The Principles of Judaism (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology) 9780198843252, 0198843259

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OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALY TIC THEOLO GY Series Editors Michael C. Rea  Oliver D. Crisp

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALY TIC THEOLO GY Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive theology, paying attention to religious traditions and the development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases high quality, cutting edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia. published titles include: Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God William Hasker The Theological Project of Modernism Faith and the Conditions of Mineness Kevin W. Hector The End of the Timeless God R. T. Mullins Ritualized Faith Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy Terence Cuneo In Defense of Conciliar Christology A Philosophical Essay Timothy Pawl Atonement Eleonore Stump Humility and Human Flourishing A Study in Analytic Moral Theology Michael W. Austin Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory Kent Dunnington

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The Principles of Judaism SAMUEL LEBENS

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Samuel Lebens 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933207 ISBN 978–0–19–884325–2 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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‫מלך העולם‬, ‫שבח לאל‬ ‫אשר הכול ממנו‬, ‫אדוני‬,

To Dean Zimmerman

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Preface This book seeks to provide a minimal axiomatization of the Orthodox Jewish faith. I don’t claim that a Jew who disagrees with the principles set out in this book is ipso facto a heretic. Other axiomatizations are possible to make sense of living the same sort of life, although I doubt that any could be as minimal, whilst making sense of the same degree of devotion to Orthodox practice. Indeed, some would consider it a heresy just how minimal my axiomatization ends up being. My aim has been simply to understand the foundations upon which my own religious commitments would stand or fall. I hope that my doing so will be helpful to believers and non-believers alike. I’ll address the aims of this book more in chapter  1. Here I want to say something about the intellectual tradition to which it hopes to belong.1 Jewish thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was primarily influenced by Continental philosophy—Kant, Hegel, and even Heidegger. But for over a century, English-speaking philosophy has been dominated by a different school: “analytic philosophy,” a tradition that has been largely ignored by Jewish thought.2 In its infancy, analytic philosophy could be characterized by a group of doctrines: realism about the mind-external world, as opposed to idealism (the view that the world is somehow dependent upon the mental); pluralism (that many things exist) as opposed to monism (that only one thing exists); and logicism (the view that mathematics can, in some significant sense, be reduced to logic). But, in the century that followed, each of these doctrines found opponents from within the analytic tradition. This book, for example, will be defending a trenchant idealism. With no remaining unifying doctrines, Michael Rea (2009) points out that what really unites analytic philosophers and binds them into a single tradition is a style of philosophizing and a shared intellectual history. The characteristic style includes the following features: writing which expresses philosophical positions in sentences that can be formalized and logically manipulated; writing which prioritizes precision, clarity, and logical coherence; writing which avoids ­ ­non-decorative use of rhetorical flourishes; working with well-understood primitive concepts, and defining very clearly new terms and concepts. In addition, analytic philosophy is unified by a shared history. When exactly did that history begin? Some point to Bernard Bolzano as the first analytical ­philosopher (Künne et al., 1997). Some point to the influence of Hermann Lotze 1  Some of this intellectual history echoes what I wrote in Lebens (2015a; 2018), and co-authored in Lebens et al. (2019a). 2  Although things are beginning to change, see Lebens et al. (2019b).

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viii Preface (Sluga, 1980; Gabriel, 2002; Milkov, 2000). But it’s uncontroversial that G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, at the turn of the previous century, were responsible for galvanizing the movement, and for its subsequent dominance over the Englishspeaking world. They are, uncontroversially, part of the shared history of analytic philosophy. That shared history has given rise to a canon of set texts, and to a growing technical vocabulary. The written style, texts, and technical vocabulary of analytic philosophy are all concerned with logical rigor. Accordingly, the one value that stands behind them all is the value of reason. We live in an age in which reason is under attack. Some on the right have developed an antipathy towards experts, science, and data; the untrustworthy tools of the liberal elites. In a mirror-image phenomenon, some on the left have been so concerned to promote safe spaces for the persecuted (certainly a noble endeavor), that freedom of speech is brought under attack, in a phenomenon described as the ‘closing of the American mind’ (Bloom, 1987; Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018). Immersed in a “post-truth” climate, Jewish theologians have begun to experiment with postmodernism, and other schools of thought that do away with the notion of objective truth. They worry that there is no way to reconcile Judaism with the knowledge that we have today; with respect for other religious outlooks; with newfound perspectives on gender and sexuality. They worry: how can we salvage rigid observance of traditional Jewish life without undermining the value of personal autonomy; and how can we make sense of continued Jewish commitment in the face of empirical evidence (from the natural sciences, to biblical studies and archaeology) that seem to undermine it? These questions are serious. In their shadow, postmodernism can seem like an attractive option. Why not say that there are no hard and fast truths? The postmodern thinker, by contrast, will tell us that each person can have her own truth. Conflicts between Judaism and other ways of thinking may simply be an illusion generated by the modernist “mistake” of taking the notion of objective truth too seriously. In a recent popular essay, describing the work of Rabbi Shagar (Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg), who borrowed heavily from postmodern thinkers, Miriam Feldman-Kaye accurately sums up, for lay people, an attitude at the heart of most postmodernist thought. Presenting this attitude (not necessarily as her own), she writes, “ ‘Logical’ or ‘rational’ modes of dialogue hold no superior qualities to other interpretative motifs but rather are pretentious ‘meta-narratives’ only ­applicable to some people and in particular contexts.”3 But if logical modes of dialogue are pretentious, how are we supposed to scrutinize postmodernist claims about logic and rationality? Are we supposed to scrutinize them illogically? The notion that logic shouldn’t be privileged is self-defeating and intellectually bankrupt.4 3 https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/the-new-jewish-philosophy-of-rav-shagar/. 4  For more extensive treatment of these themes, in defense of reason, see Boghossian (2006).

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Preface  ix Furthermore, postmodernism can appeal only to a vanishing minority. Despite the popular disregard for “fake news,” and for experts, very few people are truly able to disregard the notion of truth. Postmodernism doesn’t fly in science departments, in the workplace, or in any other place where facts still matter. A Conservative rabbi recently wrote that religious affiliation is like brand loyalty: “There are many ways to God, I just happen to like this one because I grew up with it!” This is a message unlikely to engender long-term commitment from congregants and the children that they will raise in a marketplace of competing brands. This book eschews postmodernism, regarding it as intellectually self-defeating and socially unsustainable. This book is my attempt at Jewish philosophy in the analytic style. It aspires towards logical rigor in the search for truth. A complete understanding of the world in which we live might lie out of reach for human beings, situated as we are in our subjective shells of socially conditioned experiences. But as Rabbi Tarfon said, “It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Mishna, Tractate Pirkei Avot, 2:16). In the book of Deuteronomy (7:9), Moses says, “Know therefore that the Lord your God, He is God”—this is a cognitive commandment. It requires philosophy. There is something that we have to strive to come to know. Moses goes on to describe God as “the faithful God, who keeps his covenant and mercy with them that love Him, and keep His commandments to a thousand generations.” This book doesn’t argue for the principles it lays out. Nevertheless, I do not hide that I am a person of faith. I pray that this book will help me, and others, to fulfill this biblical commandment, as we come to have an ever stronger faith in a faithful God; striving to come to know him as best we can.

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Acknowledgements This book was going to be a collection of my papers on Jewish topics, bringing them all into one place. As the project took shape, the material almost organized itself into the more ambitious project that it became. Given the initial plan, this book still contains—in full or in part—many of my previously published essays. They have been cannibalized and subsumed into something wholly new. My first acknowledgement has to be to Tyron Goldschmidt. Two chapters of this book are primarily based upon articles that we co-authored. Moreover, conversations with him convinced me that this book should be more than a collection of papers. Finally, he is a wonderful friend and a fabulous colleague. Working with him is always fun, enriching, and rewarding. My next acknowledgement is to the publishers and editors of the various volumes and journals who have allowed my work to appear here in a new guise. Chapter 1 draws from my paper “Negative Theology as Illuminating/Therapeutic Falsehood” (from Michael Fagenblat (ed.), Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, Indiana University Press, 2017). One subsection of chapter 2 draws from a paper co-authored with Dale Tuggy, “Dormant Dispositions, Agent Value, and the Trinity” (Journal for Analytic Theology, 7 (2019): 42–155). Chapter 3 cannibalizes, and adds to, “Divine Contractions: Theism Gives Birth to Idealism” (Religious Studies, published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2018; forthcoming in print), which I co-authored with Tyron Goldschmidt. Parts of my papers “God and His Imaginary Friends: A Hassidic Metaphysics” (Religious Studies, 51(2) (2015): 183–204) and “Hassidic Idealism: Kurt Vonnegut and the Creator of the Universe” (from Tyron Goldshmidt and Kenneth Pearce (eds.), Idealism: New Essays, Oxford University Press, 2017) appear in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 5 also includes passages from my “Nothing Else’ (European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 11(2) (2019): 91–110), and “Why so Negative about Negative Theology: The Search for a Plantinga-Proof Apophaticism” (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 76(3) (2014): 259–75). Chapter 6 borrows from my “Is There a Primordial Torah?” (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 82(2) (2017): 219–39). Chapter 8 cannibalizes, and adds to, “The Promise of a New Past” (Philosophers’ Imprint, 17(18) (2017): 1–25), co-authored with Tyron Goldschmidt. Finally, some parts of chapter 9 are borrowed from my “The Epistemology of Religiosity: An Orthodox Jewish Perspective” (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 74(3) (2013): 315–32).

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xii Acknowledgements Again: thanks are due to all of the editors, journals, co-authors, and publishers who have allowed this work to reappear in this new setting. My thanks are also due to those people who have influenced me philosophically and religiously. Rabbis Adam Hill and Chaim Kanterowitz (and their families) played a central role in guiding me during my first footsteps into religious observance. Rabbis Tzvi Shiloni, Chanoch Waxman, and Yair Kahn were crucial mentors to me during my years in various rabbinical schools and since. Rabbi Herzl and Batya Hefter have had a huge influence over my thinking, and their family have been an extended family to us. Rabbi Shmuel Nacham played a central role in my religious formation, opening my mind to the music of Torah. Over the years, Chief Rabbi Emeritus, Lord Sacks, has been an inspiration to me. In my most trying religious moments he was always there for me, in his published work, and in treasured correspondence, as a source of sage counsel and spiritual guidance. My parents and parents-in-law have been a constant source of support and encouragement. Maureen Kendler passed away as I was completing this book. She likely would have despaired at how technical and forbidding some of it might seem. Her passion was to share Torah with the People. She was one of my most trusted mentors. I hope that having worked through these philosophical riddles will help me, in the years to come, to share Torah with a wider audience, in her memory. This book brings together the fruits of post-docs at the University of Notre Dame, Rutgers University, and the University of Haifa. All of those appointments, and various conferences and summer schools that have had a massive influence over my thinking, were funded by foundations established by Sir John Templeton. I am deeply grateful to Michael Murray and Alexander Arnold. They played a pivotal role in helping me to secure the very generous support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation for my position at Haifa. This publication was only made possible through the support of that grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. For conversations that directly influenced this book thanks to: William Abraham, the late Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert Merrihew Adams, Michael Antony, Mark Baker, D Black, Laura Callahan, Eddy Chen, Gabriel Citron, Sarah Coakley, Marilie Coetsee, Scott Davidson, Robin Dembroff, Natalja Deng, Trent Dougherty, Alexander Douglas, Evan Fales, Curtis Franks, Yehuda Gellman, Simon Goldstein, Chris Hauser, Meir Hemmo, Simon Hewitt, Daniel and Francis Howard-Snyder, Hud Hudson, Ross Inman, Azzan Yadin-Israel, Jonathan Jacobs, Anne Jeffrey, Dru Johnson, James Jones, Nicholas Jones, Lorraine Juliano Keller, Menachem Kellner, Arnon Keren, Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini, Irem Stein Kurstal, John Kvanvig, Daniel McKaughan, Ariel Meirav, Andrew Moon, Carl Mosser, Ryan Mullins, Samuel Newlands, Tzvi Novick, Kenny Pearce, Dani Rabinowitz, Michael

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Acknowledgements  xiii Rea, Mike Rota, Howard Robinson, Tamar Ross, Rabbi Eli Rubin, Daniel Rubio, Daniel Schneider, John Schwenkler, Aaron Segal, Amy Seymour, David Shatz, Saul Smilansky, Daniel Statman, Josef Stern, Eleonore Stump, Phil Swenson, Dale Tuggy, Peter van Elswyk, Shira Weiss, Howard Wettstein, Christopher WillardKyle, Steven Wykstra, and Dean Zimmerman. I’m sure there are names missing. This is only because of my poor memory, not because of a lack of gratitude. Special thanks are due to Kelly Clark, Rabbi Michael Harris, and Iddo Landau who carefully went over parts of an earlier draft of this book with helpful suggestions and comments. Thanks to Rabbi Naftali Goldberg, a friend and study partner, who has accompanied me throughout our study of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed; a journey that has left an imprint on this book. And thanks to Hagay Forschner, my student, teacher, and friend, who has helped me immeasurably in preparing this manuscript for publication. Aaron Segal and Dani Rabinowitz founded the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism with me. Their friendship, and our association, has been a tremendous source of encouragement and stimulation to me. I hope this book will contribute towards the aims of the association. Tom Perridge, Karen Raith, John Smallman, and their fabulous colleagues at Oxford University Press have been a joy to work with, as have Cheryl Brant (project manager) and Kim Richardson (copyeditor). I am very grateful to Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea, the editors of this series, for their support. I also thank two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful suggestions. I am proud to have this book stand alongside the groundbreaking titles in Crisp and Rea’s series. My wife, Gaby, has been a constant source of encouragement and strength. She had such faith in my work that she traveled the world with me, from post-doc to post-doc, holding our young family together with her love, her capability, and her vision. With courage, honesty, and loyalty, she teaches me so much. Our relationship helps to ground my relationship with God. This book is dedicated to Dean Zimmerman. Dean is a devout Christian. This is a book of Jewish philosophy. Dean is a dualist. He won’t appreciate the idealism of this book. Dean is a presentist. This book argues against presentism. But from Dean I have learnt more important things. He is an inspiration to me i­ ntellectually, religiously, and personally. He is a tremendous philosopher, rightfully acclaimed by his peers, and yet he is full of humility and grace. The faith that he has placed in me, as a young philosopher, has lifted me up during difficult times. He is the sort of person who does good without ever wanting recognition for it. Without certain things that Dean was doing behind the scenes, I wouldn’t have a job today. I doubt if you would be reading this book. I would be happy to be half the philosopher, and half the man, that Dean is.

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Contents 1 Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface 1 1.1.  Introducing the Principles 1 1.2.  A Paradoxical Preface 6 1.3.  The Apophaticism of Saadya Gaon and Maimonides 7 1.4.  Religious Experience 10 1.5.  Route 1: True Contradictions 11 1.6.  Route 2: Non-Fundamental Truth 14 1.7.  Route 3: The Tractatus 17 1.7.1. Apophaticism as Illuminating Falsehood 1.7.2. Therapeutic Falsehood 1.7.2.1. Fallibilism and the Preface

18 21 22

PA RT I   C R E AT IO N 2 Creatio ex Nihilo31 2.1.  The Doctrine of Creatio Continua 32 2.1.1. Philosophical Considerations

32

2.1.2. Cosmological Considerations 2.1.3. Biblical and Traditional Considerations

52 55

2.1.1.1. The Argument from the Nature of Matter 2.1.1.2. The Argument from the Concept of Possibility 2.1.1.3. The argument from the Nature of Time 2.1.1.4. The Argument from God’s Rationality 2.1.1.5. The Argument from God’s Immutability 2.1.1.6. Arguments from Perfection P 2.1.1.7. A New Argument from Permanentism 2.1.1.8. Freedom and Eternity

2.2.  The Beginning of Time

2.2.1. Cosmological Considerations for the Beginning of Time 2.2.2. Philosophical Considerations for the Beginning of Time

32 35 37 38 39 40 45 50

57 57 60

2.3.  Ex Nihilo or ex Materia? 63 2.3.1. Creation According to Gersonides 2.3.2. The Gersonidean Dilemma

65 68

3 Idealism ex Nihilo 70 3.1.  Berkeley, Better, Besht 70 3.2.  From Theism to Idealism 71 3.2.1. Argument 1: From Omnipotence 71 3.2.2. Argument 2: From God’s Perfect Rationality 74 3.2.3. Argument 3: From God’s Goodness, Knowledge, and Rationality 78

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xvi Contents 3.3.  Tzimtzum and the Problem of Creation 81 3.4. Non-Literal Tzimtzum 85 3.5.  A Gersonidean Problem of Creation 86

4 Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems 4.1.  Problems with Hassidic Idealism 4.2.  Response to Problem One: Free Will 4.2.1. The Meaning of “Freedom”

4.3.  Response to Problem Two: Ontological Significance 4.4.  Response to Problem Three: Evil 4.5.  Response to Problem Four: Contradictions

5 Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits 5.1.  Jewish Nothing-Elsism

5.1.1. Interpretation 1: Non-Dualist Pantheism 5.1.2. Interpretation 2: Priority-Monistic Panentheism

5.1.2.1. The Gunk Argument 5.1.2.2. The Truthmaker Argument 5.1.2.3. The Emergence Argument 5.1.2.4. The Nomic Argument, and the Argument from Internal Relatedness

5.1.3. Interpretation 3: Hassidic Idealism

93 93 94 96

97 98 102

106 107 108 113 114 114 115

116

117

5.2.  The Problem with the Sefirot 118 5.2.1. To Be or Not to Be a Fictional Character 121 5.2.2. Clark Kent and Superman 125 5.2.3. Solving the Problem with the Sefirot 129

5.3.  Hassidic Idealism, Brains in Vats, and Religious Language 5.4.  Religious Significance

132 135

PA RT I I   R EV E L AT IO N 6 What Is the Torah? The Internal Problem with the Revelation 6.1.  What Is the Torah? Defining the Problem 6.2.  The Heavenly Torah and the Ontology of Literature 6.2.1. 6.2.2. 6.2.3. 6.2.4.

The Primary Sources The Ontology of Literature Time and the Heavenly Torah Heavenly Torah or a Heavenly Force

6.3.1. 6.3.2. 6.3.3. 6.3.4. 6.3.5.

The Pentateuchal Theory The Pentateuchal+ Theory The Pentateuchal++ Theory The Foundational Fragment Theory The Paradigm Theory

6.3.  The Internal Problem

145 145 146 147 151 155 156

158 158 162 164 165 167

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Contents  xvii

7 Ongoing Revelation and the External Problems with the Revelation 177 7.1.  A Preliminary Theory of the Revelation 177 7.1.1. The Special Status of the Pentateuch 7.1.2. Putting Stenography in its Place 7.1.3. From Sinai towards the Paradigm

177 180 183

7.2.  Making the Theory Plausible

189

7.3.  The External Problems

209

7.4.  Conclusion and a Methodology for Jewish Philosophy

220

7.2.1. The Kuzari Principle 7.2.2. Non-Jewish Continuations of Sinai 7.2.3. A Hirschian Account of Jewish Law 7.3.1. Higher Criticism 7.3.2. The Challenge of History 7.3.3. The Challenge from Ethics

189 198 205 209 212 217

PA RT I I I   R E D E M P T IO N 8 Redeeming the Past 8.1.  An Ancient Future 8.2.  A Brand New Past

8.2.1. Hypertime 8.2.2. Hudson and the Evils of the Hyper-Past 8.2.3. A Hyper-Presentistic Moving Spotlight 8.2.4. Scene Changes in the Dark 8.2.5. But God Can’t Change the Past . . . Can He? 8.2.6. Amputation and Deletion 8.2.7. The Agent Substitution Theory of Atonement 8.2.8. The Divine Proofreader Theory 8.2.9. More Objections 8.2.10.  Sophistry and Night Terrors

8.3.  Happily Ever Before

9 Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief 9.1. Summary 9.2.  My Thesis 9.3.  Orthodoxy and the Nature of Faith 9.4.  Religiosity and Make-Belief

9.4.1. Claim 1: Where Religions Demand Faith, Religiosity also Demands Make-Belief 9.4.2. Claim 2: Sometimes Religiosity Requires Making-Believe Things That Are Known to Be False 9.4.3. Four Constraints on the Principles of Judaism

Bibliography General Index Index of Classical Jewish Sources

233 233 240

242 244 245 247 249 253 253 258 259 267

269

273 273 275 276 279 287 290 293

299 313 326

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1

Introduction Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface

1.1.  Introducing the Principles When Moses went to Pharaoh, he said, “Let my people go,” not “Let my coreligionists go.” A person can be a Jew without believing in Judaism. In that sense, nationhood—for the Jew—comes first; religion comes second. Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. Moreover, in the marketplace of Jewish ideas, there are many different religious movements; competing “Judaisms.” Various forms of Orthodoxy, Conservative Judaism, and diverse branches of Progressive Judaism all claim the allegiance of some segment of the Jewish world. Given this background, I wish to make the following clear. This book is an exploration of the principles of Judaism, as a religion, written by an Orthodox Jew. Let other movements define themselves. The claim that Orthodox Judaism is the only legitimate heir to the religious covenant sealed at Sinai is, on the surface of things, an integral part of Orthodoxy itself. So far as this is the case, Orthodoxy cannot truly regard non-Orthodox Judaism as Judaism. Rather, it can regard these movements as Jewish—culturally, socially, and nationally. In that spirit, this work of Orthodox theology is called The Principles of Judaism, without qualification. Orthodoxy need not be ashamed of its particular claim to legitimacy if, indeed, it makes such a claim. Nor should other religious movements be ashamed to disagree. As it turns out, and as we shall see in chapter 7, Orthodoxy can only coherently claim that the warrant of Sinai flows today most forcefully in the direction of Orthodoxy. But this is neither to say that Orthodoxy has a monopoly on religious truth, nor is it to say that Orthodoxy has no religious lessons to learn from other Jewish movements. Nevertheless, I am trying to defend the plausibility of a conception of Judaism that emerges from purely Orthodox axioms; a Judaism that aims towards ob­ject­ ive truth, even if it is able to recognize the extent to which objective truth can never be grasped in its entirety. For that reason, the title of this book remains unqualified, despite the provisional and limited forms of Jewish and religious plur­al­ism hinted at in chapter 7.

The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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2  The Principles of Judaism Having said that, Jewish Orthodoxy is extremely broad. It includes streams of Yemenite, North African, Spanish and Portuguese, Lithuanian, Hassidic, Modern Orthodox, Neo-Hassidic Judaisms, and more. What unifies this diverse collection of communities? One could look to shared customs and practices. I leave that to sociologists and anthropologists.1 I am rather in search of beliefs, prin­ ciples of faith, or dogmas that could help us to define the limits of Orthodox Judaism. Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) laid down the most famous attempt at a Jewish catechism, in terms of his thirteen principles of faith. But some of those principles, though important and influential, may not be decisive in delineating Orthodox Jewish belief.2 For example, the ninth principle states that the Torah will never be abrogated, in whole or in part, and that God will never give another Torah. Marc Shapiro (2004) documents that this principle was never universally accepted by Jewish authorities. Consider the words of Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1697–1776; a key defender of traditional Judaism against the Sabbateans, and a highly regarded figure in Orthodox Judaism to this day): We absolutely do not admit that which Maimonides laid down, that the entire Torah will not change, for there is no decisive proof for this . . . Verily, the Sages tell us that the Holy One will give a new Torah in the [Messianic] future.3

The controversy around the ninth principle is just one of many (see Shapiro, 2004). The thirteen principles of Maimonides, though I could accept them all (under some interpretation or other), are too fine-grained to be constitutive of the parameters of Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, the Mishna Berura of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (1839–1933, known as the Chofetz Chaim) is widely seen as an authoritative legal source for Orthodox Jews today. R. Kagan (Mishna Berura, 126:2) seems to define “the apostate” in terms that are much more forgiving than the thirteen principles of Maimonides. Accordingly, we should turn to a more modest proposal. In 1425, Rabbi Yosef Albo completed his Sefer Ha-Ikkarim (Albo, 1929). Any genuinely “divine law”— he claims—must be founded upon three principles: (1) God’s existence; (2) that revelation occurs; and (3) that God fairly rewards and punishes everyone. It would also require a genuine prophet to communicate God’s law (see Weiss, 2017, p. 23). As a genuinely divine law, R. Albo concludes that Judaism is founded upon

1  In chapter 9 I will distinguish more formally between “social” religiosity and sincere religiosity, as two very different senses of religiosity. 2 And indeed, defining the limits of what constitutes Orthodox faith might not have been Maimonides’ real intention; so argues Abravanel (2004). 3  Migdal Oz, 26b–c as translated in Shapiro (2004, p. 125). For more on the possibility of updating the laws of Moses, and the criteria that would have to be met in order to permit such an innovation, see section 7.2.2 below.

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  3 these three central propositions. Out of these propositions were said to stem a number of subsidiary “roots” and “branches.”4 With an eye towards those roots and branches, Judaism renders these prin­ ciples into the following three propositions: (1) the universe is the creation of one God; (2) the Torah is a divine system of laws and wisdom, revealed to us by the creator of the universe; and (3) the creator exercises providential care over his creation, manifest in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, reward and punishment for human action, and in the promise of ultimate salvation. These principles leave a lot open. How exactly will the eschaton look? What exactly are God’s properties? What exact commandments does the Torah include? How specific and immediate is God’s providence? One of the beauties of Orthodox Judaism is that it does leave a lot open. It leaves room for different manifestations of Orthodox belief and practice. There are, accordingly, many Orthodoxies. R. Albo’s broad principles are fundamental to them all. But how do these principles—at this level of generality—distinguish Orthodox Judaism from Christianity and Islam, let alone from non-Orthodox movements in the Jewish world? We put the thirteen principles of Maimonides to one side because they were too fine-grained—they would exclude clear cases of Orthodox Judaism from being Orthodox Judaism. We therefore moved on to the three prin­ ciples of R. Albo, but a Christian or a Muslim might be able accept his three prin­ ciples under some interpretation or other. Our principles now seem to be too coarse-grained. The way forward is to add flesh to R. Albo’s bare-boned principles (as indeed, R. Albo sought to do himself with his roots and branches). In this book, without arguing for their truth, I offer what I take to be the best fleshing out of these three principles. Ultimately, I’ll end up giving them too much flesh. That is to say: my interpretations of these principles are sometimes so rad­ ical that it would be foolhardy to claim that they are, according to my in­ter­pret­ ation, essential to Orthodox Judaism. But that’s okay, because, once I’ve fleshed them out in my own, somewhat idiosyncratic way, I’m going to take a step back, in chapter 9, and assess which parts of the picture that I have offered play a fundamental role in holding up the faith, and which parts merely represent my own preferences. The project, I hope, will be useful to both believers and non-believers. Only if we can truly appreciate the meaning and significance of its fundamental prin­ ciples can we begin to debate the epistemic merits of Jewish belief (or Jewish faith—since I shall distinguish, in chapter 9, between belief and faith). But I should be clear: I don’t pursue this project in order to set forth a legally binding catechism for Orthodox Judaism (even if that was the ultimate aim of Maimonides and 4  R. Albo’s account of the essential pillars of Judaism was influenced by his contemporary, Rabbi Shimon Tzemach Duran, who lists the same three principles in his philosophical work Oheb Mishpat (Duran, 1986).

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4  The Principles of Judaism R. Albo). Rather, I pursue this project in order to sketch what I take to be the min­ imal commitments that could make sense of dedicating oneself to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. This isn’t a legal treatise. It is philosophy. Before I lay out the structure of this book, it’s important to make the following methodological disclaimer. My aim is to present the best and most charitable interpretation of the three principles outlined above. It can only achieve this goal on the basis of assuming (if only for the sake of argument) that its three cardinal principles are true. Only under the assumption that the principles are true can we sketch their logical consequences. But this assumption (adopted only for the sake of argument) has radical methodological implications. When looking at a Jewish text, a scholar who doesn’t assume the cardinal prin­ ciples of this book might be entitled to treat the text in hand as a humanly constructed, socially and historically conditioned, human artefact. But if she assumes (if only for the sake of argument) that God exists, and that God speaks to us through the texts of the Jewish tradition—both biblical and rabbinic—then she should relate differently to those texts. Accordingly, the grounding assumptions of this book—assumptions which (even if adopted only for the sake of argument) are essential to the project—sometimes license us to ignore, or to downplay, what the human author of a trad­ition­al text may have intended by their words, or what those words may have meant in their original context, and to focus, instead, under the assumption that God exists and speaks to us through the Jewish tradition, upon what God likely meant to convey to us, through them, given what we know today. Sometimes, interpretations of texts that might seem obvious to an historical scholar will be overlooked, and interpretations that might seem far-fetched to a scholar of Jewish Studies will be endorsed without question. These interpretations will be justified by the assumptions of this book; assumptions that we all need to adopt in this context, if only for the sake of argument. With this methodological point in place, I turn to the structure of this book.5 The book is divided into three parts. The first and longest part (chapters 2–5) explores the first of the three principles: that the universe was created by God. In chapter  2, I explore the medieval debate over the nature of creation, and argue that the doctrine is best understood in terms of creatio originalis ex nihilo; that God created the world at its temporal beginning, from nothing. In chapter  3, I argue that the doctrine of creation requires a radical background metaphysics; a metaphysics most explicitly worked out in the mystical and Hassidic tradition. The rest of Part I (chapters  4 and  5) deals with the implications and significance of this radical metaphysics. Since the doctrine of creation is a mainstay of 5  This methodological point is a major difference between contemporary academic Jewish Studies and the traditional practice of religious Jewish philosophy. For more on these differences, see Novick et al. (2019). See also Wyschogrod (1996, pp. xiii–xvi), and see section 7.4 below.

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  5 all of the Abrahamic religions (and many non-Abrahamic religions as well), Part I will have immediate consequences for non-Jewish faiths. On the other hand, Part I delves straight into some pretty dense metaphysics. Readers more interested in the distinctive contours of the Jewish faith, contours not shared with other religions, might want to skip, after reading this section of chapter 1, all the way to Part II (which begins at chapter 6). Part II explores the second of the three principles: that the Torah is a system of divinely revealed laws. In chapter 6, I develop a traditional riddle concerning the relationship between the “Heavenly Torah” and the “Earthly Torah.” In chapter 7, I seek to resolve that riddle with a theory of progressive or cumulative revelation. This theory of revelation will explain why an Orthodox Jew cannot accept the legal innovations of non-Orthodox Judaisms, nor the messianic claim of Jesus, nor the authority of Mohammed (even though all of them claim some connection to Sinai). This approach also proves surprisingly robust in the face of perceived threats to Orthodox theology arising from contemporary biblical scholarship and secular ethics. Christianity and Islam both believe that there was a revelation to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. This makes it a non-trivial task to demonstrate that the principles of Judaism aren’t so lenient as to be compatible with non-Jewish faiths. I turn to this task in chapter 7. If I succeed, it doesn’t mean that those faiths are incoherent or ungrounded. It just means that if they are to be coherent, they will need to be based upon different principles. This book is not a polemic against any faith. Let each religion find their own axioms, and let us debate for the sake of heaven. Part II might strike some Orthodox readers as somewhat subversive in that it undermines a certain amount of Orthodox folk theology from within. Starting from premises that any Orthodox Jew would be compelled to accept, the argument of Part II leads to the following conclusion: nobody can ever say that they have, in their hands, a complete understanding of God’s will for them, or for the world. The revelation of God’s will is a work in progress. Accordingly, even though Part II explains the grounds upon which the Orthodox Jew should reject Christianity and Islam, and upon which she should prefer one or another Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law over the in­ter­pret­ ations of non-Orthodox movements, Part II also establishes that if, for you, Orthodoxy means being the recipient of a complete and perfect knowledge of what God wills for us, then your Orthodoxy is inherently unstable. Fundamental premises of Orthodox Judaism simply cannot license such an attitude. Indeed, Orthodox Judaism is compelled to understand that, by its own lights, its conception of reality, at any given time, stands to be superseded, albeit only in certain restricted ways. In Part III (chapter 8), I discuss the general shape of Jewish eschatology. I argue that the philosophy of time, properly understood, allows us to hope for a much more radical end of days; one that doesn’t just redeem our future, but one that also redeems our past.

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6  The Principles of Judaism My aim is to engage philosophically with the principles of Judaism, not in order to stand them up, or to justify them, but in order to understand them, under their most sympathetic and coherent interpretation. In chapter 9 I return to the three principles. By now they will have been fleshed out, but they will, most readers will note, have received too much flesh! For ex­ample, I argue (in Part I) that a radical form of idealism follows from the tenets of Judaism, but in chapter  9, I don’t claim that Orthodox Judaism demands the adoption of idealism. Rather, I peel back some of the flesh, in order to reveal what seems to me to be the most minimal possible axiomatization of Orthodox Judaism. I distinguish, in chapter 9, between faith and belief. I also distinguish between three different sorts of religiosity. I use these distinctions to explore the sorts of attitudes that Orthodoxy requires its adherents to have toward its core principles. I also discuss the ways in which faith and belief alike fail to give rise to the highest form of religiosity, which requires, I argue, imagination, humility, mercy, and kindness. Before we explore the principles of Judaism, and in the remainder of this chapter, I seek to avoid the specter of a certain sort of paradox; a paradox that t­ hreatens a book of this nature.

1.2.  A Paradoxical Preface The founding fathers of Jewish philosophy, such as Saadya Gaon (882–942) and Maimonides, firmly held that very little could be said about God. The Jewish mystical tradition is also replete with embraces of the ineffable. God in his transcendence (the Ein Sof ), we are told, is beyond description.6 How then, can I make sense of the theological principles of this faith, if its traditions don’t allow anybody to say anything about theology? Analytic philosophers of religion have often shied away from apophaticism: the view that little or nothing discursive can be said about God. The Christian phil­oso­ pher Peter van Inwagen, ignoring a massive slice of theological history, makes it sound as if apophaticism didn’t even exist before 1800 (van Inwagen, 2006, p. 19)! Instead of ignoring apophaticism, Alvin Plantinga (2000)—another Christian phil­oso­pher—dedicates the first two chapters of his Warranted Christian Belief to a rebuttal of it. He voices three main concerns. First: apophaticism struggles to be coherent. As soon as you start talking about a thing that can’t be described you have violated your own constraint: describing it as a thing that can’t be described. Secondly: if you escape this absurdity and say that some concepts can meaningfully apply to God but that others can’t, then

6  See, for example, the Zohar II:42b.

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  7 you’ll most likely end up with an ad hoc and unmotivated form of apophaticism (why apply some predicates and not others? How do we draw the distinction between those which can meaningfully apply and those which can’t?). Finally, apophatic theologians tend reductively to reinterpret religious language. The central Christian claim that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, for example, may end up meaning something like, it’s generally a good thing to sacrifice for the greater good of society. Plantinga is unimpressed (ibid., p. 42): This [revisionism] is not a matter of pouring new wine into old wineskins: what we have here is nothing like the rich, powerful, fragrant wine of the great Christian truths; what we have is something wholly drab, trivial, and insipid. It is not even a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater; it is, instead, throwing out the baby and keeping the tepid bathwater, at best a bland, unappetizing potion that is neither hot nor cold and at worst a nauseating brew, fit for neither man nor beast.

In the rest of this chapter, I defend an apophaticism that is coherent, wellmo­tiv­ated, and non-revisionist. If this can’t be done, then analytic Jewish philosophy may be forced to reject the apophaticism of Saadya Gaon, Maimonides, the Zohar, and the Hassidim—just as certain analytic Christian philosophers ignore (e.g. van Inwagen) or reject (e.g. Plantinga) the apophaticism of the Cappodocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and John of Damascus. Alternatively, works of analytic Jewish philosophy, like this one, would have to embrace a contradiction, prefacing themselves always with the following paradoxical disclaimer: This book will lay out the principles of Jewish theology, in an analytical and systematic fashion, but in actual fact, Judaism believes that what this book attempts to state can’t be stated; and to the extent that I am committed to the Jewish trad­ ition, I too think that what I’ve tried to say is unsayable.

But, as Frank Ramsey put it: you can’t say what can’t be said, and you can’t whistle it either.

1.3.  The Apophaticism of Saadya Gaon and Maimonides Saadya Gaon was perhaps the first systematic theologian in the rabbinic tradition. Having satisfied himself that God exists and created everything else, he writes: There does not, therefore, remain a substance or accident or attribute that was not defined or determined or put together by Him or about which it is not

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8  The Principles of Judaism certain that this Creator was its maker. Hence it is out of the question and im­pos­sible to declare Him to be anything that he has Himself created.7

Gabriel Citron (in an unpublished paper (Citron, ms)) unpacks this argument into the following steps: (1) Whatever is to count as the creator of everything must have created all substances and all properties. (2) If a created b, then b is ontologically dependent upon a (that is to say: b depends, for its existence, upon a). (3) By (1) and (2), all substances and all properties are ontologically dependent upon the creator. (4) For something to be a substance, or have a property, is for it to be onto­ logic­ally dependent upon that substance or that property. (5) If a ≠ b, and if b is ontologically dependent upon a, then a cannot be onto­ logic­ally dependent upon b (that is to say: ontological dependence runs in only one direction). (6) By (3), (4), and (5), whatever is to count as the creator of everything cannot be a substance nor have any properties. Citron notes that premise (4) suffers from two problems. First, to be a substance isn’t to be ontologically dependent upon that substance so much as to be identical to that substance. Secondly, things are not ontologically dependent upon their accidental properties. I have the property of being 5 ft 9 in. I don’t depend for my existence upon that property. I could exist whilst being taller, or shorter. That property is accidental to me. A thing will be ontologically dependent only upon its essential properties; the properties that it could not survive without. I raise a further issue. The argument fudges an important distinction. We have established only that b depended, in the past, upon a; not that b is still dependent upon a.8 Failing to link ontological dependences to times, we smuggle in claim (5), which is true only if the dependence of b on a is indexed to the same time as the independence of a from b. God could have created properties that continue, from that point on, to exist without his intervention. Those properties would be independent of him from that point on. God could then come to instantiate them. But presumably, he always had and always has had his essential properties. Once again, then, the argument would be stronger focusing only on essential properties.

7  This translation is Gabriel Citron’s (ms), making a small emendation to Rosenblatt’s translation (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 2:8, p. 111). 8  For more on the distinction between historic and continuous ontological dependence, see Amie Thomasson (1999, ch. 2).

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  9 Revised in light of these complaints, the argument becomes: (1) Whatever is to count as the creator of everything must have created all properties. (2) If a created b, then b is historically ontologically dependent upon a (that is to say: b depended for its existence, at some time in the past, upon a). (3) By (1) and (2), all properties are historically ontologically dependent upon the creator. (4) To have a property essentially is to be constantly ontologically dependent upon that property. (5) If a ≠ b, and if b is constantly ontologically dependent upon a (as God would be upon any property that he held essentially), then a cannot be historically ontologically dependent upon b (as all properties are upon God (given (3)). (6) By (3), (4), and (5), whatever is to count as the creator of everything cannot have any properties essentially. This seems like a valid argument. Is it sound? The first premise is controversial. Do properties (and other abstracta) stand in need of creation? Did God create the number 2 and the color red, or did he rather create all pairs of objects and all red things? Furthermore, if the property of being-a-creation (or the property of beinga-creative-act) needs to be created before it can be instantiated, we find ourselves in some logically muddy waters (how could any creation occur before such properties exist?). But, if you do accept the first premise (for perhaps God creates the color red by creating red objects, and perhaps he creates creativity by acting cre­ative­ly9), then you will have grounds for denying that God has any essential properties. Van Inwagen (2006, p. 19) will think this conclusion amounts to atheism. All objects essentially instantiate existence. Without that property, they wouldn’t exist. If existence is an essential property for all beings that instantiate it, then van Inwagen might say that God’s having no essential properties entails that God doesn’t exist. You might respond: perhaps existence isn’t a property. Even so, it seems odd to imagine that anything could exist that, like Saadya’s God, didn’t have any essential properties of its own. To lose all of your essential properties, surely, is to lose your grip on reality. Of course, we could deny both that (a) existence is a property and that (b) to exist without essential properties is to be deprived of reality.10 This would save Saadya from the charge of atheism. But such escape routes seem desperate. 9  Thanks to Gaby Lebens for this point. 10  In section 2.3.1, we shall encounter the position of Robert Baker (1967, p. 211). He believes that all “bare particulars” lack essential properties.

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10  The Principles of Judaism And yet, despite atheistic appearances, Saadya Gaon presents his argument for apophaticism only after convincing himself that God exists and created everything else (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 1:1–4, pp. 38–86).11 Saadya Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Doctrines therefore contains a strange and self-defeating argumentative structure. First, Saadya argues for the existence of a creator. Then, he argues that if  there were such a creator, he could have no essential properties, including existence. A similar question arises for Maimonides. Maimonides formulates a number of arguments for God’s existence (e.g. Maimonides, 2000, 2:1). If these arguments are sound, God is the first cause. This apparently entails that God cannot be composite. If God were composed of  parts a and b, one could reasonably ask what causes a and b to come together in this way; that is, there must be, per impossibile, a cause that is prior to God (ibid., introduction to Volume II, premise 21).12 And thus, God must be simple. When you make a predication of God (that is to say: any time you say any sentence of the form “God is X”), even if you predicate an essential property, you, apparently, make a distinction between God and God’s properties. This misrepresents his simplicity (ibid., I.51). Furthermore, if God were to fall under a species or genus, that species or genus would be conceptually prior to God. The cosmological argument forbids this (ibid., I.52). But Maimonides’ argument for God’s existence describes God as falling under the genus “cause.” Thus, Maimonides’ argument for God’s existence violates the linguistic constraints that it is supposed to introduce.13 The problematic structure we found in Saadya Gaon’s thought is thus echoed in that of Maimonides. In the face of such incoherence, should analytic Jewish the­ ology reject these key claims of the founding fathers of the Jewish philosophical tradition? Either that, or we must embrace a paradox.

1.4.  Religious Experience The problem of this chapter isn’t generated merely by the desire to be faithful to an intellectual tradition. It arises before we open any book of medieval theology. Across different religious traditions, people immersed in a religious way of life 11  A point that is emphasized by Citron (ms). 12  As Michael Rea pointed out to me (in correspondence), it doesn’t follow from the fact that you can reasonably ask a question that the question has to have a good answer. One could just say that nothing caused God’s parts to come together: they have always been and must necessarily be together in just that way. Here I’m merely trying to lay out the sorts of considerations that lead Maimonides to apophatic conclusions; there may well be faulty premises along the way, indeed, I think that there must be, but that is not my immediate concern here. To understand better why Maimonides thought that anything composite must have a prior cause, see Lebens (ms). 13  There are more and less radical readings of Maimonidean apophaticism; for a particularly farreaching account, see Stern (2000; 2013).

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  11 often claim to experience God. Some claim to experience God as falling under quite straightforward concepts; they experience God as a source of love or as a source of counsel or calling. These sorts of experience are said to entail the following sorts of predications, “God loves me” or “God has called upon me to do x.”14 I call these experiences cataphatic-experiences, and the simple subject– predi­cate claims that they allegedly entail we’ll call cataphatic-claims. Scripture, trad­ition, and contemporary adherents of the world’s great religions make a great many cataphatic-claims. By contrast, there are also those who claim to experience God in what seem like paradoxical ways; as beyond description.15 Sometimes these experiences occur in the midst of a mystical rapture. Sometimes they are much less dramatic— somebody claims to experience an “indescribable presence” accompanying them in their everyday lives. These experiences give rise to the following, paradoxical, sorts of predication: “God defies all description.” Let us call these sorts of ex­peri­ ences, apophatic-experiences, and the claims that they motivate, apophatic-claims. Maimonides himself can be read as laying claim to such experiences, in addition to the philosophical arguments that led him to apophaticism (Blumenthal, 2009). Consequently, two problems arise before we’ve even turned to the philo­soph­ ic­al tradition: (1) apophatic-claims seem to contradict cataphatic-claims, yet religious people often feel compelled to make both sorts of claim (how can God be beyond description if we also say he is good and that he’s the creator?), and (2) apophatic-claims seem to be internally incoherent (how can God be beyond description if he satisfies the description “beyond description”?).

1.5.  Route 1: True Contradictions The first route out of this quagmire is simply to accept the paradox. We feel equally compelled, perhaps because we have equally vivid cataphatic and apophatic ex­peri­ences, to assert both sides of a contradiction.16 Or perhaps we feel equally 14 Embodied religious experience with propositional content is documented and explored by Christina van Dyke (2018), Steven Katz (1978; 1983; 2013), and Tanya Lurhmann (2012), among others. 15  These more transcendent sorts of experiences are the focus of influential studies such as William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1908) and Walter  T.  Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy (1961). 16 Let p be the proposition that “God is wise.” Let q be the proposition that “p is inexpressible.” You can assert the conjunction of p and q without ever falling into a logical contradiction—a contradiction that can be read directly off of the syntax of the claims, allowing you to derive both that p and that not-p. Some of the contradictions we have discussed in this section are logical, e.g. “God is describable and God is not describable” (which has the form “p and not-p”). However, some of the contradictions here are performative rather than logical. A performative contradiction is an assertion that undermines itself, not because of syntax. “God is wise and one cannot say that God is wise” is a performative contradiction. Route 1 claims that some performative contradictions are true, and that some logical contradictions are true. Thanks to Michael Rea for discussing these issues with me.

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12  The Principles of Judaism committed, say, to Maimonides’ cosmological argument as to his argument that apophaticism follows from it. Most philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, take for granted the law of non-contradiction—one can never legitimately assert a contradiction. How­ ever, some philosophers dissent, most notably, in the analytic tradition, Graham Priest. To explain, we need a quick detour through set theory. A set is a collection of things that share a property—the set of red things, for example, is the collection of all red things, the set of bicycles is the collection of all bicycles, and the set of even numbers is the collection of all even numbers. Some sets will be members of themselves, like the set of sets with more than ten members. Every single collection of things with more than ten members will be a member of the set of sets with more than ten members. Accordingly, it will be a member of itself, since it will have many more than ten members. Some sets, on the other hand, are not members of themselves. The set of sets with more than ten members has more than ten members, but the set of poodles is not a poodle. Since we know that some sets are not members of themselves (like the set of poodles, which is not a member of itself), we can construct the set of every set that isn’t a member of itself. Unfortunately, it turns out that this set is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. This paradox, known as Russell’s paradox, forced set theorists to develop new—less naïve—conceptions of what it is to be a set, in order to save set theory from contradiction. According to nonnaïve set theories, sets cannot contain themselves as members; sets are stratified into a logical hierarchy; they can only draw members from logical levels below them. To talk of sets being members of themselves or not being members of themselves is—according to non-naïve set theories—meaningless. Talk of membership and non-membership for any set, s, only makes sense for objects lower down the hierarchy than s. The paradox cannot meaningfully be stated. Disaster averted. But Priest (2006, p. 101) argues that non-naïve set theories are often inadequate by their own standards: they often fail to solve the underlying problem, giving rise to new versions of the paradox. Moreover, they fail to account for all of the mathematical data, “they produce novel and spurious problems; they bristle with ad hoc protuberances; they partake in a degenerating research programme; and so on.” By contrast, Russell paradox aside, we have good reason to accept the ax­ioms of naïve set theory. They are simple and intuitive. They tell us that whenever one can think of a property, one can also think of the set of things that has that property. The axioms tell us that some sets are members of themselves—for example, the set of sets with more than ten members, which has more than ten members, really should be a member of itself, and it should make sense to say that some sets are not members of themselves, like the set of poodles, which isn’t a

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  13 poodle. Given that we have good reason to accept naïve set theory, and given the lack of good alternatives, Priest thinks we should adopt it, even though it generates the Russell paradox. Priest suggests that we drop Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. The Russell set both is a member of itself and is not a member of itself. Embrace the contradiction! But isn’t it impossible to believe a contradiction? Priest disagrees (ibid., p. 96): “Many, in fact most, of us believe contradictions. The person who has consistent beliefs is rare.” Fine. Rational people can believe in contradictions. But do they ever do it wittingly? Priest responds: Yes, they often do: The moment one realises that one’s beliefs are inconsistent, one does not ipso facto cease to believe the inconsistent things: rather, it becomes a problem, and often a very difficult one, of how to revise one’s beliefs to produce consistency. This, of course, takes time.

But even if rational people sometimes consciously believe a contradiction, can it ever be ideal to do so? In fact, rationality seems to require the disposition never willingly to believe a contradiction, and to seek to resolve an inconsistency when found. Priest rejects this so-called demand of rationality. For a belief to be rational, he holds, is to have good reasons for holding it. He has good reason to believe that the Russell set is both a member and not a member of itself. Having good reason for this belief is, for Priest, what makes it rational. If you still need convincing, Priest (ibid., p. 100) invites you to consider the paradox of the preface. A conscientious and reputable scholar writes a book. It contains a significant number of claims. She believes everything that she’s written in it. But “she is aware that no factual book [with this number of claims] has ever been written which did not contain some falsehoods. The inductive evidence for this is overwhelming.” Accordingly, she believes the conjunction of all of her theses (since she believes each and every one of them), and she believes that at least one of them is false. She believes a contradiction, despite being “paradigmatically rational” (ibid., p. 100). Maimonides and Saadya could be equally convinced by their arguments for the existence of a God and by their arguments for his ineffability; that is, they could have equally good reason to accept both conclusions. If the conjunction of these beliefs is contradictory, then so be it. Maimonides, qua Aristotelian, wouldn’t have been eager to reject Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction (neither would Saadya have been). I’m certainly not suggesting that he (or Saadya) did. But Priest would suggest it as a rational way by which one could affirm apophaticism, despite its internal contradictions (and by which one could affirm both apophaticism and cataphaticism, despite the contradictions between them).

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14  The Principles of Judaism We may very rarely have equally good reason to assert both sides of a contradiction; and thus to think that both sides are true. But, if human logic and language can degenerate into true contradictions, then it would be reasonable to expect that this will happen when talking about God. Accordingly, my preface should read as follows: The fundamental principles of Judaism, laid out in this book, are, by their own lights, both sayable and unsayable.

Despite Priest’s preeminence, his conclusions have not found favor with many of his peers. He does offer resources to the analytic Jewish philosopher who wants to salvage some of her apophatic traditions. But the notion that some propositions can be both true and false cuts so deeply against our intuitions that almost any other route would, I believe, be preferable to what I have called route 1.17

1.6.  Route 2: Non-Fundamental Truth Jonathan Jacobs (2015) bases his defense of apophaticism on a distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental truths. This distinction, he illustrates using the following diagram:

Here are two true sentences: 1. Half of the rectangle is black, and half is white. 2. The area of the rectangle that is black is equal to the area that is white. Imagine a different linguistic community who carve reality up in different ways. Instead of thinking of the color division here in terms of halves divided by way of a central vertical line, top to bottom, “they conceptualize it as divided color-wise in half by a dotted line from the lower left corner to the upper right corner.” They 17  In his unpublished paper, Gabriel Citron argues for a variation of route 1. He makes his case, mining the works of the later Wittgenstein instead of the work of Graham Priest. In sections 3.5, 4.5, and 5.2.2–3, I will also make some room for “true” theological contradictions, but as we shall see, the sort of truth that we can give to these contradictions—and the class of relevant contradictions—is strictly restricted. In other words, don’t be under any misapprehension: no part of this book commits Jewish theology to Priest’s “dialethist” views, even though dialethism is one way out of the apophaticcataphatic puzzle (dialethism being the view that one proposition can be simultaneously true and false).

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  15 call the color of the top left triangle “whack,” and the color of the lower right ­triangle “blite” (ibid., p. 161). Using their concepts, the following two sentences are true: 3. Half of the rectangle is whack, and half is blite. 4. The area of the rectangle that is whack is equal to the area that is blite. 3 and 4 are true, but the color concepts they employ seem “gerrymandered. They don’t, as Plato put it, carve nature at the joints” (ibid., p. 162). Following Ted Sider (2012) and Kit Fine (2009), Jacobs wants to argue that 1 and 2 express fundamental truths (or, at least, relatively fundamental truths) whereas 3 and 4 express ­non-fundamental truths. This isn’t to belittle 3 and 4. By saying that a sentence is non-fundamental: You are not saying that it is unimportant. You are not saying that it is minddependent. You are not saying that it is metaphorical. It might be literally, ob­ject­ively, mind-independently, importantly true. You are, however, saying that it does not carve nature perfectly at its joints, that it is in some way gerrymandered, ontologically imperspicuous. (Jacobs, 2015, p. 170)

According to Jacobs, apophaticism is the claim that: for any proposition, P, about God’s intrinsic properties, P is not fundamentally true, nor fundamentally false. That God is wise, for example, is neither a fundamental truth nor a fundamental falsehood. But, it can still be (literally, objectively, mind-independently, and importantly) true; as a non-fundamental truth. This suggestion doesn’t give up on bivalence—the claim of classical logic that every proposition is either true or false (and, given the law of non-contradiction, never both). The proposition that God is wise, for example, must either be true or false (and not both), even if it is neither fundamentally true nor fundamentally false. You might worry. On Jacob’s account, we still end up claiming that God is fundamentally ineffable, which is, in turn, to say something about what he fundamentally is, which is to contradict ourselves. As I understand him, he escapes this problem by saying that it isn’t fundamentally true that God is fundamentally in­effable. It is only non-fundamentally true that God is fundamentally ineffable.18

18  Michael Rea (in correspondence) has suggested that there may be a contradiction lurking in the background of Jacobs’s view. Though Jacobs accepts classical logic and therefore the principle of bivalence, it seems that he is committed to the denial of bivalence at the level of fundamental truths. Jacobs thinks that it’s not fundamentally true that God is wise, and that it’s not fundamentally true that God isn’t wise. Fundamental-bivalence would be the view that, for any p, p is fundamentally true or not-p is fundamentally true. Jacob’s views about God violate fundamental-bivalence. I think it fair to fear the denial of fundamental-bivalence for similar reasons (though not identical) to the reasons that

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16  The Principles of Judaism Looking to Saadya and Maimonides, we could say: their arguments for God’s existence (as creator of everything, or as first cause) are true, but not fundamentally. Furthermore, those non-fundamental truths reveal a further non-fundamental truth about what God is fundamentally: that “For any proposition, P, about God’s intrinsic properties, P is not fundamentally true, and P is not fundamentally false.” In other words: God is non-fundamentally the first cause. This entails that (1) it isn’t fundamentally true that God is fundamentally the first cause, and (2) that it isn’t fundamentally true that he isn’t fundamentally the first cause. This is complicated, but not contradictory. According to Jacobs, perhaps my preface should read as follows: The fundamental principles of Judaism, laid out in this book may be true, but not fundamentally true.

Jacobs’s apophaticism gives rise to some concerns. If sentences 3 and 4 about the rectangle are true, then they will only be true because of more fundamental facts about the rectangle. It is the fundamental reality of the white–black color distribution that makes those non-fundamental claims true. But, if there are no fundamental truths about God, what is it about the world, as it is fundamentally, that makes our cataphatic-claims non-fundamentally true? Jacobs’s preferred response seems to be this: non-fundamental truths don’t have to be grounded in fundamental truths, but merely in an object. God himself, rather than fundamental truths about God, grounds the non-fundamental truths of our cataphatic-claims. Jacobs concludes that it is “perfectly consistent” with his formulation of apophaticism “to claim that the orthodox Christian” or, we might add, Jewish “doctrines are grounded in God” (ibid., p. 174). But according to Jacobs, the claim that God exists is not fundamentally true. Admittedly, it’s not fundamentally false either (ibid., p. 169). But, it’s remarkably hard to see how an object whose existence is not a fundamental matter can be the ultimate grounds to non-fundamental truths about that object! In other words: there’s something odd about grounding important nonfundamental truths upon a very thin fundamental basis. If nothing can be said about God fundamentally, then how does that God ground the (non-fundamental) truth of the claims of Orthodox Christianity rather than the claims of Orthodox Judaism, or Islam? The only option open to Jacobs is to accept that cataphaticclaims about God, if ever true, are mysterious. They are non-fundamental, and yet they have no grounding. But why, then, should we believe them? How can we verify them? What privileges the groundless cataphatic-claims of one religion over the groundless cataphatic-claims of another? might make us fear the denial of bivalence itself (although I should point out that footnote 1 in Lebens (2014) contains an erroneous attempt to prove this fear warranted—an error for which I apologize).

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  17 The apophatic tradition seems happy to accept that some things are mysterious. But, making all cataphatic-truths about God’s intrinsic properties groundless might be going too far.

1.7.  Route 3: The Tractatus My favored route takes its lead from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1922). At a first glance, Wittgenstein’s book seems to be an account of what a world must be like, and what a language must do, in order for a language to be able to represent a world. Wittgenstein’s arguments led him to conclude that languages must be incapable of representing how they relate to the world. Up until its conclusion, the Tractatus is all about the relationship between language and the world. Its tightly argued for conclusion tells us that this relationship cannot be spoken about. Just as with Saadya and Maimonides, we have a conclusion that uproots its own premises. Wittgenstein tries to remove the sting, saying: 6.54: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

A fashionable new reading of the Tractatus calls itself the “therapeutic” or “resolute” reading. Crudely put, it recasts the Tractatus as an attempt to cure us of the irrational desire to do metaphysics. Building upon the efforts of Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein made the best possible attempt to describe the fundamentals of reality and its relationship to language. Watching that best attempt descending into nonsense is supposed to teach us that the job simply can’t be done. The Tractatus is a course of therapy to cure us of the desire to do metaphysics. By contrast, the traditional reading claims that the Tractatus really was an attempt to do some serious metaphysics. Wittgenstein hoped that, despite his book’s failure to say anything about the nature of language and its relationship to the world, it was somehow able to show us things—deep metaphysical findings— that simply couldn’t be said. Despite being nonsensical, and despite failing to say anything about the topics it hoped to cover, the Tractatus’s nonsense was supposed to be elucidatory—showing us things that couldn’t be said. I don’t want to arbitrate between the therapeutic and traditional readings of the Tractatus (though I happen to be a traditionalist). What matters for my purposes here is that each reading can inspire a distinctive, and attractive, form of apophaticism.

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18  The Principles of Judaism

1.7.1.  Apophaticism as Illuminating Falsehood The traditional reading can be divided into two camps: both agree that the book was an attempt to show what cannot be said. The first camp finds the whole notion slightly ridiculous. To echo Ramsey’s response once more, you cannot say what cannot be said, and you can’t whistle it either. In his introduction to the Tractatus, Russell shares his suspicion that some mistake must have been made: “Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the sceptical reader that possibility that there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages [each language able to describe what a lower one fails to describe], or by some other exit.” Russell and Ramsey admired the Tractatus but couldn’t get on board with its notion of showing the unsayable. The second camp thinks that Wittgenstein’s attempt to show what cannot be said was a commendable philosophical move. The most notable members of this second camp are Elizabeth Anscombe (2001) and Peter Geach (1976). But Roger White (2010) makes perhaps the best contemporary case for it. In order to make his case, White makes the following three claims, which he attributes to Wittgenstein (ibid., pp. 24–30):19 1. Preconditions for representation cannot be stated. Suppose that we discover that, for representation of a world to be possible, p, q, and r must all be true of that world. “Saying this would lead straight to a contradiction, since we can now form the following description: ‘a world in which at least one of p, q, and r is false,’ which ex hypothesi would be a description of an indescribable world.” This doesn’t mean that there are no preconditions for representation. Indeed, every possible world has a property in common—the property of being representable. It’s just that we can’t say this. Introducing the concept of being representable into our vo­cabu­lary would be toxic, allowing us, upon its negation, to describe the in­des­crib­able. Logical space itself shows you what the preconditions to representation are, but they cannot be stated. 2.  Unrestricted generalizations cannot be made. Languages contain elementary building blocks. The possible combinations of those building blocks determine the possible elementary propositions (just like the words in the English dictionary determine the realm of possible English sentences). The limits of what can be said are determined by those elementary propositions and truth-functions of those propositions (neg­ations of them, conjunctions 19  He actually makes six claims, but I only report three, to illustrate the general thrust of his reading of the Tractatus.

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  19 of them, disjunctions of them, etc.). Imagine that p, q, and r are the complete set of elementary propositions. What can be said is merely what can be said by them and by their truth-functions. The claim that p, q, and r are all of the elementary propositions is not itself a truth-function of p, q, and r, and thus it cannot be said. Rather, if we run out of elementary propositions, we would have been shown that, say, p, q, and r were all of the elementary propositions. This fact wouldn’t be some­ thing that we could express. 3.  The logical type of an entity cannot be expressed. Russell and Frege thought that the deep grammatical distinction between subject and predicate is forced upon us by some deep underlying onto­logic­al distinction. Predicates symbolize one type of thing: say, abstract properties. Names represent another type of thing: say, objects.20 Wittgenstein claims that if these different types of entity are distinguished by different grammatical types for their names, then you can’t substitute the name for one type of entity into the same place as a name for another type of entity, in a grammatical sentence. Consequently, you won’t be able to say something like, “everything is either an object or a property.” If you could say such a thing, then the term “everything” seems to be functioning, un­gram­mat­ ical­ly, as a placeholder for a name, of either type of thing. Moreover, the expression, “x is an object” would be vacuous if the variable was restricted only to objects. And no variable (given the laws of grammar) can hover over the domain of objects and concepts simultaneously. Consequently, that something is an object can only be shown to us by the way its name must behave in the grammar of our language. Each of these three claims can be denied. To admit a class of unrepresentable things is not, contra White’s Wittgenstein, to represent any of them; at least not de re.21 The possibility of unrestricted generalization is open for debate (cf. e.g. Rayo & Uzquiano,  2006). I’m not looking to defend the reasoning of White’s Wittgenstein. I’m only looking to defend Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing. The reasons I have canvassed above were (among) the reasons that allegedly led Wittgenstein to that distinction. Assuming for the sake of argument that these reasons were sound leads us to this distinction. Once we have the distinction clearly in view, we can discharge our assumption, perhaps concluding that White’s Wittgenstein was wrong about the nature of quantification, for ex­ample. Either way: we’ll still have discovered a distinction that may or may not have uses elsewhere.22 20  Frege thought that the distinction ran deeper than Russell did. As far as Russell was concerned, all entities fall under one all-inclusive ontological category—being an entity, or a “term”—which then subdivides into “concepts” and “things” (Russell, 1992). As far as Frege was concerned, the distinction between object and concept was so deep that there was no wider category of being that they could both be members of. Russell later seems to have come round to Frege’s way of thinking (Russell, 1918). 21  To represent something de re is to think about it directly (rather than via a description of it). 22  We will see another route to the distinction between saying and showing in section 5.3.

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20  The Principles of Judaism According to White (ibid., p. 31): the Tractatus can only communicate its insights to those already tacitly aware of them—making explicit what was hitherto implicit. Perhaps the same thing can be said regarding the arguments of Maimonides and Saadya. They were addressing a religious audience. As we’ve said, in the religious life, cataphatic-experiences and apophatic-experiences are relatively commonplace. Apophatic-experiences can be very undramatic (an inchoate sense that something somehow indescribable is accompanying you throughout the journey of your life23). Apophatic-claims are internally contradictory, and thus nonsensical. And yet they may have the power to communicate to the religious believer something that she might, as of yet, only know tacitly. She has apophatic-experiences of an undramatic variety. Her religious experiences cause her to know something that cannot be said. When somebody tries to describe to her a God who cannot be described, and she sees how that attempt collapses into nonsense, some of those unsayable things that she tacitly knows are shown to her. Her knowledge is made explicit. This I call the apophaticism of showing. It is analogous to the way in which Wittgenstein (on the traditional reading) thought that utterances of “x is an object” are supposed to collapse in on themselves, and how, in so doing, they are supposed to show speakers of English something unsayable that they only knew tacitly until then. Apophatic-claims, though literally false, are here functioning as metaphors, in the way that Elizabeth Camp (2006) pictures metaphors sometimes to function, as ostending towards properties that have no literal name in the language (as of yet). We point to ineffable divine properties using apophatic figures of speech. In the case of apophaticism, it is the very way in which the utterance somehow collapses in on itself that helps to point to the ineffable properties it targets. This is apophaticism as an illuminating falsehood. Interpreting Maimonides in this Tractarian light can help him out of a very particular puzzle. Gersonides (1288–1344) couldn’t understand why, according to Maimonides, it is good to say that God isn’t ignorant, but it is bad to say that God isn’t wise. If Maimonides was really serious about his apophaticism, Gersonides contended, he should have accepted that both negative claims were true: God is neither wise nor ignorant, since no predicates apply to him at all.24 We could now  respond for Maimonides: perhaps both are false but perhaps only one is illuminating. 23  Of course, the claim that something is accompanying you throughout the journey of your life is not apophatic, it’s only made apophatic by the qualification that that something is indescribable . . . of course, it isn’t truly indescribable: if you can say of it that it is accompanying you, then you’re describing it, but that’s just to point out that apophatic statements are self-defeating. 24  See Feldman’s synopsis (Gersonides,  1987–99, Vol. II, p. 79), and Gersonides’ own argument there on pp. 111–12 (3:3).

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  21 The apophaticism of showing would have me write the following preface: This book outlines some of the fundamental principles of Judaism, but some other fundamental things can’t be said; nevertheless, I might be able to show you those extra things by uttering the falsehood, to function as an illuminating metaphor, that nothing whatsoever can be said about God.

1.7.2.  Therapeutic Falsehood According to the therapeutic reading, the Tractatus wasn’t trying to illuminate some unsayable something. It was, rather, trying to cure you of the desire to engage in ultimate metaphysics. Perhaps we could develop a therapeutic form of apophaticism. To have a systematic theology isn’t just to believe certain things about God. Rather, one has to assimilate those things that you believe/know into some sort of system. This system should tell you which theological claims are most significant, how the different claims interact with one another, and how they interact with your non-theological theories. Accordingly, let’s imagine that you make certain cataphatic-claims: God is wise, God is good, God is loving, etc. But you know, because of your apophatic-experiences, that there are, in addition to these facts, facts about God that you can’t reasonably hope to describe. You may have had some sort of direct epistemic access to some of these facts, in a religious experience, but you certainly know that you can’t do them justice in words. This should make the task of systematizing what you do know daunting, to say the least. Reading a novel, you may be led to believe that a certain character is a wicked individual. But, then, perhaps in the very last paragraph of the book, you learn something about that character that changes your interpretation of everything that came before. You are forced to reappraise everything that you thought you knew about him. You may have got all of the basic propositions describing the character’s actions right. You weren’t wrong about any of that. But now you come to realize that the way you systemized those descriptions into a theory about that character had been wrong. Systematic theologians, especially in the light of apophatic experiences, are in a similar situation to a person theorizing about a character in a book that they haven’t yet and never will have finished. Knowing that some of God’s nature is unknowable to us should make us very humble as systematizers. Even the things that we do know might be less or more significant than we currently think them to be. Maimonides and Saadya both lead their readers into a contradiction. They start with certain cataphatic-claims that are supposed to seem really well mo­tiv­ated. They argue, with all of their logical and rhetorical might, for the conclusion that

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22  The Principles of Judaism God created all that there is, or that God is the first cause. They then argue that these conclusions entail that you can’t say anything at all about God; not even that he created everything, nor that he is the first cause. Of course, they could see the contradiction. How could they have missed it? But what effect should that have? What should you do when you realize that your reasonable premises are generating an absurd consequence? We should revisit the paradox of the preface.

1.7.2.1.  Fallibilism and the Preface This paradox was first explored by David Makinson (1965). A paradigmatically rational author believes each of the assertions in her book. But she rightly regards herself as fallible. She knows that there has never been a book of comparable length and complexity that didn’t contain at least one falsehood. She performs a reasonable induction, therefore, that somewhere in the book she will have made a mistake. She admits as much in the preface to her book. There she thanks her teachers and colleagues for their helpful comments and suggestions, before noting that the remaining errors are hers. Given the “agglomeration principle,” which tells us that belief in a set of pro­ posi­tions entails belief in their conjunction, we arrive at a paradox. She rationally believes the conjunction of her assertions, since she rationally believes each ­conjunct—having gathered evidence for each and every one of them—and she rationally believes that the conjunction of all of her assertions is false, given a solid inductive inference that at least one of the conjuncts must be false. Accordingly, she rationally believes and disbelieves the conjunction of all of the assertions in her book! Graham Priest uses this example to argue that it can be rational to believe in a contradiction (Priest, 2006). According to him, the rationality of the author in this case is evidence that classical logic is faulty. In order to preserve the author’s obvious rationality, we should, instead, adopt a paraconsistent logic; a logic according to which contradictions can sometimes be true. Priest is right about the following: (1) the author believes each assertion in the book, or she is at least confident enough about their truth to assert them in the context of the book; (2) she therefore commits herself to asserting their conjunction; and yet (3) she also has, quite separately, grounds for believing, and asserting, that at least one of her assertions must be false. With very little tuition in logic, she will recognize how her various commitments seem to entail: (P) The conjunction of the assertions in this book is both true and false.

But she doesn’t assert (P). She recognizes that her commitments point in that direction, but she still doesn’t assert it. The preface doesn’t say, “Hey folks, here’s a surprising fact. I’ve stumbled upon a true contradiction. I never knew there could be such a thing. But, behold! The conjunction of the claims in this book is both

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  23 true and false!” Instead, in the preface, she says that she recognizes her fallibility. She recognizes that there’s bound to be a mistake somewhere in her book. She accepts responsibility for this fact, even though there is no assertion in the body of the book that she wishes to retract. Her commitments jointly entail (P), and yet she simply isn’t willing to assert (P). R.  Joseph Albo found himself in a similar situation. For  R.  Albo, it was an axiom that (a) “God must have all perfections and be free from all defects” (Albo, 1929, Vol. II, 2:2, p. 17). It was also clear to him that (b) “one who can not act voluntarily is deficient and can be called an agent only in a loose manner” (ibid., p. 17). The conjunction of (a) and (b) entails (c), that God is an agent who wills his voluntary actions. But it was also clear to Albo that (d): will is “the ori­ gin­ation of a new state in the agent which leads him to do something that he did not do before the volition originated” (ibid., p. 16). The conjunction of (c) and (d) entails (e): that God suffers change. Albo simply wasn’t willing to accept this consequence. He is explicit that (a), (b), (c), and (d) are to be accepted as true. He explicitly recognizes that (e) is their logical consequence, and yet he resolutely refuses to assert (e) (ibid., pp. 20–5). The author in the paradox of the preface is paradigmatically rational. She doesn’t want to assert (P). Likewise, Albo doesn’t want to assert (e). Prefaces by rational authors don’t contain claims like (P). A real solution to the puzzle would explain why, despite being willing to assert all that she says in the book, and all that she says in the preface, and despite appearances to the contrary, this does not really commit her to the truth of (P). A real solution to R. Albo’s puzzle, short of labeling him irrational, would allow him to hang onto (a)–(d) without committing him to asserting (e). The most straightforward solution to the paradox of the preface comes from Dale Jacquette (2008). The author has a source of evidence, e, for the claims in her book. e convinced her that what she wrote in the book is true. On the basis of a completely different body of evidence, e', namely considerations of her own fallibility, she comes to believe that somewhere in her book there must be an error. Jacquette claims that assertions are always made relative to a body of evidence. There is no single source of evidence that leads the author to assert (P). The assertions in the body of the book are made relative to e. The assertion made in the preface is made relative to e'. The propositions asserted in the preface may contradict those asserted in the book, but the author isn’t contradicting herself since e ≠ e'. Sadly, Jacquette’s solution won’t help us with Saadya, Maimonides, or Albo. In each of their cases, one single body of evidence seems to be generating all the trouble. A better known and more controversial solution also suffices to clear away the standard case of the paradox, but fails to be of assistance to us. The suggestion is to define belief somehow in terms of a level of credence somewhere between 0 (i.e. no confidence at all) and 1 (i.e. certainty).

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24  The Principles of Judaism On such accounts, the agglomeration principle can be denied. It can be rational to believe each of the conjuncts without believing the conjunction.25 Alex Worsnip (2016, p. 552) illustrates this phenomenon: For example, if one has credence 0.9 in each of just 7 probabilistically in­dependent propositions, the probabilistically coherent credence for their conjunction is 0.48; if one has credence 0.9 in each of 25 probabilistically in­dependent propositions, the probabilistically coherent credence for their conjunction is 0.07. If one has credence 0.99 in each of 70 probabilistically in­dependent propositions, the prob­ abil­is­tic­al­ly coherent credence for their conjunction is 0.49; if one has credence 0.99 in each of 250 probabilistically in­dependent propositions, the prob­abil­is­tic­ al­ly [coherent] credence for their conjunction is 0.08.

If the author made 250 independent claims, and had 0.99 confidence in them— which makes her close to certain that each of them are true—she’d still be crazy to believe their conjunction. The paradox of the preface evaporates. Sadly, this strategy won’t help us with Maimonides, Saadya, and Albo, since only a small number of premises end them up in absurd situations.26 Gustavo Cevolani (2017) argues: it can be rational to believe a proposition which you know likely to be false, if it is—nevertheless—verisimilar. Karl Popper coined the notion of verisimilitude. On his description, verisimilitude “represents the idea of approaching comprehensive truth”; that is to say, the notion combines both truth and some idea of comprehensiveness (Popper, 1963, p. 237). As Cevolani (2017, p. 173) puts it, we’re looking for a “ “balance” of truth and information content.” The entire combined content of Newtonian physics, taken as a package deal, for example, is false, but “seems clearly more verisimilar than the true, but much less informative, statement that planets orbit around the sun” (ibid.). According to Cevolani, belief doesn’t seek after truth, per se, but after veri­sim­ ili­tude. Accordingly, an author can coherently believe everything that she’s written, whilst knowing that it contains some falsehood. She believes it because of its  verisimilitude, and on the basis of its being more verisimilar than any other known combination of propositions about the subject matter. One reason to reject this suggestion is the peculiarity of saying “I believe that p but I think that p is probably false.” Indeed, G. E. Moore famously introduced just this sort of sentence as an absurdity to avoid (Moore, 1993). Mark Kaplan (1998; 2013) suggests a slightly less radical option. Like Moore, he thinks that we shouldn’t say, “I believe that p but I think that it’s probably false.” 25  This strategy is adopted by David Christensen (2004) and Scott Sturgeon (2008). 26  There are other solutions to the standard paradox of the preface that retain the agglomeration principle, but which also only work as solutions to the paradox in cases when “an author makes a great many . . . consecutive utterances, as it were, in one fell swoop” (Leitgeb, 2014, p. 13). Solutions of that nature will also fail to be useful to us here, for the same reason.

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  25 But, according to Kaplan, things change when we talk about certain sorts of collections of propositions; the sort of collections that constitute grand narratives. In  those situations, Kaplan would seem to concede to Cevolani: verisimilitude trumps truth as the aim of our inquiry. We can come to assert and to believe narratives that we know to be, most probably, false (if only in their finer details). Truth may be the goal when asserting individual, isolated propositions, and their conjunctions. Verisimilitude is the goal when asserting narratives, as scientific authors do in their books. These approaches are too radical for me. I never want to believe the false—be it a proposition or a narrative. A still less radical option would therefore deny that we ever believe things that we think to be probably false, but that we do sometimes accept such things—under the rubric of their comprising the best available theory to date. We accept them as the best approximation available to us, without believing them. And, when asserting narratives, we’re not saying that we believe them; we’re simply saying that we accept them because of their verisimilitude. Acceptance doesn’t require belief. Cevolani denies that this is what’s going on. Acceptance is under our voluntary control. It is totally insensitive to truth. You can accept complete and utter falsehoods, merely for the sake of argument. But the scientific attitude that aims for maximal verisimilitude, unlike acceptance, does care about truth (balanced with comprehensiveness), and may well be involuntary, as the best theory simply jumps out at a thinker as completely compelling in its verisimilitude. For those reasons, Cevolani thinks that we believe our most verisimilar stories—we don’t merely accept them. I’m not convinced. Perhaps acceptance is sometimes voluntary and sometimes not, sometimes truth-sensitive (as a component of veri­sim­ili­ tude) and sometimes not. But I’m not willing to accept that we ever consciously and rationally believe what we know to be false. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter whether we adopt: (a) the extreme position according to which belief is never aimed at truth but only ever at verisimilitude; (b) the moderate position according to which single isolated beliefs and assertions aim for truth, while belief and assertion of grand narratives aim at veri­sim­ ili­tude; or my preferred position (c), that belief always aims at truth, while the acceptance and assertion of grand narratives aim at verisimilitude. These three options allow that the author can coherently and rationally assert her grand narratives on the basis of their verisimilitude, all the while knowing them likely to be infected with some falsehood. The paradox of the preface evaporates. If some premises seem individually compelling, but collectively generate an absurdity, then we needn’t believe the absurdity; instead, we should come to realize, in the wake of the absurdity, our fallibility. We should come to realize that there must be a falsehood lurking somewhere in these premises, to generate the absurdity, even if we can’t locate that falsehood, and even if the verisimilitude of the overall picture justifies our continued adherence to the contradiction-generating

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26  The Principles of Judaism narrative. In such cases, to quote Philip Kitcher (2001, pp. 170–1), “our acceptance of the whole should be tempered by consciousness of our own fallibility.” We learn to hold onto our convictions, not even with less credence than before, but with more humility. R. Albo’s case is interesting. He was almost explicit about chasing after theological verisimilitude, having reconciled himself to the unattainability of certain truth. He was of the opinion that, although God’s essence was metaphysically simple, it could be logically divided into an infinite number of attributes.27 Since God has an infinite number of attributes, and “since a human being can not embrace the infinite in his knowledge, his [human intellectual perfection] must consist in a partial conception of God” (Albo,  1929, Vol. II, 2:30, p. 205). Something less than completely comprehensive truth is perhaps the best that we can aim for. This echoes the fallibilist response to the paradox of the preface. When Saadya and Maimonides say that God cannot be described, they say something that cannot be true, on pain of contradiction. If he cannot be described, then we shouldn’t be able to describe him as being indescribable. But, if this falsehood follows from lots of things that Saadya and Maimonides accept/believe, and have equally good reason to accept/believe, then, if they can’t isolate the false premise responsible for generating their contradictory conclusion, perhaps all they can do is to become conscious of their epistemic fallibility, and continue on with a new found sense of humility. I call this the apophaticism of argumentation. The idea is that once you have seen an argument move from your firmly held cataphatic-beliefs to a nonsensical apophatic-conclusion, you will become acutely conscious of your fallibility. This might, in turn, point you towards your own apophatic-experiences, and to the conclusion that there is much about God that you cannot know (at least not propositionally—you might experience some of these facts, or aspects of divinity, but you can’t describe them); and thus you cannot know how those unknown or unpresentable facts would make you reappraise the system of propositions that you currently believe/accept; you thereby come to realize that your knowledge is partial and—accordingly—that even the things that you do know cannot be systematized with any great degree of confidence. You are palpably struck by your theological fallibility. This brand of apophaticism gels well with the conclusions we shall arrive at in Part II of this book. There I shall argue that, given basic assumptions of Orthodox Judaism, our very best theological theories can only hope to be provisional, and verisimilar, but never complete. Did Saadya and Maimonides construct contradiction-inducing arguments only as therapy aimed at helping us to swap the goal of truth for the goal of 27  This view is similar to that of his teacher Hasdai Crescas, see chapters  2 and  3 of (Feldman, 2003).

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Introduction: Avoiding a Paradoxical Preface  27 veri­sim­ili­tude? I don’t know. But it is clear to me that they were aware of the contradictions. They hadn’t let them in by accident. Regarding Albo, I can be more assertive. He was searching for verisimilitude rather than truth. For Albo, the systematic theologian is always in the situation of a reader of a book, writing a study about one of its characters, who hasn’t yet finished reading the book, and therefore doesn’t yet have all of the facts about that character on the table. Any attempt at systematization will be preliminary. Verisimilitude will be the only plausible aim. Fidelity to the original intent of Saadya, Maimonides, and Albo isn’t my main goal (although I’m more confident about Albo). The notion that God is speaking to us through the unfolding intellectual history of Judaism (a claim that we’ll develop fully in chapter 7) summons the Jewish philosopher to give due weight to every stratum of that history, but not necessarily in ways that respect the original intent of its human authors (a claim that we’ll develop fully in section 7.4). I’m happy to accept that therapeutic apophaticism might distort the original intent of these thinkers. But the fact that we’re not forced to disregard their apophatic turn altogether is significant. The apophaticism of argumentation would have me write the following preface to this book: This book lays out the fundamental principles of Judaism. These principles may ul­tim­ate­ly entail that what I say, in this book, is unsayable. To the extent that these prin­ciples therefore contradict themselves, I will—at least—have helped you to recognize our human fallibility, and helped you to exchange truth for verisimilitude as your ultimate goal for theological inquiry. Notwithstanding, I can still say, and plaus­ibly hope, that these principles achieve—at least—a high degree of verisimilitude.

The two schools of Tractatus-interpretation cannot both be historically accurate. The two forms of apophaticism that they inspire, by contrast, can rub shoulders more easily. Apophatic-claims can be both illuminating and therapeutic. The notion that our project is searching for verisimilitude, rather than truth and certainty, is related to Jewish eschatology, and to the Jewish belief that the Messiah hasn’t yet come. Michael Wyschogrod (1996, pp. 173–4) puts it mem­or­ ably when he says: Jews have not been comfortable with theology. Theology examines the logos of God . . . But God is never seen, and where the Bible flirts with the seeing of God it does so with the greatest of reserve (e.g., “and you shall see my back but my face shall not be seen” [Exodus 33:23]). Because God is not seen, there is no logos of God . . . But Jewish thought is possible. Thought does not have to create a system . . .

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28  The Principles of Judaism To think is to shed light, to create a limited clearing. But the clearing is always surrounded by darkness and it is easy to forget the darkness and to see only the light. But Jewish thought cannot lose sight of the darkness. This is so because Jewish thought is on the way. The Jewish story is incomplete. We do not see the outcome . . . It is not a question of uncertainty. The redemption has been promised by God and therefore will come. But because it has not yet come, the story of Israel is still happening and cannot therefore be laid before us as an object of contemplation. Before faith lies the darkness of the future and therefore no logos of God is possible. At least not to man. And not now.

Despite their interest, and ingenuity, I reject routes 1 and 2. Apophatic-claims are false. They cannot be true. Contradictions can never be true. Nor do apophaticclaims require a distinction between the fundamental and the non-fundamental. Rather, they are falsehoods with the power (somehow or other) to show us things that can’t be said and/or to cure us of intellectual hubris. Apophaticism is part of the Jewish tradition, and everyday religious life. Analytic philosophers needn’t ignore apophaticism, nor reject it out of hand. We can, instead, relate to it as illuminating and/or therapeutic falsehood. I move on now, with a renewed sense of humility and fallibility, to the work of substantive the­ ology (or Jewish thought) that lies ahead. That theology aims at verisimilitude, in the knowledge that our knowledge is partial.

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PART I

C R E AT ION And each creature will know that you are its creator.

‫וְ יֵ ַדע ּכָ ל ָּפעּול ּכִ י ַא ָּתה ְפעַ לְ ּתֹו‬

And each design will understand that you are its designer.

‫וְ ִיָבין ּכָ ל יְ צּור ּכִ י ַא ָּתה יְ צַ ְרּתֹו‬

And each being that breathes the breath of life will declare,

‫ֹאמר ּכֹל ֲא ֶׁשר נְ ָׁש ָמה ְב ַאּפֹו‬ ַ ‫וְ י‬

“The Lord God of Israel is King, and over all does his Kingdom have dominion.”

‫ֹלהי יִ ְׂש ָר ֵאל ֶ ֽמלֶ ך ַּומלְ כּותֹו ַּבּכֹל ָמ ָ ֽׁשלָ ה‬ ֵ ‫יְ הֹוָ ה ֱא‬

Liturgy for Rosh Hashana

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2

Creatio ex Nihilo The first of our three fundamental principles is that God created the world. This chapter focuses on the medieval “rationalist” discussion of creation. This discus­ sion gave rise to three schools of thought. Creatio continua

The universe has always existed, with no beginning. It is never­ theless God’s creation. He is eternally creating it; giving it being.

Creatio originalis ex nihilo

The universe was created by God at some point in time (perhaps the first moment in time), before which there was nothing (except God). Ever since, God has been sustaining the universe.

Creatio originalis ex materia

The universe was created by God at some point in time (perhaps the first moment in time), before which there existed, besides God, form­ less matter. Matter, like God, exists eternally, but without form. God imposed form upon that matter. Ever since, he has been sustaining his creation, preventing it from descending back into formlessness.

Saadya Gaon,1 Maimonides,2 and Abravanel3 (1437–1508) championed creatio originalis ex nihilo. This view quickly became the majority opinion among Jewish theologians. Nevertheless, Gersonides4 championed creatio originalis ex materia, and Moshe Narboni (1300–62) (among others)5 championed creatio continua. Hasdai Crescas6 (1340–1410) likely endorsed creatio continua, although in a somewhat different and perhaps diluted form.7 In this chapter, I ask: which of the three interpretations is the most satisfactory? I suggest that the following three factors play into what should count as satisfactory: Philosophical The basic theoretical virtues that guide philosophers, such as: considerations internal consistency, coherence with our wider philosophical commitments, parsimony, and explanatory power. Cosmological All other things being equal, the account of creation that fits best considerations with contemporary cosmology is to be preferred. 1  al-Fayyûmî (1989).   2  Maimonides (2000).   3  Abravanel (1828; 1863). 4  Gersonides (1987–99; 1992). 5  Moshe Narboni (1852) and Yosef Ibn Caspi (1848) defend the view in their respective commen­ taries to Maimonides’ Guide. Isaac Albalag also defends the view (Albalag, 1973). 6  Crescas (1990).   7  See Feldman (1980). The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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32  The Principles of Judaism Religious A Jewish account of creation should fit with the biblical considerations narrative, doing minimal violence to the text. Moreover, given the nature of the unfolding revelation (discussed in chapter 7)8 our interpretation should accord with classical rabbinic literature and traditional religious sensibilities, wherever possible. I will argue that the theory of creatio originalis ex nihilo is, by these lights, the most satisfactory account of the creation.

2.1.  The Doctrine of Creatio Continua 2.1.1.  Philosophical Considerations In his masterful survey of the medieval debates, Herbert Davidson (1987) claims that there were nine philosophical arguments in favor of creatio continua. Three of them depend upon scientifically repudiated elements of Aristotle’s philosophy. In this subsection (i.e., 2.1.1), I examine the six that remain, as well as a new argument of my own. We’ll turn to scientific, biblical, and religious con­sid­er­ ations later.

2.1.1.1.  The Argument from the Nature of Matter To create a new table, I would need some wood and nails. Arranging them tablewise would allow for the property of tablehood to be instantiated; the wood and the nails would serve as the substratum for this creation. This observation points towards the following generalization: one can only create an x if there already exists some y to serve as a substratum. This generalization ultimately entails that matter must be eternal. Davidson explains (1987, p. 13): If the underlying matter of the universe came into existence, it also would come into existence from a substratum. But the nature of matter is precisely to be the substratum from which other things arise. Consequently, the underlying matter of the universe could have come into existence only from an already existing mat­ ter exactly like itself; and to assume that the underlying matter of the universe came into existence would require assuming that an underlying matter already existed. The assumption is thus self-[defeating], and matter must be eternal.9 8  Especially in section 7.4. 9  Davidson actually says that it would be self-contradictory. This is a mistake. There is no contra­ diction in a regress of underlying substances, each one serving as the substratum for, as well as preexisting, the one above it. But if each one is posited to explain the one above it, and if we never reach a bottom, then the posit—though not self-contradictory—is surely self-defeating, since it’s an ex­plan­ ation that requires ever further explanation of exactly the same sort.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  33 Maimonides (2000, 2:14, method 2) sharpened the argument, before trying to refute it. It could prove, not merely the eternity of matter (as Gersonides would argue (1987–99, Vol. III, 6:1:17, p. 325)), but the eternity of the universe (as Avicenna (1960, p. 376) and Averroes (1947, p. 10) claim). All you have to do is to recognize that you can’t have matter without form and to recognize that matter with form is a universe. The argument becomes: (1) Assume: A physical universe is matter with form. (2) Assume: Matter is the pre-existing substratum for anything that comes into existence. (3) Assume: Matter is never without form. (4) Therefore, matter always exists if anything is ever to come into being. (From 2) (5) Therefore, there is always matter with form. (From 4 and 3, given that things do come into being) (6) Therefore, there is always a universe. (From 5 and 1) (7) Therefore, if God is the creator of the universe, it must be the case that he is always creating it. (From 6) Premise 1 is compelling. If formless matter can exist, you might think that it won’t be sufficiently orderly, or substantial, to be considered a universe. But once you’ve got matter and form, it’s hard to say that you don’t have a universe—however small or unimpressive it may be. We’ll revisit premise 3 in section  2.3.1, but it certainly seems plausible. What would it mean for matter to have no form? If 1 and 3 are plausible, then 2, and its corollary, 4, are carrying most of the weight. Consequently, the argument turns upon the assumption that whatever comes into existence does so from a pre-existent substratum. This is the assump­ tion that nothing comes from nothing: ex nihilo nihil fit. But this assumption requires an argument. Otherwise, as an argument against creatio ex nihilo, it sim­ ply begs the question. You might try to justify 2 empirically. Nobody has ever seen something come from nothing. Admittedly, there are contemporary physicists who argue that mat­ ter is, in fact, sometimes seen to pop into existence from nothing (Krauss, 2012). That would empirically undermine 2, if true. But that way of talking is deceptive. The matter in question is actually generated from underlying rearrangements of quantum fields; not quite from nothing.10 Since nobody has ever seen something come from nothing, we do have inductive grounds for 2. Maimonides (2000, 2:17) responds with a thought experiment. Imagine that a child is born and nursed by his mother only for a few months. His mother dies, and his father brings him up. They live alone on a desert island. The child grows up to be intellectually competent and curious. We are to suppose that he has 10  See David Albert (2012).

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34  The Principles of Judaism never seen a woman, nor any female being, giving birth. Finally, he asks his father how he came into existence. He receives the following answer: Man begins his existence . . . in the womb of a female . . . While in the womb he is very small; yet he has life, moves, receives nourishment, and gradually grows, till he arrives at a certain stage of development. He then leaves the womb and con­ tinues to grow till he is in the condition in which you see him.

Maimonides continues: The orphan will naturally ask: “Did this person, when he lived, moved, and grew in the womb, eat and drink, and breathe with his mouth and his nostrils? . . .” The answer will be, “No.” Undoubtedly he will then attempt to refute the statements of [his father], and to prove their impossibility, by referring to the properties of a  fully developed person, in the following manner: “When any one of us is deprived of breath for a short time he dies, and cannot move any longer: how then can we imagine that any one of us has been enclosed in a bag in the midst of a body for several months and remained alive, able to move? If any one of us would swallow a living bird, the bird would die immediately when it reached the stomach, much more so when it came to the lower part of the belly . . . Suppose by accident a hole were formed in the belly of a person, it would prove fatal, and yet we are to believe that the navel of the foetus has been open! . . .” This mode of reasoning would lead to the conclusion that man cannot come into existence and develop in the manner described.

The orphan’s mistake is to generalize from the function of a fully developed per­ son to the functions that could have brought that person about. In the fully devel­ oped physics of the universe in which we live, it is a law of nature that nothing comes from nothing. But to infer backwards, and to apply that law to the gen­er­ ation of the physical universe itself, is to commit the error of the orphan. Saadya Gaon developed a related response (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 1:3, p. 76): just as we’ve never seen something come from nothing, we’ve also never seen some­ thing last forever. Empirical evidence simply can’t be brought to bear on premise 2, in either direction. Moreover, 2 has counterexamples. The Karaite theologian Aaron ben Elijah (1300–69) pressed this point particularly effectively. He notes that, even on an Aristotelian physics, there are some things that come into being from nothing (ben Elijah, 1841, ch. 6). When I build a table, I impose a form of tablehood upon the wood and the nails. The table comes from those materials (and my actions). But the form of the table comes from nowhere. Aaron ben Elijah argues, there­ fore, that forms are truly created ex nihilo. The particular form of my table’s tablehood doesn’t, in any straightforward sense, come into being from something else. But if you don’t like thinking about

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Creatio ex Nihilo  35 particular forms, or of forms popping into existence, think, instead, of singleton sets (sets that have only one member). When Socrates was born, the singleton set with Socrates as its only member popped into existence. Socrates was constructed out of matter that pre-existed Socrates. Socrates was not a creation ex nihilo. But his singleton set was. Not only has premise 2 got no argument in its favor, it even admits of (albeit wacky) counterexamples. This argument for creatio con­ tinua fails.

