159, 163–164 modern western countries and, 198

N Nablus house, 11 Niv Ha-Kevutzah movement, 27 Nivim movement, 27 non-rational movements in Judaism, 50

O Only Yesterday (Shai Agnon), 12

P paganism of European nations, 172, 203 personal viewpoint celebrations, 16 customs followed in family gatherings, 16 education at home, 14–15, 18 experiences of childhood and youth, 13 free-thinking attitude, 14 ideational development, 20 image of Jewish peoplehood, 15, 21, 37 Jamal (Arab shopkeeper), 11–12 Jewish culture and its educational message, 25 kibbutz, 23–25 life-environment in Jerusalem, 10–13 living conditions, 19–20 nationalist message, 14–15 parental guidance, 14–17 participation in Israeli War of Liberation, 13 religion and faith, 15–16 socialism, 17–18 teaching and learning of Torah, 34–36

Index

229

university studies and scholarly activities, 25–34 person’s faith, 9 Pines, Shlomo, 31–33, 41, 47 postmodernism, 118–119 postmodern secularism, 196–198 pragmatism, 117–118 private domain, 10 professionalized sports, 210 progress, idea of, 115–117 prophetic monotheism, 174 Protestantism, 172–173

Jewish legacy, 44–45 psychological-existential and methodological standpoint, 52–53 in a scholarly way, 53–54 then and now, 41 traditional and modern sources of Judaism, 55–56 Riesser, Gabriel, 72–73, 75 Romanticism, 184–187 Rosenzweig, Franz, 42, 49 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 47

R

S

radical Enlighteners, 174 radical postmodernism, 126–131 Rahel, 16 reflective consciousness, 169 Reform movement, 73–74 research and teaching in Jewish thought balance between “archeological” research and transmitting values, 56 crisis of humanism, 48–50 domains of, 41–42 German-Jewish heritage retrospect, 54–55 halakhic Judaism, 48 Hebrew labor movement, 48–50 Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah, 39–40 history of Jewish religious philosophy, 39–41 Judaism-as-actualization, 48–49 legacy of yeshiva-learning, 51–52 medieval Jewish philosophy, 43–44 messages of spiritual Zionism, 56 modern Jewish philosophy, 43–44, 47 Oral Torah, imparting of, 52–53 problems of transmitting age-old

Sabina, 24 Scholem, Gershom, 31–33, 39, 42, 47, 51 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 41 secularism, 68, 198–204 secular spiritual identity, 198–200 Seden, Dov, 47 Shamir, Moshe, 27 social equality, 69 socialist egalitarianism, 17 solitary Jew, 60–61, 63–66 predicament of, 81–83 sovereignty of man, 67–69 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict), 70–71, 73, 76, 178–179 spiritual creativity of Europe, 68, 71 spiritual image of Jews, 27 spiritual-intellectual creativity, 69 spiritual Zionism, 47

T tarbutnik, 23 technocrats, 116 technological civilization, five “divine” powers by, 216–218 Three Watches, 27 Torah, Jewish heritage of, 34–36 totalitarian democracy, 180–181

230

Index

W Western paganism, 172 worldview, 9 World War II, post communism and fascism, 187–189 generational transition in leadership, 190 history/historical thought, 109–112, 144–145 intellectual trend, 191–193 liberal and social-democratic regimes, 189–190 philosophical perspectives, 193–195 postmodern secularism, 196–198

psychological behaviorism, 191–192 secular spiritual identity, 198– 200 secular worldview, 198–204 subjective philosophies, 193–194 technological civilization, 191

Y Yiddish language, 14–15 Yitzhar, S., 27

Z Zionism, 78–79 political accomplishment of, 79

—————————————————— Epilogue and Postscript ——————————————————

— 328 —

—————————————————— Epilogue and Postscript ——————————————————

— 328 —