Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations
by Michael Wyschogrod edited by R. Kendall Soulen
Eerdman’s. 253 pp. $24.00

Ours is a time when the academic study of Judaism flourishes, but when learned exploration of Judaism’s central ideas has become rare. For that reason if for no other, the appearance of Abraham’s Promise is a welcome event. Perched on the cusp of today’s political and theological entente between Judaism and Christianity, Michael Wyschogrod’s thoughtful essays are the work of a scholar who has spent a lifetime developing a comprehensive religious philosophy, and who looks to share it with Jews and Christians alike.

An Orthodox Jew, Wyschogrod was born in 1928 in Berlin of Hungarian-Jewish parents; his family came to the United States in 1939. At Yeshiva University, he studied with the great talmudist Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, but his interest in theology was first piqued at New York’s City College, where he was exposed to the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. “I knew from the beginning,” he writes of the Danish Christian existentialist, “that here was someone of decisive importance to me.”

At least half of Wyschogrod’s published works have either addressed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity or appeared in an interfaith context. In addition to his dissertation (published in 1955 as Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence), his books include Jews and “Jewish Christianity” (with David Berger, 1978), an attempt to refute the arguments of Christian missionaries, and his most important work, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (1983), in which God’s relation to the Jews is described in the context of the Christian doctrine of incarnation.

Abraham’s Promise, which combines published and unpublished essays, is thus the capstone to an already lengthy dialogue with the Christian faith. Throughout, Wyschogrod’s questions are the right ones: the meaning of sin and atonement, chosenness, faith after the Holocaust, the importance of Christian theology for Jews. Unfortunately, many of the conclusions he draws are highly debatable when they are not altogether ill-founded.

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The purpose of Jewish-Christian dialogue, as Wyschogrod sees it, is not simply mutual understanding but something far more profound. “Dialogue with a theology as sophisticated as that of Christianity,” he writes, “advances Judaism theologically and compels it to examine problems it might not otherwise have done.” For this reason, many of the essays on Judaism in the book’s first half are framed in a context that is equally accessible to Jews and Christians. Eschewing formulaic discussions of the Sabbath, the development of halakha (religious law), or the meaning of Jewish history, Wyschogrod meditates instead on “Sin and Atonement,” “The One God of Abraham and the Unity of the God of Jewish Philosophy,” and “Judaism and Conscience.” Even those essays of more narrowly Jewish interest tend to conclude with a rhetorical turn to Christian readers.

Similarly, the second half of the book—“Jewish-Christian Relations”—deals not so much with the relation between the two communities as with the impression Christianity has made on the beliefs of one thinking Jew. In “Paul, Jews, and Gentiles,” Wyschogrod delves into the significance of a Jew’s conversion to Christianity. In a chapter on the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, and in the book’s concluding essay, he delineates the profound effect of Christian thought on his own Judaism.

Wyschogrod is of course quite aware that Judaism is not the same as Christianity. While the latter ultimately concerns God’s love for the world, his own religion, he asserts, focuses specifically on a people. More than a community of ideas or faith, Israel is a family, and its bonds to God are as unseverable as those of a child to a parent. Although the universalist view developed by Paul has “a certain plausibility,” Wyschogrod writes, believing Jews know that God loves them with a special love because of His love for Abraham. And it is this love—not, in the end, Israel’s acceptance of the divine commandments—that is responsible for the Jewish people’s continued protection from the tides of history.

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Both of Wyschogrod’s theses—that Jewish theology needs Christian theology in order to advance, and that peoplehood is the distinguishing feature of Judaism—are fertile and suggestive. But do they, at least as he formulates them, make sense against the backdrop of Jewish tradition itself? That is a far different question, and one concerning which Wyschogrod regularly disappoints. Indeed, he describes a Judaism that at times will seem thoroughly alien to anyone familiar with classic Jewish texts.

The problem is apparent at the outset, where Wyschogrod lays out the ground rules for a new Jewish philosophy. In his view, the preservation of the Jewish people is not simply a central tenet of Judaism, but one that trumps all other beliefs. Hence, any Judaism that alienates a major Jewish group is not Judaism:

No interpretation of Judaism which is unable to construct a plausible platform for Jewish unity is a viable interpretation of Judaism. Any Jewish philosophy which can cut off a significant portion of the living Jewish people from the house of Israel thereby demonstrates its own Jewish inadequacy. [emphasis in the original]

Such a dedication to unity is admirable; but it is also powerfully constricting. After all, any commitment to an idea precludes commitment to contrary ideas. To insist that such commitments are not “viable” is to bring to a halt any serious debate over principles. It is also historically indefensible. Throughout the ages, Baalists, Sadducees, early Christians, Karaites, Sabbateans, and others were rejected by mainstream Judaism precisely because of their ideological commitments.