2.1.1.2.  The Argument from the Concept of Possibility In order to create x, x needs to be possible. If its existence had been necessary, it would already have existed. If its existence had been impossible, it could never exist. Everything created is, therefore, preceded by the possibility that it could exist. But what does it mean for a prior possibility to exist? Possibilities require things to hold them. For example: the possibility that I  might one day be a dentist doesn’t exist as a substance in its own right. It is, rather, a property that I hold. I am the substance that holds that possibility. I am the subject of that possibility. Accordingly, when anything comes into existence, there must have already existed some subject—some matter—that held the rele­ vant possibility. And so, once again, we arrive at the conclusion that nothing can  come into existence from nothing. This argument for creatio continua was advanced by Avicenna, as understood by Ghazali (1927, pp. 69, 74, 100), although Ghazali sometimes seems to conflate this argument and the previous argument. Here’s one way to respond. No universe, or matter, pre-existed the creation. Instead, God pre-existed the creation. The possibility for the creation resided in him. This response is endorsed by Aquinas (Summa, I, 46, 1, ad 1) and Abravanel (1863, IV.3). In contemporary times, it is endorsed by William Lane Craig (2011, p. 905). The Aristotelian theory of modality (or possibility) distinguishes between two distinct types of disposition. We could call them powers and liabilities. A power is the disposition to effect a change. A liability is the disposition to undergo such a change. Before the creation, God had the power to create a universe. But, what, at that time, was liable to become a universe? God isn’t what became the universe. That wouldn’t be creatio ex nihilo. That would be creatio ex deo (creation out of the substance of God himself). Moreover, the notion that the universe was cre­ ated out of the body of God would entail a worrying corporealism—quite out of kilter with Orthodox sensibilities. The pre-existent possibility of the universe’s creation ex nihilo requires both a power and a liability. We know that God will be the subject of the power, but we have no candidate for the subject of the liability. No creation ex nihilo can occur. Accordingly, Maimonides (2000, 2:14, method 4), following Averroes (1930, I, pp. 100–1), thought that we’d have to do better if we want to quell this argument. Aquinas wasn’t moved by Maimonides’ concern—and neither, today, is William Lane Craig. They insist that the power to create ex nihilo is, by definition, a power

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36  The Principles of Judaism that, unlike any other power, doesn’t require a liable subject; that’s what it means for it to be ex nihilo. And what it means for God to be all powerful is that, unlike any other being, he can create ex nihilo. But Aquinas, and Craig in his wake, are begging an important question. Avicenna’s argument claims that the best account we have of modality always analyses possibilities in terms of both powers and liabilities. We infer from this “best” account of modality that creatio ex nihilo wasn’t ever possible. To defeat this argument, it isn’t sufficient to give God a power that our theory of modality labels impossible. Indeed, all of the parties to this medieval debate accept that God’s omnipotence is limited by what’s logically possible. Instead, we need to motivate a theory of modality that doesn’t always trade both in powers and liabilities. One popular contemporary account of modality regards possible worlds as sets of propositions. A possible world, on this view, is just a consistent set of proposi­ tions, containing, for every proposition p, either p or its negation (Adams, 1974). Such a set would constitute a complete description of how a world could be. On this account: when we say that “p is possibly true,” we mean that p is a member of a set that constitutes some possible world or other. Before the creation, God existed all alone, but to the extent that he could con­ ceive of creating a world, there must have been some set of propositions that described him creating a world. If there existed such a set of propositions (even if only in the mind of God), then there was, already, a possible world in which God creates a universe. If there was already such a world, then it was already possible. And thus, as soon as we move over to a different account of possibility, we also avoid Avicenna’s argument against creatio ex nihilo. Possibilities don’t require li­able subjects. The possibility of the universe coming to be, from nothing, needn’t be held, paradoxically, by a pre-existent universe. The prior-possibility could be grounded in something as tame as a set of propositions. We might ask where those propositions come from, and what they are. But they are not a universe, and they are not material, and they are not concrete. So, we’re at least very close to creatio ex nihilo. The world is created. It had a beginning. Nothing concrete, other than God, and nothing at all material, was required to pre-exist it. The problem is that there’s something quite attractive about the Aristotelian account of modality, with its appeal to powers and liabilities. The possibility that I might become a dentist shouldn’t be grounded in possible worlds (whatever they are). That possibility resides in me (Jacobs, 2010). If the theory of creatio originalis ex nihilo is incompatible with this powers-and-liabilities account of modality, that constitutes a cost. Then again, the powers-and-liabilities account anyway has to recognize a class of exceptions. For example: we can quite easily make sense of the conception and birth of Socrates in terms of pre-existent powers and liabilities. A certain sperm cell had the power to act on a certain egg, and that egg had the liability to undergo certain changes. But what about the singleton set that popped into existence along

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Creatio ex Nihilo  37 with Socrates? Was there anything in the world, prior to its existence, that had the liability to become that set? The empty set (i.e., the set with no members) would have become that set, if we had given it Socrates as a member, but that’s not what happened! The empty set remained empty upon the birth of Socrates, but a new set popped into being nonetheless: the singleton of Socrates. Admittedly, the singleton of Socrates is a strange sort of being. But so is the universe. So, if the powers-and-liabilities account has some exceptions, perhaps the universe itself will be one of them. Avicenna’s argument for an eternal uni­ verse is far from watertight. We can either deny the account of modality upon which it’s based, or, we can appeal to the fact that that account itself (even if true) is anyway subject to exceptions.

2.1.1.3.  The Argument from the Nature of Time According to Aristotle (Physics, Book IV), the passage of time requires change. If nothing is changing, then time isn’t passing. If the universe had a beginning, before which there was nothing other than an unchanging God, then that begin­ ning was also the beginning of time. If there’s no time before the universe, then we can’t say that God exists before the universe. There is no before. If God didn’t exist before the finitely old universe, then God is finitely old, and not eternal. You can only make the universe finitely old if you’re willing to give up on God being eter­ nal. Creatio continua, by contrast, allows that God is eternal, since God and the universe are both without beginning. What was God doing before he created the universe? Augustine (1966, p. 341) reports a joke: before the creation, God was busy preparing hell for people with the audacity to ask such a question! To be fair, Augustine thought that the question also warranted a serious response. According to Augustine: God precedes time, not by being located at some time earlier than time itself. God isn’t a prisoner of time, getting one day older as each day passes. God wouldn’t be sovereign, if time had that sort of power over him. A perfect God must be outside of time; unshackled. All times are equally present to God. Surely, when we say that God is eternal, we don’t mean that he’s celebrated an infinite number of birthdays. We mean that he’s altogether outside of time.11 Accordingly, God can be eternal by transcending time. But why accept the foundational assumptions of this argument, to begin with? Why assume that the passage of time requires the occurrence of change? Perhaps time was ticking hap­ pily by for an eternity, before an eternal and unchanging God created the universe at some particular point in time.12 Or why assume that God is unchanging? 11  The Mishna (Tractate Hagiga, 2:1) agrees: to ask what God was doing before time is to misunder­ stand God’s eternity. It fails even to ask a meaningful question. 12  In the medieval literature, Davidson (1987, pp. 39–40) could only find one thinker adopting this response, namely, the Karaite theologian Aaron ben Elijah. An important modern argument allowing for the passage of time without physical change can be found in Shoemaker (1969).

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38  The Principles of Judaism Nevertheless, the strength of Augustine’s response means that we can even accept, if only for the sake of argument, that the passage of time does require the occur­ rence of change, and that God is unchanging, and we can still dismiss the conclu­ sion that God’s eternity requires the eternity of the universe.

2.1.1.4.  The Argument from God’s Rationality Assume that the passage of time doesn’t require the occurrence of change. Assume also that time was ticking through the eternal void until God decided to create a universe. But what leads a rational God to select one particular time in the in­fi­ nite darkness, for the creation of the world, when there is nothing to suggest that one moment over any of its peers? The creation of a non-eternal universe would seem to demand an irrationally arbitrary decision on the part of its creator, viz. when to start it. If God is maximally rational, it follows that he must be creating eternally, so as to avoid this irrationally. Saadya Gaon responds along two fronts (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 1:4, p. 86). First, he merely insists that there was no time before the creation. Accordingly, the ques­ tion as to why God chose one pre-creation time over its peers simply doesn’t arise. Saadya’s second response is that to be a free agent is to act whenever one wishes to act. Fakhruddin Razi elaborates on this second line of response (summarized by Davidson 1987, p. 72): The arbitrary selection of a moment for creation . . . is analogous to the arbitrary selection of a location for the stars on the celestial spheres. Inasmuch as the adherents of [creatio continua] acknowledge the ability of God’s will, in the spa­ tial realm, to assign given locations to the stars in preference to other possible locations, they cannot deny the ability of his will, in the temporal realm, to fix upon a given moment for creation in preference to others.

Similarly, Dean Zimmerman writes (2002, p. 12): If God were confronted by a set of mutually incompatible states of affairs none of which was intrinsically better than any other, but any one of which was better than none, then it would be an imperfection in God if He could not arbitrarily select one among these states of affairs and bring it about. The indecisiveness of Buridan’s ass is not a virtue but a defect.

Buridan’s ass finds himself thirsty, between equidistant buckets of equally good water. “Perfectly rational,” he is never able to choose which one to drink from, and so he dies of thirst. If God were to be similarly frozen by indecision in the face of arbitrary selection, he would be no better than this ill-fated donkey. Zimmerman (ibid.) develops another response. You might think that time intervals are nothing more than measurements relative to a set of physical laws.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  39 The laws of the physical universe allow you to design what those laws will call a perfect clock. In worlds with different laws of physics, clock design would be dif­ ferent. Before God chooses to adopt a set of physical laws to govern the world, there can be no notion of a clock. How would you design a clock to work in a universe before it has physical laws? Accordingly, if time exists before the laws of nature, it will have a before and an after (a topology), but there will be no fact of the matter as to how far away one instant is from another (there will be no met­ ric). You can still ask why God chose to create at the moment that he chose, but you can’t ask, “Why did He wait that long?” because there are no facts about the length of any waiting period in pre-creation time. Either time pre-exists the creation or it doesn’t. If it does, then God can make an arbitrary decision to start creation from a particular time; and there will be no fact of the matter as to how long he waited. If time doesn’t pre-exist the creation, then the question doesn’t even get off the ground to begin with. God’s rationality is not impaired.

2.1.1.5.  The Argument from God’s Immutability God is unchanging. If he wills to create a universe, then he always wills it. If he always wills the creation of a universe, and if his will is efficacious, then there must always be a universe. To deny that the creation is eternal is to imply that God lay around in solitude before changing his mind and deciding to create. But an immutable God doesn’t change his mind. Should we accept that God is immutable? The suggestion of this book is that we try to infer what we can about God, largely, from reflecting upon his role as creator (given the first principle), legislator (given the second), and redeemer (given the third). Admittedly, we’ve been guided in this chapter by intuitions about God’s rationality (which needn’t follow directly from the three principles). But our interpretation of the principles, we said, should rest as easily as possible with the evolving canon of Jewish literature. God’s rationality is firmly entrenched in that literature. But what about his immutability? It’s less clear. The mystical doctrine of literal-tzimtzum, explored in the next chapter, has God undergoing significant change, as do many passages of the Bible (read liter­ ally). On the other hand, I shall be arguing for a non-literal interpretation of the doctrine of tzimtzum. Moreover, the Bible sometimes asserts God’s immutability (Malachi 3:6). The tradition seems undecided. If God’s immutability matters to you, don’t worry. An unchanging God can timelessly and eternally will the creation of a temporary universe (Augustine, 1966, pp. 336–7). Alternatively, his act of willing could be spread into an infinite pre-creation past, and into an infinite future, without any interruption or change. He always knew that to create a temporary universe he’d have to choose an arbi­ trary start and finish point, and always wanted to. Less indecisive than Buriden’s ass, he always knew and had always chosen which points he would arbitrarily

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40  The Principles of Judaism select. Either way, God needn’t undergo any intrinsic change in order to create a temporary universe.

2.1.1.6.  Arguments from Perfection P The final family of medieval arguments takes the following general form: 1. God has perfection P, eternally. 2. God’s instantiation of perfection P, at time t, requires the existence of a universe. 3. Therefore, the universe must be eternal. This sort of argument impressed Crescas. According to some, it led him to believe in the eternity of our universe, or at least in an infinite sequence of created uni­ verses.13 What sort of perfection could we plug into the place of P, so as to gener­ ate something compelling? One suggestion is that God’s goodness will do the job. God’s goodness is uncontroversial in the Jewish tradition. Witness the following argument. 4. God is eternally good. 5. God’s goodness cannot be instantiated, at time t, without a recipient. 6. Therefore, there must always be a recipient. If nothing is capable of receiving God’s goodness without God creating it, you arrive at the conclusion that either God is eternally creating this universe, in order for it to be a recipient, or that he is eternally creating some recipient or other.14 Aquinas offers two variations on this style of argument, in order to refute them. One runs as follows (Aquinas, 2011, p. 159): 7. God is never ignorant, and so he always knows how to create a world. 8. God is never impotent, and so he always can create a world. 9. God is never envious, and so he would never want to keep his good from others. 10. Therefore, God must eternally create a universe. A second variation suggested itself to Aquinas (ibid.), from a passage in which Augustine described God as lord from all eternity, or, at least, he refused to deny that God was lord from all eternity. You can’t be a lord for all eternity unless you eternally have subjects to lord over. This, despite the words of the popular Jewish 13  See (Feldman, 1980). 14  Some have tried to use these sorts of considerations to motivate an argument for a Christian doctrine of Trinitarianism. Arguments of that form are refuted in Lebens & Tuggy (2019).

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Creatio ex Nihilo  41 liturgical poem: “Eternal Master who reigned before all creation was formed.” How can God reign if he hasn’t yet formed a kingdom to reign over? Aquinas needn’t have turned to Augustine. The Bible includes similar state­ ments. Abraham calls God an eternal lord (Genesis 21:33). The psalmist imagines God enthroned, from all eternity (Psalm 93:2). David describes God as our father from eternity and unto eternity (1 Chronicles 29:10). You can’t be an eternal lord without eternally having something outside of yourself to control. You can’t be an eternal king without eternally having a kingdom. You can’t be our eternal father, unless we—the human race—have existed eternally. Or so you might think. But all of these arguments go wrong when they endorse some version of prem­ ise 2, which was: 2. God’s instantiation of perfection P, at time t, requires the existence of a universe.

This premise isn’t true for any value of P. To see that this is so, I rehearse a chain of thought experiments that Dale Tuggy and I devised elsewhere, for other purposes (Lebens & Tuggy, 2019).15 Imagine a society organized in the most just and sensible way possible (I’ll let you decide what counts as just and sensible). Call this society “Justinia.” Compare Justinia to a very similar society, “Disposinia.” Imagine that they are parallel soci­ eties with parallel histories. Things are so well ordered in these two societies that there are rarely any opportunities for great moral courage or sacrifice: the need doesn’t generally arise (if it does, organize them a little bit better!). One difference separates Justinia and Disposinia. In Disposinia there are at least some inhabitants who truly have the disposition, should the right circum­ stances arise, to sacrifice greatly for others and to display courage in the face of tyranny. No such people live in Justinia. A human observer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Justinia and Disposinia. Only a significant moral test would tell them apart. These tests never arise. And yet, the relevant members of Disposinia, because they possess the rele­ vant dispositions, are better than their counterparts in Justinia. This is true even though the members of the two societies can’t be distinguished by their actual behavior. This thought experiment helps us to recognize that we value positive dis­posi­ tions, even when they are dormant. We value dormant dispositions. Consequently, God’s goodness, power, and kingly good governance can all be regarded as greatmaking qualities (i.e., qualities that make an agent more worthy), even when left

15  The thought experiments require us to make certain assumptions about the nature of dis­posi­ tions. For more details than I have space for here, see Lebens & Tuggy (2019).

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42  The Principles of Judaism dormant. They are great-making qualities even when God has nobody to be good to, or to wield power over, or to govern. Fine. Yet surely, God’s goodness would be even better-making if he had made for himself the opportunity actually to manifest it! Analogously, one might think that the people of Disposinia, with the relevant dispositions, would be even worthier if they actually saved people from tyranny, or sacrificed for the needy. Sure, the opportunity never arises in their world. This might be a case of bad moral luck; fate never hands them the opportunity to attain true moral excellence. But, they would be worthier if their dispositions actually had the opportunity to bear fruit. God would be more perfect if he had made for himself the opportunity to use his goodness, power, and good governance. This line of thought, Tuggy and I think, is mistaken. Raoul Wallenberg saved many Jewish lives during the Holocaust. It is thought that he saved up to 100,000 people. It may be the case that his courage grew through the experience, such that he didn’t have the courage to save 10,000 Jews until he had saved 1,500. Acts of heroism often enable further and greater heroism. But, it didn’t have to be that way. Perhaps Raoul Wallenburg’s heroism was fully formed before the advent of the Holocaust, even if, until that point, it had been dormant. If this were so, and let’s assume that it was for the sake of argument, then Wallenburg didn’t become a better person by saving those lives; he was already a moral giant. All that happened was that his great moral stature became manifest for all to see. These considerations led Tuggy and me to the following doctrine: The Doctrine of Agent Worth The moral stature of an agent is determined exclusively by their dispositions to act intentionally and freely in morally praiseworthy ways. This doctrine has a corollary: The Doctrine of Dormant Dispositions Actualizing a valuable disposition doesn’t, in and of itself, make the agent wor­ thier than they were in virtue of having the disposition to begin with. It might be the case that actualizing a valuable disposition helps you to acquire new valuable dispositions. It might be the case that actualizing a valuable dis­pos­ ition held to some relatively low degree can help you to acquire that disposition to a new, higher degree. But these are merely side benefits of actualizing a disposition. They are contingent on a person’s background psychology. Moreover, it’s plausible that these side benefits can be acquired in other ways. Perhaps the imagination, and a good education, can foster ethical growth, without a person ever having to be thrust into situations calling for real sacrifice. Actualizing a disposition isn’t required in order to add ethical value to the agent.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  43 These doctrines help us to deflate arguments of the form 1–3, since they under­ mine premise 2. There are no perfections that in and of themselves add more value to an agent when manifest in action. Someone might object as follows:16 Imagine a person who has never played basketball, but happens to have the fully formed physical and athletic dispositions to be a superb player, immediately upon being given a ball and told the rules—even without any training. To say that Raoul Wallenburg is no better a person for having actually saved lives would be equivalent to saying that this merely potential basketball player already deserves a place in the Basketball Hall of Fame, despite having no sporting achievements to his name.17

We should not confuse the value of persons with the value of events (or circum­ stances). It is because we value certain events, involving and brought about by certain agents (such as the event of scoring lots of points), that we induct those agents into the Basketball Hall of Fame. But when we focus on the value of agents, rather than on the value of associated events, we realize that good character traits, understood as dispositions to act, are what would do all of the work, if only we had epistemic access to them. Perhaps the objector will press his case, though: The doctrine of agent worth, and its corollary, seem to imply that a person is no worse a person for committing a crime (in a circumstance of type x) than for having the disposition to commit that sort of crime (should x-like circumstances arise). Does this mean that we should be punishing people for dormant dis­posi­ tions to criminal activity?

What this objection ignores is that there are both practical and moral reasons not to punish people for the possession of dispositions. Practically, we can’t directly detect dispositions to act, and so it would be futile to attempt to punish their possessors. Morally, and more importantly, we would not want to punish all such people, because they may or may not be to blame for having those dispositions;

16  Thanks to Saul Smilansky for raising this and the following objection in correspondence. 17  It would seem that Nahmanides (1194–1270) would support this objection from Saul Smilansky. Nahmanides argues that God tested Abraham in the story of the binding of Isaac, not in order to know what Abraham would do. After all, God is omniscient. Rather, according to Nahmanides, God knew that Abraham had the disposition to go through with the binding of his son, but the reward for a disposition is less than the reward for an action. This, according to Nahmanides, is why God tested Abraham: to give him the opportunity to be worthy of the reward that is associated with action over mere dispositions so to act. See Nahmanides’ commentary to Genesis 22:1. Tuggy and I might have to resist this reading of the biblical story (see the next footnote for an alternative reading).

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44  The Principles of Judaism that would depend upon how they acquired them and/or what they’ve done to maintain them. Central to the moral life of human beings is the task of resisting many of our dispositions. Unless we resist our negative dispositions, our overall dispositions will often become more corrupt. For example, if one gives in to one’s stealing impulses, one might thereby form a habit of stealing; one changes, in this way, from a person who is often tempted to steal into a thief. That is, by choosing to steal, I typically increase my own disposition to steal. In other words, we are not always blameworthy for the dispositions we find ourselves with, although we sometimes are, and when we are, it’s typically because we acted upon a negative disposition, in such a way as to make our overall dispositions even worse.18 And so, we do have reasons not to punish people for the possession of dis­posi­ tions. These reasons don’t undermine our conceptual point, namely, that the moral value of an agent supervenes on the totality of her dispositions intentionally and freely to act. Aquinas doesn’t explicitly endorse anything like the doctrine of dormant dis­posi­ tions, but he does write that God’s goodness doesn’t exist for our benefit. As such, he concludes that “the divine goodness has no need of creatures, nor do they add anything to him” (Aquinas, 2011, p. 167). Tuggy and I would agree. Likewise, Aquinas thought that God was eternally Lord, in that he eternally had the right properties with which to govern (Aquinas, 2011, p. 168). Lordship, to the extent that it is a great-making property, is all about dispositions. And thus there was a sense, after all, in which God was king before he created his kingdom; he was supremely kingly. Muhammed al-Amidi was led to deny that God is essentially beneficent (alAmidi, 1971, p. 270). If beneficence requires beneficiaries, then beneficence as a divine perfection would render a perfect being dependent upon the existence of beneficiaries. Perfect beings cannot be dependent beings. Tuggy and I take a much more moderate line. Dormant beneficence is no less great-making than beneficence in action. It is beneficence in action that requires the existence of beneficiaries, but beneficence in action adds no inherent value to God over and above the value of beneficence left as a dormant disposition, ready to be called upon, even in God’s pre-creation solitude. 18  That is to say, how we act can affect, in the long term, what our dispositions are. This gives rise to an alternative reading of the binding of Isaac to the reading discussed in the previous footnote. At times, R. Albo seems to adopt the Nahmanidean reading that I glossed there, in the previous footnote. By testing Abraham, God gave him the opportunity to earn “the reward for deed and intention instead of the reward for intention alone” (Albo, 1929, 4:13, p. 123). But closer attention to his words reveals why he thinks that the reward is greater for an action than for a mere disposition: “since practice will strengthen [the agent’s] heart in the love of God. For an act makes a greater impression upon the soul than intention without action” (ibid.). In other words, the only reason why God might reward a person more for having acted than for having had the disposition so to act is that the action itself might enhance the quality of the disposition.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  45 Razi discussed an argument from God’s being an eternal agent to his eternally acting. If God is eternally acting, then God must always have things to act upon. He doesn’t act upon himself, since—assuming immutability—he never changes, and to act is to change something. And so, he must be eternally acting upon a creation. To block this argument, Razi denies that God is an agent (Razi, 1934, p. 51). But instead, we can say that an agent is always disposed to act, even if those dispositions remain dormant. Consequently, God’s being eternally an agent makes no demands upon him eternally to act upon anything. The doctrine of dormant dispositions undermines most, if not all, of the argu­ ments in this final family of arguments. But there are other responses besides. We could insist that God is time-transcendent. On the assumption that time began with the creation, it follows that there never was a stretch of time over which God was withholding his good from people; nor was there ever a time when he wasn’t lord and king of the universe. Moreover, some of the properties these arguments appeal to are not intrinsic or essential. Beneficence certainly seems to be an essential divine perfection, but lordship and kingship don’t. Despite poetic biblical verses pointing to eternal kingship, and eternal fatherhood, some of the sages were more than happy to state that God was not king until he had a kingdom.19 The Bible itself implies that there is some sort of sanctity that God receives from human beings (Leviticus 22:32); presumably he didn’t always have that species of sanctity. God’s essential perfection concerns intrinsic properties, which he has timelessly, but not relational ones like these. We have examined six families of medieval arguments for creatio continua. The arguments failed. Perhaps we can construct a new argument, based upon more contemporary philosophical considerations. Accordingly, I offer the following argument, from “permanentism.”

2.1.1.7.  A New Argument from Permanentism Formal logic isn’t interested in the meaning of non-logical words.20 Take the following syllogism: 1. Everything in Bnei Brak is kosher. 2. There is a pizza shop in Bnei Brak. 3. Therefore, there is a kosher pizza shop. The meanings of “kosher” and “pizza shop” and “Bnei Brak” do no work in the logic of the argument. The logical validity of the argument could just as well be illus­ trated without using those words. For example: 19  See, for example, P'sikta D'Rav Kahana, at the end of 12:6. 20  Section 2.1.1.7 was born of a conversation with Aaron Segal, to whom I’m grateful.

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46  The Principles of Judaism 1. Everything in B is K. 2. There is a P in B. 3. Therefore there is a P which is K. Logicians would symbolize this as: ("x )(Bx ® Kx ) In English: For any x, if the predicate “B” is true of x, then so is the predicate “K.” ($y )(Py & By ) In English: There exists some y, such that the predicates “P” and “B” are both true of y. 3. \($y )(Py & Ky ) In English: Therefore, there exists some y such that the predicates “P” and “K” are both true of y. 1. 2.

The same structure would demonstrate that if (1) all mammals are animals, and if (2) there is a mammal that has blue eyes, then (3) there is an animal that has blue eyes. Accordingly, the phrases “is in Bnei Brak,” “is a Pizza shop,” and “is Kosher” are non-logical predicates that play no role in this argument’s validity. They might as well be swapped for “is a mammal,” “is an animal,” and “has blue eyes,” for all it would affect the validity of the argument. By contrast, the phrases “for any x,” and “there exists some y,” which the logi­ cian symbolizes as, “∀x” and “∃y,” are essential parts of the logical machinery of the argument (as are the words “if” and “then,” symbolized by “→,” and the word “and,” symbolized by “&”). These two symbols, “∀x” and “∃y,” are called quan­ti­ fiers. We use them to quantify over a domain of objects and to say that all of them, or some of them, have some property or other. The phrase, “there exists an x” seems to be part of the logical vocabulary of our language. We can say all of the following things: there exists an x which is red, there exists an x which is taller than Michael Jordan, there exists an x called Santa Claus. In each case, we apply a non-logical predicate, “is red,” “is taller than Michael Jordan,” “is called Santa Claus,” to a variable, x, and we use a quantifier, ∃x, to say, truly or falsely, that there exists, in the domain of objects, something that would make the resulting predication true. Accordingly, we don’t need, in the non-logical vocabulary of our language, the predicate “x exists.” Such a predicate would be otiose: you’d end up saying things like, “there exists an x such that x exists”; well, of course there does! Anything inter­ esting about existence must already be expressed in the quantifiers themselves. Meghan Sullivan (2012a; 2012b) calls this doctrine “the doctrine of univocal exist­ ence,” or neo-Quineanism (since it traces back to Willard Van Orman Quine21): 21  See van Inwagen (1998), who traces this doctrine back to Quine (1980a).

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Creatio ex Nihilo  47 Univocal Existence There is a single, fundamental sense of “exists” of interest to metaphysics, and it is denoted by the existential quantifier, “∃x.” In a series of articles, Timothy Williamson (1998; 2000; 2002; 2010; 2013) has argued that neo-Quineanism commits us to necessitism (the view that anything that exists, exists necessarily), and to permanentism (the view that anything that exists always exists). We needn’t explore his necessitism here. But why adopt per­ manentism? In a nutshell, the idea is that the doctrine of univocal existence is incompatible with the following doctrine: Temporary existence Some objects change with respect to existence. The doctrine of temporary existence is only attractive given a certain philosophy of time. There are two main traditions in the philosophy of time: A-theories and the B-theory. A-theories contend that there is a deep distinction between the present, the past, and the future. According to the presentist,22 for example, only the present is real. As time passes, objects and regions of spacetime come to exist, and then cease to exist. Another species of A-theory is the growing block theory: objects and regions of spacetime come to exist as the block of spacetime grows into the future, but objects and regions of spacetime never cease to exist once they’ve come about. The present is the outermost edge of this growing block.23 The B-theory—by contrast—recognizes that some times are later than others, and that some times are earlier than others, but contends that no time is, in any absolute sense, the present, or past, or future. Compare time with space. No place in space is, in any absolute sense, here. You call a place “here” if and only if you happen to be in that place. If you’re in one place and I’m in another, we’ll both call our respective places “here.” Neither one of us will be right, and neither wrong, in any absolute sense. You’re right, relative to your location, and I’m right, relative to my location. The B-theorist says the same thing about time. We call the moment that we’re in “now,” but that doesn’t mean that, in any absolute sense, the time that we’re in is any more now than earlier times and later times. Nowness is not a real feature of any point in the timeline, just as hereness is not a real feature of any point in space. All times exist. All times are real. Some of them are present to us, but only because we happen to be in them.

22  As examples of presentists, Sullivan (2012b) cites: Prior (1967), Bigelow (1996), Zimmerman (1998), Ludlow (1999), Crisp (2003), Markosian (2004), and Merricks (2007). 23  As examples of growing block theories, Sullivan (2012b) cites: Broad (1923), Adams (1989), Tooley (1997), and Forrest (2006).

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48  The Principles of Judaism The B-theory denies the doctrine of temporary existence. It’s true that some things are only located at certain times. I, for instance, am located nowhere earlier than 1983. But I was always located on the timeline, at points after 1983. In that sense, for the B-theorist, things don’t change with respect to existence. Things don’t really come into being. You no more came into existence when your lifetime years began to be now, than you came into existence when you entered the room, and so started to be here. You no more cease to exist when your lifetime years are no longer now, than you cease to exist when you leave the same room as me, and therefore cease to be here! Ceasing to be now is not ceasing to be. Coming to be now is not coming to be. I’m not located in China, but it’s still true, in China, that I exist. Likewise, on the B-theory, we would say that, even though I’m not located in 1977, it’s still true, in 1977, that I exist. I always exist. Presentism and the growing block theory, by contrast, tend to endorse the doctrine of temporary existence. Both of these versions of the A-theory agree that things that didn’t exist at one point in time come to exist at later points in time. Sullivan and Williamson believe that even the A-theorist should deny the doctrine of temporary existence, because it contradicts the doctrine of univocal existence. The basic conflict arises when you try to state, using regular quan­ti­ fiers, under their regular interpretation, that some things come in, or that some things go out, of existence. You’ll be using the existential quantifier, to quantify over a domain of objects, and then you’ll be saying of some of the things in that domain that they don’t exist (yet, or anymore). But, if there’s nothing more to existence than falling under the domain of a quantifier, then the doctrine of tem­ porary existence collapses into the claim that there are some things that don’t exist.24 You’ve basically been forced into saying that there exist some nonexistent existents. Given a choice between the doctrine of univocal existence and the doctrine of temporary existence, Sullivan and Williamson would have us jettison temporary existence. According to them, everything we really want to say about creation and destruction can be salvaged, without the doctrine of temporary existence—and thus, there’s very little cost in dumping it. Imagine yourselves a billion years into the future, and imagine that the great River Inn has dried up. Williamson asks: What kind of thing has the [dried up river] Inn become, if it is no longer a river? . . . The best and most natural answer is just that the Inn was once a river; it is [now] a past river. Its characteristic properties concern its past; whether it continues to leave traces in the present is inessential to its nature. (Williamson, 1998, pp. 265–6) 24  Sullivan (2012a; 2012b) explores various escape routes from this problem, but finds them all to be lacking.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  49 Sullivan (2012a, p. 54) explains: According to Williamson, when objects are created or destroyed, they do not change with respect to existence. Rather they undergo a form of radical property change, gaining or losing all of their intrinsic present properties. [Over the span of billions of years the] Inn changes from being a merely future river, to being a river, to being a merely past river. But it never ceases to be full stop. Williamson is still an A-theorist, since he draws a sharp distinction between the present and other times.

Williamson is what we call “a moving-spot-light theorist.” Presentness is real. It moves over the surface of time. But it doesn’t wash things in and out of existence, it merely changes their properties. Rivers go from being future rivers, to present rivers, to past rivers, as presentness makes its way across the surface of time. Since “our beliefs about creation, destruction, coming to be, and passing away can be adequately characterized”25 without the doctrine of temporary existence—a doctrine that conflicts with neo-Quineanism—we should all adopt permanentism (the view that anything that exists always exists). Or, so the argument goes (for the record, I would rather modify my views about the quantifiers). But the assumption of permanentism generates a new argument for the eternity of the universe: 1. Assume: Everything that exists always exists, without a beginning or an end to its existing (i.e., assume permanentism). 2. Assume: The universe exists. 3. Therefore: The universe exists without a beginning or an end to its existing. (From 1 and 2) Thankfully for believers in creatio originalis, there are two responses to this argu­ ment, even on the assumption of permanentism. Response 1: The fact that the Eiffel tower existed for all eternity doesn’t mean that it wasn’t created at some point in time. The creation of the Eiffel tower occurred when it was built; when its location in spacetime became present. The same can be said for the universe. To prove that the universe is permanent isn’t to under­ mine the doctrine of creatio originalis. Perhaps the universe was, for eons, only a future universe, until God created it, in time—at which point it became a present universe, in virtue of God’s creation. And yet, one can’t help feeling that this response sacrifices too much. It concedes that the universe pre-existed its cre­ ation. That hardly sounds like creatio ex nihilo. Response 2: Permanentism, if true, entails that everything that exists on the timeline always exists on the timeline. But it doesn’t entail that the timeline itself 25  Sullivan (2012a, p. 166).

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50  The Principles of Judaism has an infinite extension in either direction. The question of whether the universe has a beginning might simply turn on the question as to whether the timeline itself, upon which things permanently exist, or permanently fail to exist, per­man­ ent­ly has a first moment. If it does, then there was a creation originalis, if not, then there wasn’t. Our argument from permanentism fails to prove its conclusion.

2.1.1.8.  Freedom and Eternity Why was it so important to rule out the eternity of the creation? Seymour Feldman (2003, p. 41) explains: if you believe that miracles—understood as God’s free intervention in history—are possible, then you must believe that the universe had a beginning. Why? Assume: (1) If something is impossible, then it will never exist; (2) if it is neces­ sary, then it will always exist; and (3) if it is possible, then, given enough time, there will be periods when it exists, and periods when it doesn’t. This is like the assump­ tion that, given an infinite amount of time, or given an infinite number of monkeys sat at typewriters, or both, a monkey will surely type the complete works of Shakespeare. In other words: given enough time, all that’s possible happens. Consequently, if we’re saying that the universe always exists, then we’re saying that it has to. If the universe has to exist, then God had no freedom not to create it. This, Maimonides thinks (2000, 2:21), is the real cost of the doctrine of creatio continua.26 Some people think that an agent is only free to act if she has the ability to do otherwise; without the ability to do otherwise, an action can’t be free. But Harry Frankfurt has famously questioned this assumption (Frankfurt, 1969). He im­agines cases like this: person A freely kills person B because A wants B dead. Person A doesn’t know that had she not decided to kill person B, person C would have used a mind control device to force her into killing person B. Person A chose to kill person B, and person C didn’t end up resorting to her mind control device. Obviously, we hold person A responsible for opting, with her own free will, to kill person B, but—in actual fact—she had no option other than to kill person B— either of her own volition, or under the mind control of person C. It seems to fol­ low: if your action flows from your will, and if it does so without hindrance or internal conflict, then you act freely, even if you have no option to act otherwise. Hasdai Crescas (1990, 2:5:3) adopts a very similar conception of free will. So per­ haps it’s no surprise that he also sees no contradiction in God’s having an eternal— and apparently therefore necessarily determined—free will (ibid., 3:1a:4–5). Maimonides contends that attempts, like this, to square a determined will with a free will are bound to fail, or to trade in Pickwickian senses of “will” 26  Note, however, that making the universe exist necessarily does carry a benefit too. It dissolves the puzzle of existence—the puzzle of why there is something contingent existing rather than nothing at all. It avoids the problem with its contention that absolutely nothing contingent exists; see Goldschmidt (2013).

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Creatio ex Nihilo  51 (2000, 2:21).27 I agree. Truly free wills cannot be predetermined. If A couldn’t have wanted other than to want B dead, then her will wasn’t free to begin with. We only think she was free because something, even in Frankfurt’s example, was left up to her. It was up to her, to some degree or other, not to want the things she wanted. Consequently, God’s will is not free to the extent that he is bound to want to create. A better way to salvage God’s freedom, on the adoption of creatio con­ tinua, is simply to deny the connection between the eternal and the necessary.28 Why think that if x happens eternally, then x necessarily had to happen? You might think that if the happening of x has no beginning, then it isn’t possible to avert it, since nothing can get in the way of its beginning.29 Fine. But does that really make x’s existence necessary? Imagine a world that has an electric keyboard in it. Imagine that the middle C of that keyboard is held down by a rock. Nothing else exists in this world. Imagine also that this world has no temporal beginning. It existed for all time, just as described. Question: could it have always been a C sharp instead of a C? Answer: that depends upon what it means for x to be possible at a world. If all it means is that there always existed a distinct possible world in which a C sharp was sound­ ing instead of a C, then it always was possible. The eternity of the given state of affairs fails to make the state of affairs necessary. So, if God is always creating a C world, that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t always have been creating a C sharp world instead, or no world at all. It seems to me that Maimonides, and much of the medieval tradition in his wake, was wrong to think that the doctrine of eternal creation robbed God of freedom. The notion of a free, eternal, and contingent creation doesn’t give rise to a contradiction. But now our question should be this: why does it matter? If there are no discernible costs to believing in creatio continua, and the belief doesn’t ren­ der God an automaton, then why expend so much effort to discount its truth? We’re looking for the most satisfactory account of creation. We want to find the best fit with cosmology, philosophy, the Hebrew Bible, and other Jewish tradi­ tions. Just because creatio continua doesn’t have the theological cost that Maimonides and others thought it to have, it doesn’t follow that there are no other costs. We’ll explore some of those costs in the remainder of this chapter. Moreover, how we understand God’s creation will have profound consequences for our religious life, in terms of how we relate to God. The great nothingness that (in some sense or other) preceded the creation, according to the doctrine of crea­ tio ex nihilo, evokes a certain sense of awe that is lost if you relate to that nothing­ ness merely as a possibility that was never actual. The belief that God fashioned

27  See Davidson (1987, p. 2, ft. 3), from whom I borrow the use of the word “Pickwickian” in this context. 28  This was, apparently, Moshe Narboni’s preferred response (see Weiss, 2017, p. 54). 29  Thanks to Rabbi Naftali Goldberg for this suggestion.

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52  The Principles of Judaism things from the outset, rather than merely sustaining them from eternity, also generates a different religious sensibility. Accordingly, we can still be glad to have found that philosophical con­sid­er­ ations have given us no reason to endorse creatio continua. We move on now to cosmological considerations.

2.1.2.  Cosmological Considerations Observers had been meticulously recording the movements of the stars for countless generations. Before the late 1920s, nothing in these celestial patterns had ever been seen to change. Abravanel suggests that, for these empirical ­reasons, above and beyond the philosophical arguments of section 2.1.1, the Israelites at Mount Sinai had to be told about creatio originalis (Abravanel, 1863, 1:2.3b). This was a truth of revelation. A truth that is, at best, surprising to the unaided reason of man. Indeed, the conviction that the universe had no beginning held sway over the greatest of all scientific minds until the early twentieth century. The dominant model, until then, was the steady state theory, according to which the universe had existed forever without undergoing any significant change. There wasn’t any data to suggest anything else. If the empirical data still pointed towards the steady state theory, how much weight would that add to the doctrine of creatio continua? Certainly, it would add some weight. But that added weight would be far from decisive. Consider Bertrand Russell’s five-minute hypothesis. As he put it (Russell, 2005, p. 94): There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remem­ bered” a wholly unreal past . . . I am not suggesting that the non-existence of the past should be entertained as a serious hypothesis. Like all sceptical hypotheses, it is logically tenable, but uninteresting.

In the fourth century, St. Ephrem the Syrian wrote that, although “the grasses were only a moment old at their creation, they appeared as if they were months old. Likewise, the trees, although only a day old when they sprouted forth, were nevertheless like . . . years old as they were fully grown and fruits were already budding on their branches” (Ephrem, 1994, p. 90). If Adam had cut down a tree in the Garden of Eden, it would have had rings. It already had fruit. Indeed, Adam himself probably didn’t look like a baby on the day he was created, named the living creatures, and ate from the forbidden fruit. We assume that he looked like a fully grown man. “Did he,” you might ask, “have a belly button?’

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Creatio ex Nihilo  53 Philip Henry Gosse popularized these questions and ideas in his book of 1857, Omphalos—referring to the belly button!30 Gosse argued that the earth must have been created with mountains and canyons, each appearing to be the ancient prod­ ucts of long geological processes. The trees were created with rings, and the first human couple were created with mature bodies, long hair, fingernails, and, yes, belly buttons! The seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–94), wasn’t convinced by the techniques used to age fossils. But even if he came to trust the reliability of these techniques, he suggested that we adopt the omphalic hypothesis. He wrote (Schneerson, 2000, p. 147): Even assuming that the period of time which the Torah allows for the age of the world is definitely too short for fossilization (although I do not see how one can be so categorical), we can still readily accept the possibility that G‑d created ready fossils, bones or skeletons (for reasons best known to him), just as he could create ready living organisms, a complete man, and such ready products as oil, coal or diamonds, without any evolutionary process.

Russell would concede to the Rebbe that this is a logical possibility, but an ­uninteresting one. And yet, why shouldn’t we be interested? Russell recognized that we come to philosophy, already, with certain in­stinct­ ive beliefs in hand (be they the product of nature or nurture). Your instinctive beliefs might not be the same as mine, but we each have some, whether or not they overlap. We also have an unceasing flow of empirical data coming our way. The philosopher, according to Russell, should seek to adopt a coherent explanation of the world, securing the best overall balance between explana­ tory power, theoretical simplicity, and consonance with as many of our in­stinct­ive beliefs as possible, giving most weight to the most instinctively held (Russell, 1998, pp. 11–12). Russell didn’t give free reign to common sense. In fact, he thought that we should be highly sceptical of it (Russell, 1914, p. 107). But he did allow it to play a role. In the final analysis, he would have us embrace those deliverances of com­ mon sense that survive philosophical and empirical scrutiny, especially if they can be marshaled to play a role in an explanatory metaphysical outlook. Given this methodology, the five-minute hypothesis, and its omphalic cousin, aren’t going to fare well. They might be logically possible, but they’re not going to play an interesting role in the sort of metaphysical system that Russell was seeking to build. They’re far too counterintuitive. One reason why a believer might want to resist the five-minute hypothesis, or Gosse’s omphalic hypothesis, is to avoid turning God into a deceiver. Why would 30  Gosse (2003).

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54  The Principles of Judaism God place us in a world full of misleading signs of antiquity? To test our faith? Are there not enough tests of faith waiting to ensnare us, that God needed to put deceptive fossils under the ground? And, how does it test our faith, since count­ less religious people have had faith in God, and the Bible, and continue to do so, whilst also believing that the universe is ancient, and was once host to dinosaurs? Did God place us in a world where we can’t trust the evidence of our senses? And, if we can’t trust the evidence of our senses, then why do we trust that the ancient Israelites heard and saw a theophany at Sinai? If God is that deceptive, doesn’t the entire edifice of Judaism come crashing down? A Jewish philosophy won’t want to make God a deceiver, especially not a sys­ tematic deceiver, and so it won’t want to disregard the tremendous weight of evi­ dence that points to the antiquity of the universe. But antiquity isn’t the same as eternity. We have evidence of antiquity, but no such evidence, it seems, can ever amount to evidence for eternity. What would such evidence look like? A Jewish philosophy also won’t want to deny the truth of the Bible. However allegorical its narratives might be, it is plausibly quite a central teaching of the Bible that God created the universe, in the beginning; even if—contra R. Schneerson— that beginning was much longer ago than a literal reading of the allegories would imply. All in all, the balance that suggests itself, between science and revelation, would conclude that the world must be very old, hence the (non-deceptive) empirical evidence of antiquity, but that the universe isn’t eternal (at least not obviously so). The universe was already very old before humans arrived on the scene. Consequently, they were at no point subjected to deceptive evidence; at least, not until the Bible came along, seeming to teach us that the universe is very young indeed. But we’ll turn to the Bible later on (I shall argue that only an anachronistic reading would take it to be detailing a historical account of the creation; and so the Bible can’t be accused of deception on this issue). The point that needs to be made here is this: should we ever have empirical evidence suggesting the eternity of the universe, it could equally well be suggestive of the antiquity of the universe. The stretch from antiquity to eternity is a stretch too far. Given the sceptical possibility of the five-minute hypothesis, however remote that possibility might be, we should know better than to stretch the evidence from antiquity to eternity. Consequently, even when the steady state theory ruled the day, cosmological considerations could not have been decisive for creatio continua. More important than all of this, perhaps, is the emergence, in the twentieth century, of new empirical evidence. In the 1920s, Alexander Friedman and Georges Lemaître independently pro­ posed a solution to Einstein’s field equations of general relativity. Their solutions suggested that the universe was not steady at all. The universe, they predicted, was expanding. Lemaître was a Catholic priest. The notion that the universe was

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Creatio ex Nihilo  55 expanding immediately suggested to Einstein that, if you were able to rewind these cosmic events, you would arrive at something like a starting point for the universe, from which the expansion began. Was Lemaître, the priest, trying to smuggle the book of Genesis into contemporary physics?31 No wonder theologians were excited by Lemaître’s prediction. No wonder Einstein was sceptical (Turek, 1989, p. 171; Farrell, 2005, p. 107). In 1929, Edwin Hubble was able to observe a Doppler shift in every deep space object, providing us with empirical evidence that every galaxy is moving away from the earth. He also observed that the greater the distance from the earth, the greater the speed at which the deep space object appears to be traveling. Friedman and Lemaître had been right. Einstein’s scepticism evaporated (Farrell, 2005, p. 115). The starry heavens may appear to the naked eye as permanent and stable, but the universe is actually dynamic. Every galaxy is accelerating, as it moves away from every other galaxy. If you rewind this process, extrapolating backwards, you seem to establish that the entire universe came tumbling out of a singularity—an event that came to be known as the Big Bang. Even when the empirical data favored the doctrine of creatio continua, it was never decisive, nor could it ever have been. Furthermore, that evidence, for what it was, has been undermined.

2.1.3.  Biblical and Traditional Considerations In section 2.1.1.6, I cited verses implying that God was always involved in creating a world. But we also saw how easy it was to discharge or to dismiss those implica­ tions. Moreover, a much more extensive set of biblical verses are deeply suggestive of the proposition that the creation had a beginning in time.32 What role should biblical data play in our considerations? We first have to address the question: what genre is the Bible? Clearly, the biblical canon extends over many genres. But the genre of history, as we know it today, didn’t emerge until Herodotus and Thucydides. The genre of natural history didn’t emerge until much later. Folklore and epic legend predate scientific natural history as literary genres by many generations. Jewish tradition contends that the Bible is divinely inspired, and that five books of it were divinely authored. But that doesn’t settle the question of what genre it is, or which genres it includes. Divinely written folklore, and divinely written legend, would still be true, and reliable, given its divinity. But, what it would mean for 31  Similar suspicions didn’t attach to the motivation of Friedman. He wasn’t a priest, and his work was largely overlooked in his lifetime. 32  A non-exhaustive selection would include: Genesis chapters 1 and 2, Isaiah 42:5, Psalms 33:6–9, Psalms 104:5–9, Proverbs 8:22–31, and Job 38.

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56  The Principles of Judaism folklore to be true or reliable folklore isn’t the same as what it would mean for a natural history to be a true or reliable natural history. The truth, and supreme importance, of divinely authored legend, despite its divine authorship, wouldn’t licence any quick and easy inference from its narratives to propositions about the natural world and its history. What a person is licenced to infer about the real world, from a piece of literature, however reliable the author, is highly sensitive to the genre of the literature in question.33 To relate to the first two chapters of Genesis, for example, as natural history is both anachronistic, and literarily naïve.34 As a story, they have many of the liter­ ary marks of an entirely different type of genre. Its style and presentation almost beg for allegorical interpretation. What’s so bad about eating fruit? What does that fruit actually symbolize? Could snakes really talk? Did they really once have legs? Or, is the snake a symbol for something? What’s more, the genre of the Bible seems to change from passage to passage and book to book. Accordingly, even though the weight of the biblical verses don’t support the idea of an eternal creation, we shouldn’t allow that fact to rule an eternal creation out decisively. Moreover, the Bible can’t be accused of being deceptive for imply­ ing things about the age of the universe. Those implications only arise when we approach the text with anachronism and naivety—treating it as a natural history. That’s our fault. It’s not the fault of the text. Notwithstanding these reservations, it seems fair to say that, even once all of the allegorical content of the biblical narratives has been unpacked, the idea that God is the world’s creator is a central teaching of the canon. That’s fine. The doc­ trine of creatio continua makes room for the fact that God is the world’s creator. The creation occurs eternally. If this is all that the Bible teaches, in the final analysis, then the Bible makes no real problems for the doctrine of creatio continua. But this isn’t all that the Bible seems to be teaching us about creation. The Bible seems to distinguish between God’s historic act of creation and his continuous acts of sustenance. Here is one illustrative example: [You] established the earth upon its foundations, that it should not be moved forevermore; You covered it with the deep as with a cloth; the waters stood above the mountains. At Your rebuke they retreated, at the voice of Your thunder they fled. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down, to the place that You had founded for them. You established a boundary which they should not pass, so that they might not return to cover the earth. [God] sends forth springs into the valleys; they run between the mountains. They give drink to every beast of the field, the wild asses quench their thirst. (Psalms 104:5–11) 33  See Hazlett & Mag Uidhir (2011). 34  We shall explore this issue further in section 7.3.2.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  57 The beginning of this passage seems to describe an historic act of initial creation. God carved out the mountains and the valleys, and put the water in its place. The end of this passage, on the other hand, is talking about the present. God presently sends spring water into the valleys. After the allegorical content and figures of speech have been unpacked, it still seems as if God has two distinct roles here: he created, and he sustains. Classically, monotheists maintain that God is sustaining the creation in being. If God were to desist, then the universe would immediately disappear. In other words, the world is constantly ontologically dependent upon God. That’s a conse­ quence of God’s constant sustenance. The Bible distinguishes between his sus­ten­ ance and his historic act of creation. The doctrine of creatio continua blurs that distinction. According to the doctrine of creatio continua, God’s constant willing of the world into being isn’t just his sustaining the world, it is also what it means for him to be its creator. Consequently, the biblical distinction between creation and sustenance collapses. The best way to secure creatio continua, without undermining this distinction, is to follow a suggestion of Crescas. Though Crescas’s final position is open to multiple readings,35 he at least entertained the idea that this universe is one of an infinite sequence of universes, each with a beginning in time, that God creates, sustains for some time, and destroys (Crescas, 1990, 3:1a:5).36 If you’re compelled to adopt creatio continua, then this infinite sequence of universes—a sequence with no beginning—seems like a better fit with the Bible and with tradition, since it distinguishes between creation and sustenance. But, why feel any compulsion?37 We have seen nothing compelling, philosophically, or cosmologically, to push us in that ontologically profligate direction. Maimonides chose to endorse creatio originalis since it constituted the best fit with the biblical data. He was right. It does.

2.2.  The Beginning of Time I turn now to considerations in favor of creatio originalis. Can we find more com­ pelling grounds than best fit with the Bible?

2.2.1.  Cosmological Considerations for the Beginning of Time In 1.2 we charted the death of the steady state theory. The universe is expanding. If you were to rewind the process, you would presumably see all of the galaxies 35  See Feldman (1980). 36  There is even a famous Midrash which motivates Crescas’s suggestion: Genesis Rabba 3:7. 37  The previous footnote cited a Midrash. But even if the tradition considers the existence of previous universes, why think that there were an infinite number of them? Moreover, Feldman (1980, p. 318) provides compelling reasons for dismissing this theory, even as a candidate for Crescas’s final position.

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58  The Principles of Judaism come together to a single infinitesimal point, known as a singularity. The beginning. The existence of this initial singularity entails that spacetime itself has an edge, or a boundary (Barrow, 2007, p. 39). Philosophers should be careful not to treat this boundary as some sort of physical thing. As Jacobus Erasmus explains (2016, p. 340): As an analogy, one could think of the edge or boundary of a walking stick. A walking stick has a boundary or beginning point if it has a finite length, but this fact does not commit one to the existence of a “boundary” . . . object . . . As Tim Maudlin notes, depicting a singularity as a line or point may mislead “the incau­ tious observer” because he/she might assume that “the singularity were some sort of thing.” However, “the singularity is an edge of space-time itself, where timelike curves simply cannot be continued.” (Maudlin, 2012, p. 144)

“The Big Bang singularity denotes, at most, a start to classical space-time” (Erasmus, 2016, p. 341). The notion that our universe had an absolute beginning was immediately seized upon by theologians as evidence of creatio originalis. Pope Pius XII declared (Krauss, 2012, p. 4): It would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, science has confirmed the contingency of the universe . . . Hence, creation took place. We say: “Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!”

I remain unconvinced by this line of reasoning.38 The theory of general relativity (henceforth GRT) can’t be the final word on theoretical physics. The Big Bang from an initial singularity is what emerges if you assume the truth of GRT and then rewind the observable expansion of the universe. Unfortunately, our understanding of gravity, under GRT, is incon­ sistent with what we know of quantum mechanics. To quote Brian Pitts (2008, p. 695), this “all but proves that there exists a consistent theory of gravity that matches GRT in some classical limit, but which differs from it in regimes when dimensional arguments suggest that quantum effects should be large.” We’re still waiting for that unified and consistent theory to be born. And thus, Pitts continues: 38  In more contemporary times, it is supported by William Lane Craig (1979; 1997; Craig & Sinclair, 2009).

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Creatio ex Nihilo  59 Once the rights of unborn theories are accepted, the default status allegedly held by GRT and hence of Big Bang cosmology . . . disappears. In the ultra-strong field regime of the hot dense so-called “early universe” (to use a term that presupposes the Big Bang singularity), GRT is just another speculation among many.

Gabriel Veneziano (2006), the father of String Theory, wrote: Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense—that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective.

Veneziano documents the best contenders in the race for a consistent theory of quantum gravity. None of them conceive of the universe beginning in a singular­ ity. On all of the best contenders, when you rewind the expansion of the universe, you don’t get to a beginning of time. Consequently, the “pre-bang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology” (ibid.). Pitts (2008, p. 688) calls this new trend among quantum gravity researchers an “intolerance” towards singularities. He writes (ibid.): Most people who work on quantum gravity take for granted that the Big Bang singularity is an artefact of incomplete physical understanding and expect or hope that uniting gravity with quantum mechanics in some kind of quantum gravity will resolve the singularity into some well-defined situation that admits of extrapolation to still earlier times, ad infinitum.

In other words, many physicists expect that once we arrive at a better understand­ ing of the universe, we’ll recognize that singularities are impossible. They expect, therefore, that what we currently think of as a singularity at the beginning of time will eventually admit of a new definition—a definition in terms of some sort of state that is no beginning at all. Of course, this isn’t the rehabilitation of a classical steady state theory, with its basically unchanging universe. The universe, we can be quite sure, is far from steady. But the idea that the Big Bang wasn’t the begin­ ning does seem to breathe new life into the notion of an eternal, albeit unsteady, universe, and thus of creatio continua. But Pitts goes further. Even if the classical Big Bang Theory is taken as gospel, we still don’t get a beginning. Consider the positive numbers. Which positive number is the smallest? There’s 1. But that’s not as small as 0.1. And that’s not as small as 0.01. And that’s not as small as 0.001. The positive numbers don’t have a first number, even if they have a limit—namely 0. Likewise, the Big Bang Theory

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60  The Principles of Judaism tells us that past time has a limit: the singularity. But it doesn’t give us a first moment. Consequently, he concludes that (ibid., p. 689): [W]hether one is tolerant or intolerant towards singularities, it turns out that there is no first moment (unless one is installed by hand), because every moment is preceded by earlier moments.

You can always go further than the empirical evidence, without contradicting it, and install a first moment “by hand.” Whether you’re tolerant or intolerant of singularities, you’ll have to install a first moment by hand, if philosophical or theological considerations give you reason to believe in a first moment. Pitts writes (ibid., p. 679): [T]heists who affirm creation in time ought to hold, with Maimonides and Aquinas in spirit, that creation in time is known by faith rather than by natural philosophy—or at least, not from the singularity in Big Bang cosmology.

Cosmological considerations really don’t seem to help us towards the conclusion that the creation occurred in time, neither do they hinder us. Perhaps other con­ sid­er­ations will help.

2.2.2.  Philosophical Considerations for the Beginning of Time Simply put, the argument I have in mind can be constructed as follows:39 1. Assume (for the sake of reductio): There are an infinite series of past times. 2. Assume: It isn’t possible to complete an infinite series.40 3. Therefore: It isn’t possible to complete the series of past times. (From 1 and 2) 4. Assume: If it isn’t possible to complete the series of past times, then pre­ sentness would never have reached us. 5. Therefore: Presentness would never have reached us. (From 3 and 4) 6. Assume: Presentness has reached us. 7. Therefore: There is no infinite series of past times. (Reductio on 1, from 1–6) 8. Assume: If there is no infinite series of past times, then there was a first moment of time. 9. Therefore: There was a first moment of time. (From 7 and 8)

39  Inspired by Saadya Gaon (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 1:2, pp. 49–50). 40  I’m not going to question this assumption. In fact, I endorse it. But I recognize that it is subject to debate. See footnotes 24 and 28 in chapter 8 for discussion of this debate.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  61 To Maimonides (2000, 1:74), and others, this argument seemed easy to resist. It trades upon four undischarged assumptions (lines 2, 4, 6, and 8). If (but only if) all of them are true, the argument will be sound. So, which of them is false? 2 and 8 seem to be self-evident. If the argument fails, it must be because it falls at 4 or 6. And, indeed, 4 and 6 both make a number of controversial presuppositions. A-theories of time (you’ll remember) contend that one moment of time is, in an absolute sense, present; all earlier times (if any exist) are the past, and all later times (if any exist) are the future. The B-theory recognizes that some times are later than others, and that some times are earlier than others, but contends that no time is, in any absolute sense, present, past, or future. A-theorists tend to claim that only they can make sense of the immediate ex­peri­ence we have, living as we do in the flow of time, of the passage of time. But B-theorists have had some success in countering, or undermining, this claim (Paul, 2010; Deng, 2013). B-theorists tend to claim that only they can render their the­ ory consistent with the findings of contemporary physics. But A-theorists have had some success in countering this claim (Zimmerman, 2008)—especially if metaphysics, like theology, is allowed to go beyond the empirical evidence, without undermining the empirical evidence. On the B-theory of time, there isn’t some property called presentness that moves across the series of instants. All times exist. All times are equally real. There is no movement in this picture of time, and thus, even if there are an infinite number of times in our past, no thing needed to complete an infinite sequence in order that we should be able to say of ourselves that we’re living in the present. There is no absolute presentness moving from one time to the next, just as there is no absolute hereness that accompanies us as we journey from place to place. So, B-theorists can deny our argument. Even among the A-theories, there might be room to deny our argument for a first moment. Presentism is the view that only one time exists: now. The past no longer exists, and the future doesn’t yet exist. You might think that presentists would automatically accept the conclusion that there is a first moment; namely the only moment; namely, now! But that’s not right. Presentists accept that there were times before ours. They don’t exist anymore, but they did exist. For the presentist, what makes past tense statements true or false is not the exist­ ence of past facts. The past and all it contains has gone. What makes past tense statements true or false is going to be something about the present. Something about the present makes it the case that there was a battle of Hastings in 1066. Something about the present makes it the case that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. So, if it’s true that there was a first moment, it would have to be something about the present that makes it true. And, if it’s false that there was a first moment, it won’t be because, as premise 1 assumes, there currently exists an infinite number of past moments. And thus, for the presentist, the whole argument misconstrues what an infinitely long past would amount to. The argument simply misfires.

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62  The Principles of Judaism This presentist response led Maimonides to reject the argument. He cites Alfarabi’s now lost work, On Changeable Beings. Because past moments are not real, Alfarabi argued, they cannot constitute a violation of line 2. They are not the sort of completed actual infinity that 2, rightly, rules out.41 But our argument for a first moment is straightforwardly sound if you have an A-theory of time, in which past moments really do exist. Three fairly standard A-theories meet this requirement. (1) The growing block theory of time says that past times exist and that future times don’t exist. The block of spacetime grows into the nothingness of the future. The edge of this growing block, in the direction of its growth, is the present. If there was no beginning to time, then the block would have had to complete an infinite amount of growth before it got to its current size. This is impossible. Consequently, the argument for a first moment goes through. (2) The branching theory says that past time exists as a single four-dimensional trunk. The present lies at a branching point, from which any number of possible futures branch out. As the property of presentness moves along its journey from one side of the timeline to the other, it selects one branch at each branching point. The trunk gets longer as the present continues on its way, discarding unselected branches as it goes. If there was no beginning to time, the property of presentness would have had to have completed an infinitely long journey. This is impossible. Consequently, the argument for a first moment goes through. (3) The moving spotlight theory says that all times exist eternally, with no branches. The property of presentness is like a spotlight that fleetingly touches on each moment as it makes its way across the face of time. If there was no beginning to time, the property of presentness would never have got to us. But we are presently in the present, and so the argument for a first moment goes through. Some have argued that if any theory of time is the true theory, then it is also neces­ sarily true. Why say such a thing? Perhaps you’ll say that if presentism, say, is true, then it turns out to be a true description of time’s essence, just as H2O turned out to be a true description of the essence of water. Before that discovery, you could have been forgiven for thinking that water had a different chemical composition. After that discovery, you must recognize that water is identical to H2O. Things cannot be non-identical to themselves. And so water, we have come to see, is necessarily H2O. Likewise, if we come to realize that time just is what presentism 41  Maimonides (2000) cites Alfarabi at the end of 1:74, having set the argument out in proposition 11 of 1:73.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  63 describes, then we’ll come to see that presentism is necessarily true. But even if presentism is necessarily true of time, there could have been a world with no time, and a different dimension in its place: not time, but shmime. Shmime could be just like time, other than for the fact that it is accurately described by, say, the growing block theory. And thus, there’s still a sense, I want to insist, in which each theory of “time” describes a real possibility. In chapter 8, I argue that God has a very good reason not to create a B-theoretic world (at least, not a standard B-theoretic one), nor a presentist one. Based on arguments developed with Tyron Goldschmidt, I claim that God has good reason to create a world with a changeable past. Moreover, I claim that neither the (stand­ ard) B-theory nor presentism would give God the ability to change the past. These claims I argue for in chapter 8. But, if (1) there are various possible ways that time could be, and if (2) God does have reason to choose a metaphysics of time that would allow for him to change the past, and (3) if the past cannot be changed on the (standard) B-theory, or on presentism, then we do have good reason to believe that we don’t live in a (standard) B-theoretic world, or in a presentistic one, since we have good reason to believe that God doesn’t make bad choices. If the arguments of chapter 8 are sound, then a relatively standard theism pro­ vides us with good reason to believe that nobody lives in a (standard) B-theoretic world, nor in a presentistic one. God wouldn’t make such a world. Consequently, we live in a non-presentistic, A-theoretic world (or, as we shall see, in section 8.3, a non-standard B-theoretic world that requires at least a first moment of hypertime). If that’s the case, then the argument for a first moment really does go through. Contrary to what Maimonides thought, and just as Saadya Gaon claimed (alFayyûmî, 1989, 1:2, pp. 49–50), theists have philosophical reasons, independent of any particular biblical data, to believe that there was a first moment.42 This will be argued for in chapter 8.

2.3.  Ex Nihilo or ex Materia? Given the argument to be developed in chapter 8, theists should accept that there was a beginning to the universe. But we haven’t established whether that beginning 42  Saadya seems to assume a non-presentist A-theory of time, independent of any theological commitments. Indeed, he thinks that reflection on the nature of time will demonstrate that time has a beginning. This only works on a non-presentist A-theory of time. He then uses the notion that the universe, and time, had a beginning to argue for the existence of a timeless creator. My argument bor­ rows from Saadya but actually is very different. I’m assuming the existence of God from the outset. I use this theological assumption to ground my adoption of a non-presentist A-theory of time. Only then do I go on to argue that time, given a non-presentist A-theory, must have had a beginning. Saadya was engaged in a different project. He was trying to demonstrate the truth of Judaism, as he understood it. I am merely trying to lay out the fundamental commitments of Judaism, under their most charitable interpretation. Accordingly, I can use the assumption of God’s existence in my arguments in ways that Saadya—given the scope of his project—could not.

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64  The Principles of Judaism was ex nihilo or ex materia. Does the Jewish tradition take a stance on this question? Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, 1040–1105) notes that the first word of the Bible is in construct form. Consequently, a good translation of the Bible’s beginning would be: In the beginning of God’s creating the heaven and the earth, the earth was unformed and void . . .

This translation implies that, right from the start, before God got around to doing anything, there was already an unformed earth. Subsequently, as God started to create, he said, “Let there be light.” In this way, he imposed order upon the preexistent chaos. This looks like creatio ex materia. According to David Winston (1971), before the rise of Christian and Muslim influences, this is how the rabbis would have understood these verses. According to Jonathan Goldstein (1984), Winston is mistaken. Creatio ex nihilo was an early rabbinic orthodoxy, unrelated to outside influences. It was actually connected to belief in the resurrection. According to Goldstein, belief in the resurrection took an extreme form in early rabbinic texts. The dead, they thought (based upon their readings of Daniel 12:2 and Isaiah 26:19), will be resurrected in their original bodies. This wasn’t the opinion of Jewish Greeks, for whom resurrection didn’t seem to be a dogma at all. This wasn’t the opinion of Josephus, who claims that we will be resurrected in new bodies. But it was the rabbinic consensus. This consensus faces certain worries. What happens if the matter that once constituted a living body has been completely annihilated, or is now part of some other living body? If we’re supposed to wait in our graves until our corpses re-form, then what about the martyrs who were cremated against their will, whose ashes have been widely dispersed and absorbed by new material objects? Will they too rise again? But if bodies can be created out of nothing, then God can bring the same body in and out of existence at will. Therefore, belief in creatio ex nihilo helps to make sense of the rabbinic doctrine of resurrection.43 Goldstein thinks it no surprise that Rabban Gamliel II, just a few decades after the destruction of the temple in 70 ce, was a champion of both doctrines: bodily resurrection (Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 90b–91a) and creatio ex nihilo (Genesis Rabba 1:9):44 A philosopher once asked Rabban Gamliel and said to him, “Your God is only a great artist because he found great materials that helped him: chaos and void, 43  Saadya Gaon makes the same connection between the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the doctrine of resurrection (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 7:1–2, pp. 264, 267). 44  Goldstein provides a rationale for trusting the reliability of both of these attributions.

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Creatio ex Nihilo  65 darkness, spirit, water, and the depths.” Rabban Gamliel responded to him: “That man’s spirit should blow! Regarding all of them, the term ‘creation’ is written: chaos and void, as it says (Isaiah 45:7), ‘He makes peace and creates evil [i.e. chaos and void]’; darkness, ‘He fashions light and creates darkness’ (ibid.) . . . ”

One part of the Bible implies that God used various tools to create the universe. Other parts come to the rescue, informing us that those tools were also created. The Bible teaches creatio ex nihilo. What’s more, we shouldn’t forget that the standard reading of the first verse of the Bible is that in the beginning, God created both the heavens and the earth—presumably, from nothing. Creatio ex nihilo has a good claim to the imprimatur of tradition. Abravanel condemns creatio ex materia as heretical, since it attributes two causes to our uni­ verse: God and the primordial material he used to fashion us (1863, 2.5, 16b). On the other hand, perhaps heresy can be avoided, since there’s still only one creator. It would, indeed, be difficult to label creatio ex materia as heretical, since it did have its own rabbinic adherents (e.g., Genesis Rabba 10:3); even if they quickly became a minority. Furthermore, the nature of rabbinic tradition, regarding doc­ trine, clearly gives us some wiggle room under pressure. If decisive philosophical considerations push us in the direction of creatio ex materia, even though the tradition favors ex nihilo, then that’s where we should go. But, we’ll see, they don’t.

2.3.1.  Creation According to Gersonides Gersonides was an A-theorist; probably a growing block theorist.45 He accepted the central argument of section 2.2.2. Time had a beginning. But he also endorsed the argument from the nature of matter (Gersonides, 1987–99, Vol. III, 6:1:17, p. 325), which we explored in section 2.1.1.1, and the argument from the nature of possibility (ibid., p. 327), which we explored in section 2.1.1.2. These arguments don’t conclude that the universe is eternal. They only conclude that matter is eternal. Gersonides therefore contends that the creation had a beginning but that it must have been preceded (ontologically if not chronologically) by some formless eternal stuff, from which God formed a universe. There are two main philosophical accounts of substance. The substance-attribute theory asks us to make a distinction between a substance and the properties that that substance has. It asks us to divide each substance (what they call “thick particulars”) into a substratum (a “thin particular”) and its properties. The bundle

45  When he discusses God’s knowledge of the future, he makes it clear that, according to him, the future doesn’t exist (Gersonides, 1987–99, Vol. II, 3:4). This makes him either a presentist or a growing block theorist. Had he been a presentist, he may have been able to resist the argument that time has a beginning. I therefore infer that he was, most likely, a growing block theorist.

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66  The Principles of Judaism theory, by contrast, simply contends that each substance is a bundle of properties without the need for any substratum. The problem with the substance-attribute view is that it posits bare (or thin) particulars that exist, somehow prior to their having any property. But this seems incoherent. Nothing can exist without properties. Even the property of having no properties seems to be a property, which only goes to show how futile is the attempt to find a thing without a property! The most popular responses to this problem all deny that the substance-attribute view requires the existence of property-less particulars. Memorably, Robert Baker (1967, p. 211) distinguished between two ways in which a particular could be bare: it could be nude, or it could be naked. A nude particular does have properties, but none of them necessarily. It could swap all of its properties for other properties. A naked particular, by contrast, has no proper­ ties at all. The substance-attribute view, according to Baker, requires that particu­ lars are nude. A nude particular that has the properties that characterize an electron, for example, could equally well have had the properties that characterize a piano. Of course, the substance that is an electron couldn’t have been a piano, but a substance is more than just a nude particular; it’s a nude particular and its attributes. Just because particulars are nude, it doesn’t mean that they’re naked. A naked particular would be a particular that had no properties at all. That would be absurd. A nude particular, by contrast, does have properties; it’s just inessential to it which properties it has. David Armstrong has a different response. Thin particulars don’t even need to be nude. A nude particular would be one that instantiates no particular set of proper­ ties essentially. A thin particular, by contrast, let’s call it “a,” could, for all the substance-attribute theory has to tell us, necessarily instantiate a certain set of prop­ erties, for example—the sort of properties that characterize an electron. What makes it a thin particular is that it simply isn’t identical to, nor is it a part of, nor is it comprised by, the properties that it instantiates. In Armstrong’s words, it is thin, but it is not bare: “It is not bare because to be bare it would have to be not instantiating any properties. But though clothed, it is thin” (Armstrong, 1989, p. 95). The thick particular, by contrast, i.e., the electron itself, is a state of affairs. The thick particular is the state of affairs of a (i.e., the thin particular) instantiating electron-properties. The bundle theorist is likely to find these views, with Andrew Bailey (2012, p. 35), to be “wildly obscure.” But for my purposes, it is important to note: nobody wants to embrace the existence of completely bare, or naked, particulars. For bundle theorists, substances have to have properties because they are nothing more than bundles of properties. The substance-attribute view makes a distinc­ tion between particulars and properties, but it needn’t posit any particulars actu­ ally existing without properties. Gersonides’ view, it seems, would embarrass both a bundle theorist and a substance-attribute theorist. It claims that before God imposed order upon the

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Creatio ex Nihilo  67 world, there was matter with no form. Here we have a bare naked particular (or, perhaps, a collection of bare naked particulars, which would later be used to form the world). In actual fact, Gersonides dilutes his position. He wants his particulars to be bare before the creation, because he wants to attribute the existence of all forms, all patterns, all beauty, and all utility to God (Gersonides, 1987–99, Vol. III, 6:1:28, p. 338). But Gersonides was forced into attributing spatial extension to primor­ dial matter. He wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having a vacuum before the creation. Instead of suggesting that there was no vacuum because there was no space before the creation, he says that there was no vacuum because precreation space was filled with formless matter (ibid., 6:1:17, pp. 325–7). Gersonides is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he wants the universe to have had a beginning, and on the other hand, he is convinced that creatio ex nihilo makes no sense. Accordingly, he posits an eternal formless mat­ ter, to function as the material of God’s creatio ex materia. And then, compelled into attributing spatial extension to this matter, it turns out that it’s not so form­ less after all: it has spatial extension. If you’ve got matter, and you’ve got form, then isn’t that, already, a material universe, of some sort? Perhaps Gersonides could escape some of these worries with his claim that the universe starts, not when form first emerges, since there is some minimal geometric form to his extended primordial matter. Rather, the universe starts when time starts. Time, you might think, doesn’t get going until physical processes of cause, effect, and change start to take place. So, the universe really is given a beginning. Anything before that beginning isn’t a universe! That might work, but only, of course, if you’re willing to tie the passage of time closely to the occurrence of change.46 Even then, it’s not clear that a universe requires the passage of time in order to be a universe. Imagine a universe just like ours—a perfect copy, with all of the intrinsic prop­ erties that our universe currently instantiates. Imagine that that universe exists for only one instant of time. That is to say, imagine that it’s extended in three dimensions, but not in the fourth. Is that not a universe, even though it’s frozen in an instant of time? If not, why not? And if it is a universe, then why isn’t Gersonides’ frozen primordial matter already a universe—since it is matter, with (geometric) form? If this frozen primordial matter is a universe, then his doctrine of creation doesn’t have God create a universe, so much as renovate one.47 Gersonides should stop worrying about vacuums. Perhaps perfect vacuums are possible. Furthermore, there needn’t be a vacuum prior to the universe, if there’s no space prior to the universe. Consequently, Gersonides’ primordial matter can revert to a more bare and naked state. Let it have no properties whatsoever, not 46  There are reasons to be wary of claiming too close an allegiance between the passage of time and the occurrence of change (Shoemaker, 1969). 47  Thanks to Saadya Lebens, with whom I discussed these instantaneous universes.

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68  The Principles of Judaism even spatial extension. Let it be completely bare. Nobody can accuse it of being a universe before it receives some form, if it has no properties at all. But now we revert to our older criticism. The notion of a bare and naked particular is inco­ herent. What would it mean for there to be particulars with no properties whatsoever? The theory of creatio ex materia has nothing to recommend itself to us. It can only be a theory of creation at all, rather than a theory of renovation, if it holds on fast to the existence of completely bare and naked particulars. George Berkeley (2009, p. 15) famously had a problem with people, such as Locke, who thought that they could conceive of the idea of a general triangle, which was “neither oblique, nor rectangle, equicrural nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once.” The theory of creatio ex materia seems to require that we go even further. On Gersonides’ account, we need to imagine things without any properties whatso­ ever. Moreover, the arguments against creatio ex nihilo haven’t stood up. We started this chapter with three medieval interpretations of the doctrine of creation. It should be clear by now that the winning candidate is creatio originalis ex nihilo; justifiably the favorite choice of the tradition.

2.3.2.  The Gersonidean Dilemma Why then did Gersonides opt for the most troublesome of cosmogonies? Remember: the argument from the nature of matter assumed, without argu­ ment, that nothing ever comes from nothing (section 2.1.1.1). This assumption had counterexamples. The property of my table’s tablehood, or the singleton set of Socrates, really did pop into existence from nothing. Note, however, that these counterexamples are abstract entities. They are neither physical, material, nor concrete. Remember also how the Aristotelian powers-and-liabilities account of possi­ bility fails to make room for the genesis of the singleton set of Socrates (sec­ tion 2.1.1.2). As far as experience can inform us, it seems to be true of physical things, that they only come to exist if, prior to their existence, there existed things liable to become them. The only counterexamples that spring to mind—such as the singleton set of Socrates—are not physical, nor material, nor concrete. Gersonides (1987–99, Vol. III, 6:1:17, p. 325) was quick to admit that creatio ex nihilo can, in fact, occur, but only when you’re talking about abstract things, such as form. His worry was that creatio ex nihilo is impossible for a world like ours: “[O]nly forms, not bodies, are created in this manner [i.e. ex nihilo] . . .’ The arguments in sections  2.1.1.1 and  2.1.1.2 fail, not merely because they admit of counterexamples. They fail because they rely on unsubstantiated assump­ tions about matter, or about the concept of possibility. Nevertheless, the fact that these assumptions admit of no known counterexamples that are physical, or

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Creatio ex Nihilo  69 material, or concrete, should—at the very least—worry us if what we’re looking to establish is the creation ex nihilo of a physical, or material, or concrete universe. Paul Kabay (2013, p. 284) notes that William Lane Craig, in search of examples of creatio ex nihilo, can only find examples of abstract entities: Among such cases, Craig focusses on abstract objects of various sorts: the equa­ tor, the centre of mass of the solar system, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. According to Craig, arguably these are all cases where something like an efficient cause brings about an entity sans material cause.

Kabay finds this ironic, since Craig is a nominalist, or fictionalist, about abstract objects. Craig doesn’t really believe that these things exist. Sherlock Holmes was created ex nihilo by Conan Doyle. But Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really exist. Kabay’s conclusion is that God may have created the world ex nihilo, but that, if he did, the world doesn’t really exist. Kabay is sympathetic to such a move, because he has room in his ontology—somewhat bizarrely—for non-existent beings.48 The world itself just turns out to be one of them! Certainly, this is going too far. Why think that abstract objects and fictional people don’t exist? They do exist. They’re just not material. So, a more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that the world does exist but that, like other counter­ examples to the assumption that nothing comes from nothing, the world isn’t really material, or physical, or, perhaps, even concrete. Even that goes too far. We can’t think of material counterexamples, other than the universe itself, to Gersonides’ assumption that nothing comes from nothing. But that shouldn’t bother us. We’re like the orphan in Maimonides’ thought experiment, eager to make bad inferences from cases of particular generation to cases of general generation. Creatio originalis ex nihilo has the imprimatur of the tradition. Creatio originalis ex materia, by contrast, is philosophically embarrass­ ing. A material world coming out of nothing is unprecedented, but that doesn’t make it impossible. Nevertheless, Gersonides may have been on to something. In the next chapter, we’ll see that Abrahamic monotheism entails a form of idealism. For some reason, idealism didn’t seem to be on the radar of medieval philosophers—this lacuna is explored by Peter King (2007)—but, for the idealist, this world isn’t material after all. Had Gersonides realized that there’s a coherent way of construing the world as immaterial, then even holding true to his assumptions, he could have, and should have, embraced the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Even according to Gersonides, non-material things really can emerge from nothing. As we shall see, that’s all that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo really demands.

48 

That is to say, Kabay is a Meinongian.

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3

Idealism ex Nihilo Our universe had a beginning. Before that, there was nothing, besides God. God created the universe ex nihilo. In this chapter (based on a paper that I coauthored with Tyron Goldschmidt) we shall see how the Jewish “mystical” ­tradition uncovered a problem at the heart of the doctrine of creation. The doctrine of tzimtzum is the alleged solution to that problem. One way into the problem of creation is to recognize that theism—along with a number of quite plausible assumptions, such as the assumption that there is a universe—entails idealism.

3.1.  Berkeley, Better, Besht Roughly speaking, idealism is the view that reality is, in some important sense, mental. In this chapter, the following varieties of idealism will be relevant: Berkeleyan Idealism Everything that exists is either a mind or an idea in a mind. Moreover, nothing is both an idea and a mind—everything is either one thing or the other. One mind is infinite (i.e., God’s mind), all others are finite. Material objects do exist, but they are actually ideas. Of course, none of your ideas are material objects. Your ideas don’t have the requisite stability, order, or detail to be material objects. Material objects are, rather, ideas in the mind of God, to which we are given some sort of access. Moderate Hassidic Idealism This view also contends that (a) everything is either a mind or an idea in a mind, and that (b) material objects are ideas in God’s mind. But this view claims that some minds are also ideas. In fact, every mind, other than God’s mind, is an idea in the mind of God. Extreme Hassidic Idealism This view agrees with the previous two views, that everything is a mind or an idea in a mind. It agrees with Berkeleyan Idealism, against Moderate Hassidic Idealism, that no mind is an idea. But it disagrees with both of the previous views in its two distinctive claims that: (a) no material object can be an idea, and (b) no mind other than God exists. In other words: there are no material objects. There The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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Idealism ex Nihilo  71 are no non-divine minds. Everything that exists, other than God’s mind, is merely an idea in God’s mind. One way to render Extreme Hassidic Idealism less absurd is to note the difference between (1) the world in which an author writes a story, and (2) what happens in that story (this distinction will be explored much more thoroughly in chapters 4 and  5). Keeping this distinction firmly in view, the Extreme Hassidic Idealist doesn’t have to deny, at least not outright, the platitudes that it seems to be denying. For example, we can maintain that finite minds and material objects really do exist. They exist at the level of (2) what God imagines. All the Extreme Hassidic Idealist is saying is that there exists a more fundamental level—the level (1) at which God is merely imagining a world—at that level, finite minds and material objects do not exist. At that level, only God and his ideas of minds and his ideas of material objects exist. But that doesn’t undermine the fact that the world that God imagines, as he imagines it, really is populated by finite minds and material objects, and that we are among them. Berkeleyan Idealism is the view of George Berkeley. Extreme Hassidic Idealism, we shall see—in sections 5.1–5.1.3 of chapter 5—is the view of various Hassidic and Kabbalistic thinkers, some of whom, such as the founder of Hassidism, Rabbi Yisrael Shem Tov (known as the Besht, 1698–1760), were contemporaneous with Berkeley. Moderate Hassidic Idealism features in this chapter merely as a bridge from Berkeley to the Besht; a bridge that will be of use in the arguments that follow.

3.2.  From Theism to Idealism I present three arguments from theism to idealism.

3.2.1.  Argument 1: From Omnipotence Argument 1. Assume: God is omnipotent. 2. Therefore: God has a most efficacious will. (From line 1, given the definition of omnipotence) 3. Therefore: Every feature of every object is wholly dependent upon God willing that object to have those features. (From line 2, given the definition of an “efficacious will”) 4. Assume: If all of the features of an object wholly depend upon a mind willing it to have those features, then that object is an idea in that mind. 5. Therefore: All objects are ideas in God’s mind. (From lines 3 and 4)

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72  The Principles of Judaism Commentary Line 1 is uncontroversial for most theists. But what does 2 mean, when it says that God has an “efficacious will”? If a being has an efficacious will, then its willing for P to be the case is sufficient for P to be the case; it makes it the case. When God wills for there to be light, then there is light. Simple as that! A being with an ­efficacious will certainly seems to be more powerful than a being without one.1 Accordingly, 2 is no more controversial than 1. Line 3 assumes that, for any object, its possession of properties would wholly depend upon God, given his efficacious will. 4 assumes that this sort of dependence, of an object upon a mind, would render the object an idea in that mind. Why might you deny 3? You might think that numbers, for example, exist necessarily and have their properties necessarily. According to this way of thinking, the number 6 exists in all possible worlds, and is even in all possible worlds. God’s having an efficacious will wouldn’t make the number 6 dependent upon him. The number 6 exists in all possible worlds. God’s having an efficacious will certainly wouldn’t make the evenness of the number 6 dependent upon him. The number 6 would be even whatever God thought. But line 3 of our argument needn’t concern itself with these matters. Whatever numbers are, it seems fair to say that they have their properties necessarily. It seems right to say that it would be a logical and/or metaphysical impossibility for the number 6, for example, to be odd. Our argument doesn’t assume that God can do the logically, or metaphysically, impossible. God’s om­nipo­tence is merely the power to do anything. Logically or metaphysically impossible things aren’t really things, since they’re not possible. As non-things, they’re not included under the scope of the word anything. God’s not being able to do them, therefore, is no limit.2 Accordingly, I can accept that God cannot efficaciously will for the number 6 to be odd. All we have to do, to avoid these sorts of worries with line 3, is to restrict our attention to contingent beings—beings that didn’t have to exist; as all created beings are. Our problems with 3 don’t end there. You might think that we have essences that restrict what is possible. If that’s true, you might think that God could not will us to be fish (since our essences wouldn’t allow it). Consequently, our features are not wholly dependent upon God’s will. But the first thing to note is that this objection assumes a controversial doctrine of essentialism.3 Perhaps there’s no limit to what we could have been. Moreover, even if we have essences, and none of us could have been fish, God is still responsible for the existence of anything with such essences, rather than things with other essences. So far, 3 stands up to 1  For an argument that omnipotence entails efficacious will, see Pearce (2017). 2  This view is defended by Maimonides (2000, 3:15). I will later defend the notion that God can do the impossible (I raise this notion in section 3.5 below), but only in a limited sense; a sense which doesn’t undermine the premises of this argument. 3  See Ahmed (2007) for arguments against this sort of essentialism.

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Idealism ex Nihilo  73 scrutiny, at least as far as it concerns contingent objects, but 4 still requires some motivation. Goldschmidt and I concede that we have no definitive argument for the truth of line 4. We merely proposed it as the best explanation of the phenomena. The phenomena are the abundant supply of confirmatory examples and the conspicuous absence of counterexamples. In other words: any time you find that all of the features of some x wholly depend upon some mind, y, willing it to have those features, then you also find that that x is an idea in mind y. Perhaps we have a counterexample in the movements of our arms. These movements depend upon our minds, and yet the movements of our arms are not ideas in our minds. This is not a counterexample. Such movements are not wholly dependent upon our minds. Another counterexample might be the distribution of colors on the canvas, which are dependent upon the will of the artist. The colors on the canvas are not ideas in the artist’s mind. But once again, the colors are not wholly dependent upon the artist’s mind, and thus they do not constitute a counterexample to 4. Line 4 might not convince somebody antecedently committed to materialism. Materialism is the view that all phenomena, including mental phenomena, are at root material phenomena, or—at least—wholly depend upon material phenomena, including brain states. Inability to convince the materialist is a weakness. Even the materialist (so long as they are atheistic) should be able to accept our argument’s conclusion that theism entails idealism. But a materialist won’t accept that minds ever have the power wholly to determine the features of ideas. According to the materialist, your mind’s willpower can’t determine the features of your ideas without all sorts of physical and neurological causes playing their essential roles alongside it (or, in some sense, beneath it). This problem can be overcome. The materialist would accept that if (contra materialism) a disembodied mind existed, and if it had the power over some object, x, to determine by will alone all of its features, then that x would be an idea of that mind. The materialist can’t accept this as a necessary condition for being an idea, since they argue that this condition is never met. But they can accept it as a sufficient condition. Accordingly, even the materialist can accept the premises of our argument. A final problem with 3 and 4 is that they seem to equivocate. Radical dependence of all contingent beings upon God does follow from God’s possession of an efficacious will. Moreover, an object being an idea does follow from its radical dependence upon a will. But “dependence” means something different in each case. The first type of dependence is causal: God’s will causes things to be. The second is constitutive: an idea’s having a feature can sometimes consist in its being willed to have that feature. The allegation is that the argument equivocates on two different senses of “dependence.” If the allegation is true, then the argument is invalid.

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74  The Principles of Judaism We salvage argument 1 when we recognize that it really maintains one sense of “dependence” throughout. The dependence in question isn’t straightforwardly causal. The artist causes the canvas to have the colors it does, but—on a classical theistic account—it is God who sustains each moment of that causal process. The canvas wouldn’t have its color without God willing it directly, or willing it in virtue of willingly respecting the freedom of the artist, by sustaining her actions, and their results, in being. The dependence associated with sustaining something in being is the only notion of dependence that our argument requires. Kenneth Pearce distinguishes between a grounding and a causing will: “An agent has a grounding will if and only if the agent’s acts of willing ground their fulfillment. An agent has a causing will if and only if, in cases in which the agent wills successfully, the agent’s willing causes its fulfillment’ (Pearce, 2017, p. 9). We can put our point this way: our finite minds have a grounding will with respect to the merely intentional objects that we dream up (Pearce seconds this). When you dream up a mental image of a flower, for example, that flower is a merely intentional object. You sustain that image in being, until you stop thinking it up. We claim that God has a grounding will with respect to all objects, rendering them all intentional from his perspective.4 The idealism that theism entails leaves Berkeley behind. Moderate Hassidic Idealism will do. All beings other than God are his ideas. You too are an idea in the mind of God—since God’s will sustains you in being. If you’re not convinced, here’s another argument.

3.2.2.  Argument 2: From God’s Perfect Rationality Argument 1. Assume: God is necessarily perfectly rational and necessarily omniscient. 2. Therefore: God would not do what he knows to be otiose, and he knows what is otiose. (From line 1, given the meaning of “perfectly rational” and “omniscient”) 3. Assume: If Berkeleyan Idealism is so much as possible, God could create a world that appears exactly like ours without creating non-mental material objects. 4. Assume: If God could create a world that appears exactly like ours without creating non-mental material objects, such objects would be otiose. 5. Therefore: If Berkeleyan Idealism is so much as possible, then God would not create non-mental material objects. (From lines 2, 3, and 4) 4  See also McCann (2012) for a similar distinction between general causation and God’s efficacious will, which bestows existence upon its objects.

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Idealism ex Nihilo  75 6. Assume: Berkeleyan Idealism is possible. 7. Therefore: God does not create non-mental material objects. (From lines 5 and 6) Commentary Perfect rationality and omniscience are acceptable to most theists. Line 3 is likewise unobjectionable. It merely describes what has to be possible if Berkeleyan Idealism is possible. Less acceptable are the claims that perfect rationality rules out otiosity (i.e., 2), or that non-mental material objects would be otiose if Berkeleyan Idealism was so much as possible (i.e., 4), or that Berkeleyan Idealism is possible (i.e., 6). But I maintain that all of these claims should be accepted. Regarding 2: a perfectly rational agent does not do something for no good ­reason—unless there is a good reason motivating the agent to do something for no good reason. Buridan’s ass should not do a dance if it doesn’t want to, and if it has no other good reason to do so. But it should arbitrarily choose one stack of hay over the other, since it should try to avoid starvation. So why deny 2? Perhaps 2 confuses what would be rational for humans with what would be rational for God. Presented with two sequences of actions, both with the same net expected utility—other than the fact that one sequence is longer and one sequence is shorter—a human agent would always be more rational to choose the shorter sequence because humans have limited resources—and thus the longer sequence will have a higher cost in time and/or energy. God wouldn’t have this problem, since he’s not limited in time or energy. Consequently, it’s not clear that decision theory, as applied to God, would rule out his choosing a course of action with otiose steps in it. 2 can be denied. You might think that a diachronic analysis (that is to say, an analysis that compares the two sequences step by step) would be of use in ruling out otiosity, and therefore rescuing line 2. Each step of the otiose sequence would have a lower utility, on average, than each step of the non-otiose sequence. But even then, you might argue that God’s being outside of time, or unlimited by time, requires us only to apply a synchronic analysis (that is to say: an analysis that compares the two sequences all at once). Or, you might appeal to sophisticated forms of diachronic analyses that forgive a sequence for detours, if subsequent steps make up for them. Goldschmidt and I could respond: if decision theory really doesn’t rule out otiosity, then there must be more to rationality than what the theory describes. That extra ingredient is spelled out by the simple and intuitive constraint: don’t act without good reason—unless you have good reason to act for no good reason. If you remain unconvinced, don’t start this argument from God’s perfect rationality. Start instead from his perfection. Perfection, you might think, always pursues the most beautiful course of action of those available, given one’s ends. You might adopt the following aesthetic principle: otiose actions are never the

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76  The Principles of Judaism most beautiful way of achieving one’s ends. So perfection doesn’t allow for the pursuit of otiose actions, even if rationality does. Alternatively, you might think that otiosity is ruled out by any plausible Principle of Sufficient Reason. Such a principle would state that every contingent being must have a reason for existing, special cases aside (compare Kleinschmidt, 2013). Otiose contingency, as such, could have no reason for existing. This reflection might be enough to stand 2 up on its own feet, if my previous attempts didn’t. Now I turn to 4. Multiple voices in the Jewish tradition suggest that God created the world for reasons that have to do with our moral and experiential lives.5 If that’s right, then non-mental matter, if it existed at all, would be a mere means towards that end. But the possibility of idealism means that the phenomenal world could exist without a non-mental material world. Non-mental matter would then not be necessary to our moral and experiential lives, and thus it would be rendered otiose. In other words: 4 follows from the thought that God’s purpose in creation has to do with what his sentient creatures achieve and/or experience. Berkeley seems to have had much the same thought: “If . . . it were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do so, must needs be a very precarious opinion; since it is to suppose, without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that are entirely useless, and serve no manner of purpose” (Berkeley, 2009, p. 32). One might resist this defense of 4, insisting that creating a mind-independent world for us to be in contact with would add value. It wouldn’t be otiose. We would refuse to plug into an experience machine for the rest of our lives—irrespective of the experiences it could promise us—because we want to be in “actual contact with . . . deeper reality” (Nozick, 2013, p. 43). Actual contact with deeper reality adds value to our lives. But Berkeley’s world is nothing like an experience machine. Berkeley’s world contains interactions with other souls and moral opportunities besides. The experience machine tears us away from the real world, whereas Berkeley’s world is the real world; according to idealism, there is no more real world lurking beyond it. We are in touch with deep reality. Regarding 6: even non-idealists accept the possibility of idealism. Bertrand Russell writes, in his very rejection of Berkeley, that “Berkeley [nevertheless] retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity” (Russell, 1998, p. 4). With all of the contentious premises defended, we can conclude that theism entails Berkeleyan Idealism. But we can go further, and stretch the argument to give us Moderate Hassidic Idealism. All we have to do is replace our talk of Berkeleyan Idealism with talk of Moderate Hassidic Idealism, and supplement all talk of mind-independent material objects with talk of independent non-divine minds. If

5  This is ably demonstrated by Alter (1995). Accordingly, I won’t go over the territory here.

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Idealism ex Nihilo  77 we can be all that we ever will be, even whilst being divine ideas, then why would God go to the trouble of making us anything more? This argument would conclude that the creation of minds that are not at once divine ideas would be otiose. The way to attack this revised argument would be to claim that Moderate Hassidic Idealism is impossible. Berkeleyan Idealism might be true—for all we know—but Moderate Hassidic Idealism cannot be true. We couldn’t be ideas, not even divine ideas. Ideas do not think or feel. When you prick them they do not bleed. Moderate Hassidic Idealism can respond: you are an idea and you do think and feel; so some ideas do think and feel! Why not think that some of God’s ideas could have feelings of their own? On the assumption that divine ideas would have as much reality as anything else, Gotthold Lessing had the same thought: the “original image is the thing itself, and to say that the thing also exists outside this original image means duplicating the latter in a way that is as unnecessary as it is absurd” (Lessing, 2005, p. 30)—emphasis added. This thought would seem to extend to mental phenomena too. If God has an image of a person experiencing something, then that image would be as real as the experience could ever be. Why duplicate it? Lessing may have been gesticulating towards Moderate Hassidic Idealism.6 So defended, the revised argument seems to be sound. Theism entails Moderate Hassidic Idealism. But we can go further. Revise the argument with the premise that (1) Extreme Hassidic Idealism is possible, and that (2) creating minds would be otiose if God could simply create ideas of minds. Extreme Hassidic Idealism distinguishes truth simpliciter from truth in the divine imagination (more on this in chapter 4). The view recognizes that, in the divine imagination you’re not just a figment of God’s imagination. You are not an idea. You are a mind. After all, you’re dreamt up as a person. In other words, although it’s true simpliciter that you’re just an idea, it’s true in the divine imagination that you’re a mind. Compare: in the play, Hamlet is a prince of Denmark and not at all an idea; outside of the play he is just an idea and not at all a prince. You might want to resist the claim that Extreme Hassidic Idealism is possible. After all, we know that we’re not imaginary because we have phenomenal consciousness. We think; therefore, we are. But I don’t deny that we have consciousness and that we think. That’s true of us—but only in God’s imagination. Compare: Hamlet has phenomenal consciousness and thinks too—inside the story. Outside of our relative stories and images, neither of us are minds. We are ideas. Inside of our stories we are minds that think and feel.7 6  Thanks to Bob Adams for the Lessing reference. Dean Zimmerman thought that we could call this argument “Why Lessing is always more”! 7  The logic of Descartes’s cogito argument works just as well, if it works at all, for fictional characters within their fictions as it does for us. This has already been argued by Jaako Hintikka (1962). For this reason, Hintikka attacks the interpretation of the cogito that renders it a logical argument rather than a “performative” argument. As a logical argument, it doesn’t work for fictional characters and so

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78  The Principles of Judaism Shakespeare didn’t create Hamlet in order that he could have a relationship with a flesh-and-blood human being. He created him for purely theatrical purposes. It is certainly essential to the story that Hamlet be a flesh-and-blood human being, but that much Shakespeare already achieved. To have made Hamlet so outside of the story would have been otiose. Analogously, God surely didn’t create us in order to have a relationship with beings on an ontological par with him. God has no need for such a relationship. Goldschmidt and I assume that God created the world entirely for our benefit, and not at all for his;8 or perhaps he created the world in order to express himself (see Lebens 2017a). Either way: God’s giving us flesh and blood outside of the story in which we live would have been as otiose as Shakespeare creating a real human being merely in order to populate his play. You might object. Even if making us material would be otiose, making us real would not be. Being real adds value. But God’s end in creation presumably centers around our moral and experiential lives, or perhaps the creation was a means of divine self-expression. The most that could matter, then, is that it should be true that we are real and that the world we live in is real—as it is from within the world as we experience it. God’s ends are in no obvious way thwarted if it is also true to say—from some perspective transcending human experience—that we are not real. Our reality adds value to us, not to God (since, if God is antecedently perfect, nothing can add value to him); it need only be true that we are real relative to the world in which we live, and we are. Argument 2 can thus be formulated in a number of ways: it can take you from theism to any of the three forms of Idealism discussed in this chapter—depending on how liberal you are as to what you imagine to be possible, and what purposes you imagine God to have had in our creation. Whatever the details, if you accept that his purposes were to do with our moral or experiential lives (or that they had something to do with self-expression), then Hassidic Idealism—of one form or another—will beckon you towards it. If you’re not convinced, I present one more argument.

