The body of faith : Judaism as corporeal election 9780816405497, 0816405492, 9780816424795, 0816424799

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udaism

Michael Wyschogrod '

The Seabury Press / New York

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1983 The Seabury Press 815 Second Avenue New York, N.Y. 10017 Copyright e 1983 by Michael Wyschogrod All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Seabury Press. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wyschogrod, Michael, 1928The body of faith. Includes index. 2. Jews1. Judaism-Essence, genius, nature. Election, Doctrine of-History of doctrines. 3. God I. Title. (Judaism) 4. Ethics, Jewish. BM601. W96 1983 296.3 83-4776 ISBN 0-8164-0549-2 ISBN 0-8164-2479-9 (pbk.) The author acknowledges the support of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in the preparation of this study.

For Abigail, Daniel, and Tamar, new cells in the body of faith.

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Even though they [the Jews] are unclean, the Divine Presence is among them.

Sifra on Lev. 16:16

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CONTENTS

Introduction

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Chapter 1 A PARTIAL KNOWLEDGE 1 1. Light and Knowledge 1 2. Biblical Reason 3 3. A Dark Reason 7 4. The Indwelling of God 11 5. Failure 14 6. Sacrifices 17 7. Israel as Sacrifice 21 8. Permitted Knowledge 29 9. Postbiblical Options 34 Chapter 2 A CHOSEN NATION 40 1. Jewish Philosophy 40 2. Marrano Philosophers 43 3. Jewish and Christian Philosophy 52 4. Love and Election 58 5. National Election 65 6. Two Traditions 70 7. Reformation Thought and Judaism 75 •

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Chapter 3 THE PERSONALITY OF GOD 82 1. God as Person 82 2. God as Thou 86 3. Personhood and Emanation 91 4. The Body 96 5. Some Traits of God 100 6. Psychological Dynamics 104 7. God and Man 108 8. A Partner in the Human Encounter 113 9. Love 119 Chapter 4 CREATED BEING 125 1. Being and Existence 125 2. Nonbeing and the One 130 3. Heidegger and the A Priori 133 4. God and Being 137 5. Ontology and Human Being 143 6. The Lord of Being 149 7. Deontology 155 8. God beyond Being 160 9. Created Being 164 10. Demythologization 169 Chapter 5 ETHICS AND JEWISH EXISTENCE 173 1. Jewish Thought 173 2. Jewish Thought and the Jewish People 174 3. A Carnal Election 175 4. Historicity 177 5. Biblical and Rabbinic Ethics 179 6. The Ethical Secedes 181 7. Jewish Disobedience 182 8. The Law 185 9. Insecurity 187 10. The Centrality of the Ethical 190 11. A Nonautonomous Ethic 191 12. The Ethical and Law 195 13. Self-Alienation in Law 197 14. God and Law 199 X

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

What Is the Law? 201 The Particular Situation 204 The Law and the Silence of God 208 God, Torah, and Israel 211 The Ethical and the Universal 215 The Ethical and History 218 Ethics, Cult, and Land 222

Chapter 6 THE UNREALIZED 224 1. Expecting the Unexpected 224 2. Process Philosophy 226 3. The Present 227 4. Renewal 230 5. History 233 6. History and Law 236 7. The Jewish People 238 8. Israel 243 9. Art 247 10. Family 252 11. Messianic Judaism 254

Notes 257 Index 263

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INTRODUCTION The drive toward Jewish self-understanding has played a limited role in the history of Judaism. From time to time, individual Jews have stepped back from their immersion in Jewish existence and raised fundamental issues concerning the basic rationale of Judaism .... ., God, Israel, history, and and its interpretation of such concepts as redemption. The most famous of these was Maimonides, but others both preceded and followed him. Nevertheless, the main energy of Judaism has not gone into this enterprise. It is generally agreed that Judaism's main effort, at least since the beginning of the rabbinic period, has gone into the elaboration of the commandments of the Torah, which prescribe the conduct of the Jew in every conceivable aspect of his life. It is true that Torah never meant ''law'' in quite the sense that word is used today. The very fact that in the contem­ . porary world law is considered a specialty properly studied by lawyers and judges but not the average person, while Torah was always considered the essential study of religious Jews, underlines the difference between the two. And because Torah was understood as the all-embracing teaching given as God's gift to Israel, it included the nonlegal, or agadic portions of the Torah. But even these texts do not generally raise theological and philosophical issues in a systematic and coherent way. It was the task of Jewish philosophers like Maimonides to weave the wealth of scriptural and rabbinic materials into systematic shape. The essay that is before the reader is another attempt to think .-