There are, moreover, central ideas in Judaism other than unity: the belief in a single God Who created the universe; a conviction of God’s revelation to man and concern for human history; and, on the moral plane, a dedication to human justice, charity, property, communal responsibility, equality before the law, and limits to the power of rulers. It is true, as Wyschogrod first put it in The Body of Faith, that “the foundation of Judaism is the family identity of the Jewish people as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” But God chose Abraham’s descendants not at random but “Because I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do what is just and right” (Genesis 18:19). One may question whether this family has consistently lived up to the Abrahamic ideal; yet to deny that Judaism is founded on ideals, and not just on a bond of blood, is to strip it of part of its essence.

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Wyschogrod’s lack of interest in Judaism’s ideals comes into relief again in his approach to Jewish law. Here he abruptly abandons the emphasis on family unity for a doctrinaire insistence on strict obedience to God’s commands for obedience’s sake. Why, he asks, did God enjoin Adam from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Because, once having eaten it, Adam would “be in a position to know why the good is good and the evil, evil. It seems that God does not wish man to have this knowledge. He is to obey God in order to obey God and for no other reason.”

Not only does God not require moral reasoning, the very act of doing something “because it is the right thing to do” strikes Wyschogrod as a revolt against God. This is what he says about the biblical ban on murder:

Do I really understand why God wants me not to murder? I know that He does not want me to do it and that should be enough. The moment I refrain from murder on other grounds than that God forbids it, I have embarked on a slippery slope.

Leaving aside the deeply problematic nature of this statement, we encounter here a major contradiction of Wyschogrod’s own test for the “viability” of Judaism. If we have no access to moral reasoning, and must act solely according to God’s explicit commands, then what are we going to do about Reform Judaism, with its belief in the individual’s autonomous search for right and wrong? The apostle of unity does not answer this question; indeed, he does not seem to notice that he has come up with the most divisive definition of Judaism imaginable.

More seriously still, in insisting that, for Judaism, basic moral ideas about murder are a “slippery slope” toward rebellion against God, Wyschogrod effectively declares that Judaism has nothing important to say about what is objectively good for individuals, communities, nations, or the world. This is surely not the Bible’s intention. In its two dozen books, the divine laws are themselves nearly lost in a deluge of aphorisms, moral stories, and value judgments declaring one thing to be “right in the eyes of the Lord” and another to be an “abomination.” Even the commandments of the Torah are frequently presented together with their reasons (“Do not oppress the stranger . . . for you were strangers in Egypt”). Biblical characters often judge their own behavior as well as the behavior of those around them without recourse to explicit orders from God.

One need only think of Abraham’s famous appeal on behalf of the denizens of Sodom—“Will the Judge of all the world not do justice?”—to recognize that, in the biblical view, there are higher truths to which even God is held to answer. In rabbinic literature, the same anti-authoritarian thrust is most famously exemplified by Rabbi Yehoshua’s statement that the Torah is “not in heaven”—in other words, that men of learning and piety must decide the meaning of divine rulings according to their own best efforts. The commitment to normative divine law is not the same as a disregard for, let alone a deprecation of, that necessary search for understanding.

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It is when he comes to Christianity that Wyschogrod’s downplaying of Judaism’s ideas becomes most troubling. Take his approach to the Trinity, which he sees merely as “a problem for rather than a complete break with Judaism”; it is in fact much closer to the latter than the former. Or take his interpretation of divine incarnation in the form of Jesus. Building on The Body of Faith, with its theme that God dwells among the Jews as the soul dwells in the body, he asserts boldly that “the Christian teaching of the incarnation of God in Jesus is the intensification of the teaching of the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that indwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of Jesus as a whole.”

To be sure, Wyschogrod is quick to dampen the revolutionary implications of this statement. Perhaps, he concedes, the Jewish view of incarnation is not quite so literal, or so fleshy, as the idea that Jesus is God. Yet the difference, he insists, is far more subtle than most people are willing to recognize. Judaism may not endorse incarnation, but it has “incarnational elements” that, if “more diffuse than the Christian version,” are nevertheless “very real.”

But there are significant reasons why Judaism historically took issue with the idea that God became flesh, and it is telling that Wyschogrod does not cite any traditional sources to justify his idiosyncratic interpretation. Indeed, he could not. By and large, the Bible and Talmud draw an unambiguous distinction between God and the world, and certainly between God and Israel. The reason is simple: if Israel were a literal or straightforward incarnation of God, then commandments, covenant, free will, divine punishment, laws, and a host of other central Jewish ideas and institutions would become incomprehensible. To turn the Jewish people itself into God, with whatever disclaimers or qualifications, is hardly an advance toward a better understanding either of Judaism or of its relation to Christianity.

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Ultimately, the test of a Jewish philosopher lies in his ability to articulate essential ideas of the Jewish tradition in terms a modern reader can both respect and embrace. Concerning one such essential idea, Abraham’s Promise does indeed meet the test, offering a powerful defense of the centrality of Jewish nationhood at a time when unity seems increasingly out of reach. Similarly to Wyschogrod’s credit is his pioneering openness to the new and extremely important theological dialogue between Judaism and Christianity.

Regrettably, however, in other crucial aspects Abraham’s Promise presents a skewed and deeply misleading understanding of the Jewish tradition. In that sense, the “promise” of its title does not just remain unfulfilled but is very nearly betrayed.

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