3.2.3.  Argument 3: From God’s Goodness, Knowledge, and Rationality Argument 1. Assume: God is perfectly good, perfectly knowledgeable, and perfectly rational. 2. Assume: God created our suboptimal world. it shouldn’t work for us. Kripke’s criticism of Hintikka (Kripke, 2013) simply concedes that the cogito is sound, when uttered by Hamlet. I take Kripke’s side. 8  Again, I direct readers to Alter (1995).

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Idealism ex Nihilo  79 3. Assume: A perfectly good and rational God would never knowingly create a suboptimal world. 4. Lines 1–3 cannot all be true without contradiction. 5. Extreme Hassidic Idealism claims that line 1 is fundamentally true, but false relative to the image that God imagines; that line 2 is true relative to the image that God imagines, but fundamentally false, since God didn’t really create a world. He merely imagined doing so. Since lines 1 and 2 are only asserted relative to different levels of reality, there is no contradiction. 6. Extreme Hassidic Idealism allows the theist to assert lines 1–3 (albeit, ­relative to different levels of reality) without contradiction. Commentary Line 1 will be uncontroversial to most theists. Some would deny 2, because they’d deny that this world is suboptimal. According to them, we live in a world that couldn’t be better than it is. But I deny that any world could be optimal, and so this world must be suboptimal. Imagine that a happy rabbit, all things being equal, makes the world better for its happy existence. It seems to follow that, so long as God created enough space and resources for it not to interfere with the happiness of other beings, an extra happy rabbit would make the world even better. So long, then, as God created enough space and resources for more rabbits, God could always have created a better world by creating another happy rabbit (see Swinburne, 2004, pp. 114–15). You never reach a best world. No world is optimal. Those who deny 3 (see e.g. Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder (1994; 1996)) suggest that God can sort all of the suboptimal universes into those that are acceptable to God and those that are not even minimally acceptable. God can then arbitrarily choose one of the acceptable universes. Since there is no best ­universe, he has to make an arbitrary decision if he wants to create at all. In such situations, it isn’t irrational to make an arbitrary decision.9 Daniel Rubio (2018) disagrees. After dividing the possible worlds into two—the acceptable and the un­accept­ able—rational decision theory would still mandate that God shouldn’t choose the worst of the acceptable; i.e., the minimally acceptable world. After dismissing that world, the same principle would dictate that he dismisses the least acceptable of the new remainder. The same principle would keep dictating that he dismiss the least acceptable of the ever newer remainder. In Rubio’s words, “After infinitely many steps,” in which God dismisses the least acceptable, “we run out of worlds.” Remember: God doesn’t have to create (God is unlike Buridan’s ass, who really does need to eat and drink).

9  I recently defended such a view myself (Lebens, 2017a), before seeing the error of my ways.

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80  The Principles of Judaism Rubio accepts that if God is omniscient, and bound by the demands of goodness and rationality, then he cannot create any world. Rubio’s response is to deny that God is bound by the demands of goodness and rationality. Goldschmidt and I worry that this amounts to the claim that God is neither good nor rational. If God is perfectly good and perfectly wise, and if he is therefore bound by the demands of goodness and rationality, then we have to conclude that this world is imaginary. Fundamentally, God wouldn’t create such a world. Berkeleyan and Moderate Hassidic Idealism deny that we are imaginary. Consequently, theists should adopt Extreme Hassidic Idealism. Lines 1–3 of this argument should be accepted by all theists, but the only way we can make sense of them simultaneously emerges upon the adoption of Extreme Hassidic Idealism. The argument faces four significant problems (if not more). Problem 1: if a good God would never make x, then why would a good God imagine making x? Goldschmidt and I can respond: an author wouldn’t want to make bad things real, but she might want to write a story about bad things happening. That is to say: even though God has reason to refrain from creating a world like ours, we don’t accept that he thereby has reason to refrain from imagining a world like ours. According to Extreme Hassidic Idealism, our suffering isn’t real from God’s transcendent perspective; it is no more real to God than the suffering of fictional characters is to their author. The fact that fictional pain is fictionally real for fictional characters creates no obligation upon real authors to refrain from imagining fictional pain. Consequently, a good reason to refrain from making x does not automatically generate a good reason to refrain from imagining x.10 Problem 2: this argument entails that, relative to the world that God imagines, God created a suboptimal world, and thus, relative to the world that God im­agines, God isn’t perfectly good, or perfectly rational. We bite this bullet. We insist that God is perfectly good and perfectly rational, but as a character in his own imaginary world, he is at least immoral enough, or irrational enough, or both, to have created this world. This is a type of divine hiddenness: God doesn’t appear in this world exactly as he is beyond this world. He does so in order to make this world possible. If God allowed us to see his full goodness, we couldn’t continue to exist (compare Exodus 33:20). If God acted in perfect goodness and rationality, then he would not have created the universe. And indeed he has not. But he has diminished his goodness, or his rationality, in an imaginary universe, so that such a universe could coherently be imagined to be. Problem 3: the argument doesn’t force the theist to concede, with Extreme Hassidic Idealism, that this world is—from some fundamental perspective— imaginary. It leaves another option open to God: not to create at all. Perhaps argument 3 is, therefore, a theistic proof that the world doesn’t exist.

10  I have more to say on this issue in section 4.4 of chapter 4.

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Idealism ex Nihilo  81 We’ve already seen that classical theism entails the non-existence of the universe, according to Paul Kabay (2013). As a Meinongian (a person who believes that non-existent entities can have some sort of being), Kabay doesn’t accept that the existence of the universe is self-evident. He believes that there are nonexistent beings. Why not conclude that we are among them? Kabay thinks that fictional characters are non-existent beings. Accordingly, for him, the notion that the world is fictional collapses into the notion that it is non-existent. Along with most philosophers, Goldschmidt and I reject Meinongianism. The non-existence of the universe isn’t a live option for us. Furthermore: imaginary and fictional things do exist. They’re just not what they seem to be. Imaginary unicorns, for example, are not animals, but they do exist. They are ideas. So are we.11 Problem 4: Rubio gives up on God’s perfect rationality and goodness (though he wouldn’t put it this way), but he can make sense of the claim that God loves us. On our suggestion, what becomes of God’s love for us; and what becomes of our relationship with God? Goldschmidt and I respond: it is possible to love a fictional creation. Tolstoy was said to cry upon realizing how Anna Karenina’s life would end. Also: one should never forget that Extreme Hassidic Idealism stratifies reality into two levels. Even if we are imaginary from God’s transcendent perspective, we are still real within the world in which we live, and so is our relationship with God, who appears within the story itself, as a character, and loves us.

3.3.  Tzimtzum and the Problem of Creation The doctrine of tzimtzum (contraction) claims that to create the world, God first of all had to make room for it. The doctrine traces back at least to Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Arizal, 1534–72), and has since become a central doctrine of Jewish mysticism.12 Rabbi Hayyim Vital (1543–1620) provides the first written account of the Arizal’s theory. He tells us that in the beginning, “a most supreme, simple light filled the whole of existence.” Subsequently, that light contracted uniformly in all directions, away from the “exact centre of its light”  (Vital,  1999, pp. 11–13). A uniform contraction in all directions, away from some fixed point, would leave a circle, unoccupied by the light. Then, we’re told, a straight line of light extended into the center of this circle of darkness. All of this is supposed to have happened before Genesis 1:1. And so we have three stages that have to take place before the familiar creation story. First, there was an infinite light, uniformly extended, leaving no space

11  For the claim that fictional characters are ideas, see Everett & Schroeder (2015). 12  Gershom Scholem (1990, pp. 449–50) suggests that Nahmanides was the first to propose a doctrine of tzimtzum. The doctrine is also prefigured in the work of Rabbi Moses Cordovero (1522–70, see Sack (1989)).

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82  The Principles of Judaism untouched. Second, there was a contraction of that light, leaving a circular void of darkness surrounded by light. Third, a line of light penetrated the circle, creating a channel by which the light can move from the outside into the circle. R. Vital seems to be suggesting that the creation wasn’t possible until God fashioned a space in which it could occur. Teasing out an argument, we can present the doctrine of tzimtzum as a solution to a philosophical problem: The Problem of Creation: God is infinite. Hence, he (or his light) fills all space. Hence, there is no vacant space in which creation can occur. Hence, the creation cannot occur. But creation does occur. The Solution: God must have ceased to be infinite, contracting so as to create the requisite vacant space. Sadly, the problem (so stated) isn’t compelling. God’s being infinite need not mean that he, or anything emanating from him, is infinitely extended in space. The natural numbers are infinite, but they are not extended in space. You might think that if God is infinite, then he contains all things. But that’s a confusion. The number series doesn’t contain everything. Moreover, if God contains everything, then God has physical parts—an unsightly corollary. God’s infinity doesn’t generate these sorts of problems. His infinity only means that he has infinite power, knowledge, or goodness—none of which obviously entails infinite spatial extension. Nevertheless, in addition to his being infinite, God is taken to be omnipresent. Perhaps, then, we can refine the problem: The Real Problem of Creation: God is omnipresent. Hence, he fills all space. Hence, there is no vacant space in which creation can occur. But creation does occur. The Solution: God must have relinquished his omnipresence, contracting ­himself so as to leave some space vacant for creation. This still isn’t compelling. Omnipresence is usually understood in one of two ways. The first is that God really and literally is located throughout space. The other denies that God is literally located anywhere; rather, his power, knowledge, and/or goodness extend everywhere. The first understanding does entail that no space is vacant, but it’s poorly motivated, and problematic. Why think that a simple incorporeal God would be extended in space, and how could such a being have extension (although see Inman,  2017)? The second understanding undermines the entire problem. The fact that God is omnipresent doesn’t entail that no space is vacant. Even if you assume the first conception of omnipresence, why assume that a space needs to be vacant in order for creation to occur in it? After all, even ma­ter­ ial objects might be able to coincide with one another. For example, you might think that the statue spatially coincides with the lump of clay from which it was

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Idealism ex Nihilo  83 formed. Christopher Hughes (1997) explores a scenario in which one ship can be thought to coincide with another ship. And even if you don’t think that two ma­ter­ial beings can coincide, since neither God nor his light are material, your usual worries with collocation might not apply. And thus, even if God is literally located in every space, it needn’t follow that there’s no room for anything else. The way to avoid these problems is to relate to R. Vital’s talk of light as, in some sense or other, metaphorical. Perhaps he’s saying that some divine attribute or other, metaphorically rendered as “light,” makes creation impossible. It’s not that God’s nature leaves no room in physical space, but that it leaves no room in logical space. We arrive at a new interpretation of the problem. The Really Real Problem of Creation: God has a perfection, or a set of perfections, P. His possession of P leaves no logical space for creation. Hence, creation does not occur. But creation does occur. The Solution: God must relinquish or rein in P in order to create. The contraction is not spatial, but of God’s perfection. We need to spell out what perfection P might be, and why it would leave no lo­gic­al space (i.e., no possibility) for creation. But there are some other issues to attend to first. Whether or not the contraction is spatial, there are problems with taking it literally. Rabbi Yosef Irgas (1685–1730) develops ten arguments against a literal interpretation of God’s contraction. For example, consider a literal spatial contraction. Various classical Jewish sources describe God as formless and ­incomparable (e.g. Isaiah 40:18; Maimonides, Mishne Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 1:11), and prohibit corporeal representation of God. But if tzimtzum is interpreted spatially and literally, then they transgress this prohibition by attributing a spatial form to God—viz., the form of “an encompassing circle with an empty space at its center and a straight line within it” (Irgas, 2015, p. 230).13 There are also problems with a literal non-spatial contraction. You might think that relinquishing a perfection is incompatible with perfection. Why would and how could a perfect being harm itself? Moreover, relinquishing a perfection in the act of creation is incompatible with God’s immutability. If any of God’s attributes diminish in the act of creation, then how can we say that God is unchanging? In the previous chapter, section 2.1.1.5, we noted that the doctrine of im­mut­ abil­ity might not be a central pillar of Jewish theology. Nevertheless, it certainly has been widely held at various points in Jewish intellectual history. Moreover, the Bible quotes God, saying of himself, explicitly, that “I don’t change” (Malachi 3:6). If any of God’s attributes—especially attributes that we thought to be 13  This is a translation of Shomer Emunim (HaKadmon) section 35.

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84  The Principles of Judaism intrinsic to him—diminish in the act of creation, then it becomes impossible to say that God is unchanging, and that he is, after the creation, just as he was before the creation, and just as he always will be. These considerations were compelling to many. R. Irgas writes: “It is an obvious and agreed fact among all the Kabbalists that the Ein Sof [i.e. The Infinite One] permanently exists as a single entity without any change at all . . . It is . . . stated many places in the Zohar that the Ein Sof does not change at all—and among them: ‘and he changes His actions and there is no change in Him’ ” (Irgas, 2015, p. 235).14 Similarly, consider the Yalkut Shimoni’s enigmatic phrase: “You are he from before the creation of the world. You are he after the creation of the world. You are he in this world. You are he in the world to come.”15 Rabbi Shneur Zalman (1745–1812; the Baal HaTanya) explains this passage: God remains throughout these epochs and places, “without any change in essence or knowledge” (Borukhovich 1973, II:7). God’s essential properties never change; and they are never reined in. Thus, on either a spatial or a non-spatial construal of the problem of creation, a formless, perfect, and immutable God cannot perform the required contraction. These considerations led to a non-literal interpretation of tzimtzum. The non-literalists don’t really advocate for the doctrine of tzimtzum, but for the illusion of tzimtzum. There was no real contraction of divine attributes. There was merely the appearance of such a contraction. The Baal HaTanya explains that, while tzimtzum occurs from our perspective, from God’s perspective it does not: Know this: “In the heavens above and on the earth below—there is nothing else [besides God]” (Deuteronomy 4:39) . . . Therefore, even the earth and that which is below it are completely nonexistent and empty from the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He . . . [W]ith his attribute of Gevurah [restraint] and Tzimtzum, he hides and conceals the life-force which flows into the heavens and the earth, so that they and all their hosts should appear as if they were in­de­ pend­ent­ly existing entities. The Tzimtzum and concealment is, however, only from the perspective of the lower realms, but from the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He, everything before Him is considered as actually naught, just as the light of the sun in the sun. (ibid., II:6)

Non-literal tzimtzum faces theological problems of its own. If tzimtzum is a prerequisite for creation, but only appeared to happen, then it follows that creation itself only appeared to happen. Creation turns into an illusion too. The non-literalists 14  This is a translation of Shomer Emunim (HaKadmon) section 35. 15  Yalkut Shimoni, Devarim section 836. The Yalkut Shimoni is a compendium of Midrashic texts, probably compiled in the thirteenth century.

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Idealism ex Nihilo  85 therefore appear to be committed to a radical acosmism (i.e., the view that the universe doesn’t exist). This line of attack is pursued by Rabbi Shlomo Elyashiv (1841–1926; the Leshem), who claims that the resulting acosmism undermines the Torah’s account of creation and the rest of the Jewish narrative (Elyashiv, 2015, p. 214).16 He adopts a literalist interpretation instead: God literally had to contract his spatial extension, or diminish in some other perfection—depending upon whether the spatial or non-spatial interpretation of the problem of creation is adopted. But doesn’t this render God both changing and, worse, doesn’t it render him, currently at least, imperfect?

3.4. Non-Literal Tzimtzum The Really Real Problem of Creation is, so far, merely schematic: God has a perfection, or a set of perfections, P—which leaves no logical space for creation. But what is P? The beginning of this chapter showcased multiple arguments from divine perfections to idealism—these arguments can fill in the gap in the Really Real Problem of Creation. For example, replacing perfection P with omnipotence, and “the creation” with “the creation of objects beyond God’s mind,” makes for: The Really Real Problem (Omnipotence): God is omnipotent. If God is om­nipo­ tent, then there is no logical space for the creation of objects beyond God’s mind (given argument 1 (of section 3.2.1)). Hence, the creation of objects beyond God’s mind doesn’t occur. But the creation of objects beyond God’s mind does occur. Literal tzimtzum regards this problem as a reductio on God currently being omnipotent. God’s omnipotence must have literally contracted, so as to make room, in logical space, for the creation. But this waters down one’s theism. It strips God, even if only temporarily, of his omnipotence. Extreme Hassidic Idealism has no such problem. It claims that God is om­nipo­ tent, and that objects beyond God’s mind were never created. The creation of such objects only appears to occur. But it doesn’t and can’t. Tzimtzum is an illusion. Replace P with “perfect rationality and omniscience,” or with “perfect rationality, knowledge, and goodness”—the attributes at work in arguments 2 and 3 (from sections  3.2.2 and  3.2.3, respectively).17 The proponent of literal tzimtzum can treat the problem in each case as a reductio on God’s currently possessing the rele­ vant perfection. 16  This is a translation of Leshem Shevo V’Achlama, D’rush Olam Hatohu, Part 1, D’rush 5, 7:8, 57b. 17  Indeed, it should be particularly clear how argument 3 is associated with non-literal tzimtzum. It explicitly entails that a perfectly rational and perfectly good God appears in the story of this world as somewhat less than perfect. That appearance is skin deep. The tzimtzum of God’s perfection is nonfundamental (the way in which degrees of fundamentality enter this picture is expanded upon in the next chapter, section 4.3).

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86  The Principles of Judaism The proponent of literal tzimtzum therefore denies all three of our arguments for idealism, but only because she waters down her theism—stripping God, even if only temporarily, of the relevant perfections. Extreme Hassidic Idealism, by contrast, retains all of God’s perfections, but views the problem of creation as a reductio on the creation of a world beyond God’s mind. Can Extreme Hassidic Idealism avoid collapsing into acosmism? Can it avoid collapsing into pantheism or panentheism, since it has the world as a part of God’s mind? I contend that it can avoid these heterodox labels. The cosmos is a set of ideas in the mind of God. The ideas exist. And thus the cosmos exists. That isn’t acosmism. Nor does the view collapse into pantheism or panentheism, at least not obviously. Ideas are not obviously identical with or parts of the minds that hold them; divine ideas are, likewise, not obviously identical to or parts of God’s mind. We do talk about ideas being inside minds. But this talk is probably metaphorical. Orthodox opponents of non-literal tzimtzum might remain dissatisfied. They might claim that the world is still robbed of its significance if it is merely an illusion (more on this in chapter 4). But again: “the world is merely an illusion” is false, when uttered by us, on our level of reality, even if true when uttered about us by God from his level of reality. Recall the Baal HaTanya quoted above (in section 3.3). It’s true that Hassidic Idealism (in any form) doesn’t accord us the same degree of reality as it does to God. But a desire to share an ontological pedestal with God is profanity, reminiscent of the builders of Babel, who—in the rabbinic understanding—tried to conquer the heavens.

3.5.  A Gersonidean Problem of Creation R. Vital’s problem of creation dovetails with the medieval discussion of the last chapter. One way to make this explicit is to develop a new problem of creation that moves, not from one of God’s perfections, but from the concept of creatio ex nihilo itself. Argument 4 1. Assume: Traditional theists should adopt an account of causation and nat­ ural laws that comports with creatio ex nihilo. 2. Assume: A Humean account does not comport with creatio ex nihilo. 3. Assume: Non-Humean accounts do not either, unless they appeal directly to God in order to explain causation and the laws of nature. 4. Two options remain: (1) an account of causation that does appeal to God, or (2) the denial of a fundamentally physical creation. 5. Both of the options listed in line 4 entail idealism. 6. Therefore: The theist should adopt idealism.

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Idealism ex Nihilo  87 Commentary The theist (especially in light of the previous chapter) will want an account of physics that renders creatio ex nihilo possible. So, what are laws of nature? Imagine that we all agree that it’s a law of nature that Fs cause Gs. Classical Humeanism takes this to be nothing more than the regular observed correlation between Fs and Gs. But: if causation is nothing more than regularity, then there can never be a one-off cause of a one-off effect—such as creation is taken to be. Of course, God could have created a sequence of worlds (à la Crescas). Then the creation of a world is not a one-off event. But this ties God’s hands. It entails that God cannot create one world but that he must create many if he creates any. And what of completely one-off miracles? They seem to be ruled out by the Humean. The theist has a number of reasons to look for a different account of natural laws. More contemporary versions of Humeanism do allow for one-off causes of one-off events. According to David Lewis’s neo-Humeanism, x can be said to have caused y iff, in the nearest possible world where x didn’t occur, then neither did y (Lewis, 1973). It turns out, therefore, that Humeanism (so revised) can allow for God’s one-off creation of the universe (and other one-off miracles), iff, in the ­closest possible world in which God didn’t create a universe (or enact the miracle), there is no universe (or miracle). Like its classical ancestor, this form of Humeanism doesn’t think in terms of causal power. Instead, classical Humeanism thinks in terms of regularities, and neo-Humeanism thinks in terms of counterfactual dependencies. Neither of these views should be acceptable to the theist, who thinks of creatio ex nihilo in terms of God’s exercise of power. Of course, the Humean can offer the theist a reductive account of God’s causal power, in terms of counterfactual dependence, or regularity. But I wager that most theists would want to resist Humeanism if it came at the cost of such a reductive account of omnipotence. God’s statement “Let there be light” had the power to bring something into being. His statement isn’t merely correlated in the right way with worlds that happen to have light in them. His statement brought light into being. Given that we’re looking for an account of creation that gives due weight to contemporary cosmology, we should also pay attention to the scientific community; a community that doesn’t sound all that Humean. When Einstein was searching for laws of nature, he wasn’t searching for regularities, or counterfactual dependencies. He was searching for something somehow inevitable. “What really interests me,” he told his then assistant, Ernst Strauss, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”18 He described the enterprise of physics as “not only to know how nature and her transactions are carried through, but also to reach as far as possible the utopian and seemingly arrogant aim of knowing

18  Einstein, as quoted by Holton (1986, p. 91).

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88  The Principles of Judaism why nature is thus and not otherwise . . . Thereby one experiences, so to speak, that God Himself could not have arranged these connections in any other way than that which factually exists.”19 Steven Weinberg (1994, p. 114) claims that a similar phenomenon can be found in “the simplest version of quantum electrodynamics . . . [A]ny sort of small change in this theory would . . . lead to a theory with infinities [i.e., absurdities] that could [only] be canceled by a redefinition of the constants of the theory [itself].” Laws of nature, it seems, are thought to be such that any small change in them will lead to a logical absurdity. Richard Feynman (1992, p. 55) reports a similar criterion for the truly natural laws. In short: physicists have come to believe that fundamental laws have a “logical rigidity” (Weinberg, 1994, p. 149). But what is logical rigidity? The idea seems to be that, given the sort of world we live in, logic will dictate that there’s only one way that things could work. Other worlds are possible, but if its laws of physics are different, then it won’t be composed of electrons and protons, although it may  be composed of shmelectrons and shprotons. As Weinberg puts it (ibid., pp. 235–6): Whatever the final theory may be, it will certainly not be logically inevitable. Even if the final theory turns out to be a theory of strings that can be expressed in a few simple equations, and even if we can show that this is the  only possible quantum-mechanical theory that can describe gravitation along with other forces without mathematical inconsistencies, we will still have to ask why there should be such a thing as gravitation and why nature should obey the rules of quantum mechanics. Why does the universe not consist merely of point particles orbiting endlessly according to the rules of Newtonian mechanics?

The laws we’re looking for are supposed to be “logically rigid,” but still contingent. The law will say that given the sort of thing that electrons and protons are, and given the sort of thing that gravity is (etc.), the laws of nature have to be thus and so. But there didn’t have to be electrons, protons, or gravity. Humeanism cannot secure an account of the creation that will be satisfactory to the theist, nor can it accommodate the way that scientists tend to relate to their own discipline. It doesn’t give rise to logically rigid laws of nature. Line 2 of our argument survives scrutiny. Call a theory naturalistic if it doesn’t invoke God. Line 3 claims that appropriately naturalistic non-Humean theories of causation cannot comport with creatio ex nihilo. I present two such views, in relation to our law that Fs cause Gs.

19  Einstein (1929, p. 126).

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Idealism ex Nihilo  89 Nomic necessitarianism: The property of Fness is related to the property of Gness by a necessitation relation. This relation entails that where F is instantiated, G will have to be too.20 Dispositional essentialism: The Fs and Gs are related to one another in virtue of their essential dispositions.21 These views can make no sense of creatio ex nihilo. Consider the laws of conservation. The law of energy conservation states that, in any closed physical system, including the universe, the quantity of matter/energy is constant.22 On nomic necessitarianism, these laws are a set of higher-order relations between the ­properties of matter/energy across all of spacetime: these relations necessitate the conservation of matter/energy. On dispositional essentialism, matter/energy ­conservation is an essential disposition, if not of fundamental particles, then of worlds of a certain kind (see Bigelow et al., 1992). There might have been a universe without such laws—where the relevant second-order relations don’t relate, or where the relevant dispositions are not had by the things that exist there. But these laws do bind our world. A universe in which at t0 there is no matter and no energy, and at t1 there is matter and energy, cannot be our world on either view. In a world such as that, matter-energy is not necessarily conserved, as it is in ours. Humeanism doesn’t accord enough legislative oomph to natural laws. It doesn’t do justice to what ­scientists tend to be looking for. But these non-Humean alternatives accord them too much legislative oomph. God has no room left in which to maneuver. This leads us to option 1 of line 4. The theist can adopt the following account of the laws of nature: Supernatural Non-Humeanism: Causal power is all located in God’s will. The laws of nature are regularities, which scientists discover, in God’s will. God’s ­policy is generally to have Gs follow from Fs. Any such conception of natural laws will certainly make room for creatio ex nihilo and other miracles, but it leads directly back to argument 1 (from section 3.2.1 20  See: David Armstrong (1983), John Foster (1983) and Fred Dretske (1977), among others. 21 For more on dispositional essentialism, see: Brian Ellis (2001), Chris Swoyer (1982), and Alexander Bird (2005), among others. 22  You’ll recall from the previous chapter that, according to Lawrence Krauss (2012), matter in our own universe does sometimes pop out of nothing. But, in actual fact, the events that he reports result from underlying rearrangements of quantum fields. As David Albert (2012) puts it: “The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.’

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90  The Principles of Judaism above)—an argument that has all states of affairs wholly dependent upon the mind of God. To be sure, one way of escaping argument 1 is by putting a wedge between God’s will and the continuing function of the world. Laws of nature might be able to serve as such a wedge, but only if they’re truly independent of God (at least, after he establishes them). Option 1 rules out any such independence. Option 1 entails idealism. Option 2, as we shall see, gives up on the idea of a physical universe altogether. You might resist the argument, thus far, hoping that the theist can adopt a nat­uralistic non-Humeanism. On this view: abstract natural laws really do govern the physical universe, but God has the power to break them. This would  avoid both option 1 and option 2. But natural laws don’t really have legislative oomph if God has a veto over them. On this view, God’s will is still very much in the driver’s seat. We’re still going to be sucked—via argument 1—into idealism. Another way to resist insists that laws of nature can evolve over time. Accordingly, just because the current laws of nature don’t allow for creatio ex nihilo, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t previously. But standardly, theists think that God can work miracles. This amounts to God having the ability to suspend any law of nature at any time, even if the law in question is thought to hold at that time. And thus, God still has a veto over the laws of nature, at any given stage of their evolution. And thus, God’s will is still in the driver’s seat. We’re still going to be sucked—via argument 1—into idealism. Option 2 assumes Extreme Hassidic Idealism. It admits of a more and a less radical construal: Option 2, Moderate: Creatio ex nihilo is true simpliciter (since the universe is just an idea that God thought into being), but false within the image that God imagines (since, in the image, the universe is governed by laws of physics that render creation from nothing impossible). Option 2, Radical: Creatio ex nihilo is true simpliciter, and true in the image that God imagines, even assuming a naturalistic non-Humeanism. Yes, the laws of physics demand that nothing can come from nothing, but imaginings, like stories, can contain contradictions. Contradictions can even be true in a story. Thus it could be true in the image that God imagines, that this world is both physical and created ex nihilo. The contradiction of a physical world created from nothing is true, but only in God’s imagination. The moderate construal will be more attractive to those who think that God wouldn’t imagine contradictions. If God imagines a physical universe, then he doesn’t imagine it coming out of nothing. Physical universes, given a naturalistic non-Humeanism, can’t behave that way. When the Bible, or Jewish tradition,

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Idealism ex Nihilo  91 seem to describe a creation ex nihilo, the narrative must be taking a God’s eye perspective; describing a reality beyond the world in which we live. At that level of reality, the universe is an idea that God thought into being from nothing. But, within the story, the universe could not have come from nothing. The radical construal, by contrast, takes the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo to be about the genesis of the world qua physical world. It also takes God’s omnipotent range of powers over our world to include the impossible. To some, these features will be attractive. This radical construal permits the impossible creation of a ­physic­al world, ex nihilo, but in a way that does not violate classical logic. Outside of a story, contradictions are toxic to classical logic, entailing anything and everything. Inside of a story, contradictions are not toxic. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, contain a contradiction about the location of Watson’s war wound. But this does not entail that anything and everything is true inside the Sherlock Homes stories. Option 2 can be neutral as to what kind of things the laws of nature are. Alternatively, if the world is an idea in the mind of God, why not adopt option 1, and appeal to that fact, as did Berkeley (and as do Del Ratzsch (1987) and John Foster (2004) in our times), to explain the legislative oomph of the laws of nature? For our purposes, note that both options 1 and 2 require the theist to adopt either the Moderate Hassidic Idealism minimally entailed by argument 1 (from section 3.2.1 above) or Extreme Hassidic Idealism. Despite my best efforts to present its strongest face, argument 4 probably isn’t watertight. One can probably make sense of creatio ex nihilo without thinking crudely in terms of a universe that contains no matter and no energy at t0 and then matter and energy at t1. Rather, one can simply envisage a ­physic­al universe with a constant measure of matter-energy and a beginning with no before. Moreover, the argument as stated is probably too harsh on the Humean. Perhaps a theistic Humeanism, with an appropriate conception of divine power, can be rendered plausible. Leaving these issues aside, argument 4’s main merit is how it helps us to link the medieval “rationalist” discussion to the Kabbalistic discussion. Perhaps Gersonides was struck by the power of an argument somewhat like argument 4, and saw it as a reductio on creatio ex nihilo. If so, that would have been, in part, because idealism wasn’t a live option on the philosophical map of the Middle Ages (see King, 2007). Just like R. Vital, Gersonides had discovered (or came close to discovering) a problem of creation, and just like the problems we can attribute to R. Vital, the appropriate solution needn’t be to give up on creation (or to adopt the associated absurdities of Gersonidean creatio origionalis ex materia). The solution is simply the radical idealism of non-literal tzimtzum. We can now state the first principle of Judaism, under its most satisfactory interpretation:

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92  The Principles of Judaism Outside of any narrative, the universe is an idea in the mind of God. That idea was created ex nihilo. God thought it out of nothing. In the story of the physical world (given what we shall argue in chapter 8), we know that our timeline must have had a beginning. Laws of nature, in the story, are—I suggest, along with option 1—nothing more than regularities in the way that God, in the story, wills for the world to run. Nothing about this conception of natural law forbids it from being the case that, in the story, the physical universe was the product of creatio originalis ex nihilo. The alternatives—that the universe was created, in the story, from a formless matter, or that, in the story, the creation of the universe was somehow paradoxical—are therefore to be shunned in favor of the classical doctrine of creation ex nihilo, both inside and outside of the story: creation ex nihilo of the idea in the mind of God that constitutes this universe, and creatio ex nihilo of the physical universe inside the story. This engenders no paradox and is consistent with the empirical data, and with the weight of the Jewish tradition.

In the next two chapters, we shall explore some of the problems and op­por­tun­ ities that arise from the Hassidic Idealism at the heart of this account.

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4

Hassidic Idealism Responding to Problems

That God created the universe is a key tenet of Judaism. But it gives rise to various problems—the problems of creation. These problems are solved upon the adoption of Extreme Hassidic Idealism (which, from hereon in, I simply call Hassidic Idealism—having left the moderate variety behind). The overall aim of this book isn’t to argue for the truth of the principles of Judaism, but I am in search of their most plausible and coherent interpretation. To the extent, then, that Hassidic Idealism seems unsightly and implausible, my project is in trouble. Consequently, in this chapter, I will be responding to a set of problems that arise upon the adoption of Hassidic Idealism. In the next chapter, I’ll address some hidden benefits of the view.

4.1.  Problems with Hassidic Idealism Problem One: The Loss of Freedom If I am a character in God’s dream or story, then I have no free will. I do whatever he imagines me to do. Why would God command me to act in certain ways and hold me responsible for my actions, if I have no freedom? Problem Two: The Loss of Significance If we are just characters in God’s dream or story, then I’m not real; or, at the very least, I lose a degree of ontological significance; significance I thought entitled to believe myself to have. Problem Three: The Problem of Evil If God is writing this story, why did he have to include such horrific scenes of suf­ fering and depravity? The classical theodicies seem shut off to the Hassidic Idealist. Evil is all God’s fault. Problem Four: Anything Goes If fictions can be host to contradictions, and our world is just a fiction, then our world can be host to contradictions too. Faced with problems in theology, phil­ oso­phy, or even the hard sciences and mathematics, why search for a solution? The problem might merely be one of the contradictions that’s true in our story. The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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94  The Principles of Judaism

4.2.  Response to Problem One: Free Will Hassidic Idealism seems to entail a stifling determinism. The Izhbitza Rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801–54), was a leader of the Hassidic movement in Poland. His commitment to Hassidic Idealism is quite explicit—he says that this world is like a dream; or, perhaps a lucid dream, in the mind of God.1 His determinism also seems to be pretty explicit. He is notorious for his play on the famous Talmudic phrase that “All is in the hands of heaven, except for the fear of heaven,” which, in the Izhbitza’s teaching, became, “All is in the hands of heaven, even the fear of heaven!”2 And yet, elsewhere the Izhbitza seems committed to our having free will3 and to the radical contingency of events that transpire around us.4 The Izhbitza thus seems committed to a contradiction: everything is preordained, and yet some things are truly up to us. Rabbi Herzl Hefter (2013, pp. 61–2) suggests that we pay careful attention to the corollaries of the Izhbitza’s Hassidic Idealism. According to the Izhbitza, God dreams us all up as being free, and that “fact makes free will a reality.” We have what R. Hefter calls a “paradoxical two-tiered” reality. On one tier, determinism is true. On the other, human beings have libertarian free will. I don’t see a paradox here. A good way to explore this two-tiered reality is by looking at the semantics of fiction. Take the following sentences: (1) Hamlet was a Danish prince. (2) Hamlet was an investment banker. (3) Hamlet was a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination. There is a sense in which (1) is true and (2) is false. If, in an English literature class, you contend that Hamlet wasn’t a Danish prince, but that he was an invest­ ment banker, your teacher will say that you have made a mistake. However, there’s another sense in which both sentences are false. To be a Danish prince or an investment banker, you need to exist outside of Shakespeare’s imagination. And 1  See Leiner (1995), Parshat Miketz—a translation can be found in Hefter (2013, p. 61). A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer is aware that she is dreaming, and, to varying degrees, is able to control the content of the dream. The Izhbitza himself doesn’t say that the dream is lucid, but I think it fair to assume so, for fear of committing him to all sorts of heresies unnecessarily. 2 See Hefter (2013, p. 46) and Leiner (1995, Parshat Vayerah, s.v. vatechahesh); the original Talmudic dictum comes from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Brachot, 33b. 3 See the Izhbitza’s response to Amalek (Leiner, 1995, Parshat Beshallach s.v. Hashem, and Hefter 2013, p. 51) 4  See Hefter (2013, p. 59). The passage that R. Hefter quotes from (i.e., Leiner, 1995, Parshat Tazria s.v. Isha) talks about the mystery that from one perspective a phenomenon can be in our control, and from another perspective it can be preordained. The continuation of the passage from which R. Hefter quotes goes on to talk about the radical contingency of conceiving a child, in contrast with the “fact” that the child’s birth was preordained.

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Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems  95 yet, when your literature teacher asks you whether or not Hamlet was a Danish prince, you would be mistaken to say, “No, I don’t think he was, since he was merely a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination.” We are dealing with two senses of truth and falsehood: truth-relative-to-the-Hamlet-fiction, call it truthH, in which (1) is true and (2) and (3) are false; and truth simpliciter, in which (1) and (2) are false and (3) is true. We have two tiers, and no paradox. Take the following two sentences: (4) Hamlet only did what Shakespeare ordained for him. (5) Hamlet had free will, and thus the choice to kill his uncle was his own. Sentence (4) is true, but would be the wrong answer to your teacher’s question when she asks you why Hamlet killed his uncle. Thus, sentence (4) has truth simpliciter, but it isn’t trueH. Shakespeare could have written a play about Hamlet the automaton with no will or emotion. It would have been a very different play. The Hamlet that we know and love is a Hamlet with free will. Sentences (1) and (5) are trueH, which is a real species of truth, but, they are false simpliciter. Sentences (3) and (4) are true, but falseH. Sentence (2) is false and falseH. Shakespeare is the author of Hamlet; God, for the Izhbitza (and any Hassidic Idealist), is—so to speak—the author/dreamer of our world. And thus, the Izhbitza (and any other Hassidic Idealist) can make the following two claims: (6) We only do what God ordains for us. (7) We have libertarian free will. Just as you can assert sentences (4) and (5) without contradicting yourself, the Izhbitza can assert sentences (6) and (7) without contradicting himself. To accuse you of contradiction, when asserting (4) and (5), is to ignore the semantic ascent that you tacitly make, between asserting (4), relative to the standards of truthH, and (5) relative to the standards of truth simpliciter. Likewise, to accuse the Izhbitza of contradiction, for asserting (6) and (7), is to ignore the semantic ascent that he is tacitly making between (6), which he asserts relative to the standards of truth simpliciter, and (7), which he asserts relative to the standards of truth-relative-to-thestory-that-God-tells-of-our-world (call it truthE). God’s being the author of our world is no more (and admittedly no less) of an attack on our freedom than Shakespeare’s authorship of Hamlet is an attack on Hamlet’s freedom. John Polkinghorne (2005, p. 16) writes: Charlotte Brontë can decree, in her authorial providence, that the distraught and wandering Jane Eyre shall end up at the cottage of those who, unknown to her, are her distant relatives and through whom she will learn of a timely inheritance. That is the exercise of a naked power of disposal which seems to bear little

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96  The Principles of Judaism analogy to the subtle relationships of God to a world to which he gives a large measure of creaturely freedom.

Polkinghorne falls into the trap of conflating two levels of discourse that need to be kept separate. Brontë doesn’t attack Jane Eyre’s freedom. At the very same level of discourse at which it’s true to say that Jane Eyre ended up at that cottage, it’s false to say that Brontë ordained it. And, at the level of discourse at which it’s true to say that Brontë is in control, it’s not really true that Jane Eyre went to any cot­ tage. Fictional characters aren’t located in space. Gersonides believed that God couldn’t know the future (at least not the contin­ gent parts of the future), because the future hasn’t yet happened (Gersonides, 1987–99, Vol. II, 3:4, pp. 117–18). To be omniscient is to know everything that is. Since the future isn’t yet, God doesn’t know it yet. This view is known today as Open Theism. There’s something somewhat comforting about the view that God lives, with us, in real time, waiting to see how things unfold; rooting for us to make the right choices.5 But there’s also something somewhat disconcerting about a God who can’t be sure that all will end well; whose omniscience is left blinded by the darkness of the future. Hassidic Idealism has the best of both worlds. It can be trueE that God doesn’t know the future. God, as he appears, as a character in our story, lives in the moment, as do we. But it can also be true simpliciter that God knows all that will ever be, indeed, that it’s all up to him.

4.2.1.  The Meaning of “Freedom” Polkinghorne could defend himself, perhaps, with the claim that we don’t want fictional freedom, like Jane Eyre’s freedom—we want real bona fide freedom. To put the concern another way: our response to Problem One isn’t good enough because we demand more ontological significance for ourselves and for our free­ dom. We don’t just want to exist in a fiction; we want to exist. We don’t just want freedom in a fiction; we want freedom. That is the challenge of Problem Two, which I address in section 4.3. A related issue should be dealt with here. Perhaps the word “freedom” relative to truthH doesn’t mean the same thing as “freedom” relative to truth simpliciter. A fiction-operator, such as “in the Hamlet fiction it is true that {insert sentence here},” takes a sentence and relativizes its truth-conditions to the fiction. The con­ cern is that predicates under the scope of such operators shift their meaning. It is whatever “freedom” means, free from the scope of any fiction-operators, that Problem One is concerned about. To be told that we have whatever “freedom”

5  Gersonides’ God is not as personal as this. The God of contemporary Open Theism is.

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Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems  97 means under the scope of a fiction-operator is no response at all; after all, even Hamlet has that much freedom. But this is the wrong way to think about fictionoperators. Take the following sentence: (8)  In the Hamlet-fiction it is true that Hamlet is free. The meaning of any complex sentence has to be arrived at in stages. Following an example of Michael Dummett’s (1981, p. 10), witness the brackets in the expres­ sion “(2 + 3) × 6.” They serve to illustrate that, in relation to the multiplicationoperator, “the whole expression ‘2 + 3’ is to be treated as unitary.” The first stage in the construction of our expression joins “2” to “3” by “+” to form “2 + 3.” Only in the second stage do we join the expression formed in the first stage to “6” by the multiplication-operator. Thus, complex expressions have an “order of construc­ tion,” or a constructional history. “2 + (3 × 6)” has a different constructional ­history, and thus a different meaning, to “(2 + 3) × 6.” Sentence (8) is not an exception. It has a constructional history. The phrase, “In the Hamlet-fiction it is true that {insert sentence here}” is a sen­ tential operator. It operates upon fully formed sentences, which we plug into it. The semantic function of the predicate “x is free” is to make atomic sentences true when the referent/value of x is free. The operator then comes along, after the formation of that atomic sentence, at the next stage of the constructional history of the complex (or molecular) sentence, and relativizes the truth-conditions to the story. First we construct the meaning of “Hamlet is free”; only then can we apply the operator, to arrive at the meaning expressed by sentence (8). In some important sense, then, predicates within the scope of such operators mean just the same thing as they always mean. They have finished making their semantic contribu­ tion before any operators come on the scene. If we thought that predicates meant something different under the scope of such operators, it would be very hard to follow conversations about dreams and stories. Our response to Problem One involves no shift in the meaning of “freedom.”

4.3.  Response to Problem Two: Ontological Significance The desire to exist in the most fundamental way possible, such that the sentence “you are not imaginary” will not merely be trueE, but true simpliciter, is not a desire shared by the committed Hassidic Idealist. Perhaps as a result of religious experiences of God’s incomparable reality, or perhaps out of commitment to the theological orthodoxy that God is ontologically prior to all else, the Hassidic Idealist is happy to exist “only” as a figment of God’s imagination. Problem Two is simply out of kilter with Hassidic sensibilities. Remember what we said in the previous chapter, section 3.4: the desire to share an ontological pedestal with God

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98  The Principles of Judaism is the height of profanity—like the builders of the tower of Babel, who sought to conquer the heavens. Nevertheless, there is something that I can offer you, in order to “cure” you of your desire to be fundamental. (9) Between 1880 and 1914 [the years in which the Sherlock Holmes stories were set], there was no such address as 221B Baker Street. Sentence (9) is true. But (9) isn’t true-relative-to-the-Sherlock-Holmes-stories (it isn’t trueS). Sherlock needn’t worry about the truth simpliciter of sentence (9) since (9) is falseS. Sherlock Holmes has a greater stake in the truthS than he does in what we call truth simpliciter. Likewise, you have a greater stake in truthE than you do in what God would call truth simpliciter. The following sentences are trueE: “you are free”; “you are real”; “you are the figment of nobody’s imagination.” That should be enough for you. But perhaps you are distressed about the ultimate truth simpliciter of “you are a figment of God’s imagination and your actions are determined.” But remember: that sentence is falseE, and “you are free and ontologically significant” is trueE. In short, there are two incommensurate axes upon which to evaluate a sentence: (1) its metaphysical ultimacy/fundamentality and (2) its pragmatic relevance. TrueE sentences are more metaphysically fundamental than trueS sentences and trueH sentences. But sentences that we would call true simpliciter are of much less pragmatic relevance to Sherlock, all things considered, than are trueS sentences. Similarly, your freedom, and your existence, might not have the sort of onto­ logic­al ultimacy that you desire for them, but at least, for you, they are real, and ­maximally relevant. Perhaps a creator who gives his creatures more ontological significance would be more perfect, and thus perhaps Hassidic Idealism has failed to describe the greatest possible being of classical theology.6 But the previous chapter established that Hassidic Idealism is a consequence of classical theological perfections. Remember: literal tzimtzum waters down God’s perfection. Hassidic Idealism (and its non-literal tzimtzum) protects it.

4.4.  Response to Problem Three: Evil In a famous Talmudic story, Moses gets a glimpse of the future sage Rabbi Akiva and his horrific death. In essence, Moses asks God the following question (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Menachot 29b):

6  This probing criticism was put to me by Robin Dembroff.

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Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems  99 (10)  Why do such bad things happen to Rabbi Akiva?7 God answers: “‫ כך עלה במחשבה‬, ‫שתוק‬.” The Soncino translation of the Talmud (Epstein, 1935–48) translates this phrase: “Be silent, for such is my decree.” But this translation does violence to the text. A better translation would be this: Be silent, for so it arose in my mind.8 Authors sometimes report a certain lack of control over their characters or their stories. They even talk of their character’s taking on a life of their own. Of course, authors are ultimately in control. If they don’t like the direction a story takes, they can change it.9 But there may be a limited sense in which they’re not in control, a sense in which the creative process places the creator in a passive role. The creator waits to see what will arise in her mind; unfolding the internal logic of the story in ways that may even surprise her.10 When God says to Moses, “Look, that’s just how it arose in my mind,” he’s saying that he’s just a dreamer or an author. He’s not completely in control of the dream that he’s dreaming or the story he’s spinning. You might think: if God is a perfect being, he wouldn’t create in a passive way. He’d have a plan, and stick to it. But perhaps the creative process is such that even the perfect author must be sensitive to the ideas and images that passively “arise.” A perfect being might have to be in control of his thoughts—maybe that’s not the case with a perfect creator/artisan. But why is God so matter of fact? Why doesn’t he say, “Look Moses, I’m sorry that that’s what came up in my mind”? Why doesn’t he try to change the story, or to dream it towards a fairer ending? In the dream/story that is this world, God appears as a character: a good and loving character. Consequently, the sentence “He loves us” is trueE of God. But perhaps that trueE sentence is false simpliciter.11 God might be saying to Moses, “Look, from the perspective of my character in the story, I owe you a theodicy, because my character loves you and has the power to save you, but you know me as an author, in my transcendence, and, from that perspective, I don’t owe my merely fictional characters anything, and I’ll continue to create as the ideas rise up to me.” Two very different potential theodicies arise: 7  Moses’ question, in actual fact, is more directly concerned with the relationship between Torah study and reward/punishment. But, as we shall see, the answer that Moses received—explained as I shall explain it—has more to do with Rabbi Akiva and the particular contours of his life; and thus the question to which God most directly responds is question (10). 8  I’m grateful to Howard Wettstein for pointing out how evocative this phrase is. 9  For more on God as an editor, or proofreader of history, see chapter 8, section 8.2.8. 10  An even more accurate translation of God’s response would be, “so it arose in thought.” It didn’t arise in God’s thought, but in thought itself. It wasn’t God’s act of thinking. Instead, he passively beheld the unfolding of a thought. 11  There’s no reason to think that a fictional character can’t be an object of somebody’s love and concern. Moreover, what has most pragmatic relevance to us is that the claim “God loves us” is trueE, whether or not it’s true simpliciter.

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100  The Principles of Judaism Theodicy 1: God isn’t responsible for evil, even though he is its author, because, like any author, certain scenes just arise in his mind. God might even love his fic­ tional characters. But he can’t stop the horrific scenes arising before his mind. God is not a perfect Being so much as a perfect Artisan. Theodicy 1 also gives us a freedom that might be less offensive to critics than the account of freedom given in section 4.2. “We are free” is true of us, even relative to the standards of truth simpliciter, in the sense that characters can surprise their authors. Theodicy 2: We can deny the claim of Theodicy 1 that the creative process involves passivity. On the contrary, God writes the history of the world and is in complete control. But an author has no moral responsibility for the evils occur­ ring in her stories. Anthony Burgess is not morally responsible for the evil things that occur in his Clockwork Orange. The rape victim in that book would be acting irrationally if she accused Burgess of moral responsibility for it. “Burges imagined the rape into existence” is false-relative-to-the-Clockwork-Orange-fiction (call it falseCO). It is only true simpliciter. And, relative to the standards of truth simpliciter, that woman isn’t a real woman. Burgess couldn’t have harmed her. (11)  God is morally responsible for all evil that has occurred in history. Sentence (11) is false simpliciter. Fundamentally, history is merely a fictional story that God authors. Admittedly, (11) seems to be trueE. But, relative to the stand­ ards of truthE, all of the traditional theodicies are open to the Hassidic Idealist, because the Hassidic Idealist doesn’t think that it is trueE to say that “God ­determines everything that everybody does.” This gets God—as a character in the story of this world—sufficiently off the hook for the evil that occurs in our world so as to make room for the project of theodicy. We will turn to that project in chapter 8. Not only are traditional theodicies open to the Hassidic Idealist, relative to the standards of truthE, but Hassidic Idealism shows us how the problem of evil doesn’t touch God as he is in himself. This is the crux of Theodicy 2. For, just as truthE-claims are the ones that are most pragmatically relevant to us; ­truthsimpliciter-claims are the truth-claims that are most pragmatically relevant to God, so to speak. And if (11) is false simpliciter, then that’s what’s going to matter to God. According to Theodicy 2, God says: “Recall, Moses, that I, as Creator, am not morally responsible in the way that you are suggesting, with your question, that I am, because the sort of responsibility you have in mind only makes sense within creation.”12 Theodicy 1 may not satisfy you. Even if you accept that God can’t help himself, you might think that it doesn’t get him off the moral hook. God might not be

12  Thanks to Curtis Franks for help with this paragraph.

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Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems  101 harming real people when he harms us—but you may count it as a moral failing in an author that they can imagine scenes containing barbaric depravity. Burgess was not responsible for the rape of a real woman, but we might count it against him as a moral vice that his subconscious could spew up such filth. I would want to resist this line of attack. Some works of excruciating darkness are so brilliant that to count them as a vice against their creators seems incongruous with the inherent worth of their creation. The second theodicy stands to face a more powerful objection. Burgess isn’t morally responsible for evils occurring in his stories because they don’t hurt sen­ tient persons. God should be morally responsible since his stories, unlike Burgess’s stories, affect sentient persons: us. The key to this critique is: (12)  Unlike fictional characters, we are sentient, die, and exist in spacetime.13 But sentence (12) is only trueE. It is, by the lights of Extreme Hassidic Idealism (as opposed to Moderate Hassidic Idealism), false simpliciter. We only make a dis­ tinction between God’s stories and Burgess’s stories because we’re living in God’s story. But, inside Burgess’s stories, it is true to say that his characters are sentient persons. And, outside of our story, it is true to say that we are merely abstract objects—fictional characters; figments of God’s imagination. Outside of God’s stories, we are not sentient (this is the defining creed of Extreme Hassidic Idealism as opposed to Moderate Hassidic Idealism). If you don’t like this way of thinking, it seems to me that you’re not really taking Extreme Hassidic Idealism—and by extension, theism—seriously. Finally, you might say that if Hassidic Idealism is true, then authors should be more careful: as it turns out, their characters really do suffer, just as we suffer as God’s characters. Because authors should be careful, and because God isn’t care­ ful, God is not off the hook for the evil that occurs in our world.14 But, once again, I fear that this line of attack doesn’t really get to grips with Extreme Hassidic Idealism. From God’s transcendent perspective, which is the one that is max­ imally relevant to him, it really is true that we are abstract objects.15 It really is false that we are sentient beings. And thus, from his transcendent perspective, it really is true that he isn’t morally responsible for the evils that occur to us, which, from that perspective, are merely fictitious evils. The main conclusion to draw from Theodicy 2 is that the classical theodicies, as they pertain to God—as he appears in this world, as a character in his own story—are open to Hassidic Idealism after all. The claim that allegedly closes the

13  Thanks to Robin Dembroff for help with articulating this concern. 14  This concern was put to me by Amy Seymour. 15  Or “artifactual objects” (cf. Thomasson, 1999), or whatever sort of objects creatures of fiction are!

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102  The Principles of Judaism door to traditional theodicies (i.e., the claim that God completely controls our destiny) isn’t trueE, and thus, relative to the standards of truthE, the traditional theodicies might well be true. We return to theodicy in chapter 8.

4.5.  Response to Problem Four: Contradictions David Lewis (1978) suggests that truth in a fiction is really a function of what’s going on in a relevant set of possible worlds. It’s trueS that Sherlock Holmes is a detective iff, in all of the closest possible worlds in which the text of the story is read, not as fiction, but as known fact, it refers, in that world, to a person called Sherlock Holmes who is a detective. The suggestion might sound strange but it seems to get a lot right. For example: it is falseS that Holmes is a plumber because in each of the relevant worlds the relevant texts refer to a person called Sherlock Holmes who is not a plumber; it is neither trueS nor falseS that Holmes has an even number of hairs on his head because in some of the relevant worlds, the per­ son referred to by the texts has an even number of hairs, and in some he doesn’t. Unfortunately, Lewis can’t account for stories containing contradictions, since in no set of possible worlds are contradictions true (Currie, 2008). Furthermore, the technical fixes that Lewis suggests to remedy this problem can’t accommodate stories in which true contradictions feature as a central and pervasive aspect of the story. But there are stories like that. Tamar Gendler tells a story, called Goldbach’s Tower (2000, pp. 67–8), about a group of mathematicians, from all over the world, united by a common purpose and language. Together they prove Goldbach’s conjecture (that every even num­ ber is the sum of two primes). God disapproves of their audacity, punishing them by making 12 no longer the sum of 7 and 5; ruining the proof. A righteous math­ ematician prays to God for mercy. God decides that he’ll relent, but only if twelve righteous mathematicians can be found. Unfortunately, they can find only seven in one city and five in another. Before God’s edict, this would have been enough to overturn God’s edict. The case comes before Solomon the Wise. They explain that they have enough righteous mathematicians to overturn God’s edict, but only once God’s edict is overturned. Solomon reaches a judicious compromise: from here on in, 12 will be both the sum of 5 and 7 and not the sum of 5 and 7. The contradictions here are not accidental, as was the contradictory location of Watson’s war wound in the Sherlock Holmes stories (which is sometimes located in his shoulder and sometimes in his leg). Moreover, the contradictions in the Goldbach story are not incidental to the plot, unlike Watson’s wound. There is no set of possible worlds in which the events of this impossible story could occur. And yet, as a story, it seems to work, in a funny sort of way. We might not be able to get the same sort of imaginative purchase over the key events of the story as we could over a story whose storyline is possible. But, we

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Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems  103 understand the story, or at least, we understand something from it; at the very least, to the extent that it amuses us, it works as a piece of storytelling. This provides the background to our fourth problem. The worry is this: if contra­dic­tions can be true, in a story, and if we live in a story, then anything goes. General relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics? No problem. True contradiction! We have conflicting evidence as to whether the suspect is guilty or innocent? No problem. True contradiction! We can’t reconcile the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God, with the existence of the evil we see around us? No problem. True contradiction! This attitude seems no less threatening to human knowledge than Descartes’s skeptical scenario that we live under the spell of an evil demon, causing us to think that impossible things are true. The first thing to note is that contradictions in a fiction are local. Outside of a story, by contrast, if it’s true that 2 + 2 = 5, then it’s also true that Paris is the capital of Japan. Classical logic encodes this insight. The basic intuition is: if we’re allow­ ing something false to be true, then the concept of truth loses all its significance, so if 2 + 2 = 5, then anything goes. Therefore: contradictions outside of a story quickly go global. But that’s not how contradictions work within fiction. In Goldbach’s Tower, it’s true that 12 is both the sum of 5 and 7 and not the sum of 5 and 7. That true contradiction doesn’t entail, in the story, that there are no mathematicians, or that there’s no God, or that Solomon isn’t wise. The only contradictions that are true in a fiction are the ones that the author stipulates to be true, or that the conventions of the genre, in combination with the text of the story, stipulate to be true. If our world is a story, then even if it contains contradictions, those contra­dic­ tions can be well contained. For example, the true contradictions of our world could be reserved exclusively for talk about God, and nothing else, just as the only contradictions that are true in Goldbach’s Tower have to do with the numbers 5, 7, and 12. Stories can localize impossibility in this way. Mystics often make the claim that logic and reason break down when trying to talk about God. This view explains why, and explains how those contradictions can be so localized. Outside of the story, classical logic reigns, and there are no true contradictions. Inside of the story, classical logic reigns except for some very local exceptions. Consider the difference between the evil demon of Descartes’s skeptical scenario and the God of any standard theism (a God that Descartes comes to embrace for himself, given his ontological argument, which supposedly allows him to dismiss his own skeptical scenario). The former is evil while the latter is good. The argu­ ments, in the previous chapter, that led us to Hassidic Idealism, began with the assumption of a relatively standard theism, with its infinitely good and powerful God. Only given this assumption did the problem of creation emerge, which motivated Hassidic Idealism as its solution. Accordingly, we already come to this discussion with the belief in a good God.

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104  The Principles of Judaism I’m not trying to answer Descartes’s concern. How do we know that we’re not under the power of an evil demon? I don’t know! I have no knockdown response to radical skepticism. But if you’ve already arrived at Hassidic Idealism, you’ve done so because you already believe in the existence of an infinitely good and powerful God. Commitment to the existence of such a God, once we have it, should shield us from worry: we know that the God in question can make contra­ dic­tions true, in our world, but ex hypothesi he isn’t an evil demon; rather, he’s perfectly good. Consequently, we can trust God not to make contradictions true too often, and without good reason, because it wouldn’t be consistent with his kindness and grace. But the answer can’t be as simple as that. As we saw in section 4.4, from God’s transcendent perspective, we’re not even real. From that perspective, he owes us no moral consideration. So why should we, mere characters in a story, trust that he’s writing a story in which classical logic is granted dominion? The answer is straightforward. There is a sort of faith that allows us to trust that God protects us from systematic epistemic calamity. It isn’t faith in God’s good­ ness. For the Hassidic Idealist, faith in God’s goodness is not the sort of faith that can undergird this trust; not because God isn’t good, but because, from his transcendent perspective, we’re not real; we cannot be objects of his ethical concern. Rather, the Hassidic Idealist can trust that God is a perfect storyteller. A perfect storyteller might introduce contradictions into her story. But she won’t do it accidentally, nor incidentally. That would generate aesthetic defects. When a contradiction does occur, it will occur front and center, and will be ­necessary to the plot; just like the contradictions in Goldbach’s Tower. And thus, whenever we’re faced with a putative contradiction, there will always be a prima facie obligation to resolve it, since—on the basis of our faith in God’s creative excellence—we trust that no contradiction will be true unless it’s discovered to be glaring and necessary to God’s narrative purposes. Given the sense of humility that creatures should have in the face of their cre­ ator, we shouldn’t presume to know God’s narrative purposes. The principles of Judaism don’t state why God created the world (although a summary of trad­ ition­al approaches can be gleaned from Alter (1995)). But whatever God’s pur­ poses, we know that contradictions in the work of a perfect storyteller will only appear when absolutely necessary. Consequently, our default position should always be to find a way around apparent contradictions.16 If you do have grounds for faith in God’s creative excellence, then Hassidic Idealism won’t collapse into a pernicious form of skepticism. God’s creative 16  For that reason, the radical reading of option 2, in section 3.5 of chapter 3, should strike us as deeply unattractive. To relate to creation ex nihilo as a contradiction is a possibility that Hassidic Idealism opens up, but one that shouldn’t be embraced lightly. Option 1, you’ll recall, allows the story of God’s creating a physical universe ex nihilo to be free of contradiction. For that reason, it is to be preferred over option 2.

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Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems  105 excellence entails that the attribution of contradictions should be a last resort. And, if contradictions do occur, they will be local. Is God an excellent author? Some have found it hard to see God’s goodness manifest in our cruel world, but it’s relatively easy to look at this world and, when viewing it as a story, to see the narrative excellence of its author. Our world is an amazing story with dazzling detail, bursting with all sorts of imaginative creations. Hassidic Idealism is in a similar position to David Lewis’s modal realism. Modal realism is the claim that an infinite number of concrete possible worlds exist. Modal realism allowed Lewis to perform wonders in the face of various philosophical riddles. But the posit was too weird for many people to accept. Lewis concedes (1986, section 2.8) that the best critical response to his worldview was the “incredulous stare.” He felt he could answer any technical problems with his posit; but he recognized how outlandish it seemed. If we have good reason to be theists, then we have good reason to be Hassidic Idealists. Indeed, the former entails the latter. We shouldn’t be worried by the problems that seem to arise, since the only criticism that doesn’t receive a satisfy­ ing response is not really a criticism at all: it’s an incredulous stare.

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5

Hassidic Idealism Some Hidden Benefits

The last chapter sought to defray the apparent costs of Hassidic Idealism. This chapter looks at some hidden benefits of the view. There are a host of independent reasons for the adoption of idealism. Some have argued that the very notion of mind-independent matter is somehow incoherent. Berkeley (2009) is the locus classicus of this argument. Berkeley’s argument has been ridiculed by some (Franklin, 2002), but is worthy of reappraisal (Stapleford, 2017). In addition: quantum mechanics might suggest that minds are much more basic than a reductive physicalism would suggest; minds might even play a crucial role in making reality determinate (Stapp,  2001; Chalmers & McQueen, forthcoming). The hard problem of consciousness, which arises when one tries to explain the emergence of subjective first-person consciousness from purely physical systems, might also point one in the direction of idealism (Chalmers, forthcoming). The Hassidic Idealist can help herself to all of these ancillary motivations.1 But the benefits I address in this chapter are religious. I suggest that Hassidic Idealism can serve as a key to unlock a number of thorny traditions in Jewish thought, and in the philosophy of religion more broadly. In section  5.1, I will show how Hassidic Idealism makes the most sense out of a tradition that I call Jewish Nothing-Elsism. In section 5.2, I show how Hassidic Idealism can render the Kabbalistic tradition of the sefirot coherent, and consistent with monotheism. In section  5.3, I show that Hassidic Idealism can reframe an old debate in the philosophy of religious language. In section 5.4, I give a brief sample of the sort of religious inspiration that believers can draw from Hassidic Idealism.2

1 For more defenses of idealism see Pelczar (2015), Foster (2008), and Goldschmidt & Pearce (2017). 2  Elsewhere, I demonstrate that Hassidic Idealism has a unique response to the atheistic argument from divine hiddenness, but considerations of space have caused me to leave that response out of this book. I therefore refer readers to Lebens (Forthcoming).

The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  107

5.1.  Jewish Nothing-Elsism In the book of Deuteronomy (4:39), Moses tells the children of Israel to “know this day, and lay it on thy heart, that the LORD, He is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is nothing else.” The final clause of this verse is a dec­lar­ ation of monotheism. There is no other God. Nevertheless, one can trace a central line of Kabbalistic thought, which takes this verse to be saying something more radical. It’s not merely that there are no Gods besides the one God of Abraham; it’s that besides that God, there is nothing else at all. Call this school Nothing-Elsism. Rabbi Moses Cordovero (1522–70) writes: “The essence of God is in everything, and nothing exists outside of God. Since God gives being to all, it isn’t fitting to say that there would be any created thing living by way of another. Rather, he is their existence, their life, and his existence is found in all things.”3 R.  Cordovero is a Nothing-Elser. Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz (1555–1630) writes: [N]othing exists without his existence. For he, may he be blessed, gives being to all, and life to all, and he is the existence of those that exist. And there is no existence other than his existence. It’s just that this existence clings to him more, and from this existence, other existence cascades outwards, and all is in the first power, and this is the thing that is infinite.4

R. Horowitz is a Nothing-Elser. The founder of Hassidic Judaism, the Besht, tells us that even when we recite Moses’ apparent declaration of monotheism (i.e., Deuteronomy 6:4), in the prayer known as the shema, we should have in mind that: [T]here is nothing else in the entire world, other than the Holy One, Blessed be He; that all the world is filled with his glory [alluding to Isaiah 6:3]. And the fundamental principle of this intention is that the person should consider himself as empty and void, and he has no fundamentality other than the soul that is within him, which is a portion of God above [alluding to Job 31:2]. Consequently, there is nothing in the world other than the one, Holy One, blessed be He.5

The Besht is a Nothing-Elser. Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl (1730–97) was a student of the Besht. He wrote that “Divinity above, Israel, Torah, the world-to-come, and this world, 3  Shiur Komah, Modena manuscript, 206b, quoted in Sack (1989, pp. 213-4). This quotation appears with a different translation in Michaelson (2009, p. 62). 4  Horowitz (1997, tractate Shevout, 160a). 5  Shem Tov (1938, Parshat Vaetchanan 13).

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108  The Principles of Judaism are all one.” They seem to be many distinct things. But this is an illusion. “By way of them all, Godliness is spread out, this in a more internal way, and this in a more external way, in the mode of clothing and a body.”6 The things that look less holy are not really distinct from the things that are more holy. It’s just that the holy things appear to us through the illusory garb of the less holy. R. Menachem Nachum is a Nothing-Elser. The Baal HaTanya writes: [E]very intelligent person will understand clearly that each creature and being is actually considered naught and absolute nothingness in relation to the Activating Force . . . continuously calling it into existence and bringing it from absolute nonbeing into being. The reason that all things created and activated appear to us as existing and tangible, is that we do not comprehend nor see with our physical eyes the power of G‑d . . . If, however, the eye were permitted to see and to comprehend the life-force and spirituality which is in every created thing, flowing into it . . . then the materiality, grossness and tangibility of the creature would not be seen by our eyes at all . . . Hence, there is truly nothing besides Him.7

When compared to the existence of God, who gives being to all other things, the being of those other things is somehow nullified. A sunbeam illuminates things outside of the sun. But in the sun itself, a sunbeam is—to all intents and purposes—nothing. Even beyond the orb of the sun, it is merely an emanation of the sun. Using this metaphor, the Baal HaTanya tells us, “It is only in the space of the universe, under the heavens and on the earth, where the body of the sun-globe is not present, that this light and radiance appears to the eye to have actual existence.”8 From the perspective of God, who is analogous, in this metaphor, to the sun, the world itself doesn’t exist; it is a mere emanation. There is “truly nothing besides Him.” Like his Hassidic forbears, the Baal HaTanya is a Nothing-Elser. This is not a literary tradition that likes to lay out its arguments with numbered premises. How exactly are we to understand these texts, and the school that they constitute? Three interpretations suggest themselves. Only one survives scrutiny.

5.1.1.  Interpretation 1: Non-Dualist Pantheism One way to go is to interpret these texts with a flat-footed literalism. They’re telling us that only one thing really exists. Accordingly, Jay Michaelson calls Jewish

6 Twersky (2015), Parshat Vayeitze, s.v. v’ata. Also cited, with slightly different translation, in Michaelson (2009, p. 71). 7  Baruchovitch (1973, Shaar Hayichud Vehaemuna, chapter 3). 8 Ibid.

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  109 Nothing-Elsism the “radical path of nondual Judaism.” According to nondualism: [S]uperficial perceptions of separation—of duality—are not ultimately correct . . . [I]n its deepest reality, all of being is one. The boundaries we see all around us, between you and the outside world, between tables and chairs, are  not ul­tim­ate­ly real—though they may be partially true, or true in some ­relative way. (Michaelson, 2009, p. 17)

Non-dualism is what Jonathan Schaffer calls existence monism. According to existence monism, “there are no particles, pebbles, planets, or any other proper parts to the world. There is only a seamless Parmenidean whole” (Schaffer, 2010a, p. 341). To say that everything is God is to say that there only exists one thing, and that that one thing—that Parmenidean whole—is God. And yet, to attribute existence monism to the Jewish Nothing-Elsers is highly uncharitable, for a number of reasons. The first reason is philosophical. Bertrand Russell (1992; 1906) and G. E. Moore (1919) confronted, in the early days of their career, some unambiguous adherents of existence monism. Their arguments against existence monism were devastating. I’ll focus here on Russell. One absurd consequence of existence monism is that any proposition that seems to be about two things will have to be transformed into a proposition about one thing, since there only is one thing for propositions to be about; namely, the Parmindean whole—or, in our case: God. But this won’t work, Russell argues, for any proposition that contains an asymmetrical relation: The proposition ‘a is greater than b’, we are told, does not really say anything about either a or b, but about the two together. Denoting the whole which they compose [with the symbol ‘(ab)’, we will have to analyse the proposition that a is greater than b so that it says] . . . ‘(ab) contains diversity of magnitude.’ Now to this statement . . . there is a special objection in the case of asymmetry. (ab) is symmetrical with regard to a and b [since, if there’s only one thing in all of existence, then there can’t be two distinct fusions of a and b, one for a and b (in that order), and the other for b and a (in that order)], and thus the property of the whole will be exactly the same in the case where a is greater than b as in the case where b is greater than a. (Russell, 1992, p. 215)

Russell’s conclusion, in simple English, is this: the existence monist can’t distinguish the proposition that “2 > 1” from the false proposition that “1 > 2.” Nondualists tend to wave their hands around, at this point, in an attempt to save the “apparent” truth of mathematics. Remember, Michaelson (2009, p. 17) has told us

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110  The Principles of Judaism that “perceptions of separation—of duality—are not ultimately correct,” but he does allow that they may be “partially true, or true in some relative way.” Fine. But the non-dualist certainly seems to think that the non-dual perspective on reality is somehow truer than any perspective that engages in separation. Michaelson makes much of the point that the world of separation, to which number theory would apply, is actually one, but that even this oneness is an illusion, because true reality transcends number altogether, even the number one. He assures us that “[t]he Kabbalistic math of this reality is that 2 = 1 = 0. Fortunately,” he confesses, “I don’t have to be good at math anymore” (ibid., p. 9). What is he talking about? I think he means something like this: to entertain any thought about the world, even the thought that “all is one,” is somehow to separate the world from the thought that thinks of it. Accordingly, no thought, for  the non-dualist, can by wholly true. Nevertheless, we can still say that the world of separation and multiplicity, signified by the number 2, is less true than the world of unity, signified by the number 1, and less true still than the unthinkable thought that encompasses all, signified by the number 0. All levels represent one reality, which is why Michaelson’s “Kabbalistic math” can tell us that 2 = 1 = 0, but each stage of this equation is truer than the one that comes before it. Russell understood this well. If you adopt a non-dualistic perspective, then the ultimate would be a proposition about the whole universe, since the whole is all that is real; and this proposition would describe the whole universe, in its entirety, with one exhaustive predicate. But even that proposition couldn’t be completely true, since it would have to include a distinction between subject and predicate. But if you’re a non-dualist, then every distinction—even the distinction between subject and predicate—introduces falsity into your thought. Truth will have to come in degrees, and no proposition can be completely true. To quote Russell (1906, p. 39): The one final and complete truth [for a non-dualist] must consist of a propos­ ition with one subject, namely the Whole, and one predicate. But since this involves distinguishing subject from predicate, as though they could be diverse, even this is not quite true. . . [but] it is as true as any truth can be.

Russell’s first complaint is easy to register: a low grade partial truth doesn’t seem fitting for an indubitable theorem of number theory, such as the claim that 2 > 1. To call such a claim as that less true than the wild speculations of metaphysicians and theologians is to beggar belief! Secondly, if no proposition is entirely true, then the monistic theory itself cannot be entirely true. And if “the partial truths which embody the monistic phil­ oso­phy” are not entirely true, then “any deductions we may make from them may depend upon their false aspect rather than their true one, and may therefore be

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  111 erroneous” (ibid., p. 36); i.e., by the lights of the non-dualist we shouldn’t trust any non-dual conclusions. To summarize: Russell’s main argument is that existence monism cannot attrib­ute complete truth to innocuous mathematical propositions; and it gives rise to a completely untenable theory of truth. We should be very careful before we attrib­ute the label of existence monism to anybody, since to attribute that label to them is to commit them to a complete philosophical disaster. There are religious considerations to weigh up too. Theistic non-dualism is a form of pantheism. The problem with pantheism is that it leans one in either of the following two directions, both of which are problematic. The first direction takes the identity between God and the universe, and uses it to bleed God so thoroughly into the universe that it’s basically no longer the case that there remains what any objective bystander would be willing to call a universe at all. The denial of the existence of the universe is acosmism. But what of the Torah, and its cre­ ation narrative, and its description of a world below the heavens, and its injunction that we should serve the Lord our God? How does any of this make sense if there is no universe, and there is nothing other than God? The other direction in which pantheism pushes takes the identity between God and the universe, and uses it to bleed the universe so thoroughly into God that it’s basically no longer the case that there remains what any objective bystander would be willing to call a deity at all. Indeed, Michaelson is keen to emphasize how little rests between the non-dualist and the atheist. It’s not that there’s a personal God pulling the strings of the universe. It’s merely that the universe is God; not a personal God, since all distinctions of personality and agency get washed away in the Parmenidean whole that subsumes all distinctions. Michaelson writes (2009, p. 30): [N]onduality may be said to be the place where mysticism and atheism shake hands. The cosmology may be identical, as there are no puppet-masters pulling the strings of our reality. Yet the stage is now a cathedral.

It sounds beautiful. But to place so thin a wedge between theism and atheism is to arrive at something wholly alien to the basic Jewish narrative of a divine commander, father, and king. The bastions of Jewish Nothing-Elsism were, despite their radicalism and their often antinomian rhetoric, eager to lie at the heart of the Jewish tradition, along with its canonical narratives, and its body of ritual law. Anything close to atheism, I would wager, cannot be close to them. Michaelson could resist this line of attack. Non-dualism, he might say, is the summit of theological piety: “It is the ultimate antidote to idolatry . . . not just any image of God, but even any experience that sets itself apart from others, is error” (ibid., p. 56). But given the monistic theory of truth, this response is somewhat

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112  The Principles of Judaism empty. Everything is error on their account, including the claim that everything is error! Russell commends Harold  H.  Joachim for having “considered very carefully the whole question of error” from a monistic perspective (Russell, 1906, p. 32). Joachim came to the following conclusion, which to Russell seemed “the only possible one for a monistic theory of truth.” Joachim says that “the erring subject’s confident belief in the truth of his knowledge distinctively characterizes error, and converts a partial apprehension of the truth into falsity” (ibid., quoting Joachim (1906, p. 162)). On Joachim’s account, error has nothing to do with truth or falsehood: every proposition with which mere mortals deal is somewhere between true and false; error, on the other hand, resides in the confident belief that a partial truth is wholly true. Russell goes on to conjure up the following scene. A jury has to decide whether a man has committed a crime. If they keep in mind the monistic theory of truth, and that any verdict they come to can only ever amount to a partial truth, then their verdict will be right, whatever their verdict. If they forget the monistic ­theory, the same verdict will be erroneous! Given the monistic theory of truth, the non-dualist can sacrifice goats to Baal, and libate wine to Hermes, providing that she remains humble in the knowledge that all truths are partial. This will not be error, nor idolatry. But if she takes part in a traditional Jewish prayer service, confident in the belief that to do so is mandated by God, she falls into error and idolatry far worse than that of the Baal and Hermes worshiper. I am sympathetic to the notion that theological certainty is a form of idolatry. But this goes too far! Go back to the quotes with which we started section 5.1. They do abound with declarations of the following form: “nothing exists outside of God”; “there is no existence other than his existence”; “there is nothing else in the entire world, other than the Holy One, Blessed be He”; “there is truly nothing besides Him.” But the very same passages tell us that things don’t live by way of another—implying that things other than God do exist but only by way of God; that, from God’s “existence, other existence cascades outwards”—implying that God gives being to ­others; that a person “has no fundamentality other than the [Godly] soul that is within him”—implying that we do have our own being which is grounded in God’s; and even when these texts declare our existence to be nullified, they say this only relative to God’s existence. And thus, existence monism, which is ­philo­soph­ic­ally disastrous and religiously heterodox, is also unsupported by these texts. These texts don’t deny that we exist. They deny that our existence is independent of God. They deny that our existence is fundamental. When they do deny that we exist, they do so only from a certain perspective, and only in a certain sense. Jewish Nothing-Elsism doesn’t preach that nothing else exists besides God. It preaches that nothing else exists in quite the way that God does; and nothing else.

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5.1.2.  Interpretation 2: Priority-Monistic Panentheism Schaffer (2010c) argues that when writers could be understood as existence monists, there is often a more charitable reading available, according to which they are not existence monists but priority monists. Priority monism doesn’t deny that many things exist; it merely insists that they are all grounded by, and that their existence is explained by, the existence of the whole cosmos; the whole cosmos is the one and only fundamental concrete entity that grounds all other concrete entities. When writers write that only one thing exists, they can sometimes be read to be saying that only one thing is fundamental, and that that one thing is the whole that all non-fundamental things compose. Elsewhere, I have argued that Schaffer is sometimes too charitable, and too eager to read priority monism into the words of avowed and sincere existence monists (Lebens,  2017b). But we already have reason to deny that the Jewish Nothing-Elsers were existence monists. Can we then follow Schaffer’s strategy and read their words in line with the distinctive thesis of priority monism? Assume classical theism. Accordingly, God exists a se (that is to say, he exists in virtue of nothing other than himself). At some point in time, he created a universe, distinct from himself. Assume also priority monism. Accordingly, the most fundamental ontological substance is the whole that all existent things compose. What the classical theist calls God and the universe that he creates would compose a whole: the fusion of God and his creation. Call that whole W. On the assumption of priority monism, W is the ground of all being, and turns out to be more fundamental than God. That would be heterodox! Indeed, we would seem to have landed ourselves in a contradiction. If God exists a se, then he cannot be ontologically grounded by W. The problem is easily avoided. Stop calling the thing that we were calling God “God.” Instead, call it the soul of God. The universe that that soul created is the body of God. God is W, the fusion of God’s body and soul. W is ontologically fundamental. Nothing else is. This is Nothing-Elsism. Nothing other than God is fundamental. This is panentheism: the created universe is a proper part of God. And this is priority monism, since the only fundamental being is the one whole that all other beings compose. This interpretation of Jewish Nothing-Elsism provides us with a much better fit with the texts. According both to the texts and to priority-monistic panentheism: (1) Nothing exists by way of beings other than God—since God is the fusion of all things, in which all things are grounded; (2) The existence of all things “cascades outwards” from God, since God is the ground of all being; (3) A person “has no fundamentality” other than that which is derived from God, since God is the only fundamental being; and (4) Our existence is nullified relative to God’s existence, since his existence is fundamental; ours is derivative.

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114  The Principles of Judaism And yet, there are philosophical and theological reasons to resist this new interpretation of Nothing-Elsism. The philosophical reasons concern motivation. The theological reasons concern the heterodox consequences of panentheism. I start with considerations of motivation. Schaffer’s variety of priority monism will have much of its motivation sapped from it, I suggest, if one is antecedently committed to any standard sort of Abrahamic theism. Here are a characteristic sample of the arguments that Schaffer advances for his doctrine.

5.1.2.1.  The Gunk Argument Gunk is a substance that can be infinitely divided. Imagine that we can divide the atom into subatomic particles, and those particles into strings, but then imagine further that we can divide those strings into twines, and those twines into threads, and so on, ad infinitum. Such a universe would be gunky. Gunk seems to be metaphysically possible, and is even thought, by some, to be a live empirical possibility for our own universe.9 If priority monism is false, then gunk shouldn’t be so much as possible. How would we get going, building a gunky universe, bottom to top? A universe has to have foundations, either at the bottom or at the top. Without the doctrine of priority monism, according to which the foundations are at the top, there would be nothing foundational at gunky worlds. In Schaffer’s words, “Being would be in­fi­nite­ly deferred, never achieved” (Schaffer, 2010c, p. 62). It seems reasonable to suppose that being itself must be grounded in some foundational level. Gunk can have no foundation, unless you allow the whole universe to be the foundation, and then you arrive at priority monism. I have no quarrel with this argument, on the assumption of atheism. But if you assume theism, then you don’t require Schaffer’s doctrine of priority monism. The fundamental being needn’t be the whole that all of the gunk comprises. It needn’t be some basic block of gunk that is never reached, in the infinite process of div­ ision. A non-gunky, mereologically simple God could be what grounds the gunk. He wills all of it into being. Schaffer’s priority monism is better labeled priority holism, since it gives priority to the whole. Theism also gives priority to one thing, and to one thing only—in that sense, theism is also a variety of priority monism, but it isn’t holistic. The one primary being isn’t a mereological fusion: it is a mereologically simple God. The gunk argument needn’t push a theist towards Schaffer’s variety of priority monism, even if it should convince the atheist. 5.1.2.2.  The Truthmaker Argument According to Schaffer (2010b), if a proposition p is true at a world w, then p’s truth at w is grounded in the fundamental features of w. Even non-fundamental 9  See Schaffer (2003, p. 5).

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  115 truths have to be grounded in something fundamental (as we discussed in chapter  1, section  1.5). Schaffer claims that the whole world is required to make ­negative-existential propositions true. That there are no unicorns is not made true by any particular corner of the world lacking a unicorn. It is made true by the global lack of unicorns. The whole world is a truthmaker to negative existentials. Accordingly, the whole world is fundamental. We have arrived at a holistic priority monism. Once again: if you’re antecedently committed to theism, this argument loses its force. If God is omnipotent, he merely has to will for p to be true in order to make it true. If God willed for there to be unicorns, then there would be. He may sometimes will for things to go differently to the way that they actually go, but if he does, he only does so in virtue of having bequeathed free will to his creatures, and in virtue of his continually reining himself in, in accordance with this free decision. But, at any moment, he has the power to will and to make true anything under the sun.10 Accordingly, that God doesn’t will for there to be unicorns suffices for there being no unicorns. Who needs a fundamental truth-making whole, when you already have a fundamental truth-making God?

5.1.2.3.  The Emergence Argument When building something complex up, from simple parts, it can sometimes be a mystery how certain complex properties emerge. In the history of analytic phil­oso­ phy, a good example can be drawn from the unity of propositions. Propositions are able to represent states of affairs. They have truth-values. They say something. But, if you analyse them down into their putative constituents, they lose a special something. The proposition that Romeo loves Juliet says something about the world. It says something about Romeo and Juliet. It says something about love. But the list of its disparate constituents—Romeo, love, and Juliet—despite being a faithful analysis of its putative constituents, fails to retain that special property held by the whole proposition: namely, the property of representationality. Russell struggled to explain how this property emerged. How could he recombine the parts of the proposition, post-analysis, and which hidden ingredient did he still need to discover, in order to explain the emergence of representation? Frege had no such struggle. Instead, he took propositions to be primary. The constituents of propositions are abstractions, or decompositions, out of the whole. They exist. But they are anterior. Propositions are prior. The question as to how 10  Once we recognize the truth of Hassidic Idealism, this passage will need to be finessed. It should read: “In the story of this world, God (as a character) may sometimes will for things to go differently to the way that they actually go, but if he does, he only does so in virtue of having bequeathed free will to his creatures, and in virtue of his continually reining himself in, in accordance with this free decision. And, from his transcendent perspective, outside of the story, even our free decisions are completely authored by him. And so, on both tiers of reality, and at any moment, he has the power to will, and to make true, anything under the sun.”

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116  The Principles of Judaism complex properties emerge upon the construction of a whole from its parts doesn’t arise if you take the whole to be prior to the parts.11 The hard problem of consciousness can be raised along similar lines. If the brain is an aggregate of unconscious matter, then how does the complex property of consciousness emerge? The cosmopsychist says that the whole universe is a conscious being, and that discrete consciousnesses are merely abstractions from it.12 Once again, the putative solution to the problem of emergence is achieved upon swapping a bottom-up explanation for a top-down explanation. The world as a whole has a number of emergent properties, many of which are less controversial than the claim that the universe as whole has a consciousness all of its own. Bottom-up explanations struggle with emergent properties. Schaffer takes this to be an argument for priority holism. But if we exchange fundamental building blocks, not for a fundamental whole, but for a fundamental will of God, then complex properties don’t emerge merely (and mysteriously) in response to clever forms of combination, and recombination, of simple building blocks, but in response to an all-powerful will. Accordingly, it’s not clear that, for a theist, the problem of emergence emerges to begin with.

5.1.2.4.  The Nomic Argument, and the Argument from Internal Relatedness The nomic argument (Schaffer, 2013) claims that the cosmos, as a whole, but that none of its proper parts, is governed by certain fundamental laws of nature. On the further assumption that anything governed in this way is ontologically fundamental, it follows that the cosmos as a whole is fundamental. The argument from internal relatedness (Schaffer, 2010a) follows from the observation that proper parts of the universe aren’t always open to free recombination. If they were really fundamental building blocks, you might think that, like Lego bricks, you could combine and recombine them in any which way. If, by contrast, the whole is fundamental, and the proper parts are anterior, then the question doesn’t arise. Once again: if you believe in a law-giving, all-powerful, agent, who governs the universe, and stipulates rules of combination, then Schaffer’s arguments lose their bite. So why attribute priority holism to the Jewish Nothing-Elsers, given that they were antecedently theistic? We shouldn’t forget that panentheism has heterodox consequences. If the material universe is a proper part of God, then God has material proper parts. One of the thirteen principles of Maimonides stipulates that God is incorporeal. Famously, the centrality of this principle was denied by some medieval au­thor­ ities (Shapiro, 2004, p. 55). Nevertheless, to attribute the wholesale rejection of this principle to the bastions of the Kabbalistic and Hassidic traditions would constitute quite a cost. 11  This construal of Frege is admittedly controversial. It is rooted in Linsky (1992). 12  On cosmopsychism, see Shani (2015).

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  117 The notion of God’s simplicity also plays a role in Jewish orthodoxy. In high medieval theology, God’s simplicity was taken to extremes. It was taken to mean that God had no properties, and/or that he was identical to all of his properties. Some of these views lead to irresolvable riddles (Plantinga, 1980). But, one vestige of divine simplicity that seems central to the tradition—a vestige that survives philosophical scrutiny—is that the Ein Sof (i.e., God in his transcendence) is mereologically simple. Panentheism, with its talk of God’s proper parts, his body, and his soul, violates this one last vestige of the doctrine of simplicity. Our second interpretation of Jewish Nothing-Elsism is much more charitable than our first. It fits better with the texts. It is guilty of no obvious or glaring confusion. But it commits the authors of the Nothing-Else tradition to a philo­soph­ ic­al doctrine that lacks motivation for theists, and generates a panentheism that is jarring with the Jewish tradition.

5.1.3.  Interpretation 3: Hassidic Idealism The roots of Jewish Nothing-Elsism run deeper than a biblical verse or two. Jay Michaelson gives a standard-sounding account of the underlying motivation for Nothing-Elsism. He writes (Michaelson, 2009, pp. 27 and 58): Kabalists begin from the premise that there is a One, that which does not change, and deduce that because the one is infinite, it is all there really is . . . If [an] object has its own separate existence, then the Ein Sof exists everywhere but suddenly stops at the border of the object; it is thus not Ein Sof [Infinite]. Therefore the object must be filled with God . . . [O]ne can’t hold that there is something infinite and also that something else exists apart from it . . .

We’ve seen this confusion before (chapter  3, section  3.3). The natural numbers are an infinite sequence. But the existence of tables and chairs doesn’t threaten the number sequence with finitude; why then would it threaten the creator of the heavens and the earth? Michaelson is alluding to the Kabbalistic tradition of tzimtzum, which we explored in chapter 3. But we discovered there that the problem had nothing to do with God’s infinity leaving no vacant space. The problem had to do with various perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, perfect rationality, and perfect goodness) leaving no room in logical space for the creation of anything beyond God’s mind. The best response to this problem—the really real problem of creation—is the assertion that God didn’t create anything beyond God’s mind: the world is a thought in the mind of God.

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118  The Principles of Judaism Jewish Nothing-Elsers are Hassidic Idealists. Jewish Nothing-Elsers say that nothing exists besides God. They mean that nothing else fundamental exists. This is priority monism, but not priority holism. We’ve already demonstrated, in chapter 3, that Hassidic Idealism is not pantheistic, since ideas are not identical to the minds that think them; it is not acosmic, since it is committed to the existence of the cosmos as an existent idea (or set of ideas); and it is not panentheistic, since ideas needn’t be thought of as parts of the mind that think them up. Jewish NothingElsism is neither panentheistic, nor pantheistic, nor acosmic. Jewish NothingElsism is Hassidic Idealism. The overwhelming preponderance of Nothing-Elsism among the Hassidim is why I called it “Hassidic Idealism” to begin with. And indeed, it is Hassidic Idealism that saves Jewish Nothing-Elsism from absurdity and/or heterodoxy.

5.2.  The Problem with the Sefirot Kabbalistic Judaism describes a dynamic process unfolding within the godhead. Peter Schäfer explains: God remains one and one alone, but he possesses at the same time an incredibly rich inner life; his Godhead unfolds in potencies, energies, emanations (Heb. Sefirot13), which embody different aspects of God’s essence continually inter­ relat­ing with one another. (Schäfer, 2000, p. 222)

The sefirot are something like divine energies. Schäfer is particularly interested in the doctrine that some of them are male and others female, and that some of them make love to each other. Some of them are also in conflict, such as the sefira of loving-kindness (‫)חסד‬, and the sefira of strict justice (‫)דין‬. According to Moshe Idel (1988, pp. 136–53), the Sefer ha-Bahir, one of the earli­est works of medieval Kabbala, viewed the sefirot, not yet named as such, in terms of tools, or powers. God uses them to create and govern the world. A later school, under the influence of Rabbi Isaac the Blind (1160–1235), viewed the sefirot as distinct parts of the essential structure of God, rather than mere tools at his disposal. The sefirot—on this view—are supposed to be many, and yet somehow, paradoxically, one—so as not to conflict with God’s simplicity. To quote R. Isaac the Blind:

13 In Sefer Yetzira (ch. 1) the notion of ten sefirot appears for the first time, and it seems to mean there numerals; its literal meaning is countings, but it seems fair to translate it idiomatically in this context, as Schäfer does.

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  119 [A]ll the attributes, which seem as if they are separate, are not separated {at all} since {all of them} are one, as the{ir} beginning is, which unites everything “in one word”. (Idel, 1988, p. 137)14

Yet another school viewed them as ways in which God is related to the world (although this school claims that he could have been related to the world in other ways). These different schools developed under different thinkers, but very often, especially as the tradition matures, one finds them rubbing shoulders within a single text. Witness the words of Rabbi Abraham Cohen De-Herrera (1570–1635): The Sefiroth are emanations from the primal simple unity; . . . mirrors of His truth, which share in his nature and essence . . . ; structures of his wisdom and representations of His will and desire; receptacles of His strength and instruments of his activity; . . . distributors of His grace and goodness; judges of His kingdom . . . and simultaneously the designations, attributes, and names of He who is the highest of all and who encompasses all. These ten names are indistinguishable; ten attributes of His sublime glory and greatness; ten fingers of His mighty hands, five of His right and five of His left; ten lights by which he radiates Himself; ten garments of glory, in which He is garbed; ten visions, in which He is seen; ten forms, in which He has formed everything; . . . ten lecterns, from which He teaches; ten thrones, from which he judges the nations; ten divisions of paradise . . . ten steps, on which he descends, and ten on which one ascends to Him; . . . ten lights, which illuminate all intelligences; ten kinds of fire, which consume all desires; ten kinds of glory, which rejoice all rational souls and intellects; ten words, by which the world was created; ten spirits, by which the world is moved and kept alive; ten commandments; ten numbers, dimensions, and weights, by which all is counted, weighed, and measured; . . . (Herrera, 1666, Treatise 7, ch. 4), as translated in Scholem (1991, pp. 40–1)

It’s not clear how all of these metaphors can be true, simultaneously, of any single set of ten things. Rather, elements from all of the schools that Idel lists (and more) often rub shoulders, in conflict with one another. The frustration of nailing down a single doctrine of the sefirot is manifest in the famous attack from Rabbi Shlomo ben Shimon Duran, the Rashbash (1400–67): [The Kabbalists] don’t even know what these ten sefirot are; whether they are [option 1] descriptions [of one God] or [option 2] names [of ten entities] or 14  The Hebrew original of R. Isaac the Blind’s Commentary to Sefer Yetzira, which Idel is quoting, can be found as an appendix to Scholem (1963). The precise quote can be found on page 6 of that appendix.