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philosophically about Judaism. As such, it joins a relatively limited literature of uneven quality and influence on the development of Judaism. Most of these works were written in Hebrew and almost all were written by Jews deeply steeped in Torah learning. But in this century, thinkers such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig have made significant contributions. These were not Torah scholars with a secondary philosophic interest. They were primarily philos­ ophers whose interest in Judaism grew out of their philosophic in­ terests. That is not altogether the case with the author of this essay. Since Jewish education in a traditional home begins at an early age, my Jewish education preceded my interest in philosophy but not by much. Before my sixteenth birthday I had developed an interest in philosophy that has never left me. I therefore do not classify myself as an outsider who is discovering his roots but as as an insider whose Judaism has been deepened by his philosophy and whose philos­ ophy has been enriched by his Judaism. The basic orientation of the work is based on a number of convic­ tions I have come to over the years, which the attentive reader will discover soon enough. But it may be helpful to state some of these beliefs immediately-if briefly- so that from the outset the reader understand both the presuppositions and aims of the argument. 1. My Judaism is biblical. It is biblical because the Judaism of the rabbis is biblical. It is, of course, supplemented by the oral Torah, which is considered to have been revealed by God to Moses alongside the written Torah. But the oral Torah is dependent on and is inconceivable without the written Torah. It is the written Torah -that is the primary document of revelation. Only in the case of the written Torah is there an authorized text, which, when written as specified, brings into being a physical object-the Torah scroll-that is holy. It is therefore a distortion of Judaism to claim, as some have done, that the Judaism of the rabbis is discontinuous with biblical Judaism. While the rabbinic Judaism of Babylonia or eastern Europe does not follow deductively from Scripture, it is clearly continuous with it and no reader of the Bible would have any difficulty recogniz­ ing most rabbinic practices as biblically rooted. 2. Maimonides' demythologization of the concept of God is un­ biblical and ultimately dangerous to Jewish faith. Jewish faith cannot survive if a personal relation between the Jew and God is not possi­ ble. But no personal relation is possible with an Aristotelian Un­ moved Mover. The God who appears in the Bible is a very specific person with certain definite character traits. Because man is also . ..._

Introduction xv such a person, the drama of the Bible is the interaction of this God with a wide variety of persons and one specific people: Israel. The widely shared Jewish reluctance to come to grips with thE: real bib­ lical God and the success that Maimonidean thinking has had in de­ personalizing God are not unrelated to Christian Trinitarian devel­ opments. Because Christianity embraced a theology of incarnation in which a human being and God are alleged to be one, Judaism re­ coiled to the other extreme and made the absolute incorporeality of God essential. But the God of the Bible enters space by dwelling in the Tabernacle and the Temple in Jerusalem. Judaism must therefore avoid both making God too abstract and too concrete. 3. The election of the people of Israel as the people of God con­ stitutes the sanctification of a natural family. God could have chosen a spiritual criterion: the election of all those who have faith or who obey God's commandments. The liberal mind would find such an election far more congenial. But God did not choose this path. He chose the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There are, of course, religious and ethical demands made of the elect. When they do not live up to those demands, they are punished. But the essential belonging to the people of election is derived from descent from the Patriarchs. The election of Israel is therefore a corporeal election. One result of this is that a Jew cannot resign his election. Were elec­ tions based on faith or ethics, a change in belief or conduct would terminate the election and the responsibilities connected with it. But because the election of Israel is of the flesh, a Jew remains in the ser­ vice of God no matter what he believes or does. The Jewish body as well as the Jewish soul is therefore holy, a truth that was well understood by those enemies of God who knew that they had to murder the Jewish body along with the teachings of Israel. 4. The ethical plays a central role in Judaism. At almost every point of revelation found in the Bible, God makes very clear ethical demands of Israel. But the ethical is not autonomous in Judaism. It is rooted in the being and command of God, without which no obligation is conceivable. But because Israel is a holy people and re­ mains holy even in its rebellion, many Jews who came to reject the divine aspect of Judaism transferred their religious energy to the ethical, and this led to various distortions that reduced Judaism to the ethical. In recent times, the reduction of Judaism to ethics has been accompanied by a denigration of the peoplehood of Israel. In its place, an unrooted international ethicism was substituted. At the root of this substitution is a spiritualizing heresy for which the body