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120  The Principles of Judaism [option 3] emanations that emanate from Him, may He be blessed. There is no room in logical space for a fourth option. (Duran 1998, Responsum 189)

The Rashbash has a problem with each option. If the sefirot are distinct descriptions of one God, then how do they improve upon the thirteen attributes that God himself revealed to Moses (Exodus 34:6–7)? The Rashbash speaks of Kabbalists who say that Moses didn’t attain full know­ledge of the sefirot. But Moses was the greatest prophet. So, either the sefirot aren’t worth knowing, because the thirteen biblical attributes trump them, or the Kabbalists are heretical, claiming a greater knowledge of God than the greatest prophet. In actual fact, option 1 wasn’t too popular among the Kabbalists. The sefirot have to be more than mere descriptions in order to interact—to make love and war. But even regarding options 2 and 3, one could still ask why Moses didn’t know of the sefirot. According to the Baal HaTanya, the sefirot were concealed from Moses. Jewish doctrine only dictates that Moses was the greatest prophet. But, according to the Baal HaTanya, certain Kabbalists had a more profound understanding of divine matters than did Moses, but not through prophecy. As the Babylonian Talmud says, “A wise man is better than a prophet” (Tractate Baba Batra 12a). The Baal HaTanya explains: Because by his wisdom, he can apprehend exceedingly beyond the levels that can descend netherwards in a mode of revelation to the prophet in the vision of their prophecy. For only the lowest ranks [of divine wisdom] can descend and become revealed to them. (Borukhovich 1973, Part IV, letter 19, as quoted by Shapiro 2004, p. 90)

The wise man uses the power of his intellect to climb up to a higher rung of the ladder of divine wisdom than would be able to descend downwards towards the prophet. Moreover, the sefirot are not as innovative as they are sometimes presented as being. For example, R.  Isaac the Blind gave seven of the sefirot (known as the lower sefirot) their names from a list of attributes appearing in 1 Chronicles 29:11 (see Dan, 1986, p. 2)—giving them a biblical anchor. The rabbinic text Avot d’Rabi Natan (37:1) talks about seven attributes serving before the lower throne—again, these were taken to be the lower sefirot. Emulating these attributes for yourself, we are told there, can give you knowledge of God himself. The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Hagiga 12a) talks about the ten “things” with which God created the world, listing attributes that could be mapped onto the sefirot. The sefirot didn’t come from nowhere. The Kabbalists may have climbed to a higher rung than that which descends to a prophet, but they got their leg up that ladder from the revealed tradition. Nothing here denigrates Moses’ prophetic power. The Kabbalists were standing on the shoulders of giants. Given that most Kabbalists think in terms of options 2 or 3, the continuation of  the Rashbash’s critique has more bite. If the sefirot are names of distinct

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  121 entities—be they part of some larger godhead or not—then the doctrine posits complexity within the nature of God, or, worse still, a panoply of warring and love-making pagan gods. Even if they’re all parts of a single God, the Rashbash regards the doctrine as analogous to Christianity, which “claims that there are three, whereas these people claim that there are ten” (Duran, 1998, Responsum 189). Alternatively, if you follow option 3, and say that the sefirot are emanations of  God—powers, or tools that he uses—then the sefirot are akin to angels. But Kabbalists pray to the sefirot, and praying to angels (however popular the practice may have been from time to time) is forbidden to Jews, “for all who pray to one of the angels is a heretic” (ibid.).15 To summarize: traditional Jewish theology rejects the puzzling Christian idea that the existence of three divine persons is somehow consistent with monotheism. The problem is compounded if you’ve got ten divine entities. The sefirot certainly seem to be distinct entities, since they fight and make love. The Kabbalists often urge that these distinct entities are all one, but the Christians also talk about how the three divine persons are actually one God, and it’s always been a puzzle as to how that can be. If they are parts of God, one might think that worshiping less than God’s whole self is theologically problematic, and if they are external to God, then the problem with worshiping them becomes worse. I call this family of concerns “the problem with the sefirot.” And yet, the sefirot have become a mainstream feature of Orthodox Jewish theology. In the remainder of this section, I hope to show how Hassidic Idealism has the resources to resolve the problem. First we need to take another detour through the philosophy of fiction.

5.2.1.  To Be or Not to Be a Fictional Character Take the following sentence: S. Hamlet is a Danish prince S is true in Shakespeare’s play. But, to revisit a distinction that was central in the previous chapter, outside of the play it’s false. Accordingly, it is somewhat natural to think that there is some sort of intensional operator, which we shall call the 15  There is a prayer standardly published in Jewish prayer books, as part of a penitential prayer service known as selichot, which appears to be addressed to angels, asking them to beseech God on our behalf. But, precisely for this reason, there is great controversy about this prayer. Rabbi Yehudah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague (1520–1609), famously ruled that it isn’t appropriate to recite it (Loew 1961, ch. 12). For our purposes, prayers in which Jews seem to pray directly to God’s personified attributes, or to the sefirot, seem to be more pertinent. One such prayer made it into the standard prayer book for the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. So, it seems that many Jews today have the custom of praying to one of the sefirot (Sacks, 2012, p. 1167). Although some controversy also attached to this prayer, it’s fair to say that it has attracted much less ire. Is this because praying to the sefirot is better than praying to angels? Not according to the Rashbash, on option 3!

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122  The Principles of Judaism fiction-operator, which takes a sentence and says that that sentence is (at least) fictionally true. When we say that S is true, since Hamlet wasn’t an actual Danish prince, we mean that it’s true under the scope of such an operator. When we assert S, we generally mean something like It’s fictionally true that S. Or, in the language of the previous chapter, truthH becomes truth simpliciter under the scope of a ­fiction-operator that takes a sentence and says that it’s fictionally true. Now, imagine a new play, telling the story of Shakespeare pulling off a conspiracy, and how, actually, Hamlet did exist, and wasn’t fictional at all, but how Shakespeare had changed a couple of important details in his portrayal of Hamlet’s life, in order to cover his tracks. Let’s call this new play Conspiracy. It tells us that Hamlet wasn’t a Danish prince. Instead, we’re told that he was a tax collector from Shoreditch. When talking relative to the classical play, the sentence S is true, but relative to Conspiracy, S is false. And, when talking relative to the classical play, the sentence “Hamlet is from Shoreditch” is false. But, that sentence comes out true, relative to Conspiracy. And thus, it becomes clear that our fiction-operator needs to be indexed to a given fiction. Let F be our sentential fiction-operator. Let’s introduce a subscript letter to represent the fictional discourse that the operator is indexed to. Let “H” stands for the Hamlet fiction, and “C” stand for the Conspiracy fiction. Accordingly, “FH(S)” says that it is true, relative to the Hamlet story, that Hamlet is a prince of Denmark. “FC(not-S)” says that it is true, relative to the Conspiracy story, that Hamlet is not a prince of Denmark. We can also make use of a non-fiction-operator. You might think such an operator otiose. Whenever we’re not engaged in fiction (i.e., in the majority of our everyday lives), we make assertions aimed at being true. It goes without saying that they’re aimed at being non-fictionally true! The reason that such an operator might still be useful is because of the ways in which it sometimes interacts with our fiction-operator. To say that N(S) is to say that S is true outside of any fiction. Using these operators, we can define two rules of thumb that generally hold across works of fiction: (R1) Fx(R) → Fx(N(R)) (R2) Fx(R) → Fx(not-(Fx(R))) Rule 1 tells us that if it’s fictionally true that R, relative to some fiction x, then it’s also fictionally true, relative to that fiction, that R is non-fictionally true. An ex­ample: because Sherlock Holmes is a detective in the stories told by Conan Doyle, relative to those stories it’s non-fictionally true that Sherlock Holmes is a detective. In those stories, he’s a non-fictional detective. Similarly, Rule 2 tells us that if R is fictionally true, relative to some fiction x, then within that fiction, so to speak, it would be false to say that R is fictionally true relative to fiction x, since, within that  fiction, x isn’t a fiction! Standardly, you can have fictions within

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  123 fictions, but these will generally be of the form Fx(Fy(R)), such that the internal ­ ction-operator is indexed to a different fiction (namely, the fiction in the fi ­fiction—the fictional fiction!). Some fictions break these rules. Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1991) is a good example. Towards the end of the novel, Vonnegut inserts himself, as a character, into the story. Authors are often characters in their own stories, but here Vonnegut inserts himself into the story as the author of the story that he finds himself in. “I was there,” he reports, “to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout” (ibid., pp. 192–3). Let’s label some of these claims: T. Kurt Vonnegut went to Midland City to witness a confrontation between Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. U. Kurt Vonnegut created Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. T, of course, isn’t actually true. Vonnegut didn’t go to Midland City. The Midland City in Breakfast of Champions is a fictional place. Accordingly, we can safely say that N(not-T). But U is true, or at least plausibly true. Some argue that fictional characters are Platonic entities existing eternally in Plato’s heaven. Alternatively, one might seek to define a fictional character in terms of a set of individuals across possible worlds (Lewis, 1978). On either of these accounts, characters are not created by authors, but merely discovered. On those accounts then, U is false. You might think that fictional characters don’t exist in any shape or form, so they can neither be created nor discovered (Crane, 2013). On that view too, U is false. And yet, there are certainly plausible accounts according to which fictional characters really are created, as so-called “impure abstracta” (Thomasson, 1999; Kripke, 2013), or—perhaps—as ideas (Everett & Schroeder, 2015). So, whilst T is obviously false, U is, at least, plausible. For those who think that fictional characters are created by their authors, it is true to say that N(U). But of course T isn’t false in the story. Relative to the story told in Breakfast of Champions, it is true that Kurt Vonnegut visited Midland City. Calling this fiction B, we can say that FB(T). But U is false in the story. We’ve been told about Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s parents. In the story, it isn’t true that they are fictional characters. In the story, it’s true that they are human beings, with human parents. So what we have, in the sentence “I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout,” is a claim that is neither true in the fiction—since, in the fiction it isn’t the case that Vonnegut created Hoover and Trout—nor true outside of the fiction—since, outside of the fiction, Vonnegut was never in the fictional Midland City.

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124  The Principles of Judaism “N(T&U)” is false, since “N(not-T)” is true, and “FB(T&U)” is false, since “FB(not-U)” is true. Impossible things, as we know, can happen in some stories. You might think that Breakfast of Champions is such a story. But that would be a conclusion that a conscientious reader would only adopt as a last resort, since, unless we’re explicitly told otherwise, authors (of most genres) generally try to make their stories logically coherent. What’s really going on is that Vonnegut is purposefully collapsing what are supposed to be distinct diegetic levels. The humor of such a sentence is bound up with a surreptitious switch between different levels of discourse. He isn’t saying that N(T&U), nor is he saying that FB(T&U). Instead, he surreptitiously switches operators midway through the sentence. He’s really saying that FB(T)&N(U). You might dispute my reading. In the story, Vonnegut is something of a god. Indeed, he says as much himself: “I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge” (Vonnegut, 1991, p. 200). Just as a theist in this world will claim that she has two parents, but that she was also created by God,16 you might claim that, in the story, Hoover and Trout had biological parents, but also that they were created by an all-powerful Vonnegut. On this basis, you could claim that T and U, whatever their actual truth-values, are both true in the story. And since “FB(U)” is true after all, so is the claim that FB(T&U). But that doesn’t seem right to me. Imagine that God appeared to you. He says, “I have come to tell you that you are merely a figment of my imagination.” You come to believe, because of this vivid experience, that you are nothing more than a figment of God’s imagination. Should you stop believing that you’re a human being, made up of flesh and blood? God isn’t imagining that you’re a table. God isn’t imagining that you’re a chair. God’s imagining that you are a human being, and therefore, within the story that he’s imagining, it is true that you are a human being. To find out that you are merely a fictional character, as Kilgore Trout later discovers in the Breakfast of Champions, is to discover that what you had hitherto thought to be true simpliciter is merely true relative to the fiction you are part of. That is to say, to find out that you are living in a fiction is to find out that every sentence that you had formerly taken to be non-fictionally true might only actually be true relative to the fiction that you’re living in. You needn’t reject all of the things you thought you knew, you merely need to apply a different operator to them—not the non-fiction-operator, but the fiction-operator. Your parents will still be your parents; your home will still be located where you think it is—within the fiction in which you now know you live. Bearing all of this in mind: Trout hasn’t been told that, in the story, he isn’t a  human being with human concerns; a mere creation of a human author. He 16  For example, see the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nidda 31a.

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  125 hasn’t been told that FB(U). Rather, he’s merely been told that what’s true relative to his story isn’t the final word on the metaphysics of the matter, since what’s true relative to the story will often be false simpliciter. He’s been told that even though “FB(not-U)” is true, this isn’t the final word on the matter, since “N(U)” is also true. Again, Trout hasn’t been told that it’s false, in the story, that he’s a human being. Instead, he’s been offered a glimpse into some deeper reality than the one he lives his life within. Trout’s prayer to Vonnegut, at the end of the book, is this: “Make me young, make me young, make me young!” (Vonnegut, 1991, p. 295). Trout’s prayer is rational. He realizes that he has a tremendous stake in his fiction-relative truths, hence his request to be made young, rather than to be made a compelling character. Trout’s interest remains invested in his fictional life as a human being, and not in his non-fictional life as a fictional character. If God tells you that you’re a figment of his imagination, what would your prayer be? “Make it non-fictionally true that I’m a poignant character in your dream,” or “within the story of your dream, give me health, wealth and happiness”? And thus, I don’t think it right to say that T and U are both true within the story. U is false within the story, but in the story, Trout discovers that what’s true relative to his story isn’t always, even in the story, non-fictionally true. In other words, the Breakfast of Champions breaks (R1). Let V be the sentence “Kilgore Trout is a human being and not a fictional character.” Even though it’s true that FB(V), contra (R1), this doesn’t entail that FB(N(V)). Indeed, what Kilgore Trout comes to learn, within the story, is that what’s true relative to his fiction is not automatically to be taken, even within the story itself, as non-fictionally true. The story also violates (R2). Even though it’s true that FB(V), contra (R2), this doesn’t entail that FB(not-(FB(V))). On the contrary, what Kilgore Trout comes to learn, within the story itself, is that he is merely a character in that story; a story that he has a tremendous stake in. To discover that you’re a character in a story is also to discover that you’re in a story that violates (R1) and (R2).

5.2.2.  Clark Kent and Superman Lois Lane doesn’t know that Clark Kent is Superman. Imagine that she writes a story about Superman and Clark. In the story, they fight for Lois’s affection. Call this story “L,” for Loving Lois. It seems to me that the following claim is true: FL(Superman ≠ Clark Kent). This claim doesn’t conflict with the other true claim, which Lois doesn’t know, namely: N(Superman = Clark Kent). Relative to the fiction L, you’d be wrong to think that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, even if, outside of that fiction, they are the same person.

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126  The Principles of Judaism I’m assuming a direct reference theory of names, according to which the meaning of a name is simply the object or person to which it refers. Accordingly, “Superman = Clark Kent” (if true) expresses a proposition of the form a = a (since both names name the same thing). And thus, I seem to be saying that, for a certain a, it’s true that FL(a ≠ a)—in other words, it’s true in Loving Lois that a isn’t identical to itself. But then, Loving Lois turns out to be a story in which im­pos­ sible things happen. If you know that Superman and Clark Kent are one person, it might strike you that Loving Lois really is a completely absurd story: how could Superman pick Clark Kent up, raising him above his own head, and throw him out of a window, in a fit of jealous rage? And yet, it’s pretty easy for us to put ourselves in the pos­ ition of a reader who doesn’t know that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, and thus, it’s pretty easy for us to see this story as not at all absurd. Some stories contain a crucial and central impossibility in their plot—let’s call them Gendler-tales, in honour of Gendler’s story about Goldbach’s conjecture (chapter 4, section 4.5). Gendler-tales will generally strike their readers as strange or comical. They tend to wear their absurdity on their sleeve, in a way that Loving Lois doesn’t (especially if you don’t happen to know that Clark Kent and Superman are, outside of the story, one person). To say that Loving Lois is a Gendler-tale doesn’t do justice to the fact that it reads like a pretty normal story. It’s not a mindbender in the same way that Goldbach’s Tower is. One response would be to dump the direct reference theory. Accordingly, the sentence “Superman ≠ Clark Kent” doesn’t express a proposition of the form a ≠ a. Instead, it express a proposition more like, the name “Superman” and the name “Clark Kent” do not co-refer. The proposition that a ≠ a is necessarily false. But the claim that two names happen not to co-refer is a contingent fact about a language. Dumping the direct reference theory can help us to salvage Loving Lois. It isn’t a Gendler-tale because the sentence “Superman ≠ Clark Kent” doesn’t express any sort of impossibility, since those names didn’t have to co-refer. But indirect the­or­ies of reference are generally thought to be bad theories (see Kripke, 1972). Another way to save Loving Lois from being classed as a Gendler-tale is to say that a name refers directly to its bearer, but under the scope of a fiction-operator its reference will shift. When I speak about Napoleon, my use of the name “Napoleon” picks out its bearer, namely, the French general defeated at Waterloo. But when I read a fiction about Napoleon, the name picks out a fictional character (whatever your metaphysics of fictional characters may be). This character is a representation of Napoleon, but it is not Napoleon himself. On this reading, “Superman ≠ Clark Kent” might express a proposition of the form a ≠ a when uttered outside of the scope of Lois’s fiction-operator. But her fiction creates (or discovers) two distinct fictional characters—one called “Superman” and one called “Clark.” She thinks that her two characters are representations of two different people, when, in fact, they are actually two distinct

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  127 representations of the same person; but they are distinct. In the context of her fiction, “Superman ≠ Clark Kent” expresses a proposition of the form a ≠ b. That proposition is true, both in the fiction and outside of it. Lois’s story really is about two distinct characters, who just happen to be, unbeknownst to Lois, representations of the same non-fictional person. We can call this the surrogacy theory. When a non-fictional person appears in a fiction, they do so via a surrogate. In Loving Lois, one non-fictional person happens to have two distinct surrogates. Thomasson rejects the surrogacy theory, but on what seem to me to be faulty grounds. She says (Thomasson, 1999, p. 104): Most works of historical fiction would lose much of their poignancy if they were not set amid real historical events and individuals, and fictionalized biographies or comedies often center on the idea that the lives of famous historical in­di­vid­ uals went rather differently. Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, for example, would lose much of its humor if it did not involve the real Lenin, Tristan Tzara, and James Joyce coming together in Vienna [sic],17 but only some similar fictional in­di­vid­ uals (in a similar fictional city).

The surrogacy theory is harder to dismiss than Thomasson makes out. We should assume that the fictional surrogate for Lenin is a representation of Lenin. What it means for x to be a representation of y needn’t bother us. For current purposes, we can operate with a rough and ready, intuitive notion of one thing’s representing another. We can say that a story is about x iff it directly refers to x or to a representation of x. Stoppard’s Travesties can then be about Lenin, even if it doesn’t refer to Lenin. It will refer to a representation of Lenin, and so it’s still about Lenin. Where the theory starts to break down is when we probe its account of selfreference. I take it to be uncontroversial that: (1)  Kurt Vonnegut refers to himself in Breakfast of Champions. (2) Breakfast of Champions refers to its author and is, therefore, selfreferential. The surrogacy theory is committed to the notion that, in (1), “Kurt Vonnegut” refers to the real author, and “himself ” refers not to the author but to his fictional surrogate.18 But can that be what makes a book self-referential? Surely, the term “self-referential” can only apply to a text when an author refers to himself, and therefore Vonnegut’s writing can only be self-referential if he refers in it, not to a surrogate of himself, but to himself. Perhaps this begs the question against the surrogacy theory by assuming that self-referential fiction has to have the author 17  The play is actually set in Zurich. 18  This already amounts to an odd, indirect, and non-standard form of anaphoric reference.

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128  The Principles of Judaism referring to herself rather than to a surrogate of herself. But self-referential nonfiction surely refers to its author directly. Can the surrogate theorist give a uniform analysis of (2) and (3)? (3) Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography refers to its author and is, therefore, selfreferential. Are we to say that Breakfast of Champions is self-referential in virtue of referring to a surrogate of its author, whilst Russell’s Autobiography is self-referential in ­virtue of referring directly to its author? Why the asymmetry? You could try to avoid this asymmetry via the following analysis of self-reference: “x refers to its author” is true iff x was written by y, and x contains a name that either refers to y, or refers to some z, such that z is a representation of y. This single analysis can take care of (2) and (3). But can this really be an analysis of self-reference? A story can perhaps be about a person in virtue of referring to a surrogate of that person. But surely a story doesn’t refer to a person unless it refers to that person. To deny that would be to deny a tautology. And yet, this ad hoc analysis of self-reference seems to be denying just that tautology. This analysis seems to allow that an author refers to herself without referring to herself. I can’t see a nontautology-denying analysis of the predicates in question that would allow (1) and (2) to be true, whilst also giving a uniform analysis to (2) and (3). Consequently, I think we should accept that fiction-operators don’t shift the reference of names under their scope. “Lenin” refers to the same Lenin both inside and outside of Stoppard’s play. Accordingly, if “Superman ≠ Clark Kent” expresses a proposition of the form a ≠ a, then it does so inside and outside of a fiction-operator. I therefore think we should accept that Loving Lois is a Gendlertale after all. But we can explain why Goldbach’s Tower strikes us as more of a mind-bender than Loving Lois. In both stories a restricted number of logically and metaphysically impossible propositions are fictionally true. But here’s the salient difference: the story that Loving Lois tells us is epistemically possible, in a certain sense, even if it’s logically and metaphysically impossible. Goldbach’s Tower isn’t even epistemically possible in the limited way that Loving Lois is. It’s generally regarded to be a consequence of direct reference theories (albeit a puzzling one) that there are some logical contradictions that a reasonable person can come to believe (see Kripke, 1979). According to the direct reference theorist, the sentence “Superman is strong and Clark Kent is not strong” expresses a propos­ition of the form a is strong and a is not strong—an outright contradiction. But a reasonable person could still come to believe such a proposition, as long as she doesn’t yet know that “Superman” and “Clark Kent” co-refer. Reasonable agents are often mistaken about identity statements. We sometimes think that a = b only to discover that a ≠ b, and vice versa. So even though true identity propositions are necessarily true, their falsehood often strikes us as

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  129 epi­stem­ic­al­ly possible, since we’ve often been wrong about identity statements in the past. Loving Lois is a Gendler-tale, but it’s less of a mind-bender than some, because its tale is epistemically possible. It might be the case that, were Superman to read the story himself, it would strike him to be equally as bizarre as Goldbach’s Tower, but that might just be because, for him, it isn’t an epistemic possibility that “Superman ≠ Clark Kent.” Epistemic possibility is agent relative, and thus whether a story is epistemically possible will also be agent relative. Nevertheless, we can still isolate a class of Gendler-tale that we can call “epistemically possible Gendler-tales,” even if that class is defined relative to agents. We can draw two conclusions: (1) In a wide variety of epistemically possible Gendler-tales, a false identity or a false non-identity claim can be true, relative to the fiction; and (2) This gives us no reason to think that fiction-operators are reference shifters.

5.2.3.  Solving the Problem with the Sefirot God is a character in the story that is this world, as well as being its author. Fiction-operators are not reference-shifting—so just as Vonnegut himself is a character in his story, God himself is a character in the story in which we appear. We are God’s characters, and, if you believe in the veracity of religious experience, we experience him in our lives, just as Trout experienced Vonnegut. But perhaps we meet God as more than one character in this story, even though, outside of the fiction, he is one God. We have already seen how the following two claims can be true: 1. FL(Superman ≠ Clark Kent) 2. N(Superman = Clark Kent) A similar thing could be true about God. Call the story of our world “W,” and call the ten sefirot “s1” through to “s10.” Why can’t both of the following claims be true? 1. FW(s1, s2, s3, . . ., s10 are all distinct from one another) 2. N(s1 = s2 = s3 . . . = s10) We witness God as ten distinct characters in our story, even though, in actual fact, there is only one God. We witness his mercy, and his anger, and we witness the conflict between the two, and we witness them as independent forces. In actual fact there’s only one thing there, even though it’s fictionally true that there are ten.

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130  The Principles of Judaism Vonnegut appeared to Trout. It was understood by some readers that this was to be Vonnegut’s last novel (Lehmann-Haupt, 1973), and thus, he came to set all of his characters free because he no longer had plans to use them in further works of fiction. Alternatively, he was merely retiring Trout, who had until now been a recurring character in Vonnegut’s work. In actual fact, Vonnegut continued to write stories, and they continued to contain Trout. Perhaps Vonnegut was of two minds. Part of him had wanted to retire his recurring character, or even to give up writing fiction altogether, and part of him didn’t. Imagine that he wanted to be a character in the story he was writing, and wanted to express, in the story, his conflicted feelings to Trout. So, with some audacity, I’m going to write a paragraph that didn’t appear, but could have appeared, in Breakfast of Champions (text in italics comes from the original (Vonnegut, 1991, p. 293), the rest is my own invention): I wanted to set Trout free but there was a niggling voice in my head telling me that I wouldn’t be able to. I simply had too many stories still to tell. I split myself into two different people. This way I’d be able to express myself better. I said to him, as Kurt Vonnegut-1: “I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout . . . I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs, Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.” “No you won’t!” I told Vonnegut-1, as Vonnegut-2, “I won’t let you.” And at that very moment, the two Vonneguts—both of whom were me, but neither of whom were each other—started fighting right in front of Kilgore’s astonished eyes.

Why can’t an author insert himself into a novel as two people, in the novel, even though he’s only one person outside of the novel? I see no reason why this shouldn’t be possible. You could say that even in my shoddy rewrite of Breakfast of Champions, the two Vonneguts are still one person, despite my efforts to present them as two. And yet, they fight in front of Kilgore’s very eyes. They certainly seem to be two rather than one. The narrative goes so far as to stipulate their nonidentity. You might think that they are two distinct surrogates of the one Vonnegut, but I don’t see why we should be forced into saying that. Lenin, and not a surrogate of his, appears in fictions about him. Superman and Clark Kent are not surrogates in Loving Lois. I don’t see why Vonnegut-1 and Vonnegut-2 should be surrogates. They are fictionally two, even though they are actually one. Kabbalists experience God, through the tradition, or through religious experience, as ten distinct entities. Perhaps then, in the story that God tells, he himself is

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  131 ten distinct entities. To attribute contradictions to God as an author is something that we shouldn’t do at all casually, for reasons outlined in chapter 4, section 4.5. But we have also said that if contradictions are front and center, and essential to a plot, then they suggest no defect in their author. Perhaps it is central to God’s story that he express himself through these ten fictionally distinct characters. Against the Rashbash, I would claim that this isn’t polytheism, nor does it imply any real complexity in the godhead. God might be ten distinct entities within the fiction, but in actual fact he is one. You might then claim that I’m being disingenuous. I have already said that fictional characters have a greater stake in the truths of their fiction than in what’s true beyond their fiction. So, the Rashbash’s charge can be rephrased: Hassidic Idealism coupled with the doctrine of the sefirot claims that in the fiction there are ten distinct divine entities, and thus, in the fiction, polytheism is true! The fact that God is one, beyond our fiction, doesn’t save the Kabbalist if the fictional truths are the more important ones. This criticism won’t stick. In section 5.2.2, we concluded that a story in which the characters discover that they are fictional characters is a story that doesn’t abide by (R1) and (R2). Because (R1) is false, the fact that FW(s1, s2, s3, . . ., s10 are all distinct from one another) is quite consistent with the claim that FW(N(s1 = s2 = s3 . . . = s10)). In other words, even in the fiction itself, it’s non-fictionally true that all of the sefirot are one. Those confusing passages in which the Kabbalists insist that despite being ten, the sefirot are really one, can now be made coherent. According to the fiction we live in, there are ten distinct sefirot, but, even according to the fiction that we live in, it is non-fictionally the case that they are identical; and a mere fiction that God is many. The truths that are most directly relevant to us are the truths of the fiction that we live in, but we know that the truth that is most relevant to God is the nonfictional truth, according to which God is one. We therefore know that monotheism, rather than polytheism, gets to the core of God’s essence. And crucially, because the fiction-operator doesn’t shift reference, when you pray to one of the sefirot, you are praying to the one God who is all of the sefirot.19 Just as Trout has a stake in the non-fictional decisions of Vonnegut, which could make him young, we have a stake in the non-fictional decisions of the one and only God. And thus his non-fictional unity is of crucial importance to us, even in the fiction. I have utilized Hassidic Idealism to respond to the problem of the sefirot.20 What emerges from this picture is that, if we do adopt the doctrine of the sefirot, then the world we live in is actually an epistemically possible Gendler-tale.

19  This implies that the Rashbash is wrong to think that praying to the sefirot is no better than praying to angels. 20  Rabbi Eli Rubin suggests (in correspondence) that a similar line of thinking has been advocated by thinkers within the Lubavitch tradition. I don’t have the space to assess that intriguing claim here.

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132  The Principles of Judaism

5.3.  Hassidic Idealism, Brains in Vats, and Religious Language In this section, I argue that Hassidic Idealism can shed new light on both sides of an old theological debate—the debate explored in chapter 1, between apophatic and cataphatic theologians. Hilary Putnam argued that we can know that we are not brains in vats (Putnam, 1982). Given Putnam’s somewhat ambiguous statement of the argument, I invoke Anthony Brueckner’s (1986) reconstruction of it. Putnam’s argument relies upon a “causal theory” of reference: a person can only refer to entities to which he and his act of reference stand in certain causal relations. Imagine that you are a brain in a vat (henceforth, a BIV). Because you’re a BIV, you have never witnessed a real tree, but only computer-generated simulations of trees. Imagine that you have never been taught English by anybody who has any causal contact with real trees. Instead, you, or your community of unknowingly envatted brains, have coincidentally developed a language that is internally indistinguishable from English. Given the contours of this thought experiment, your use of the word “tree” couldn’t possibly refer to a tree. Putnam offers three possible alternative referents for the BIV’s token of “tree”: (i) the tree-in-the-image (which Brueckner (1986, p. 150) takes to be “the succession of sense impressions had by the BIV”); or (ii) the electrical impulses that cause the BIV to have the sense impressions that are had when un-envatted brains see a tree; or (iii) the features of the computer program responsible for generating those impulses. Opting for option (i), though any of them would do, Brueckner reconstructs Putnam’s argument as follows: (a) Either I am a BIV (speaking vat-English) or I am a non-BIV (speaking English). (b) If I am a BIV (speaking vat-English), then my utterances of “I am a BIV” are true iff I have sense impressions as of being a BIV. (Given option (i)) (c) Even if I am a BIV (speaking vat-English), I certainly don’t have sense impressions as of being a BIV. (d) If I am a BIV (speaking vat-English), then my utterances of “I am a BIV” are false. (Given (b) and (c)) (e) If I am a non-BIV (speaking English), then my utterances of “I am a BIV” are true iff I am a BIV. (f) If I am a non-BIV (speaking English), then my utterances of “I am a BIV” are false. (Given (e)) (g)  Therefore: My utterances of “I am a BIV” are false. (Given (a), (d), and (f)) What’s more, the following sentence turns out to be true whether it is said in English or in vat-English:

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  133 (T)  My utterances of “I am a BIV” are true iff I am a BIV. Since you know that your utterances of “I am a BIV” are false, you also know, given (T), that you are not a BIV. Opponents of this argument will think that they’ve been victim to some sort of philosophical sleight of hand. Brueckner (ibid., p. 164) contends that Putnam’s argument amounts to nothing more than a “trick.” Given (g), I do know that the proposition I happen to be asserting with my tokens of “I am a BIV” is a false proposition, but I don’t know which proposition it is that I’m asserting. I don’t know if I’m speaking English or vat-English. I don’t know if I am falsely asserting the proposition expressed by English tokens of the sentence, or falsely asserting the proposition expressed by vat-English tokens of the sentence. There’s a big difference! Thomas Nagel writes (1986, p. 73): If I accept the argument, I must conclude that a brain in a vat can’t think truly that it is a brain in a vat, even though others can think this about it. What follows? Only that I cannot express my skepticism by saying “Perhaps I am a brain in a vat.” Instead I must say “Perhaps I can’t even think the truth about what I am, because I lack the necessary concepts and my circumstances make it im­pos­ sible for me to acquire them!” If this doesn’t qualify as skepticism, I don’t know what does.

Imagine that we are scientists looking at the output of BIVs. One day, we observe one of the brains uttering the sentence, “I am a brain in a vat.” On the assumption of Putnam’s theory of reference, we know that the brain must be speaking vatEnglish. Thus, we know that she’s said something false. But we also know that, in the final analysis, this falsehood has a different cause from the falsehood that arose when she said that “2 + 2 = 5.” The latter falsehood arose through bad arithmetic. The former falsehood seems to arise only because the BIV didn’t have the linguistic capability to express what she really wanted to assert. We might say, about that BIV, in such a situation, that despite saying something false, she had come about as close as she could to articulating the truth about her situation. We might say that her falsehood was illuminating. To echo Nagel, it was an attempt to think the truth about what she is, despite lacking the necessary concepts. This brings us back to the notion of an illuminating falsehood, which we discussed in chapter 1, section 1.6.1—but this time, without any of the intricate background philosophy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Witness an analogous argument: (h) Either I am a figment of God’s imagination (in which case I make assertions relative to the standards of truthE (i.e., truth relative to God’s imagined

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134  The Principles of Judaism scene)), or I am not a figment of God’s imagination (in which case I make assertions relative to the standards of truth simpliciter). (i) If I am a figment of God’s imagination, then my utterances of “I am a figment of God’s imagination” are true iff, according to the image that God imagines, I am a figment of his imagination. (Given a causal theory of reference) (j) If I am a figment of God’s imagination, then I do at least know that I am not a figment of his imagination in the image that he imagines (since, ex hypothesi, he imagines me to be a person). (k) If I am a figment of God’s imagination, then my utterances of “I am a figment of God’s imagination” are false relative to the standards to which I asserted them. (Given (i) and (j)) (l) If I am not a figment of God’s imagination, then my utterances of “I am a figment of God’s imagination” are true iff I am a figment of God’s imagination. (m) If I am not a figment of God’s imagination, then my utterances of “I am a figment of God’s imagination” are false. (n) Therefore: My utterances of “I am a figment of God’s imagination” are false. (Given (h), (k), and (m)) Furthermore, my utterances of (T') are true, relative to my own standard of truth, be that truthE or truth simpliciter: (T') My utterances of “I am a figment of God’s imagination” are true iff I am a ­figment of God’s imagination. Knowledge of (n) and (T') might be enough to undermine Hassidic Idealism. We can know that we’re not a figment of God’s imagination. But perhaps this is what leads so many mystical Hassidic Idealists to their sense of mystery. Perhaps they recognize that all of the things that they want to assert about the relationship between God and the world are false; that they are unable to make assertions relative to God’s truth-standard, and thus unable to assert the propositions that they want to assert. On this reading, the Hassidic Idealist would identify with Nagel’s words: “Perhaps I can’t even think the truth about what I am, because . . . my circumstances make it impossible . . .!” On this suggestion, talk of our being figments of God’s imagination, or characters in his story, is false; but such falsehoods might still be the best that the Hassidic Idealist can do to gesticulate towards the propositions he was unable to express—the propositions that his words might well have expressed had he been able to speak the language of God. In chapter  1, we saw that Jewish theology might not be able to promise truth, but it aspired to get as close to the truth as we could. Perhaps Hassidic Idealism is an illuminating falsehood, and words can get no closer to expressing what’s really the case.

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  135 There is a temptation to describe the BIV’s utterance of “I am a BIV” as a failed attempt to assert the proposition that English expresses with tokens of “I am a BIV.” She did assert something. She asserted the proposition expressed by vatEnglish tokens of “I am a BIV.” But it is intuitive to describe her as attempting, and failing, to assert a proposition that was, in the end, epistemically closed off to her. The inaccessible proposition was the one that her falsehood somehow “gesticulated” towards. She showed what she couldn’t say. Wittgenstein would be proud! To return to the language of chapter  1, perhaps our cataphatic-claims express what we know of God as we experience him in the story, and our apophaticclaims (though false) illuminate something about the very same God as we catch some sort of glimpse of him beyond, in his transcendence. Having said all of this, it’s not clear to me that Hassidic Idealists need to defend anything like the apophatic mystery and paradox towards which so many Hassidic masters seem to have been attracted. In Putnam’s thought experiment, the BIVs have no contact with the outside world; nobody from outside of the vat teaches them how to speak English. Disanalogously, even if we are characters in God’s story, God has—according to the basic Jewish narrative—inserted himself into the story, as a character, and communicates with us. Putnam’s BIVs can’t learn English, whereas God can teach us “Godese.” The “philosophical moves” that allow us to articulate Hassidic Idealism only work if we have the linguistic and epistemic ability to understand assertions made relative to truth-standards more “fundamental” than our own. If God has made contact with us, then we may well be speaking Godese already. But, if this concern overwhelms you—how can mere characters express truths about the world beyond their own?—you can at least appreciate the doctrines of Hassidic Idealism as apophatic mysticism; as falsehoods illuminating theological facts that can’t be conventionally asserted—like the BIV who can’t say what it is that she’s showing. Moreover, we have discovered a new way of framing apophaticism and its debate with cataphaticism: can figments of God’s imagination meaningfully engage in theological speculation, or not? So far, in this chapter, we’ve established that Hassidic Idealism can function as a key for understanding old theological debates, and for making sense of various Jewish mystical-intellectual traditions. It’s a doctrine that helps to make sense of other Jewish doctrines and debates. This gives it an added value for the Jewish philosopher.

5.4.  Religious Significance Before we move on to Part II, I thought it might be worthwhile to sketch, as a representative sample, some dimensions of religious significance that emerge in the wake of Hassidic Idealism, and to say something about the theology that’s beginning to emerge.

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136  The Principles of Judaism A central religious metaphor describes God in terms of a dreamer, dreaming the world into existence.21 A related metaphor describes God in terms of a storyteller, telling the story that is our world.22 Hassidic Idealism builds upon these metaphors. It takes them literally, or at least seriously.23 It is a view that animates those metaphors. In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera discusses one of his characters, Tereza, who is stuck in a situation in which she feels torn between something she deeply wants to do and her feeling of nausea. Her mind wants one thing and her body another. Kundera says that she was born in that moment. It was for this scene that she was created: It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation . . . Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach . . . Tereza was born . . . of a situation which brutally reveals the irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience. (Kundera, 1995, p. 37)

Later, he returns to his theme (ibid., p. 215): [C]haracters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Tereza has a mother. In the story we learn about her. But outside of the story, her real mother—so to speak—is a metaphor; because every character is a metaphor for something that the author is trying to express. This insight can serve as a key in order to understand a great deal of Kabbalistic and Hassidic readings of the Bible. Abraham was the son of a woman, the wife of Terach. Mrs. Terach. The Bible doesn’t tell us her name, but it’s safe to assume that Abraham had a mother. In fact, he refers to her obliquely, at one point in the story (Genesis 20:12). The Babylonian Talmud calls her Amathlai (Baba Batra 91a). Abraham lived a real

21  A Hindu myth describes Vishnu dreaming our world into being (Zimmer, 1946, pp. 38–9). 22  C. S. Lewis (2009, p. 169). 23  Max Black (1954) and Donald Davidson (1984), despite their many disagreements on the nature of metaphor, both accept that a distinction can be drawn between the literal and the metaphorical. Lakoff and Johnson (1999), on the other hand, would argue that all thought is, in some sense or other, metaphorical. I remain neutral: to take a metaphor seriously, for the purposes of this book, is either to take it literally, if you agree with Black and Davidson, or, for Lakoff and Johnson, to take it as being, in some sense, indispensable.

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  137 life, and real things happened to him.24 But, in the Kabbalistic tradition, he’s also an expression of an idea. Abraham symbolizes God’s ‫( חסד‬loving-kindness). God’s justice is represented in this world by Isaac. Jacob (somewhat surprisingly) is taken to represent God’s truth. This hermeneutic makes sense on the adoption of Hassidic Idealism. Abraham may have been born of a woman, in the story, but that doesn’t undermine the fact that his real mother was a metaphor. When the Torah tells us a story, two things are happening: there’s what’s true in the story—the real history about real people—but there’s also the drama that’s ongoing in the mind of God; a drama that’s expressed through the unfolding of the story. The Zohar (I.7b) alludes to this. The Torah starts with the second letter of the alphabet, with its numerical value, 2, in order to illustrate that there are two stories unfolding in unison; one revealed, and one hidden; a story told, and a story about the author telling the story. It’s as if the Kabbala seeks to gain a psychological appreciation of God, by looking at the story he tells, and coming to know more about him, just as we might psychoanalyze an author through their novel. Elsewhere, the Zohar (III.151a) reports: Rabbi Shimon said: Woe to the person who says that the Torah comes to tell commonplace stories and the words of ordinary people . . . Rather, all the words of the Torah are supernal matters and supreme secrets . . . The Torah story is the clothing of the Torah. A person who thinks that the clothing is the Torah itself and there is nothing more, will be destroyed and not merit the World to Come . . . The fools look only at the clothing, which are the stories in the Torah . . . But the wise, servants of the supreme king that stood at Sinai, they look only at the soul, which is the most important of all. In time to Come, they will see the soul of the soul.25

The story of this world doesn’t end with the Bible. The story is still unfolding. Consequently, every person you meet is the expression of a divine idea. Everything that happens in your life, even those things that are truly random, and truly coincidental, can also be saturated with meaning and religious significance, from a higher perspective. In a novel, every event is ripe for interpretation, even if the narrator insists that it was a coincidence. Every aspect of one’s life can be elevated by the supposition that it’s being lived in the very mind of God. Moreover, we’re left with a probing existential question. If you are a metaphor, then what are you a metaphor for?

24 To what extent this assumption is justified, and important, we’ll discuss in chapter  7, section 7.3.2. 25  As translated by Gellman (2016, p. 138). To view the Torah as (primarily) an attempt at history is, according to the Zohar, foolishness. See chapter 7, section 7.3.2, for more on this theme.

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138  The Principles of Judaism Another dimension of religious significance: If there are n billion people on earth, then God could be thought to be writing n billion stories concurrently. In our own stories, we’re the main character. But, in other people’s stories, we’re supporting cast, or merely incidental, or we don’t appear at all. This makes sense of the practice of the famous Hassidic master Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Peshischa (1767–1827). In each pocket he carried a slip of paper. On one he had written, in accordance with the saying of the Mishna (Sanhedrin 4:5): “for my sake was the world created.” On the other, he had written the words of Abraham (Genesis 18:27): “I am dust and ashes.” Both can be true, since we may well be appearing in multiple, overlapping, concurrent, stories. In some of them, the first slip of paper describes our situation. In others, the second slip describes our situation. Both have their place. What’s true of individuals can be true of communities and nations. Rabbi Lord Jacobovitz said: I believe that every people—and indeed, in a more limited way, every individual— is “chosen” or destined for some distinct purpose in advancing the designs of providence. Only, some fulfill their mission and others do not. Maybe the Greeks were chosen for their unique contributions to art and philosophy, the Romans for their pioneering services in law and government, the British for bringing parliamentary rule into the world, and the Americans for piloting democracy in a pluralistic society. The Jews were chosen by God to be “peculiar unto Me” as the pioneers of religion and morality; this was and is their national purpose. (Agus et al., 1966)26

God is telling multiple, consistent, and overlapping stories all at once. In some of these stories, one nation is chosen, for it is the story of that nation. In others, another nation is chosen, for it is the story of that nation. This approach could come off the hinges. For example, in the story of the Jewish people, it could be false that Jesus rose from the dead, and false that he was the Messiah, and yet, for the Christians, living in a different story, it could be true that Jesus rose from the dead, and true that he was the Messiah. But when Jews were ready to die by their millions rather than convert to Christianity, surely they were denying more than Jesus’ claim to be their Messiah, in their national story. They were denying that he was the Messiah at all. They were denying, outright, that he was God incarnate. Does Hassidic Idealism undermine, God forbid, their martyrdom? Does it entail that there are two stories here, equally fundamental from God’s perspective: one in which Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, and one in which

26  The Bible itself implies that God can have intimate relations with other nations, see Isaiah 19:25.

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  139 he was? Did the martyrs really give their lives for one fiction over another, when neither fiction was, in actual fact, more fundamental than the other? Thankfully, Hassidic Idealism doesn’t go that far. We’ve already suggested that faith in God, as an author, requires that we try to interpret his stories as coherent and consistent wherever possible. Evidently, Christians and Jews are living in the same world. We talk to each other. We interact. If we are each in different stories, then those stories are something like concurrent, overlapping tales—like a series of books about one set of characters, in one universe. Given the way in which these stories must be overlapping, and given our faith in God’s good authorship, we’d have reason to think that the brute facts—the fictional world history, and the like—must be constant over each of the stories. In this series of stories, either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn’t. Either he was the Messiah or he wasn’t. But what will change from story to story is who the main characters happen to be. The Hassidic Idealist might contend that non-Jewish religions are wrong about all sorts of things. They might be mistaken about the facts of the stories in which we collectively live; just as Othello was mistaken about the facts of the story in which he lived, when he thought that Desdemona loved Casio. But, given the ­tenets of Hassidic Idealism, the Jewish people would be wrong to think that their chosenness gives them any sort of fundamental spotlight. The Jewish people are the main character of their collective story. Other peoples are the main characters of theirs. God has a relationship with us all. We are all, collectively and singularly, dust and ashes, even though we are all, also, the center of the world; a world that was created just for us. Finally, a word about the theology that’s emerging from Part I of this book. R.  Albo’s three principles of Judaism, unadorned by corollaries, “roots,” and “branches,” tell us very little about the character and attributes of God. But we’re beginning to see that a theory of creation starts to flesh out the picture we have of God. That’s one of the reasons why medieval Jewish philosophy always began with a discussion of the creation. Theories of creation, against the background of an Aristotelian physics, played a large role in motivating an a-personal theology among the Jewish medieval rationalists, such as Saadya Gaon (al-Fayyûmî, 1989) and Maimonides (2000). This physics was thought to give rise to a cosmological argument for the existence of God. As we mentioned in chapter  1, their cosmological argument posited a being that was prior to all species and genera. It seemed to require that this being was mereologically and metaphysically simple; since if this being were complex, comprised of parts a and b, then you could come to ask what caused a and b to come together. If God instantiates more than one property, then you could come to ask what causes those properties to be co-instantiated. But, since this being was supposed to be the first cause, there could be no answer to these questions. Instead, we were to infer that this being isn’t complex in any way. This theology was, in large part, including the parts that might seem most philosophically

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140  The Principles of Judaism suspect today, encouraged by the contemporary science of its day, and its Aristotelian conception of what explanation must amount to (Lebens, ms). The God of this theology was thought to be a-personal for a number of ­reasons. First: it cannot fall under the species of a person, since it is prior to all species and genera. Second: to the extent that persons are complex (if not mereologically, then at least in virtue of instantiating complex properties), then personhood would be incompatible with divine simplicity. But we know that there are a number of problems with this medieval picture. The radical notion of simplicity gives rise to all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes, which can only be avoided with some clumsy and counter-intuitive epicycles—as was argued, for instance, by Alvin Plantinga (1980). This medieval theology also leads to a radical apophaticism that seems to be self-referentially incoherent. Even if it is somehow illuminating to say that God is indescribable, we also believe it to be false. We can see the falsehood quite clearly. If God’s being the first cause of the cosmological argument entails that he falls under no species or genera, then he can’t fall under the species or genera of “being a cause,” but if he isn’t a cause, then how can he be the first cause, and if he isn’t the first cause, then how is he the being that the cosmological argument supposedly proved to exist? Maimonides was led by the science of his day (Lebens, ms). At the outset of this chapter, I mentioned that contemporary science makes Idealism a more attractive option than it seemed to be before. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics make mental properties at least as fundamental—if not more fundamental—than apparently non-mental properties. In addition, I mentioned that the hard problem of consciousness also renders idealism more attractive than it may have seemed hitherto. Finally, at the end of chapter  3, we saw that the only scientifically and philosophically reputable way that a theist, who believes in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, can conceive of the laws of nature may well end up entailing idealism. Accordingly, the theist who respects the science and philosophy of our day as much as Maimonides and Saadya respected the science and philosophy of their days might feel compelled towards either a Berkeleyan or a Hassidic Idealism; other arguments in Part I have sided more strongly with Hassidic Idealism. Either way, what both forms of idealism have in common is that God isn’t thought of as prior to all species and genera. We can describe this God as falling under certain categories. For instance, God will have to be a mind; a mind who thinks. The mental is the most fundamental category that we have. Why then do most mystics, including the Hassidim, talk about the Ein Sof— i.e., God in his transcendence—as beyond all description? In actual fact, it seems to follow from Hassidic Idealism that we can describe God in his transcendence, albeit only partially and at a high level of generality. We can describe him as a person; as a mind that thinks. Apophatic religious experiences surely played a significant role in sustaining the notion that the Ein Sof was beyond description (Matt, 1990). But there was

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Hassidic Idealism: Some Hidden Benefits  141 probably more to it than that. Maimonides has a weighty status in the Jewish trad­ition. Given their recognition of an ongoing revelation, unfolding in the evolution of the Jewish tradition (a recognition that I share, and develop in chapter 7), the Kabbalists were likely unwilling to jettison the God of Maimonides. His ­apopaphatic, impersonal God became their Ein Sof. I’m not the first to suggest that the influence of Maimonides was part of the inspiration for the simplicity of the Ein Sof (Idel, 1986; 1988, p. 253; Matt, 1990). But I’m also not the first to notice that the Kabbalah failed to depersonalize God. Michael Wyschogrod (1996, p. 98) writes: It is difficult to resist the conclusion that tsimtsum Judaizes the emanation of Neoplatonism [according to which the creation is the unthinking overflow of God’s abundance]. Whereas in classical Neoplatonism the process of emanation is unknown to the Absolute and is therefore in no sense an undertaking on the part of the Absolute, Judaism cannot absorb such an impersonal process at the core of its faith. Before emanation takes place, there must be a prior divine movement [viz., tzimtzum] to make possible the subsequent process, and this prior movement is purposive . . . So, against its will, and against its better judgement, the kabbalah deals with, or at least leaves a place for, the personality of Hashem [even at the level of the Ein Sof  ] . . .

True: stuck as we are within the story of this world, we might know painfully little of God in his transcendence. He might be the person that we vaguely experience through the mist of our most apophatic religious experiences; like brains in a vat recognizing what they are, at the same time as recognizing the semantic obstacles in the way of expressing just what they recognize themselves to be. But even this Ein Sof, of whom we can know so little, in that he acts, and imagines this world into being in an act of creative tzimtzum, must be a personal mind; a mind that imagines. Only a person could conjure a story. Ironically, the Kabbalists tried to hold on to an impersonal layer in their conception of God, partly in order to be loyal to Maimonides. But loyalty to the spirit of Maimonides in our new scientific context might actually license an idealism with a personal God; be it Berkeleyan Idealism, or something stronger. Even if it didn’t license such a move, the Kabbalists weren’t really able to escape from a personal conception of God. Indeed, theism cannot really make sense of creatio originalis without the sort of idealism that renders God a person. Throughout, I’ve been assuming that God is perfect, and that he is therefore omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. These are mainstream assumptions for a post-medieval Orthodox Jewish theology to adopt. But throughout Part I of this book, we’ve undergone a journey that has added to these assumptions. We’ve come to the conclusion that the only sort of world that a perfect God could create would be no world at all, but a dream or a story world. Our starting

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142  The Principles of Judaism theological assumptions have therefore led us to Hassidic Idealism, and now Hassidic Idealism reveals to us more about God than our starting assumptions made explicit. We arrive at a God who is a storyteller, or lucid dreamer, with intentions, cre­ ative designs, and narrative purpose. More: Hassidic Idealism combines with empirical data accrued throughout our lives to generate good reason to have faith in God’s creative depth and ingenuity. It takes an amazing imagination to come up with this stunningly detailed world. Imagine imagining a Beethoven and all of his music ex nihilo! Moreover, in the story of this world, God’s omnipotence takes on a new character: God—as we have discussed—can even make contradictions true (in the story). Outside of the story, God’s omnipotence must be limited to the possible. Inside of the story, no such limitations need be in play. Within the story, principles of aesthetics place a more robust set of limitations upon God than do the laws of logic. Contradictions will only appear where there is a narrative and aesthetic justification given God’s aims in the creation. Part I has given rise to a theology who’s perfect God is a stunningly creative mind, with limitless power over, and knowledge of, all that occurs in our world. In Parts II and III, we leave behind the notion of God beyond the story, and delve into the story that he reputedly tells: a story in which he reveals his will to the Jewish people, and promises to redeem them.

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PART II

R EV E L AT ION You were revealed in a cloud of glory, to your holy people, in order to speak with them.

‫בֹודָך עַ ל עַ ם‬ ֽ ֶ ְ‫ּבעֲ נַ ן ּכ‬ ַ ‫ֽית‬ ָ ‫ַא ָּתה נִ גְ ֵל‬ .‫ָק ְד ֶׁשָך לְ ַד ֵּבר עִ ָּמם‬

From the heavens, you caused them to hear your voice, and you were revealed unto them in mists of purity.

‫ֽית‬ ָ ‫קֹולָֽך וְ נִ גְ ֵל‬ ֶ ‫ִמן ַה ָּׁש ַ ֽמיִ ם ִה ְׁש ַמעְ ָּתם‬ .‫עֲ לֵ ֶיהם ְּבעַ ְר ְפלֵ י ֽט ַֹהר‬

The whole wide world quaked before you, and the works of creation shuddered before you, as you revealed yourself, our king, on Mount Sinai, to teach Torah and commandments to your people.

‫ּגַ ם ּכָ ל ָהעֹולָ ם ּכֻ ּלֹו ָחל ִמ ָּפנֶ ֽיָך ְּוב ִרּיֹות‬ ‫לֹותָך‬ ְ ָ‫אׁשית ָח ְרדּו ִמ ֶ ּֽמךָ ְּב ִהּג‬ ִ ‫ְּב ֵר‬ ‫ל־הר ִסינַ י לְ לַ ֵּמד לְ עַ ְּמָך‬ ַ ‫ַמלְ ֵּכֽנּו ַע‬ .‫ּומצְ וֹות‬ ִ ‫ּתֹורה‬ ָ

Liturgy for Rosh Hashana

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6

What Is the Torah? The Internal Problem with the Revelation

A plausible doctrine of creation has to cohere with the findings of contemporary empirical sciences and philosophy. Our second doctrine—the claim that the Torah is the revealed word of God—will likewise have to cohere with the findings of contemporary empirical sciences and philosophy. Regarding the empirical ­sciences: biblical studies and archaeology suggest that the Pentateuch isn’t what Orthodox Judaism takes it to be, namely, the unmediated record of God’s word to Moses. Regarding philosophy: the Torah contains details in deep tension with many of our modern ethical beliefs. These problems could be called the external problems with revelation. They arise from considerations that are external to the tradition of Judaism. I address them in chapter 7. First, we have to respond to a much neglected internal problem: a problem about the nature of the revelation arising within the texts of the tradition themselves. The problem arises when we ask what the Torah is.

6.1.  What Is the Torah? Defining the Problem The Hebrew word “torah” can mean instruction.1 In Leviticus, it is often used to refer to a specific chapter of priestly law.2 In the book of Deuteronomy, it takes on a wider scope. “The Torah” becomes a book.3 Rabbinic tradition would often have it that Moses is referring to the entire Pentateuch. Other times it seems clear that he is referring only to the book of Deuteronomy itself,4 or to sections of 1  Genesis 26:5 states: “Abraham heeded my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my instructions (toratai).” Based upon this verse, a suggestion emerged that Abraham somehow had access to the entire Torah, from the Pentateuch to the Talmud (see Mishna Kiddushin 4:14, Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma 28b). Nevertheless, the plain meaning of the verse is that Abraham obeyed whatever instructions God happened to give him personally. 2  As in Leviticus 6:2: “Command Aaron and his sons, saying, ‘This is the Torah of the burnt offering . . .’ ” 3  See, e.g., Deuteronomy 31:9. 4  Deuteronomy 17:18–19 commands kings of Israel to have a written “copy of this Torah” and to carry it with them at all times. Maimonides rules that these laws refer to an entire Torah, i.e., to a Pentateuch (Maimonides Commentary to the Mishna, Sanhedrin 4:7). But the Babylonian Talmud rules that a king should wear his copy of the Torah as some sort of amulet (tractate Sanhedrin 21b). Abravanel (commentary to the Torah, Deuteronomy 17:18) saw a difficulty here: a kosher Torah scroll cannot be written small enough to form an amulet. He suggests that the phrase “this Torah,” in the relevant verses “refers to the book of Deuteronomy, which contains the main essential laws of the

The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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146  The Principles of Judaism Deuteronomy.5 James Sanders (1972, p. 2) notes that in the prologue to Ben Sira, and perhaps even in Ezra and Nehemiah, the word “torah” seems to be used, for the first time(s) unambiguously, to refer to the entire Pentateuch. In rabbinic Judaism, the word takes on even more flexibility. Sometimes it refers to the entire Hebrew Bible, and sometimes to the Pentateuch alone. Sometimes it is stretched to refer even to the products of the rabbinic tradition—the Midrash, Mishna, Tosefta, and Talmud—although those works will often be referred to as “the Oral Torah,” as opposed to “the Written Torah,” given that they are a written record of (sometimes) ancient oral traditions.6 There is a central tradition, according to which the Torah existed before the creation. Some have argued—on philosophical grounds—that there can be no such “heavenly” Torah; that any tradition to the contrary has to be explained away. In section  6.2, I seek to demonstrate that those counter-arguments are based upon a mistaken ontology of literary works. Once you’re convinced that the Jewish tradition is committed to the existence of a Heavenly Torah, in addition to the Torah that we have in our hands, then the internal problem with the revelation emerges. The problem concerns the following question: how are the Heavenly and Earthly Torahs supposed to be related?

6.2.  The Heavenly Torah and the Ontology of Literature Orthodoxy doesn’t regard the rabbis as infallible, especially outside of their central areas of authority. When the rabbis of the Talmud offer cures for various diseases, for example, or share scientific insights, many Orthodox thinkers think that we’re licensed to dismiss them.7 But if the Heavenly Torah is a central posit of Talmudic theology and hermeneutics—disciplines that clearly lie among their lasting areas of authority—then it won’t be so simple for the Orthodox Jew to dismiss.

Torah but is smaller and could be carried as an amulet.” Maimonides escapes the difficulty by ruling that the king must keep his Torah scroll with him (almost) constantly, but not as a wearable item; that is to say, he doesn’t take the Talmudic comment about an amulet to be authoritative (Mishne Torah, Hilchot Melachim u’Milchamot 2:1). 5  Indeed, the seven-yearly public reading of “this Torah,” mandated in Deuteronomy 31, was traditionally understood to refer to a selection of excerpts from the book of Deuteronomy (Mishna Sota 7:8). 6  Jacob Neusner (1985) compiled a comprehensive (if not quite exhaustive) survey of the uses of the word “Torah” in the classic rabbinic works. 7  See Rav Sherira Gaon’s (906–1006) responsum on this issue, as quoted by Carmell (2005, p. 5). Or note what Maimonides writes (2000, 3:14): “You must, however, not expect that everything our Sages say respecting astronomical matters should agree with observation, for mathematics were not fully developed in those days and their statements were not based on the authority of the Prophets, but on the knowledge which they either themselves possessed or derived from contemporary men of science.”

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  147 A comparison with demonology might be instructive. Some within the trad­ ition have felt licensed to ignore8 or reinterpret demonological texts,9 so as to avoid any continued Jewish commitment to the existence of demons. These moves were controversial,10 and were only adopted because of what were thought to be overwhelming considerations against the existence of demons.11 To deny the existence of a Heavenly Torah, I argue, would likewise require compelling philosophical motivation. Moreover, no such motivation is forthcoming.

6.2.1.  The Primary Sources Our story begins before the emergence of any rabbinic texts, with Philo’s belief in God’s Logos. David Winston provides a summary of Philonic descriptions of the Logos (Winston, 1985, pp. 16–17): It is the image of God, the first-begotten son of the Uncreated father, the chief of angels, the High Priest of the cosmos, the shadow of God or even the second God, the idea of ideas, the paradigmatic archetype of the macrocosm and of the human mind, the microcosm . . . the cupbearer of God and the toastmaster of the feast, who differs not from the draught he pours, the Logos fills the soul of rational man with gaiety and gladness. He is a lover of the alone and the solitary, never mixing with the crowd of things created and destined to perish. Yet, extending himself from the center of the universe to its furthest bounds and from its extremities to its center again, he runs nature’s unvanquished course, joining and binding fast all its parts. Constituting the unbreakable bound of the universe, he mediates and moderates the threatenings of the opposing elements, so that the universe may produce a complete harmony.12

8  Maimonides fails to codify demonological laws from the Talmud. Tractate Sanhedrin 101a, in the Babylonian Talmud, rules against inquiring of a demon the whereabouts of one’s lost property, a law which is codified by the Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh Deah, 179:16), but omitted by Maimonides in the Mishne Torah. See H. S. Lewis (1905, pp. 485–6). 9  When he doesn’t ignore them, Maimonides (2000, 1:7) reinterprets them. Rabbi Mencahem Meiri (1249–1306) attempts to reinterpret quite consistently throughout his commentary to the Babylonian Talmud. See his comments to Tractate Pesachim 109a s.v. becama mekomot. Rabbi  A.  Soloveichik (1917–2001) even recasts demonology as microbiology (Soloveichik, 1991, pp. 50–2). 10  See the comments of Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman (the Vilna Gaon, 1720–97), Bi’ur ha-Gra (Yoreh Deah, 179:6, note 13). 11  Talmudic demonology is often susceptible to empirical disconfirmation. For instance: one could run a double-blind trial to see whether the protective measures against demons prescribed in the Talmud carried out by a large group of subjects derive any benefits. 12 In this excerpt, Winston weaves references together from various sources in Philo, e.g. Quaestiones in Exodum 2.124; De migratione Abrahami 103; De confusione linguarum 63, 146; Quod Deus sit immutabilis 31; Quis rerum divinarum heres sit 205, 234; De fuga et inventione 112; De vita Mosis 2.134; Legum allegoriae 3.96; De somniis 2.249; and De plantatione 9–10.

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148  The Principles of Judaism It’s not clear that these adjectives form a coherent set. Worse still: “[The Logos] is neither uncreated by God, nor created as you, but midway between the two extremes, a surety to both sides.”13 Is the Logos one of God’s creations or not? Yes, and no. Elsewhere, Philo answers the question in the affirmative. The Logos was created.14 So now we have to say that, for Philo, the Logos is both created and also neither created nor uncreated! At one point, Philo calls the Logos a “Second God” (deuteros theos).15 Daniel Boyarin (2006) seems eager to read this as Binitarianism: the doctrine that God is comprised of two people. But, who’s to say that “deuteros theos” should be understood as a second person within the godhead rather than as a completely distinct, secondary, or deputy, god (with a lowercase g)?16 There’s only one person in the godhead, God (with an uppercase G), and that God has a deputy god (with a lowercase g), distinct from and subordinate to him; something like an archangel. Philo is not an authoritative source for Orthodox Judaism, but he was responding to biblical cues. “The personified Wisdom already makes her appearance in Proverbs and Job in the guise of a charming female figure playing always before [God], having been created by him at the beginning of his work (Prov. 8:30).”17 According to Azzan Yadin (2003; 2004), it or something like it is also referred to, if somewhat obliquely, in the Pentateuch. Numbers 7:89 states: And when Moses went into the tent of meeting that he might speak with him, then he heard the voice speaking unto him from above the ark-cover that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim; and he spoke unto him.

Yadin (2004, p. 116) points out that there are no mentions of God in the previous verses to allow for words like “he” and “him” to refer anaphorically to God. Rather, “him” seems to be referring to God’s voice. Yadin (2003, p. 602) also points out that the verb “speaking” appears, oddly, in the hitpael (or reflexive) form, and thus the verb could be read as “causing oneself to speak” (ibid., p. 606). Yadin concludes that it isn’t God that is speaking to Moses but that it really is God’s voice. God’s voice, that is to say, has some sort of independence from God. Yadin notes that the Sifri to Numbers (section 58) comes to exactly the same reading. It says: [Scripture] states that Moses would enter into the Tent of Meeting and stand there, and the voice descended from highest heavens to between the Cherubs, and he heard the voice speaking to him from within. 13 

Quis rerum divinarum heres sit 205–6. De opificio mundi 16. 15  Quaestiones in Genesim 2:62. 16  To be fair to him, Boyarin (2006, p. 114) does eventually concede that, at least, “Philo oscillates about whether Logos, God’s son, exists separately or is totally incorporated within the Godhead.” 17  Winston (1985, p. 15). 14 

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  149 It is not God but God’s voice doing the descending and speaking. Yadin (2003) also develops a close reading of the Sinai theophany in Exodus (chapters 19–20) according to which an intermediary is posited there between God and the Jewish people. Once again, the reading he ends up with finds independent support in the halakhic Midrash (this time, the Mekhilta de Rabbi Shimon on Exodus 20:19): “[You yourselves saw that] I spoke to you from the heavens” (Exodus 20:18). One verse says: “from the heavens” and one verse says, “The Lord came down upon Mount Sinai” (Exodus 19:20). How can both passages be maintained? The matter is decided by the verse: “From the heavens He let you hear His voice to discipline you [, on earth he showed you his great fire, and from amidst that fire you heard his words]” (Deuteronomy 4:36) . . .

Where was God during the Sinai theophany: in the heavens, or in the fire upon Mount Sinai? The Midrash answers: God was in the heavens all along, but his voice was present in the fire. These Pentateuchal references to a hypostasized voice are somewhat vague and obscure, but a hypostasized voice appears much more clearly in later books of the Bible, such as Daniel (4:28), and on numerous occasions in the book of Ezekiel (see Yadin 2003). Moving from the Bible to the Apocrypha, God’s Wisdom is vividly personified in Wisdom of Solomon. She is called Sophia; an effulgence of God’s glory and his agent in creation (7:25–6; 8:4; 9:1–2). The author takes Sophia to be his wife. She contains all scientific knowledge, and is the source of morality and prophecy. This wisdom—the Logos—makes a noteworthy appearance in Ben Sira, and appears there, perhaps for the first time, as clearly identified with the Torah (Ben Sira 24:23). The rabbis wanted to rid Judaism of any temptation towards Binitarianism. Witness their ambivalence towards Metatron, the powerful angel (see Tractate Hagiga, of the Babylonian Talmud, 15a). They were also quick to dismiss Rabbi Akiva’s reading of Daniel 7:9, which had King David sitting on a heavenly throne besides God; Rabbi Akiva obediently retracted. Whether Rabbi Akiva’s reading of Daniel, or people’s beliefs about the senior angel Metatron, ever descended into fully fledged Binitarianism is difficult to know; but the danger with these doctrines is clear and present, as is the danger of the Logos. These doctrines lean in the direction of Binitarianism, or worse, bi-theism. Despite this fear, good reasons remain for positing intermediaries like Metatron and the Logos. Take the Metatron. There are biblical verses that seem to refer directly to him (see, e.g., Exodus 23:20–2). Moreover, if you want to preserve God’s transcendence, you might feel compelled to posit various beings charged with bridging the chasm between him and us. The same two considerations apply to the Logos. It provides a referent for all of the biblical talk of a pre-existent wisdom, and, granted a little poetic license, it could even provide a referent for God’s

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150  The Principles of Judaism hypostasized voice/fire. Like the Metatron, it could also serve as a bridge between the heavens and the earth. Moreover, that the world itself was created in con­sult­ ation with the Torah; that the Torah is a book that has existed for all time—puts the Torah on a pedestal that suits the rabbinic movement. The rabbis don’t get rid of these dangerous posits. Instead, they sanitize them. Metatron remains; but he’s rebuked and put in his place (tractate Hagiga of the Babylonian Talmud, 15a)—he’s just an angel; nothing more grand than that (tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud 38b). The Logos, which at least threatened to become a second god in the work of Philo, becomes, in the words of the rabbis, as in Ben Sira, an eternal book—not an eternal person. Boyarin notes: the rabbis have removed the potential sting from this doctrine.18 In its sanitized form, the Heavenly Torah appears right throughout traditional rabbinic texts. The Sifri to Numbers (section 134) alludes to a heavenly text, which God consults over matters of law. Genesis Rabba (1:1 and 1:4) presents God as consulting his Heavenly Torah; a blueprint for the creation of the world.19 The Midrash Tanchuma (Bereshit 1) has God consulting the Torah during creation, describing it as written in flames of black upon flames of white. It later presents God, at the theophany at Sinai, reading from a heavenly text (ibid., Yitro 15). Perhaps the hypostasized “great fire” of the theophany is now construed as a fiery Torah. In Leviticus Rabba (35:6) and Deuteronomy Rabba (4:2), we’re told that God judges our lives according to the precepts of the Torah that lies in front of him. The Midrash on Psalms (8:2) has angels lamenting Moses’ taking their Torah from them. The same collection of Midrashim tells us that the Torah was created 974 generations before the creation of the world (Midrash on Psalms 105:3). Another tradition tells us that it was created 2,000 years before the creation of the world (Genesis Rabba 8:2). The Mishna in Tractate Avot 3:14 reads: “the precious instrument [i.e., the Torah] through which the world was created has been given to [the Jews].”20 And, in the final Mishna of Tractate Kiddushin, at least as that Mishna appears in both Talmuds,21 we are told that Abraham observed the entire Torah. After all, God praises him for observing “my Torah” (Genesis 26:5). This Mishna assumes that the Torah preexists, if not creation, then at least the revelation at Sinai.

18  At one point, he claims that they might have got rid of these doctrines altogether had they not been too popular to eradicate (Boyarin, 2006, p. 143). I reject that reading. There are ample biblical and theological reasons to hang on to these posits. Moreover, even if Boyarin was right, the popularity of a doctrine among the faithful of Israel is a philosophically relevant datum, as shall become clear in chapter 7 (especially section 7.4). 19  See Runia (1989, p. 411) and Urbach (1975, pp. 199–200) for a comparison between Genesis Rabba and Philo’s De opificio mundi. 20  Admittedly, not every version of the text includes the clause “through which the world was created,” but a large number of versions do; versions with which Orthodox Jews would be familiar. 21  The relevant part of the Mishna is likely to be a later interpolation, but Orthodox Judaism, impervious as it often is to source criticism, is going to relate to it as a Mishna, regardless of these considerations.

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  151 Talk of a Heavenly Torah extends into both Talmuds. In tractates Sanhedrin (111a) and Mencahot (29b) of the Babylonian Talmud, Moses ascends to the heavens to find God writing a Torah. This could be the Torah that he’s about to give to Moses. On that view, the Torah in question is not necessarily primordial; God may have started writing it only moments earlier. But, according to the Bible (Deut. 31:9), it seems as if Moses wrote the Torah; it wasn’t simply handed down to him; so this Torah can’t be that Torah! Furthermore, if you’re a divine atemporalist, you’ll think that God acts outside of time, in an eternal present. Accordingly, you’re going to read these Talmudic tales as Moses somehow witnessing God timelessly writing an eternal Torah. The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Pesachim 54a) also lists the Torah as one of the things that was created before the creation of the world, and presents the Torah as essential for the world’s continued existence (ibid., 68b). The Palestinian Talmud, in tractates Shekalim 6:1 and Sota 8:3, describes a fiery Torah of black and white flames, given to Moses by God. Once again, this can’t be the Torah that Moses wrote and put in the Holy Ark. That would have been a fire hazard! Rather, these texts seem to be talking about the blueprint from  which Moses copied his Torah. Its description exactly echoes/anticipates Midrashic descriptions of the Heavenly Torah. After the closing of the Talmud, references to the Heavenly Torah can be found among the Geonim (the rabbis from c.590 until c.1040) and the Rishonim (rabbis from c.1040 until 1563). Among the Geonim, a responsum can be found that explains why every word of the public reading of the Torah must be directly read from the scroll—not by heart—since even God himself read from the scroll that was laid out before him in heaven (Teshuvot Hageonim, Sha’arei Teshuvah, section 351). Nahmanides (1194–1270), among the Rishonim (the medieval rabbis), stands out in terms of his vivid account of the eternal Heavenly Torah, in the introduction to his commentary to the Pentateuch. In summary: the tradition of a Heavenly Torah has biblical warrant, appears in the Midrashim, the Mishna, both Talmuds, and in the writings of the Geonim and Rishonim (not to mention its integrality to the Jewish mystical tradition; see, e.g., the Zohar, Parshat Terumah). The tradition of a Heavenly Torah appears throughout the ages, in most of the texts that any Orthodox Jew is likely to take seriously. And thus, I hope to have demonstrated that the Heavenly Torah is not a notion that any Orthodox Jewish theology can lightly dismiss, even if there’s clearly a lot of figurative language and metaphor to decode.

6.2.2.  The Ontology of Literature Could a book exist before the creation of the physical space required to contain it? Rabbi Yehuda ben Barzilai (b.1070) was concerned that it couldn’t.22 Rabbi 22 

As he is cited by Heschel (2006, p. 339).

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152  The Principles of Judaism Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167) declares that rabbinic talk of a pre-existent Torah must be profoundly figurative and shouldn’t be understood as an ontological thesis about something created before the world. Without physical motion, he thinks, there can be no such thing as time. To be before the physical creation is, therefore, to be before time, and you can’t have anything before time, because “before” picks out a relation between temporal relata.23 Both of these rabbis deny that there is such a thing as a Heavenly Torah. Consequently, all of the texts that we explored in section 6.2.1 have to be explained away or ignored—much as we might explain away or ignore the texts that refer to demons. Of course, if you’re not offended by abstract objects, then the problems raised by R. Yehuda ben Barzilai and ibn Ezra disappear. Abstracta aren’t in space and time. But what kind of abstractum would something have to be, in order to fit the profile of the Heavenly Torah? Elsewhere (Lebens, 2015b), I have argued that all talk about literary works is ambiguous. For example, there are, besides a fictional whale, at least three entities (or categories of entity) worthy of the name “Moby Dick.” The first is a pure abstractum; something like the ordered lexical items reproduced in every copy of the novel, or the ordered set of propositions expressed by the symbols printed in them. In fact, there may be a number of abstracta that could claim to be Moby Dick: a set of letters, a set of symbols, a set of sentences of English, or a set of propositions, etc. Sometimes we’re interested in the content of the book (i.e., a set of propositions), and sometimes we’re interested in the way that those propositions are expressed (i.e., a set of English sentences under an interpretation). Either way, one disambiguation of “Moby Dick” will be in terms of a pure abstractum. But, when speaking of the Heavenly Torah, I think we’re rarely identifying it with its content. I have three reasons for thinking this. 1. To think that the Heavenly Torah actually has writing, or even words, inside of it, is too quickly to take too literal a reading of the source material. We should be open to the possibility, advocated for by Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (1740–1810), that the Heavenly Torah is some sort of ethereal wisdom that is somehow pre-linguistic.24 To identify it in terms of specific content is perhaps to impose too fine-grained an identity upon it. 2. We also shouldn’t rule out too quickly the possibility that the Heavenly Torah does have content, and that its content is largely identical to the content of the Pentateuch. This is the opinion of Nahmanides. He thinks of the Heavenly Torah as a string of letters without gaps. This string of letters, he thinks, maps perfectly on to the letters of the Pentateuch, once you add in the gaps. Considered in terms of its content, this Heavenly Torah will be 23  24 

See ibn Ezra’s Introduction to his Commentary to the Pentateuch, Path 4. Kedushat Levi, Parshat Bereshit, s.v. Od Yevo’ar Bereshit.

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  153 basically identical to the Pentateuch, but, in that we’re talking about the Heavenly Torah as opposed to the Torah simpliciter, on the assumption that their content is identical, it seems that we’re not identifying the Heavenly Torah with its content alone. 3. When we consider literary works as pure abstracta, then authorship is nothing more than discovery; it isn’t creation. If Moby Dick is a Platonic abstractum, then presumably it pre-existed Melville. But then, God in his omniscience must have discovered it long before Melville ever did. Does this mean that God is a co-author of Moby Dick, qua pure abstractum? No. We can restrict the authorship-relation to be a relation between a Platonic literary structure and a non-divine mind. Consequently, when we’re thinking of literary works as pure abstracta, what we mean by authorship is a discovery-relation between a non-divine mind and an abstractum. But that’s not going to help us to define what it means for God to author a work—since God is a divine mind; and, if we want to say that God’s variety of authorship is the mere discovery of a Platonic literary form, then we’re going to have to say that, relative to the relation of divine authorship, God is the author of every literary work, qua pure abstractum, since he must have discovered them all. But surely God’s relationship to the Heavenly Torah is somehow privileged over his relationship to all other works of literature. Accordingly, when we’re thinking about the Heavenly Torah, we’re probably not relating to it merely as a pure abstractum. There are times when you might be interested in the propositional content of a work, or the sound of its words, without any regard for the author and her particular achievements. But, sometimes, what you appreciate when you appreciate a work of literature is what the author did. What-Melville-did is the second type of entity worthy of the name “Moby Dick” (see Davies, 2004). However, I’m pretty sure that, when we’re talking about the Heavenly Torah, we’re not talking about God’s literary achievement. First: God might merely have said, “Let there be a Heavenly Torah,” which doesn’t give us much, by way of generative performance, to get our teeth into! Secondly: when God turns to the Heavenly Torah to guide his creative activity, it doesn’t seem right to say that the generative performance that gave rise to the Heavenly Torah is the object of his consultation. The final way in which to disambiguate talk of Moby Dick is in terms of impure abstracta. Amie Thomasson (2004, p. 90) thinks that literary works are always to be identified with impure abstracta. She says: [W]orks of literature . . . seem to fall between the cracks of traditional category systems: accommodating them [i.e., works of literature] will require acknowledging intervening categories for temporally determined, dependent abstracta: abstract artefacts created by human intentional activities.

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154  The Principles of Judaism It is the product of these activities that we call impure abstracta. Think of a sonata by Beethoven written in 1806. We don’t want to identify the sonata with its sound structure, that would be a return to pure Platonism. We certainly don’t want to identify it with its performances or physical score copies. Jerrold Levinson (1990, p. 224) suggests that we identify it with “the performed-sound-structure-asindicated-by-Beethoven-in-March-1806”; not with the structure itself, but with the structure as indicated; an “indicated type.” What does he mean? What is an indicated type? Indicated types can be thought of in terms of impure sets. A pure set has only abstract members—like the set of natural numbers. An impure set is a set that has some non-abstract members. Beethoven’s sonata will be the set that includes him, his act, at a specific time in 1806, of indicating a particular sonic structure, and the sonic structure itself. With Beethoven and his particular actions as members, the set is impure. God knew the content of the Heavenly Torah (if it has any) for as long as he knew the content of Moby Dick. But God didn’t merely select the content of the Heavenly Torah from his bookshelf, so to speak, preferring it to Moby Dick. Instead, his action of selecting the content of the Heavenly Torah created a new entity: an indicated type. Thinking of impure abstracta as impure sets is a good way of getting your head around the theory. But I argue (Lebens,  2015b) that impure abstracta theory is better off thinking of literary works, not in terms of sets, or n-tuples, but in terms of simple abstracta—entities without members and without parts. When you create a work, part of what you do is to bring this abstract thing— the work—into existence.25 You also invest it with properties: you give it literary content, style, etc. But those properties are not constituents of the thing; they are simply properties of the thing. This makes room even for a Heavenly Torah with no literary content. A simple impure abstractum can take on new properties over time—such as being much beloved by fans of sci-fi, or harshly criticized, or misunderstood—that are beyond the author’s control. As I explain elsewhere (Lebens,  2015b), thinking of these impure abstracta as simple saves you from various problems that infect indicated type theory.26 What makes these abstracta impure is that they are ontologically dependent upon their concrete creators, whereas pure abstracta are ontologically independent of all concreta. I open a new file on Word for Windows with the intention of creating a literary work (namely, this book). From that moment on, something new existed (a book 25  One can’t deny the possibility of doing this by saying that it’s part of the definition of “abstract” to exist timelessly and therefore not to be capable of coming into existence. First of all, the abstract–concrete distinction is notoriously difficult to define. Secondly, following Thomasson, we’re looking for an ontological category that we have reason to believe lies between the cracks of classical tax­on­omies. If you’re not happy calling these created things abstract, call them “shmabstract,” since they certainly don’t seem to be concrete! 26  Problems raised by Davies (2004) and by Caplan and Matheson (2004).

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  155 in progress). At that stage in its development it was a mere book draft, or draft attempt; just as all trees were once saplings, all books were once drafts. Through the actions that I take, this work in progress acquires more and more properties. It acquires a subject matter, a determinate form, a tone, a style, and more. At some point in time this work in progress became a fully fledged book. Even if the file gets rubbed from my hard drive, to the extent that it is remembered, or can be somehow recovered, it exists. It isn’t concrete. But it isn’t purely abstract. It is an impure abstractum. Through some intentional act, like my act of opening a new file on Word for Windows, God brought a simple impure abstractum into existence—the Heavenly Torah; it can have a literary structure, it can have content, it is a book after all, but that structure and content isn’t a constituent of the Heavenly Torah, but a property held by it. The Heavenly Torah isn’t concrete. It is an impure abstractum. It doesn’t need a physical location in order to exist. Rabbi Yehuda ben Barzilai’s concern has no standing.

6.2.3.  Time and the Heavenly Torah Now to the concern of ibn Ezra. When was the Heavenly Torah created? If you think that God himself is outside of time, then I think we can usefully borrow a term from Christian philosophy. Christian thought developed a notion of eternal generation in order to describe the relation between the Father and the Son. G. L. Prestige introduces eternal generation in these terms (quoted in Wiles, 1976, pp. 20–2): [T]he begetting of the Son was not an event in time, but represents an eternal process within the eternal being of God, no less actual at this moment than it was before the worlds were made . . .

Echoing Prestige, we can say: God’s begetting/creation of the Heavenly Torah was not an event in time, but represents an eternal process between a timeless God and his timeless Torah, no less actual at this moment than it was before the worlds were made. We are licensed to speak of the Torah as if it existed before creation, given that its creation is an eternal process—outside of, or beyond, time.27 God is constantly giving birth to his Torah in his eternal present; indeed, the rabbis describe the Torah as God’s only daughter28—so the metaphor of begetting seems particularly apt. 27  You’re going to have to make sense of the notion of an eternal present to allow for eternal processes like this. Stump and Kretzmann (1981; 1987; 1992) and Stump (2016) try to defend this notion. 28  See, e.g., Tanchuma P’koudey 4; Exodus Rabba 33:1.

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156  The Principles of Judaism If the property of redness exists timelessly, then so does its singleton (i.e., the set containing redness as its only member). But, even though both of these entities are timeless, and neither is created by the other, the singleton is ontologically dependent upon the property of redness. Likewise, the Heavenly Torah and God might both be outside of time, but the Heavenly Torah is dependent upon God for its existence. More than that, the Heavenly Torah, in order to be a literary impure abstractum, needs to be eternally ontologically dependent upon an eternal act of God—his act of authoring the Heavenly Torah. If you believe that God resides within time, a number of other options suggest themselves. In chapter 2, we discussed the model of creatio continua, according to which God is creating the universe at all times, stretching back into an infinite past. Well, even if we deny creatio continua vis-à-vis the universe, we can still say that God was always creating the Heavenly Torah, stretching back into an infinite pre-universe past. Or, just as God chose a time at which to create the universe, perhaps he chose an earlier time at which to create the Heavenly Torah. To make either account work, you’ll have to deny ibn Ezra’s contention that there can be no time without motion. But plenty of philosophers are willing to deny that anyway (see, e.g., Shoemaker, 1969). We discussed in chapter 2, section 2.1.1.4, that before God chooses to adopt a set of laws to govern the physical world, there can be no notion of a clock. And thus, if there’s such a thing as pre-universe time, it will have a before and an after (a topology), but there will be no fact of the matter as to how far away one instant is from another (there will be no metric). Accordingly, one cannot salvage rabbinic talk of the Heavenly Torah preceding the world for “2,000 years” or for “974 generations,” because pre-universe time admits of no metric. This isn’t a terrible cost. Both phrases are almost self-evidently figurative, hyperbolic, and/ or symbolic. Whether you believe that the Heavenly Torah is created eternally, or was created during pre-time, ibn Ezra’s temporal objection doesn’t seem to bite.

6.2.4.  Heavenly Torah or a Heavenly Force There isn’t a concrete Torah scroll made out of parchment in heaven; nor a fiery Torah of black and white flames. But to say that beneath the metaphors and the figures of speech there was no underlying commitment to the existence of something worthy of being called a Heavenly Torah beggars belief—especially if you appreciate the history of the ideas in question; a history of the hypostatization followed by the sanitization of various heavenly beings. Maimonides wasn’t Platonic enough to believe in the existence of a non-concrete book. But even he recognized that the rabbis must have been talking about some entity or other.

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  157 Whenever God is presented as consulting a heavenly host, just as he is presented in our sources as consulting the Heavenly Torah, Maimonides would present matters as follows (Maimonides 2000, 2:6): These passages do not convey the idea that God spoke, thought, reflected, or that He consulted and employed the opinion of other beings, as ignorant persons have believed. How could the Creator be assisted by those whom He created! They only show that all parts of the Universe, even the limbs of animals in their actual form, are produced through angels: for natural forces and angels are identical.

God creates, according to Maimonides, via the forces known to Maimonides’ contemporaries as “Aristotle’s separate intellects,” which Maimonides identifies with the angels of biblical and rabbinic literature.29 Maimonides (ibid.) identifies the Metatron angel, “the prince of the world,” with the Active Intellect. Perhaps he would view the Heavenly Torah as a different metaphorical conceit for speaking of the same thing. After all, the Heavenly Torah is spoken of as an entity that God consults; and, in those sources, it is presented as the most senior of consultants.30 Or perhaps the Heavenly Torah is an even higher intellect: a higher-ranking angel—closer to God. But if God consults something, in the literature of the rabbis, Maimonides tells us to read it in terms of existing angelic forces at God’s disposal. The Heavenly Torah exists as an angelic force. Commitment to the existence of a Heavenly Torah is grounded in the Bible, Midrash, Mishna, and Talmuds. The posit, differently understood, is found in the works of both Nahmanides (in the form of a primordial Pentateuchal string of letters with no gaps) and Maimonides (in the form of an Aristotelian intellect)— two of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the medieval age.31 Some very great rabbis stood against it. But their opposition always seems to have been based upon dubious philosophical premises. Given a contemporary metaphysics—one no longer committed to Aristotle’s separate intellects—how should we understand this posit? I suggest that the Heavenly Torah is a literary impure abstractum, eternally generated, or created in 29  That this chapter of the Guide might be aimed at the Heavenly Torah tradition, alongside angelology, is suggested by Urbach (Urbach, 1975, p. 200). 30  In the Guide, I.65, Maimonides says that the Torah is created. It looks as if Maimonides is saying that the Torah was created at the time that it was revealed to Moses. This doesn’t undermine my reading of the Guide II.6, according to which the Heavenly Torah is said to exist and to be identical with the Active Intellect. On a closer reading of I.65, Maimonides isn’t really clear that the Torah was created at the time that it was revealed, only that it was created—Maimonides leaves the timing of its creation open. 31  Saadya Gaon was quick to deflate biblical talk of God’s hypostasized wisdom, in his polemic against Trinitarianism. There he read such texts nominalistically (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 2:6, p. 107). And yet, even he posits the existence of a “special ether,” which the Bible calls “the Glory of God,” and the Talmud calls the Shekhinah: a created force that mediates between God and the physical universe (Brody, 2013, pp. 49–50; al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 2:10, pp. 120–2, 2:12, pp. 129–31).

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158  The Principles of Judaism pre-universe time. The posit is much closer to the spirit of the primary sources than is the account of Maimonides. Moreover, it poses no philosophical problem worrisome enough to justify a radical reappraisal of those texts. But the posit does give rise to what I’ve called the internal problem with the revelation. The question is this: does the Heavenly Torah have a specific content, and if it does, how is that content related to the content of the Earthly Torah?

6.3.  The Internal Problem How are the heavenly and Earthly Torahs related? A number of options suggest themselves.

6.3.1.  The Pentateuchal Theory One option is that the Heavenly Torah is lexically identical to the Pentateuch.32 We shall call this view the Pentateuchal Theory. Moses copied the Pentateuch from the heavenly text, or God dictated the text to him from the heavenly copy.33 Unfortunately, the Pentateuchal Theory generates numerous concerns. No human action recorded in the Pentateuch could possibly have been conducted freely, if they were already inscribed, before they actually happened, in the Primordial Torah. One way of squaring God’s omniscience with our freedom is to suggest, with Gersonides, that God doesn’t know future contingents, because they don’t yet exist. Another response—associated most prominently with Boethius— suggests that God’s knowledge doesn’t precede our actions, since God’s knowledge, like God himself, is removed from time altogether. These responses are closed off to us by the Pentateuchal Theory. The future wasn’t open for the characters in the book of Numbers, for example, if their story was sealed and delivered to Moses before it occurred in real life. God’s knowledge might be outside of time, but the Pentateuch burst onto the timeline when it was given to Moses, and it had foreknowledge of all sorts of future human actions, such as the future rebellion of Korah. Perhaps we can salvage the theory if we deny that the Torah was received in its entirety at Sinai, but insist that it was received in installments.34

32 Perhaps this view receives some support from the Midrash in Deuteronomy Rabba 8:6. According to one opinion there, we are to understand Deuteronomy 30:10–11 as teaching us that no content remains in heaven yet to be revealed. Although this same opinion could also support the Foundational Fragment theory of section 6.3.4. 33  Nahmanides, in his introduction to his commentary on the Pentateuch, offers both the dictation and the transcription model as valid alternatives. 34  See, e.g., the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 60a.

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  159 But we have another problem concerning God’s morality. Deuteronomy 21 grants a victorious Jewish army certain sexual rights over female captives. The soldier must first of all take the woman he desires back to his home, leave her to grieve her losses, shave her hair and pare her nails, and more. Once the process is complete, the soldier has a right to make this woman his wife, via a consummation of the relationship. If he no longer desires this, she becomes a free and equal citizen of Israel. The rabbis were shocked by the depravity of these laws. The rabbis had pioneered a legal system in which conjugal rape was forbidden.35 By contrast, it wasn’t made illegal in Finland until 1994. Lichtenstein didn’t make it illegal until 2001. No wonder the rabbis—given their views on this issue—were dismayed by the provisions of Deuteronomy 21. This was their defense: these laws are a concession to the evil inclination of men.36 In times of war, soldiers are prone to act in horrendous ways. God knew that if he commanded an ancient people not to rape in times of war, they would not listen. But a larger number of potential rapists would listen if they were told that they could have their evil way, but in a restrained and delayed fashion. The picture that emerges still isn’t pretty, but the rabbis comforted themselves with the notion that this was merely a compromise with the evil inclination of mankind. But are we to believe that the Heavenly Torah, God’s own timeless Torah, is lexically identical to our Pentateuch, with its ethical concessions and compromises? Could God, before creation, and before the fall of mankind, not conceive of a law more perfect than the law of the captive woman? It would be one thing if, in God’s eternal Torah, the offending commandments were written in a conditional form; e.g., “if you’re living in an imperfect society with conditions X, Y, and Z, then you should apply law P as a compromise.” But if the Heavenly Torah is lexically identical to the Pentateuch in our hands, then it can’t be thought to include that kind of conditional framing, for seemingly immoral Pentateuchal laws, since the Pentateuch itself contains no such conditional qualifications. A third concern emerges when we consider the textual integrity of the Pentateuch. The Pentateuchal Theory entails that the Pentateuch, as we have it, is lexically identical to the Heavenly Torah. This would most naturally accompany the view that the text of the Pentateuch has remained stable ever since Moses copied it from the Heavenly Torah. Indeed, the Babylonian Talmud records the following claim (Tractate Sanhedrin 99a):

35  So rules Maimonides, Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Issurei Biah 21:12, based upon numerous Talmudic injunctions, for example, the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eiruvin 100b. The Israeli Supreme Court appealed to such passages in Jewish law in order to affirm that conjugal rape is illegal in the State of Israel (Cr. A. 91/80, Cohen v. State of Israel). 36  Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 21b.

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160  The Principles of Judaism Because he has despised the word of the Lord (Numbers 15:31). This refers to one who says there is no Torah from Heaven. And even if he said that the whole of the Torah is from Heaven, except for a particular verse, which was not said by the Holy One, blessed be He, but by Moses of his own accord, he is included under the scope of because he has despised the word of the Lord.

Accordingly, Maimonides encodes the following in his principles of faith: The eighth Principle of Faith: That the Torah has been revealed from heaven. This implies our belief that the whole of this Torah found in our hands this day is the Torah that was handed down by Moses and that it is all of divine origin. By this I mean that the whole of the Torah came unto him from before God in a manner which is metaphorically called “speaking”; but the real nature of that communication is unknown to everybody except to Moses, peace be upon him, to whom it came. In handing down the Torah, Moses was like a scribe writing from dictation the whole of it, its chronicles, its narratives, and its precepts.37

But Maimonides knew as well as anybody else that there are different variants of the Pentateuch in our hands today. In modern times, the Orthodox authority Rabbi Moshe Sofer (the Hatam Sofer, 1762–1839) ruled that a scribe shouldn’t recite a blessing before the writing of a Torah scroll precisely because we’re uncertain whether the text we have today is sufficiently accurate (Shapiro 2004, p. 94). Accordingly, Shaprio concludes that Maimonides was speaking to the masses when he wrote these principles of faith. Maimonides thought that there were some falsehoods, or at least oversimplifications, that society as a whole would do well to believe, even if the scholarly class could rise above them. To quote Shapiro (ibid., p. 120): In [Maimonides’] time, Muslims were challenging the Jews, claiming that they had altered the text of the Torah. This accusation began with Muhammed, who, as quoted in the Koran, had charged the rabbis with falsifying and tampering with the original Torah text . . . In the face of such an assault, it is not hard to see why Maimonides felt it was important for the masses to believe that their text was the exact equivalent of Moses’ text.

In actual fact, and as Maimonides was well aware, rabbinic tradition contains a good deal of skepticism about the textual integrity of the Pentateuch. The Talmud itself contains an opinion, accepted by a number of post-Talmudic authorities, such as Rabbi Yosef ben Meir Even Migash (1077–1141), that the last eight verses 37 Maimonides, Commentary to the Mishna, Introduction to the tenth chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin.

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  161 of the Pentateuch were written by Joshua.38 Ibn Ezra goes further than the Talmud, claiming that Joshua wrote the final twelve verses.39 Where a Jew crosses the line, according to Rabbi Yosef ben Eliezer Bonfils (b. 1335, known as the tzafnat paaneach), is if he believes that a commandment or an entire narrative section was added after Moses. But there might be good reason to believe that the odd verse here or there was added later. How could Moses have written that “the Cannanites were then in the land” (Genesis 12:6) in the past tense, implying that they were no longer in the land, when, during Moses’ life, they were still in the land? You might worry about the Talmudic statement that I  quoted above, which seems to condemn anybody who believes that a single detail of the Pentateuch was missing from God’s dictation to Moses. Rabbi Bonfils responds that that Talmudic discussion must apply only to people who think that a commandment or entire narrative section was added to the Torah.40 We could follow Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg’s advice (1923–99) and read Maimonides’ eighth principle as follows: the Pentateuch that we have in our hands today is identical, more or less, to the copy that was dictated to Moses.41 Perhaps our text is likewise identical, more or less, to the content of the Heavenly Torah; call this the Pentateuchal-more-or-less Theory. But if we have reason to believe that whole verses were added after Moses, albeit only with the sanction of prophecy, and albeit only for explanatory reasons, uncomfortable questions arise. Did the Heavenly Torah always contain those explanations, and by way of prophetic addition, our text was brought closer to the original, or is our text becoming polluted? Is the Pentateuch moving closer to the content of the Heavenly Torah, or further away? One final worry for the Pentateuchal Theory. If you think that the Heavenly Torah was the blueprint for the entire creation,42 and if you think that the content of the Heavenly Torah is identical (more or less) to the content of our Pentateuch, then it follows that the content of our Pentateuch contains (more or less) all that one might need for the creation of a universe. Quantum physics, genetic biology, and more; it’s all there, somewhere, between Genesis 1:1 and Deuteronomy 34:12. As the sage Ben Bag Bag said about the Torah, “Turn it over and over for everything is in it.”43 Nahmanides adopts the Pentateuchal Theory (or something close to it), as well as the view that the Heavenly Torah serves as the blueprint to creation. Accordingly, Nahmanides accepts that the Pentateuch contains every item of knowledge necessary for the creation and maintenance of a universe. Great secrets are, according to Nahmanides, encoded in the shapes of the Pentateuchal letters, and the crowns 38 

See Babylonian Talmud, Tractates Baba Batra 15a, Makot 11a, and Menachot 30a. Ibn Ezra, Commentary to Deuteronomy 34:1; see Shapiro (2004, pp. 107–9) and Heschel (2006, pp. 633–8). 40  Heschel (2006, p. 635). 41  Weinberg (1991, pp. 90–1). 42  Genesis Rabba 1:1. 43  Mishna Avot 5:26. 39 

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162  The Principles of Judaism that adorn those letters, including the “activity of the constellations; . . . the intersections of stellar orbits; . . . the vitality of the animals and the rage of the wild beasts; the might of the winds; the thoughts of man; . . . [and] the potential properties of various roots . . .”44 Ben Bag Bag’s claim can be read less ambitiously. Perhaps he merely meant that the Torah contains everything that we Jews need to know in order to live a good Jewish life. The Pentateuchal Theory, by contrast, seems to entail that the secrets of the Higgs boson are encoded in the letter shapes and decorative crowns of the Pentateuch; this beggars belief. Despite these significant worries, the Pentateuchal Theory has one significant consideration in its favor. Certain Hebrew letters can sometimes be dropped from a word without loss of meaning. Rabbi Akiva was wont to derive halakhic ramifications from the inclusion and omission of these “optional” letters in the Pentateuch. These exegetical methods have bequeathed a number of important laws to the Jewish codes of law.45 Of course, you don’t have to believe in a Heavenly Torah in order to make sense of this hermeneutic. The mere belief that the Pentateuch was the product of divine dictation is enough to infuse every single letter (and lack of a letter) with reams and reams of significance, with or without the pre-existence of a Heavenly Torah. But, if you think that the Pentateuch is merely an approximation, or a human unpacking of a divine text, as some of our later theories will suggest, then Rabbi Akiva’s legal exegeses are called into doubt; for it would seem as if he was placing legal significance upon arbitrary and even accidental details of the text. The Pentateuchal Theory, tied as it is to a stenographic theory of the revelation of the Pentateuch, can claim the following strength: it can support Rabbi Akiva’s legal exegeses and the Jewish laws that stand upon them.

6.3.2.  The Pentateuchal+ Theory The Pentateuchal+ Theory makes the following claims: (1) the Heavenly Torah contains the content of the entire Pentateuch; (2) the Heavenly Torah contains more content than the Pentateuch; (3) the entire Heavenly Torah was revealed to Moses at Sinai; and (4) what didn’t make it into the Pentateuch became (at least the beginnings of) the Oral Torah. The Heavenly Torah includes the law of the captive woman, for example, but, according to the Pentateuchal+ Theory, it also includes God’s explanation, later recorded in the Talmud, that this law is only designed as a compromise for a certain human situation that society will one day outgrow. 44 

Blinder (2004, p. 9). For a plausible reading of what these hermeneutical tools really come down to, see footnote 2 of the next chapter. 45 

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  163 Rabbinic Judaism claims that Moses needed to be given certain explanations to make sense of the Pentateuch—what is this booth type thing that we’re supposed to dwell in during the festival of Tabernacles, and what are these phylacteries that we’re supposed to don on our arms and heads? Once one accepts, with Nahmanides, that the Pentateuch contains all sorts of scientific secrets that no reader could discover unaided, it makes even less sense for God to give Moses the Pentateuch without giving him a substantial tutorial on how to decode it; in other words, an Oral Torah. The content of the Heavenly Torah isn’t properly accessed if you only have the words of the Pentateuch in front of you; there are certain supplementary ex­plan­ ations that you also need to see. And thus the Pentateuchal Theory might lead you to the Pentateuchal+ Theory. If God was going to reveal his Heavenly Torah, he’d have to give us more than just the Pentateuch. According to the Pentateuchal+ Theory, Moses—on Mount Sinai—must have been told everything that anyone could ever need to know; indeed, everything that God needed to know for running and maintaining a universe. Consequently, if the Oral Torah ever comes up with anything worth knowing—indeed, even if the diligent student comes up with something worth knowing—it simply must have been given to Moses at Sinai.46 But now the following question arises: if Moses received a maximal Oral Torah, then where did all that knowledge go to? Why don’t all rabbis today have knowledge of Mosaic nuclear physics? And why is our Oral Torah so patchy and riven with uncertainty and disagreement? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72) canvases two traditional responses: (1) Moses didn’t pass on all of the Oral Torah that he received, but merely conveyed what was necessary for the eventual reconstruction, through debate and dialectics, of what he received; or, more popularly, (2) many details of the oral tradition were lost and forgotten over time and had to be reconstructed through reason. Maimonides decried the second option: “Whoever thinks that . . . the disputes arose because of mistakes or forgetfulness . . . such a person’s words are, by my life, despicable and very ugly; they are the words of one who simply does not know, and does not grasp basic principles.”47 As Moshe Halbertal explains (1997, pp. 60–1), Maimonides disliked the second option because, if we accuse the bastions of the tradition of forgetfulness, then we call the very nature of tradition into question. The second option is, therefore, subversive. But even according to the first option, the Oral Torah might have gone wrong in its efforts to reconstruct the divine will. Why did Moses take such a risk, and why should we ever believe that we’ve accurately reconstructed what Moses didn’t pass on? Our tradition, for all we know, may have gone a long way off script. 46  See, e.g., Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berachot 5a; Palestinian Talmud, Tractate Peah 17a, and Midrash Hagadol on Exodus 31:18. 47  Maimonides, Introduction to his Commentary on the Mishna, cited and translated in Heschel (2006, p. 576).

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164  The Principles of Judaism To summarize: the Pentateuchal+ Theory avoids the general implausibility of believing the Higgs boson to be hiding in the Pentateuch, but it does so at a cost, since it has to argue that the Oral Tradition used to contain all such knowledge and has since become corrupted. It also asks us to believe that Moses had, and presumably understood, a complete science.48

6.3.3.  The Pentateuchal++ Theory Perhaps the earliest rabbinic reference to a document on high can be found in the Sifri to Numbers (section 134). It discusses the biblical episode of the daughters of Zelophehad. They asked Moses a legal question. Moses didn’t seem to know what to say. Instead, he turned to God, who replied (Numbers 27:7) that “The plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just.” In the Sifri, God’s response is presented as follows: “Well do Zelophehad’s daughters claim, for so is the section written before me on high.”49 This Midrash posits a discrepancy between the text revealed to Moses and the text on high. Perhaps the Pentateuch was revealed in installments.50 Perhaps Moses hadn’t yet received the relevant passage.51 But Rabbi Akiva, a figure associated with the Pentateuchal Theory,52 is also associated with the view that the entire Pentateuch was given to Moses in one installment at Sinai.53 How can Rabbi Akiva make sense of the story of the daughters of Zelophehad? Did Moses not remember that he had already written down the story in which they would come to him, and how God would rule? Perhaps Moses knew the law, but wanted to demonstrate how to respond to questions with humility;54 or he didn’t want to shame the lower courts, making the question that had puzzled them look easy.55 But the simplest reading makes it seem as if the theophany at Sinai left some details out. A daring reading of the Sifri suggests the following: the content of the Heavenly Torah is never identical to the content of the Pentateuch; Moses looked in his book and couldn’t find the answer; God looked in his, and he could.56 Perhaps the Midrash is suggesting that no revelation is exhaustive. 48  Furthermore, the Pentateuchal+ Theory fails to do justice to the religious significance and the religious experience of engaging with the Oral Torah, see section 6.3.5. 49  As translated by Novick (2011, p. 590). 50  See, e.g., Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 60a. 51  Abarbanel held that the Primordial Torah was revealed to Moses in stages (Mif ’a lot Elohim 1:2). 52  Regarding his commitment to a sort of Pentateuchal Theory, see Midrash Tanchuma (Yitro 15). 53  Babylonian Talmud, Tractates Chagiga 6a–b, Sotah 37b, and Zevachim 115b. 54  This is the line taken by the Jerusalem Targum on Numbers 27:5, where he quotes his own comments on Numbers 15:34. 55  See Numbers Rabba 21:12. 56  Of course, the Pentateuch eventually came to include God’s own laws regarding female inheritance, after Moses clarified the matter, but the point of the Midrash could be read more broadly: at no point in time does the Torah on earth completely reflect the Torah on high.

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  165 This theory I call the Pentateuchal++ Theory. According to this theory, the Heavenly Torah contains the content of the Pentateuch, and perhaps some of the content of the Oral Torah too, but it contains more content even than that. In contrast to the Pentateuchal+ Theory, the Pentateuchal++ Theory states that that extra content was never revealed. Whatever has been revealed to us is but a fraction of the Heavenly Torah. Like the Pentateuchal+ Theory, the Pentateuchal++ Theory avoids the problem of God’s seeming immorality. The troubling aspects of the Pentateuch are but a fragment of the content of the Heavenly Torah. Anything that seems unethical in the Pentateuch could perhaps be out of context. Only if we had the whole Heavenly Torah could we see how the offending verses are actually to be understood as a compromise with a specific moment in time. According to both previous theories, the content of the revelation to Moses contained every item of knowledge necessary for the creation and maintenance of the universe. Either all of that knowledge is there in the Pentateuch (as the Pentateuchal Theory would assert), or it’s there in the combination of the Pentateuch and the other items of knowledge given to Moses at Mount Sinai. In fact, the Pentateuchal+ Theory has to sully the mechanisms of tradition; claiming that parts of the Oral Torah were lost, just in order to explain where all of this knowledge went. The Pentateuchal++ Theory avoids this whole issue. We can hold onto the tradition that the Heavenly Torah served as the blueprint for the creation of the universe, but perhaps the bits that were relevant for stringing molecules together were never revealed to mankind.

6.3.4.  The Foundational Fragment Theory The Mishna in Avot states (5:6): Ten things were created at twilight of the [first ever] Sabbath eve. These are: the mouth of the earth [which swallowed Korach]; the mouth of [Miriam’s] well; the mouth of [Balaam’s] ass; the rainbow; the manna; [Moses’] staff; the shamir [a mythical stone-cutting snail]; the writing, the inscription and the tablets [of the Ten Commandments]. Some say also the destructive spirits, the burial place of Moses, and the ram of our father Abraham. And some say the original [pair of metal] tongs, for tongs are made with tongs.

The six days of creation are a special prehistoric time, in which the fabric of the universe was coming into being, much like the Aborigine notion of “dreamtime.” Locating the creation of the tablets in that time is to give them something of a prehistorical, mythical, status, even if they aren’t the blueprint for all of creation. We’re still in the ball park of a Primordial Torah. Indeed, according to the

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166  The Principles of Judaism post-Mishnaic collection, Avot de Rabbi Natan (2:3), it wasn’t a heavenly Pentateuch that Moses pried away from the angels; it was, instead, these heavenly tablets. The fact that they existed in the heavens gives rise to the notion that they weren’t physical tablets, but impure abstracta which somehow became concrete, perhaps when Moses received them.57 It is said that all of the laws of the Torah are implicit in the Decalogue. This notion can be found in the writings of Philo,58 the Palestinian Talmud,59 Saadya Gaon,60 and certain medieval Midrashim.61 Perhaps the dreamtime tablets trad­ ition is as follows: what existed in heaven before the revelation wasn’t the content of the Pentateuch, but the content of the Ten Commandments, which, in turn, imply the remaining laws of the Torah. On this view, the Pentateuch isn’t a transcription of a primordial Torah but is, instead, an unpacking of that Heavenly Torah; even, one might say, a commentary upon that Heavenly Torah. Rabbi Yechiel Michael ben Uzziel, who lived in Germany in the early eighteenth century, wrote: [The Babylonian Talmud teaches, in tractate Baba Batra 15a, that] at the time that Moses wrote down the Torah, the Holy and Blessed One spoke, and Moses also spoke and wrote . . . [W]hy were both of them, the Holy and Blessed One and Moses, speaking at the time of the writing down of the Torah? But the Holy and Blessed One was speaking the Written Torah, and Moses began to speak the Oral Torah, which was founded by him; and only then did he write, including allusions in his writing to that Oral Torah that he grasped on his own. If so, it seems that this is why the text says, “Write down for yourself these commandments” (Exodus 34:27), rather than more simply, “Write down these commandments.” It said what it said—“write down for yourself ”—so as to say, “write in allusions [to] that which is yours,” that Oral Torah which you apprehended on your own.62

This is the Foundational Fragment Theory.63 The idea is that what preceded the creation (or at least what preceded the revelation), or what was revealed to Moses, 57  Tzvi Novick, in correspondence, has raised the following issue: isn’t the Mishna in Avot talking about an actual physical set of stone tablets, and the creation of real concreta in time? I certainly see that it could be read that way. We’re talking about a set of things that God created as he created the physical world. But some of the things listed in this Mishna can barely be called physical entities— what is the mouth of a donkey when that donkey hasn’t been born yet? What is a disembodied orifice? And when you combine this Mishna with the tradition of Moses wrestling the tablets from the angels, it looks as if we’re dealing with something more ethereal, and not a real clump of stone. 58  At the beginning of De specialibus legibus. 59  Palestinian Talmud, Tractate Shekalim 49d. 60  See his Azharot—his rhyming liturgical enumeration of the 613 commandments—in his Siddur (al-Fayyûmî, 1963). 61  e.g., Numbers Rabba 13:16. 62  Nezer Ha-kodesh, on Genesis Rabba 1:15, as translated in Heschel (2006, p. 584). 63  Intimations towards such a theory can be found in certain Hassidic sources, see Me’or Eynayim, of R. Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, Parshat Vayyera, s.v. kiyem Avraham avinu and Mayse (2019, pp. 109–10).

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  167 was but a foundational fragment that had to be expanded by human reason in order to form the Pentateuch and the Oral Torah. This fragment wasn’t supposed to be a blueprint for the creation, but a foundation for Jewish law and philosophy. The Foundational Fragment Theory is a non-Pentateuchal theory. It denies that the entire Pentateuch is somehow contained in the Heavenly Torah, even if the entire foundational fragment is contained in the Pentateuch.

6.3.5.  The Paradigm Theory Another non-Pentateuchal theory retains the full-blooded tradition of the Heavenly Torah, serving as a blueprint for creation, but states that it represents the infinite will of God, such that no human language could hope to represent it. I call this the Paradigm Theory. It finds mature expression in the writings of the Hassidim.64 The Izhbitza wrote about the first of the Ten Commandments, noting that God used the Hebrew word “anokhi” as the personal pronoun, when he could equally well have used the synonym, “ani”: “I (anokhi) am the Lord your God.” The verse does not state “ani,” for if it stated “ani” that would imply that the Holy One Blessed Be He revealed then the totality of His light to Israel, precluding the possibility of further delving into His words, for everything would already be revealed. The letter khaf [of anokhi], however, denotes that the revelation is not complete, but is rather an estimation and comparison to the light which God will reveal in the future.65

R. Hefter (2009, p. 17) explains: the letter khaf can be used as a prefix of comparison, and thus the correct “translation” of the commandment would be “I am as the Lord . . .” Even the revelation at Sinai was partial and incomplete. Consider, also, the Izhbitza’s commentary to Leviticus 26:3: If you walk in the path of my statutes: “If ” indicates uncertainty. That is to say that even one who walks in the path of the Torah must also be in a state of uncertainty, since perhaps he is not fulfilling the will of God completely. The will of God is exceedingly profound.66

Jewish law is only an approximation of God’s infinite will. It is the best we have. We have no authority to jettison any of its details. But it is, perforce, an approximation. 64 

For a rich study on theories of revelation in early Hassidic thought, see Mayse (2019). Mei Ha-Shiloah, on Parshat Yitro, s.v. anokhi, as translated by Hefter (2009, p. 17). 66  Ibid., Parshat Bechukotai, as translated by Hefter (2013, p. 47). 65 

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168  The Principles of Judaism The Izhbitza’s student Rav Tzadok Hakohen (1823–1900) compares the Written Torah to the tetragrammaton, a name of God that Jews don’t say aloud; instead, when they see it written in the Torah, they read out a substitute name, “adanoi.”67 Rav Tzadok compares the Oral Torah to the name “adanoi,” and the Written Torah to the tetragrammaton. Though he doesn’t put his point quite this bluntly, one could read him to be saying that just as the tetragrammaton is too holy to come into the world without the clothing of the name “adanoi,” so too the Written Torah cannot come into this world without being channeled through the prism of the Oral Torah.68 The reader reads the verses of the Torah, and what comes out of his mouth is not what he sees with his eyes—since he substitutes “adanoi”69 for the tetragrammaton; and thus, as the Written Torah comes into the world, through its public readings, it becomes the Oral Torah. Even what we call the Written Torah becomes Oral as soon as it’s read. All the Torah that we have, from the Pentateuch onwards, is an attempt to represent an intangible Heavenly Torah that cannot be contained in this world, however hard we try to bring it down. In that sense, all that we ever have in our hands—including the Pentateuch—is, in comparison to the Heavenly Torah, nothing but an Oral Torah. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Betichev expresses this view most beautifully, in the following words:70 Hashem, may he be blessed, emanates emanations, and we, in our prayers, perform a contraction with the emanation, each one according to his will—this one performs a contraction with the letters [that spell] “life,” [in order to pray] for life; and this one with the letters [that spell] “wisdom” [in order to pray] for wisdom; and this one with the letters [that spell] “wealth,” [in order to pray] for wealth; and so too for every good—each according to his will. And behold, all that there is in the spiritual world has a correlate in the material world. Accordingly, we behold that in the material world there is a voice, and there is speech. The voice is all-inclusive, and the speech is the contraction of the voice into the letters of speech. And so too [in the spiritual world:] On Rosh Hashana the voice of the shofar is the emanation from the creator, blessed be he. It is allinclusive. That which we say [in our Rosh Hashana liturgy—which has three ­topics, namely:] [God’s] sovereignty, [God’s] memory and [verses about the] shofar blasts—is the contraction by which we contract the emanation from the 67 

Sometimes the name is substituted by the word “elohim.” Tzadok, Risisei Laila, section 56. On the notion that the tetragrammaton comes into the world clothed by substitute names, Rav Tzadok is drawing from a much older tradition, from Rabbi Yosef Giqatillah (1248–1305), see Sefer Sha’arei Orah, Sha’ar 1, Sefira 10. 69  Or, sometimes “elohim,” as I pointed out in footnote 67. 70  Kedushat Levi, Parshat Bereshit, s.v. Od Yevo’ar Bereshit. 68  Rav

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  169 creator, blessed be he, through the letters [of the Hebrew alphabet], each one according to his will. And behold, the all-inclusive emanation from the creator, may he be blessed, is the aspect of the Written Torah, and the contraction of the emanation with the alphabet, that we create, is the aspect of the Oral Torah. For the Oral Torah is in the will of Israel, when they create the explanation of the Written Torah.

Here, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak compares the Written Torah to a wordless all-inclusive shofar blast of divine emanation. As soon as you’re dressing that voice up in words— even the words of the Pentateuch—you’re already in the domain of the Oral Torah. Of course, these thinkers recognize a difference between the Pentateuch and the Talmud. Relative to one another, the Pentateuch is Written Torah, and the Talmud is Oral Torah, and the status of the other biblical writings falls somewhere between the status of the Written and the Oral Torahs. But their point is that, relative to the Heavenly Torah, everything on earth is like a commentary on the real Written Torah; a Torah that cannot be contained nor expressed in human language. In the land of Israel, long before the rise of Polish Hassidut, Rabbi Abraham Azulai (1570–1643) wrote that “the wisdom and esoteric knowledge in the Torah are infinite, and it is impossible that they should all be passed on to a human being who is finite.”71 According to the Paradigm Theory, to think that the Divine Torah, representing God’s own most cherished thoughts, could be adequately contained in human language, and in any human mind, is to court a sort of a heresy. There is room in logical space for a sixth theory of the Heavenly Torah, asserting the following three theses: (1) there exists a Heavenly Torah; (2) the Pentateuch bears no relation to the content of the Heavenly Torah; (3) the Pentateuch was authored by God and was dictated by him to Moses. This non-Pentateuchal theory would be heresy-proof because it maintains that whatever the Pentateuch is, it is still the product of divine dictation to Moses. The only problem with this heresy-proof theory is that it does serious violence to the rabbinic traditions surrounding the Heavenly Torah. To think that the Heavenly Torah has no overlap with or intimate relationship to the Pentateuch is to do tremendous violence to the entire tradition, according to which God read from the Heavenly Torah at the theophany at Sinai,72 and Moses wrestled it away from the angels. Why hang on to a Heavenly Torah, if you’re going to ignore its role in all of the sources that talk about it? For that reason, I won’t offer the heresy-proof version of a non-Pentateuchal theory as an option. 71  R. Abraham Azulai, Introduction to his commentary on Avot, as translated in Heschel (2006, p. 582). 72  Midrash Tanchuma (Yitro 15).

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170  The Principles of Judaism But, of course, this leads us to the first weakness to confront non-Pentateuchal theories, namely: they seem open to the charge of heresy. They suggest that the Pentateuch is a partially human product; either a human attempt to “unpack” or to “grasp towards” the Heavenly Torah. Is it heretical to think that the Pentateuch is partially of human origin? Rabbi Michael Harris usefully suggests a distinction between verbal revelation and propositional revelation.73 The idea of verbal revelation gives rise to the stenographic model of God’s revelation to Moses: God dictated the Pentateuch word for word. Propositional revelation is the idea that Moses had some content revealed to him, but that he, personally, had to clothe that content in words. The propositional view may not be the mainstream, but it won’t be easy to rule out as beyond the pale. It is consonant with the wording of Maimonides’ eighth principle, since that principle explicitly calls the stenographic notion of verbal revelation a metaphor, nor does the propositional model clearly contradict the Talmudic pronouncement (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 99a) against the notion that Moses included content at his own initiative. Using your own words to clothe a revelation isn’t the same thing as including material on your own initiative. The Midrash Lekah Tov makes reference to additions made by the arranger, editor, or compiler of the Pentateuch. Even if you identify this figure with Moses, these comments (about additions) certainly suggest that he had an independent role in formulating the language of the Pentateuch. The Midrash Sekhel Tov mentions the editor on several different occasions in his commentary, in just the same way.74 Rabbi Yosef Bekhor Shor (b. 1140) talks of the author of the book, which also suggests that a human, probably Mosaic hand, was involved in editing, or supplementing, the text.75 Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, the Rashbam (1085–1158), wrote the following words in his commentary to the book of Genesis: [T]his entire section, concerning the six days of creation—Moses wrote it for anticipatory purposes to make explicit to you (the reader) what God said when he gave the Torah (Exodus 20:8–11): Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy . . .  for in six days did the LORD make heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day . . . That is why Moses related to Israel this entire chapter about creation . . .76 73  R.  Harris owes this distinction to Neil Gillman (1990, pp. 16–17) but employs it somewhat differently (see Harris, 2016, pp. 100–8 and note 73). 74  See e.g. Midrash Sekhel Tov to Genesis 26:32 and 47:26. For further discussion of the concept of the sadran in Lekah Tov and Sekhel Tov, see Steiner (2003). I owe these references to R. Michael Harris (2016). Bazak (2014) collects even more source material (of varying degrees of persuasiveness) to argue for the orthodoxy of something like a propositional revelation. 75  See e.g. his commentary to Gen. 32:20; 35:20. 76  As translated by Harris (2012, p. 117).

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  171 Here, the Rashbam clearly gives Moses personal responsibility for the presentation of the content of the Pentateuch. To claim that a propositional theory is heretical goes too far. We don’t want to accuse the Lekah Tov, the Sekhel Tov, and the Rashbam (or any of the other major rabbinic figures that we’ve quoted) of heresy. And yet the threat of heresy isn’t far away. On a propositional account, we find ourselves asking, why does rabbinic exegesis of the Pentateuch make so much out of so little, when the fine detail of the text isn’t even wholly divine? And, why should we trust the Pentateuch, as understood through the prism of rabbinic interpretation, in cases where it offends against our very deeply held moral convictions? Perhaps the Pentateuch is just wrong on those issues that push against our moral intuitions—perhaps some human error simply crept in around the edges. Non-Pentateuchal theories might not be heretical, but in giving rise to these questions, they threaten to give rise to heresy; they threaten to undermine the entire halakhic edifice of rabbinic Judaism. One Midrash makes a suggestion that might help: Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani said: why does it say concerning each thing [that Moses did in the making of the Tabernacle] As the Lord commanded Moses? This may be compared to a king who commanded his servant, saying to him, “Build me a palace.” The servant expertly built him a great and spectacular palace. He wrote on everything [he built,] the name of the king. When he finished, the king entered and saw it and was very pleased. He said: “All this honour has my servant done me, including inscribing my name on every place, yet while I am inside, he is outside! Call him that he may come right in.” So too, when Moses finished the work of the Tabernacle, and he wrote in every section, As the Lord commanded Moses, God appeared and His Presence dwelt in it [the Tabernacle] and He saw it and it pleased Him . . .77

In this Midrash, God approves of Moses’ textual additions after they were written. Likewise, it is widely held, within rabbinic Judaism, that Moses had a very big hand in the authorship of Deuteronomy. The Mishna rules that the curses listed in Leviticus should be read without any interruptions. In the Talmud, Abbaye explains: The Mishna refers only to the curses in Leviticus; however, one may divide the curses in Deuteronomy. What is the reason? The former were framed in the ­plural, and Moses transmitted them from on high, whereas the latter were framed in the singular, and Moses delivered them by his own mouth.78 77  78 

Midrash Hagadol, on Exodus 40:38, as translated by Shapiro (2004, pp. 114–15). Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Megillah 31b, as translated in Heschel (2006, p. 452).

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172  The Principles of Judaism In later generations this view was expanded: it isn’t just the curses in Deuteronomy that were from Moses’ own mouth; rather, the whole book of Deuteronomy was. The Zohar presents Deuteronomy as if it is Moses’ own commentary upon the earlier books of the Pentateuch, which makes Deuteronomy the first book of rabbinic commentary, the first work of Oral Torah.79 R. Heschel (2005, pp. 467–8) canvasses a long list of rabbis who accepted that Moses had a hand in the authorship of Deuteronomy. How do they reconcile this with the view that Moses didn’t add anything to the Pentateuch on his own initiative? The Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman; 1720–97) claims that the first four books are unique, in that Moses taught them in real time, as they were being communicated to him; as if God was speaking through his voice box. Deuteronomy, on the other hand, though it wasn’t spoken on Moses’ own initiative, was different. There was a delay between the conveyance of the divine message and Moses’ teaching that message. During that delay, Moses, like all the other prophets, was charged with finding the words himself to convey the message.80 That is to say, as far as the Vilna Gaon is concerned, verbal revelation is the model for the first four books, and propositional revelation is the model for the fifth (and for much of the rest of the Bible). But then, why should we be able to engage in the same sorts of radical exegesis in the book of Deuteronomy as we do in the first four books? The Zohar suggests: Even though the entire Torah is the Word of God, some is the words of Moses as  well. Which part? For example: the rebuke in the book of Deuteronomy. Afterwards they were included in the Divine.81

Marcel Duchamp took a bottle rack. He didn’t make the bottle rack. He simply acquired it. He then transformed it into a sculpture, variously called “Bottle Rack,” “Bottle Drier,” and “Hedgehog.”82 He didn’t break it down and rebuild it, providing it with a new shape or form. He simply inscribed it. Duchamp forgot what words he inscribed on it, but the mere act of inscription, or perhaps his pla­ cing it in an art gallery with the intention of presenting it as a sculpture, is what took a mundane piece of functional furniture and made a sculpture out of it. It looked like a hedgehog before Duchamp set eyes on it. But it wasn’t a sculpture of a hedgehog until Duchamp invested it with that intention. The emptiness of the bottle rack wasn’t a statement on Duchamp’s bachelorhood, until he appropriated the rack and made it into a sculpture, and placed it into his oeuvre which, in that period, was often thought to have been preoccupied with his 79 

Zohar Va’ethanan 261a; see Heschel (2006, p. 455). This view of the Vilna Gaon is cited in Ohel Ya’akov, by Rabbi Ya’akov (1740–1804, the Magid of Dubna) in his introduction to Deuteronomy. 81  Zohar, Vayikra 7a, my italics. 82  “Herrisson” in French is a homonym. It means hedgehog, bottle rack, and bottle drier. 80 

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  173 bachelorhood. Had people really remarked on the phallic nature of that bottle rack before Duchamp’s appropriation of it; that it was “waiting for wet bottles to be hung on its prongs . . . obviously, laughably Freudian”?83 I can imagine those words uttered in an art gallery about a bottle rack sculpture on display. But I imagine that they weren’t uttered in the shop where the bottle rack was sold. Without changing a thing about the form of this rack, Duchamp invested it with new meanings and properties. It doesn’t matter whether God originally wrote the words of Deuteronomy. The book became a product of the divine mind, even if it was only appropriated by God. All of the radical modes of rabbinic exegesis make sense, even in the book of Deuteronomy. We can extend this theory beyond Deuteronomy. It doesn’t matter if Moses, or even others, were involved in the wording of any verse in the Pentateuch, so long as God subsequently appropriated it. The Pentateuch, on this picture, might not be identical to the Heavenly Torah, but it is still a book that, after its human input, was appropriated by God, taking on all of the authority of a divinely authored book.84 But how do we know that God appropriated the text? We’ll return to that question in the next chapter, section 7.1.3. According to the non-Pentateuchal theories, Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch was an attempt to unpack the content of the Heavenly Torah, or to gesticulate towards its ineffable content. In a sense, every subsequent generation of Jewish sages was charged with continuing that same job. We’re not forgetting more and more Torah as our debates proliferate. On the contrary, we’re unpacking more and more content that needs to be clarified in the furnace of rabbinic debate; or we’re arriving (hopefully) at ever more precise approximations of the infinite will of God. Nor should we fear that we’re falling away from the precise copy of the Heavenly Torah that we once had—as we should fear on the Pentateuchal-moreor-less Theory. We never had a precise copy. A precise copy is impossible for humans to achieve. Instead, we are charged with working towards the Heavenly Torah as an ideal. In Jewish axiology, the product of a (so to speak) human–divine partnership can be more valuable than the work of God alone.85 By those lights, non-Pentateuchal theories are able to give a greater value to the study of Torah than Pentateuchal theories. A striking Midrash agrees: To what can it be compared? To a mortal king who had two servants, both of whom he loved unconditionally. He gave each of them a small measure of wheat, and small bunch of flax. What did the clever one of the two do? He took the flax and weaved a cloth, and he took the wheat and made flour, which he then sifted, 83 

See Seigel (1995, p. 126). notion of divine appropriation is stronger than John Webster’s (2003) related notion of sanctification. 85  See Midrash Tanchuma, Parashat Tazria, 5. 84  This

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174  The Principles of Judaism ground finely, kneaded, and baked into bread, placed on the table, and spread the cloth over it . . . The foolish one did nothing with what he was given . . . Now consider: which of these was most dear to the king? . . . It is thus the case that when the Holy One and Blessed One gave the Torah to Israel, it was given to them as wheat with which to produce flour, and as flax with which to produce a garment.86

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was frustrated with his student Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who refused to speak his own words of Torah and would only reproduce what he had been told. Eventually: Rabbi Eliezer sat and expounded things beyond that which was spoken to Moses at Sinai, and his face glowed as with the light of the sun, the rays going forth as the rays from Moses’ face. You couldn’t tell whether it was day or night . . . Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai . . . kissed him on his head, and said: Happy are you, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that this one descended from you.87

The danger of heresy still lurks in the background. We can’t allow just anybody to speak things beyond what was heard at Sinai! It can’t be that we’re all licensed to make up words of Torah as we go along. And yet there is something appealing here: we have the sense that the revelation didn’t end at Sinai. It continues. To participate in the Oral Torah is to play a role in the unfolding of the Torah; the cumulative revelation of the Heavenly Torah; a cosmic drama without parallel. In the book of Deuteronomy (5:19), the theophany is described with these words: “The Lord spoke those words to your whole congregation at the mountain, with a mighty voice out of the fire and the dense clouds, and no more.” The words which we have rendered “and no more” are, in the original Hebrew, ambiguous. They could be read as attaching to the words that God spoke. The meaning would then be that God spoke those words and no more. That is to say: he said nothing else. Alternatively, they could be read as attaching to the mighty voice. Their meaning would then be different. They would mean: “it did not cease,” which is to say, the voice heard at Sinai is still echoing today.88 Siding with the second reading, Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz argues that rabbinic law was, in a sense, uttered at Sinai.89 It was somehow latent in the voice we heard there, as a potential; a potential that is only actualized when the time is right, by rabbis who hear the echo of Sinai, and have a great deal of understanding 86 

Seder Eliyahu Zuta, chapter 2, as translated in Heschel (2006, p. 579). de Rabbi Natan 13, according to version B of Solomon Shechter, as translated in Heschel (2006, p. 572). 88  See Rashi’s commentary to the Torah loc. cit. 89 See Shnei Luchot Habrit, Toldot Adam Beit Chachma (Telitaah), as translated in Heschel (2006, pp. 582–3). 87  Avot

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The Internal Problem with the Revelation  175 concerning the specifics of their time, in terms of “earthly affairs,” and the status of the “souls of the generation.” Sages are no longer regarded, by this theory, as faithful conduits of the tradition. Instead, the sages have to have a feeling for the zeitgeist, and the spiritual insight to know whether, in the earthly affairs of the day, and in the clamor for halakhic evolution, they hear the echo of Sinai or not.90 Which human innovations are acceptable and become part of the body of the Torah? Which do not? Unlike the Pentateuchal-more-or-less Theory, the non-Pentateuchal theories don’t claim that we ever had a perfect copy of the Heavenly Torah in our hands. Moreover, the non-Pentateuchal theories will give authority to the minutiae of the Pentateuchal text, on the basis that God appropriated it, and not because it necessarily agrees with the primordial content of the Heavenly Torah. But, questions of authority aside, we can still ask a troubling question, similar to the question that faced the Pentateuchal-more-or-less Theory, namely: how do we know that our Torah is getting closer to the paradigm of the Heavenly Torah, and not drifting ever further away? Despite the hanging questions, we have also seen the religious virtue of this approach: it gives a new and added value to the study of the Oral Torah; the sage becomes a partner of God, so to speak. This virtue should be added to the one that was noted above, in the name of Rabbi Abraham Azulai; that non-Pentateuchal theories (and the Pentateuchal++ Theory) save us from the sacrilege of believing that, at any given moment in time, our tradition is privy to the entire grandeur of the divine wisdom of the Heavenly Torah.91 We have raised seven concerns: (1) exacerbating theological fatalism; (2) questioning divine morality; (3) making implausible claims about the stability of the Pentateuchal text; (4) making implausible claims about the scientific wisdom contained in the Pentateuch and/or the Oral Torah; (5) casting doubt over the purity and integrity of the rabbinic tradition; (6) giving rise to questions that could lead to apostasy; and (7) the heretical claim that any body of text can completely encapsulate the divine will or the Divine Torah. We have also seen two theoretical virtues: (A) containing a defense of the rabbinic traditions of legal exegesis of the Pentateuch; and (B) increasing the value and significance of traditional Torah scholarship. Using those numbers to represent those seven concerns, and those letters to represent those two virtues, we can summarize what we’ve discovered to date in the following table: 90  Rav Tzadok Hakohen thought that the zeitgeist might well play a role in halakhic development; see e.g., Tzidkat ha-Tzaddik, section 90, and Risisei Laila, section 56. David Shatz (2013) examines some of the challenges ahead for a theory that recognizes an ethic external to the halakha, and to views that think halakhic evolution should be guided by ethical development in the world at large. Shatz’s survey of the philosophical and rabbinic territory is characteristically enlightening, and his bibliography is a useful platform for further reflection on these issues. 91  N.B., the Foundational Fragment Theory does this by denying that God created a Heavenly Torah; he only created a foundational fragment for the future edifice of Jewish law and thought.

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176  The Principles of Judaism  

Problems

Pentateuchal Theory Pentateuchal+ Theory Pentateuchal++ Theory Non-Pentateuchal Theories Foundational Fragment Paradigm Theory Theory

Virtues

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

A

B

✓ ✓ ✓    

✓    

✓ ?92 ✓

✓ ✓  

  ✓  

     

✓ ✓  

 

 

 

 

✓

 

✓   ✓   ✓       ✓

Consulting this table, we can begin to appreciate the internal problem with the revelation. Some of the options on the table impiously impugn the integrity of the rabbinic tradition itself (problem 5). Some of them make the somewhat sacrilegious claim that God’s own supernal Torah and infinite will can be contained in a single human tradition (problem 7). Some of them cannot do real justice to the value and significance of Torah scholarship (i.e., failure to secure B). Some can save you from those impious corollaries, but open up new questions about the authority of the halakha (problem 6) which, if left unaddressed, could lead to the collapse of the whole legal edifice of rabbinic Judaism. Moreover, the denial of the existence of the Heavenly Torah is not a viable option either: it would fly in the face of almost all of the central texts of the Jewish canon, without any independent or compelling philosophical rationale. And thus, whatever you do with the Heavenly Torah, even if you deny its existence, your treatment of it will give rise to uncomfortable choices right at the heart of any rabbinic philosophy of scripture. These issues don’t arise from secular ethics or from the perceived threat of academic biblical scholarship. These issues arise from the Jewish tradition itself. This is the internal problem with the revelation. In the next chapter, I present a theory of revelation that can resolve the internal problem whilst standing strong in the face of external problems too.

92  Does the Pentateuchal+ Theory really avoid problem 3? On the one hand, it doesn’t make the outlandish claim that the Pentateuch contains some hidden reference to the Higgs boson. On the other hand, it does make the outlandish claim that Moses was made aware of the Higgs boson and given a complete science that he (presumably) grasped and understood and that we have subsequently lost. Is this less outlandish? If so, we seem only to have lessened the outlandishness rather than to have avoided it altogether, and even this victory was bought at the cost of problem 5.

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7

Ongoing Revelation and the External Problems with the Revelation The previous chapter introduced the internal problem with the revelation. In ­section 7.1 of this chapter, I develop a preliminary theory of the revelation with that problem in mind. In section 7.2, I provide some reasons for thinking the pre­lim­in­ary theory to be, at least somewhat, plausible. In section 7.3, I respond to  ­various external problems that have been raised with Jewish belief in the ­revelation—challenges that emerge from biblical criticism, archeology, and e­ thics. In the final section, I lay out a final formulation of the theory of the revelation in light of the foregoing discussion, and draw some methodological conclusions for Jewish philosophy.

7.1.  A Preliminary Theory of the Revelation 7.1.1.  The Special Status of the Pentateuch Before laying out a theory of the revelation, I want to lay down the following constraint: a theory of the revelation that doesn’t privilege the Pentateuch over other books cannot be in harmony with the weight of the Jewish tradition. This claim might sound obvious, but there are some countervailing considerations that one could raise against it. The Torah scroll is a ritual object. We store it in a special place at the focal point of the synagogue. We stand in its presence. We kiss it as we come close to it. It is written in concert with numerous ritualistic–legal requirements. Its public reading is legislated and regulated. In these respects, it is unlike any other Jewish book. But Benjamin Sommer is right, nonetheless, to point out how the “Written Torah might be compared to a constitutional monarch: hers are the honor and the ceremony. But we all know that the Oral Torah, as the prime minister, holds the power” (Sommer, 2015, p. 176).1 Rabbi Chaim Brovender allegedly maintained that the Hebrew Bible is not really a Jewish book. It only becomes a Jewish book when understood through the

1  A similar point is made by James Kugel (2007, pp. 680–1). The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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178  The Principles of Judaism prism of rabbinic tradition. Similarly, one finds the Midrash (Tanchuma, Teruma 8) boldly comparing the words of the Written Torah to the temptress of Proverbs chapter 5; a temptress that seeks to lead the people astray—presumably towards the errors of the Sadducees (and other sects that reject the Oral Torah, such as the Karites). Through this Midrashic lens, Proverbs urges us to turn to the words of the Torah only through the prism of rabbinic interpretation. Be that as it may. A constitutional monarch is still a monarch: A medieval rabbi may argue against an older medieval text. An amora [any rabbi from roughly 200 to 500 ce] may disagree with a tanna [any rabbi from roughly 0 to 200 ce], at least if he can find another tannaitic tradition to bolster his claim. But neither will argue that scripture itself is wrong. (Sommer, 2015, p. 175)

Sommer, who notes this fact, tries to play it down. He doubts that “this difference of attitude has a major impact in the construction of Jewish law and thought. Disagreements with Written Torah are not absent in Jewish literatures; they are merely cloaked as interpretations, interpretations that we today would characterize as strong misreadings . . .” (ibid.). But even if Sommer is right, and the characteristic attitude of rabbinic scholarship towards the text of the Hebrew Bible gives them carte blanche to disagree with the Written Torah at will, and to cloak their disagreements as “interpretations,” a theory of the revelation that claims to underlie this tradition should still seek to explain that “skin-deep” deference. In fact, the extreme interpretative liberties that the tradition sometimes takes, regarding the Pentateuch, may actually be evidence that it regards that text as more divine than any other. As Tamar Ross (2004, p. 150) puts it: Undoubtedly there is a significant difference . . . between the claim that the received word of God contains infinite possibilities of interpretation and the postmodernist rejection of metaphysics and the notion of universal truth altogether.

That is to say, extreme deconstructionism makes more sense in relation to a text that is thought to be divine, and therefore pregnant with infinite potential, than it does in relation to other texts. I wrote this book. It doesn’t contain an infinite number of potential meanings. It means what I meant when I wrote it. But when God writes a book, with his infinite wisdom, it really can hold infinite meanings. Moreover, rabbinic authorities much more often find that their hands are tied by biblical texts than Sommer seems to recognize. The Oral Torah has the final word, and utilizes very extensive interpretative tools, but the Oral Torah doesn’t allow itself explicitly to overrule, disagree with, or discount verses of the Pentateuch— even if it sometimes seems to interpret them into oblivion—and its hermeneutical tool kit does have limits.

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Ongoing Revelation  179 Michael Wyschogrod excoriates ArtScroll—Mesorah Publications, a prom­in­ent publisher of English–Hebrew translations of Jewish texts. He finds sacrilegious their decision not to translate the Song of Songs but, instead, to publish a homiletical interpretation in place of a translation. Wyschogrod’s ire is not directed at the homiletical interpretation, but at the decision to present such an interpretation instead of a translation. He writes with sarcasm and disdain: One can only wonder why the original text of the Song of Songs is read in the synagogue on the Sabbath of Passover and not a midrashic interpretation of it. In fact, why is the original language of the Pentateuch read in the synagogue instead of a midrashic interpretation? Why not eliminate the bible altogether and read the Mishnah in the synagogue? (Wyschogrod, 1996, p. xxii)

Later on he writes (ibid., p. xxiv): Sometimes we are so eager to validate the divine origin of the oral Torah that we refuse to recognize any difference between the Torahs. But that is profoundly unrabbinic. The rabbis did not order the writing of a Torah scroll with the teachings of the oral Torah inserted in the spaces of the written Torah. Such a Torah scroll would be unfit for use in the synagogue . . . To appreciate the subtleties of rabbinic commentary, we must first read the written Torah. Only then can we appreciate the contribution of the oral Torah. We must be careful not to become so anti-Karaitic that we lose direct contact with the text of scripture. Respect for the oral Torah does not require erasing the difference between the two Torahs.

In other words: the Oral Torah presupposes that we know and understand the unadorned Written Torah, upon which it comments. I should raise another respect in which the privilege of the Pentateuch is manifest. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, the rabbinic tradition contains rulings based upon spellings and other minor textual details of the Pentateuch. It treats the Pentateuchal text as omnisignificant. The rabbinic tradition bears this attitude to no other body of texts. Once again: a Jewish theory of the revelation should explain that difference. A theory that doesn’t meet this constraint, I claim, would be revisionary of Jewish attitudes and practices.2

2  Saadya Gaon adopted a radical and rational reading of these adventurous modes of rabbinic exegesis. He didn’t take them to be serious principles of hermeneutics. Rather, he took them to be “prin­ ciples that they [the rabbis] discovered ex post facto as a result of painstaking examination of accepted traditions in comparison with Biblical texts” (Brody, 2013, p. 34). Personally, I find this approach attractive, but a theory of the revelation still needs to explain this sort of behavior; behavior that seeks to root accepted tradition, even if only ex post facto, in the minutiae of Scripture.

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180  The Principles of Judaism Indeed, meeting this constraint might well be one of the key watermarks of an Orthodox Jewish theology, as opposed to the theology of the Conservative movement. The Conservative rabbi and theologian Louis Jacobs was committed to the notion that the Pentateuch is the voice of “eternity expressing itself in time,” but he was also reconciled to the idea that it contains “higher and lower [elements], error as well as truth, the ignoble as well as the noble” (Jacobs, 1999, p. 51).3 In many ways, Sommer’s theology is a culmination of Conservative thinking, inspired by Rabbis Heschel, and Jacobs, as well as by Franz Rosenzweig. Sommer views the Pentateuch as the product of many authors. On his theory, “the wording in the Pentateuch is a joint effort involving heavenly and earthly contributions” (Sommer, 2015, p. 2), and is no different in kind from the wording of the Oral Torah, which he also views as a joint effort. In short, his theory seeks definitively to collapse the distinction between the Written and Oral Torah. In his words: “there is only Oral Torah, which starts with Genesis 1:1” (ibid., p. 147). In failing to meet the constraint that I have laid down, Sommer will be aware that his approach fails to constitute even a minimally Orthodox theology.4 He doesn’t claim to be an Orthodox thinker. But for the reasons given above, I can only relate to such a theology as deeply revisionary of traditional practices and attitudes.

7.1.2.  Putting Stenography in its Place One might think that an Orthodox Jewish theology would have to include a stenographic account of the revelation of the Pentateuch. God dictated every word to Moses. That would certainly explain its privileged status, and its omnisignificance. Moreover, we can recall the Talmudic discussion (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 99a) of a person who denies of even one part of the Pentateuch that “it was said by the Holy One, blessed be He, but by Moses of his own accord.” It concludes that such a person has “despised the word of the Lord.” That discussion suggests a picture of Moses passively recording the words that God dictated to him. But we also know that the Talmud elsewhere advances the theory, later endorsed by a number of important medieval rabbis, that the closing verses of the Pentateuch were added by Joshua after the death of Moses.5 According to the Tzafnat Paaneach,6 when the Talmud denies that Moses, or anybody else, added a single thing of his own accord, it needn’t mean that no

3  Tamar Ross (2004, p. 297) notes that this marks an improvement in “Jacob’s original exposition, written as if one could go through the Pentateuch and tick off such passages as the commandment to wipe out the Amalekites as a human and not a divine element.” 4 Ironically, in trying to appease ultra-Orthodox sensibilities, ArtScroll stand accused—by Wyschogrod—of falling into this distinctly unorthodox camp. 5  See Babylonian Talmud, Tractates Baba Batra 15a, Makot 11a, and Menachot 30a. 6  See Heschel (2005, p. 635).

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Ongoing Revelation  181 words or verses were added; it needn’t mean that everything was written down passively. It might merely mean that no commandment or narrative section was added without direct divine instruction. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that Moses, and others, were left with the task of finding appropriate words for recording what God had told them to record. The closest that anyone in the Talmud gets to endorsing a stenographic account of the revelation appears in a discussion of the verses that recount the death of Moses. One theory (put forward either by Rabbi Yehuda or by Rabbi Nechemya) has it that Joshua wrote those verses. He wrote them after Moses had died. How could that be, Rabbi Shimon asks, since Moses had already presented a complete Torah scroll to the priests (Deuteronomy 31:26) before he died? Rabbi Shimon argues that Moses wrote every word, even if he wrote the last few verses in a different way: [U]ntil this point, the Holy One, Blessed be He, spoke, and Moses spoke and wrote. From this point forward [with respect to the verses concerning the death of Moses], the Holy One, Blessed be He, spoke and Moses wrote with tears.7

But the wording of this theory is peculiar. If Moses was passively taking dictation, then why was he speaking? Shouldn’t he simply have written what God was saying without saying anything himself? Accordingly, it isn’t obvious that Rabbi Shimon is presenting a straightforwardly stenographic model. We’ve already seen the reading of the Nezer Ha-kodesh (which I cited in chapter 6, section 6.3.4). According to his reading of this passage, Moses did take dictation from God, but he was also permitted to add his own explanations and interpretations. And thus: “The Holy and Blessed One was speaking the Written Torah, and Moses began to speak the Oral Torah, which was founded by him; and only then did he write, including allusions in his writing to that Oral Torah that he grasped on his own.”8 God spoke his Torah, and Moses spoke his Torah, and then Moses wrote some sort of combination of the two. Far from being a clear endorsement of a stenographic model of the revelation, Rabbi Shimon’s words give rise to a very radical reading indeed. Presumably, it was for this reason that Rabbi Yoel ben Shmuel Sirkis (1561–1640), known as the Bach, was moved to suggest that the text of the Talmud must have been corrupted here. It couldn’t have meant that Moses spoke between God’s speech and Moses’ writing.9 Ironically, in this Talmudic tradition about scribal fidelity, the Bach insisted that the scribes of the Talmud must have erred. The text should read: “God spoke

7 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Batra 15a (echoed in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Menachot 30a). 8  Nezer Ha-kodesh, on Genesis Rabba 1:15, as translated in Heschel (2006, p. 584). 9  See Hagahot HaBach, on the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Batra 15a.

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182  The Principles of Judaism and Moses wrote.” It shouldn’t have read: “God spoke, and Moses spoke and wrote.” But without the Bach’s emendation, the text of the Talmud that we have, in our hands, includes no clear-cut endorsement of a stenographic revelation to Moses.10 Accordingly, the Talmud needn’t commit us to a stenographic model of the Pentateuch’s authorship. Of course, if we don’t adopt a stenographic model, we will have to explain what justifies the omnisignificance attributed to the Pentateuch. Nonetheless, the Talmud doesn’t explicitly contain an articulation of a stenographic model; neither—by the way—does the Pentateuch itself. The stenographic model makes its way into the tradition most notably in Maimonides’ thirteen principles. As we saw, the eighth principle has it that: “In handing down the Torah, Moses was like a scribe [or, indeed a stenographer] writing from dictation the whole of it, its chronicles, its narratives, and its precepts.” But Maimonides himself notes that the stenographic model was just a metaphor: “the real nature of that communication is unknown to everybody except to Moses, peace be upon him, to whom it came.”11 And thus, even in its most canonical location, the stenographic model wasn’t seriously entertained as a literal description of the Pentateuch’s revelation. There is a tendency inherent in the stenographic model towards some sort of Pentateuchal Theory of the Heavenly Torah (either the Pentateuchal Theory, the Pentateuchal+ Theory, or the Pentateuchal++ Theory, of the previous chapter). If you believe that God dictated, word for word, the Pentateuch to Moses, then you might be tempted to think that we have, in our hands, some sort of perfect book— a faithful copy of the eternal Heavenly Torah of God. But, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Pentateuchal theories of the Heavenly Torah were beset with serious problems, such as exacerbating theological fatalism; impugning divine morality; making implausible claims about the stability of the Pentateuchal text and the scientific wisdom contained in the Written and Oral Torah; casting doubt over the purity and integrity of the rabbinic tradition; and advancing the heretical claim that any body of texts can completely encapsulate the divine will or the Divine Torah. But we should note: the stenographic model doesn’t entail a Pentateuchal theory of the Heavenly Torah. Perhaps God dictated, word for word, a contextbound, and context-sensitive, foundational fragment of text—not as a copy of the Heavenly Torah, but as a fragment that he knew would serve as the best possible foundation, for that people, in that time, to begin the process of bringing the Earthly Torah closer and closer, over the course of generations, towards the perfect heavenly paradigm to which it aims. In this way, one can combine elements of the foundational fragment and the paradigm theories canvassed in the 10  I’m grateful to R. Michael Harris for discussing this issue with me. 11  Maimonides, Introduction to the tenth chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin, in his commentary to the Mishna.

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Ongoing Revelation  183 previous chapter, whilst also maintaining a stenographic model of the revelation of the Pentateuch.12 We have thus two lessons to take forward as we go on to sketch a preliminary theory of the revelation. (1) Our theory will have to make sense of the privileged role played by the Written Torah in the Jewish tradition. (2) The stenographic model of the revelation of the Pentateuch, though by no means ruled out, is not as essential to Orthodoxy as one might have assumed. With these lessons in hand, we can move on to propose a preliminary theory of the revelation.

7.1.3.  From Sinai towards the Paradigm The Pentateuchal theories of the previous chapter are to be avoided. Where the non-Pentateuchal theories faced only one problem, the Pentateuchal theories faced—between them—a combination of six. The only problem faced by the nonPentateuchal theories was as follows: they raise certain questions that could lead one towards heretical conclusions; for instance, they force us to ask whether the evolution of the Earthly Torah, and contemporary halakhic practice, is moving closer towards, or further away, from the heavenly paradigm, or from God’s will. These questions may, if we’re not careful, lead us to view the Written Torah as not fully divine; leading us to violate the constraint laid down in section  7.1.1. That is to say: the non-Pentateuchal theories don’t come equipped with a natural story to tell about why the Pentateuch should be treated as Orthodox Judaism treats it. These issues, I claim, are vitiated as soon as one believes that there was a national theophany at Sinai. Central to the Jewish faith is the claim that there was just such an event. But we should note that the tradition is deliciously ambiguous as to what, exactly, the Jewish people heard there. A close reading of Exodus 20 raises a number of perplexing issues. You might think it clear from Exodus 20:1, for example, that God addressed the entire Decalogue to the Jewish people, gathered—as they were—at the foot of the mountain. But every other verse reporting the occurrence of divine speech in the Pentateuch contains the word ‫אל‬, or the particle -‫ל‬, to place beyond doubt to whom the speech was addressed. The only exception is Exodus 20:1. Benjamin Sommer (2015, p. 38) notes: “Only in this verse introducing the Decalogue in Exodus is there any doubt about the recipient of divine speech.” For this, and other reasons, the Jewish tradition contains all sorts of claims about what, exactly, was heard by the nation at Sinai.

12  A hybrid combination of these two theories of the revelation (without the stenographic element) is intimated by various early Hassidic thinkers, especially R. Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl. See Mayse (2019).

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184  The Principles of Judaism According to one common opinion, they heard only the first two com­ mandments,13 before asking Moses to serve as an intermediary, for fear that they could take no more exposure to such unmediated divinity.14 Another opinion claims that they heard all ten commandments of the Decalogue before asking Moses to serve as an intermediary for any further commandments.15 One Hassidic tradition says that they heard only the first letter of the Decalogue.16 Given the linguistic ambiguities of the account in Exodus, it could be that they merely heard thunder, or a voice without words at all. The book of Deuteronomy (5:22) makes things clearer: the masses heard a voice talking. But did they hear any words? After this theophany, Moses ascended into the cloud atop Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:18). But what did he receive? Later, he is told to ascend in order to receive the tablets, and the Torah, and the laws (Exodus 24:12). But we know that the word Torah is ambiguous. It would be overreach to infer from such talk that Moses received a completed Pentateuch in the aftermath of the Sinai theophany. Of course, the opinion that Moses did receive the completed text up there is reflected in the tradition—especially in the Midrashic accounts of Moses wrestling a Torah scroll from the angels (e.g., Midrash Tehillim 8:2). But we have also seen the Talmudic opinion that Moses received the Pentateuch in instalments over many years (e.g., Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 60a). Despite all of these disagreements, and all of this ambiguity, the tradition is unanimous in asserting the following: there was a mass revelation at Sinai. The Jewish people heard a divine voice speaking (even if they couldn’t make out all or any of the words). The Pentateuch is the earliest piece of literature in our hands to have been written in the wake of Moses’ experience at the top of the mountain. I will take this unanimous assertion about the theophany at Sinai, in conjunction with some widely held theological assumptions, and nothing more, as the basis upon which to build a theory of the revelation. God is all-knowing. Presumably, he foresaw the literature, ritual, and law that would come tumbling into being as a result of the Jewish experience at Sinai.17 And yet, he chose to initiate the experience. Consequently, I claim that Judaism should view the theophany at Sinai as something like a divine stamp of approval 13  See Babylonian Talmud, Tractates Makkot 24a and Horayot 8a, and Exodus Rabba 33:7. 14  This school would read Exodus 20:16 as reporting, after the completion of the Decalogue, how the Decalogue itself had been interrupted by the fearful masses. It also reads events through the prism of Deuteronomy 5:5, trying to reconcile the Exodus account with the Deuteronomy account. 15  See Psikta Rabbati 22:5 and Song of Songs Rabba 1:13, for a presentation of both of these opinions, and see Mekhilta de Rabbi Yishmael, Masechta d’Bachodesh, section 9, for the latter opinion. For medieval supporters of this latter opinion, see the comments of Rashbam and ibn Ezra to Exodus 20:16, and of Rabbi Ovadia ben Yacov Sforno (1475–1550) to Exodus 20:1. See also Nahmanides to Exodus 20:7. 16  This opinion is attributed to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanov (1745–1815) by two of his students. See Sommer (2015, pp. 89–91). 17  Or, if God’s omniscience doesn’t extend to future contingents, then he still knew all of the relevant possibilities and their likelihoods.

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Ongoing Revelation  185 of the religious tradition that grew out of it. This can very quickly help us to meet the constraint on a theory of the revelation that I laid down in section 7.1.1. The tradition came to treat the Pentateuch as uniquely divine. But God knew that this would happen, in the wake of Sinai, and yet he went ahead with the theophany. He knew that these attitudes would become deeply integral to the entire tradition, and yet he gave the tradition his seal of approval. And thus, we can say that either (1) Moses did write it all down at God’s behest, just as the stenographic model would suggest, or (2) the Pentateuchal text came to be in a somewhat less immediate manner, but God nevertheless foresaw its being attributed directly to him, as a central element of the tradition moving forward, and he appropriated it. Once you give Sinai this seal-giving function, the choice between those two alternatives is less significant. Witness the following Midrash (Exodus Rabba 47:9): The ministering angels said before the Holy One, blessed be He, you’re giving Moses permission to write whatever he wants . . .? [God responded,] ‘Heaven forbid that Moses should do such a thing, but even if he does, he is trusted. As it says (Numbers 12:7), ‘For this is not true of my servant Moses, for he is trusted in all my house.’

God is presented as trusting Moses to write what he was commanded to write, but also as trusting him even if he did choose to add his own words. Little weight therefore is placed upon which of these alternatives occurs. It’s as if God’s stamp of approval works in two ways. The first way relies on God’s foreknowledge, and since God knew the future trajectory of the tradition, he was able to give it his approval. The second way in which God gives a stamp of approval to the tradition is that he bestows interpretive authority upon trusted human partners, which allows them, in a sense, to speak on his behalf.18 The Pentateuchal text is uniquely divine, either because the stenographic model is true after all, or because God appropriated the text as his, in various ways, through his forward-looking stamp of approval at Sinai. Either way, our theory of the revelation has met the constraint laid down upon it. So far, the account has smudged over an obvious concern. To treat the Sinai theophany as granting a divine seal of approval to the traditions that came tumbling out of it is to ignore the fact that many competing traditions can be described as tumbling out of that one event. Presumably, God can’t have been endorsing them all—given their incompatibility. But the idea isn’t that God endorses everything that claims to have come from Sinai, or every idea had in response to Sinai. Rather, God endorses a particular 18  We’ve already documented, in the previous chapter (section 6.3.5), various traditions according to which Moses was credited with innovations that God only came to appropriate later on. For more examples see Babylonian Talmud, Tractates Shabbat 87a and Yevamot 62a, and Numbers Rabba 19:33.

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186  The Principles of Judaism cultural process. He doesn’t endorse every notion expressed along the way. Rather, he endorses the general parameters that the process lays down over time. When Hillel and Shammai, for example, came to mutually exclusive conceptions of what the law demands, in particular circumstances, the tradition was able to say of them that both opinions were the “words of the living God” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin 13b), because—at that time at least—both opinions were live options within the evolving legal tradition as it stood. Even when the rabbis made individual rulings that God may not have made himself, had it been directly up to him, the tradition views him as lending his approval (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Metzia 59a–b); once again, because he didn’t endorse the specifics, but he endorsed a particular process. But which process, exactly? Given that the theophany at Sinai was clearly a formative event in the history of a particular nation, we can say that the process that God endorses is, among other things, a national process; a process that takes place within a particular national community. Given that the process is, in part, a legislative process, and a process that has come to be centered around texts, we can say that it is an interpretive process. Tamar Ross writes that, at any given time, the textual canon of Judaism generates “within the interpretive community most committed to their study and practice” a “picture” or a “form of life” (Ross, 2004, p. 248). It is those pictures and forms of life, generated by the interpretive community within the Jewish nation, i.e., by those most committed to the study and practice of Judaism, that God can be said to be endorsing, provisionally, and not for all time, but for each generation in its time, as the interpretative tradition continues to generate new pictures and new forms of life, as it evolves towards its heavenly paradigm. We no longer have to believe that God endorses slavery (see Rabbi N. Rabinowitz, 2003). Rather, we have to believe that he was willing to be viewed as endorsing slavery, at the time in which the tradition universally attributed this view to him; perhaps as part of our moral development. It is a well-known halakhic fact that the most committed cross-sections of Jewish society play a pivotal role in determining the content of the revealed law, over time. Indeed, the rabbis would appeal to the practices of committed Jewry in order to resolve rabbinic disputes (Babylonian Talmud, Tractates Berakhot 45a, Eruvin 14b, and Menahot 35b). Popular custom (minhag) has authoritative status. Moreover, the rabbis are not permitted to create edicts that the religious community will not accept (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Avoda Zara 36a). Rabbi Sacks writes (1993, p. x): A reading of the history of the Jews at times of crisis—the Babylonian exile, the Maccabean revolt, the destruction of the Second Temple, fifteenth-century Spain—suggests that the pattern of Jewry’s continuity is determined at such moments by its most intensely religious members.

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Ongoing Revelation  187 At any given time there will be a number of equally committed but competing interpretive communities within the Jewish world. But that’s okay. The process is one that only takes on clear contours as time goes by. Accordingly, I can agree with Benjamin Sommer (2015, p. 250) that: In the year 50 ce, there was no criterion that allowed one to say which forms of Judaism were the right ones. On a purely theoretical level nobody could prove that the traditions of the Pharisees and the earliest rabbis were Torah while the writings of the Qumran sect and the teachings of the Sadducees were not. But by the year 600, it had become clear that this was the case. There is no conclusive way to explain why the philosopher Philo’s first-century attempt to fuse Plato and Judaism did not become Torah, whereas Maimonides’ twelfth-century attempt to fuse Aristotle and Judaism did . . .

Sometimes only time will decide what was in and what wasn’t in the Torah. The grey areas, at any given time, until they become clarified, fall under the disclaimer that, at least for now, “these and these can be regarded as the words of the living God.” Despite the grey areas, we can begin to see why this is still a distinctly Orthodox theory of the revelation. First of all, it justifies the distinctively Orthodox treatment of the Pentateuchal texts—since this treatment is universally agreed to by all of the Jews most committed to living in accordance with the revelation at Sinai. Secondly, only the Orthodox community today can claim to have the adherence of a wide community, deeply committed to living in accordance with the unfolding Torah. It is important to be clear: there are—certainly—many deeply religious nonOrthodox Jews. But I think it fair to say, with Rabbi Benny Lau (1999), that one of the key distinctions between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism is that the rulings of the Conservative rabbinate are, on the whole, addressed to a halakhically apathetic laity. Deeply committed non-Orthodox Jews tend heavily towards being rabbis themselves. The Orthodox rabbinate, by contrast, addresses itself, on the whole, to a halakhically observant laity. More progressive movements—to the left of Conservativism—are unlikely even to claim deep commitment to life in accordance with Torah law—the halakhot, for them, have “the right to a vote, but not the right to [a] veto” (Kaplan, 1967, p. 28). This all indicates that the warrant of Sinai flows most forcefully today in the direction of Orthodoxy. In the previous chapter we saw how the Jewish tradition is committed to the existence of a Heavenly Torah. The Pentateuchal theories claim that our earthly Pentateuch is identical to that Heavenly Torah, or to some proper part of it. Those theories were untenable, not least because they tended to undermine the nature of the rabbinic tradition itself.

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188  The Principles of Judaism The theory I’ve been advocating for here envisages a cumulative revelation, initiated by a warrant-bestowing theophany at Sinai. We remain neutral as to how stenographic the authorship of the Pentateuch may have been, but even if it was dictated word for word by God to Moses, we still insist that its revelation to the Jewish people was the beginning of a long process aimed at bringing the Earthly Torah ever closer to its heavenly paradigm. But doesn’t Orthodoxy insist that the Torah is unchanging and perfect? Yes. But it is the Heavenly Torah that is perfect and unchanging. It is only its earthly manifestation that changes in ways restricted by the tradition itself, in the hands of its most committed guardians. Should we be worried that we’re moving ever further away from the paradigm rather than edging ever closer to it? To this worry, I have three responses. First of all, a religiosity tempered by humility is surely a good thing. In the previous chapter, section 6.3.5, we saw Rabbi Leiner’s teaching that when walking in the path of God, you should always have the humility to serve in the know­ ledge that your understanding of what God really wants from you can, at best, only ever be an approximation. The gap between the Earthly and Heavenly Torah can give rise to all sorts of questions and fears, but it can also give rise to a religiosity tempered by humility. That’s a good thing. Secondly, although the rabbinic tradition concedes that halakhic decisions sometimes go not as God would have chosen, had he been asked directly (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Metzia 59a–b), it also has room for the notion of the holy spirit (ruach hakodesh) somehow animating the process of Torah scholarship.19 As Yehuda Jerome Gellman (2016, p. 149) puts it, belief in reve­la­ tion has always been part of a broader package of beliefs: The “generic” belief that Torah is from heaven does not stand alone. It stands together with the generic belief that the continued existence of the Jewish people is from heaven. And it goes together with the generic belief that the forms of Jewish life as lived through the ages, without romanticizing it, with all their difficulties and human shortcomings, are from heaven. And it stands with the generic belief that the rabbinic and later teachings are from heaven. This compound generic belief stands as the faith conviction of a traditional Jew.

God has many means at his disposal. There may be issues of Jewish law about which he’s happy for the rabbis to decide matters in any number of ways, and other issues about which he might have such a strong preference that he’s willing to intervene in subtle miraculous ways so as to nudge Jewish discussions in a certain direction. Given enough time, and patience, God could silently underwrite 19  See, for one example, the comments of Rabbi Avraham ben David (c.1125–1198), the Ravad, to the Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Sukka Velulav 8:5.

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Ongoing Revelation  189 this process without interfering (at least not severely) with the freedom of his human partners. Finally, the belief that an omniscient God appeared at Sinai, knowing what he was initiating, plays a crucial role in reassuring the faithful that, if they strive to live within the dictates of the Torah, as it appears to them in the age in which they live, and if they do so with all due humility, then they will be doing the very best that can be expected of them even if they don’t get everything right.

7.2.  Making the Theory Plausible The aim of this book is not to argue for the truth of any particular principle of Judaism. But I do aim to cast them in a plausible light. If you accept the first of the three principles, and especially if you accept the sort of theology that has to accompany the first principle, then God’s entering into a covenantal relationship with a people will not strike you as inherently implausible. God is a person (both inside and outside of the story of this world). A person can have relationships. Of course, it will be implausible to say that a good God would enter into a relationship with a particular people at the expense of others. But the election of the Jewish people needn’t rule out God’s having special relationships with other peoples too (see chapter  5, section  5.4). Moreover, the election of the Jewish ­people was supposed to be a vehicle for bringing blessing to all of the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3). What’s distinctive about the theory of the revelation that I sketched in section 7.1 is how much of it follows merely from belief in the theophany at Sinai. Accordingly, in section  7.2.1, I want to put forward a central reason, for those already committed to the theism of Part I, for thinking it to be at least plausible that such an event occurred. In section 7.2.2, I will discuss why believing that this event occurred should lead one to Judaism—not merely to Orthodox Judaism over other denominations, as I argued in section 7.1.3, but to Judaism over other religions that also accept that Sinai occurred. The plausibility of the Jewish story is increased immeasurably if one believes that the election of the Jewish people, and their attendant obligation to observe the laws of the unfolding Torah, are somehow aimed at the betterment of the entire world. Accordingly, in section 7.2.3, I provide a sketch of a conception of Jewish law that hopes to live up to that claim.

7.2.1.  The Kuzari Principle Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi (1075–1141) wrote a series of dialogues between a gentile king and a number of philosopher-theologians; most prominently among them, a

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190  The Principles of Judaism rabbi. This masterpiece of Jewish philosophy is called The Kuzari. In his first gambit, the rabbi introduced his God to the gentile king as “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” This perplexes the king. Why not begin with a grander description, such as: the creator of the heavens and earth? The rabbi replies that he was merely following a hallowed precedent: In the same strain spoke Moses to Pharaoh, when he told him: ‘The God of the Hebrews sent me to thee,’ . . . He did not say: ‘The God of heaven and earth,’ nor ‘my Creator and thine sent me.’ In the same way, God commenced His speech to the assembled people of Israel: ‘I am the God whom you worship, who has led you out of the land of Egypt,’ but He did not say: ‘I am the Creator of the world and your Creator.’20

The Jewish relationship with God is, primarily, a personal one. Israel doesn’t know God as a theoretical posit. Rather, its people know God through His miracles and providence, and thus: I answered thee as was fitting, and is fitting for the whole of Israel who knew these things, first from personal experience [especially via the national revelation at Sinai], and afterwards through uninterrupted tradition, which is equal to the former.21

Apparently, personal experience is equal to uninterrupted tradition, as a ground for belief. This principle has been used by Jewish philosophers from Saadya Gaon (who predates The Kuzari) to Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb (of today) to generate arguments such as this: 1. Any widespread historical belief is either true, or was sold to the general public via some sort of witting or unwitting deception. 2. Belief in the revelation at Sinai is widespread among the Jewish people, as is the belief that this knowledge has been passed down faithfully from gen­er­ ation to generation since the event itself. 3. Therefore, this belief is either true, or was sold to them via some sort of deception. 4. At no point in time could a whole nation have been deceived into the content of the story in question. Nations can be deceived about their distant history, as many Britons were deceived into believing that there was a King Arthur in a court called Camelot.22 But part of the story that we’re talking about makes the outlandish claim that every generation, including the 20  Halevi (1905, I.25). 21  Ibid., my italics. 22  Thanks to Arieh Kovleh for this point.

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Ongoing Revelation  191 gen­er­ation that is now listening to the story, received the tradition from their parents. Thus the Jewish people would never have adopted the narrative in question, unless all of their parents had already told them the story. At no point would the Jewish nation have bought the lie that millions of their forebears witnessed something and that it was faithfully passed down from generation to generation, unless all or most of the parents of their gen­er­ation had already told them, and unless the nation was already a sizeable nation. 5. Therefore, the Jewish belief in the story of the revelation couldn’t have been spread by deception. 6. Therefore, the belief must be true. Unfortunately, this argument is open to various criticisms. First: we all know that traditions handed down from generation to generation are subject to corruption. Imagine a massive inter-generational game of broken telephone. By the time the message reaches the end of the line, its originator has died, and can’t confirm its accuracy. Indeed, entire societies have come to believe false things about their own histories. Responding to these concerns, R.  Gottlieb argues that despite the successful spread of many false beliefs, there is no recorded instance of a society believing that its forebears all witnessed a remarkable event, and believing that this know­ ledge had been passed down in an unbroken chain, where we also know that the event didn’t occur. Call an event a national unforgettable if it was (a) remarkable, (b) witnessed by the majority of a nation, and (c) its memory was alleged to have been passed down in an unbroken chain within the community who witnessed it.23 On Rabbi Gottlieb’s construal of the Kuzari Principle, the principle states that reports of national unforgettables are reliable. Tyron Goldschmidt (2019, p. 233), following suggestions of Jonathan Edwards (1722; 1743) and Charles Leslie (1841), builds more into the notion of a national unforgettable. Goldschmidt’s version of the principle, which he calls the Jumbled Kuzari Principle, states that: “A tradition is likely true if it is (1) accepted by a nation; describes (2) a national experience of a previous generation of that nation; which (3) would be expected to create a continuous national memory until the tradition is in place; is (4) insulting to that nation [e.g., calling them stiff-necked and listing their sins]; and (5) makes universal, difficult and severe demands on that nation.” I would add to clause (3) that the nation in question actually thinks itself to have possessed a national memory of the event without interruption.

23  I would argue that R. Gottlieb isn’t clear enough in his assertion of criterion (c), which in my presentation of his work I have sought to emphasize.

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192  The Principles of Judaism R.  Gottlieb knows that you can imagine counterexamples to the Kuzari Principle, perhaps through broken telephone like phenomena, but this doesn’t strike him as relevant at all: [T]he ability to imagine counterexamples to the Kuzari Princple is no reason to think that those counterexamples really exist. That is why the only relevant evidence against the Kuzari Principle would be documented violations. (Gottlieb, 2017, p. 174)

Goldschmidt (2019, p. 239) explains: The principle is [an] . . . empirical generalization. Like the generalization that all cats like catnip. Imagining some cats that don’t won’t help. Better: look at the actual cats. If you discover any that don’t, you might reasonably settle with something less than a perfect generalization. And if you discover enough that don’t, then you might reasonably doubt whether Tibbles will.

To disprove an empirical generalization, you need actual, real-world, empirical counterexamples. Even if you find them, you won’t have discounted the gen­er­al­ iza­tion altogether. It will no longer be a perfect generalization, but, until you have a significant number of actual, real-world, empirical counterexamples, you’ll still have a useful rule of thumb, conferring probability, if not watertight reliability, on every report of a national unforgettable.24 Moreover, there are no known violations. If, for example, an entire nation believes that their country was invaded and occupied by an enemy nation for some stretch of time, and if it believes that ever since, it has been commemorating those events in an unbroken chain, you can trust that the story is true (at least in broad outline). By parity of reason, we can trust that the story of the Sinai reve­la­ tion is true (at least in broad outline). Perhaps we can imagine a primitive set of Hebrews witnessing a remarkable natural event, which transformed, over time, into the report of a continuously remembered national theophany. But R. Gottlieb is right to point out:

24  The Kuzari Principle can fairly be described as an empirical generalization. We have a number of confirmed instances of true traditions regarding national unforgettables, and no clear coun­ter­ex­ amples. I should note, however: it would be harder to claim that the Jumbled Kuzari Principle is a well-buttressed empirical generalization since it is so specific that there’s only one obvious candidate tradition that confirms it—namely the Jewish traditions of national unforgettables. One confirmatory event is not enough to give you a safe empirical generalization, even if there are no counterexamples. Nevertheless, since the Kuzari Principle is grounded in numerous empirical observations, the Jumbled Kuzari Principle can inherit some of its force, qua empirical generalization, since the Jumbled Kuzari Principle is just a more elaborate version of the Kuzari Principle. In addition to the empirical force of the Kuzari Principle, the Jumbled Kuzari Principle can boast a certain degree of extra intuitive force. Thanks to Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini and Tyron Goldschmidt for discussing this with me.

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Ongoing Revelation  193 If the [story] of the revelation . . . arose through this process of gradually transforming a natural event, and this . . . is a natural process consistent with normal human psychology, then there ought to be parallels. There ought to be other cases where this process produced beliefs that clearly violate the Kuzari Principle—false beliefs in national events that would have created national traditions [in an un­ broken chain]. While there are certainly many examples of the gradual ­[corruption of national memories] regarding “small and not-particularlymemorable” events, if there are no such parallels regarding large-scale, national memorable events, then the believer in the gradual option is appealing to a hypothetical ­psychological process of which there are no known instances. (Gottlieb, 2017, p. 176)

Surely it would have been easier to convert Jews to Christianity, for example, had Jesus performed miracles not merely to anonymous crowds in the hundreds or thousands, but to the entire assembled nation. There are cultural pressures to tell such stories; all the more so if they can emerge gradually with no malicious intent. But, so Gottlieb argues, we never find them emerging. We never find national traditions about continuously commemorated national unforgettables, except where the unforgettable events actually occurred. Yehuda Gellman isn’t convinced. He thinks that he has a counterexample in the  form of the Mahayana tradition, recorded in the Lotus Sutra, according to which: [T]he Buddha sat before a vast audience made up of people from many geographical areas of India. There were eighty thousand enlightened ones, the king of the devas accompanied by 20,000 people, a long list of names of holy ones, each surrounded by several hundreds of thousands of attendants . . . In short, there were millions of people in attendance, including those of great religious and political importance and influence. Here are some of the things that happened there: The Buddha made flowers rain down from the sky on all those in attendance. The entire world quaked. This is so unprecedented that all were filled with joy. Then the Buddha emitted a ray of light from the tuft of white hair between his eyebrows. The light illuminated all the eighteen thousand worlds in the east, down as far as the lowest hell . . . and up as high as . . . heaven. All the sentient beings in those worlds living in the six transmigratory states became visible from this world. The Buddhas in those worlds were also seen, and the Dharma they were teaching could be heard. (Gellman, 2016, pp. 79–80)

Judaism doesn’t believe that this event occurred, even though it sounds like a national unforgettable. But two points seem decisive here. First: even according to

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194  The Principles of Judaism Mahayana tradition, the story of the Lotus Sutra wasn’t continuously com­mem­­ orated. Indeed, their tradition explicitly teaches that “the Lotus Sutra was written at the time of Buddha, [but] then hidden away for hundreds of years and brought to light only after that” (ibid., p. 79). Even though the tradition in question doesn’t claim that the story was ever lost, or that the memory was ever interrupted, the fact that the text was, according to the tradition itself, hidden away for hundreds of years creates room to doubt that the memory really was handed down without interruption. The Kuzari Principle, as I understand it (and R. Gottlieb would have done well to emphasize this point more clearly), only concerns traditions of national unforgettables that, according to the traditions themselves, were always commemorated and never lost. Those are the traditions that would be difficult to fabricate. The Mahayana tradition in question doesn’t purport to be such an account, or it creates room in its own canonical text for doubt on this front, given that it concedes that the text was hidden away for centuries, and therefore the tradition in question doesn’t straightforwardly constitute a counterexample to the Kuzari Principle. Secondly: as Goldschmidt (2019) points out, it’s not at all clear that Orthodox Jewish believers in the Kuzari Principle need to be committed to the falsehood of this particular Mahayana tradition. Jewish theology doesn’t rule out the possibility that other cultures have had profound collective religious experiences. Perhaps the Lotus Sutra is a record of such an event. The Kuzari Principle stands, and thus we still have good reason to believe that the biblical accounts of certain national unforgettables are true.25 Fine. Perhaps belief in this Mahayana tradition is consistent with Judaism. Even so, Gellman makes a strong point:26 surely Judaism doesn’t demand that we believe in this story from the Lotus Sutra. And yet, if our reason for belief in the revelation of the Torah is commitment to the Kuzari Principle, and if we do have to believe in that revelation, then we seem committed to the absurd claim that Judaism requires its adherents to believe in these miracles attributed to the Buddha, merely in order to be Orthodox Jews. I have three responses. First: we should remember that the Mahayana tradition isn’t a decisive instance of the Kuzari Principle, as I said before. Second: even if it is, it certainly doesn’t satisfy Goldschmidt’s Jumbled Kuzari Principle. Finding a known counterexample to that principle will be exceedingly difficult. Goldschmidt (2019, p. 233) writes:

25  Does this event authenticate later Mahayana traditions, as Sinai does to Jewish traditions? If it does, this might raise worries for the Jewish tradition, to the extent that the two traditions make mutually exclusive claims (although one would have to develop further arguments, and conduct further research, to discover whether and to what extent there really is such mutual exclusivity between the claims of both traditions). Moreover, our first response suffices to dispel this worry to begin with. 26  In conversation with me.

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Ongoing Revelation  195 Just imagine trying to convince the Nepalese that three hundred years ago Napoleon visited their country for fifty years, and that everything he touched turned into gold. And also that: most everyone he visited tried to molest him, and so he put a curse on them—their enemies will enslave them unless they fast once a week, and tell the story to their children every day. And that they did tell the story to their children every day. It’s not going to happen. The Nepalese would not believe this unless it happened. Now imagine . . . adding such aspects to the Jewish tradition [in addition to their national unforgettables that tell insulting stories about the “stiff-necked” Jews themselves, and which make many demands]: that e.g. God commanded them to give up work one day every week, to give up agricultural work one of every seven years, not to eat many foods, to refrain from physical contact with spouses for a period every month, that they must constantly retell the tradition and make literary and symbolic reminders of it, and that they did do this continuously, etc. What is the relevant difference between this story and the previous one? Nothing. Except that it happened. The Israelites did believe this. They would not have believed this unless it happened.

Thirdly: Gellman’s target is the classical Kuzari argument, which tries to prove that the central story of the Hebrew Bible is true, on the sole basis of the Kuzari Principle, or even on the basis of the jumbled version of the principle. But I am not endorsing any such argument. Rather, I’m saying that if you already believe that a personal God exists, then, on the basis of that belief, the Kuzari Principle (and its jumbled descendent) render the story of Sinai somewhat plausible; perhaps even compelling. Remember, the principles of Judaism needn’t be plausible in isolation to be plausible together. The second principle of Judaism, I suggest, is plausible in light of the first. If your theism is of a personal kind, quite unlike the religious doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism, then a Mahayana violation of the Kuzari Principle might be surprising, but you’d be less likely to see it as decisive evidence for the truth of the Mahayana tradition—since that tradition stands at odds with your theology. Violations of the Jumbled Kuzari Principle are even more surprising than violations of the standard Kuzari Principle. We know of no other nation in history that has adopted a false narrative that so clearly violates the Jumbled Kuzari Principle as does the Sinai narrative. It’s at least surprising that this principle could be so flagrantly violated. But if you add to this fact an antecedent commitment to the first principle of Judaism—which gives us belief in a personal God—then we have to look at the evidence in light of the existence of a being who wills things, and can will things for a people, and is capable of revealing that will to a people through an event like the Sinai revelation. If such a being existed, it wouldn’t be surprising to think that

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196  The Principles of Judaism it would reveal its will, at some point in history, to any people it sought to command (for one reason or another). Accordingly, the Kuzari argument might not strike you as plausible if you’re an atheist. Perhaps Gellman is right to dismiss the argument, for that reason—since it doesn’t have the power to bring the atheist to belief in the principles of Judaism. But if you’re not using the argument to convince yourself (and your audience) that the God of Judaism exists—if you’re already committed to that doctrine— then the argument takes on a new force. Given an antecedent commitment to a personal God, the Kuzari argument renders the narrative of the Sinai revelation plausible at worst; compelling at best. If you believe in a personal God, then you probably should believe that there was a theophany at Sinai. People will accuse Goldschmidt (and R.  Gottlieb) of naivety; of failure to attend to the subtle and sophisticated ways in which cultures and national narratives emerge. But they have—either in the Kuzari Principle, or in the Jumbled Kuzari Principle—an empirical generalization.27 Until their critics find an unambiguous counterexample to their generalization, they seem to be on solid ground, however naïve they may sound. Moreover, and once again, their argument becomes even stronger if we’re already willing to assume the existence of a personal God to begin with. Another objection to the Kuzari Principle focuses on the book of 2 Kings, chapters 22–3. It reports that an unheard of scroll was found in the temple. This story implies that everybody accepted, uncritically, that the scroll and its content were authentic. Nobody asked how there could have been an ancient, God-given, book of the Bible that nobody had told them about beforehand. This implies that people were more susceptible to deception than premise 9 in our argument allows for. First: note that the existence of a book isn’t a national unforgettable. The Kuzari Principle doesn’t deny that a forged book could be passed off as authentic. The Kuzari Principle applies to the tradition of a theophany at Sinai, manna in the desert, an escape from Egypt, and the splitting of the Red Sea. It applies to ­traditions concerning national unforgettables when those traditions claim a continuous chain of testimony and commemoration. It doesn’t apply to national ­forgettables! Moreover, according to the influential theory of Wilhelm de Wette, the book that was “discovered” in the temple was the book of Deuteronomy (see Kugel, 2007, p. 39). For reasons that will become apparent (in section 7.3.1), I  am unconvinced by this claim. But let’s imagine that’s it’s true for the sake of argument. What moved King Josiah about the book that was discovered seems to have been, on the assumption that it was the book of Deuteronomy, the stirring words

27  Though see footnote 24 above.

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Ongoing Revelation  197 of rebuke that Moses delivers in it to the Jewish people. Moses warns the Jewish people that if they sin, and follow other gods, as they were doing in the time of King Josiah, there would be great suffering and destruction. It was this information that seems to have moved King Josiah to tears, and to renting his clothes (2  Kings 22:19). When he declares, “[G]reat is the wrath of the LORD that is ­kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us” (2 Kings 22:13), he sounds like a man who’s had the fear of God driven into him by the fearful threats of Moses in the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is, generally, a summary of the other four books of the Pentateuch, with the addition of moving and compelling sermons (and a handful of new laws). The book is not the first record of any of the Jewish national unforgettables, which are all recorded in earlier books. Therefore, the “discovery” of this book is irrelevant to the Kuzari Principle, if it was the book of Deuteronomy. First, because the authorship and existence of that book, at that time, wasn’t a national unforgettable. Second, because the discovery of the book inculcated, consistent with it’s being the book of Deuteronomy, a new-found religious fervor rather than a new-found religion. One final objection to the Kuzari Principle runs as follows: the Bible and the prophets don’t try to hide the fact that at various points throughout Jewish history, idol worship was widespread. Consequently, a story about a mass revelation that was subsequently forgotten might have been easy to spread at some points in time, precisely because idol worship had taken over for generations, and thus nobody would have been surprised that their idolatrous parents hadn’t told them the story. This critique, I think, is off the mark. The biblical account of Jewish history paints a picture of a culture in which syncretism and monolatry were rife. The God of the Hebrew Bible was often regarded, by the often wayward Jews of bib­ lical times, as one of many regional gods, competing for their affections. These attitudes were the bane of the prophets’ existence. “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is god, follow him” (1 Kings 18:21), demanded a frustrated Elijah who wanted the Jewish ­people to make their mind up. But there is no notion that God had been forgotten about at any point, or that the transmission of the relevant narratives of national unforgettables had ever broken down. Bearing all of this in mind, and remembering that we’re only looking to render the Bible’s relatively minimal description of the Sinai event as plausible as pos­ sible, without trying to prove that it’s true, witness the following concession from Gellman: I note that the Torah, thousands of years ago, described an event of outstanding vividness and extraordinary meaning, that is, of a spectacular founding event to

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198  The Principles of Judaism which, reportedly, all Israelites were witness. Intuitively, this counts as evidence that something significant happened back then. (Gellman, 2016, p. 75)

But for us, that’s enough! We really do have evidence—all the more compelling if  you already accept the existence of a personal God—that there really was a remarkable collective religious experience as Sinai. The biblical account of Sinai is shrouded in all sorts of ambiguities, but it’s clear that the experience was thought, from our earliest records of it, to have been an unprecedented religious experience. These records claim that the glory of God was perceived by an entire nation with such vividness as to threaten their con­ tinued existence. They begged Moses to intercede, and saw him ascend into the cloud atop the mountain. The Kuzari Principle, especially given an antecedent commitment to theism, gives us prima facie evidence that such an event likely occurred. And, if such an event occurred, or likely occurred, then the entire theory of the revelation outlined in this chapter—a theory according to which the entire process of the unfolding of Jewish law and lore was given some sort of divine seal of approval at a national theophany—is rendered more and more plausible.

7.2.2.  Non-Jewish Continuations of Sinai If I’m offering a minimal axiomatization of contemporary Judaism, one might hope that each of the principles should be absolutely necessary for making sense of commitment to an Orthodox Jewish life. But, in actual fact, I don’t rule out the notion that other axiomatizations might be possible. If I’m not suggesting that my principles are necessary, then it’s even more important to my project that the three principles should be jointly sufficient for making sense of Judaism. But if Christianity and Islam can both accept my three principles, then they won’t be jointly sufficient for Judaism; they will merely open the door to a number of Abrahamic religions. For these principles to serve their collective purpose, they need to close the door on other religions. But Christianity and Islam accept that the Sinai reve­la­ tion occurred. Is there anything in this second principle that’s distinctively Jewish? In this section, I argue that there is. I argue that other religions would do better not to believe that Sinai was a real historical event; that it was just a myth— or, that they would do better to give it a very different interpretation. I say this because, understood as the second principle of Judaism understands it, the Sinai event closes the door on non-Jewish Abrahamic religions. I reiterate what I stated in chapter  1: no part of this book is intended as a polemic against other faiths (or against non-Orthodox movements in the Jewish

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Ongoing Revelation  199 world). At this stage of the book, I’m merely seeking to explain how the principles of Judaism rule out central claims of other, closely related, faiths. This is not to attack those faiths. Those faiths will simply have to stand upon different prin­ ciples to the principles of Judaism (and non-Orthodox streams of Judaism will require their own axioms too). One prominent argument among Christian philosophers and apologists points to the evidence they claim to have for Jesus’ miraculous resurrection.28 A prom­in­ ent argument among Muslim philosophers and apologists for the central claims of the Muslim narrative concerns the reportedly supernatural properties of the allegedly inimitable Quran.29 But once you accept the role that Sinai plays in granting warrant to an internal national process among the Jewish people over time—i.e., once you accept the second principle of Judaism—these arguments lose their sting. I shall try to demonstrate this point in what remains of this section. Richard Swinburne presents a survey of evidence to suggest that Jesus rose from the dead. The evidence is based upon testimony. There is a possibility of forgery, deceit, or the commission of honest mistakes in the transmission of testimony. Swinburne doesn’t deny these possibilities, but he thinks them remote. We have good reason, he argues, to believe in the existence of a personal God. If that’s true, then we have reason to believe that that God would at some point become incarnate among us. In so doing, God would be able “[1] to provide a means of atonement; [2] to identify with our suffering; and [3] to show us how to live and encourage us to do so” (Swinburne,  2003, p. 50). Each of these considerations, Swinburne suggests, “makes it at least an equal best act for God to become incarnate, and the second reason plausibly makes it a unique best act” (ibid.). Recognizing our fallibility, Swinburne tones his claim down from his bold assertion that becoming incarnate would be the unique best act for God, to the claim that it is at least as “probable as not that, if there is a God, he will become incarnate (in order to identify with our suffering and for at least one of the other two reasons)” (ibid.). Recognizing that God exists, and is as least as likely as not to become incarnate, means that the amount of evidence required to believe that God has become incarnate, at some point in history, is less than it otherwise would have been. Now add the following two claims: 1. If God does become incarnate in some human person, in part to show us how to live, he should give us good grounds for believing that that person is God incarnate. 2. If a human lived a life that made him or her as good a candidate as can be imagined for being God incarnate, and God wrought a miracle that led 28  See for example Craig (2000) and Swinburne (2003). 29  See, for the history of this claim, Larkin (1988) and Vasalou (2002).

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200  The Principles of Judaism people to believe that this candidate really was God incarnate, then God would be guilty of bringing about a massive deception. In light of the first point, Swinburne writes (ibid., p. 62): If God is to give us good grounds for believing that some prophet is God Incarnate, he must provide some further evidence, evidence of some kind of divine signature on that life which could not be produced by normal processes but only by God himself (or by some agent permitted to do so by God) . . . The prophet’s life needs to be signed by a super-miracle.