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of Israel is of very little significance. But the faith of Israel is a carnal faith. Judaism does not escape the real, material, and political world for a Gnostic heaven. Redemption must take place in the world in which men live, and if death is conquered, it is not conquered by the immortality of a Platonic soul freed of its material cover, but by the promise of resurrection into the materiality of human existence. Jewish ethics must maintain its relation to the heteronomy of God's command and the historical and existential soil of Jewish peoplehood. 5. Finally, Jewish thought since the emancipation has found itself drawn to philosophies of reason of the most universalistic sort. When Spinoza composed his Ethics in geometric form, he gave ex­ pression to the Jewish dream of a neutral and objective world ruled by ahistorical reason in which national and mythological forces are subdued and in which the Jew turns into the human and his exclu­ sion from the Christian and national West ends forever. But the col­ lective souls of the nations cannot be exorcised. The mythological national communities will not disappear because they, too, were created by God. A philosophy that wishes to remain in contact with human reality must examine not only geometry but also poetry, which is reflective of the particularity of the national consciousness and destiny. If Heidegger is the philosopher whose presence is most clearly felt in this work, it is because he is the philosopher of this century through whom the tradition speaks. That his name will forever be tainted with his association with Nazism is a commentary on the depth of the demonic forces unloosened by Nazism and the limitations of an autonomous philosophy. The need of the hour is for Judaism to struggle with the spiritual forces that are active in con­ temporary history. Not a few Jewish philosophic works have, to a greater or lesser degree, engaged in dialogue with either Christianity or Islam or both. Sometimes this has been quite explicit, sometimes less so. In this work, there is an ongoing dialogue with Christianity. While the dialogue between Judaism and Christianity has been of interest to me for some years, it is not the primary focus of attention in these pages. Nevertheless, it is far from absent. Given the centrality of theology and the resulting high state of its development in Chris­ tianity, I have found it most helpful to compare the Jewish stand­ point with that of Christianity at certain critical points in the discus­ sion. At times, I was very conscious of doing this, at times, less so. In general, I have found such comparison most useful in formulating

Introduction

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a Jewish view on various questions. The temptation here is to make the contrast as sharp as possible, thereby, at times, distorting Jud·aism. I have attempted to avoid this temptation. The incama­ tional direction of my thinking became possible for me only after I succeeded from freeing myself from the need to be as different from Christianity as possible. I am now convinced that a renewed, non­ Maimonidean Judaism constitutes a return to origins in the deepest Jewish sense. Chapter 1 (''A Partial Knowledge'') deals with the role of reason in Judaism. Philosophy is a reaching for light, but the human condition is an interplay between light and darkness. This is particularly true of Jewish existence, which is tied to an as yet unfulfilled history and to the destiny of a national family. Jewish theology is therefore never more than a partial understanding of the Jewish situation. Chapter 2 (''A Chosen Nation'') explores the corporeality of Jewish election. God did not choose a community of faith or those who obey his commandments but the seed of Abraham. While commandments are imposed on this family-disobedience of which leads to calamity -the election as such is of the body of Israel. It is for this reason that philosophy, directed primarily at the realm of ideas, is not central to Judaism. This chapter also deals with the secular aspect of Jewish election. Chapter 3 (''The Personality of God'') focuses on the concreteness of the biblical God. The God of the Bible is a specific personality who stands in a specific relationship with the people of Israel. In spite of a tendency to depersonalize God in the spirit of Neoplatonism, the psychological concreteness of the biblical God has to be faced and in­ corporated into contemporary Judaism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the mutual love between God and Israel. Chapter 4 (''God and Deontology'') explores the relationship be­ tween being and God. Is God a being among other beings? Is there a concept (being?) that embraces both God and the creation? Does being serve as a substitute for God in the philosophy of Heidegger? The chapter argues that nonbeing is the necessary corollary of being and that nonbeing, expressed in action, is violence. This chapter is somewhat more difficult than the others, though it should not be beyond the attentive, nontechnically trained reader. Chapter 5 (''Ethics and Jewish Existence'') discusses Jewish ethics in light of the interpretation of Jewish election previously developed. The tendency of philosophical ethics, especially in its Kantian form,

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is to construct universal laws. But human existence is concrete and historical, and ethical problems arise in discrete situations. Is God's will expressed in universal law or in particular command? The chap­ ter attempts to reconcile the Jewish reentry into history with God's ethical law. Chapter 6 (''The Unrealized'') examines the messianic dimension of Judaism. The corporeality of Jewish election is connected to redemption in the earthly Jerusalem. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the danger inherent in a spiritualized messianism. It is clear to me that Jewish life throughout the world is in the midst of a particularly stormy period. I can only hope that this work makes some contribution to Jewish self-understanding. I am indebted to Esther Guttenberg for her patience in typing drafts of the manuscript and to Morris Wyszogrod for the design of the cover. My conversations with him have taught me much about the suffering and courage of the Jewish people.

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Chapter A PARTIAL KNO

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