Given the second point, if any person could credibly have been God incarnate, and God allows that person to be raised from the dead, then that person must have truly been God incarnate. Putting all of this together, Swinburne comes to the relevant evidence, already with reason to think it as likely as not that God would have become incarnate at some point or other, and that a super-miracle attached to a human life would be an expected corollary of incarnation, and that one wouldn’t expect to see halfdecent evidence for such a super-miracle attached to an exemplary human life, if that human hadn’t been God incarnate. He even claims to have reason to assume that if God was going to become incarnate, he would likely do so in first-century Palestine. Consequently, the testimonial evidence that we do have for the claim that Jesus lived an exemplary life, in first-century Palestine, and was then resurrected, although susceptible to some degree of doubt before thinking through these prior probabilities, becomes massively compelling.30 The Christian philosophers and theologians that I most respect do not embrace Christianity on the basis of this sort of argument. Accordingly, I’m not trying to make a straw man of Christianity. Their religion is built upon different axioms and is embraced on the back of different sorts of experiences. But the second principle of Judaism shuts the door on Swinburne’s argument, and that fact is important, as it will help us to understand the ways in which the principles of Judaism really are distinctively Jewish. Of course, you might simply respond to Swinburne with the contention that it’s impossible for a perfect God to become incarnate. You might think that the purposes that incarnation serve are better served in other ways. Swinburne thinks, for example, that only the offering up of a perfect human life could bring atonement and reparation for human sin, and that “The only human life not owed to God would be a human life led by God himself, God Incarnate that is; for God can owe nothing to God” (ibid., p. 41). But, in chapter 8 (sections 8.2.6–7) of this 30  Indeed, in an appendix to his book, Swinburne (2003) runs through the Bayesian calculations to show just how close to certainty he thinks we should be that Jesus was God.

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Ongoing Revelation  201 book, we will see a wholly different conception of how human atonement might be possible. Once you doubt that God would become incarnate, and die for our sins; or once you doubt that this would be the best strategy for bringing about atonement, then you alter the equation, and neutralize much of the power of the putative evidence that Jesus was resurrected. With these altered priors, you might be more prone to believe that the resurrection was a hoax,31 perhaps even a well-intentioned hoax;32 or that the “testimony” arose through a process of wishful thinking, or collective delusion, or through some other natural process, witting or unwitting, innocent or malign. A second route simply maintains that Jesus performing miracles, however impressive, would be of no help in establishing his claim to be God incarnate, or even the Messiah. Why? Maimonides claims that we shouldn’t believe what a person says just because that person can do miracles (Mishne Torah, Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 8:1). The halakha does recognize the significance of miracles. It bestows the defeasible legal status of “prophet” upon a person who performs a sign or a wonder (Maimonides, Mishne Torah, ibid., 7:7). But this is a legal function given to a miracle; it doesn’t mean that that miracle, in and of itself, is evidence that the miracle-worker is speaking the truth. Indeed: if the person goes on to say something demonstrably false, then we know that they’re not a prophet after all, whatever magic tricks they were able to pull off. That’s why the status of “prophet” bestowed in virtue of a miracle, is defeasible. It can be rescinded. Indeed, Moses explicitly prophesised that there would be false prophets sent to test our faith, and that those false prophets would be able to perform signs and wonders (Deuteronomy 13:3-4). Moses tells us that any prophet who teaches us to contravene the laws of Moses, for instance by worshipping other gods, is to be considered a false prophet. But why should we believe Moses? Surely not because of the miracles that he wrought! No, we believe in Moses not because of anything that he said or did, but because of Sinai. As Maimonides puts it (Mishne Torah, Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 8:2): What is the source of our faith in [Moses]? The standing at Mount Sinai. Our eyes saw, and not a stranger’s. Our ears heard, and not another’s. The fire, the thunder, the lightning. [Moses] entered the thick clouds; the Voice spoke to him and we heard [it say], “Moses, Moses, go tell them the following . . . ”

R.  Albo (1929) argues that the whole intention of the Sinai experience was to demonstrate to the Jewish people that Moses was a prophet in the most direct 31  At the time of Jesus” death, it was, apparently, widely believed that the resurrection was a hoax. The book of Matthew (chapter 28), for example, goes to great lengths to address this wide-spread belief. 32  See the controversial Bahrdt (1784-92).

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202  The Principles of Judaism way, by allowing the entire nation to hear God talking to him.33 Consequently, the Jewish people had “a direct proof that Moses was a divine messenger through whom a perpetual law was to be given” (ibid., 1:18:9). That law recognizes the role of prophets. It bestows a defeasible prophetic status upon miracle workers. Nevertheless, their entire authority, as prophets, stems not from the fact that they can do miracles, but from the Torah, whose authority comes from the experience had by the entire nation at Sinai. Unlike Maimonides, Albo doesn’t deny that new laws may be revealed at some future time, but if those laws contradict the laws of Moses, then they don’t get their authority from Sinai. They could only receive any authority over the Jewish people if they were accompanied by a national theophany of their own; a second Sinai-like event (ibid., 3:19). A miracle, short of that, is proof of nothing. Jesus claims to have come to embody the law of Moses, rather than to abrogate it (Matthew 5:17–18). But his church quickly came to disregard the binding authority of Jewish law, even for Jewish followers of Jesus (Galatians 3). It didn’t play the rabbinic “game” of trying to interpret into seeming oblivion certain passages of the Pentateuch. Rather, it teaches that, since the coming of Jesus, large segments of the law of Moses no longer apply; perhaps because Jesus fulfilled them so fully. Moreover, when Jesus claimed that he was the “the way and the truth and the life,” and that no one can access the Father except through him (John 14:6), he really might have been claiming some sort of divinity for h ­ imself— subtly leading us away from our unadulterated relationship with God, as Moses had warned. But if you accept our theory of the revelation, then there are serious problems regarding any tradition as binding or truthful, if that tradition seeks to undermine the theology, or override the legal traditions that came tumbling out of Sinai, without the occurrence of a second Sinai-like event. A resurrection, a feeding of five thousand, and a walking on water, are not a second Sinai—they are not a national theophany. If Jesus asks us to change our relationship to the law in such a fundamental way, without a second Sinai, then he is like the false prophet ­spoken of in Deuteronomy 13, irrespective of miracles he may have wrought. Given our theory of the revelation, your prior probabilities should be calibrated differently to Swinburne’s. Reading Deuteronomy should lead you to expect that prophets will come and go, some of them potentially with amazing powers to do the supernatural. But, if those prophets, or the traditions that flow from them, seek to override the Torah of Moses in the day-to-day life of the Jewish people, you’ll know that those prophets and those traditions are false. Evidence for the resurrection doesn’t change this equation. Swinburne (2003, p. 62) writes that: 33 The promise appears in Exodus 19:9. The explicit fulfillment of this promise comes at Deuteronomy 5:27.

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Ongoing Revelation  203 [A]lthough the Israelite religion may have been founded on a miracle (such as the crossing of the Red Sea), the detailed historical evidence for it is simply not in the same league as the evidence of the Resurrection—whatever particular value one gives to the strength of the latter evidence.

I disagree. The existence of continuous traditions of national unforgettables constitutes evidence for their truth. The mass revelation and nationally witnessed miracles of the Jewish narrative are unparalleled in human history. The theist will likely see the continuous tradition of the Sinai narrative as evidence that the story was based in fact. The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, on the other hand, is only powerful—even for the theist—to the extent that you’ve gerrymandered your prior probabilities, and even then, evidence for the resurrection doesn’t entail that the resurrected was a true prophet of God, and given the claims made for Jesus, no miracle could establish this, by the lights of the principles of Judaism, short of a second Sinai-like event. At the time of Jesus’ life, and shortly after it, there were a number of devout Jewish followers of Jesus hoping that his claim to being the Messiah would be universally accepted by their co-religionists. At that time, people of good faith would have had grounds to hope that the Sinai theophany would give warrant to their claims, merely in virtue of the Jewish people coming, collectively, to accept them, and so enfolding their belief in Jesus’ messianic status into the woof and warp of the unfolding national religious literature of the Jewish people. But that didn’t happen. The Jewish people as a nation rejected Jesus’s messianic claim. Sinai was a national experience. It wasn’t an international experience. It is said to have occurred between the Exodus and the coming into the land of Israel. It was, among other things, a foundational event in the life of a particular nation. Accordingly, the warrant it gives to traditions can be thought to be internal to the Jewish national life. Given the role that Sinai plays in bestowing divine warrant upon an unfolding national tradition, it became clear, over time, that this warrant did not flow to the central claims of the church. The Jewish nation rejected Christianity. In fact, with hindsight, and from the perspective of Judaism, it became almost perverse to claim that Jesus was their Messiah—the long-awaited savior of the Jewish people—since his life and works ushered in a two millennia-long series of unmitigated disasters for the people he had reputedly come to save.34

34  I don’t mean to insinuate that there’s anything perverse about Christianity. It is never my intention to besmirch the faith commitments of others; especially of people I respect and admire. My assertion here is made relative to specifically Jewish expectations of what the Messiah should be. Again: Christianity can certainly make sense, but it will need to be founded on different principles to the principles of Judaism.

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204  The Principles of Judaism Similar considerations apply to Islamic arguments. Reputed miracles in the life of Mohammed, or the reputedly miraculous spread of Islam, or the reputedly miraculous character of the text of the Quran,35 could be utilized as premises in arguments for the truth of Islam. Any such argument can be responded to in analo­gous ways to our response to Swinburne. A first route would take issue with the evidence. The second route is more interesting. It would say that even if the evidence were compelling, and we came to believe that something miraculous occurred in the production of the Quran, and the spread of Islam, we should still rather see it as a test sent from God than as a reason to give up upon a single line of the Torah, short that is of a second Sinai-like event. And thus we see that it is the second principle of Judaism that shuts the door on these other Abrahamic faiths. The Jewish religion does make room for the possibility, and even the probability, that God makes himself known to multiple communities in multiple ways.36 He may well forge covenants with other peoples alongside his covenant with the Jews.37 But if a tradition claims to override the authority of Jewish law in the life of the Jewish people, then it will require a second Sinai-like event. Without such an event, believers in Judaism will have no reason to jettison their commitment to the continuously unfolding national Jewish religious literature—otherwise known as the Earthly Torah. Short of such an event, they have every reason to commit themselves to living within the laws of the Torah as it is currently understood by, at least some segment of, contemporary Orthodox Judaism. We’ve seen that the Kuzari Principle, though not a watertight proof of anything, renders the claim that the Sinai theophany occurred plausible, in light of the theism of Part I. We’ve also seen that once you have reason to believe that the Sinai theophany occurred, then the entire theory of the revelation put forward in section 7.1 of this chapter is rendered plausible in its wake, at the expense of nonOrthodox denominations (a claim we saw in section 7.1.3), and at the expense of non-Jewish religions (the claim of section 7.2.2), to the extent that those religions conflict with the basic Jewish narrative. If you’re certain that God exists, then the notion that that God might orchestrate a revelation at some point in time won’t strike you as odd. In fact, it might strike you as much less surprising than a flagrant violation of the Jumbled Kuzari Principle. In this way, you could come to think (on the assumption that God exists) that the revelation at Sinai very likely occurred. But in order truly to render the doctrine of the revelation plausible, one still needs to believe that Jewish law, and its observance, could somehow be a good thing for the Jew and for the world. Otherwise, how can you see it as divine? If 35  See the references in footnote 29 above, regarding the nature of the Quran. 36  See Brill (2010). 37  Verses in the Bible, such as Deuteronomy 10:15 (and many others), which seem to indicate that the election was exclusive will have to be read as Rabbi Jacobowitz would surely read them, such that the exclusive election is indexed to a specific task/role (see chapter 5, section 5.4).

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Ongoing Revelation  205 Jewish law is immoral, then surely a violation of the Kuzari Principle, and even the Jumbled Kuzari Principle, is more likely than this law having being given by a perfectly good God. I turn to that issue next.

7.2.3.  A Hirschian Account of Jewish Law Jewish laws can seem unethical. We will respond to that issue in section  7.3.3. Part of the response has to recognize that, on the model of the revelation that I propose, Jewish law itself is always a work in progress. Nevertheless, if one cannot sense an overriding value in the evolving system of Jewish law, as and when we find it, then the doctrine of the revelation loses a large degree of plausibility. Why think that God would want the Jews to keep their laws? In this section, I sketch Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s account of Jewish law, to showcase one way in which Jewish law could be viewed as a good for the Jews and a good for the world.38 Rabbi Hirsch (1808–88) believed that the Jewish ­people exist, as a people, primarily as a vehicle for God to educate the world towards a certain type of ethical monotheism—not merely by how they live, since they often don’t live up to their mission, but also through the story that emerges through their history. God, in the book of Genesis, is not primarily interested in commanding any particularly detailed set of laws to anybody. It’s as if he’s much more interested in seeing where human creativity and diversity will lead when left to its own devices, than he is interested in promoting rote obedience to any set of his own laws. This God merely intercedes from time to time, and sets some very straightforward parameters (parameters which the rabbis cull from the text. They call these parameters the Seven Noahide Laws.39 They are the very general legal principles that, according to the rabbis, God commands everybody to obey). When basic norms of justice break down, the God of Genesis can be very angry, and he sometimes enacts fierce punishment. But he doesn’t issue particularly detailed laws to anybody. Sometimes, the first a people hear of this God is when he punishes them for doing evil. Clearly, he’s not punishing them for breaking the terms of a legal system that he revealed to them beforehand. There was no such revelation. Rather, this God will punish evil, and promote justice, but he also wants people to work things out for themselves. He’s not a legislator. Take the story of Babel. It presents the entire human population as uniting around a common vision and language, and yet God sees fit to disperse the

38  This summary seeks to encompass views that he presents in his commentary to the Pentateuch (Hirsch, 2009), and in his key philosophical and legal writings (Hirsch, 1995; 2002), but its focus is the tenth letter of his Nineteen Letters (Hirsch, 1995), as well as a long excerpt from the ninth letter. 39  See Novak (2011).

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206  The Principles of Judaism population and to encourage the proliferation of languages. In other words: God seems interested in promoting the full spectrum of possibilities inherent in the simple light of humanity. Perhaps this is the meaning of the rainbow, which appears slightly before the story of Babel; a simple white light can refract into glorious technicolor. This God is not interested in human conformity. He’s interested in what Rabbi Sacks would call the dignity of difference. He’s interested in human self-discovery, within some very general parameters. This is not a God that we might expect to legislate a litany of demanding laws from on high. And yet, left to their own devices, humanity too often sinks to despicable depths of depravity. Accordingly, the Jewish narrative seems to make the following claim: a God who doesn’t demand conformity, and who is interested in human diversity, nevertheless found it wise to choose one small people, and to provide for them a very specific set of laws for them to guard and observe. The point wasn’t to promote conversion to this new religion. That wouldn’t be in the interest of a God who cherishes self-discovery and human diversity. The point was to establish one nation to serve a particular role. Its role would be to inspire the world, and to teach them, through their history, if not through their actions, the ideals of an ethical monotheism; an ethical monotheism that doesn’t demand religious or le­gis­la­tive conformity, so long as it sits within certain very general parameters. Rabbi Hirsch writes about the wonder of Jewish history, and how it communicates a timeless message to the world, even when the Jews themselves failed to live up fully to their mission; sometimes through fault of their own, and sometimes because of the crippling weight of anti-Semitic oppression. Indeed, the very survival of a Jewish national identity is, he thinks, a wonder to behold. He writes (Hirsch, 1995, pp. 127–8): A thousand times, fanatic fervor—defended in the name of violent delusions— opened before [Israel] the door to full earthly happiness if only, with one single word, it would deny the One Alone and express disloyalty to the Torah. But it always flung away this easy key—and instead bowed its neck to the executioner’s blow. It scorned the lure of wealth and pleasure, and, indeed, sacrificed its own scanty measure of happiness, the most precious treasures of life on earth—wives, children, parents, brothers and sisters, as well as the individual Jews’ own life and possessions, and all earthy joys. On every page of history, [Israel] has inscribed with its lifeblood that it venerates and loves only One God and that there are human values more sublime than possessions and the gratification of one’s desires. Its affirmation of loyalty to God and the Torah has been sealed with more than its blood: the entire history of its [exile] constitutes one gigantic altar on which it sacrificed everything that men desire and love—for the sake of acknowledging God and His Laws. This altar has smoked in every part of the world and among

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Ongoing Revelation  207 all nations. Is it conceivable that these nations learnt nothing from all this? Could they fail to recognize that the higher power preserving [Israel] throughout its experiences is the One Alone, and the loyalty to Him demonstrated by [Israel] is the task of all humanity?

But, in times of oppression, despite the tremendous message taught to the world by Jewish collective survival, the Jew can’t flourish individually. Moreover, the full power of a life lived in accordance with Jewish law is muted. Accordingly, when the Jew has full freedom to flourish, and when she doesn’t fall short of the demands of Jewish law, Rabbi Hirsch thinks that something wondrous occurs. Jewish law, when followed in the correct spirit, is, according to his view, entirely calibrated towards creating inspiring ambassadors of ethical monotheism. Accordingly, he finds that all of the commandments and rituals of Judaism fit into one of the following six categories: (1)   Torot: This category includes commandments to hold certain attitudes towards God; to love him; and to fear him; together with belief in various ideas about mankind (e.g., that we’re all created in the image of God) and the Jewish people (e.g., that they have a responsibility to be a light unto the nations). As we shall see in chapter  9, section  9.4.1, Rabbi Hirsch didn’t relate to these sorts of commandments as mere dogmas to be assented to, but as principles of living to be absorbed by the heart rather than the brain alone. He thought it insufficient to believe in the Jewish narrative; instead, the Jew is invited to look at the world with new eyes from its perspective; through the prism of its symbols and narratives; to live constantly in the world that Judaism introduces to her. Accordingly, the Torot are valuable, in large part, because of the effect that they can have over behavior. Looking at the world in a certain way, through a certain narrative, can have a profound effect over your moral fiber. What does it do to you, for example, to view yourself constantly as an ambassador of God? Of course, it could lead to a certain degree of arrogance, or paternalism, but if this attitude is ac­com­pan­ied with the humility that comes along with the recognition that Jewish law and Jewish narrative can never amount to more than an approximation of God’s in­estim­able will, then one can hope that the Torot will transform a person for the better. (2)  Mishpatim: The laws of this category help to promote justice between human beings. (3)  Chukim: This category was often understood, by other commentators, to include only the laws that human reason cannot fathom; such as the pro­hib­ition on wearing clothes that mix wool and linen. Rabbi Hirsch, by contrast, thought that these laws were about the promotion of justice towards non-human beings, based on the principle that all things that exist play some role in God’s service; i.e., justice towards the earth, and plants and animals, as well as towards your

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208  The Principles of Judaism inanimate property, and your own body. R.  Hirsch’s idea is that sometimes we understand the demands of justice for non-humans, such as animal welfare, and sometimes we don’t, because we don’t understand the divine purpose of certain things, such as wool and linen, for example. For that, we rely on revelation. This conception of the Chukim feeds into the fact that, for Rabbi Hirsch, the truly lawabiding Jew has to be actively concerned for our ecology. (4)  Mitzvot: The Mishpatim are the demands of justice; demands that you can rightfully claim from others, and that others can rightfully claim from you. The Mitzvot, by contrast, are the demands of love—nobody can rightfully claim these from others; but God calls upon us to be more than just just. We are called upon to be loving. The Jew doesn’t really live up to these precepts until he or she becomes a bastion of love, charity, and social activism; loving the stranger, and standing up for the oppressed. To love others is to help them to fulfill their potential whenever you are able, and for no ulterior purpose. (5)  Edot: These are precepts that, by word or ritualistic action, serve for the individual, and for the Jewish people, and sometimes for the world beyond, as re­minders of all the truths that we are supposed to embody. In this vein, R. Hirsch understood many Jewish rituals as attempts to wake the Jews out of their slumber and to resensitize them to their mission. (6)  Avodah: These laws concern worship. They are designed to purify and sanctify the inner life of the Jew—in order to help her accomplish her mission in the world—by refining her thinking through word and symbolic ritual. Having placed all Jewish laws within one of these categories, Rabbi Hirsch argues that the whole system of Jewish law is founded upon three basic ­concepts—justice, love, and education towards justice and love (Hirsch, 1995, letter 10). By “justice” he means: consideration for every being as a creation of God, for all p ­ ossessions as having a purpose before God, and for the natural order as being ordained by God; and, therefore, compliance with the claims that they make upon us. By “love” he means: acceptance of all beings as children of God; promotion of their welfare, and acceptance of the responsibility to help them to better fulfill their God-given mission. By “education” he refers to the rituals that give expression to Jewish philosophy, such that if, through life’s struggles, one loses sight of one’s values, one can strive to reinstill them in one’s heart. It is easy to look at Jewish law as a stale and rigid set of prescriptions. Viewed in that light, it becomes difficult to believe that any God would care that one small nation abide by them. My purpose, in this section, was to sketch the possibility of viewing the system of Jewish law, in the context of biblical and rabbinic teaching, as something infused with value, for a people charged with a specific mission: to be ambassadors of ethical monotheism. To imagine observant Jews really living up to the demands of Jewish law, as Rabbi Hirsch construes it, is to imagine something truly wonderful: a real light unto the nations.

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Ongoing Revelation  209

7.3.  The External Problems In this section, I try to demonstrate that the doctrine of the revelation that has emerged thus far is well equipped to cope with the problems that seem to arise for it from beyond the contours of the Jewish tradition.

7.3.1.  Higher Criticism The first set of worries emerge from biblical studies. Over the years, since Wellhausen, the Documentary hypothesis and the Neo-Documentary hypothesis have commanded center stage within the academic study of the Bible. Careful philology, attention to minute details, and systematic comparison between bib­ lical texts and contemporary near eastern literature, have helped scholars to “identify” a number of different strata within the biblical texts, and to date and locate various different authors, and conflicting traditions, lying beneath the superficial unity of the Pentateuch, not to mention the rest of the Bible. James Kugel (2007, p. 667) reports how disquieting these findings have been for Orthodox sensibilities: Modern scholars’ explanations have proven very persuasive—and that is just the problem, since, in approaching the text in the way they have, they seemed to have stripped the Bible of much of its special status. How is the Hebrew Bible any different now from the altogether human creations of ancient Near Eastern literature? . . . [M]odern scholarship . . . [has reduced] Scripture to the level of any ordinary, human composition . . .

Or as Benjamin Sommer (2015, p. 18) puts it, more succinctly: “The Bible as illuminated by historical scholarship shrank into a motley accumulation of his­tor­ic­ al­ly dependent, culturally relative textual scraps.” I respond to these concerns in two ways. First, I point to the fact that contemporary biblical scholarship is built upon certain assumptions that theists simply reject. James Kugel (2007, pp. 31–2) summarizes five foundational assumptions of contemporary biblical scholarship; assumptions which are owed to Spinoza (1632–67): 1. Scripture is to be understood on its own terms, rather than through the interpretative lenses of any particular church or religious tradition. 2. We have to make efforts to understand the language of the Bible and its own world of ideas, without imposing later conceptions upon it. 3. Consequently, we should assume that scripture means just what scripture says, even when its plain meaning contradicts contemporary values, mores, and conceptions, unless internal textual considerations force upon us a figurative interpretation. 4. To understand

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210  The Principles of Judaism the meaning of scripture, we first of all have to investigate how the books were put together. We have to construct biographies for the authors, based upon know­ ledge of their writings and their historical context, and understand their words in light of these biographies. 5. In considering the words of the prophets, one must recognize that they frequently contradict one another. Hermeneutics of reconciliation are to be eschewed in favor of recognizing the multiple conflicting voices beneath the surface. We should only accept these assumptions if one assumes, from the outset, that scripture is a thoroughly human text, put together by natural historical processes. Methodological naturalism is the doctrine that scientists, while conducting their scientific investigations, should eschew supernatural explanations. The doctrine is adopted even by many theistic scientists, who have good reason to keep God out of the laboratory, so to speak. Methodological naturalism is often well motivated,40 but if the question under discussion is whether or not supernatural causes exist, or whether they can be involved in the authorship of a text, then methodological naturalism seems to be clearly inappropriate; indeed, in­tel­lec­tual­ly dishonest. Compare: meticulous scholarship has led some theorists to suggest that “William Shakespeare” was merely a pseudonym for Sir Henry Neville.41 The man from Stratford, traditionally credited with authorship of some of the greatest plays and poems in the English language, they claim, was not their author at all. Detailed study of Neville’s biography renders his life a compelling fit for having authored the works attributed to Shakespeare. More compelling are Neville’s own handwritten notes, found in the books of his extensive library. They match what would be expected to be found in research for Shakespeare’s plays. Notwith­ standing this evidence, and this meticulous scholarship, the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars remain resolutely unconvinced. A key proponent of the Neville theory, John Casson, told the Guardian news­ paper (Flood, 2018): “There are no letters from William of Stratford. His parents were illiterate, his daughters were illiterate: how do you become the greatest writer ever when your family are illiterate?” Indeed, the entire Neville theory is rendered compelling only because of an underlying prejudice that the son of illiterate parents couldn’t have authored such majestic works. Accordingly, noted Shakespeare expert Brian Vickers put the theory down to “snobbery, and ignorance”: They are unaware that the Elizabethan grammar school was an intense crash course in reading and writing Latin verse, prose, and plays—the bigger schools often acted plays by Terence in the original . . . As for ‘experience of life’, there are a few blank years between his leaving Stratford and starting as an actor in the early 1590s where he might have travelled. In any case, London was full of 40  Although I will subject it to scrutiny in section 7.4 of this chapter. 41  See, for example, James & Rubinstein (2009) and Casson & Rubinstein (2016).

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Ongoing Revelation  211 books, he read widely, and he evidently had a receptive memory. Having acted in plays written in blank verse, lyrics and prose, he knew the conventions of drama from the inside. Above all, he had a great imagination, and didn’t need to have been to Venice to write The Merchant of Venice, or Othello. What’s most dispiriting about these anti-Stratfordians is their denial of Shakespeare’s creative imagination. (ibid.)

If you resolutely assume from the outset that x is false (or that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Othello), then you’re almost bound to find “compelling evidence” that x is false (or that Shakespeare didn’t write Othello). Kugel (2007, p. 35) is right to note that “the minute one began to read Scripture with the same assumptions one brought to the reading of humanly authored books, the argument was lost.” But that assumption wasn’t fair-handed, if the question under investigation is precisely the claim that this book is the product of a one-off human–divine encounter. Having repeatedly labeled it intellectually dishonest to disregard the “findings” of biblical criticism, Benjamin Sommer (2015, p. 262) makes an important admission: When I say that denying biblical scholarship is dishonest, I am speaking of modern Jews who, on an intellectual level, acquiesce to the validity of the main findings of biblical criticism but who, through a technique of compartmentalization or self-deception, pretend for religious purposes that they do not regard these findings as valid. I am not, however, referring to Jews who genuinely find the conceptions of scripture of Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages con­vin­cing . . . Given the assumptions those interpreters made in good faith about the nature of biblical language . . . it was possible to explain away each individual textual oddity that centuries later led to the development of Pentateuchal source criticism. People who make these assumptions honestly find that biblical criticism poses little threat. For those of us who do not fully share those assumptions, however, honesty requires that we confront the challenge of biblical criticism.

If you assume that God wasn’t the principal author of the Penateuch, then certain textual anomalies are bound to take on a different light. But if you’re open to a personal theism, and to the idea that God was intimately involved in the authorship of the Bible, then the same data will take on a different appearance. All that fundamentally separates modern scholarship from traditional Orthodox attitudes to the Bible is a different set of assumptions (and prejudices). Kugel (2007, p. 136) makes this point explicitly: What truly separates these two groups of interpreters is the set of unwritten instructions that guide them in reading the biblical text. Accept the one’s, and

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212  The Principles of Judaism the other’s interpretations appear irrelevant at best, at worst a willful and foolish hiding from the obvious. It is thanks to this crucial difference in assumptions that these two groups can read exactly the same words and perceive two quite different messages.

And so, biblical criticism shouldn’t pose a threat to us if we accept that a personal God exists, and that a theophany occurred at Sinai. Alvin Plantinga (2015, p. 105) provides an analogy: [W]e can imagine a renegade group of whimsical physicists proposing to reconstruct physics by refusing to use any beliefs that comes from memory, say, or perhaps memory of anything more than one minute ago. Perhaps something could be done along these lines, but it would be a poor, paltry, truncated, trifling thing. And now suppose that, say, Newton’s laws or special relativity turned out to be dubious and unconfirmed from this point of view: that would presumably give little pause to more traditional physicists. This truncated physics could hardly call in to question physics of the fuller variety.

My first response to the challenge of higher criticism is to recognize that its findings can only be compelling if one is willing to make assumptions that completely beg the question against traditional religion to begin with. The second response notes that Orthodox Judaism is not committed ideo­logic­ al­ly to a stenographic model of the authorship of the Pentateuch. The theory of the revelation we’ve advanced justifies the way that Orthodoxy treats the Pentateuch not because of how it was authored—we don’t know exactly how it was authored—but because of the role that Sinai plays, in conversation with the evolving Jewish tradition, in revealing that God has appropriated any added word or letter of the Pentateuch, if there are such words and letters. I refer readers back, therefore, to our discussion of Duchamp, and the power of appropriation, in the previous chapter, section 6.3.5.

7.3.2.  The Challenge of History A second, and related, challenge to traditional Judaism comes from archeological and historical investigation of the biblical period. Gellman establishes the contours of the problem, in the following terms: In the form traditional Judaism has taken for ages, its devotees have been expected to believe that the Torah is a historically accurate account of events that took place in ancient times. In the more strictly traditional circles, this includes that God created the world in six days, less than 6,000 years ago, that

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Ongoing Revelation  213 Adam and Eve were the first humans, and that multiple languages came to be as a result of the tower of Babel. Although some Orthodox Jews openly will hesitate to accept those accounts as historical, generally, they are expected to take as his­ tor­ic­al­ly true that Abraham went to Canaan at God’s command; that Jacob had twelve sons, who became the twelve tribes; that Joseph was sold unto Egypt and became second to the Pharaoh; that the children of Jacob came to Egypt, were enslaved, and stayed there for a few hundred years, becoming a mighty nation of 2 to 3 million people; and that God liberated them by bringing ten plagues upon the Egyptians. They are expected to believe that the Israelites then wandered the desert for forty years, ate miraculous food, that God gave them the Ten Commandments and the Torah in the desert through Moses, and that the p ­ eople subsequently stormed and defeated Canaan and settled in the Land of Israel.

Apparently, this history—even if we bracket the cosmogony, and biology, and focus only on Israel’s national history—doesn’t stand up to archeological scrutiny. Regarding the claim that millions of Israelites swept into the promised land, Kugel (2007, p. 382) reports: [M]ost archaeologists [note] that during the whole period when Israel might conceivably have emerged . . . there is in fact no evidence of any sizable influx of people into the region, save for that of the coast-dwelling Philistines . . . [Conseq uently,] most modern scholars reject the Bible’s . . . picture of a great exchange of populations—more than a million Israelites entering Canaan and displacing the native population.

Gellman (2016, ch. 1) is concerned that repeated excavations of the Sinai desert have failed to turn up any evidence of the massive Israelite encampments that the Bible records, during the forty years of wandering there. There are two responses that could be made to this family of concerns. One is less concessive than the other. The first points out that lack of evidence for certain events isn’t proof that they didn’t happen. For example, the encampment in the wilderness is reported to have been so miraculous that you might not expect any remains to have been left. Their clothes were miraculously preserved on their bodies and they were fed by manna from heaven (Deuteronomy 8:2–4). This first response notes, also, that some historians and archeologists, albeit a minority of them, are more amenable to the general contours of the biblical narrative of the Israelites than are others (see, for example, Hoffmeier (1999; 2011) and Kitchen (2006)). But Gellman doesn’t argue that lack of evidence is proof that something didn’t happen. Gellman rather argues that where there’s a strong expectation of evidence, then—and only then—does a conspicuous lack of evidence suggest that something didn’t happen. You might not expect to find clothes and waste from a

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214  The Principles of Judaism miraculous nomadic experience, but many people reportedly died during those forty years. You would expect to find bones. You would also expect to find animal bones from all of those sacrifices and from the meat that they purchased, and reared, along the way. And yet what we call the Sinai desert is 60,000 km2 of forbidding terrain. The Israelites often stayed for long periods of time in just one place. Place names in the narrative are ambiguous, making it hard to retrace their steps. Archeological surveys may have been extensive, but surely, we’re talking about needles in a haystack. Moreover, we also have no reason to think that what we call the Sinai desert is the same expanse of land as that which the Bible calls the Sinai desert. When are we to assume that the failure to find traces of the Israelites, in such a massive, difficult, and ambiguously located terrain, constitutes proof that the story didn’t happen? How many stones have been left unturned? How many need to be turned in order to render the story unlikely to a person already assuming that God exists and that the revelation at Sinai likely occurred? Our second response is more concessive, but perhaps more interesting. Ultimately, our second response is what Gellman proposes himself, but I would argue that it’s less radical than he takes it to be. Gellman establishes the problem by assuming that traditional Judaism has, for a long time, expected its adherents “to believe that the Torah is a historically accurate account of events that took place in ancient times.” Adhering to the sort of cumulative picture of the reve­la­tion that I also advocate, Gellman’s claim is that contemporary archeological research is helping to usher in a new phase of the revelation’s unfolding, in which we come to realize, more fully, that the Torah, though true and divine, is simply not a history book. It is something else. Fundamentally, I agree with him that the Torah is not a history book. But I would claim that this is not a radical or new finding. Jewish literature and Jewish narratives long predate the birth of history as a literary genre. Ancient Jewish audiences would have been acquainted with other genres, such as myth, folklore, legend, and the like, but not, it would seem, with history. Moreover, even if they were acquainted with the genres that I’ve listed, they were still living before the rise of literary theory, and thus were unlikely to be all that self-consciously aware of the difference between the different genres with which they were familiar. Of course, if you asked ancient Jews whether the stuff described in the Bible happened, they’d have said yes. But that doesn’t mean that biblical literature was ever intended as history, nor read as history. Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, an example I pick at random, is an influential work of history, and is regarded so by our culture. But note: we haven’t designed any rituals to re-enact its main scenes. We may want to read it, criticize it, and agree or disagree with it, but we don’t try to relive it. That’s not the sort of attitude we adopt towards a work of history, but it is the sort of attitude we adopt towards the Bible. In fact, a history becomes a myth precisely when a culture starts to embed its narrative into their rituals and symbols. In

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Ongoing Revelation  215 coming to recognize that the Bible is not a work of history, we are not radically revising old conceptions. We are simply coming to a self-conscious understanding of something that was always the case. E. D. Hirsch (1978, p. 31) reports that when he first started teaching the Bible as literature, he did so because it contains poems and stories. He later came to realize that the Bible is literature for a more profound reason; because “Reading the Bible brings the whole soul of man into activity.” If a person relates to a narrative as all religious people relate to their canonical narratives—as sources of eternal wisdom, as a tapestry of symbols, and as a collection of narratives that call to be re-enacted and brought to life by a language of ritual—then they simply aren’t relating to that narrative under the literary cat­ egory of “history.” And thus, non-historical interpretations of religious narratives are wrongly labeled new-fangled, or revolutionary. In fact, taking scripture to be attempts at history is what really generates anachronism. Faced with a narrative or a story putatively about the distant past, an ancient audience would have been unlikely to evaluate it in terms of its historical a­ c­cur­acy. History is a much later science. Rather, ancient audiences were more likely to assess stories about the ancient past in terms of their potency, symbolism, drama, and message. Faced with a story about the genesis of humanity, for example, there were no conceivable tools for verifying the story, and thus historical accuracy simply wouldn’t have been an available measure of evaluation. Archeologists have discovered that in the community of the Dead Sea scrolls there were two different versions of Jeremiah in circulation. This didn’t seem to bother anybody (Kugel, 2007, p. 596). This is consistent with their not requiring historical accuracy from works about the distant past. As we’ve argued (chapter  2, section  2.1.3), to say that a book isn’t a work of history is not to say that it isn’t divine, or that it doesn’t convey deep truths. Perhaps the Bible is a divinely authored myth. To ask it to conform to the findings of archeology is to misconstrue the sort of book that it is. As we become more self-conscious and more knowledgeable, our religiosity will have to become more self-conscious and sophisticated. We have to know what it might mean for God to invite us to view the world through the prism of certain stories without, at the same time, taking those stories to be accurate histories. But if the Bible isn’t to be trusted as a history, and if ancient people had no his­ tor­ic­al awareness, doesn’t that undermine the Kuzari argument, and our belief in the historicity of the Sinai revelation? I don’t think so. Ancient audiences may have been uninterested in historical accuracy, in general, but faced with a story about them, in their own times, we can be more confident that a story wouldn’t be widely received unless it was verifiable, or at least, if it didn’t make wildly in­ac­cur­ ate claims that could easily be repudiated. Consequently, nobody would have accepted that the entire nation witnessed a theophany and continuously passed down its memory in an unbroken chain, unless that story was true.

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216  The Principles of Judaism But if the archeological evidence is to be trusted as history, over the Bible, and if that evidence suggests that there wasn’t a mass exodus, then why think that there was a mass revelation in the desert, in the aftermath of that exodus? The story of the Sinai revelation is a story about the people of the Exodus. If there was no Exodus then why think that there was a revelation? Kugel suggests the following scenario (2007, p. 232): It may be that the story was originally much more localized and involved far fewer people—perhaps only a small band of escapees from Egyptian servitude. Scholars have long noted that the exodus theme is especially prominent in northern (non-Judahite) texts. For that reason, some have supposed that the whole exodus tradition was originally found only among some of the northern tribes, most likely the Rachel tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. After David succeeded in uniting the twelve tribes under one flag, this formerly local bit of history would have become part of the common heritage of all tribes. Certainly such a turn of events would not be unparalleled. After all, Americans of my generation were taught in school about “our Pilgrim fathers” who came over on the Mayflower or “our founding fathers,” the signers of the Declaration of Independence and drafters of the Constitution—whereas the overwhelming majority of Americans could hardly be said to be descended from this idealized ancestor group.

The Kuzari Principle surely allows that a national unforgettable can happen to one nation, and that new additions to that nation can come to adopt the story as their own, just as converts today will tell their children that “we were slaves in Egypt.” If the tradition itself claims to be unbroken since the time of its initiation, the argument of section 7.2.1 still gives us reason to think it grounded in fact. As long as we have reason to think that there was a theophany at Sinai, even if it happened only to one or two tribes—who were, at that time, an entire nation— that later merged with others, you still have reason to think that the nationalreligious traditions that tumbled out of that moment received a divine stamp of approval. Now, to summarize my responses to Gellman and his concerns regarding archeology. My two responses are these: (1) we don’t have overwhelming reason to think that the national narratives of the Bible are inaccurate. When scholars note the northern characteristics of the Exodus texts, for example, they are engaging in a mode of biblical scholarship—one that isolates northern authors—that stands upon assumptions that theists needn’t adopt (and indeed, Gellman himself is suspicious of contemporary biblical scholarship). Moreover, when you’re dealing with the miraculous stories of the Exodus and the wilderness years, there are good reasons to assume that there wouldn’t be too much empirical evidence left

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Ongoing Revelation  217 over—Egyptians wouldn’t have been keen to record their own downfall, and the miraculous sustenance of the wilderness encampments wouldn’t have left behind regular archeological remains, nor do we really know exactly where to look. (2) The Bible was never intended to be a natural history. We have reason to think that it is divine, so long as we have reason to think that the theophany at Sinai occurred. We can have such reason, without transforming the Bible into a history book against its will. I think that both responses are right. We’ve already discussed, in chapter 5, section 5.4, the ways in which mystical readings of the Torah go beyond the putatively historical narrative, in order to uncover what was going on, so to speak, in the mind of God. Moreover, we don’t just read the Bible to find out what’s unfolding, so to speak, in the mind of God. We also recognize that, as creatures in the image of God, we too have processes unfolding within us that are essentially expressed by God’s book. Indeed, Gellman (2016, p. 185), points out how: In the Hasidic literature . . . We all have an Adam and Eve inside of us, defying God and then exiled. We are all Abraham, called to leave our natural state and to go to a faraway place where we will be blessed. We all have a Moses and a Pharaoh within us, confronting one another time and again, until the time of personal redemption from the narrow confines of self-absorption. We each have within us the capacity to stand at Sinai and receive the Torah anew.

The Torah was never history. It was always much more than that.

7.3.3.  The Challenge from Ethics Contemporary ethics generates a final worry for a traditional account of the reve­ la­tion. The Bible endorses attitudes and actions that strike us, today, as unethical. This provides us with reason for doubting that it’s true, and thus that it comes from God. Benjamin Sommer (2015, p. 28) evinces this attitude: It is the presence of texts such as these [viz., ethically troubling texts], more than the existence of the contradictions noticed by source critics, that precludes me from believing in the traditional Jewish and Christian view of the Bible’s revelatory origin. Moral issues rather than historical-philological ones pose the most disturbing challenge to the Bible’s status as scripture. I am not alone in this respect. To many a modern Jew, the Tanakh is a hallowed book but also an embarrassing one. However much we revere it, we are aware of its human side.

The paradigm theory of the previous chapter, which we have enfolded into our theory of the revelation, is well placed to respond to these concerns.

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218  The Principles of Judaism The Pentateuch’s position as the unchanging written constitution of the Jewish people has been firmly cemented into the practice of the community of the faithful. Consequently, its position as a written constitution has been approved by the God who appeared at Sinai. But the meaning of its words is radically undetermined. It is up to the tradition to unpack them in light of its own evolution, guided by ruach hakodesh (the holy spirit), towards the Heavenly Torah that lies forever over the horizon. At any given time, the committed Jew is faced with the task of finding a re­flect­ ive equilibrium between the demands of Jewish law as it is in their day and age, and their own ethical intuitions. From amidst the tension between (1) the evolving ethical sensibilities of the community of the faithful, (2) what rabbinic in­genu­ity can discover in the latent possibilities of the tradition as it finds it, in order to accommodate those evolving sensibilities, and (3) what social development and history throw into the mix, that Torah emerges. The equilibrium pulls in multiple directions. Sometimes, a religious person has to have the humility to say, “My ­ethic­al intuitions tell me x, but my tradition tells me y. Perhaps my in­tu­itions on this matter are simply incorrect.” But sometimes the ethical intuitions will inform new readings of old texts, and help the tradition to find innovative ways forward. On this model, many factors play a role in bringing the Torah closer to its heavenly paradigm. Social and political movements, other religions, and more directly, non-Orthodox denominations within the Jewish world, all play a role in awakening certain sensitivities and attitudes within the Orthodox community. Liberal segments of that community agitate for change within the halakha. Conservative elements within the same community resist any change. The legal traditions themselves create obstacles to some changes, whilst being more amen­ able to other changes. The changes and evolutions that make it through this process can claim to be an echo of Sinai. In the words of Tamar Ross (2004, p. 210): The cumulative understanding of revelation allows us to view the phenomenon of feminism itself—even if it appears to stem from sources outside of Judaism— as a gift from God. In this sense, assimilating feminism into Judaism is no different than the imbibing of Aristotelianism by Maimonidean rationalism or the absorption of certain ideas from Gnosticism and the Neoplatonic tradition by the Kabbalah, among other examples.

The written Torah prescribes the death penalty; Judaism evolved beyond it, the rabbis putting so many checks and balances upon its use that it became inoperative. The written Torah apparently commands a literal eye for an eye. The rabbis move us beyond that reading. The Torah contains the law of the captive woman, but the rabbis tell us that this was merely an accommodation with the base side of  humanity, at an earlier stage of our ethical development. Rabbi Nahum Rabinowitz has elegantly shown how a similar thing can be said about the Torah’s

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Ongoing Revelation  219 accommodation with slavery (Rabinowitz, 2003). We believe and hope that the Earthly Torah is moving closer to heaven, but we don’t delete the stages that came before. As Tamar Ross (2004, p. 208) puts it: [I]f the evolution of events and ideas is to be viewed as a cumulative mani­fest­ ation of God’s divine providence, then the very fact that the Jewish community of believers accepted the canonized foundational Torah when they did is an expression of God’s will. So too may the subsequent interpretations of that foundational Judaism, the ideas and social norms that the community of committed Jews accept or reject, be viewed as an expression of that will. It is only natural that I, as a cumulativist, attach religious importance not only to the circumstances precipitating interpretations of the primary revelation of Sinai, but also to the fact that it was the Sinaitic revelation that came first and that was accorded foundational value.

Or, in the words of Gellman (2016, p. 152): The holiness of the particulars of the Torah and the rabbinic literature results not from a stenographic theology but from their having been, diverse as they are, included in and contributive of the process of Providence, respectively, without which Providence, in varying degrees of imposition, the Torah and rabbinic literature would not have the general kinds of contents, the forms, and moods they have. That is why nobody should erase anything from the Torah or rabbinic literature about which they have become tepid on moral grounds. We are to preserve a place for it in the Torah, and, when the time has come, read narratives with a new meaning. We are to actively maneuver around a law, if it comes to that, so as to neutralize its applicability and its being a precedent for behavior today. No story or law is to disappear. Even if God did not plan a particular item per se, it is there in the Torah because it took up its place in what was a broad, high-level providential process stretching over time. As such, it is holy.

Sommer cannot bring himself to believe in a God who sanctions genocide. But our theory of the revelation makes no such claim about God. Rather, it claims that God was willing to be viewed as endorsing genocide in ancient times, as he sought to guide a barbaric world towards the light. To allow yourself to be viewed in such a way is pretty horrifying, but no more horrifying than the human situ­ ation to which God was addressing himself. We can of course ask, and should worry, about those caught in the gap between the Earthly Torah as it is today and the Heavenly Torah as it should be. What

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220  The Principles of Judaism about the slaves that Judaism tolerated being bought and sold? What about the victims of brutal conquests? What about the people who today feel excluded by Jewish law because of their various, deeply held identities? These questions, I submit, are part of the problem of evil. Why does God put us into an imperfect world, why does he allow us to face the challenges that we face, and why does he choose a model in which the Torah unfolds in partnership with free human beings, with all of their shortcomings? The problem of evil, and the seemingly unacceptable price God pays for human freedom, we will address in chapter 8.

7.4.  Conclusion and a Methodology for Jewish Philosophy Our theory of the revelation stands up well in the face of external problems. But the theory wasn’t composed with the apologetic motivation of standing up to its contemporary critics. Rather, it emerged in response to the internal problems that it had to circumnavigate within the Jewish tradition itself. The theory states: At an event at Sinai, God gave an endorsement to a religious tradition that would evolve among the nation of Israel. That tradition would come to view the Pentateuch as a sacred written constitution, never to be amended (at least not without a second Sinai-like event). His endorsement demands that, today, we should relate to the Pentateuch as if it were dictated word for word by God to man (which, perhaps it really was). Whether or not this is an historically ac­cur­ate account of the genesis of the Pentateuch (which, perhaps it really is), God foresaw that the religious tradition stemming from Sinai would (at least) evolve to endorse this attitude as central to its very identity. Accordingly, even if God didn’t write the Pentateuch word for word (which he may well have done), it is as if God has now appropriated the text of the Pentateuch as his own, by his very appearance at Sinai. The Pentateuchal text is only one part of the Torah. That which is fixed is the words; not their interpretation. God also endorsed, at Sinai, the process of evolving traditions and interpretations that the faithful of Israel would develop over time, including their relationship with other books of the Bible. There may be wrong turns from time to time, but guided by ruach hakosdesh (the holy spirit of God), the general trajectory is such that the unfolding content of the revelation, through the religiously observant communities of the Jewish people, brings the content of the Earthly Torah ever closer to the content of the Heavenly Torah.

Judaism is a religion that legislates all sorts of actions in its halakhic texts. But it is  not a conciliar religion like Christianity.42 We never had councils making 42  The Mishna’s only attempt at a catechism (Sanhedrin 10:1) reveals that it isn’t explicitly concerned with what people think but only with what they say and do. The Mishna rules that you’re an

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Ongoing Revelation  221 pronouncements on fine-grained issues of philosophy and theology. Accordingly, halakhic codes impose much more uniformity of action upon the observant than they impose uniformity of thought. Nevertheless, armed with our conception of the revelation—a conception according to which God plays a role in overseeing the unfolding of the Torah—a method for conducting Jewish philosophy suggests itself. Jewish philosophy, given our theory of the revelation, should seek to draw as much as it can from every movement of the faithful, within the Jewish tradition, from the medieval rationalists, to the ancient mystics, and the Hassidim, reconciling all of these different strata, as far as is possible, into a cohesive whole. Indeed, I suggested from the outset of this book that I’d be looking to articulate principles of Judaism that carve a path of best fit among all of these different and often conflicting schools of thought. This way of proceeding is inspired by the thought that, through an ongoing process, to which all of the varied schools of Jewish thought contribute, something heavenly is unfolding—such is the claim that emerges from the second principle. There have been some, in the study of Jewish intellectual history, who have sought to draw a hard and fast distinction between Jewish rationalism and Jewish mysticism. For some, Jewish philosophy has to embrace only the rationalistic traditions, and Jewish mysticism shouldn’t enter into the project of Jewish phil­oso­phy. What the second principle suggests to the Jewish philosopher is that she shouldn’t be taken in by such a distinction. Again: since God speaks to us through the apostate if you verbally deny the doctrine of the resurrection, or the divinity of the Oral Torah. These were the rallying cries of the Sadducees. The Talmudic gloss on this Mishna defines “the Apikoros” (or heretic) as a person who disrespects the rabbis. Kellner concludes (2006b): it doesn’t matter what you think, just don’t say that the Oral Torah isn’t from heaven, or that the dead won’t rise. If you go about saying such things, then you’ll be adding to sectarian strife, or undermining the rabbis. I don’t go as far as Kellner. He seems to want to give doctrine almost no role to play in Jewish life. This book, by contrast, is a quest to uncover the doctrinal heart of the religion. Nevertheless, I agree with Kellner that Judaism isn’t a conciliar religion. Many of the texts that appear to be attempts at ­catechism—such as the Mishna in tractate Sanhedrin—can be read as Kellner would instruct us to read them. Any doctrines that we do have will be broad and open to multiple interpretations. The Sanhedrin, the closest the Jews have had to a council, tended to rule on issues of practical halakha and not on the nature of the godhead. Our councils were not too interested in metaphysics. I largely agree, therefore, with the concise comparison between Christian and rabbinic theology to be found in Brody (2013, p. 40): Classical rabbinic Judaism is grounded in a comprehensive system of halakhah that determines behavioural norms in every aspect of life and sets community boundaries accordingly (as opposed to Christianity, with its emphasis on correct belief) . . . The literature of the Sages does not expound dogma or attempt to deal in a systematic way with broader questions of belief and outlook. On rare occasions, a particular opinion is denounced, but holding such an opinion carries no penalty in this world . . . A few basic prin­ciples of faith, such as the belief in a God who revealed himself to the children of Israel and charged them to keep the Torah’s commandments, were presumably shared by all the [sages] . . . but they were little inclined on the whole to theological and philosophical speculation. Any system of practice has to be based upon some principles, but Judaism isn’t generally in the business of legislating belief. When it does, it does so sparingly, and with appeal only to broad and general principles.

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222  The Principles of Judaism unfolding of Jewish intellectual history, the Jewish philosopher should seek to enfold all of the various threads of Jewish thought, where possible, into a cohesive whole. Moreover, and in fact, the very idea that a hard and fast distinction can be drawn between Jewish mysticism and Jewish rationalism fails to stand up to scrutiny. It was Gershom Scholem who first made the study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism respectable by applying the tools of philology and history to the field. But he didn’t make the content and the doctrines of the Kabbalah respectable. A quip sometimes attributed to him, and sometimes attributed to Saul Liberman, is that mysticism is nonsense, but the history of mysticism is wisenschaft (i.e., a respectable science). Even after Scholem made the study respectable in academic circles, the doctrines of Jewish mysticism retained their status as nonsense. It was Scholem’s study of the nonsense that was scientific. Scholem didn’t only include the texts and traditions that called themselves “Kabbalistic” in his study. Nevertheless, as David Blumenthal notes, Scholem was selective as to the texts he did include (Blumenthal, 2009, p. vi): [Scholem] studied carefully, among other subjects, the literature of the Heikhalot, of the Sefer Yetsira, and of the Zohar; the works of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, of Abraham Abulafia, and of Isaac Luria; and two mystical groups, the Sabbatean movement and Hasidism. However, although he acknowledged the influence of Maimonides on Abraham Abulafia, Scholem never devoted a full study to . . . Mai­moni­des . . . Following Scholem, two generations of scholars of Jewish mysticism did not include Maimonides in their studies . . .

Blumenthal contrasts this with the fact that “for 150 years, scholars of Jewish ­phil­oso­phy have seen Maimonides as the philosopher par excellence” (ibid.). So, whatever mysticism is, Maimonides is out. And, whatever Jewish philosophy is, the literature that Scholem studied is out. In his introduction to his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides seems to claim that he was the recipient of enlightening experiences that defied the power of language to convey. He could be read as presenting the aim of his Guide in terms of inculcating such experiences, with the prophetic state of constant enlightenment as the ultimate aim. He was also, as we saw in chapter  1, resolutely apophatic. These experiences could be read as mystical experiences, and thus the book could be conceived, without doing violence to the text, as a sort of rationalistic mysticism. Why then was his work excluded, for so many years, from the study of Jewish mysticism? It doesn’t seem an exaggeration to claim that, in the first half-century of academic studies of Jewish mysticism, the works worthy of being called “rationalistic” were the works with which philosophers could fruitfully engage, and the works deemed “mystical” were the works that were thought to hold no philosophical promise.

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Ongoing Revelation  223 Just as one can fruitfully engage philosophically with Plato and Bertrand Russell, one can fruitfully engage with Maimonides, but not with the Zohar. This makes the Zohar a mystical text and the works of Maimonides rational. And this makes Maimonides a rationalist even though there’s very good reason to think that he was interested in mystical experience. But if the possibility of fruitful philosophical engagement is really the nub of the distinction, then it will collapse upon inspection. So far in this book, we’ve engaged philosophically with all sorts of texts that we traditionally label mystical, from the Zohar to the Tanya. It’s clear that there are texts in the Jewish tradition that read like philosophical prose, and texts that don’t. But that detail of literary form isn’t sufficient to establish an opposition between the rational and the mystical, especially not if fruitful philosophical engagement is the real benchmark. Dostoevsky rewards philosophical engagement, despite not writing philosophical prose; as do the aphorisms of Nietzsche, the novels of Iris Murdoch, and the dialogues of Plato. One is minded of the teaching of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi (Babylonian Talmud, tractate Yevamot 11b): “a person should not pour the water from his well when others are in need of it.” Philosophers might yet find a use for the water that Scholem dismissed as nonsense.43 Another way in which Jewish scholars have sought to draw the mystical– rational distinction has to do with ontological parsimony, and an opposition to the supernatural. Once again, on this view, Maimonides is thought to be central to the distinction. Moshe Idel claims that the tradition that came to be known as Kabbalah came into existence partly as a response to the challenge posed by Maimonides, whilst Maimonides’ philosophy was, in turn, said to have come about partly as a response to certain proto-Kabbalistic tendencies in the Judaism of his day (Idel, 1986; 1988, p. 253). To define Jewish mysticism is, on this account, to define what it was that Maimonides was reacting to, and what it was that crystalized in op­pos­ ition to him. According to Menachem Kellner (2006a), Maimonides’ opposition to the proto-Kabbalah of his day was partly a consequence of his nominalism, according to which abstract properties don’t exist outside of the mind. On this view, abstract properties merely correspond to concepts that the mind uses to organize the elem­ents of the mind-external world. Kellner quotes the Guide for the Perplexed (iii.18) to demonstrate that this really was Maimonides’ view. Maimonides writes: I say that it is known that no species exists outside the mind, but that the species and the other universals are, as you know, mental notions and that every existent outside the mind is an individual or group of individuals. 43  Thanks to Hagay Forschner for this reference.

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224  The Principles of Judaism Accordingly, Maimonides—the nominalist—was in search of a streamlined ontology. In his code of Jewish Law, the Mishne Torah, Maimonides divides his ontology into three categories of entities: (1) those composed of matter and form and subject to generation and corruption; (2) those composed of matter and form and not subject to generation and corruption; and (3) those composed of form only. Kellner notes: This tripartite division leaves no room for the multifarious denizens of the universe so beloved of ancient Jewish mysticism: angels and demons, forces, p ­ owers, occult properties (segulot), all those aspects of the cosmos which we today would lump together under the rubric ‘supernatural’. For Maimonides there is God and nature and nothing else. (Kellner, 2006a, p. 12)

Maimonides is cast as the champion of naturalism against the supernaturalism of the mystical tradition: Among the [notions] which Maimonides seeks to de-hypostasize are the properties of holiness, the Hebrew language, the Land of Israel, the people of Israel, the divine glory (kavod), the divine presence (shekhinah), angels, and sin. Consistent with this approach, he seeks to present distinctions fundamental to Judaism, such as holy/profane, ritually pure/ritually impure, permissible/impermissible, and, especially, Jew/non-Jew as institutional, sociological, and his­­toric­al issues, and not as ontological matters. (ibid., pp. 2–3)

According to Kellner’s Maimonides, this streamlined ontology, which includes only the world of nature in addition to a transcendent God, was the key contribution of Judaism, a religion which “depopulated the heavens.” Maimonides was therefore “committed to battling efforts to repopulate them” (ibid., p. 12). A more populous heaven, by way of the Christian Trinity, or Jewish mystical supernaturalism, was what Maimonides was standing to oppose. To the extent that the proto-Kabbalah of his day had introduced complexity into the godhead, and posited supernatural entities, Maimonides was hoping to use philosophy in order to “purify a corrupted and paganized Torah” (ibid., p. 3). When the Kabbalah posits ten hypostasized divine attributes, flowing out from the godhead, the rationalists were the ones to point out the undermining similarity to Christianity. Ontological profligacy is to be shunned, because it reduces Judaism to a crypto-Christianity, or to paganism.44 44  Remember the words of the Rashbash in chapter 5, section 5.2, above—he compared the doctrine of sefirot with the doctrine of the Trinity.

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Ongoing Revelation  225 Sefer Yetzira—a mystical text with which Maimonides was familiar— “contributed the theory that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet entered the process of creation not only as creative forces but as the elements of its material structure” (Idel, 1992, p. 47). By contrast, Maimonides relegated the Hebrew language, denying that it had any intrinsic sort of holiness or magical power. Isadore Twersky claimed that this was characteristic of Maimonides’ consistent op­pos­ ition to hypostasized entities with intrinsic sanctity (Twersky, 1980, p. 324 n.). According to Kellner, “Maimonides’ approach to the nature of Hebrew is but a reflection of his deeper adherence to the scientific culture of his day, and of his rejection of the occult” (Kellner, 2006a, p. 21). His attack on the use of charms and amulets, allegedly p ­ owered by the letters of the name of God, further drives home his hostility to the occult (see Maimonides, 2000, 1:61–2 and 3:37; Hilchot Avodat Kochavim, ch. 11). According to Kellner, the second element of Maimonides’ opposition to protoKabbalah was his insistence on God’s transcendence. This insistence comes along with an attendant risk: [T]he more God is understood as transcendent, the greater the need and impulse to posit quasi-divine intermediaries to bridge the gap between God and ourselves. However, such intermediaries turn monotheism into monolatry. There is ample evidence that much of the Judaism which Maimonides knew had succumbed to this dangerous impulse. (Kellner, 2006a, p. 14)

The picture that emerges from this analysis is that Jewish mysticism, in contradistinction to Maimonidean rationalism, is predicated upon (1) supernaturalism, and (2) a commitment either to (2a) divine immanentism or to (2b) divine transcendence that comes along with celestial intermediaries. Jewish rationalism, by contrast, amounts to the combination of naturalism and a commitment to an intermediaryfree divine transcendence (Maimonides does allow for ­intermediary-like entities himself, such as the separate intellects, but only because these posits seem to have been necessitated by the natural sciences of his day). I have no doubt that Maimonides did indeed subscribe to nominalism and divine transcendence, and that he had a tendency to eschew the supernatural. But I have a number of reasons to think that these are not sufficient resources with which to draw a meaningful, and useful, binary opposition between Jewish mysticism and rationalism. First of all, we should distinguish between belief in magic, amulets, and charms— on the one hand—and belief in supernatural entities—on the other. How exactly to define “magic” is subject to scholarly debate (see Harari, 2002), but it’s clear that it has something to do with human agents being able to controvert the natural order at will, or to manipulate the heavenly powers using code words, rituals, and recipes.

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226  The Principles of Judaism Time and time again, empirical studies reveal that the powers of magicians are fabricated and/or hollow, and open to reverse-engineering (Page, 2010). It would be irrational to believe in their claims in the face of such powerful counterevidence. When magical remedies are found to be effective, they are also found to have natural explanations, and so turn out not to be magical at all (just as willow bark was used in ancient magical remedies, and is now the basis of aspirin). Belief in supernatural entities, however, doesn’t entail the belief that human beings have the power to manipulate them, or to subvert the natural order. You can have supernatural entities in your ontology without believing in magic. Only a nominalist about abstract objects, and indeed, only a very close-minded nominalist at that, would think that realism about abstract objects was somehow inherently irrational. Willard Van Orman Quine shared Maimonides’ desire for a streamlined ontology, calling it a “taste for desert landscapes” (Quine, 1980a, p. 4). But he was, in the final analysis, unable to make sense of the truth of math­em­at­ics without positing the existence of numbers, as abstract entities (Quine, 1976; 1980a;  1980b; 1981a; 1981b). Did this attempt to make sense of mathematics make him irrational? He may have been wrong. Perhaps the nominalist can make sense of mathematics after all. But Quine wasn’t being irrational. He also wasn’t a mystic! Accordingly, nominalism shouldn’t play any role in establishing a binary op­pos­ ition between mysticism and rationalism. Kellner (2006a) also claims that ontological commitment to supernatural en­tities is a watermark of Jewish mysticism. Jewish rationalism, by contrast, is defined in part by its commitment to the existence only of natural entities, and God. But the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is far from simple to draw, and this threatens to collapse any distinction drawn in its wake. Natural entities—you might think—are the ones that science posits; supernat­ ural entities, by contrast, are the ones for which science has no use. But it certainly can’t be that simple. The number and variety of entities that science posits changes as science develops. Imagine that electrons, little particles with negative charge, running around at dizzying speed, were posited for no good reason years before they were posited for good reason. Surely, they would have been dubbed “supernatural.” But then, given a role to play in the sciences, as they have today, they are eminently natural. Tim Crane pushes a similar point against physicalism. Physicalism is sometimes defined as the view that the only entities that exist are the ones that physics discusses, or that the only entities that exist must at least depend somehow upon the ones that physics discusses. But, as Crane points out, “no one believes that physics proper is now finished: physics may discover many new entities and laws in order to adequately account for reality” (Crane, 1994, p. 480).45 45  See also Crane & Mellor (1990).

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Ongoing Revelation  227 Consequently, the physicalist isn’t (yet) in a position to distinguish the physical from the non-physical. Similarly, the naturalist tells us that the only entities that exist are the ones that the natural sciences discuss, or that the only entities that exist must at least depend somehow upon the ones that the natural sciences discuss. But absent a complete natural science, the naturalist is in no position to  distinguish the nat­ural from the supernatural, and so the distinction is of ­little use. In order to explain how we happen to live in a very unlikely sort of universe, in which the constants of physics seem to be finely tuned for the possibility of life, some physicists posit the existence of a vast multitude of other universes, with different constants. On the assumption that all these universes exist, it becomes less unlikely that some of them, like ours, should be hospitable to life. Appealing to God and to design, rather than to a multitude of natural universes, in order to explain fine tuning, would be considered unscientific by many (Koperski, 2015, p. 211). A multitude of universes are natural entities, whereas God is supernatural. But why categorize things this way? Of course, God is thought to be supernatural in that he is supposed to transcend nature, or to ground it. But if his existence can explain some empirical data, then what—other than prejudice—makes him the wrong sort of entity for science to posit? What—other than prejudice—really grounds the natural/supernatural distinction? Methodological naturalism is a weaker claim than naturalism. It doesn’t deny the existence of the supernatural; rather, it claims that science should act as if God and other supernatural entities don’t exist. Some theists claim that, despite the truth of theism, and despite the fact that we don’t have a clear handle on the difference between the natural and the supernatural, methodological naturalism is still a wise tactic for science to adopt (Clark, 2014, pp. 42–4). One reason for thinking this to be true is an appreciation of how theistic and supernatural ex­plan­ ations have a long history of being science-stopping. You needn’t investigate what thunder and lightning is, and why it happens when it happens, if you simply put it all down to warring Gods throwing bolts of fire around in the heavens. If you take supernatural posits out of the picture, science is forced to provide better explanations. However, Jeffrey Koperski (2015, p. 212) argues that you don’t need to adopt a methodological naturalism in order to avoid science-stopping explanations: Many historical confrontations between naturalistic and [theistic] hypotheses were settled by appeal to simplicity in the form of Ockham’s razor. To cite one (overly used) example, when Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his Mécanique Céleste, the emperor wished to know why it did not contain any reference to God. Laplace replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis”.

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228  The Principles of Judaism Bad science can be avoided if we demand that our theories be subject to Koperski’s shaping principles: fruitfulness, testability, and concreteness (ibid., p. 213). Failing to live up to those ideals is why polytheistic accounts of thunder failed to be good science. The failure needn’t be cashed out in terms of a forbidden category of entity: the dreaded supernatural. And this is all for the good, because, as science expands, so does its ontological imagination. Leibniz accused Newton of introducing, by the name of “gravity,” an occult and supernatural force that allows objects to act on one another from a distance (Leibniz et al., 1956, p. 92). Who today would call Newton’s force of gravity supernatural (even if we no longer ­happen to endorse Newton’s physics)? What one generation of scientists think of as newfangled and unnatural, the next may well think of as mundane and perfectly natural. If we seek to draw the mystical–rational distinction on the natural–supernatural distinction, I fear that we’ll be drawing our distinction upon shifting sands. This will remain the case until our natural sciences are complete. Using Maimonides to erect a cast-iron distinction between Jewish mysticism and rationalism fails for all of the reasons we’ve canvassed above. Furthermore, it only serves to obscure certain universal mystical tropes to be found in the Jewish texts that get labeled “rational”—such as Maimonides’ claim to ineffable experience of a transcendent other. It also prematurely precludes philosophical engagement with the writings of those authors who get labeled “mystical.” Though it turns out to be ill-defined, the natural–supernatural distinction might serve as a useful heuristic in intellectual history. Maimonides really was reacting to certain trends that he thought to be pagan and deleterious. The Kabbalistic tradition really did emerge (partly) in response to challenges posed by  Maimonides. If that story is easier to tell with reference to certain heuristic devices, then so be it. Thankfully, Jewish studies is developing a more nuanced attitude towards these issues as it continues to evolve beyond the contributions of Scholem. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Jewish intellectual history provides a useful basis for a deep philosophical distinction between the rational and the mystical. It doesn’t. Moreover, and this is my central point here, Jewish philosophers committed to the second principle of Judaism are bound to see every historical stratum of Jewish thought and literature that was ever clung to by communities of the faithful as part of an unfolding revelation. The job of the Jewish philosopher is to subject these traditions to philosophical scrutiny and seek to emerge with the most philosophically attractive way of finding a best fit between them. That’s why, in this book, the rationalist Gersonides rubs shoulders with the mystical Rabbi Vital; the Germanic Rabbi Hirsch rubs shoulders with the Hassidic Izhbitza; the Talmud, Midrash, and the Torah rub shoulders with generations of commentators; and Descartes, Berkeley, Quine, and David Lewis rub shoulders with the Besht.

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Ongoing Revelation  229 Our second principle suggests some sort of philosophical methodology to the Jewish philosopher. She should seek to relate to the entire gamut of the Jewish tradition as it relates to itself: an ongoing revelation that began at Sinai, and that continues to unfold towards the Heavenly Torah, with the help of our critical and philosophical faculties, as they are informed by external and internal bodies of literature. This is the methodology at work in this book, as I seek to uncover a workable axiomatization for the Jewish faith.

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PART III

R E DE MPTION Remember us with a good memory before you

‫זָ כְ ֵ ֽרנּו ְּבזִ ּכָ רֹון טֹוב לְ ָפנֶ ֽיָך‬

Decree upon us a decree of salvation and mercy from the ancient lofty heavens

‫ָּופ ְק ֵ ֽדנּו ִּב ְפ ֻק ַּדת יְ ׁשּועָ ה וְ ַר ֲח ִמים ִמ ְּׁש ֵמי ְׁש ֵמי‬ ‫ֶ ֽק ֶדם‬

And remember for us, O Lord our God, the covenant, the lovingkindness and the oath

‫ֹלהינּו ֶאת ַה ְּב ִרית וְ ֶאת‬ ֽ ֵ ‫ּוזְ כָ ר ָלֽנּו יְ הֹוָ ה ֱא‬ ‫ת־ה ְּׁשבּועָ ה‬ ַ ‫ַה ֶ ֽח ֶסד וְ ֶא‬

Which you swore to Abraham our father on Mount Moriah . . .

‫ֲא ֶׁשר נִ ְׁש ַ ּֽבעְ ָּת לְ ַא ְב ָר ָהם ָא ִ ֽבינּו ְּב ַהר‬ …‫ּמֹורּיָ ה‬ ִ ‫ַה‬

Our God, and God of our ancestors

‫בֹותינּו‬ ֽ ֵ ‫אֹלהי ֲא‬ ֵ ֵ‫ֹלהינּו ו‬ ֽ ֵ ‫ֱא‬

Sound the great Shofar of our freedom

‫רּותנּו‬ ֽ ֵ ‫ׁשֹופר ּגָ דֹול לְ ֵח‬ ָ ‫ְּת ַקע ְּב‬

And raise a banner to gather our exiles, and bring close those of us who are scattered among the nations

‫זּורינּו ִמ ֵּבין‬ ֽ ֵ ‫ּיֹותינּו וְ ָק ֵרב ְּפ‬ ֽ ֵ ֻ‫וְ ָׂשא נֵ ס לְ ַק ֵּבץ ּגָ ל‬ ‫ַהּגֹויִ ם‬

And gather our dispersed from the ends of the earth

‫פּוצֹותינּו ּכַ ּנֵ ס ִמּיַ ְרּכְ ֵתי ָ ֽא ֶרץ‬ ֵֽ ְ‫ּונ‬

And bring us to Zion, your city, in joyous song

‫יאנּו לְ צִ ּיֹון ִע ְירָך ְּב ִרּנָ ה‬ ֽ ֵ ‫וַ ֲה ִב‬

And to Jerusalem, your Temple, in eternal gladness.

‫ירּוׁש ַל ִֽם ֵּבית ִמ ְק ָּד ְׁשָך ְּב ִׂש ְמ ַחת עֹולָ ם‬ ָ ִ‫וְ ל‬ Liturgy for Rosh Hashana

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8

Redeeming the Past In section 8.1 of this chapter, I lay out some of the conditions that Jewish scripture and tradition lay down for what would constitute the coming of the Messiah. Messianism is only one element of the third principle of Judaism, which states that the creator exercises providential care over his creation. This care is manifest, not merely in the promise of an ultimate eschatological redemption, but in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, and in the provision of reward and punishment for human action. The plausibility of this third principle is radically threatened, therefore, by the problem of evil. The promises of messianism and an afterlife are helpful, but to witness the flourishing of the wicked on earth, alongside the suffering of the innocent and the righteous, can only serve to undermine one’s faith in the existence of a just and watchful eye. Judaism needs a theodicy. In section 8.2, I develop a philosophy of time. That philosophy gives rise to a new theodicy and a new account of atonement. It also provides an explanation of various Jewish rituals, and adds an entirely new dimension to Jewish eschatology. Given this account of time, which I developed in conjunction with Tyron Goldschmidt (Lebens & Goldschmidt, 2017), it turns out that it is rational to hope, not merely for salvation in the future, but also for the salvation, and wholesale renovation, of the past. This metaphysics of time will help us to demonstrate that the present existence of evil needn’t undermine one’s faith in God’s providence, or in his promise of salvation.

8.1.  An Ancient Future The non-Jewish prophet Balaam was charged with cursing the Jewish people. On three separate occasions he opened his mouth, ostensibly to curse them, but God puts words of blessing on his lips instead. Rabbinic tradition considers Balaam’s blessings to contain some of the earliest prophecies of the coming of a messianic king. One of the blessings reads as follows (Numbers 24:17): I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not soon; there shall step forth a star out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite through the corners of Moab, and break down all the sons of Seth.

The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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234  The Principles of Judaism Bringing together a number of older traditions, Maimonides (Hilhkot Melachim 11:1) reads these verses as referring, prophetically, to two future people: “I see him, but not now” was taken to refer to King David; “I behold him, but not soon” was taken to refer to somebody else—a king and redeemer who stood further off in history than David. The star of Jacob refers to David, whilst the scepter refers to the Messiah. This prophecy was underwritten by Moses. Moses assured the Children of Israel that “God will bring back your captivity and have mercy upon you. He will gather you up again from among the nations . . . Even if your Diaspora is at the ends of the heavens, God will gather you up from there . . . and bring you to the land . . .” (Deuteronomy 30:3–5). However long and however wide the exile of the Jews may be, the redemption and the return to their land will eventually transpire. The later prophets are much more explicit about the dimensions and the wonder of this final redemption. According to the Hebrew prophets, as they have been understood by the Jewish tradition, the Messiah will be an anointed king, descended from David and Solomon (Isaiah 11:1; 1 Chron. 22:8–10; 2 Chron. 7:18). He will be sought throughout the world for his guidance (Isaiah 2:4; Zech. 8:23). He will restore the Sanhedrin (Isaiah 1:26), and re-establish the Jews firmly in their homeland (Isaiah 11:12). In his day, the entire world will recognize and worship the God of Israel (Isaiah 2:2–3). His reign will see an end to tyranny (Isaiah 2:12; 11:4). Knowledge of God will fill the world (Isaiah 11:9). Peace will reign (Isaiah 2:4). Wisdom will become the main pursuit of human kind (Amos 8:11). Death—or perhaps only illness and pestilence, depending on how literally we’re to take the relevant verse—shall be no more (Isaiah 25:8). Crucially, the Messiah shall reestablish the Temple in Jerusalem (Isaiah 56:7; Ezekiel chs. 40–7). Assuming that this occurs at a time when all of the world recognizes the truth of the basic Jewish narrative, we should also assume that the building of the Temple in Jerusalem will be a welcome development for all, creating a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 56:7); not, God forbid, by force.1 Maimonides rules that only a man can be an anointed monarch (Hilkhot Melachim 1:5, based on Sifri, Parshat Shoftim 29); hence we’ve been talking about the Messiah as a king, and not as a queen. Having said that, Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet/Adret (the Rashba, 1235–1310) learnt from the case of Deborah in the book of Judges that a woman can assume all of the powers of a king, in Jewish law, so long as she is, in some sense or other, freely elected by the public. A female monarch, on this view, cannot be imposed upon the people by a prophet, but she can be chosen by the people, and then given all of the powers—including the

1  The extent to which the messianic era will allow for religious pluralism is subject to debate; see R. Michael Harris (2016, pp. 140–3).

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Redeeming the Past  235 powers to coerce—of a king.2 Perhaps, then, the prohibition on women monarchs is another example of the phenomenon we encountered in chapters 6 and 7, of accommodation: i.e., a legal compromise with ancient mores, containing an internal loophole, in anticipation of our cultural and ethical evolution. Moreover, the Talmudic consensus in support of the reign of Queen Salome (Heb. Shelomtzion) puts some pressure on the ruling of Maimonides to begin with. She was a female monarch who ruled with the support of the rabbis. I will continue to talk about the Messiah as a “he,” in conformity with tradition, but I don’t want to rule out other possibilities. It seems to me that part of our redemption should anyway involve our coming to see that a woman is equally capable of leading us to salvation as is a man. The reign of the Messiah is only one of many mechanisms by which God is thought, by the Jewish tradition, to underwrite ultimate justice for all. Jewish trad­ition affirms that there will be a massive resurrection of the dead, and promises a disembodied afterlife for those moments between death and resurrection. With less consensus, it also envisages purgatory, and a finite series of reincarnations for those souls in need of further refinement. Some go so far as to envisage an enteral hell fire, or annihilation for the worst offenders (see Brody, 2016–17; Segal, 2016; Goldschmidt & Segal, 2017; Goldschmidt & Seacord, 2013). God is thought to have a broad eschatological tool box. The coming of the messianic king is only part of the story. Jewish eschatology can be thought of in terms of two extreme camps, with various intermediate positions between them. Segal (2016) calls the extremes intellectualism and devotionalism. Intellectualism believes that the ultimate good, held in store for the righteous, consists of a “steady, continuous, and perfect cognition of those truths the person knew only dimly when she died, since she is finally unencumbered by bodily needs and desires” (ibid., p. 152). Resurrection is “at best a sideshow” (Goldschmidt & Segal, 2017, p. 114). It will occur, since the prophets foresaw it, but it won’t occur for our benefit. It will occur only “to demonstrate God’s power over nature” (ibid.). Its effects will be temporary. “Those who are resurrected will die again and return to the more blessed state of disembodied intellect, unencumbered by the bodily veil that would interfere with the apprehension of metaphysical truths” (ibid.). Devotionalism, by contrast, believes that our resurrected state is no eschatological sideshow, but the main event. The eternal afterlife, on their view, “consists in an increasingly intense devotion to God and reciprocally loving relationship with Him while in the embodied state that [a person] attains upon resurrection” (Segal, 2016, p. 153). We do continue to exist between death and resurrection, in a disembodied state, but this disembodied afterlife is the warm-up act for the never-ending post-resurrection event. 2 See Hiddushei HaRashba, on Tractate Shevuot 30a, s.v. v’lo b’nashim.

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236  The Principles of Judaism Intellectualists tend to believe that our bodies will be much the same after resurrection as they were before. The devotionalists, by contrast, tend to believe that our bodies will be new, and somehow magnificent. Intellectualists tend to envisage a pretty natural (rather than supernatural) messianic reign. Although a mass resurrection will occur at some point in the history of the messianic kingdom, the bodies that rise up will be recognizably human; eventually they will die again; and other than that miracle, the laws of nature will be unaltered. Maimonides—the intellectualist—claims that the prophetic vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6) shouldn’t be read as a miraculous trans­­ forma­tion of the wolf into an herbivore. Rather, it’s a metaphor. It means that nations that had been wolflike aggressors will begin to live in peace with their neighbors (Maimonides, Hilkhot Melachim 12:1). He emphasized the rabbinic dictum (ibid., 12:2): “There is no difference between this world and the messianic era other than the subjugation of the Jews in exile [which ends forever in the messianic era]” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 91b).3 Devotionalists, by contrast, envisage a very different, and much more miraculous, messianic era. The resurrection will occur during the messianic reign. The bodies that arise will be somehow magnificent, and immortal. All who live in this eternal messianic kingdom will grow closer and closer to God, in some sort of ecstatic embodied devotional experience. There are various intermediate positions between intellectualism and devotionalism. One compromise—endorsed in slightly different ways by Saadya Gaon and Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–46), on the basis of various biblical verses—predicts the occurrence of two resurrections. The first resurrection gives certain individuals the opportunity to live, for a finite duration, in an earthy, messianic kingdom that runs pretty naturally, as per the messianism of intellectualism. The second resurrection gives another set of individuals (perhaps a more inclusive set, or perhaps a more exclusive set) eternal life in an embodied world to come, with new bodies, enjoying an exquisite, spiritual, embodied, but distinctly unearthly existence. The Jewish tradition also talks of a messianic king from the line of Joseph, in addition to the Messiah from the line of David: ‘The Lord then showed me four craftsmen’ (Zechariah 2:3). Who are these four craftsmen? . . . They are (1) the Messiah from the line of David, (2) the Messiah from the line of Joseph, (3) Elijah, and (4) the righteous High Priest [who will serve in the third temple]. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sukkah 52b)

3  See also Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Brachot 34b.

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Redeeming the Past  237 Who is this Messiah from the line of Joseph? Saadya Gaon finds various biblical allusions to the existence of such a figure. He argues that his coming might not be necessary. His coming will only occur if, by some appointed time, the Jewish ­people are still not worthy of the ultimate Messiah. This Messiah will be like a “herald . . . who puts the nation in proper condition and clears the way, as Scripture says: Behold, I send My messenger, and He shall clear the way before Me (Mal. 3:1).” Alternatively, “he might be compared to one who purges with fire those members of the nation who have committed grave sins, or to one who washes with lye those of its constituents who have been guilty of slight infractions” (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 8:6, p. 304). The Messiah son of Joseph paves the way for the Messiah son of David, but only if such paving is required. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) was invited to address a memorial service for Theodore Herzl (1860–1904), the father of modern Zionism. Given how secular Herzl was, to eulogize him may have been deemed inappropriate for a chief rabbi at that time. On the other hand, Rabbi Kook was a leader in the land of Israel. Many of his flock had been inspired by Herzl’s movement to leave Europe for the Jewish ancestral homeland. In the end, Rabbi Kook spoke. Without mentioning Herzl by name, he heavily implied that Herzl was an approximation of a Messiah of the line of Joseph. Herzl had galvanized the Jewish people to return home, paving the way for a future, and more religious, redemption.4 Just as the Messiah of Joseph is something of an eschatological contingency, which may or may not be called for, or may or may not have already happened, so too the heralding of Elijah the prophet. Maimonides writes (Hilkhot Melachim 2:2): There are some Sages who say that Elijah’s coming will precede the coming of the Messiah. All these and similar matters cannot be definitely known by man until they occur since these matters are vague in the words of the prophets. Also, the wise men have no established tradition regarding these matters, only their own interpretations of the verses. Therefore, there is debate regarding these matters.

Moreover, Maimonides worries that excessive attention to messianic texts can distract us from our immediate responsibilities (ibid.): Regardless of the debate concerning these questions, neither the order of these events nor their precise detail are among the fundamental principles of the faith. A person should not occupy himself with the Talmudic legends and Midrashim regarding these and similar matters, nor should he consider them as essential principles of the religion, for study of them will neither bring love nor fear of God. 4  Rabbi Kook’s speech can be read here: https://www.machonso.org/uploads/images/13-D-10-lamentation.pdf.

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238  The Principles of Judaism Ultimately we have to wait and see whether the intellectualists or the devotionalists had the most accurate conception of the eschaton, and whether Elijah and a Messiah son of Joseph will be required, or not. But we do need to know the min­ imum requirements of a potential Messiah son of David. The distinction between Judaism and Christianity hangs, in part, upon this question. The minimum requirements for a Messiah of the line of David therefore sit at the frontier of the definition of the Jewish religion—and, for Orthodox Judaism, his coming isn’t optional. Accordingly, Maimonides sketches a set of minimum requirements that all sides of the various debates can agree to (Hilkhot Melachim 11:4): If a King shall arise from the house of David, and he engages with the Torah, and toils in commandments, like David his father, in accordance with the Written and Oral Torah, and if he enjoins all of Israel to walk in it, to repair its breaches, and wages the wars of God, then he will be a presumptive Messiah. If he succeeds [in his mission] and builds the temple in its place, and gathers in the dispersed of Israel, then he is certainly the Messiah . . . and he shall fix the entire world, to serve God together, as it is written: ‘For then I will make the peoples pure of speech, so that they all invoke the Lord by name and serve Him with one accord’ (Zephaniah 3:9). But if he does not succeed thus far, or is killed—it will be known that he isn’t the one that the Torah promised, rather, he is like all other great and upright kings of the house of David that died [i.e., a hero of Israel, but not the Messiah].

He later adds (ibid., 12:5): In that era, there will be neither famine, war, envy nor competition, since good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust. The occupation of the entire world will be solely to know God.

It is inconceivable that the faithful of Israel would ever regard anybody as the Messiah who didn’t meet these criteria. A number of people may already have qualified as presumptive Messiahs. Rabbi Akiva thought, for some time, that Shimon Bar Kokhba was a presumptive Messiah (Palestinian Talmud, Taanit 4:6, Lamentations Rabba 2:4). But it’s clear that there hasn’t yet been a presumptive Messiah who finally cleared the hurdles that, according to the formulation of Maimonides, could transform him into the actual Messiah. The Temple was never rebuilt. Hunger, war, and envy persist. The world isn’t yet saved. And, on the basis of the previous chapter, we can say that nobody could be the Messiah without being accepted as the Messiah by the faithful of Israel. That the Messiah hasn’t yet come is key to understanding the Jewish faith. Our interpretation of the Sinai theophany, just like Jewish messianism, is inherently forward-looking. At Sinai, God was giving a stamp of approval to a process. The

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Redeeming the Past  239 Torah that we have in our hands isn’t yet the Torah that God has in heaven, nor is the world that we live in yet redeemed. But the process has God’s stamp of approval. Judaism is a future-oriented faith. Rabbi Sacks writes (2005, pp. 12–13): [This] is what hope is in Judaism: a refusal to give up on your deepest ideals, but a refusal likewise to say, in a world still disfigured by evil, that the Messiah has yet come, and the world is saved. There is work still to be done, the journey is not yet complete, and it depends on us: we who now all too briefly stride upon the stage of time.

In terms of what to expect from our eventual Messiah, Maimonides has given us only the very broad outlines. A believer in the principles of Judaism would be best advised to live a life of faith and service, and—regarding the eschaton—to wait and see. As I suggested in chapter 1, section 1.7.2.1, this is why Judaism is happy to settle for a verisimilar theology. The story isn’t finished.5 If an all-powerful God exists, then sending a Messiah fitting the Maimonidean description is eminently within his power. But if God was powerful enough to eradicate evil and suffering, and caring enough to want to, then we wouldn’t have to wait for a Messiah and an afterlife. We’d be fine already. How can we believe that there exists an all-powerful God who cares about us, in the face of all the evil and suffering in our world? The third principle of Judaism states that the creator of the universe exercises providential and judicial care over his creation. The promise of a Messiah is just one part of this principle. This principle loses any semblance of plausibility in the face of the existence of evil—or so the worry goes. According to Hassidic Idealism, God owes us no theodicy. From his transcendent perspective, we are merely fictional. But that doesn’t address the heart of the problem. We don’t live our lives in God’s transcendent perspective. We live our lives in his story. In that story, God—the author—appears as a character, and, as a character, he is supposed to be kind and caring. We are supposed to be his beloved creatures. The third principle of Judaism is supposed to be true, not from outside of the story, but even from within it. Consequently, God, as he appears in the story of this world, seems to owe us an account of how and why he allows so much evil to prosper, before the advent of the eschaton. In the remainder of this chapter, I will be talking of God only as he appears to us in the story, not as he is in his transcendence. I will offer a new response to the problem of evil, in order to render the third principle of Judaism as plausible as it can be rendered.

5  For a beautiful and engaging discussion of what Modern Orthodox Jews can reasonably and authentically hope for in a messianic age see R. Michael Harris (2016, ch. 5).

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240  The Principles of Judaism

8.2.  A Brand New Past A quick disclaimer: the response we’re about to develop towards the problem of evil will strike many readers as sophistry that beggars belief. I know that’s how it will strike people. I’ll come back to that in section 8.2.10. Before that point, I’ll make no apologies for the seeming implausibility and sophistry that’s to follow. According to Rabbi Tzadok Hakohen, God will one day erase from history the sins of the penitent. Once God erases them, they never will have occurred. Call this view Ultimate Forgiveness (UF). R. Tzadok begins his comment reflecting on a Talmudic prohibition against reminding a penitent person of past sins: A sign of complete repentance is when [the sinner] no longer remembers his sin at all, as it is stated (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Metzia 58b), that you should not tell a penitent person, “Remember [your past deeds]”. And similarly, God, may He be blessed, doesn’t remind the completely penitent, and automatically [the sinner] does not remember, since all of man’s powers are from God . . . if God, may he be Blessed, doesn’t emanate unto him, and remind him, he does not remember. (Hakohen, 1998, section 99)

R. Tzadok does not endorse nonchalance about sin. He insists that the forgetfulness in question must be bestowed by God, and will only fall upon sinners who have toiled to repent. Nevertheless, the bystander shouldn’t remind the sinner of his sins, because that risks thwarting the divine gift of forgetfulness, should it already have occurred.6 R. Tzadok continues, although now it isn’t clear whether he has in mind the penitent only or all sinners: In [the Midrash] Tanna D’bei Eliyahu Rabbah (81) [we learn] that in the future the Holy One Blessed be He will say, ‘I don’t remember his sins, and they don’t arise in my heart.’ And the sages already say [in the Midrash Song of Songs Rabbah 5:2] that the Holy One Blessed be He is the heart of Israel. As it says, ‘[God] is the rock of my heart’ [Psalm 73:26]. Automatically, [the sin] also doesn’t arise in the heart of the person. And this is a taste of the world to come. (ibid.)

In the end of days, everyone will forget certain sins. Since God is the source of all of our mental powers, if it is no longer present in God’s mind, then it won’t be present in anybody else’s. 6  God could make the sinner forget again. It’s not as if that would pose a significant obstacle to God’s will. But to remind a sinner of their sin still would be in conflict with God’s will.

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Redeeming the Past  241 Fine. But God can’t forget. God would not be omniscient if there were past events that he had forgotten—there would be something he wouldn’t know. To secure God’s omniscience and “forgetfulness,” the forgotten events need to disappear altogether. Indeed. God says: “I, even I, am He that erases your transgressions for my own sake; and your sins I will not remember” (Isaiah 43:25). He won’t remember them because he will have erased them. Jeremiah promises (Jer. 50: 20): “In those days, and in that time, says the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none, and the sins of Judah, and they shall not be found.” They shall not be found because they will be gone from history. The Izhbitza was R.  Tzadok’s teacher. He goes further than his disciple. According to him, God will remove absolutely all traces of evil from the past— moral evil and natural evil. It will one day be the case that nothing bad will ever have happened. Call this more strident theory No More Evil (NME). Consider the Izhbitza’s commentary to Genesis 2:16–17: In the future, when the sin of Adam will be fixed, then the verse will be rearranged [i.e. repunctuated], “from all the trees in the garden you may surely eat and from the tree of the knowledge of good,” and after that the next verse will begin, “And evil do not eat.” Meaning to eat the good in the tree and not to eat the evil. The blessed God will clarify that [Adam] only ate the good, and the sin was only in his mind as insignificant as garlic peel, and no more. (Leiner, 1995, ad. loc.)

This passage raises questions of interpretation. It’s not entirely clear what’s being said. But on one plausible reading, the Izhbitza here espouses NME. When Jewish mystics use the verb “to clarify” (Heb. levarer), they rarely just mean intellectual clarification. Intellectual clarification doesn’t affect its object; the object merely comes to be better known. The clarification that mystics tend to refer to involves the object itself undergoing change, much like the purification of a metal—a process that changes and clarifies the material at hand (Jacobson, 1993). When God is said to “clarify” something, He’s being said to change it in so doing. I would suggest we read the Izhbitza’s comment as follows: God will return to the original sin and change it; purifying it; making it such that it didn’t happen; or that it wasn’t a sin. If that sin didn’t happen, then presumably there was no fall and no punishment. God will have to go on changing the rest of the punctuation of the Torah until it records an entirely new history. NME gives new significance to Isaiah’s prophecy that, in the end of days, God will wipe away our tears (Isaiah 25:8): God will make it such that we never cried in the first place. An interpretive problem concerns the residual “garlic peel.” The garlic peel is an allusion to the Zohar, and other mystical texts, that speak of reality having a  garlic-like structure, with superficial layers covering something more

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242  The Principles of Judaism substantial.7 Perhaps it’s being said that Adam’s sin still leaves some residue. Or perhaps all that’s being said is that Adam’s sin will be totally discarded, as the new past—a past without sin—is revealed beneath it. We’ll come back to the garlic peel later on. To make sense of UF and NME, we need to explore the philosophy of time.

8.2.1. Hypertime Hud Hudson (2014) compares five theories of time: 1. Presentism: the view that only present things exist. 2. The Growing Block Theory: the view that only present and past things exist. 3. The Shrinking Block Theory: the view that only present and future things exist. 4. The Disappearing Branch Theory: the view that past, present, and future things exist, and that the future “consists of a proliferation of equally real branches that suddenly disappear as soon as time flows along any path excluding them” (ibid., p. 79). 5. Eternalism: the view that past, present, and future things exist, “with no additions, subtractions, or disappearing branches” (ibid.). Other than eternalism, these views take time itself to be changing, or growing, or shrinking, or shedding branches. For change to make sense here, there might have to be a quasi-temporal dimension, external to time itself, in which time itself can change. Think of the timeline as a container that holds changing events. But if time itself is to change, it too needs to be held in its own container. This is one popular motivation for positing a new dimension, called hypertime.8 We can illustrate the appeal of hypertime by focusing on the Growing Block Theory. The idea would be that the block of spacetime is such-and-such a size at hypertime0 and is bigger at hypertime1. The duration of the growth of time itself is measured, not in time, because it’s time that we’re measuring, but in hypertime. Time grows over the course of hypertime.9 7  Garlic peel is also referred to in Jewish legal texts as setting the standard for a miniscule but still legally significant volume for a channel connecting bodies of water, see Shulkhan Arukh, Yore Deah, 201:54. 8  See Smart (1949) and Markosian (1993) for doubts about the need for hypertime. In any case, hyper-tenses, as we shall see, certainly have their uses. Moreover, whether or not any theory of time requires the existence of hypertime, if hypertime is a metaphysical and epistemic possibility, then we should investigate it for its potential in making sense of UF and NME. 9  It has sometimes been argued that theories of an absolute and robust passage of time are bound to conflict with Einstein’s theory of relativity. But see, for example, Zimmerman (2008), Belot (2005), and Skow (2015, chs. 8–9).

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Redeeming the Past  243 Having enriched our metaphysics, and added hypertime to time, we can enrich our language, and add hyper-tenses. The hyper-past-tense: what hyper-was the case is what is the case in the hyper-past. The hyper-present-tense: what hyper-is the case is what is the case in the hyper-present. The hyper-future-tense: what hyper-will be the case is what is the case in the hyper-future. The invocation of hyper-tenses can help us to make more sense of time undergoing change, and thereby allows for a more perspicuous statement of the five theories: 1. Presentism is the view that only present things hyper-presently exist. 2. The Growing Block Theory is the view that over the course of hypertime, spacetime is growing. For any two moments of hypertime—ht0 and ht1—the timeline will be longer at ht1 than it is at ht0. At any hypertime, the interior of the spacetime block is called “the past,” and the outermost hyperplane of spacetime, in the direction of its growth, is called “the present.” Past things exist in the past and present things exist in the present. At no hypertime can there be said to be a future, containing future things. 3. The Shrinking Block Theory is the view that over the course of hypertime, spacetime is shrinking. For any two moments of hypertime—ht0 and ht1— the timeline will be shorter at ht1 than it is at ht0. At any hypertime, the interior of the spacetime block is called “the future,” and the outermost hyperplane of spacetime, in the direction of its shrinkage, is called “the present.” Future things exist in the future and present things exist in the present. At no hypertime can there be said to be a past, containing past things. 4. The Disappearing Branch Theory is the view that, at any hypertime, past, present, and future things exist. The past is the collection of things that have already happened. The future consists of a proliferation of equally real branches. At any given hypertime, the present is the earliest branching point. At each new moment of hypertime, the past grows, and some of the branches that hyper-were in the future disappear, as one branch is selected to become the present and, hyper-later on, the past. 5. Eternalism generates no prima facie need to posit a hypertime at all. What­ ever hyper-was, hyper-is, and hyper-always hyper-will be. Hudson notes that theories 2 and 3 appeal to “additions and subtractions [that] are unfailingly uni-directional and always in increments of (at least) an entire

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244  The Principles of Judaism hyperplane” (ibid., p. 81). Hudson invites us to be more imaginative. He presents the hypothesis that spacetime is a morphing block. The following story illustrates the notion of a morphing block. It hyper-was the case, once upon a hypertime, that the calendars on the outermost surface of spacetime read October 14, 1066. At that hypertime, spacetime has a certain specific volume. At another hypertime, the calendars on the outermost surface of spacetime read April 19, 1775. At that hypertime, spacetime has a different volume. Imagine that the growth of spacetime between those two hypermoments is steady and uni-directional, just as posited by the Growing Block Theory. The volume of spacetime at the second hyper-moment will be larger than it hyper-was at the first hyper-moment, since “the first plurality of hyperplanes have been joined by uncountably many others over the 709-year interval that separates the two occasions; reality is growing” (ibid., p. 82). Now imagine that at some later hyper-moment, hyperplanes start steadily appearing at both ends of the block—time starts growing into the past, and into the future. Perhaps this is hyper-followed by a reversal, in which the last hyperplane of spacetime remains fixed, as more, and ever earlier, hyperplanes continue to be added to the other end: reality is hyper-now growing only in the pastward direction. Imagine then an alarming hyper-development: hyperplanes at both ends hyper-begin to disappear. This block is unpredictable. It can change, over hypertime, in any number of ways. This block is morphing. If the growing and shrinking blocks are possibilities, then it seems that the morphing block is too.

8.2.2.  Hudson and the Evils of the Hyper-Past We can make use of the morphing block theory to make sense of UF and NME: UF-Hyper: The spacetime block that is hyper-present contains a past in which Gittel sinned. Gittel repents. God hyper-will thus ensure that at some point in the hyper-future (i.e., the eschaton), the spacetime block hyper-will no longer contain Gittel’s sin (the event hyper-will be replaced by a sin-shaped hole in spacetime, so to speak). NME-Hyper: The spacetime block that is hyper-present contains all sorts of past evils—both natural and moral. At some point in the hyper-future, however, the past hyper-will contain no evils whatsoever. It hyper-will be the case that bad things never happened. God’s hands are not tied by time’s passage. That something is hyper-presently in the past doesn’t mean that it hyper-always hyper-will be in the past. However, God’s hands are tied by the passage of hypertime. Thus Hudson writes:

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Redeeming the Past  245 Although it does not now lie in anyone’s future, perhaps some hyperday, every tear may be brushed away in the most permanent of ways, with pain and suffering not merely being a thing of the past but instead belonging only to hyperhistory. (Hudson, 2014, pp. 193–4)

Gittel’s sins can be removed from her past, but not from her hyper-past. Imagine that Gittel sinned at t1. Perhaps that sin can be removed from t1 at some later hypertime. Indeed, if you’re standing at t2, in Figure 8.1 below, and the circle represents Gittel’s sin, then you can truly say that that sin doesn’t exist in your past. It exists only in your hyper-past. Perhaps this picture captures R. Leiner’s garlic peel metaphor. Like a husk peeled from the clove, removed but not entirely destroyed, Adam’s sin will be peeled away, but it won’t cease to exist entirely; while no longer a part of history, it will exist in hyper-history.

h2

t0

h1

t0

h0

t0

t1

t2

t1

Figure 8.1 

In this way, Hudson can help us to make sense of both UF and NME. But now we can ask: is an evil any less bad for existing just in the hyper-past? Perhaps there’s a philosophy of time that would allow God to do better.

8.2.3.  A Hyper-Presentistic Moving Spotlight To move on, we must draw upon a curious feature of presentism. The presentist denies that the past and future exist. Accordingly, she has a problem explaining how past-tense sentences can be true. Dean Zimmerman (2008, p. 219) illustrates the problem with the following sentence: “A dinosaur walked past this place 150,000,000 years ago.” Imagine that a dinosaur did walk past the place in question, but left no lasting trace. The opponent of presentism objects: Point to something in the world . . . that makes it true that a dinosaur walked past this place 150,000,000 years ago. It is true, but there is nothing about the way the world is now that requires that it be true or that makes it true; and according to

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246  The Principles of Judaism you presentists, there is nothing more to the world than the way it is now. So you have no truthmakers for such straightforward truths about the past. (ibid.)

Zimmerman provides one possible response: Things can instantiate “backwardlooking” properties—that is to say, properties held by things in the present but which make past-tense sentences true. A place, for example, can presently have the backward-looking property of having been occupied by a dinosaur 150,000,000 years ago. Presently instantiated, but “backward-looking” or “forwardlooking” properties provide the resources for making sense of truths in the past and future tenses, without invoking past and future events, objects, and times. There doesn’t have to be a place called the past in order to speak truly in the past tense. Drawing this lesson, we can make sense of hyper-tenses, without committing ourselves to hypertimes. There doesn’t have to be a hyper-past in order to speak truly in the hyper-past tense. A hyper-presentist can make sense of talking about the hyper-future, and the hyper-past, merely in terms of hyper-backward-looking and hyper-forward-looking properties instantiated in the hyper-present. Consider the Moving Spotlight Theory of time. For the eternalist, all times exist eternally and unchangingly. The Moving Spotlight Theory, by contrast, accepts that all times exist, but it also takes them to undergo a change. C. D. Broad illustrated this in terms of a “policeman’s bull’s-eye,” a lamp that casts a beam of light: We are naturally tempted to regard the history of the world as existing eternally in a certain order of events. Along this, and in a fixed direction, we imagine the characteristic of presentness as moving, somewhat like the spot of light from a policeman’s bull’s-eye traversing the fronts of the houses in a street. What is illuminated is the present, what has been illuminated is the past, and what has not yet been illuminated is the future. (Broad, 1923, p. 59)

The Moving Spotlight Theory accepts that over the course of hyper-history the eternally existing times undergo change. At one hyper-moment, one time will be lit up by the spotlight of presentness, and at another hyper-moment, a different time will be lit up, and the previous present will lie in the darkness of the past. But  you can be a Moving Spotlight Theorist without believing that hypertime exists. You can be a Moving Spotlight Theorist and a hyper-presentist (Skow, 2015, p. 46)—a hyper-presentist is somebody who believes that the only hypertime that exists is hyper-now; there might be a past and a future, but there is no hyper-past and hyper-future, there is only the hyper-present.

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Redeeming the Past  247 Let’s transform Broad’s policeman’s bull’s-eye into a theater spotlight. At any hypertime, only the actors, props, and scenery in one region of the stage can be seen in the spotlight. The rest of the stage, populated though it is, with actors, props, and scenery, is shrouded in darkness, until the spotlight makes its way along its sweep towards the future. But who’s to say that things stay still in the dark? In a slick Broadway production, while the audience is looking at the lit up regions, the stage crew, clad in dark clothes, is rearranging the furniture in the dark. On the Moving Spotlight Theory, the past is fixed. The only changes it undergoes are those associated with moving from the dark, into the light, and then back into the dark forever more. Here’s a new theory, the Scene-Changing Theory: it’s the Moving Spotlight Theory with the addition that the stage crew can hypersometimes change the scenery in the dark. This theory is coupled with hyperpresentism. There are no hypertimes other than the hyper-present. To bring out some features of this model, consider the following two sentences. 1. It was the case that p. 2. It hyper-was the case that p was past. The truthmaker of 1 would be the hyper-present existence of the-fact-that-p on the stage of time, on the past-side of the spotlight. The truthmaker of 2, by contrast, would be quite different. 2 wouldn’t be made true by the location of the-fact-that-p in some place called the hyper-past. The view we’re exploring doesn’t believe in hypertimes (other than the hyper-present). The view is hyper-presentist. Rather, the truthmaker of 2 would be the fact that the timeline itself instantiates a hyperbackward-looking property, the property of hyper-having-been-such-that-p.

8.2.4.  Scene Changes in the Dark The Scene-Changing Theory can make sense of UF and NME: UF-Scene-Change: Gittel sinned. Gittel repented. It hyper-was the case that Gittel’s sin was located on the stage (first in the region called the future, then in the spotlight, and then in the region called the past). In virtue of her repentance (or simply in virtue of the coming of the eschaton), God removes the sin from the stage of time. The stage will now only have the hyper-backward-looking property of hyper-having had Gittel sin upon it. But that sin exists nowhere. The sin has been replaced by a property. NME-Scene-Change: As things appear to us, the stage of time contains many evils. At some point in the hyper-future, those evils hyper-will be located nowhere. It hyper-will still be true that they existed in the hyper-past, but that hyper-won’t be

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248  The Principles of Judaism made true by the existence of any evil events in some place called the hyper-past, but only by a hyper-backward-looking property. One feature of presentism is that you can’t refer de re to things that no longer exist, or that only will exist in the future. You can only speak of them de dicto.10 Hyper-presentism inherits an analogous feature. We can’t refer de re to events that are only in the hyper-past or the hyper-future. We can only describe them de dicto. Accordingly, hyper-backward-looking properties can describe hyper-past evils de dicto, but if the evils are not hyper-present, there will be nothing to refer to de re. Contra Hudson, God’s hands are not tied by the hyper-past. There is no hyperpast. Reality will be such that it hyper-used to have evil located in the past. But once the evil is gone, it’s gone. We won’t even be able to refer to it de re. In this respect, our model, unlike Hudson’s, allows God to erase evils without trace. Another way of putting the point: God will be able to erase evil events without leaving a trace of evil. The event will leave some mark, but not an evil one. What will remain will be the instantiation in the hyper-present of a hyper-backwardlooking property that describes (de dicto) a non-existent event that hyper-used to be. To return to the Izhbitza’s metaphor: that property, and not any actual evil event, is the garlic peel that’s left behind. On presentism, the world’s containing past evils is just the present instantiating certain backward-looking properties that describe evil. If past evils are bad, then the backward-looking properties are a bad thing for the present to instantiate. If it’s tragic for the world to instantiate certain backward-looking properties, then why isn’t it tragic for the world to instantiate otherwise identical hyper-backwardlooking properties? But if you’re not a presentist about time—and you’re merely a hyper-presentist about hypertime—then you can mark the following difference and bestow upon it an axiological significance: (1) past evils are bad because they exist in the past; they remain there forever replaying the horror of what was;11 (2) merely hyper-past evils are not bad at all, since they don’t exist; all that exists in their place is a shadow—a property that marks the fact that they hyper-used to exist. The Scene-Changing Theory, as presented, is a combination of a Moving Spot­ light Theory and hyper-presentism, but in essence, the moving spotlight part of the theory can be ditched—the metaphor of the light and dark parts of the stage, and the motion of the spotlight, helped to convey the distinctive features of the view. But the essential ingredients are just this: a philosophy of time according to

10  To think of something de re is to think of it directly. To think of something de dicto is to think of it via a description that it satisfies, without thinking of it directly. When I think of the tallest man in North America, I’m thinking of someone, but not de re. I don’t even know who the tallest man in North America is. Rather, I’m thinking of him de dicto. But, when I think of my wife, Gaby, I think of her directly, de re. 11  Or, at least, some of the horror, depending upon how much you think things change in virtue of being past.

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Redeeming the Past  249 which the past really exists (i.e., neither presentism nor a shrinking block) in combination with hyper-presentism. Any such combination allows God to improve the world by changing the past—exchanging evil events with mere hyper-backwardlooking properties. We have encountered two models of time that can accommodate UF and NME. Hudson’s account is committed to the existence of the hyper-past. This ties God’s hands. He can remove evil from the past, but not from the hyper-past. The Scene-Changing Theory, by contrast, is hyper-presentistic. It allows God utterly to obliterate evils from the past; leaving some sort of shadow, in the shape of a property, but no evil events or doings.

8.2.5.  But God Can’t Change the Past . . . Can He? Before exploring why God might want to change the past, a number of objections arise against the mere possibility that He could. Objection 1. Since God is essentially omniscient, God knows everything at every time, and so cannot forget anything. The Bible explicitly presents God as not forgetting sins (Amos 8:7). The liturgy of the high holy days reads, “There is no forgetting before your throne of glory, and nothing is hidden from before your eyes” (Scherman, 2007b, p. 510). Thus the very possibility of UF and NME is incompatible with the doctrines of Orthodox Judaism. God cannot forget. Reply. On UF and NME, the evils that God hyper-will have deleted, hyperonce they’ve been deleted, never existed. Thus, on UF and NME, God does not forget anything. Loose talk of God’s forgetting things is more aptly put as his not remembering them: “your sins I will not remember” (Isaiah 43:25). He hyper-will not remember them, not because he hyper-will have forgotten them, but because they hyper-will never have happened. God does promise not to forget certain sins (Amos 8:7). Either these occasions are exceptions, where God resolves hypernever to remove particular sins from the past, so that the punishment will be hyper-eternal, or God hyper-will never forget them even though he hyper-will one day delete them; at which hyper-point, he still won’t (strictly speaking) forget them, because there will be nothing to forget. Beth Seacord and Kenneth Hochstetter (2018) ask, if God deletes things, won’t he remember deleting them? And if he remembers deleting them, won’t he remember what he deleted? We can respond as follows: some presentists take memory to depend upon the backward-looking properties instantiated by (or in) the present. For example: the present instantiates the backward-looking property of Hilary Clinton losing a presidential election. If we remember her losing, then our memory depends upon that property. Memory, then, would be a de dicto affair. We won’t stand related, de re, to (most or all of) what we remember, since what we remember (generally) no longer exists. Rather, we remember, de dicto,

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250  The Principles of Judaism that such and such occurred. Remember, we are not presentists. We think that the past exists. Accordingly, and unlike presentists, we think that (many or most of) our memories are de re. We remember Hilary Clinton’s losing the presidential election. We stand directly related to that existent past event. In addition to our de re memories, we do have some de dicto memories: we remember that such and such occurred, but we forget exactly when, and to whom. Those memories are less rich and full-blooded than our de re memories. Since we are not presentists, but hyper-presentists, we allow the following: God remembers, de re, all the evils committed. But, even though they hyperhappened, evils that hyper-were deleted do not exist. Thus God cannot remember them de re. He remembers that he acted. He remembers that he deleted, but God’s memory of the evils here will be de dicto, and thus less substantial. This is the “garlic peel.” Ultimately, God can’t remember things that didn’t happen. Hyper-after deletion, the evils did not happen. What God knows of them can’t be de re, but only de dicto. Objection 2. On UF or NME, God does something unjust. Sinners won’t face consequences for their sins; instead, the sins will be eliminated and they will no longer have been sinners. The Hebrew Bible presents God as judging everybody fairly; for example, “He will judge [all] nations with equity” (Psalm 96:10). Therefore, UF and NME are false, if the Bible is true. Ryan Mullins (2018) adds to this worry that, on our view, relevant stages of a victimized person end up getting deleted, whereas they are in need of healing and justice, not mere erasure. A good God would not remedy past evils by deleting them. Reply. There are at least three replies to this objection. First, on UF, sins might only be deleted if the sinner was repentant hyper-before the change of the past. Providing that the repentance was sincere, and providing that the wrongdoer did everything that can reasonably be expected of them in order to compensate and ask forgiveness from their victims, then it doesn’t go against God’s nature to forgive. This way, the deletion will only occur after the victims receive a measure of healing—hyper-before any deletion. What better way for God to forgive, and to rehabilitate the penitent sinner, than to make it the case that he never sinned? Second, on NME, or versions of UF in which God ultimately deletes all sins, irrespective of repentance, it could still be the case that God punishes sinners, commensurate with their sins, and gives healing to victims, before erasing the sins, the punishment, the victimhood, and the healing. Adopting this strategy, God could ensure that no wrongdoing is left hyper-unpunished, and also that no sins, injuries, punishment, or healing end up existing at all. Third, UF and NME do not undermine God’s justice. Injustice can only occur if sins are left unpunished. But if God makes it the case that the sins never occurred, then there aren’t any unpunished sins; nor unhealed wounds. Objection 3. The Mishna forbids praying for a change in the past/present:

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Redeeming the Past  251 He who beseeches over the past—behold, that is a vain prayer. How so? If his wife was pregnant, and he said, “May it be [God’s] will that my wife will give birth to a boy”—behold, that is a vain prayer. If he was along the way and heard a voice screaming in the city, and he said, “May it be [God’s] will that these are not the members of my household”—behold, that is a vain prayer. (Berakhot 9:3)

What has already been done, or is in the process of becoming, cannot be undone. But UF and NME require just that. No matter their Hassidic pedigree, if UF and NME are incompatible with a legally binding view of the Mishna, then an Orthodox Jew will have to renounce them. Orthodoxy is committed to the notion that the past cannot be undone, even by God. Reply. On Michael Dummett’s reading, the rabbis assume that God cannot undo the unfolding of an event based upon a prayer uttered after the event began. This seems to be the classical understanding of the text. Rabbi Ovadya of Bartenora (1445–1515) writes, in his commentary to this Mishna: “It’s a vain  prayer, because what has happened, has happened,” and Maimonides writes in his commentary: “A thing which is past is a thing which is gone; whose time has come. One shouldn’t pray over a matter that has already been decreed.” Accordingly, Dummett (1964) attacks this Mishna. He argues, if God has foreknowledge, then he can act on the basis of your future prayer, before you utter it, and without having to change the past. Call this power—i.e., the power to change the present on the basis of foreknowledge of future prayers—a counterfactual power over the past. If God knows that you’re going to pray later, that might affect how he acts now. Given God’s counterfactual power over the past, such a prayer can be eminently reasonable. Dummett makes the following two assumptions: 1. The rabbis forbade this type of prayer thinking that God wouldn’t be able to answer them affirmatively, given the fixity of the past. 2. God can change the past, but only in a counterfactual sense. Both assumptions are mistaken. Dummett considers any non-counterfactual power over the past to be a “logical impossibility” fraught with “self-contradiction” (1964, p. 341). He doesn’t say why. We assume his concern is this. If p used to be the case, and then we change the past, such that p was never the case, then we have to say that two things are true: (1) that p was never the case, and (2) that p used to be the case. But if it was never the case, then it can’t ever have been the case. And, if it was never the case, then what was it that was changed? Dummett’s linguistic resources are impoverished. He lacks hyper-tenses. We can quite easily make sense of the past changing without giving rise to contradiction.

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252  The Principles of Judaism We don’t have to say that (1) p used to be the case and that (2) it was never the case. Rather, after the change, we say that (1*) p hyper-was the case, but that (2) it was never the case. Dummett’s second assumption is false. God has much more than mere counterfactual power over the past. Dummett also likely reads too much metaphysics into the rabbis’ prohibition. Perhaps they forbade such a prayer merely because there’s impiety implicit in asking God to perform certain acts and miracles—not because God has no power to bring about the desired result.12 The prayer is vain, if immoral, because God won’t take an immorally uttered prayer into consideration. This Mishna might therefore be neutral on matters of metaphysics. If our Hassidic theories of time conflict with a Mishna, that would be a problem for their Orthodox pedigree. But, if the theories only conflict with a reading of the Mishna, put forward by certain commentaries, and it has no bearing on how the law is applied, then the problem is significantly reduced. Furthermore, it’s not even certain that R. Ovadya and Maimonides read the Mishna as Dummett did (although Crescas (1990, 2.3.1) certainly did). R. Ovadya’s phrase “what has happened, has happened” doesn’t explicitly entail that God can’t change it. The problem might only be that it would take a miracle; and that it isn’t our place to request one. The fact that the past went a certain way is, at least, prima facie evidence that God didn’t mind it turning out that way. Maimonides, given his talk of God’s “decree,” might only be saying that it isn’t our place to ask God to change the past since God might have wanted it to be as it was. Again, this gives us no reason to think that God couldn’t change it. Moreover, it’s clear that prominent voices in the tradition didn’t relate to the Mishna as precluding God’s ability to change the gender of a baby in utero. The authors of a Midrash (Tanchuma, Vayeitze 8), and the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Brachot 60a), who knew this Mishna, nevertheless contended that Dina was originally a male fetus, miraculously transformed in utero, into a female fetus. They clearly didn’t think that the Mishna’s prohibition related to what God was capable of. Thankfully, Dummett’s first assumption is ungrounded. We can read the Mishna so as not to conflict with our theory of time. We can read the commentaries this way too. We should; not merely to save the Orthodox pedigree of our Hassidic theory of time; we should do it to save the Mishna and its commentaries from Dummett’s attack, which would be quite apposite if the Mishna’s only concern was metaphysical.13

12  Halbertal (2010) reads the Mishna much as we do, but justifies his reading based on the wider context of the chapter in which it is found; see also Smilansky (2014), on the ethics of certain forms of prayer. 13  Thanks to Dov Weinstein for pressing Goldschmidt and me regarding the classical commentaries here.

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Redeeming the Past  253 We have no reason to think that God can’t change the past. The question now becomes whether he would or should. Before turning to that, we need to draw a distinction.

8.2.6.  Amputation and Deletion God could erase past sins, eliminating entire scenes from history, destroying the parts of spacetime where they took place—leaving some sort of gap. This is “Ultimate Forgiveness—Deletion” (UF-D). Alternatively, God could leave the sins in place—keeping scenes of history looking much as they do, as it were, from the outside—but making it such that they are no longer performed by the sinner. The sin and the relevant temporal part of the sinner are still there, but they no longer belong to the sinner, who is thus no longer a sinner at all. The sinful temporal part would have been amputated from the “sinner.” On this view, history is left without any gaps, but people can be left with temporal gaps in their histories. This is “Ultimate Forgiveness—Amputation” (UF-A). The verse in Isaiah states: “your sins I will not remember.” According to UF-D, God won’t remember them because they won’t be there to remember. According to UF-A, God won’t remember them as your sins, because it hyper-will be the case that it wasn’t you who performed them. The amputation can occur in two ways. First, the sin and the relevant temporal part of the sinner could remain in place while no longer belonging to anyone— the temporal part is actually no part of anything at all. Alternatively, if sins and temporal parts could not float freely, the sin and relevant temporal part could come to be possessed by someone or something else. The next section identifies possible candidates.

8.2.7.  The Agent Substitution Theory of Atonement Gittel sinned for five minutes from 2 p.m. January 1, 2018. Sometime later, Gittel repented. In virtue of her repentance (or perhaps in virtue of the coming of the Messiah, even without her repentance), God makes it such that Gittel wasn’t the agent who sinned. He doesn’t remove the sin from time. He doesn’t change history, physically, but changes it metaphysically. Accordingly, Gittel simply has a gap in her history for five minutes. Who then was doing the sin? It turns out that some Gittel-like thing that hyperwas a temporal part of Gittel, but which isn’t a temporal part of her hyper-anymore, is what did the sin. It looks just like Gittel. It thinks it is Gittel. But it isn’t. When it hyper-was a part of Gittel, this temporal part hyper-wasn’t a person in its own right—we surely don’t want to say that all of our people-like parts are

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254  The Principles of Judaism people in their own right—given how many millions of atoms there are sitting in my chair, and how many distinct but overlapping people could be cut out from those atoms, you can’t think that every person-like part of a person is a person, otherwise there would be millions of people in my chair with me. But now that this person-like part is not a part of Gittel (any hyper-more), and given that it does have a human body, a psychology, an ability to act, and an ability to sin, it seems that we should regard this temporal part—cut free—as a person in its own right. Not Gittel, because of the amputation, but Tova (who incorrectly thinks that she’s Gittel). Tova is created only to do the sin that Gittel hyper-had done. But surely it’s unfair to be created only to mop up the sins of another. If you’re worried that these temporal parts cannot be left to float free without becoming people, and if you worry that these people are being used unfairly as mops for other people’s sins, then God will have to amputate the temporal part from Gittel, and attach it to something else, in order to prevent it from becoming a person, or sufficiently person-like. Only in this way might we escape the emergence of Tova, and her legitimate grievance. There are at least three candidates the temporal part of Gittel could become a part of: (a) God, (b) an evil person, or (c) an entity that isn’t a person; on option (c), even though it’s a person-like part being attached to a non-person, that part won’t become a person in its own right because it goes from being merely a personlike part of a person to being a person-like part of a non-person.14 Consider the alternatives in order. If God attaches the sinful temporal part to himself, then the sin that Gittel hyperdid wasn’t performed by Gittel at all; it was performed by God. Furthermore, if God did it, then it might not be a sin at all. God might not have been prohibited from performing the relevant action. For example, it’s a sin for Jews to desecrate the Sabbath, but not for God. Moreover, God would be performing a good deed, rather than a sin, in manifesting his mercy to benefit Gittel! On this account, God hyper-will himself have performed our sins, and they hyper-will thereby cease to be sins. There is no need for punishment once the sins have been wiped away. Jewish tradition doesn’t read the suffering servant passage of Isaiah (53) as referring to God, suffering in place of us.15 God has no need to suffer. Indeed, we can now make sense of the widespread biblical talk of God’s “carrying” our sins.16 God will carry them by performing them in our place in 14  We’re assuming here a solution to the problem of the many, such that we don’t think that each temporal part of a person is a person in its own right. 15  In one classical Jewish understanding, Isaiah is referring to the Jewish people—collectively— rather than to God. It should be noted that the passage, read in this light, most naturally begins in chapter 52:4, with some tangents intervening (i.e., verses 7–10), before the passage continues in chapter 53. 16  The central biblical description of God describes him as “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, carrying iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6–7). The metaphor of God’s carrying sin is widespread

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Redeeming the Past  255 our hyper-future past. He will never need to be punished on our account, or to suffer, because the “sins,” upon God’s performing them, will no longer be sins. Alternatively, if God detaches Gittel’s sinful part and attaches it to an evil person, say Hitler, then the sin that Gittel hyper-did wasn’t performed by Gittel at all; it was performed by Hitler. Part of his eternal punishment is that he’s used as a cosmic mop to clean up other people’s sins, and to be punished for them too. In the book of Esther, when the evil Haman is brought to justice, it seems as if he is being executed for his having sought to sleep with Queen Esther in the king’s own house. In actual fact, Haman wasn’t trying to sleep with her at all; he was begging her for mercy. It’s clear that Haman was going to be punished for trying to wipe out the Jews, but it’s not clear that he was going to be executed until the king misconstrues what Haman was doing, as he had fallen upon Esther’s couch. Although Haman is punished for his genocidal plans, he also has to suffer the additional indignity of being punished for a crime of attempted adultery that he didn’t commit. And yet there’s a certain poetic justice. Haman was going to kill every Jew for a crime that wasn’t a crime—existing. Thus, there is poetic justice in his receiving punishment for a crime that he didn’t commit, in addition to the crimes that he did commit. If Hitler is used as a cosmic mop, there would be a certain justice, despite—in fact because—of the seeming injustice. Some sinners try to inflict undeserving punishment on others and perhaps they thereby deserve punishment for things that they didn’t do.17 On the third and final alternative, God detaches Gittel’s sinful part and attaches it to a non-human—perhaps a goat, or a pile of coins, or to some breadcrumbs. In that case, the sin that Gittel hyper-did wasn’t performed by Gittel at all, but was performed by a goat, or a pile of coins, or by some crumbs of bread. Presumably, the goat won’t feel hard done by, having a sinful person-like part attached to it, since it’s just a goat. A fortiori in the case of inanimate substitutes. This third alternative can help to make sense of a number of Jewish texts, laws, and rituals concerning atonement. Nahmanides explains animal sacrifice in the following terms: [S]ince the deeds of man are completed in thought, word and action, God commanded that when they sin they should bring a sacrifice, place their hands upon it—[an action] in place of the action—verbally confess in place of the [sinful] word, and burn in fire the intestines and the kidneys, which are the seat of thought and desire, and its legs, in place of the hands and legs of a person, that performs all

beyond this quote; see Schwartz (1994; 1995). The metaphor could be cashed out in terms of God’s carrying the metaphysical stain of our sin, removing that stain from our souls. But Goldschmidt and I are not sure what such a stain could be. 17  Thanks to Gaby Lebens for this interpretation.

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256  The Principles of Judaism actions, and to sprinkle the blood over the altar, in place of the blood of the person’s soul, so that the person should think, in his doing all of this, that he has sinned to his God with his body and his soul, and it would be fitting to spill his [own] blood, and burn his [own] body, were it not for the lovingkindness of the creator, who takes our offerings from us, and the sacrifice atones such that its blood should be in place of the person’s blood, its soul in place of the person’s soul, and the extremities of the sacrifice in place of the extremities of the person . . . (Nahmanides, on Leviticus 1:9)

The goat dies on your behalf. As soon as a person has sinned, there’s a sense in which he is no longer worthy of living (see Gen. 2:17; Ezek. 18:4). When you bring a sin offering you recognize this fact. You recognize that there’s some sense in which you’re worthy of death, but God in his mercy allows you to put an animal in your place. How does that help? Perhaps, if your sacrifice was brought in sincere contrition, God might perform an act of amputation and substitution. God can make it the case that the goat was the agent who performed the sins. The suffering that the animal goes through in the sacrifice is a concern, but some within the Jewish tradition, such as Saadya Gaon (al-Fayyûmî, 1989, 3:10, p. 175), have appealed to an animal afterlife as compensation.18 Post-biblical Judaism developed a number of further rituals that can be explained similarly. In one such ritual, Jews swing a chicken overhead and then donate it to the poor. During the ritual, they utter a prayer over it: “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This rooster [or hen] will go to its death while I will enter and proceed to a good long life and to peace” (Scherman, 2007a, p. 4).19 UF-A allows us to take this declaration quite literally. If God finds you to be worthy of atonement, then he can make it the case that the chicken was the one who performed the sins that you hyper-performed. Some people perform the same ritual, not with a chicken, but with money that they will give to the poor. A person declares: “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This money will go to charity while I will enter and proceed to a good long life and to peace” (ibid.). UF-A allows us to take this declaration quite literally. If God finds you to be worthy of atonement, God can make it the case that a person-like part of the money performed your hyper-past sins. 18  He speaks there of compensation for the slaughtered animal. This is widely understood to be referring to an animal afterlife. Only with such an afterlife could there possibly be post-death compensation. 19  Note that the chicken, in this ceremony, was supposed to be donated to the poor for a meal, and that the contemporary practice of performing this ceremony in mass gatherings, in settings that inevitably lead to extreme cruelty to animals, and where many carcasses are simply thrown away, some before they’ve even been properly slaughtered, has no place in Jewish law, and is a public desecration of God’s name. One cannot hope to appease God with “offerings” that desecrate his name (see Isaiah 1:11–17 and Amos 5:22). I refer only to the ritual as it used to be practiced, and would advise people today to use money instead of meat.

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Redeeming the Past  257 One final ritual. On the Jewish New Year, people have a custom of throwing bread into the river, as a sign that they have discarded their sins. This ritual needn’t be mere symbolism. If it be God’s will, he can make it the case that the bread performed the sins that you are quite literally casting off. Who should your victims be angry with, once you’ve received atonement? You, or crumbs of bread, or the pile of money that actually performed the sin that you hyper-once performed? The question threatens to reduce UF-A ever closer to absurdity. But, if you think that atonement only comes after real and sincere repentance, and that real and sincere repentance requires substantial efforts to ameliorate and compensate your victims, then your victims shouldn’t be angry with you by the time that you receive atonement. Their anger would, by now, be unreasonable— as unreasonable as being angry with a pile of money for having wronged you! Alternatively, if atonement comes to everyone in the eschaton (irrespective of repentance), perhaps it’s right to say that anger would be a misplaced emotion in the utopia of the eschaton; as misplaced as being angry with some crumbs of bread for having wronged you! The discussion above has proceeded in terms of temporal parts (the notion that an extended object can be divided into temporal slices just as it could be divided into spatial slices). But we aim for more metaphysical neutrality: we need not be committed to the existence of temporal parts that can be moved about. We can make sense of God’s cutting and pasting project without necessarily adopting a temporal parts ontology—and in terms of the two main theories of the nature of substance (which I sketched in chapter 2, section 2.3.1). On the substance–attribute theory, each substance is made up of a substratum and its properties. We can then make do without temporal parts as follows: a substratum hyper-had certain properties (being sinful or vicious) during an interval; the substratum no longer exists during that interval, or it exists but no longer has those properties during the interval; and another substratum takes on those properties over that interval. On the bundle theory, each substance is a bundle of compresent properties without any substratum. We can then make do without temporal parts as follows: a subject is a bundle of properties; it hyper-had certain properties (being sinful or vicious) during an interval; the bundle no longer exists during that interval, or it exists but no longer has those properties during the interval; and another bundle comes to be compresent with those properties over that interval. We had the problem that God shouldn’t leave amputated temporal parts freefloating, in case this brings about a new person or person-like being—who could be wronged if created only as a cosmic mop. The problem can be rephrased: God shouldn’t amputate properties and attach them to a newly created substratum, or make them into their own bundle, because doing so would create a new person or person-like being. If God detaches a person-like collection of properties from a person, and doesn’t want to get rid of them entirely, it seems that he should attach them

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258  The Principles of Judaism to something or somebody else. In this way, once you accept that God can change the past, you don’t need to adopt a temporal parts ontology to make sense of the amputation of sin (UF-A) or of the agent substitution theory of atonement.20 If you believe that God gave us free will for a reason, you might think that even if he could change the past, he wouldn’t—at least not where changing the past entails changing the ways in which we have acted, for to do so would be, retro­ active­ly, to strip us of our freedom. UF, when conditioned upon repentance, suggests a response. God allows history to unfold in accordance with the free will given to us. But what happens if we come to regret what we’ve done? We can repent, and try to make amends. This might engender God’s forgiveness. But we might want more than forgiveness. We might want to be saved from the shame of having those episodes recorded in our biographies for all (including ourselves) to (continue to) see. Saving penitent sinners from this eternal shame might be sufficient reason for God to change the past. This might be the difference between mere forgiveness and atonement.

8.2.8.  The Divine Proofreader Theory Our first response to why God might want to change the past is tied to UF, and to amputation or deletion being conditioned upon repentance. A broader response explains why God might want to alter the past more radically, even opting for NME. It’s classically maintained that God wanted to make us free. Freely performed goods are better, all things considered, than coerced goods. Rightfully earned reward is cherished more than arbitrary reward (see Luzzatto, 1982, pp. 17–19; see also Rasmussen, 2013). Accordingly, God creates us free to give us the opportunity to earn just reward. The problem, of course, is that we can abuse our freedom. 20  There are other models—some wedded to a temporal parts ontology, and some not—for amputation and substitution that we don’t explore here. Some of them have a historical pedigree. Duns Scotus develops a metaphysics of substance and property to account for the possibility of the incarnation. This metaphysics allows for the possibility of “alien supposits”; see McCord Adams (2006, ch. 5). McCord Adams assures us (in correspondence) that the notion of an alien supposit would allow for amputation, by which a goat, say, could come to alien supposit the properties that used to belong to a sinful human being; even those properties that wouldn’t naturally be had by a goat. Scotus’s view is that only in the incarnation does alien supposition occur. The Jewish view, by contrast, would be that alien supposition didn’t occur when Scotus thought it did, but—on the Jewish view—it might occur much more often than he thought nonetheless. Chisholm (1976, Appendix A) sets out Jonathan Edwards’s account of how God might justly impute to us the sin of Adam via the doctrines of temporal parts and “of truth by divine convention”: when God contemplates the temporal parts of objects at different times as one, they thereby come to compose one thing. Thus: “God could regard temporally scattered individuals—you this year, me last year, and the Vice-President the year before that—as comprising a single individual. And then he could justly punish you this year and me last year for the sins that the Vice-President committed the year before that” (1976, p. 139). This is one way of understanding how substitution works, and it might provide one way to understand how amputation works too. Amputation might draw on the “doctrine of truth by divine convention” in the opposite direction of Edwards: God could cease to treat the relevant temporal part as a part of the sinner.

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Redeeming the Past  259 According to the free will theodicy, moral evil is a price worth paying for the good of free will. Stephen Maitzen objects that no good God would allow a child to experience intense suffering merely to preserve the free will of their abuser: To put it mildly, there’s something less than perfect about letting a child suffer terribly for the primary benefit of someone else—whether for the benefit of a bystander who gets a hero’s chance to intervene, or for the benefit of a childabuser who gets to exercise unchecked free will. If you doubt the previous sentence, consider whether you would dream of letting a child you love suffer abuse in order to secure either of those benefits. (Maitzen, 2013, p. 259)

Here’s a response to Maitzen. God gives us free will and, so to speak, says, “Take one.” Then we live our lives. We do some good and some bad. All of it is of our own creation. At the end of time, God says, “Cut.” Imagine that scenes 1 and 3 are fantastic, but that scene 2 is horrific. God cuts out scene 2. This would leave a gap. So God says, “Scene 2, take 2.” We then get another shot at linking scenes 1 and 3 together. Again, we might do good, or we might do bad. Scene 2, take 2, is of our own authorship. God is a patient director. We can do a take 3, or 4, or however many more it takes until the timeline has nothing bad left on it. By allowing evils to exist hyper-temporarily, God can have the best results of free will—all goods will be of our own creation and all rewards will have been justly rewarded—but eventually it will be the case that nobody will have done any bad. God can have his cake and eat it too. Even the natural evils can be removed, although we can offer no explanation as to why they hyper-happened. God is like a proofreader who allows us to write our own biographies, but once we’re finished, he asks us to rewrite the passages that need editing. Free will might not be a worthy price to pay for evils that are always going to exist (we can agree with Maitzen about that). However, free will might be worth the price of hypertemporary evils that one hyper-day never hyper-will have existed. Thus, God is able to give us all free will and ultimately to ensure that we hyper-will never have abused it. This is the Divine Proofreader Theory: a new response to the problem of evil.

8.2.9.  More Objections We have argued that God can change the past and has reason to do so. According to UF, he might want to save penitent people from eternal shame. According to the Divine Proofreader Theory, he might want to do so in order to rid the world of evil, whilst also ensuring free will. Now for some more objections, in addition to those raised in section 8.2.5.

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260  The Principles of Judaism Objection 4. If temporal parts of sinners are deleted or amputated, then the past will become physically gappy (on UF-D or NME, at least when unadorned by the Divine Proofreader Theory, or in circumstances in which proofreading isn’t appropriate, for one reason or another) or metaphysically gappy (on UF-A). Con­ sider an otherwise evil event that has a good effect. Once the evil is deleted, the good will no longer be an effect—since it will have no cause. It will be a freefloating event. For example, imagine that a temporal part of a sinner is deleted or amputated. Any act of kindness directed towards that sinner at that time would be undermined. A preacher who hyper-once had encouraged the sinner to change his ways, will now have been preaching towards a goat, or money, etc. (on UF-A). If deletion occurs, then the preacher will turn out to have been preaching to a ­physic­al gap. Alternatively, if your theory of deletion is supplemented by the Divine Proofreader Theory, then the whole scene might no longer occur in such a way as to provide an opportunity to preach. On NME, kindness towards those suffering from natural evils will be undermined. For example, a nurse who hyper-once had tended to the victim of a disease will now be tending to a perfectly healthy subject, or to no one at all. Alternatively, the entire scene would have been rewritten. As traditional theodicies point out, some goods are inextricably connected to evils; thus, with the deletion or amputation of evils there will sometimes also be less good. A gappy history also generates a theological, or religious, problem. Consider the rabbinic promises to penitent sinners such as Elazar ben Dordia (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Avodah Zarah 17a). Elazar’s life was reprehensible, but he was finally moved to repent. His repentance takes so much effort that he dies in the act of beseeching God. The Talmud (ibid.) reports a heavenly voice declaring Elazar’s acceptance into heaven, and honors him with the title “Rabbi.” But, since his life was so debauched, if God deleted the sinful parts, almost nothing would have remained of him. How does this advantage Elazar? Why would the tradition celebrate such deathbed penitents, if so little of their lives are destined to remain on the historical record? The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Berakhot 34b) tells us that the truly penitent attain a higher place in heaven than those who didn’t sin in the first place. Why, if repentance merely renders you with a shorter life than you had before? In sum, the fourth objection is this: playing with the past is going to have too much collateral damage. Most radically, if Adam never sinned, in the hyperfuture past, then we hyper-won’t have existed at all, since humanity hyper-will never have left Eden, and history hyper-will have taken a completely different course (see Luzzatto, 1997, I.3.5–9).21 21  Amputation and substitution give rise to further metaphysical problems about spatially and temporally scattered objects. For an example of spatial scatter, a goat could be grazing in a field outside

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Redeeming the Past  261 Reply. One has to recognize that sometimes proofreading won’t be sufficient to fill in the gaps. Goldschmidt and I initially provided a movie director analogy to illustrate the Divine Proofreader Theory. In simple cases of divine proofreading, you might have whole scenes that can simply be cut and reshot; taking the action from a set start to a set conclusion, giving the actors complete freedom to improvise once more. But sometimes, as we’ve seen, the good and the bad are intertwined in such complex ways, or the cuts are going to render such causal and aesthetic instability, that there’s no possibility of a simple reshoot. God might then need to become a more heavy-handed editor. On traditional religious views, God created and sustains the universe, and thus could be described, not merely as its proofreader, but as its lead author too. Free creatures might have some authorial privileges, but much might be left up to God. Indeed, according to Jewish tradition, “everything is in the hands of heaven, except for the fear of heaven” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 33b)—everything is determined by God, except for our own moral choices. After deleting certain heavily embedded evils, God himself might set the goods that remain into a new world history. History could thus remain physically, metaphysically, and aesthetically seamless, even in the wake of the most intricate and involved edits. The preacher no longer will have had the opportunity to help the sinner repent, since the sinner will no longer have been a sinner; the nurse no longer will have had the opportunity to show kindness to those suffering, since there will no longer have been any suffering. Now, however, we have proposed that God’s editorial toolbox allows for some radical fixes. In his commentary to Exodus 32:32, Rabbi Hayyim ibn Attar (the Or HaHayyim, 1696–1743) anticipates this kind of problem. After Israel’s sin with the golden calf, Moses says: “But now, forgive [lit. carry] their sin, and if not, please erase me from the book You are writing.” The commentators debate which book Moses is referring to. According to the Or HaHayyim, Moses wanted to be erased from the book of remembrance—a book in which God records our deeds and which he consults when judging us on the days of awe. But, as we discussed at the outset of section  8.2, to be written out of God’s memory is to be written out of the past itself. Jerusalem and simultaneously have a human-like part committing a sin in Rome. For an example of temporal scatter, a human could upon sinning suddenly cease to exist only subsequently, suddenly to return to the scene. The objection contends that such gaps are impossible. However, philosophers to date have no plausible theories of synchronic or diachronic composition that would rule out spatial or temporal scatter—not least because we have no plausible theories of composition. Certain theories would indeed render spatial scatter impossible; but such theories are false (see van Inwagen,  1990, chs. 3, 6, and 7). Objects often do have spatially distant and disconnected parts: consider a bee colony or a solar system. Objects would also seem to have temporal gaps: consider disassembling and reassembling a ship—plausibly the same ship goes out of and later comes back into existence. Certain theories of personal identity must allow for temporal gaps in persons: for example, a psychological continuity theory must allow for a temporal gap in the case of a temporary coma. Accordingly, we should bracket this family of concerns.

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262  The Principles of Judaism God’s response to Moses (Exodus 32:33) is jarring. Moses had said that if God doesn’t forgive the sinners, then he wants to be erased from God’s book. God’s response is that only the sinners will be erased. This seems completely to ignore Moses’s ultimatum. God could have replied by accepting or rejecting the ultimatum, but to reply that he will erase only the sinners makes it seem as though he hasn’t heard what Moses said at all. The Or HaHayyim responds (ad loc.): “And if not, erase me” [Exodus 32:32]. That is to say that in the midst of that which transpired between Israel and the Holy one blessed be he, the faithful servant merited, with the merit that accrued to him in each command, and in particular, in the giving of the Torah, how much merit accrued to Moses in his wearying efforts with the people of Israel, and all is written in the book of memory before Him. And now, if [God] doesn’t carry their sin, all of the merits of Moses will have to be deleted from the book, as [those merits] are written amidst and by means of the merits of Israel. And God replied, that [Moses]’ words are not correct, since only the sinner himself will God delete from his book, after having written them in the book, but he who merited by means of it, will not lose his merit, which he merited in it, in virtue of undoing this one and his evil.

Moses wasn’t issuing an ultimatum at all. He was merely raising our problem. If God was going to write the entire Jewish people out of history, then who will Moses have led out of slavery? What would become of Moses’ acts of kindness? God’s response is now appropriate. He’s informing Moses that it is actually possible to edit out the bad parts of history whilst holding the rest constant—however tightly intertwined the bad and good might be. We’re not told how, but we’re told that it’s possible. How is it possible? We can only speculate. Take, for example, the nurse who will no longer show kindness to the suffering, since there will no longer have been suffering. Something of her kindness could nevertheless be retained. She might perform the same act—at least as it is internally described—even while there is no suffering there. She might tend to a crying patient, even while there is really no suffering behind the tears. She might even tend to something like an hallucin­ ation of a crying patient. There will no longer be the kindness of actually alleviating suffering. But if what matters most are the actions—as internally described—and the virtues these develop, then what matters most can be preserved. This comes at the cost of some deception, however, and ties us to a particular moral theory, according to which the value of the act supervenes on its internal description. God might avoid causing the deception, and allow for the agent’s actions to have real-world effect, by changing the scene more radically. Instead of her tending to the crying patient, she could instead be performing a quite different action, even as internally described. This action might build her character to the same degree—and otherwise have the same degree of moral value—as tending to the crying patient would.

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Redeeming the Past  263 She might instead be tending to her garden: this could develop the virtues of care and patience—and give rise to a beautiful creation besides. She’d have to be very devoted to her garden. But perhaps the same quantity and quality of goods— or something close enough—might be realized in such a way. Alternatively, God could simply bestow the relevant virtues on the nurse, even while eliminating the events that hyper-had conferred these virtues upon her. She will now have the care and patience, even while she might not have the opportunity to manifest them. These dispositions may be virtue enough (especially given our doctrine of dormant dispositions, from chapter 2, section 2.1.1.6). These maneuvers of heavy-handed editing might be problematic. The nurse hyper-was responsible for the kindness of tending to the patient. But now God has coordinated what she does, or has simply bestowed the virtues on her. Is she still responsible for her actions or her character? The nurse wasn’t given a chance to reshoot scenes, improvising each take as she saw fit. In cases of heavy-handed editing, where does human freedom go? We might develop a notion of derivative responsibility in such cases: even though her actions are now divinely coordinated, or her character trait is now divinely bestowed, she is ultimately responsible for them because they are coordinated or bestowed in light of how she hyper-had freely acted (compare Kane, 1998, ch. 5). With such tools at his disposal, God can ensure that humanity never fell from Eden and that each of us came to exist and came freely to perform, in the final shoot of history, the same sorts of goods that we hyper-originally performed in all previous shoots.22 In the final take of history, God might be a heavy-handed scriptwriter, but if he writes the script only in conversation with our free actions in previous takes, then we will still, ultimately, be responsible for the goods that we perform. Finally there was the problem of repentant sinners like Elazar ben Dordia: how do such sinners benefit by having so much of their lives deleted? First, Elazar does not lose anything good—after repentance he despises the evil parts of his life. Secondly, such an act of repentance might be sufficiently good so as to make for a worthwhile life. Thirdly, God could replace Elazar’s sinful life with a different life, commensurate to the good that was done to the creation by Elazar’s choice to undo the evil he hyper-had done. Fourthly, through his act of repentance, he gains the world to come—overall he does not have a shorter life, but an infinitely longer life, against which all of our finite lives pale in comparison. Objection 5. How many retakes of history will humanity require to get things right from start to finish? Perhaps we might suffer from trans-hypertime-depravity (compare Plantinga,  1974, p. 188): perhaps we hyper-never hyper-will get everything right.23 The immediate answer is that the opportunity to reshoot scenes 22  The task is made easier once one denies origins essentialism—which is easy enough (Ahmed, 2007, pp. 45–8). 23  This concern was brought to the attention of Goldschmidt and me by an anonymous reviewer.

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264  The Principles of Judaism increases the odds of our getting everything right. In the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Taanit 25a), Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat dreams that God offers to rewind time, so as to give him a second chance to attain some wealth. Fine, but a second chance is no guarantee! Two takes is not very many. Rabbi Elazar refuses the offer. But the odds of everything going well hyper-will converge on certainty as the sequence of retakes approaches infinity. And yet, Maitzen might contend that the disutility of gratuitous suffering is so high that no odds, short of certainty that it hyper-will be deleted, can justify the gamble. Reply. First, the objection operates under a problematic assumption. It assumes that the Divine Proofreader Theory only increases the likelihood of removing all suffering. Perhaps the theory can do more. As the number of reshoots approaches infinity, the chance of a history without evil converges on 1. Accordingly, perhaps we should expect that God would simply complete an infinite number of retakes. Instead of a mere increased likelihood of a history without evil, a likelihood converging on certainty, there will be certainty. There will be no gamble. Free will might not be worth the price of hyper-eternal suffering. But if God completes an infinite series of retakes, then he can guarantee that no evil will be hyper-eternal. All evil will certainly be hyper-temporary, and one hyper-day hyper-will have never happened at all. Though Goldschmidt and I (2017, p. 23) suggested this response to objection 5, I now think it lacking. God’s knowledge and activity, it seems plausible to say, can encompass infinities. In one single glance, so to speak, he can see all mathematical facts, and their structure. In one act of will, he can act upon any number of things, up to an infinite number. So the idea of his completing an infinite number of takes might seem plausible. But, on the other hand, God can do all of this without having to undergo any sort of change. If God is outside of time, he sees all things and acts in an unchanging eternal present. And, even if God exists in time, he could see all of the mathematical facts in each and every instant, and his will for all things at all times might also be exactly the same from instant to instant. So his ability to encompass infinities doesn’t require that he undergoes change. But nothing, including God, it seems fair to say, can complete an infinite number of changes.24 24  Thanks to Aaron Segal for discussion of these issues. It should be pointed out that not everybody shares the intuition that completing an infinite sequence is impossible. I’m not sure what to say to such people. To me it seems like an a priori impossibility. Hud Hudson, in correspondence, tried to push me on this issue. Why can’t an infinite sequence of changes be completed? He wrote: “Suppose I persist for a closed, continuous interval of time from 1pm to 2pm on July 8, 2019. At the first moment of that interval, t, I have the property, P, being exactly as old as I am at t. And at a later moment of that interval, t*, I have the property, Q, being exactly as old as I am at t*. In fact I have just such a property for every moment in that interval. But as the moments go by, I change with respect to that series of properties. I run through a succession of incompatible properties, fully enjoying each one for just an instant, and thus completing an (uncountably) infinite number of changes by 2pm.” I’m not at all sure that there can really be instantaneous property instantiation. Moreover, I’m not sure that time is continuous. Much clearer to me than either of those assumptions is that an infinite

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Redeeming the Past  265 Accordingly, God cannot complete an infinite number of retakes because that would require that things undergo and complete an infinite number of changes. Perhaps God could divide us into an infinite number of hyper-temporal parts, and have each part do one retake in some sense simultaneously (hyper-hyper simultaneously) to all our other hyper-temporal parts. Accordingly, no one thing undergoes an infinite number of changes. But even if that seems possible (and it shouldn’t, because it seems like a cheat—if each part is a part of us, then we would have undergone an infinite number of changes), it doesn’t seem possible for time itself to undergo an infinite series of changes, which is what would need to happen if God were to complete an infinite series of retakes. Fortunately, Goldschmidt and I had another response to this objection; a response I would now rely upon more firmly. In actual fact, and before turning to our second response, it might be possible to salvage our first response even with my insistence that infinite sequences ­cannot be completed. Hud Hudson25 suggests the following, in correspondence: assuming that the chances of success converge on 1 as the number of retakes increases, and if there’s no upper limit on the possible number of retakes, then it’s certain that we’ll get to a take that is free of suffering, eventually. The sufferingfree take will not be the last item in the line, since there is no such thing as a last item in an endless line. Therefore, wherever the first suffering-free take occurs in the infinite sequences of retakes, whichever finite slot that take occupies in the infinite series of retakes, God could very well stop right there, with no further need to continue adding elements to the series of retakes, and with no need to complete an infinite sequence. In other words, God can guarantee success without having to complete an infinite sequence of takes. But Hudson himself is reluctant to endorse this response because he worries about the assumption that the probabilities converge on certainty as the number of takes approaches infinity. His worry is grounded in the fear that probability theory doesn’t work well when dealing with draws from infinite sets. So, once again, it might be lucky that Goldschmidt and I had a second response to objection 5. I turn to that response now. We have already conceded that proofreading might not always work, and that God may some(hyper)times have to combine proofreading with somewhat ­heavier-duty editing techniques—techniques which can preserve the goods of the hyper-past, alongside a notion of derivative freedom, to remove even the most trenchant evils. Accordingly, our second—and I would now argue our only—response to objection 5 is that God can switch to heavier-handed editorial techniques whenever he concludes that a series of retakes is not hyper-eventually hypergoing to remove a certain evil episode. sequence cannot be completed. And thus, I find myself sticking to my guns. For more on why one might want to resist the possibility of completing an infinite sequence, see Gwiazda (2012). 25  Even though he doesn’t share my antipathy towards completed infinite sequences . . .

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266  The Principles of Judaism This reply will be more robust if God has a kind of middle knowledge. Middle knowledge is knowledge of true counterfactuals about how agents would freely act, in any given circumstance. Hyper-middle knowledge would be knowledge of true counterfactuals about how agents would freely act in all possible futures and hyper-futures. Hyper-middle knowledge provides God with knowledge of what free agents hyper-would do. Wherever possible, God will want to remove evil through proofreading alone. After all, it is a characteristic of God, in the Jewish tradition (canonically in the book of Jonah), to want to maximize our chances of getting things right on our own. Simple libertarian freedom seems to be more valuable than derivative freedom. Yet God doesn’t have to rely on proofreading. If God has hyper-middle knowledge, he will know when to move on to something more heavy-duty than proofreading.26 Without such knowledge, the decision to abandon proofreading after n takes, rather than after n + 1 takes, will— admittedly—be arbitrary. But even then, we could trust God to make an arbitrary decision rather than to gamble with hyper-permanent evil. Objection 6. Once it’s the case that Gittel didn’t actually perform the sin she hyper-once performed, hyper-will she be left with a false memory of performing it? Either way, we are left with a problem. On the one hand, if she is left with a false memory, then she isn’t saved from the shame of remembering the sin. On the other hand, if her memory of the sin is deleted, along with everyone else’s, then the problem is that there seems to be no further benefit in deleting or amputating the sin—especially once all the relevant agents have repented and all the relevant victims have been compensated; just let them all forget. Reply. Even if Gittel is left with shame from false memories, there would still be less total evil in virtue of God’s changing the past. This would make sense if God’s motive for changing the past is to reduce evil. Alternatively, God could alter Gittel’s psychology so that she no longer feels shame from false memories. Furthermore, even if God’s motive for changing the past really is shame reduction, he could merely inform Gittel that her memories are hyper-now false, and thereby remove at least some of the shame from them. Even if shame-reduction is the main reason for God changing the past, God might still want to leave Gittel with some residue shame, in order to serve the additional purpose of soul-building: Gittel might thereby be more modest or less judgmental. This provides a new account of what the garlic peel might be—a false memory with a certain utility. This might also be closer to the Izhbitza’s meaning, since—on his presentation—the garlic peel seems to exist in the mind of the ex-sinner, and not only in the mind of God (although the text is ambiguous on that point).

26  Goldschmidt and I are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that hyper-foreknowledge might not be up to the task, and for recommending a kind of middle knowledge.

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Redeeming the Past  267 Even if the relevant memories are deleted, there is still some added benefit in deleting or amputating the sin as well as the memory. If the sin is deleted, there would be less total evil, since the evil of the sin would have been removed. If the sin is transferred, there would be less total evil, since it would no longer be a sin, or else it would serve a cosmic purpose (in the case of a cosmic mop). In short, shame-removal wouldn’t be God’s only motive for changing the past, via deletion or amputation. Even if God’s changing the past leaves us with no memories of how things hyper-used to be, his changing the past would still secure more good than his merely changing our memories would have done. In chan­ ging the past, God can simultaneously affect both shame and evil reduction.

8.2.10.  Sophistry and Night Terrors The strongest objection to UF, NME, agent substitution, and the Divine Proof­ reader Theory is the implausibility and sophistry they seem to evince. This objection is motivated by the vivid reality of evil in our world that causes us to look askance upon philosophical theories that try to write that evil away. You can tell me that suffering is merely a hyper-temporary phase and that it hyper-will be the case that nobody ever experienced any pain, but that’s scant consolation to victims of pain and suffering in the hyper-present. I recognize the strength of this objection. The philosophical machinery deployed in this chapter isn’t as persuasive a defense of God as our very real pain and suffering seem to be an indictment of him. But the key attitude underlying Jewish eschatology is hope. There is no denying that the pain and suffering we see around us is a real and vivid evil. But an appreciation of the metaphysics of time can help us to see that even in the midst of this darkness the theist can have reason to hope. The philosopher can appreciate that the fundamental structure of reality might be very different to how it seems, and this appreciation can ground a real and significant hope that what seems to be real evil will, from a different perspective, one hyper-day, seem to be as insignificant as garlic peel. Gabriel Citron develops a different theodicy. He writes (Citron, 2015, p. 249): When we wake up after having had a nightmare—no matter how much we may have dreamt that we suffered—we are often filled entirely with relief, and do not consider ourselves to have actually suffered very much at all. And since it is epistemically possible that this whole life is simply a dream, it follows that it is epistemically possible that in reality there is very little suffering at all, despite what seems so plainly to be the case. In short: for all we know, when we die we are really “waking up”, and all the sufferings of this life will seem as utterly insignificant as the sufferings of nightmares often do upon waking . . .

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268  The Principles of Judaism My eschatological hope isn’t that we’ll wake up to realize that we’d only been dreaming until now. I’m pretty convinced that I’m awake!27 But Citron’s point is important and can carry over to the theories developed in this chapter. Our critics would be right to say that pain and suffering in the hyper-present are truly terrible evils. But we have had experiences of waking up from terrible nightmares. And however real that suffering was, whilst we were asleep, with the relief of waking up, we don’t look back at our sleeping selves as if we were really suffering, or (if there was suffering) that the suffering was at all severe. Nightmares are certainly unpleasant, but waking up is a relief that all but washes away the suffering; only a garlic peel remains. Citron writes (ibid., p. 255): [O]ne criterion of horrific suffering is . . . that—if it is remembered—it entails at least some consequent suffering (anxiety, bitterness, brokenness, or any number of other negative after-effects). Thus, if it is possible to undergo a very intense nightmare and then simply to shake it off in the morning without a second thought, it is highly implausible to think that the dreaming of that nightmare was anything like a horrific suffering . . .

Once God has changed the past, and we look back at our hyper-past suffering, I think it will be very similar to the person who looks back at a nightmare. And though I’m not advancing Citron’s theodicy, because I don’t see much religious value in the skeptical possibility that we’re not really awake right now, I do want to point out three similarities between my position and Citron’s. (1) Neither of us deny the horror of human suffering, but we do believe that it’s metaphysically possible that we will go through a transformation (for Citron, waking up, for Goldschmidt and me, history itself will transform), and this transformation will render that suffering somehow unreal in retrospect; (2) the experience of waking up from a nightmare can help us to recognize that such transformations are possible; and (3) we both draw hope from our respective theories even if we’re not convinced that they’re true. As Citron puts it (ibid., p. 270): This idea first occurred to me on a recent Day of Atonement, when I read the line of the liturgy which envisages a time when “all evil will disappear like smoke”. It struck me that this is a perfect description of what happens when we wake up from a nightmare: the terrible sufferings which had beset us and which had seemed so real, simply dissipate in the light of day, vanishing into nothingness 27  Having said that, it would be interesting to sketch the Jewish precedents for Citron’s view. In the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Taanit 23a, Choni HaMe’aggel reads Psalms 126:1 as suggesting that the seventy-year exile in Babylon felt to those who returned from it like nothing more than a bad dream. But then he wonders whether it’s possible for a dream to last, even if only subjectively (within the dream’s internal narrative), for seventy years. And thus, he seems to be thinking that the exile really was a dream, and not that it just felt like one!

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Redeeming the Past  269 and insignificance. For all we know—I thought—this is exactly what will happen with all our suffering. And since this is epistemically possible, it follows that— contrary to the claims of arguments from evil—it is epistemically possible that there is a God . . . I prefer to leave it as it is—a defense of the possibility of hope: hope that God exists, hope that goodness is not alien to the world, and hope that injustice and suffering do not have the final word, or perhaps much of a word at all. After all, the psalmist commended no more than this when he said [Psalms 27:14]: “Hope to the Lord, be strong and your heart will be given courage—and hope to the Lord!”

You may think that a Scene-Changing Theory is implausible, but existence itself is implausible. At least the Scene-Changing Theory can give us reason to hope; to hope that one hyper-day there never will have been any pain at all.

8.3.  Happily Ever Before Way back in chapter 2, section 2.2.2, I issued a promissory note. I said that by the end of chapter 8, we would be in a position to substantiate Saadya Gaon’s argument for the existence of a first moment. Now it’s time to fill that argument in. The Scene-Changing Theory allows for a number of variations. It requires hyper-presentism about hypertime, but it allows for any theory of time, providing it is committed to the existence of the past (that is to say, it is compatible with the growing block or falling branches theories, the moving spotlight, and eternalism). All the Scene-Changing Theory requires is this: the past exists, the hyper-past doesn’t, and the spacetime block, including the past, can change over the course of hypertime. With this in mind, let us now return to Saadya Gaon’s argument for the existence of a first moment (which we saw in chapter 2, section 2.2.2): 1. Assume that there are an infinite series of past times. 2. It isn’t possible to complete an infinite series. 3. Therefore, it isn’t possible to complete the series of past times. 4. If it isn’t possible to complete the series of past times, then presentness would never have reached us. 5. Therefore, presentness would never have reached us. 6. But presentness has reached us. 7. Therefore, there is no infinite series of past times. 8. If there is no infinite series of past times, then there was a first moment of time. 9. Therefore, there was a first moment of time.

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270  The Principles of Judaism In chapter 2, section 2.2.2, we saw that the presentist and the standard B-theorist might have the resources to block this argument. But how does Saadya’s argument stand up in the face of the Scene-Changing Theory? If your Scene-Changing Theory includes a growing block, falling branches, or a moving spotlight, then your theory is a non-presentistic A-theory. It posits an objective present that moves. The present can’t have completed an infinitely long journey, and so there must have been a first moment. Accordingly, for many scene-changers, Saadya Gaon’s argument must be endorsed. But what if your Scene-Changing Theory is the combination of eternalism and hyper-presentism? On this combination of views, all times exist and no time is objectively the present—in that respect, your theory is a B-theory, but—as a scenechanger—you will accept that the timeline as a whole is subject to change over the course of hypertime. Since this is a Scene-Changing Theory of time, we have no reason to think that God wouldn’t have chosen to create time in this way. But this particular combination of views doesn’t think that there’s a property called presentness that has to move over the face of time. Consequently, this combination of views allows that there could have been no first moment in time. Saadya’s argument can be rejected by eternalist scene-changers. But still, you could generate a similar argument—not for a beginning to time, but at least for a beginning to hypertime. Even if the universe is infinitely extended in time, it cannot be infinitely extended in hypertime—and thus, somewhere there is a beginning. The argument would look like this: 1*. Assume that there are an infinite series of hyper-past hypertimes. 2*. It isn’t possible to complete an infinite series. 3*. Therefore, it isn’t possible to complete the series of hyper-past hypertimes. 4*. If it isn’t possible to complete the series of hyper-past hypertimes, then hyper-presentness would never have reached us. 5*. Therefore, hyper-presentness would never have reached us. 6*. But hyper-presentness has reached us. 7*. Therefore, there is no infinite series of hyper-past hypertimes. 8*. If there is no infinite series of hyper-past hypertimes, then there was a first hyper-moment of hypertime. 9*. Therefore, there hyper-was a first hyper-moment of hypertime. But perhaps an eternalist scene-changer will deny argument 1*–9*. Scene-changers are hyper-presentists. Hyper-presentism contends that hyper-past moments are not real, and so an infinite sequence of them can’t be so problematic. They are not the sort of completed actual infinity that line 2* would rightly rule out. For the same reason that presentists wouldn’t accept 1–9, hyper-presentists shouldn’t accept 1*–9*. An infinitely long hyper-past, for a hyper-presentist, wouldn’t be cashed out in  terms of the existence of an infinite number of hyper-past moments. For a

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Redeeming the Past  271 hyper-presentist, the assumption of 1* is false and its falsehood has nothing to do with whether or not the hyper-past is infinitely long; there are no hyper-past moments. And yet an eternalist scene-changer does have reason to think that the hyper-past has a finite length. Not because of argument 1*–9*, but in light of the following argument: 10. Nothing can have completed an infinite sequence of changes.28 11. If the hyper-past is infinitely long, then time itself has undergone an infinite sequence of changes. 12. Therefore the hyper-past is not infinitely long. There is no reason to posit a hypertime if one doesn’t think that time itself undergoes change. The number of hypertimes a person might have reason to posit is directly related to the number of changes that time itself is thought to have undergone. So, even if you deny that time requires change, it seems plausible that hypertime does require the change of time.29 10–12 should convince an eternalist scene-changer. Theists should be scene-changers, because it would make sense for God to create a world with a changeable past that can be improved over the course of hypertime. Moreover, all scene-changers have to accept that the universe has some sort of temporal or hyper-temporal beginning—either via argument 1–9, which should convince all scene-changers other than eternalist scene-changers, or via 10–12. And thus, our reflections on the eschaton have helped us to stand up our argument, from chapter 2 (section 2.2.2), for the beginning of time (or at least a beginning to hypertime). The rabbis talk of God’s having created repentance before creating the world (e.g., Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nedarim 39b). Initially it seems bizarre to say such a thing. Repentance can’t exist without sinners. But now we can say this:

28  You might reject this premise, thinking that supertasks are possible (although see footnote 24 above). But even if you do believe in the possibility of supertasks, I’d insist that you should accept my argument (i.e., 10–12). As a believer in supertasks, you’ll think that a Zeno series can be completed (in part) because a Zeno series has finite limits even if it has no first and/or last members. Accordingly, you’ll think that there’s no problem with Achilles crossing infinitely many distinct, non-overlapping distances, so long as the distances get shorter and shorter and Achilles doesn’t slow down. The distances sum up to a finite limit. If Achilles doesn’t slow down, he will cross that limit. But this argument (i.e., 10 -12) concerns a series of discrete changes, whose infinite members do not sum up to a finite limit, since there is no sense whatsoever in which this series has a starting limit (a limit being a point at which the infinite sequence converges). This is not a Zeno series. And thus, even a believer in supertasks should be able to formulate this argument in such a way as to render it sound. Thanks to Dean Zimmerman for discussion of this point. 29  Sydney Shoemaker (1969) developed arguments to suggest that time can coherently be said to pass while nothing changes. But there is no obvious way to extend his arguments, which revolve around certain thought-experiments, to hypertime, and thus, no reason to think that hypertime can pass without change occurring to the timeline, or that there can be empty hypertimes with no timeline present.

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272  The Principles of Judaism God created repentance before he created the world in that he chose, at the outset of his creation, a metaphysics for time that would allow for real atonement; namely, a scene-changing model of time. To conclude: a theist has grounds to hope for God’s ultimate salvation. We can’t know exactly how the eschaton will look. Indeed, regarding its finer details, Orthodox Judaism counsels us to wait and see. But we do have reason, nevertheless, to hope that God’s salvation will redeem not merely our future, but also our present and our past. In this hope lies the best response to the pervasive problem of evil. This hope is the foundation of Jewish faith in a God who is, despite the burning evil, injustice, pain, and suffering of our hyper-present, looked up to as a steadfast source of providential care. This hope is underwritten by a philosophy of time that allows for the improvement of the past. ‫ ִקּוִ ִיתי יְ הוָ ה‬,‫לִ יׁשּועָ ְתָך‬ For your salvation, I hope, O Lord (Gen. 49:18)

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9

Conclusions Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief

What exactly are the fundamental doctrines that can make sense of continued commitment to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle? What minimal attitude towards those doctrines entails that you are a religious (Orthodox) Jew? What does it even mean to be religious? This chapter looks to answer those questions.

9.1. Summary R. Albo suggested that the existence of any truly divine law would rely upon three general principles: (1) that God exists; (2) that revelation occurs; and (3) that God ensures appropriate rewards and punishments for all agents. The creation doesn’t actually feature in R. Albo’s list of fundamental principles. Rather, it appears—in his system—among the roots and branches. Kalamic philosophy, by contrast, tends to start from the doctrine of creation, rather than from the bare assertion of God’s existence. Given that we’re after an understanding of the essence of Judaism (rather than the notion of a divine law in the abstract— which was R. Albo’s starting point), and given that we’re interested in religiosity, I would side with the Kalamic philosophers here, but not for Kalamic reasons. Kalamic philosophers derive God’s existence, and many of his attributes, only through a cosmological argument. Belief in the creation comes first, and then we learn about the creator through it. I contend that creation has to come first for other reasons. To believe in God, but not to relate to him as your creator, is to rip the very soul out of the distinctively Jewish attitude we are supposed to bear in our hearts towards God. He isn’t just an ontological posit. He is our maker. And thus, when I put forward the three principles of Judaism, I embed some of what R. Albo related to merely as “roots” and “branches” into the body of his principles. In chapter 1, those three principles—so embellished—were stated as follows: (1) the universe is the creation of one God; (2) the Torah is a divine system of laws and wisdom, revealed to us by the creator of the universe; and (3) the creator exercises providential care over his creation, manifest in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, reward and punishment for human action, and in the The Principles of Judaism. Samuel Lebens, Oxford University Press (2020). © Samuel Lebens. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843252.001.0001

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274  The Principles of Judaism promise of ultimate salvation. Now that we’ve completed the journey of this book, in search of the most plausible rendering of this set of principles, they have become: Principle 1: Outside of any narrative, the universe is an idea in the mind of God. This idea was created ex nihilo. In the story of this world, relative to which it is a physical world, we know that the timeline (or, at least, the hyper-timeline) must have had a beginning. Accordingly, even in the story of this world, we should accept that there was a creatio originalis (or, at least, a creatio hyper-originalis). We have no reason to deny the claim that that creation, in the story, was ex nihilo, and we have good reason to deny that it was ex materia, since we reject the notion of formless matter. The next two principles are stated relative to what goes on within the story: Principle 2: At an event at Sinai, God gave an endorsement to a religious tradition that would evolve among the nation of Israel. That tradition would come to view the Pentateuch as a sacred written constitution, never to be amended (at least not without a second Sinai-like event). His endorsement demands that, today, we should relate to the Pentateuch as if it were dictated word for word by God to man (which, perhaps, it really was). Whether or not this is an historically accurate account of the genesis of the Pentateuch (which, perhaps, it really is), God foresaw that the religious tradition stemming from Sinai would (at least) evolve to endorse this attitude as central to its very identity. Accordingly, even if God didn’t write the Pentateuch word for word (which he may well have done), it is as if God has now appropriated the text of the Pentateuch as his own, by his very appearance at Sinai. The Pentateuchal text is only one part of the Torah. That which is fixed is the words; not their interpretation. God also endorsed, at Sinai, the process of evolving traditions and interpretations that the faithful of Israel would develop over time, including their relationship with other books of the Bible. There may be wrong turns from time to time, but guided by ruach hakosdesh (the holy spirit of God), the general trajectory is such that the unfolding content of the revelation, through the religiously observant communities of the Jewish people, brings the content of the Earthly Torah ever closer to the content of the Heavenly Torah. Principle 3: God is a good and powerful God. He oversees his creation, sustaining it in being, and he ensures that people are rewarded for the good that they have done, and punished for the bad. We hope for the coming of the Messiah, who will live up, at least, to the requirements set out by Maimonides. Moreover, we have reason to hope that God’s salvation will redeem not merely our future from all remnant of pain, injustice, and suffering, but also that his salvation will redeem our present and our past.

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  275

9.2.  My Thesis To the extent that these principles are necessary for making sense of commitment to Judaism, I argue that you cannot be considered faithful to the tenets of Judaism without holding an attitude of faith towards some element of each of the three principles, as follows: F1. One must have faith that there is one God who created the universe. One needn’t have faith in the other elements of principle 1 (i.e., Hassidic Idealism and creatio ex nihilo). This book has merely tried to argue for the conclusion that those elements fall out of the most plausible interpretation of God’s being the creator of our universe. F2. One must have faith that principle 2 is true in its entirety (although one has some leeway over how literally and non-reductively one wants to relate to the notion of a Heavenly Torah. I suggest that we relate to it as a simple impure abstractum, but Orthodoxy doesn’t stand or fall on such a claim). F3. One must have faith in God’s messianic promise, at least as delineated by Maimonides’ requirements, and have faith in God’s being a good and powerful source of providential care. You needn’t endorse a scene-changing philosophy of time. I merely argue that such a theory falls out of the most plausible eschatology. And, indeed, a good case can be made for the necessity of F1–F3 for Orthodox Judaism. If you don’t live up to F1, then you will not be relating to God in a distinctively Jewish way. Your Judaism could slip into some sort of pantheism, or into a deeply impersonal theism.1 If you don’t live up to F2, then you may have slipped into a non-Orthodox Judaism, or even into some entirely non-Jewish form of monotheism. If you don’t live up to F3, then you will have divested yourself of the historical national aspirations of all religious Jews. By denying God’s providence, you may have slipped into deism. Moreover, if you require less from a Messiah than does Maimonides, then you may have slipped into some form of Christianity or Sabbateanism. And yet, perhaps other axiomatizations of Judaism are possible. My project hasn’t been to propose a catechism. My project has been to suggest a minimal set of propositions that can make sense of commitment to an Orthodox Jewish life. Accordingly, what’s really crucial to my project is that any set of plausibly consistent attitudes that contains F1–F3 will be jointly sufficient for being a faithful Jew.2 1  Maimonides didn’t think that God was a person, but he did think that God’s creating the world demonstrated that God has free will and agenthood (even if those terms are applied equivocally to God). 2 What I mean here by “plausibly consistent” is that the set of attitudes can’t contain obvious ­contradictions. You can’t have faith that God created the world, alongside faith that there is no God. But I can’t demand true consistency, since I imagine that very few people have beliefs and attitudes that are, from the perspective of omniscience, consistent.

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276  The Principles of Judaism And they are. A Jew who lives up to F1–F3 has every reason to dedicate their lives to the service of God as this is understood by some segment or other of contemporary Orthodox Judaism. But you’ll notice that claims F1–F3 don’t speak of belief. They only speak of faith. To have faith that p is true isn’t necessarily to believe it. Orthodox Judaism requires faith from its adherents. Belief—I argue in the next section—isn’t to be confused with faith. Indeed, I shall argue that (1) Orthodox Judaism requires faith rather than belief, and that (2) Jewish religiosity requires something in addition to faith: not belief, but make-belief. Moreover, I shall argue that (3), the demands of religiosity place certain constraints upon what could plausibly constitute principles of Judaism.

9.3.  Orthodoxy and the Nature of Faith A religious person is a person of faith. According to Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013), faith that p (i.e., propositional faith) has four ingredients: (i) A positive evaluation of p. (ii) A positive conative orientation towards p. (iii) A positive cognitive attitude towards p. (iv) Resilience to counter-evidence for p. To afford p a positive evaluation is Howard-Snyder’s way of saying that you think that p is the sort of thing that people should want to be true. Some time ago, I wrote a paper on the nature of faith (Lebens, 2017a). An anonymous reviewer raised a worthy objection to Howard-Snyder’s first ingredient. “Why can’t I have ‘faith’,” the reviewer asked, “that my son’s basketball team will win their game—even though I don’t at all expect the opposing teams’ parents to want it to be true?” I can imagine two lines of response. (1)  It might be possible to have faith in such situations, but somehow blameworthy. Just as it’s possible but blameworthy to have beliefs without sufficient evidence, it might be possible but blameworthy to have faith that p without affording p a positive evaluation, or while wrongly affording p a positive evaluation. You can certainly have blameless faith that your son will do his best, but to have faith that he’ll win is to have faith that equally worthy others will lose, and thus perhaps faith is the wrong sort of attitude to have here. (2)  Some sports fans argue that it would be objectively good for their team to win out over others. When Leicester City won the Premier League (2015–16), it

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  277 was said to be a good thing for English football, in that it demonstrated what could be achieved by smaller clubs with fewer resources. Against tremendous odds, people had faith that Leicester would do it. And they did! The first option is more concessive. It accepts, against Howard-Snyder, that an appropriate positive evaluation is not constitutive of faith, but constitutive only of appropriate faith. The second response is more strident. A person only really has faith that p when, rightly or wrongly, they afford it a positive evaluation. In his second ingredient, Howard-Snyder gesticulates towards the difference between wanting something intrinsically and wanting something instrumentally.3 The mother in the midst of an agonizing cancer treatment may no longer care, in and of herself, whether she lives or dies, but she must at least have some relevant desire, perhaps the desire to be there for her children as they grow up, if we’re to make sense of the claim that she has faith that she’ll survive (Howard-Snyder, 2013, p. 363). And thus, to have a positive conative orientation towards p is either to want p to be true, intrinsically, or, as in the case of the suffering mother, to want its truth indirectly, or instrumentally. To have faith that p doesn’t merely require the thought that people should want p to be true. It also requires the person of faith to want it to be true for themselves. Here is a putative counterexample to this second ingredient. Let p be the proposition that you will never again take heroin. You might want p to be false, since, as a recovering drug addict, you might want, against your better judgment, to continue taking drugs. You might nevertheless have faith that p (despite wanting it to be false). But you still have faith, at least as long as your higher-order desire not to want to take heroin remains stronger than your lower-order desire to take it. A positive conative orientation will have to be an overall desire for the truth of a proposition—intrinsically or instrumentally—all things considered. A positive-cognitive attitude, Howard-Snyder’s third ingredient, is some non-0 credence. But how much credence do you need? Howard-Snyder thinks that you have a positive cognitive attitude toward p even if you only think that p is the least unlikely of the relevant options. And thus, however exactly we’re to define this attitude, it’s certain that there are contexts in which we can say that a person has faith, without it being appropriate to say that they have belief. This seems right. Faith must be compatible with doubt, as is well captured by Daniel McKaughan (2013, pp. 106–7):

3  He doesn’t use this distinction explicitly, but it certainly seems to be what he’s gunning for. I’m grateful to Simon Hewitt for pointing this out to me.

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278  The Principles of Judaism Faith is clearly not incompatible with a persistent sense of uncertainty, dark nights of the soul, or a pervasive sense of the hiddenness of God . . . If deep, sincere, and wholehearted faith coexists with doubt in the lived experience of many religiously committed persons and can do so in a relatively stable way despite fluctuating levels of confidence, surely this fact is one that any adequate account of faith ought to be able to accommodate. Belief-plus models [which insist that faith always requires belief] define faith in such a way as to preclude significant doubt, yet faith appears to be compatible with doubt in a way or to an extent that belief is not.

Belief isn’t necessary. The earliest attempt at a rabbinic catechism (Mishna Sanhedrin 10:1) condemns a person for saying that the Torah isn’t from heaven, or that the resurrection will not occur. The rabbis condemn the disbeliever for believing, or perhaps merely for saying, that central religious claims are false.4 It doesn’t condemn them for not being fully convinced. A person of faith, after all, can have doubts. This leads us to the fourth ingredient of faith. I said that there are contexts in which faith can be attributed to a person, but in which belief cannot be comfortably attributed. The idea is simply that the minimal degree of confidence picked out by the word “belief ” often (but not always) differs from the minimal degree of confidence picked out by the word “faith.” These things are context-sensitive. It’s similar to the way in which the precise height picked out by the word “tall” can differ from conversation to conversation. The height that makes a basketball player tall is not the height that makes an Ashkenazi rabbi tall. “Faith” and “belief ” do pick out, in any given conversation, a requisite degree of confidence; but that degree can shift from conversation to conversation; just as “tall” picks out a minimum height, but the height in question shifts from conversations concerning basketball players to conversations concerning Ashkenazi rabbis. Most importantly for our purposes: the degree picked out by “faith” is often lower than the degree picked out by “belief,” in a given context. This gives rise to two conclusions: (1) faith doesn’t require belief, and (2) faith will often be more resilient than belief, since it often doesn’t require as high a threshold of confidence as does belief. In the words of Rabbi Norman Lamm (2006, p. 15): “Emunah [i.e. faith] is thus a dialectical process, not an established fact, an inner encounter between ‘yes’ and ‘maybe,’ between the exclamation point and the question mark.”5 Accordingly, my beliefs will shift much more readily than my faith, and so they should. I can heartily endorse the attitude that the eighty-year-old Bertrand 4  For more on this early catechism, including an even more deflationary reading of it, see chapter 7, footnote 42. 5  Thanks to R. Michael Harris for reminding me of R. Lamm’s rich essay.

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  279 Russell manifested when he described his life, until that point, as “eighty years of changing beliefs and unchanging hopes.”6 Bear in mind that sometimes, in conversation, people use the word “belief ” colloquially, especially in religious contexts, to pick out what Howard-Snyder calls propositional faith. Classical Hebrew has no clear way to mark the distinction between faith and belief. Both are sometimes called Emunah (‫)אמונה‬. But note that, notwithstanding, it is Howard-Snyder-type faith, rather than belief, that religions typically demand towards their creed. If you believe in the tenets of a religion, but you do so only begrudgingly, hoping them to be false, then there is something fatally awry at the heart of your religious psychology. But if your heart is aligned, and yet you suffer from cognitive doubts, then your faith may be in crisis, but your faith is still alive. Faith is the epistemic attitude that Orthodox Judaism demands.

9.4.  Religiosity and Make-Belief Having laid out the fundamental principles of Judaism, and explained the attitude that Orthodoxy requires towards those principles, the main job of this chapter—and indeed, the main job of this book—has already been accomplished. In what remains of this chapter, I want to distinguish between what Orthodox Judaism requires doctrinally, what it requires socially, and the extra something required for genuine religiosity. Ultimately, I shall argue, an axiomatization of Judaism can only be warranted if it can hope to inculcate religiosity among its adherents. “Religiosity” can helpfully be divided into three senses. One sense is purely sociological. You are religious if you belong to a religious community. Such belonging might be contingent upon certain outward signs of compliance with religious doctrine and law, but nothing more. Borrowing from the Yiddish, Jewish people will often call a person who is religious, in this sense, “frum.” I call this first notion: social-frumkeit. Some people are even quite open about the fact that, for them, religiosity is about nothing more than social-frumkeit (Lefkowitz, 2014). The other senses of “religiosity” have to do with the psychological and spiritual condition of the homo religiosus. The first of these I call sincere-frumkeit. Sincerefrumkeit is what you have if you have faith in the tenets of your religion. The final category I simply call religiosity. Even in cases of the sincerest forms of frumkeit, sincerely frum people often achieve real religiosity only fleetingly. How does this elusive notion of religiosity differ from sincere-frumkeit?

6  51 seconds into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb3k6tB-Or8.

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280  The Principles of Judaism According to the Jewish tradition, the Bible contains 613 commandments. Obviously, one of the essential ingredients of a religious Jewish life is going to be halakhic observance. Part of Jewish religiosity is to strive with every fiber of one’s being to obey and to fulfill these commandments. Nevertheless, although the effort to be halakhically observant might be sufficient to help you gain entrance into certain segments of frum society, it won’t be sufficient to make you religious. In the book of Leviticus (19:2), the Torah commands the Jewish people to be holy.7 Nahmanides, in his classic commentary to this verse, goes out of his way to explain why this commandment was necessary. One might think that if you keep all of the other 612 commandments, if and when they pertain to you, then you’d be holy by default. Given that assumption, you might think it bizarre that the Torah then commands you, in addition to the other 612 commandments, to be holy. Nahmanides contends that the assumption is simply false: it is possible to be a disgusting creature with the permission of the Torah. That’s to say: you can keep all of the other commandments that you’re commanded in, and still somehow fall short. You can be frum—certainly socially-frum, and perhaps even sincerely frum— and yet lacking. In order to define religiosity, we have to explore this extra ingredient that we’re supposed to strive for above and beyond halakhic observance narrowly conceived. We’re supposed to strive for holiness. So, what is holiness? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel points out that in Judaism, we less often speak of a person being a believer than we speak of them being a yore shamayim—as somebody who stands in awe of the heavens; or a yore Hashem—somebody who stands in awe of God.8 Awe seems to play an even more central role than epistemological commitment in the constitution of a religious Jew. Howard Wettstein was inspired by this insight to reflect upon the nature of awe. He describes four examples of awe that people experience in their everyday lives (Wettstein, 2012, p. 30): 1. Awe at natural grandeur: “the feeling of an astronaut standing on the moon, or somebody powerfully moved by the night sky at the top of a mountain, or a relevantly similar ocean experience.” 2. Awe at human grandeur: “awe at the power of people to find inner resources in horrible circumstances, awe at human goodness and caring . . . powerful responses to great art . . . or to great achievements in science, mathematics, philosophy.” 3. Awe at the birth of one’s children: to witness the birth of a child is an awesome experience. Wettstein points out that this category of awe might be a combination of the first two categories: there is the awe of nature, and there’s also the awe inspired by the woman who managed to bring new life into the world. 7  At least, this is the classical Jewish understanding of the verse. 8  “Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew” (Heschel, 1955, p. 77).

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  281 4. Awe of type 1 compounded by awe of type 2: “For example, one at the top of the mountain, awestruck not only by the overwhelming beauty and majesty of nature, but also by the fact that humans, constructed of the stuff of the mountain, can take such a thing in, and indeed that we can feel awe at it.” Wettstein (2012, p. 33) makes an interesting suggestion: “For many people, and not only those who would consider themselves religious, there is something holy about the objects of awe experience—childbirth, a great symphony, the Grand Canyon. There is, moreover, a feeling of horror associated with the thought of destroying such objects, events, and so on. To do so—even to allow such a thing—would be sacrilege.” Even if you were an atheist, you might find it appropriate to use words associated with sanctity—such as holiness—when talking about objects of awe. Attitudes of awe towards an object seem to go hand in hand with the appropriateness of calling that object holy.9 We can flesh this idea out by looking at three Midrashim. Our first Midrash comes from Exodus Rabba (38:7): Rabbi Hannina said: A holy one will come and enter into the holy place, and sacrifice before the Holy One, and atone for the holy people. A holy one will come—this refers to Aaron [the priest], as it is said: “Aaron the holy one of the Lord” (Psalm 106:16). And enter into the holy place—this refers to the Sanctuary, as it is said: “The Sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established” [the word for “Sanctuary” here—mikdash—shares its root with the word for holiness] (Exodus 15:17). And sacrifice before the Holy One—this refers to the Holy One, Blessed be He, as it is said, “for Holy am I, the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:2). And atone for the holy people—this refers to the Israelites, as it is said, “You shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:2).

There’s certainly a poetic quality to Rabbi Hannina’s statement, with its rhythmic repetition of the word “holy,” but there doesn’t seem to be any new idea here. We know that the service of the priest in the Temple was aimed at atoning for the sins of the Israelites. The hidden significance of his statement lies in the proof-texts used to substantiate his use of the word “holy.” The verse in Psalms that refers to Aaron as holy (Psalm 106:16) is supposed to anchor the first use. The fact that the Torah refers to the Sanctuary as the mikdash is supposed to anchor the second use

9  Now, you might think that a sports star, or a film star, is awesome without thinking them to be holy. I would want to argue that here we’ve slipped into a derivative, and distinctly modern, slang, sense of the word “awesome”; one not so linked to the attitude of wonder (but linked simply to admir­ ation and appreciation). Slang awe isn’t linked to holiness. Real awe is.

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282  The Principles of Judaism (Exodus 15:17). That God calls himself holy in Leviticus (19:2) is supposed to anchor the third use. The fourth use is supposed to be anchored by the fact that the Jewish people were told, “You shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:2). It barely needs proving that Aaron, or the Sanctuary, or God himself are holy, and yet the verses offered are incontrovertible. The only proof-text that doesn’t seem convincing is the one that we needed the most. How do we know that the Jewish people are holy? The source that the Midrash provides is far from convincing. The fact that we’re commanded to be holy doesn’t mean that we are holy. In fact, if anything, it’s an indication that we’re not yet holy, or that our holiness is at risk. If our holiness were assured, why would we need this commandment? Other wellknown verses, such as Deuteronomy 14:21, would have been more convincing. Leviticus 19:12, as a proof-text for the holiness of Israel, by contrast, introduces a surprising note of contingency into the picture that Rabbi Hannina sketches. The Midrash seems to be alluding to the mutuality of holiness. Somehow, none of the characters in this quartet—God, the Jewish people, Aaron, and the Temple—can be holy without the other. They seem to be in a dance with one another; dependent upon one another. In this Midrash, God’s name is The Holy One, and, thus, even by its lights, there is a sense in which God is defined by his essential property of holiness. But the Midrash also seems to be introducing us to another variety of holiness—holiness as a relational property. This new type of holiness isn’t an essential property, but something that is bestowed upon another by the attitude that is held towards it. Because we are all awestruck by the Grand Canyon, it becomes holy—because God sanctifies the seventh day, it becomes holy.10 There needs to be an act of sanctification. To be holy, in this new sense of the word at least, you need to be made holy by another. The Jewish people make God holy (see Leviticus 22:32 and Ezekiel 20:41).11 It is strange to think that slaughtering animals in a tent, in the middle of a desert, is inherently holy. Is my putting phylacteries on in the morning saturated with holiness if, in all other respects, I’m a reprehensible person? It might make me frum, but does it make me religious? Subversively, the Midrash seems to be suggesting that, in a sense, Aaron and the Temple and the service of the Temple (and even God himself) are not holy unless the Jewish people are holy. Conversely, the Jewish people can’t be holy without Aaron and the Temple and the Temple service. Many Jews feel that the key message of their Jewish heritage is to love the widow and the orphan and to engage in social justice. If you’re doing all that, they

10  Genesis 2:3. 11 Clearly, God has an essential holiness that’s unimpeachable and disconnected from human reach. Here we must be appealing to a different species of holiness; a species which is accidental to God and acquired by him in light of human actions.

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  283 might contend, then you don’t need the other commandments.12 This Midrash addresses them. They might be wonderfully good and decent people, but there will be some sense in which they won’t be holy. Holiness is a package deal. There is a quartet: the priest (who can represent all ritual activity), the place, God, and the people. In a magical moment of joint attention, when all of the pieces fit together, in that moment, holiness emerges collectively. If you view God with awe, and therefore make him holy, he will reciprocate, and you will be holy too. If you view the commandments with awe, then they will become holy, and they, in turn, will make you holy. Rashi, in his commentary to Leviticus 19:2, says that to be holy is to distance oneself from sins of a sexual nature. For Nahmanides, to be holy isn’t merely to run away from the desires of the flesh. To be holy is to be an upright and decent human being. But have we understood Rashi correctly? One of Rashi’s sourcetexts was a Midrash from Leviticus Rabba (24:6). In a shocking part, which Rashi doesn’t quote, it is asked why Elisha the prophet was called “holy” by the Shunamite woman: Rabbi Joshua, son of Levi, brought a proof from the case of the Shunamite woman. This is what is written (II King 4:9): “And she said to her husband, Behold now, I  know that he is a holy man of God.” Rabbi Jonah said: [“he is a holy man” implies that] he was a holy man, but that his servants were not holy. As it is written (II Kings 4): “Gehazi [Elisha’s servant] came near to push her away”—in pushing her away, he touched her breasts.13 Rabbi Eivon says that [the fact that the Shunamite woman called Elisha holy] proves that he never once gazed at her. And, the Rabbis say that she [the Shunamite woman] never once found a nocturnal emission on his bed sheets.

The Shunamite woman calls Elisha holy because he didn’t grope her. This places the bar absurdly low. If you don’t sexually molest somebody, then you’re holy?! Surely Elisha’s claim to holiness was much loftier than that. This is how the Midrash begins: Rabbi Judah, son of Pazi, said: Why are the commandments concerning illicit sexual relations (Leviticus 18) juxtaposed with the laws of holiness (Leviticus 19)? Only to teach you that wherever you find people erecting barriers against

12  Albert Einstein (2007, p. 90) adds another few details to the list when he says, “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence—these are features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my lucky stars that I belong to it.” 13  This is inferred from a play on words that doesn’t easily translate. The verb used in the verse for pushing away is leHodfa, and the Midrash reads into this the words beHod yofYah, which means, “the majesty of her beauty.”

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284  The Principles of Judaism sexual licentiousness, there too will you find holiness . . . all those who erect barriers against sexual licentiousness are called holy.

Let’s take this view—which seems to be Rashi’s view—seriously, and let’s ask why: why does holiness come hand in hand with preventative measures against sexual licentiousness? In order to answer this question, let’s go back to Wettstein’s point about holiness. Holiness is associated with awe. It’s associated with an attitude or a posture towards the world. If you could bottle that feeling that you have when you’re at the Grand Canyon, and adopt that attitude towards all people, objects, and events, then you would see holiness all around you; and, given the reciprocity of holiness that we saw alluded to in our first Midrash, you too would become holy. So, why is running away from desires of the flesh an essential component of this thing called holiness? Awe is a relatively easy bubble to burst. It's easy to make any situation feel absurd. All you have to do is to stand outside of the situation for a moment. An anecdote: I remember sitting in a fascinating class by a gifted teacher; the room was packed and I was thoroughly enjoying the content of the talk; when all of a sudden, looking at all of the people in the room, my attention was drawn to their heads, and I had the thought, “what a lot of skulls and brains there are in this room.” The thought completely ruined my experience. The room was transformed into a room full of skulls and brains. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. This is something that has fascinated existentialist philosophers: the ease with which a situation can be made to feel absurd. In fact, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea pays a great deal of attention to this phenomenon. The book follows a character, Antoine Roquentin, with the uncanny ability to make any experience feel absurd. And, we can do that too. You just have to try, for a moment, as it were, to stand outside of the situation that you’re in. What we do in those moments of perceived absurdity is to treat things merely as objects, and to strip them of their social statuses and their socially constructed properties. You treat a baseball bat just as a stick of wood, or a football as a bundle of pig skin, and then the whole surrounding social structure that is baseball or football just seems to collapse under the pressure of its own absurdity. There was a room full of people, but as soon as I saw them as skulls and brains, the situation became absurd. I didn’t see the people anymore. What you do when you make an experience absurd is to treat the things in that moment merely as objects. A cardinal example of objectification occurs in sexual sins. You see somebody that you find sexually attractive, and relate to them, not as a person, but as a desirable object. In the cases that the Torah mentions, the objectification often happens on two levels. When a brother and a sister sleep with each other—most of the illicit relationships listed in Leviticus are incestuous—objectification occurs— but they also ruin a pre-existing human relationship. You can’t be a brother and a

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  285 sister if you’re also lovers. The conventional familial nature of that relationship has to be shattered. Rashi’s idea might be this: the key to holiness is an attitude; this attitude is the antithesis of objectifying things. On this reading, Rashi’s position includes and goes beyond that of Nahmanides. If you were the kind of person who could never objectify another, not even in the realm of sexuality, where the temptation is greatest; if, when you went out to buy a piece of clothing, only to find out that it was a product of slave labor, you couldn’t bring yourself to buy it because you know that cheap labor isn’t just a resource, but is the degradation of other human beings; if you couldn’t bring yourself to buy factory-farmed meat because of the awe in which you hold the animal kingdom; if you’re holy because you see holiness in others, never failing to be struck by the prism of awe through which other people, and the entire created world, deserve to be viewed, then you simply can’t bring yourself to act in immoral ways. If you constantly adopt this attitude and this posture towards the world, then you couldn’t fail to be an ethical person. You’d be more than that, you’d be holy.14 William Kolbrener (2012) tells a story about helping an Ultra-Orthodox woman up many flights of stairs with heavy shopping. In that society, the genders live ever more segregated lives. Accordingly, she wouldn’t look at him to acknowledge him or to thank him. He talks about how sexualized such a society must be. Gender and sexuality has to be on your mind the whole time: don’t look; don’t look; don’t look. If you end up thinking like that, then you have forbidden matters on your mind almost constantly. The stereotypical Ultra-Orthodox reaction to sexuality is thus a cure that is so powerful that it brings back the original malady. People, once again, end up objectifying each other. As I understand Rashi, the factor that brings about holiness isn't prudishness, for that can go too far, but it is the refusal to turn another person into an object. If you become too prudish, you begin to objectify people once again. A society, like the Ultra-Orthodox communities that insist on having gender segregation on public transport, that reduces a woman to back-of-the-bus-fodder, so aware of a person’s gender, may be a frum society, sincerely so, but it is not a holy society. It is a society that objectifies people. It is a highly sexualized society. One more Midrash cements this view of holiness into place (Leviticus Rabba 14:5): “When a woman conceives . . .” (Leviticus 12:2). This relates to that which is written: “Behold, I was brought forth in sin [and in sin did my mother conceive me]” (Psalm 51:7). Rabbi Acha said, “Even if one be the most pious of the pious, it’s impossible that he should have no streak of iniquity in him.”

14  As Howard Wettstein put the point to me in conversation: awe gives rise to imperatives.

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286  The Principles of Judaism David said before the Holy One, Blessed be He, “Lord of the Universe! Did my father Jesse have the intention of bringing me into the world? Why, his only intention was personal enjoyment. The proof for this is that when they had both had their desires satisfied, he turned his face in one direction, and she turned her face in the opposite direction and it was you that caused every single drop to enter,” and this is what David meant when he said: “For when my father and my mother forsook me, the Lord did gather me in” (Psalm 27:10).

King David’s parents weren’t bothered to conceive that night. They were just interested in satiating their own desires, evidenced by the fact that they turned away from each other as soon as the act was done. It was God who caused the sperm to penetrate the egg, long after Jesse and his wife had finished what they had set out to do. It was God who gathered David in. But Jesse and his wife can’t be blamed for the fact that God was necessary for the conception to occur—presumably, on the world view of the Midrash, this is always the case. The sin here, it seems, was that they turned away from each other; evidence of the fact that this wasn’t a moment of deep interpersonal connection, but a moment of synchronized self-satisfaction. They were using one another. What would the remedy be to this? Had Jesse and his wife, after their physical satisfaction, looked meaningfully into one another’s eyes, and maybe even thought about the enormity of the situation that a child might be about to come into the world as a result of this holy union; had that been the dynamic of that moment, we wouldn’t have been able to say that David was conceived in sin. These Midrashim, read together, make a cumulative case for Wettstein’s approach to holiness. Holiness—or, at least one species of it—emerges when people behold the world, and everything in it, through the attitude of awe. You can be a good person without being holy. But you can’t be holy without being a good person. Elisha—in the rabbinic imagination—wasn’t merely holy because he refrained from molesting the Shunamite woman. Rather, the Midrash suggests, he was holy because such an act was the complete antithesis of his character. He saw the image of God reflected in every corner of the creation. He was unable to view anything without an attendant attitude of awe. It was, the Midrash suggests, impossible for him to reduce a human being into an object for physical gratification; he would not gaze at a woman’s body as if it were an inanimate work of art. Nocturnal emissions were impossible for him because sexuality was only ever relevant in the context of real interpersonal intimacy. This is what it means, according to the Midrash, to say that Elisha was holy. Most of us only reach this state fleetingly, when we are overcome by awe. Most of the time, sincerely frum people are trying to be religious. When they are filled with awe for God and his creation, and when that sensation is so overwhelming that they cannot possibly act in conflict with it, then, in those moments, they are

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  287 actually succeeding. And thus, we can see the distinction between sincere-frumkeit and religiosity. The former strives towards the latter. This book has laid out certain minimal requirements for sincere-frumkeit, in terms of F1–F3. In the remainder of this chapter, I make two claims about the nature of religiosity, and then argue that the demands of religiosity place constraints upon any plausible axiomatization of Judaism.

9.4.1.  Claim 1: Where Religions Demand Faith, Religiosity also Demands Make-Belief Religions have creeds. Creeds demand faith. You simply cannot be a sincerely frum or religious Jew if you don’t have faith that God exists, and created the world. We’ve labeled that demand F1. But, even in cases like this, faith, and even belief, isn’t enough for religiosity. In order to illustrate this point, I want to quote Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary to Exodus 20:2; his commentary to the first of the Ten Commandments, seemingly, a commandment to believe, or to have faith, in God. If this verse is to be taken as a commandment, he argues, it cannot be read as “I am the Lord your God.” Instead, it must be read as “I, the Lord, shall be your God.” You must make me your God. And thus this commandment lays the “basis for our entire relationship to God, constituting the duty that our sages call ‫קבלת‬ ‫עול מלכות שמים‬, accepting the yolk of God’s kingship.” This isn’t merely a commandment to believe, or have faith, it’s a commandment to make God your God; to accept his sovereignty over your life; to submit to him. Obviously, this flies in the face of the medieval commentaries who spoke of a commandment to believe/ know. As far as Maimonides is concerned, you haven’t fulfilled this commandment until you have convinced yourself rationally that God exists.15 Rabbi Hirsch thought this was wrong: What the philosophers ancient and modern call the belief in the existence of God is as remote as can be from the meaning of this verse regarding the foundations of Jewish thought and Jewish life. The fundamental truth of Jewish life is not belief in God’s existence or that God is one and only one. It is rather that the one and only God, the God of truth, is my God. He created and formed me, He gave me my standing, He informed me of my duty, and He continues to create me and to form me, to keep me, to guide me, and to lead me. My belief is not that my connection to Him is through an endless chain of events as a chance product of a universe of which He was the first cause aeons ago. Rather, my

15  See Maimonides’ Sefer Hamitzvot, Mitzvot Aseh 1.

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288  The Principles of Judaism belief is that every breath that I take and that every moment of my existence is a direct gift of His power and love, and that my duty is to devote every moment of my life to His service alone. (Hirsch, 2009—on Exodus 20:2)

I believe that smoking causes cancer. I rarely think about that belief. It’s just there, unconsciously waiting until somebody asks me, “Do you believe that smoking causes cancer?” to which, I'll respond, “Yes, I do.” Despite the fact that I constantly believe it, I’m not constantly thinking about the belief or its content. The belief that you have chronic back pain, on the other hand, is very different. You can’t hold that belief without being constantly aware of that which you believe. It would never be appropriate to respond to the question, “Do you believe that you’re suffering from chronic back pain?” with, “Gosh, I suppose I do!” Sometimes you can be surprised to realize that you have a belief, but that cannot be the case with the belief that you have chronic back pain. The content of some beliefs forces itself upon your experience. For Rabbi Hirsch, the point of the first of the Ten Commandments isn’t merely to believe that God exists. You can have that belief and barely be aware of the fact that you believe it. Rather, the commandment is to hold the belief and to experience its content. You have to believe it and to make-believe it too. When I engage in a game of make-belief, I try to experience the world as if I were a soldier in the trenches, or whatever it is that I’m trying to make-believe. It would be a really boring game, surely, to make-believe that we’re sitting around doing nothing, but that we’re soldiers, and it’s simply an off day, and that we’re all just sitting around reading books, on leave, knowing in the back of our minds that we’re soldiers, but not consciously aware of that fact, nor experiencing the world in a distinctively soldier-like way. That would be a pretty hard make-belief to maintain, and a pretty boring one, if you want to make-believe that you’re a soldier. What you generally do when you play a game of make-believe is to attempt to experience the world as being a certain way; to experience the world as a soldier; aware that you’re a soldier. So, my definition of make-belief is this: to make-believe that p is to try to experience the world, and your place in it, as if p were true. To make-believe that the world is orbiting the sun at 100,000 kilometers per hour is a game you can play even though it happens to be true; to make-believe in its truth is to try to experience yourself as standing on a planet that isn’t still, as the earth beneath our feet generally feels to be to us, but on a planet that is moving very quickly. If you don’t like the terminology, don’t call it make-belief— call it attentive seeing as. You might believe that you’re a creature of God. But it takes more to attend to this, and to see yourself in the moment, through the prism of your belief, as a creature of God. Attentive seeing as engages the imagination.

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  289 You can believe that there’s a God and do all sorts of horrendous things. But, if you're experiencing the world right now as a world in which God is your God, making certain demands of you and believing certain things about you and your potential; if you’re experiencing the world that way right now, it would be much harder for you to sin. Sincerely frum people sin. And, despite the fact that they sin, they do believe or have faith that God exists; even when they’re sinning. The mere belief isn’t enough to make them religious; not in the holistic sense of religiosity outlined above. Mere faith, or even belief, isn’t enough to make a person holy. But I suggest that making-believe that God exists, to wit, trying to experience the world as a world in which God is your God, is an ingredient for real religiosity; an ingredient for inculcating the right posture and attitude towards the world. Accordingly, even where faith is an essential ingredient for the religious life, such as F1, it is, often, not a sufficiently absorbing epistemic state. Religiosity requires make-belief, or, at least, attentive seeing as (which are both species of imagination). Dani Rabinowitz (2014) suggests that religiosity never requires make-belief or imagination. It merely requires a match between a person’s beliefs and their emotions. The sincerely frum person, when failing to be religious, holds a set of beliefs, but fails “to appreciate the psychological import of those beliefs.” He compares it to a scenario in which he believes that a dog is dangerous, but fails to run for safety, and therefore fails to adopt an appropriate psychological stance towards the content of his belief. Natalja Deng (2014) suggests that I may have been misreading Rabbi Hirsch. Just as Rabinowitz would have it, all that is necessary is that we have the right psychological attitude towards the content of our beliefs; that we realize fully what it is that we believe when we believe that p, and that we attend to the belief ’s implications.16 With this in mind, Deng suggests that perhaps Rabbi Hirsch’s key point is that it’s important for us to have the right belief to start off with. The relevant belief is not the belief that God exists, but that “every breath that I take and that every moment of my existence is a direct gift of His power and love, etc.” It’s about getting the proposition right; not the attitude—the attitude can be bogstandard belief—or faith. If you have the right belief-content, and the appropriate psychological attitude towards that content, then you’re doing just fine, and there’s no need for make-belief here. I respond. Take Golda. Golda believes in God. She believes that God wills her to observe Jewish law. She recognizes the psychological import of those beliefs. Accordingly, she diligently observes every detail of Jewish law. To strengthen the thought experiment, let us imagine that she’s almost superhuman in that she never suffers from any form of akrasia (weakness of will). Furthermore, given her

16  Paraphrasing Deng (2014).

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290  The Principles of Judaism recognition of the psychological import of her beliefs, she is suitably moved by God’s kindness, and suitably reverential of his power and might. She never acts in ways that conflict with her beliefs. She is clearly frum in the sincerest way imaginable. Despite her sincere and unimpeachable frumkeit, whole hours go by (between performance of ritual laws, for instance) in which Golda doesn’t think about her theological beliefs. She gets distracted, although she never sins. At those times, the relevant beliefs are background beliefs. And, at those times, perhaps her reverence, and her being moved by God’s kindness, are also background, or dispositional, states. At any point, if you asked her, “Are you moved by God’s kindness?” she’d say, “Yes, I am.” But her theological beliefs and the concomitant psychological states might be equally in the background. At those times, despite her sincerefrumkeit, she fails—in those moments of distraction—to be religious (in my sense of the word). It probably isn’t possible to be religious all of the time. Between moments of religiosity, Golda has the requisite beliefs and she adopts the appropriate psychological attitudes towards those beliefs. But it’s all dispositional; it’s all in the background. Religious beliefs (as opposed to regular frum beliefs), and religious emotions, are occurrent (as opposed to dispositional)—almost overwhelmingly so. Beliefs and emotions become occurrent only when a person is concomitantly attending to the world in a certain way: through the prism of those beliefs. I maintain that that is a function of the imagination, even though you may have faith, or belief, that the proposition you’re imagining is true. Rabbi Hirsch’s point is that our religious beliefs are not supposed to be in the background. We have to try to keep them, to the best of our abilities—even if we can only succeed intermittently—in our cognitive and emotional foreground. By moving from the sanitized proposition that “God exists” to the proposition that every breath is his gift, R. Hirsch is providing our belief with a content that’s more absorbing for our imagination; that lends itself to the sort of attentive seeing-as that gives rise to religiosity. Faith is sufficient for sincere-frumkeit, but sincerely frum people—like Golda—strive towards something more; they strive towards moments of religiosity. To do so they must engage their imagination.

9.4.2.  Claim 2: Sometimes Religiosity Requires Making-Believe Things That Are Known to Be False In his Laws of Repentance (Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 3:4), Maimonides tells us the following: A person needs to view himself, throughout the entire year, as if he were equally balanced between merit and sin and the world were equally balanced between

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  291 merit and sin. If he performs one sin, he tips his balance and that of the entire world to the side of guilt and brings destruction upon himself. [But,] if he fulfils one commandment, he tips his balance and that of the entire world to the side of merit and brings deliverance and salvation to himself and others. As it is said (Proverbs 10:25): A righteous man is the foundation of the world. [I.e.,] he, who acted righteously, tipped the balance of the entire world to merit, and saved it.

And thus, we have to view the world as if things are very evenly balanced. If you put even one step wrong, everything will come tumbling down. On the other hand, if you do something marginally good, for instance, putting a tiny amount of money into a charity box, you save the world. Some of the classical commentaries on these laws seem perplexed as to how Maimonides could say these things, when they’re not true. We all sin. And, the world doesn’t end.17 But Maimonides knows it’s not true. He wasn’t stating these things as a matter of fact. You’re not supposed to believe it. But you are supposed to make-believe it. Imagine that you have a speech to make in front of a massive audience. You’re wracked with nervousness. A friend suggests that you pretend everyone in the audience is wearing a silly hat. If his suggestion works, how does it work? I suggest that it would work as follows: when the time comes, you know that they’re not wearing silly hats, but, the very attempt to visualize the hats may insert just enough irreverence into the proceedings so as to overcome your nerves. Your friend is appealing to what I call the corrective effects of make-belief. V. S. Ramachandran is a renowned neuroscientist and physician. He is the first physician to have cured the pain of amputees’ phantom limbs. Phantom hands are often clenched so tightly that the phantom fingers and finger nails inflict unbearable pain upon the phantom palm. Many of these patients can’t escape the pain because their phantom fists are paralyzed in this eye-watering clench. Ramachandran discovered a surprisingly low-tech solution. He got his patients to put their remaining hands into a box, mimicking the position that they felt their phantom hands to be in. Inside the box was a mirror. When the patient looked down, he didn’t merely see his actual hand; he saw its reflection as well. This looked just like seeing his actual hand and his phantom. By slowly opening his only real hand, he could make it look as if he was opening both of his “hands.” And, sure enough, this deceived the brain into thinking that the phantom hand had opened. This relieved the pain. These patients aren’t mad. They know that they only have one real hand. They knew that the box contained a mirror—they must have worked that out! But the illusion (even though they knew that it was an illusion) was what the brain needed to behave appropriately in the real world. This is just like the make-believe about 17 See, especially, the standard Hebrew commentaries printed alongside Maimonides’ Mishne Torah (ad loc.).

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292  The Principles of Judaism the silly hats; it might help to give rise to behavior that’s more appropriate to the real world than your behavior would have been without the make-believe. Sometimes our actions are so ill-suited to the actual world that only an illusion, coupled with the sustained suspension of disbelief, or a game of make-belief, can generate behavior that’s appropriate.18 Interestingly, some corrective make-beliefs only seem to have their corrective effects if you know that they’re not true. If your make-belief was too vivid—if, for instance, you really saw that room full of silly hats—you might feel a little bit out of place. If you vividly saw yourself as having the sole responsibility of the entire universe hanging upon your shoulders, you might be paralyzed by the weight of that responsibility. These make-beliefs are corrective when you try to experience the world through them, but only when you don’t succeed in creating too vivid of a make-belief experience. It’s not like you’re trying to deceive yourself. You’re playing a sort of a game. A second example: “We were slaves in Egypt,” Jewish parents tell themselves and their children each Seder Night, reading from the Haggada,19 “and the Lord our God took us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” And then they read, “If the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken us out of Egypt, then we, our children, and our children’s children would have remained slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” But that’s not true. Do contemporary Jews really believe that however many thousands of years after the fact, they would still have been slaves to Pharaoh? There is no Pharaoh. Do they really believe that had they stayed enslaved, the only political institutions in the history of man to have lasted for that many millennia would have been the Pharaonic ones, which would still be going strong? This all seems highly unlikely. But, then, later on in the Haggada, we read that “In every generation, a person is obliged to regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” As if. The task isn’t to believe; the task is to make-believe. If you walk around constantly experiencing yourself as personally liberated by God, and you see all other people in the world suffering forms of modern-day slavery as comrades who you can empathize with because you were once where they were; if that’s the posture you have towards the world, then you’ll be well on your way to being holy. Rabinowitz (2014) doesn’t think that this sort of posture is necessary for religiosity. As he puts it: we “do not have to make-believe that we left Egypt to get ourselves in the right frame of mind to display the kinds of sensitivities [that] Lebens thinks that such make-believing engenders.” You can still be kind to the stranger and still be thankful to God for freeing your ancestors, even if you don’t engage with the make-belief that you yourself were freed from Egypt. And yet the sources are relatively clear, Judaism doesn’t demand that we merely adopt the right 18  For more on Ramachandran’s work on phantom limbs, see Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1999). 19  The book that contains the text and the liturgy for the Seder Night, the first night of Passover.

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  293 attitudes towards strangers and towards God. Judaism encodes as law (“In every generation, a person is obliged to regard himself as if . . .”) that we place ourselves within the Exodus story, make-believing that it happened to us personally, each and every Passover. Rabinowitz can’t imagine that it can ever be rational to make-believe something that you know to be false. Moreover, he claims that “someone who acts on the basis of such irrationality ought to be censored for doing so.” Were Ramachandran’s patients acting irrationally by suspending disbelief? It would be unethical to test the following hypothesis, but it is likely true: if you instruct patients to tell themselves constantly that Ramachandran’s mirror box contains a mirror, the treatment would lose its therapeutic value. The suspension of disbelief, which is a mild form of make-belief, is likely essential for this therapy to work. According to Rabinowitz, it would seem that a person ought to be censored for allowing themselves to make-believe that they can see both of their hands, when they know that they only have one hand. But it’s also going to cure their very real phantom pain. To call this game of make-belief irrational, in the face of the great corrective effects that it engenders, seems strained, to say the least. To makebelieve that p, whilst knowing it to be false, is not always irrational, and needn’t ever fall into the epistemic vice of self-deception. I don’t believe that the world was created in six days in exactly the way that God’s Torah, taken literally, describes. I don’t think that God revealed a natural history book to us. That’s not how I relate to God’s word. But perhaps those words are an invitation to view the world—without deceiving ourselves or anybody else (since we’re sophisticated beings who can look at one world in multiple ways)— through the prism of that story. Perhaps the rich tapestries and narratives of the Jewish canon provide me with a God-given symbolic landscape according to which I might be able to choreograph my life, with a great deal of imaginative engagement, and in this way come to heal myself, and the world around me, and also come to know, through the corrective effects of this make-belief, a fundamental religious reality that might be impossible to grasp unaided.

9.4.3.  Four Constraints on the Principles of Judaism We’ve seen that the Mishna and the Talmud contain no explicit catechism, and certainly nothing very detailed in terms of a set of beliefs that can rule a person in or out of the community. The closest that the pre-medieval rabbinic tradition comes to such a list is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin (10:1), which plausibly only worries about what people say in public, and not what they believe. By contrast, the tradition does contain a list of character traits that are posited as essential to the Jewish identity. If a person lacks these traits, the tradition

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294  The Principles of Judaism counsels us to suspect that they’re not really Jewish. The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yevamot 79a, states, in the name of King David: There are three distinguishing signs of this nation: they are merciful, they have a sense of shame, and they perform acts of kindness . . . Anybody who has these three traits is fitting to cleave to this nation.

In place of a list of definitive beliefs, Jewish tradition offers us a list of definitive characteristics. Maimonides takes this source so seriously that when he draws up the laws of forbidden sexual relationships, and codifies the prohibition on Jews marrying non-Jews, he writes (Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Issurei Biah 19:17): Any family that is presumed to be Jewish, one can marry into [without the need for further proof]. Even so . . . anybody that has within him arrogance, or cruelty, or hatred towards God’s creatures, and does not act with kindness towards them, he is greatly suspected, lest he be a Gibeonite [i.e., somebody who lives among the Jews but is not really Jewish]. Regarding the Gibeonites, it is written (II Samuel 21:2) “And the Gibeonites are not of the children of Israel,” since they were arrogant, and did not seek peace, and had no compassion on the children of Israel . . .

Maimonides takes this issue so seriously that even when a Jew is permitted by one area of Jewish law to act with cruelty and callousness, he takes it for granted that a Jew in touch with her identity wouldn’t act in such a way; nor is it really permitted, even if one chapter of the law allows it, since it would violate the obligation of imitatio Dei. For example, he admits that the laws of slavery, narrowly conceived, allowed for a Jewish slave master to work his gentile slaves with no regard for their human dignity. But then he writes (ibid., Hilkhot Avadim 9:8): [But] one should not press his heavy yoke on his slave and torment him, but should give him to eat and drink of everything. The sages of old were in the habit of sharing with the slave every dish they ate, and they fed the cattle as well as the slaves before they themselves sat down to eat . . . Nor should a master disgrace his servant by hand or by words; the biblical law surrendered them to servitude, but not to disgrace. He should not madly scream at his  servant, but speak to him gently and listen to his claims and complaints . . . Cruelty is frequently to be found only among heathens who worship idols. The progeny of our father Abraham, however, the people of Israel upon whom God bestowed the goodness of the Torah, commanding them to keep the laws of goodness, are merciful toward all creatures. So too, in speaking of the divine attributes, which he has commanded us to imitate, the psalmist says: “His mercy is over all his works” (Psalm 145:9). Whoever is merciful will

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  295 receive mercy, as it is written: “He will be merciful and compassionate to you and multiply you” (Deuteronomy 13:18).

But what if a Jew consistently fails to be kind? It would seem that he couldn’t truly be in the community of Israel, upon whom God bestowed the Torah—and, in its wake, the quality of kindness. The classical rabbinic tradition may not have a formulated set of cardinal beliefs. But it does have a cardinal set of character traits. It’s important to note: the tradition recognizes that non-Jews (especially if they’re not idolaters) can have these traits. Moreover, the tradition—as Maimonides understands it—isn’t making some essentialist claim that these traits are written into the Jewish DNA, as some sort of ethnic trait. Rather, these are the traits that God bestows upon the community which receives his Torah. Somebody who has these traits on their own is worthy to join the Jewish people, should they want to convert. Moreover, somebody who doesn’t have these traits can only be considered a member of the Jewish community in an attenuated sense. In addition to these traits, there is also one cardinal value that we should explore. Rabbi Sacks (2005, ch. 8) traces the evolution of the rabbinic notion of darkei shalom—the ways of peace. The prophetic vision of eschatological peace arguably contains, as a perquisite, a common acceptance, by all people, of the truth of Judaism—or at least, of monotheism (ibid., pp. 98–104). On this prophetic conception of peace, only our fellow monotheists are entitled to our care. But we do not live in prophetic times. We do not live in messianic times. We live in times of doubt. We live in the time of the hiddenness of the divine presence. We live at a time in which it would be unfair to expect all people to recognize the truth of monotheism. Accordingly, the rabbinic notion of darkei shalom is a notion of a pre-messianic approximation of peace. Since we cannot, in these times, blame a person for their failure to agree with our theology, the rabbis command us, in this era of divine hiddenness, to extend kindness to people irrespective of their theology. Summarizing the Mishna (Tractates Gittin 5:8 and Sheviit 4:3), and the Tosefta (Gittin 3:18), the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Gittin 61a) teaches: One does not protest against poor gentiles [who come to take] gleanings, forgotten [sheaves,] and the produce in the corner of the field, which is given to the poor [even though they are meant exclusively for the Jewish poor], on account of darkei shalom. [Similarly,] the Sages taught: one sustains poor gentiles along with poor Jews, and one visits sick gentiles along with sick Jews, and one buries dead gentiles along with dead Jews. [All this is done] on account of darkei shalom.

These laws are not simply there to avoid conflict with gentiles. There are such laws. They are called the laws of eivah. These laws, by contrast, are designed to promote peace—as an ideal—despite our differences. They apply even to idolaters

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296  The Principles of Judaism (see Tosefta Avoda Zara 1:3). Unlike prophetic (or eschatological) peace, these laws apply in a period of time in which differences are to be expected, and are in no way blameworthy. The name of these laws—darkei shalom—is a reference to the verse in Proverbs (3:17), classically understood to be about the Torah herself: “Her ways are ways (darkei) of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace (shalom).” These laws may be a rabbinic innovation, but the rabbis are suggesting, by their very name, that they reveal the beating heart of the Torah; since all her ways are peace. The cardinal character traits and the laws of darkei shalom are deeply relevant to the project of this book. There may be many ways to axiomatize Orthodox Judaism so as to justify a person’s commitment to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. But some of those alternative schemes must surely be ruled out by the tradition itself, given the three character traits that the tradition treats as essential to the Jewish identity, and given the claim of the rabbis that peace lies at the very heart of the project of the Torah. For example, the theory of revelation put forward in this book recognizes that the revelation is ongoing and that, at any given time, we only have a provisional grasp of God’s inestimable will. I could imagine an Orthodox catechism that urges us to have more certainty. But any ideology that presumes to have certainty over such issues, it could be argued, has no sense of shame. It would be arrogant in the extreme to claim to know, with certainty, the mind of God. Accordingly, such a catechism would be counterproductive in the inculcation of one of Judaism’s cardinal character traits. In this book, I have urged a conception of the Jewish election that isn’t exclusivist or xenophobic; but which sees the Jewish mission as tied up with promoting the welfare of all of humankind. There is clearly room in logical space to imagine a Jewish catechism that expressed very different attitudes. But would faith in such principles inculcate compassion, and encourage good deeds to all of God’s creatures? Would it promote the ways of peace? If not, then the catechism that we’re imagining promotes a set of cardinal beliefs that are at odds with the cardinal character traits of Judaism, and with the beating heart of the Torah. In other words, the principles of Judaism that I have laid out in this book should be taken seriously, not merely because faith in them would be sufficient to engender sincere commitment to a life of Orthodox Jewish practice. They should be taken seriously because they give rise to a conception of sincere-frumkeit that can plausibly hope to inculcate the cardinal character traits of Judaism; they can plausibly hope to give rise—if only fleetingly—to the true aim of sincere-frumkeit, namely religiosity. The three cardinal character traits of the rabbis, and the rabbinic promotion of a pre-messianic peace in the face of differences, lay down significant constraints upon what can be considered axioms of the Jewish faith. Beware of conceptions of Judaism that violate those constraints, since the weight of the Jewish tradition

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Conclusions: Frumkeit, Faith, and Make-Belief  297 seems to question the Jewishness of their proponents. My hope is that the principles of this book meet those constraints. My intention in belittling the role of belief in this chapter has had nothing to do with the fashionable desire to replace Orthodox Judaism with orthopraxy.20 On the contrary, this entire book has been about laying down the doctrinal heart of Judaism (however coarse-grained those doctrines might be). Social-frumkeit can make do with orthopraxy. Sincere-frumkeit requires faith and doctrines. But, as we’ve seen, it will take more than faith, and more than belief, to make us holy. To become Jews, in the most fully fledged sense, requires a set of principles that make room for a sense of shame, and mercy, and kindness. To make us religious, it will require imagination. Regarding the role of imagination, the central message of this book can be summed up (to the extent that this book has a message that can be summed up in words) in the following aphorism: God has the decency to pretend that we exist; the least that we can do is to return the favor. .‫֖יבֹות ָ֣יה ָׁשלֽ ֹום‬ ֶ ‫ְּד ָרכֶ ָ֥יה ַד ְרכֵ י־ ֹנ֑עַ ם ְ ֽוכָ ל־נְ ִת‬ .‫חּיִ ים ִהיא לַ ַּמ ֲחזִ ִיקים ָּבּה וְ ת ְֹמכֶ ָיה ְמ ֻא ָּׁשר‬-‫ץ‬ ַ ֵ‫ע‬ Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peaceful. She is a tree of life to those who hold fast to her, and those who cling to her are happy. (Proverbs 3) 20  A move perhaps most famously associated with Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–94) (Leibowitz, 1995).

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General Index Aaaron the Priest  145ff, 281–282 Abbaye 171 Aborigine 165 Abraham  41, 43ff, 44ff, 107, 136–137, 138, 145ff, 150, 165, 174, 190, 213, 217, 231, 294 Abrahamic religions  5, 69, 114, 198, 204 Abravanel, Don Isaac  2ff, 31, 35, 52, 65, 145ff Abstracta  19, 68–69, 101, 152, 153–155, 223, 226 Absurdity  25, 88, 126, 284 Abulafia, Rabbi Abraham  222 Acceptance 25–26 Acha, Rabbi  285 Achilles 271ff Acosmism  85, 86, 111, 118 Adam  52, 213, 217, 241, 242, 245, 258ff, 260 Adams, Marilyn McCord  xii, 258ff Adams, Robert  xii, 36, 47ff, 77ff Aderet, Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham (the Rashba)  234–235 Afterlife  233, 235, 239 (see also, Animal afterlife) Agent worth, the doctrine of  42, 43 Agent-substitution  256, 258, 260ff, 267 Agglomeration principle  22, 24 Ahmed, Arif  72ff, 263ff Akiva, Rabbi  98–99, 149, 162, 164, 238 Akrasia 289 Al-Amidi, Muhammed  44 Albalag, Rabbi Isaac  31ff Albert, David  33ff, 89ff Albo, Rabbi Yosef  2–4, 23, 24, 26, 27, 44ff, 201–202, 273 Alfarabi 62 Allegory  54, 56–57 (see also, Metaphor) Amalek  94ff, 180ff Amathlai 136 Amorayim 178 Amputation (of temporal parts)  253–254, 256, 258, 260, 267 Analytical philosophy  vii–viii, ix, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 28, 115 Angels  121, 131ff, 147, 148, 149–150, 157, 166, 169, 184, 185, 224 Animal afterlife  256 Annihilation  64, 235 Anscombe, Elizabeth  18 Antinomianism 111

Apophaticism  6–7, 10–17, 20–21, 26–28, 132, 135, 140, 141, 222 Apophaticism of showing  20–21 Apophaticism of argumentation  26–27 Appropriation  172–173, 175, 185, 212, 220, 274 Aquinas, Thomas  35–36, 40–41, 44, 60 Ari (see Luria, Rabbi Isaac) Aristotle  13, 32, 34, 35–36, 37, 68, 139–140, 157, 187, 218 Armstrong, David  66, 89ff Arthur, of Camelot  190 ArtScroll-Mesorah Publications  179, 180ff Aseity (see, God) Asymmetry (see, Relations) Atheism  9–10, 73, 106ff, 111, 114 A-theory (see, Time) Atonement  199–201, 233, 255–258, 272 (see also, Agent-substitution) Attentive seeing-as  288–290 Augustine  37–38, 39, 40–42 Authority  146, 167, 173, 175, 176, 185, 202, 204 Averroes  33, 35 Avicenna  33, 35 Avodah 208 Awe  51, 261, 280–286 Azulai, Rabbi Abraham  169, 175 Baal  112, 197 Baal HaTanya (see, Boruckhovich, Rabbi Shneur Zalman) Babel (see, Tower of Babel) Bach (see, Sirkis, Rabbi Yoel ben Shmuel) Backward-looking properties  246, 248–29 (see also, Hyper-backward-looking properties) Baker, Robert  9ff, 66 Balaam  165, 233 Balaam’s ass  165, 166ff Bar Kokhba, Shimon  238 Bar Nachman, Rabbi Shmuel  171 Bar Yochai, Rabbi Shimon  137, 181 Bare particular (see, Particulars) Barzilai, Rabbi Yehuda  151–152, 155 Basketball Hall of Fame  43 Bazak, Rabbi Amnon  170ff Beethoven, Ludwig Van  69, 142, 154

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314  General Index Beirur (see, Clarification) Belief  112, 188–189, 190–191, 193, 276–279, 287–290, 295–297 (see also, Faith; Make-Belief) Instinctive belief (see, Russell, Bertrand) ben David, Rabbi Abraham (the Ravad)  188ff ben Dordia, Rabbi Elazar  260, 263 ben Elijah, Rabbi Aaron  34, 37ff ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Eliezer  174 ben Levi, Rabbi Joshua  283 ben Meir, Rabbi Shmuel (Rashbam)  170–171, 184ff ben Pazi, Rabbi Judah  283 ben Pedat, Rabbi Elazar  264 ben Shlomo, Rabbi Eliyahu (the Vilna Gaon)  147, 172 Ben Sira  146, 149, 150 ben Uziel, Rabbi Yechiel Michael (Nezer Hakodesh)  166, 181 ben Zakkai, Rabbi Yochanan  174 Berkeley, George  68, 70–71, 74–77, 80, 91, 106, 140, 141, 228 Besht (see, Shem Tov, Rabbi Yisrael) Biblical criticism (see, Documentary hypothesis) Big Bang Theory  55, 58–60 Binitarianism  148, 149 Blumenthal, David  11, 222 Bolzano, Bernard  vii Bonfils, Rabbi Yosef ben Eliezer (the Tzafnat Paaneach)  161, 180 Borukhovich, Rabbi Shneur Zalman (the Baal HaTanya)  84, 86, 108, 120 Boyarin, Daniel  148, 150 Brains in Vats (BIVs)  132–133, 135 Breadcrumbs (for atonement)  255, 257 Breakfast of Champions  123–125, 127–128, 130 Brill, Rabbi Alan  204 Broad, C. D.  47ff, 246 Brody, Baruch  235 Brody, Robert  157ff, 179ff, 221ff Broken telephone  191–192 Brontë, Charlotte  95–96 Brovender, Rabbi Chaim  177 Brueckner, Anthony  132–133 B-theory (see Time) Buddha  193–194 (see also, Mahayana Buddhism) Buddhism (see, Mahayana Buddhism) Bundle Theory (see Substance) Burgess, Anthony  100–101 Buridan’s ass  38, 75, 79 Camp, Elizabeth  20 Casson, John  210 Catechism  2, 3, 220ff–221ff, 275, 278, 293, 296

Catholicism 54 Causal theory of reference (see Reference) Causation  74ff, 86–88 Cevolani, Gustavo  24–25 Chabad (see, Lubavitch Hassidism) Chalmers, David  106 Chicken (for atonement)  256 Chisholm, Roderick  258ff Chofetz Chaim (see Kagan, Rabbi Yisrael Meir) Choni Hame’aggel  268ff Chosen people  138–139, 189, 204ff, 296 Christianity  xiii, 3, 5, 6–7, 16, 40ff, 64, 121, 138–139, 155, 193, 198–200, 203, 217, 220, 224, 238, 275 Chukim 207–208 Citron, Gabriel  xii, 8, 10ff, 14ff, 267–268 Clarification (beirur) 241 Clark, Kelly  xiii, 227 Clinton, Hilary  249–250 Clocks (see, Time) Clockwork Orange  100 Coins (for atonement)  255 Composition  10, 62, 88, 109, 113, 224, 258ff, 261ff Concreta  36, 68–69, 105, 113, 154–155, 156, 166 Consciousness  77, 106, 116, 140 Conservation 89 Conservative Judaism  ix, 1, 180, 187 Conspiracy (fictional play)  122 Continental philosophy  vii Contradiction  7, 11, 11–14, 15, 18, 21–23, 25–28, 32ff, 51, 60, 79, 90–91, 93, 94–95, 102–105, 113, 128, 131, 140, 142, 251, 275ff Converts  216, 295 Cordovero, Rabbi Moses  81ff, 107 Cosmic mop  225, 257, 267 Cosmology  10, 12, 31, 51, 52–54, 57–60, 87, 111, 139, 140, 273 Cosmopsychism 116 Counterfactuals (see, Dependence) Craig, William Lane  35–36, 58ff, 69, 199ff Crane, Tim  123, 226 Creatio continua (see, Creation) Creatio ex materia (see, Creation) Creatio ex nihilo (see, Creation) Creatio originalis (see, Creation) Creation  3, 4, 9, 29, 31–32, 35–39, 41, 44–45, 48–50, 51–52, 55–58, 60, 65, 67–68, 70, 76–78, 86–91, 100, 105, 113, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 233, 239, 259, 263, 272, 273–274, 286 (see also, Generation) and the Alphabet  225 and the Torah/Logos  146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157ff, 161, 165, 166–167

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General Index  315 Creatio continua  31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 45, 50–52, 52, 54–55, 56–57, 59, 156 Creatio ex deo 35 Creatio ex materia  31, 63–65, 67–69, 91, 274 Creatio ex nihilo  4, 31–36, 49, 51, 63–65, 67–69, 70, 86–92, 104ff, 140, 142, 274–275 Creatio originalis  4, 31–32, 36, 49–50, 52, 57, 58, 68, 69, 92, 141, 274 Problem of  81–82, 93, 103 Real problem of  82–83 Really real problem of  83–86, 117 Six days of  165, 170 Credence  23–24, 26, 227 Crescas, Rabbi Hasdai  26ff, 31, 40, 50, 57, 87, 252 Cumulative revelation (see, Revelation) Currie, Gregory  102 Darkei Shalom (see, Peace) David  41, 149, 216, 234, 236–238, 286, 294 Davidson, Donald  136ff Davidson, Herbert  32, 37ff, 38, 51ff Davies, David  153, 154ff De dicto  248, 249–250 De re  19, 248, 249–250 De Wette, Wilhelm  196 Decision theory  38–39, 75, 79, 266 Diachronic 75 Synchronic 75 Deconstructionism 178 De-Herrera, Rabbi Abraham  119 Deletion  219, 249–250, 253, 258, 260–264, 266–267 Dembroff, Robin  xii, 98ff, 101ff Demons  147, 152, 224 of Descartes  103–104 Deng, Natalja  xii, 61, 289 Dependence  vii, 8–9, 44, 57, 71–74, 90, 153, 154, 156, 226–227 Counterfactual dependencies  87 Descartes, Rene  77ff, 228 (see also, Demons) Deuteronomy, the book of  ix, 107, 145, 171–173, 174, 184, 196–197, 202 (for individual verses see, Index of Jewish Sources) Devotionalism  235–236, 238 Dialetheism  11–14, 14ff Din, ‫( דין‬see, Justice) Dina 252 Direct reference theory (see, Reference) Disappearing branch theory (see, Time) Disposinia 41–42 Dispositional essentialism  89 Dispositions  13, 35, 41–45, 89, 263, 290 Divine hiddenness  80, 106ff, 278, 295

Divine Proofreader Theory  99ff, 258–261, 264, 267 Documentary hypothesis  viii, 4–5, 145, 176, 177, 209–212, 216 Doppler shift  55 Dormant dispositions  41–45 Dormant dispositions, the doctrine of  42, 44, 45, 263 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  223 Doyle, Conan  69, 122 Dreams  74, 93, 94–95, 97, 99, 125, 136, 141–142, 264, 267–268 Dreamtime 165–166 Dretske, Fred  89ff Duchamp, Marcel  172–173, 212 Dummett, Michael  97, 251–252 Duns, John Scotus  258ff Duran, Rabbi Shimon ben Tzemach  3ff Duran, Rabbi Shlomo ben Shimon (the Rashbash)  119–121, 131, 224ff Earthly Torah (see, Torah) Eden, Garden of  52, 260, 263 Edot 208 Education  42, 208 Edwards, Jonathan  191, 258ff Efficacious will (see, God) Egypt  190, 196, 213, 216–217, 292 Eiffel Tower  49 Ein Sof  6, 84, 117, 140–141 Light of the  81–83 Einstein, Albert  54–55, 87–88, 283ff, (see also, General Theory of Relativity) Eivon, Rabbi  283 Election (see, Chosen people) Electrons  66, 88, 226 Elijah  197, 236–238 Elisha  283, 286 Elyashiv, Rabbi Shlomo (the Leshem)  85 Emden, Rabbi Yaakov  2 Ephrem, the Syrian  52 Erasmus, Jacob  58 Error  111–112, 171, 180 Eschatology  3, 5, 27, 233–239, 244, 247, 257, 267–268, 271–272, 275, 295–296 Essentialism  72, 263ff Eternal generation  155 Eternalism (see, Time) Eternalist scene-changing (see, Time) Eternity  33, 37–38, 40–41, 49, 50–52, 54, 180 Ethical monotheism  205–208 Ethics (and Morality)  5, 42, 44, 76, 78, 100–101, 104, 138, 145, 149, 159, 165, 171, 175, 176, 177, 182, 186, 205, 217–220, 235, 252, 262, 285 (see also, Ethical monotheism)

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316  General Index Eve  213, 217 Evidence  viii, 13, 22, 23, 34, 54–55, 58, 60–61, 103, 178, 192, 195, 198, 200–204, 210–211, 212–217, 225, 226, 252, 276, 286 Evil  65, 93, 98–102, 103, 165, 220, 233, 239, 240, 241, 247, 248, 249–250, 254, 255, 259–269, 272 Natural evil  241, 259–260 Moral evil  159, 205, 241, 259 Past evil  244, 245, 248–249 Ex nihilo nihil fit 33 Exegesis  162, 171–173, 175, 179ff Exile  186, 206, 234, 236, 268ff Existence  8–10, 16, 32–37, 46–50, 64, 67, 72, 74ff, 81, 98, 107–108, 112, 113, 117–118, 154–155, 261ff, 269 (see also, Univocal existence) puzzle of existence  50ff Existence monism (see, Monism) Experience machine  76 External problem of the revelation (see Revelation) Eyre, Jane  95–96 Ezra and Nehemiah  146 Faith  3, 6, 54, 60, 104, 139, 141, 142, 188, 201, 203ff, 233, 239, 272, 275–279, 280ff, 287–290, 296–297 Fakhruddin, Razi  38, 45 Fallibilism  22–28, 199 Falling branch theory (see, Time) Falsehood  25–26, 28, 95, 112, 133, 160 Illuminating falsehood  20–21, 133, 134–135 Feldman-Kaye, Miriam  viii Female captive  159, 162, 218 Feminism 218 Feynman, Richard  88 Fiction  93–105, 118–131 Fiction operator  96–97, 121–124, 126, 128, 131 Fictional characters  21, 27, 77ff, 80–81, 96, 99–101, 104, 115ff, 123, 125, 126–127, 129–131, 134–135, 136, 138–139, 142, 239 Fictions within fictions  122–123 Fine, Kit  15 Finland 159 Five-minute hypothesis (see, Russell, Bertrand) Flow of time (see, Time) Form  31, 33–34, 67–68, 83, 224 Formless matter  31, 33, 65, 67, 92, 274 Forschner, Hagay  xiii, 223ff Fossils 53–54 Foster, John  89ff, 91, 106ff Foundational Fragment Theory  158ff, 165–167, 175ff, 176, 182

Frankfurt, Harry  50–51 Franks, Curtis  xii, 100ff Free will  50–51, 93–95, 115, 258–259, 264, 275ff (see also, Freedom) Freedom  viii  50–51, 74, 93, 95, 96–97, 98, 100, 158, 189, 207, 220, 258, 261, 263, 265–266 Frege, Gottlob  17, 19, 115–116 Friedman, Alexander  54–55 Frumkeit Sincere-frumkeit  279, 287, 290, 296, 297 Social-frumkeit  279, 297 Fundamentality (see also, Ultimacy)  14–17, 28, 71, 79–80, 85ff, 98, 107, 112–118, 135, 138–139, 140 Future (see, Time) Gamliel, Rabban  64–65 Garlic peel  241–242, 245, 248, 250, 266, 267–268 Geach, Peter  18 Gehazi 283 Gellman, Yehuda (Jerome)  xii, 137ff, 188, 193–198, 212–217, 219 Gendler, Tamar Szabó  102, 126 Gendler-tales  126, 129, 131 General Theory of Relativity (GRT)  54, 58–59, 103, 242ff Generalisation  19, 32 (see also, Quantification) Empirical generalisation  192, 196 Generation  34 (see also, Eternal generation) General generation  69 Particular generation  69 Generative performance  153 Geonim 151 Gersonides, Rabbi Levi  20, 31, 33, 65–69, 91, 96, 158, 228 Gibeonites 294 Giqatillah, Rabbi Yosef   168ff Goat (as a sacrifice)  112, 225–226, 258ff, 260 God (see also, Divine hiddenness) a se 113 and Change (immutability)  23, 39–40, 83–84, 117, 264–265 A-personal  96ff, 111, 139–141, 275 as an Agent  23, 38, 45, 116 as Character  80–81, 96, 99, 100, 101, 115ff, 129, 239 as Deceiver  53–54 as Dreamer  94–95, 99, 136, 142 as Eternal  37–41, 44–45, 155 as Father  41, 45, 111, 147, 155, 202 as Free  38, 50–51, 275ff as King  29, 41, 44–45, 111, 137, 143, 171, 173–174

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General Index  317 as Lord  40–45 as Storyteller  104, 136, 142 Beneficent 44 Carrying sins  254, 255ff God’s body  35, 113, 117 God’s creative excellence  104–105 God’s efficacious will  39, 71–72, 74ff God’s goodness  21, 40–42, 44, 78–81, 82, 85, 104–105, 117, 119, 254ff God’s imagination  77, 90, 97–98, 101, 124, 125, 133–134, 135, 142 God’s infinity  82, 117 God’s knowledge  40, 65ff, 74, 78–79, 82, 84, 85, 96, 158, 249, 250, 251, 264, 266 God’s memory  168, 241, 249, 250, 261–262 God’s mind (or God as a mind)  36, 70–74, 85–86, 90, 91–92, 94, 99–100, 117–118, 137, 140–142, 153, 173, 217, 240, 266, 274, 296 God’s properties/attributes  3, 8–10, 15–16, 17–20, 44–45, 83, 84, 85, 117, 119–120, 139–142, 224, 273, 294 their Infinity  26 God’s self-expression  78 God’s voice  143, 145ff, 148–150, 174, 184, 201 God’s will  5, 38, 51, 72, 73, 74, 89–90, 116, 163, 167, 173, 175, 176, 182–183, 207, 219, 240ff, 257, 296 Omnipotent  36, 71–72, 85, 87, 91, 115, 117, 141–142 Omnipresent  82, 117 Omniscient  43ff, 74–75, 80, 85, 96, 117, 141, 153, 158, 184ff, 189, 241, 249, 275ff Perfect  37, 42, 44, 78, 83–84, 98, 99, 104, 141–142, 200, 259 Perfect artisan  99–100 Perfectly good  80–81, 85, 117 Perfectly knowledgeable  78 Perfectly rational  74–75, 80–81, 85, 117 Personal  96ff, 111, 140–141, 190, 195–196, 198–199, 211–212, 275 seeing God’s face  27, 80 simplicity  10, 26, 82, 114, 117, 118, 119, 139–141 Time transcendent  45, 151 Transcendent  80–81, 101, 104, 115ff, 224–225, 228, 239 Godese (God’s language)  135 Goldbach’s tower  102–104, 126, 128–129 Goldberg, Rabbi Naftali  xiii, 51 Goldschmidt, Tyron  xi, 50ff, 63, 70, 73, 75, 78, 80–81, 106ff, 191–192, 194, 196, 233, 235, 252ff, 255ff, 261, 263ff, 264–265, 266ff, 268 (see also, Jumbled Kuzari Principle)

on the Causal Power of Absences  (see, Absences) Gosse, Philip Henry  53 Gottlieb, Rabbi Dovid  190–194, 196 Grand Canyon  281–282, 284 Gravity  58–59, 88, 228 Growing Block Theory (see, Time) Guilt  235, 291 Gunk 114 Gwiazda, Jeremy  265ff Haggada 292 HaKohen, Rabbi Tzadok  168, 175, 240 Halakha  162, 171, 175–176, 183, 186–188, 201, 218, 220–221, 280 Halbertal, Moshe  163, 252ff Halevi, Rabbi Yehuda  189–190 Haman 255 Hamlet  77–78, 94–95, 96–97, 121–122 Hannina, Rabbi  281 Harari, Yuval  225 Harris, Rabbi Michael  xiii, 170, 182ff, 234ff, 239ff, 278ff Hassidic Idealism  78, 86, 92, 93–94, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103–105, 106, 115ff, 117–118, 121, 131, 132, 134–135, 135–140, 142, 239, 275 Extreme  70–71, 77, 79–81, 85–86, 90, 91, 93, 101 Moderate  70–71, 74, 76–77, 80, 91, 101 Hatam Sofer (see, Sofer, Rabbi Moshe) Heavenly Torah (see, Torah) Hebrew Bible  27, 39, 41, 45, 51, 54–57, 64–65, 83, 90, 136–137, 138ff, 146, 149, 151, 157, 172, 177–179, 195–197, 204ff, 209, 211, 213–217, 220, 249, 250, 274, 280 (see also, Torah) as Literature  215 Genre of the  55–56 Hedgehog 172 Hefter, Rabbi Herzl  xii, 94, 167 Hegel, Georg  vii Heidegger, Martin  vii Hell  37, 193, 235 Hermes 112 Herodotus 55 Herzl, Theodore  237 Heschel, Rabbi Abraham Joshua  151ff, 161ff, 163, 166ff, 169ff, 171ff, 172, 174ff, 180, 181ff, 280 Hessed, ‫( חסד‬see, Lovingkindness) Heterodox  86, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118 Hewitt, Simon  xii, 277ff Hiddenness (see, Divine hiddenness) Higgs Boson  162, 164, 176ff

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318  General Index Higher criticism (see, Documentary Hypothesis) Hinduism 136ff Hintikka, Jaako  77ff Hirsch, E. D.  215 Hirsch, Rabbi Samson Raphael  205–208, 228, 287–290 History  vii–viii, 6, 27, 50, 55–56, 83, 99ff, 100, 115, 137, 139, 156, 186, 197, 205–206, 212–217, 218, 221–222, 228, 246, 253, 258, 260–264, 268 (see also, Natural history) Hitler, Adolph  255 (see also, Cosmic mop) Hobsbawm, Eric  214 Hochstetter, Kenneth  249 Hoffmeier, James  213 Holiness  219, 224, 225, 280–286 Holmes, Sherlock  69, 91, 98, 102, 122 Holocaust 42 Holy Spirit (ruach hakodesh)  188, 218, 220, 274 Hoover, Dwayne  123–124 Hope  5, 219, 233, 239, 267, 268–269, 272, 274, 279, 296 Horowitz, Rabbi Isaiah (the Shla)  107, 174 Howard-Snyder, Daniel  xii, 79, 276–277, 279 Hubble, Edwin  55 Hudson, Hud  xii, 242–245, 248–249, 264ff, 265 Hughes, Christopher  83 Human-divine partnership (see, Partnership) Humeanism 86–91 Humility  6, 26, 28, 104, 164, 188–189, 207, 218 Hyper-backward-looking properties  246–248 Hyper-middle-knowledge 266 Hyper-presentism  248–249, 269–270 Hyper-tenses  242ff, 243, 246, 251 Hypertime  63, 242–248, 263, 269–271 Ibn Attar, Rabbi Hayyim (the Or HaHayyim)  261–262 Ibn Caspi, Rabbi Yosef  31 Ibn Ezra, Rabbi Abraham  152, 155–156, 161, 184ff Idealism  vii, xiii, 6, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74–76, 78, 85, 86, 90–91, 106, 140–141 (see also, Hassidic Idealism) Idel, Moshe  118–119, 141, 223, 225 Idolatry  111–112, 294–296 Illuminating falsehood (see, Falsehood) Imagination  6, 42, 77, 90, 94–95, 97–98, 101, 124, 125, 133–134, 135, 142, 211, 228, 286, 288–290, 297 Imitatio Dei 294 Immutability (see, God) Impure abstracta (see, Abstracta) Incarnation (see, Jesus) Indicated Type Theory  154 Ineffability  6, 13, 15, 20, 173, 228

Infinity  50, 61–2, 82, 88, 114, 117, 156, 178, 264–265, 270 (see also, God) completing an Infinite series  60–61, 264–265, 264ff, 269–271, 271ff Infinite sequence of universes  40, 57 Inman, Ross  xii, 82 Inn, the River  48–49 Intellects (see, Separate intellects) Intellectualism  235–236, 238 Internal problem of the revelation  (see, Revelation) Internal relatedness (see, Relations) Irgas, Rabbi Yosef  83–84 Isaac  43ff, 44ff, 137, 174, 190 Isaac, Rabbi, the blind  118–119, 120 Isaiah  55ff, 64, 65, 83, 107, 138, 234, 236, 241, 249, 253, 254, 256ff (for individual verses see, Index of Jewish Sources) Islam  3, 5, 16, 64, 160, 198–199, 204 Israeli Supreme Court  159ff Izhbitza (see Leiner, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef) Jacobovitz, Rabbi Immanuel  138 Jacobs, Jonathan  xii, 14–16, 36 Jacobs, Rabbi Louis  180 Jacquette, Dale  23 James, William  11ff Jeremiah  215, 241 (for individual verses see, Index of Jewish Sources) Jesse 286 Jesus  5, 7, 138, 193, 201–203 Incarnation  138, 199–201 Resurrection of  138–139, 199, 201, 203 Jewish identity  1, 206, 275, 293, 294, 296 Jewish Studies  4, 228 Joachim, Harold  112 Johnson, Mark  136ff Jonah 266 Jonah, Rabbi  283 Josephus 64 Joshua  161, 180–181 Josiah 196–197 Joyce, James  127 Julius Caesar  61 Jumbled Kuzari Principle  191, 192ff, 194–196, 204–205 Justice (‫דין‬, ‫צדק‬, and ‫  )משפט‬118, 137, 205, 207–208, 235, 250, 255, 282, 283ff Justinia 41 Kabay, Paul  69, 81 Kabbalah  71, 84, 91, 106, 107, 110, 116–121, 130–131, 137, 141, 218, 222–225, 228 Proto-Kabbalah 223–224

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General Index  319 Kagan, Rabbi Yisrael Meir (the Chofetz Chaim)  2 Kane, Robert  263 Kant, Immauel  vii Kaplan, Mark  24–25 Kaplan, Mordechai  187 Karenina, Anna  69, 81 Katz, Steven  11f Kedushat Levi (see, Levi Yitzchak) Kellner, Menachem  xii, 221ff, 223–226 Kent, Clark  125–130 Kindness  6, 104, 260–263, 287, 290, 294–295, (see also, Lovingkindness) King, Peter  69, 91 Kirk-Giannini, Cameron Domenico  xii, 192ff Kitchen, Kenneth  213 Kitcher, Philip  26 Kleinschmidt, Shieva  76 Kolbrener, William  285 Kook, Rabbi Abraham Isaac  237 Koperski, Jeffrey  227–228 Korah 158 Kovleh, Arieh  190ff Krauss, Lawrence  33, 89ff Kretzmann, Norman  155 Kripke, Saul  77–78ff, 123, 126, 128 Kugel, James  177ff, 196, 209, 211, 213, 215–216 Kundera, Milan  136 Kuzari 190 Kuzari Principle (see also, Jumbled Kuzari Principle)  189, 191–198, 204–205, 215–216 Lakoff, George  136ff Lamm, Rabbi Norman  278 Lane, Lois  125–129 Language  7, 14, 17–20, 46, 106, 126, 132–135, 151, 167, 169, 170, 205, 211, 222, 224–225, 243 Lau, Rabbi Benny  187 Laplace, Pierre-Simon  227 Law of Nature (see, Nature) Law of Non-Contradiction  12–13, 15 Lebens, Gaby  xiii, 9, 248ff, 255ff Lebens, Saadya  67ff Lebens, Samuel  viiff, 10ff, 16ff, 40ff, 41, 78, 79ff, 106ff, 113, 140, 152, 154, 233, 276, 292 Leibniz, Gottfried  228 Leicester City F.C.  276–277 Leiner, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef (the Izhbitza)  94–95, 167, 188, 228, 241, 245 Lekah Tov  170–171 Lemaître, George  54–55 Lenin  127–128, 130 Leshem (see, Elayashiv, Rabbi Shlomo) Leslie, Charles  191

Lessing, Gotthold  77 Levi Yitzchak, Rabbi, of Bedichev (the Kedushat Levi)  152, 168–169 Levinson, Jerrold  154 Lewis, C. S.  136ff Lewis, David  87, 102, 105, 123, 228 Lewis. H. S.  147 Liabilities  35–37, 68 Libertarian freedom  94–95, 266 (see also, Freedom; Free Will) Lichtenstein 159 Light unto the nations  207–208 Locke, John  68 Loew, Rabbi Yehuda (the Maharal of Prague) 121ff Logic  vii, viii, 14, 15, 22, 45, 91, 103–104, 142 (see also, Paraconsistent logic) Logical rigidity  88 Logicism vii Logos  27–28, 147–150 (see also, Heavenly Torah) Lotus Sutra  193–194 Lotze, Hermann  vii Loving Lois (fictional story)  125–129 Lovingkindness (‫  )חסד‬118, 137, 256 Lubavitch Hassidism  131ff (see also, Boruckhovich, Rabbi Shneur Zalman; Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem Mendel; Tanya) Lurhmann, Tanya  11ff Luria, Rabbi Isaac (the Arizal)  81, 222 Luzzatto, Rabbi Moshe Chaim (the Ramchal)  236, 258, 260 Magic  201, 225–226 Maharal of Prague (see, Loew, Rabbi Yehuda) Mahayana Buddhism  193–195 Maimonides, Rabbi Moses  31, 35, 50–51, 57, 60, 61–63, 72ff, 83, 139–141, 145–147ff, 156–158, 159ff, 163, 187, 201–202, 251–252, 275ff, 287, 290–291, 294–295 and Apophaticism  6–7, 10, 12–13, 16, 20, 26–27 and Contradiction  17, 21, 23–24, 26–27 and Mysticism  11, 141, 222–226, 228 and the Messiah  234–235, 236–239, 274–275 Orphan thought experiment  33–34, 69 Thirteen principles of Faith  2–3, 116, 160–161, 170, 182 Maitzen, Stephen  259, 264 Make-belief  276, 288–289, 291–293 Makinson, David  22 Manna  165, 196, 213 Markosian, Ned  47ff, 242ff Materialism  73 (see also, Physicalism; Naturalism)

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320  General Index Mathematics  vii, 93, 109–110, 146ff, 226, 280 Matter  31–33, 35, 58, 64, 65, 67–68, 76, 89, 91–92, 106, 116, 224 (see also, Formless matter) Primordial  65, 67 Maudlin, Tim  58 Mayflower 216 Mayse, Ariel  166ff, 167ff, 183ff McQueen, Kelvin  106 Meinongianism  69ff, 81 Meiri, Rabbi Menachem  147ff Melville, Herman  153 Memory  191, 194, 212, 215, 249–250, 266–267 (see also, God) Menachem Mendel, Rabbi, of Rymanov  184ff Menachem Nachum, Rabbi, of Chernobyl  107–108, 166ff, 183ff Mereology  114, 117, 139–140 Merricks, Trenton  47ff Messiah  27, 138–139, 201, 203, 233–239, 253, 274–275 as a Woman  234–235 of the Line of David  236–238 of the Line of Joseph  236–237 Metaphor  20–21, 136 Metatron  149–150, 157 Methodological naturalism  210, 227 Michaelson, Jay  107ff, 108–111, 117 Microbiology 147ff Middle-knowledge 266 Midland City  123 Midrash  146, 157, 228 (for individual Midrashim see, the Index of Jewish Sources) Migash, Rabbi Yosef ben Meir  160 Mikdash (see, Sanctuary) Mind-external world  vii, 76, 106, 223 Miracles  50, 87, 89–90, 190, 193, 194, 199–204, 236, 252 Miriam’s well  165 Mishna  146, 151, 157, 252, 293 (for individual Mishnayot see, the Index of Jewish Sources) Mishpatim  207–208 (see also, Justice) Mitzvot 208 Moby Dick  152–154 Modal realism  105 Mohammed  5, 160, 204 Monism  vii (see also, Monistic theory of truth) existence monism  109, 111–112 priority monism  113–115, 118 Monistic theory of truth (see, Truth) Monolatry  197, 225 Moore, George Edward  viii, 24, 109 Morality (see, Ethics) Morphing block theory (see, Time)

Moses  ix, 1, 2ff, 98–100, 107, 120, 145, 148, 150–151, 157ff, 158–166, 169–174, 176ff, 180–182, 184–185, 190, 197, 198, 201–202, 213, 217, 234, 261–262 Moses’ staff  165 Moving Spotlight Theory (see, Time) Mullins, Ryan  xii, 250 Murdoch, Iris  223 Mysticism  4, 6, 11, 39, 70, 81, 111, 134–135, 135, 151, 217, 221–229, 241 Rationalistic-mysticism (see, Rationalism) Mythology  136ff, 165, 214–215 Nagel, Thomas  133–134 Nahmanides, Rabbi Moses  81ff, 184ff on the Binding of Isaac  43ff, 44ff on the Heavenly Torah  151–152, 157, 158ff, 161, 163 on Holiness  280–285 on Sacrifice  255–256 Naked particular (see, particulars) Napoleon  126, 195, 227 Narboni, Rabbi Moshe  31, 51ff National unforgettable  191–197, 203, 216 Nationhood  1, 138, 183, 186, 190–204, 206–208, 213, 215, 216, 220, 237, 274, 275, 294 Natural history  55–56, 217, 293 Naturalism (see also, Methodological naturalism)  210, 224–225, 227 Nature, law of  34, 87, 90 Necessitism 47 Nechemya, Rabbi  181 Neo-Documentary Hypothesis  209 (see also, Documentary Hypothesis) Neo-Quineanism 46–49 Nepal 195 Neusner, Jacob  146ff Neville, Henry  210 New Year (Rosh Hashana)  168–169, 257 Newton, Isaac  228 Newtonian mechanics  24, 88 Nezer Hakodesh (see, Ben Uziel, Rabbi Yechiel Michael) Nietzsche, Friedrich  223 Nightmares 267–268 No More Evil (NME)  241–242, 244–245, 247, 249–251, 258, 260, 267 Noahide Laws  205 Nomic necessitarianism  89 Nominalism  223, 225–226 Non-dualism (see, Monism) Non-fiction  122, 124, 125, 127, 131 Non-fiction operator  122 Nothing-Elsism  106–109, 111–114, 116–118

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General Index  321 Nothingness  51, 62, 108, 268 Novak, David  205ff Novel (fiction)  21, 123, 130, 137, 152, 223 Novick, Tzvi  xii, 4ff, 164ff, 166ff Nozick, Robert  76 Nuclear physics  163 Nude particular (see, Particulars) Numbers  12, 59, 72, 82, 103, 117, 118ff, 119, 154, 226 Objectification 284–285 Occult  224–225, 228 Ockham’s razor  227 Omnipotence (see, God) Omnipresence (see, God) Omniscience (see, God) Omnisignificance (see, Torah) Omphalic hypothesis  53 Ongoing revelation (see, Revelation) Ontological significance (see, Significance) Open Theism  96 Or HaHayyim (see, Ibn Attar, Rabbi Hayyim) Oral Torah (see, Torah) Orphan thought experiment (see, Maimonides) Orthodox Judaism  vii, 1–6, 16, 26, 35, 64, 86, 117, 121, 141, 145–146, 150ff, 151, 160, 170ff, 180, 183, 187–189, 194, 204, 209, 211–213, 218, 238, 239ff, 249, 251, 252, 272, 273, 275–276, 279, 296–297 (see also, Ultra-Orthodoxy) Orthopraxy 297 Otiosity 74–78 Ovadya, Rabbi, of Bartenora  251–252 Panentheism  86, 113–114, 116–117 Pantheism  86, 108, 111, 275 Paraconsistent logic  22 and not 22 Paradigm Theory  167, 169, 175, 182, 183, 186, 188, 217–218 Parsimony  31, 223 Particulars 65–68 Bare  9ff, 66, 68 Naked 66–68 Nude 66 Thick 65 Thin  65, 66 Partnership (human-divine)  173, 175, 185, 189, 220 Passage of time (see, Time) Past (see, Time) Peace  65, 234, 236, 256, 294 Prophetic or Eschatological Peace  295–296 Ways of Peace  295–297 (see darkei shalom) Pearce, Kenneth  xii, 72ff, 74, 106ff Pelczar, Michael  106ff

Pentateuch  145–146, 148–149, 152–153, 166–168, 177–180, 182–185, 187–188, 197, 202, 209, 211–212, 218, 220, 274 (see also, Torah; for individual verses see, Index of Jewish Sources) Pentateuchal Theory  158–165, 173, 176, 182–183, 187 Pentateuchal+ Theory  162–165, 176, 182 Pentateuchal++ Theory  164–165, 175, 176, 182 Pentateuchal-More-or-Less Theory  161, 173, 175 Performative Contradiction (see, Contradiction) Permanentism 45–50 Phantom limbs  291–292 Phenomenal consciousness (see, Consciousness) Philistines 213 Philo  147–148, 150, 166, 187 Physical laws  38–39 Physicalism  106, 226 Physics  24, 34, 39, 55, 58–59, 61, 87–90, 139, 161, 212, 226–228, (see also, General theory of relativity; Gravity; Higgs Boson; Nature; Newtonian mechanics; Nuclear physics; Quantum electrodynamics; Quantum field; Quantum gravity; Quantum physics; Singularity; String theory; Physical laws) Pitts, Brian  58–60 Pius XII  58 Plantinga, Alvin  6–7, 117, 140, 212, 263 Plato  15, 123, 153, 156, 187, 223 Plato’s heaven  123 Pluralism metaphysical pluralism  vii religious pluralism  1, 234ff Polkinghorne, John  95–96 Polytheism 131 Popper, Karl  24 Possibility  35–37, 65, 68 Empirical 114 Epistemic  128–129, 131, 242ff, 267, 269 Logical  36, 53 Metaphysical  114, 268 Powers-and-liabilities theory of possibility  35–37, 68 Possible worlds  18, 36, 51, 72, 79, 87, 102, 105, 123 Postmodernism  viii–ix, 178 Powers-and-liabilities theory of possibility  (see, Possibility) Pragmatic relevance  98–100 Prayer  107, 112, 125, 131, 168–169, 234, 252ff, 256 about the Past  250–252 to Angels  121 Preface Paradox  13, 22–26

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322  General Index Present (see, Time) Presentism (see, Time) Prestige, G. L.  155 Priest, Graham  12–14, 22 Prior, Arthur  47ff Priority holism  114, 116, 118 Priority monism (see, Monism) Problem(s) of the Revelation (see, Revelation) Progressive Judaism  1, 187 Proofreading (see, Divine Proofreader Theory) Prophecy  120, 149, 161 the False prophet  201–202 Propositions  3, 14, 17–19, 22–26, 36, 109, 111, 115, 128, 134, 152, 275 (see also, Unity of propositions) Propositional Revelation (see, Revelation) Proto-Kabbalah (see, Kabbalah) Psychology  42, 137, 193, 254, 261ff, 266, 279, 289–290 Punishment  3, 43–44, 99ff, 205, 233, 241, 249–250, 254–255, 258ff, 273 Pure abstracta (see, Abstracta) Purgatory 235 Putnam, Hilary  132–133, 135 Puzzle of existence (see, Existence) Quantification  18–19, 46, 48–49 Unrestricted quantification  18 Quantum electrodynamics  88 Quantum fields  33, 89ff Quantum gravity  59 Quantum physics  33, 58–59, 88, 103, 106, 140, 161 Quine, W. V. O.  46ff, 226, 228 (see also, Neo-Quineanism) Quran  160, 199, 204 Rabinowitz, Dani  xiii, 289, 292–293 Rabinowitz, Rabbi Nacham  186, 218–219 Rainbow  165, 206 Ramachandran, V. S.  291–293 Ramchal (see, Luzzatto, Rabbi Moshe Chaim) Ramsey, Frank  7, 18 Rashba (see, Aderet, Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham) Rashbam (see, ben Meir, Rabbi Shmuel) Rashbash (see, Duran, Rabbi Shlomo ben Shimon) Rashi (see, Yitzchaki, Rabbi Shlomo) Rasmussen, Joshua  258 Rationalism  218, 221–222, 225–226, 228 Rationalistic-mysticism 222 Ratzsch, Del  91 Ravad (see, ben David, Rabbi Abraham) Rea, Michael  vii, xiii, 10ff, 11ff, 15ff Realism  vii, 226

Reference  126, 132–134 Causal theory of reference  133–134 Direct reference theory  126, 128 Reference shift  126, 128–129, 131 Self-reference  127–128 (see, Self-reference) Reflective equilibrium  218 Reform Judaism (see, Progressive Judaism) Reincarnation 235 Relations  17, 45, 78, 89, 132, 152, 153, 282, 284–285, 294 Asymmetric 109 Internal 116 With God  81, 96, 138ff, 139, 189, 190, 202, 235, 287 Relativity (see, General Theory of Relativity) Religiosity  2f, 6, 188, 197, 215, 218, 268, 273, 275–276, 278–282, 286–287, 289–290, 293, 296–297 Religious experience  10–11, 21, 129, 130, 163ff, 194, 198, 222–223 Religious language  7, 106, 132 Repentance  240, 247, 250, 253, 257–258, 260, 263, 271–272 Representation  18, 115 in Fiction  126–128 of God  83 Resolute Reading (see, Tractatus) Resurrection  64, 221ff, 235–236, 278 (see also, Jesus) Revelation  2, 5, 52, 54, 120, 150, 164, 165–167, 177–179, 183–198, 202–205, 208, 212, 214–221, 273–274 Cumulative/ongoing  5, 32, 141, 174, 214, 296 Problem of the External  145, 177, 209, 228–229 Internal  145, 146, 158, 176, 177 Stenographic theory of  162, 170, 180–183, 219 Verbal v. Propositional  170, 172 Reward  2–3, 43ff, 44ff, 99ff, 233, 258–259, 273–274 Ri Migash (see, Migash, Rabbi Yosef ben Meir) Rishonim 151 Rosenberg, Rabbi Shimon Gershon (see, Shagar) Rosenzweig, Franz  180 Rosh Hashana (see, New Year) Ross, Tamar  xiii, 178, 180ff, 186, 218–219 Ruach hakodesh (see, Holy Spirit) Rubin, Rabbi Eli  xiii, 131 Rubio, Daniel  xiii, 79–81 Russell, Bertrand  viii, 17–19, 76, 115, 128, 223, 279 Against monism  109–112 Five-minute hypothesis  52 Instinctive beliefs  53

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General Index  323 Russell set  13 Russell’s paradox  12–13 Saadya Gaon  27, 38, 139–140, 157ff, 190, 256 on Apophaticism  6–9, 16, 20, 26 on Contradiction  10, 13, 17, 21–24, 26 on Creatio ex nihilo  31, 34, 64ff on Modes of exegesis  179ff on the Decalogue  166 on the Eschaton  236–237 on Time  60ff, 63, 269–270 Sabbateanism  2, 222, 275 Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan  xii, 189, 206, 239, 295 Sacrifice  41–42, 112, 206, 214, 225–256, 281 Sadducees  178, 187, 221ff Salome, Queen (Shelomtzion)  235 Sanctuary (Tabernacle)  171, 281–282 (see also, Temple) Sanders, James  146 Sartre, Jean-Paul  284 Scatter  258ff, 260–261ff Scene-Changing Theory (see, Time) Schäfer, Peter  118 Schaffer, Jonathan  109, 113–116 Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem Mendel  53–54 Scholem, Gershom  81ff, 222–223, 228 Science  viii–ix, 54, 58, 93, 140, 145, 146ff, 164, 176ff, 215, 222, 225, 226–228, 280, (see also, Cosmology; Microbiology; Physics) Scotus (see, Duns, John Scotus) Seacord, Beth  235, 249 Seder night  292 Sefer Yetzira  118ff, 119ff, 225 Sefirot  106, 118–121, 129–131, 224ff Segal, Aaron  xiii, 45ff, 235, 264ff Segulot 224 Sekhel Tov  170–171 Self-reference (see, Reference) Separate intellects  157, 225 Set theory  12–13, 37 Seymour, Amy  xiii, 101ff Shagar, Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg  viii Shakespeare, William  50, 78, 94–95, 121–122, 210–211 Shalom (see, Peace) Shame  258–259, 266–267, 294, 296–297 Shapiro, Marc  2, 116, 120, 160, 161ff Shelomtzion (see, Salome, Queen) Shem Tov, Rabbi Yisrael (the Besht)  70–71, 107, 228 Sherira Gaon  146ff Shimon bar Yochai, Rabbi (see, Bar Yochai) Shla (see, Horowitz, Rabbi Isaiah)

Shoemaker, Sydney  37ff, 67ff, 156, 271ff Shor, Rabbi Yosef Bekhor  170 Showing (as opposed to saying)  17–21, 28, 135 Shrinking Block Theory (see, Time) Shunamite woman  283, 286 Sider, Ted  15 Significance (see also, Omnisignificance) Legal 162 Ontological  93, 96, 97–98 Religious  135–138, 164ff, 175–176 Simcha Bunem, Rabbi, of Peshischa  138 Simplicity (see, God) Sin  197, 200, 224, 240–242, 244–245, 247, 253–258, 260–262, 266–267, 285–286, 289, 290–291 Sinai Sinai Desert  213–214 Sinai-like event  202–204, 220, 274 Theophany/revelation  1, 5, 52, 54, 137, 149–150, 162–165, 167, 169, 174–175, 183–190, 192, 195–204, 215–220, 229, 238, 274 Sincere-frumkeit (see, Frumkeit) Singularity  55, 58–60 Sirkis, Rabbi Yoel ben Shmuel (the Bach)  181 Skepticism  103–104, 133, 160, 268 Slavery  186, 219–220, 285, 292, 294 Smilansky, Saul  xiii, 43ff, 252ff Social-frumkeit (see, Frumkeit) Socrates  35, 36–37, 68 Sofer, Rabbi Moshe (the Hatam Sofer)  160 Solomon  102, 103, 234 Soloveichik, Rabbi Aaron  147ff Sommer, Benjamin  177–178, 180, 183, 184ff, 187, 209, 211, 217, 219 Song of Songs  179 Sophia 149 Spinoza, Baruch  209 Stace, Walter T.  11ff Stapleford, Scott  106 Stapp, Henry  106 Steady State Theory  52, 54, 57, 59 Stenography (see, Revelation) Stoppard, Tom  127–128 String theory  59 Stump, Eleonore  xiii, 155ff Substance  7–8, 32ff, 35, 65–66, 114, 257, 258ff Bundle Theory  65–66, 257 Substance-attribute theory  66, 257 Sufficient Reason, principle of  76 Sullivan, Meghan  46–49 Sun  24, 84, 108, 174, 288 Superman 125–130 Supernatural  89, 199, 202, 210, 223–228, 236

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324  General Index Surrogacy theory  127–128, 130 Sustenance  3, 56–57, 217, 233, 273 Swinburne, Richard  79, 199–204 Syncretism 197 Systematic theology  7, 21, 27, 221ff Tabernacle (see, Sanctuary) Tablets  165–166, 184 Talmud  145ff, 146, 151, 169, 182, 228, 293 (for individual citations see, Index of Jewish Sources) Tannayim 178 Tanya  223 (for individual citations see, Index of Jewish Sources) Tarfon, Rabbi  ix Temple  64, 186, 196, 234, 236, 238, 281–282 Temporal parts  253, 254, 257–258, 265 Temporary existence, the doctrine of  47–49 Terach 136 Teshuva (see, Repentance) Tetragrammaton 168 Theodicy  99–102, 233, 239, 267–268, 359 Theology  5, 27–28, 61, 83, 93, 98, 117, 121, 134, 135, 139–142, 146, 151, 180, 189, 194, 195, 202, 219, 221, 239, 295 (see also, Systematic theology) Theophany  192, 202, 215 (see also, Sinai) Therapeutic Reading (see, Tractatus) Thick particular (see, Particulars) Thin particular (see, Particulars) Thirteen Principles of Faith (see, Maimonides) Thomasson, Amie  8ff, 101ff, 123, 127, 153, 154ff Thucydides 55 Time (see also, Hypertime) A-theory  47–49, 61–63, 65, 270 B-theory  47–48, 61, 63, 270 Clocks  39, 156 Eternalism  242–243, 246, 269–271 Falling/disappearing branch  242–243, 269–270 Flow 61 Future  2, 5, 28, 29, 47, 49, 61–62, 65ff, 96, 158, 167, 184ff, 185, 233, 239, 240–248, 251, 272, 274 Growing Block  47–48, 62–63, 65, 242–244, 269–270, Limit 60 Metric  39, 156 Morphing block theory  244 Moving Spotlight  49, 62, 246–248, 269–270 Passage  37–38, 61, 67, 242ff, 244 Past  5, 39, 47–49, 52, 60–63, 156, 215, 233, 240–253, 258, 259–261, 266–268, 269–272, 274 Present  37, 47–49, 61–62, 151, 155, 242–243, 246, 248, 249, 250–251, 264, 270, 272, 274

Presentism  47–48, 61–63, 65ff, 242–243, 245–246, 248–250, 270 Scene-Changing Theory  247–249, 269, 270–272, 275 Eternalist Scene-Changing  270–271 Shrinking Block  242–244, 249 Topology  39, 156 Tolstoy, Leo  69, 81, 130 Torah (see also, Pentateuch; for individual citations see, Index of Jewish Sources) as God’s daughter  155 Earthly Torah  5, 146, 158, 182, 183, 188, 204, 219, 220, 274 Heavenly Torah  5, 146–147, 150–159, 161–170, 173–176, 182, 187–188, 218–220, 229, 274, 275 Omnisignificance  180, 182 Oral Torah  146, 162–169, 172, 174–175, 177–182, 221ff, 238 the word, “Torah”  145–146 Torah Scroll  145–146ff, 184, 151, 156, 160, 177, 179, 181 Written Torah  146, 166, 168–169, 177–179, 181, 183, 218 Torot 207 Tosefta  146 (for individual citations see, Index of Jewish Sources) Tower of Babel  86, 98, 205–206, 213 Tractatus Logico Philosophicus  17–18, 20, 21, 27, 133 Therapeutic/Resolute Reading  17, 21 Traditional Reading  17, 18, 20 Traditional Reading (see, Tractatus) Travesties (play)  127 Triangles 68 Trinity  40ff, 157ff, 224 Trout, Kilgore  123–125, 129–131 Truth by divine convention  258ff in Fiction  95 Monistic theory of  111–112 Simpliciter  77, 95 Truthmakers  114–115, 246–247 Tuggy, Dale  xi, xiii, 40ff, 41–44 Twersky, Isidore  225 Tzafnat Paaneach (see, Bonfils, Rabbi Yosef ben Eliezer) Tzara, Tristan  127 Tzimztum  39, 70, 81–86, 91, 98, 117, 141 Ultimacy  98, 109–110 (see also, Fundamentality) Ultimate Forgiveness (UF)  240, 242, 244–245, 247, 249–251, 253, 256–257, 258, 259–260, 267 Ultra-Orthodoxy  180ff, 285

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General Index  325 Unbearable Lightness of Being 136 Unity of propositions  115 Universe  3–4, 31–41, 45, 49–50, 52, 54–55, 56, 57–59, 63, 65, 67–68, 69, 70, 79, 80–81, 85, 87, 88–92, 93, 104ff, 108, 110–111, 113, 114, 116, 139, 147, 156–158, 161, 163, 165, 224, 227, 261, 270, 271, 273–275, 287, 292 Univocal existence, the doctrine of  46–48 Urbach, Ephraim  150ff, 157ff

Causing will  74 Grounding will  74 Williamson, Timothy  47–49 Winston, David  64, 147–148 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  14ff, 17–20, 135 (see also, Tractatus) Women  34, 136–137, 234–235 (see also, Female captive; Feminism) Word for Windows  154–155 Worsnip, Alex  25 Written Torah (see, Torah) Wyschogrod, Michael  4ff, 27–28, 141, 179, 180ff

Vacuum 67 Van Dyke, Christina  11ff Van Inwagen, Peter  6–7, 9, 46ff, 261ff Veneziano, Gabriel  59 Verbal Revelation (see, Revelation) Verisimilitude  24–28, 239 Vickers, Brian  210–211 Vilna Gaon (see, ben Shlomo, Rabbi Eliyahu) Vital, Rabbi Hayyim  81–83, 86, 91, 228 Vonnegut, Kurt  123–125, 127, 129–131

Yadin, Azzan  xii, 148–149 Yehuda Hanassi, Rabbi  223 Yehuda (bar Ilai), Rabbi  181 Yitzchaki, Rabbi Shlomo (Rashi)  64, 174ff, 283–285 Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement)  121ff, 268 Yonah, Rabbi (see Jonah, Rabbi)

Wallenberg, Raoul  42–43 Ways of peace (see, Peace) Weinberg, Rabbi Yaakov  161 Weinberg, Steven  88 Wellhausen, Julius  209 Wettstein, Howard  xiii, 99ff, 280–281, 285ff White, Roger  18–20 Will  23, 50, 71, 73, 95, 168–169, 225, 289 (see also, Free will; God)

Zelophehad’s daughters  164 Zeno series  271ff Zimmer, Heinrich  136ff Zimmerman, Dean  v, xiii, 38, 47ff, 61, 77ff, 242ff, 245–246, 271ff Zionism 237 Zohar  7, 84, 137, 172, 222–223, 241 (for individual citations see, Index of Jewish Sources)

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Index of Classical Jewish Sources Hebrew Bible Genesis 1 55ff 1:1 81 2 55ff 2:3 282ff 2:16–17 241 2:17 246 12:3 189 12:6 161 18:27 138 20:12 136 21:33 41 26:5  145ff, 150 Exodus 15:17 281–282 19:9 202ff 19:20 149 20 183 20:1  183, 184ff 20:2 287–288 20:16 184ff 20:18  149, 184 23:20–22 149 24:12 184 32:32 261–262 32:33 262 33:20 80 33:23 27 34:6–7  120, 254ff 34:27 166 Leviticus 6:2 145ff 19:2 280–285 22:32  45, 282 26:3 167 Numbers 7:89 148 12:17 185 15:31 160 24:17 233 27:5 164ff 27:7 164

Deuteronomy 4:39  84, 107 5:5 184ff 5:19 174 5:22 184 5:27 202ff 6:4 107 7:9 ix 8:2–4 213 10:15 204ff 13 202 13:3–4 201 13:18 294–295 14:21 282 17:18–19 145ff 21 159 30:3–5 234 30:10–11 158ff 31 146ff 31:9  145ff, 151 31:26 181 2 Samuel 21:2 294 1 Kings 18:21 197 2 Kings 4:9 283 22–23 196–197 22:13 197 22:19 197 Isaiah 1:11–17 256ff 1:26 234 2:4 234 2:12 234 6:3 107 11:1 234 11:4 234 11:6 236 11:9 234 11:12 234 19:25 138ff 25:8  234, 241

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Index of Classical Jewish Sources  327 26:19 64 40:18 83 42:5 55ff 45:7 65 43:25  241, 249 52:4 254ff 53 254 56:7 234 Jeremiah 50:20 241 Ezekiel 18:4 256 20:41 282 40–47 234

29:10 41 29:11 120 2 Chronicles 7:18 234

Rabbinic Texts Mishna Tractate Avot 3:14 150 5:6 165 5:26 161ff Tractate Berachot 9:3 251

Amos 5:22 256ff 8:7 249 8:11 234

Tractate Gittin 5:8 295

Zechariah 8:23 234

Tractate Sanhedrin 4:5 138 10:1  220ff, 278, 293

Malachi 3:1 237 3:6  39, 83 Psalms 27:14 269 33:6–9 55ff 73:26 240 93:2 41 96:10 250 104:5–9 55ff 104:5–11 56 106:16 281 126:1 268ff 145:9 294 Proverbs 3:17 296 8:22–31 55ff 8:30 148 Job 38 55ff 31:2 107 Daniel 4:28 149 7:9 149 12:2 64 1 Chronicles 22:8–10 234

Tractate Kiddushin 4:14 145ff

Tractate Sheviit 4:3 295 Tractate Sotah 7:8 146ff Tractate Hagiga 2:1 37ff Tosefta Tractate Avoda Zara 1:3 296 Tractate Gittin 3:18 295 Minor Tractates Tractate Avot de Rabbi Natan 2:3 166 13 (version B of Solomon Shechter) 174ff 37:1 120 Babylonian Talmud Tractate Avoda Zara 17a 260 36a 186 Tractate Baba Batra 12a 120 15a  161ff, 166, 180ff, 181 91a 136 Tractate Baba Metzia 59a–b  186, 188

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328  Index of Classical Jewish Sources Babylonian Talmud (cont.) Tractate Berachot 5a 163ff 33b  94ff, 261 34b  236ff, 260 45a 186 60a 252 Tractate Eiruvin 100b 159ff 13b 186 14b 186 Tractate Gittin 60a  158ff, 164ff, 184 61a 295 Tractate Hagiga 6a–b 164ff 12a 120 15a  149, 150 Tractate Horayot 8a 184ff Tractate Kiddushin 21b 159ff Tractate Makkot 11a 161ff 24a 184ff Tractate Megillah 31b 171 Tractate Menachot 29b  98–99, 151 30a  161ff, 180ff, 181ff 35b 186 Tractate Nedarim 39b 271 Tractate Nidda 31a 124ff Tractate Pesachim 54a 151 68b 151 Tractate Sanhedrin 21b 145ff 38b 150 90b–91a 64 91b 236 99a  159–160, 170, 180 101a 147ff 111a 151 Tractate Shabbat 87a 185ff Tractate Sotah 37b 164ff

Tractate Sukkah 52b 236 Tractate Taanit 23a 268ff 25a 264 Tractate Yevamot 62a 185ff 79a 294 Tractate Yoma 28b 145ff Tractate Zevachim 115b 164ff Palestinian Talmud Tractate Peah 17a 163ff Tractate Shekalim 49d 166ff 6:1 151 Tractate Sotah 8:3 151 Tractate Taanit 4:6 238 Halakhic Midrash Mekhilta de Rabbi Yishamel Yitro  9, 184ff Mekhilta de Rabbi Shimon Exodus 20:19 149 Sifri to Numbers §134  150, 164 §58 148 Sifri to Deuteronomy Shoftim  29, 234 Narrative Midrash Midrash Hagadol Exodus 40:38 171 Midrash on Psalms 105:3 150 8:2  150, 184 Midrash Rabba Genesis 1:1  150, 161ff 1:4 150 1:9 64–65 3:7 57ff 8:2 150 10:3 65 Exodus 33:1 155ff 33:7 184ff

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 27/02/20, SPi

Index of Classical Jewish Sources  329 38:7 381 47:9 185 Leviticus 14:5 285–286 24:6 283–284 35:6 150 Numbers 13:16 166ff 19:33 185ff 21:12 164ff Deuteronomy 4:2 150 8:6 158ff Lamentations 2:4 238 Song of Songs 5:2 240 1:13 184ff Midrash Tanchuma Bereshit  1, 150 Vayeitze  8, 252 Yitro  15, 150, 164ff, 169ff Teruma  8, 178 P’koudey  4, 155ff Tazria  5, 173ff Midrash Sekhel Tov Genesis 26:32 170ff Genesis 47:26  170ff P’sikta D’rav Kahana 12:6 45ff Psikta Rabbati 22:5 184ff Seder Eliyahu Zuta §2 173–174 Tanna D’bei Eliyahu Rabba §81 240 Yalkut Shimoni Devarim §836 84

Medieval Commentaries and Texts Abravanel, Commentary on the Torah Deuteronomy 17:18  145ff Bartenora on the Mishna Berachot 9:3  251 Emunot VaDeyot (Saadya Gaon) 1:1–4 10 1:2  60ff, 63 1:3 34 1:4 38

2.6 157ff 2:8 8 2:10 157ff 2.12 157ff 3:10 256 7:1–2 64ff 8:6 237 Hiddushei HaRashba Tractate Shevuot 30a  234–235 Ibn Ezra, Commentary on the Torah Introduction, Netiv  4, 152 Deuteronomy 34:1  161 Sefer HaKuzari (R. Yehuda HaLevi) I.25 190 Maimonides, Commentary to the Mishna Introduction 163 Berachot 9:3  251 Introduction to chapter 10 of Sanhedrin  160, 182 Sanhedrin 4:7  154ff Meiri on the Talmud Pesachim 109a 147ff Mif ’alot Elohim (Abravanel) 1:2 164ff 2:4:18a 52 2:5:16b 65 4:3 35 Milchamot Hashem (Gersonides) 3:4  64ff, 96 6:1:17  33, 65, 67, 68 6:1:28 67 Moreh Nevuchim (Maimonides) 1:7 147ff 1:51 10 1:52 10 1:61–62 225 1.65 157ff 1:73 62ff 1:74  61, 62ff 2 – Introduction 10 2:1 10 2.6 157 2:14  33, 35 2:17 33–34 2:21 50–51 3:15 72ff 3.14 146ff 3:37 225 Nachamnides, Commentary on the Torah Introduction  151, 161–162 Genesis 22:1 43ff

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330  Index of Classical Jewish Sources Medieval Commentaries and Texts (cont.) Leviticus 1:9  255–256 Leviticus 19:2  280, 285 Exodus 20:7  184ff Ohr Hashem (Crescas) 2.3.1 252 2:5:3 50 3:1a:4–5 50 3:1a:5 57 Rabbi Yosef Bekhor Shor, Commentary on the Torah Genesis 32:20 170ff Genesis 35:20 170ff Rashbam, Commentary on the Torah Genesis 1:1  170 Rashi, Commentary on the Torah Genesis 1:1 64 Leviticus 19:2  283, 285 Deuteronomy 5:19  174ff Sefer HaIkarim (Rabbi Albo) 1:18:9 202 2:2 23 3:19 202 2:30 26 4:13 44f

Halakhic Works Bi’ur ha-Gra YD 179:6  note 13, 157ff Mishna Berura 126:2 2 Mishne Torah Hilchot Avadim 9:8 294 Hilchot Avodat Kochavim 11 225 Hilhot Issurei Biah 21:12 159ff 19:17 294

Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 1:11 83 7:7 201 8:1 201 8:2 201 Ravad on the Mishne Torah Hilkhot Sukka Velulav 8:5 188ff Sefer Hamitzvot Mitzvot Aseh  1, 287ff Shulchan Aruch YD 179:16 147ff YD 201:54 242ff Teshuvot Hageonim Shaarei Teshuvah 151 She’elot uteshuvot Ha-Rashbash §189 119–121

Kabbalistic and Hassidic Texts Derekh Hashem I.3.5–9 260 Etz Hayyim Heichal Adam Kadmon  2, 81 Kedushat Levi Bereshit  152ff, 168 Leshem Shevo V’Achlama, D’rush Olam Hatohu 85 Mei Hashiloach Bereshit 241 Vayerah 94 Miketz 94 Beshallach 94ff Yitro 167 Tazria 94ff Bekhukotai 167 Me’or Eynayim Parshat Vayyera 166ff Parshat Vayeitze 108 Ohel Ya’akov Introduction to Deuteronomy 172ff

Hilchot Melachim 1:5 234 2:1 146ff 2:2 237 11:1 234 11:4 238 12:1 236 12:2 236 12:5 238

R. Abraham Azulai, Commentary to Avot Introduction 169

Hilchot Teshuva 3:4 290–291

Sefer Yetzira Chapter 1  118ff

Risisei Laila 56  168ff, 175ff Sefer Baal Shem Tov Parshat Vaetchanan  13, 107 Sefer Sh’arei Orah Sha’ar 1, Sefira 10  168ff

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Index of Classical Jewish Sources  331 Sha’ar ha-Shamayim 7:4 119 Shiur Komah (Modena manuscript) 206b 107 Shnei Luchot Habrit Toldot Adam Beit Chachma (Telitaah) 174 Tractate Shevuot 160a 107 Shomer Emunim (HaKadmon) §35 83–84 Tanya II:6 84 II:7 84 II:3 108 IV.19 120 Tzidkat haTzaddik 90 175ff 99 240 Zohar Vayikra 7a 172 I.7b 137

II.42b 6ff Vae’thanan 261a 172 III.151a 137

Later Rabbinic Works Hagahot HaBach Baba Batra 15a  181 Sforno on Exodus 20:1 184ff Nineteen Letters (Rabbi Hirsch) Letter 9  206–207 Letter 10  208 Rabbi Hirsch on the Pentateuch Exodus 20:2  287–288 Migdal Oz (Rabbi Yaakov Emden) 26b–c 2 Netivot Olam (Maharal of Prague) 12 121ff Nezer Ha-Kodesh Genesis Rabba 1:15  166, 181