Jewish Thinkers
Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy.
by Emil L. Fackenheim.
Basic Books. 275 pp. $10.00.
If Not Now, When? Toward a Reconstitution of the Jewish People.
by Mordecai M. Kaplan and Arthur A. Cohen.
Schocken. 136 pp. $5.95.
God and the Jews, world history and its creator, pure eternity and suffering temporality—these are the poles which define the scope of Jewish theology and within which the arguments of Jewish thinkers must be situated. For the Jew, the natural and the supernatural coexist, and history is the arena of their interaction, the substance of which gradually fills man's life with meaning. The Jewish thinker must strike a balance between the two positions, avoiding an excessive commitment to either in his attempt to arrive at an understanding of what it means to exist as a Jew in this world before the God who once chose the Jews as His people, but now hides His face.
This concern of the Jewish religious thinker is by no means a new one, but the modern Jewish thinker faces a different and more complex challenge than did his medieval forebear. The secular constitution of modern society has transformed the meaning of religious identity, so that what was once a binding cultural-religious monolith has become something fragmented and utterly voluntary. In a world without God, why should Jews remain Jews? In the place of an obsolete historical necessity, a philosophical and theological necessity must be demonstrated. Jewish survival must now be argued for, and Jewish existence in the modern world justified for Jews. This justification must reformulate the supernatural pole of theology as well; arguing for the vitality of Judaism, the Jewish theologian must simultaneously reinstate the possibility of standing before a living, personal God.
Emil Fackenheim has addressed himself searchingly to this effort on many occasions and he continues to do so in his latest book as well. Spurred by the conviction that “ever since the Nazi Holocaust it is Western civilization that is on trial,” Fackenheim accuses modern Jews of blithely accepting assumptions of the Enlightenment period which in reality make any “serious investigation of things Jewish” impossible. Fackenheim seeks to explode these assumptions—they include the premise that Jews can be fairly judged by a civilization that has pursued them—in the name of the authenticity of Jewish thought. One senses throughout Fackenheim's work a kind of pride, the pride of one who, having questioned his tradition from a critical distance that he will never relinquish, emerges confident of the validity of that tradition before all others.
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It is Fackenheim's particular intention in his new hook to deal with the relations between modern philosophy and modern Jewish thought (the latter he defines tentatively as “the critical inquiry into the modern destiny of the Jewish people and its faith”). The “encounters” he discusses are by no means peripheral to their protagonists; the stakes for each, we are told, are very high. For Fackenheim, philosophy's claim to having transcended medieval parochialism and arrived at a carefully conceived objectivity is put into doubt by the discovery that many of its most notable achievements do, in fact, operate out of specifically anti-Jewish or pro-Christian presuppositions. Yet Fackenheim is not engaged here in mere polemical exposé. He makes the much more serious claim that an anti-Jewish bias lies at the very heart of several philosophical systems, and that an objective and sober understanding of the principles of Jewish life and faith by the thinkers in question would have forced serious revisions of fundamental doctrines. The critique of Western civilization in terms of its attitude toward the Jews—a critique which Fackenheim as a philosopher of history had elsewhere made in analyzing the social and cultural preconditions of Auschwitz—is here transposed to the “pure” realm of thought.
Fackenheim confronts Judaism with formidable antagonists as he runs the gamut of modern philosophy: logical empiricism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre. The method remains the same throughout. The author sets forth the various critiques of Judaism (as formulated or implied by the philosophies in question), and demonstrates that these are based upon preconceptions rather than analysis. He then presents a Jewish response, grounded in an orientation radically different from the philosophical. The exposition is consistently patient and clear, and thoroughly documented; it is characterized everywhere by the unique virtues we have come to expect of Fackenheim's writings. The scholarship is impressive, as always, and there are numerous intellectual surprises to be found along the way (such as the consideration of Kierkegaard's treatment of Abraham against a Kantian background, or the specific explication of the anti-Jewish attitudes of the left-wing Hegelians in terms of the master's own perspective on Judaism) .
The most significant of Judaism's “encounters” which Fackenheim discusses are those with Kant and Hegel. Kant revolutionized ethics by positing autonomy as the essence of morality; that is, according to the Kantian view, an imperative is not binding unless it is in conformity with one's will. Morality is the free self-legislation of man, who is an end in himself. Such a conception proves devastating to any notion of revealed morality, and in particular poses a challenge to Judaism. Commandments legislated by God and performed for His sake cannot, in the Kantian view, be essentially moral; on the other hand, imperatives which are self-legislated, however they may coincide with divine commandments, are not essentially religions. Kant in effect declares—the point becomes explicit in a small treatise on the Binding of Isaac—that God is in principle superfluous to morality, an assertion which quite obviously aims at the very core of Jewish faith.
At the center of the Kantian challenge lies the problem of the natural and the supernatural, and Fackenheim's task is thus to demonstrate the compatibility of transcendent God and immanent, ethical man. The Kantian challenge, he begins by noting, rests on a premise which Judaism does not share: that the Torah, i.e., the moral law, is a bar between man and God. To the contrary, he argues, for Judaism the Torah is a bridge between man and God; morality does not preclude the Jew's immediate relation with the Divine Presence. Fackenheim elucidates this position with what is perhaps the most theologically rewarding idea of the book, the “three-termed relationship” of revealed morality. According to this notion, an individual's ethical act is directed simultaneously at the other person and at God. Judaism recognizes the needs of the other as the occasion for a personal action, but goes on to make the “startling claim” that God Himself enters into the relationship. While the commandments must be performed for their own sake, as a moral response to reality, God is recognized as the origin of this reality, as the source of the value intrinsic to the world. God creates and insists upon the independent being of this immanent world, and is thus responsible for its moral law. Far from implying a logical contradiction, the doctrine of revealed morality testifies to that unique community of the natural and the supernatural which characterizes Judaism and which transcends the Kantian dilemma.
With regard to Hegel, Fackenheim writes that his thought “remains the deepest modern philosophical challenge to Jewish religious existence to this day.” The Hegelian system seeks to frame a comprehensive, universal truth which can be realized in history. This ultimate truth is a synthesis of the truths of previous cultures, one which assigns these cultures to their proper historical stations. Hegel's program thus requires both a close and objective investigation of former cultures (including Judaism), and the immediate rejection of their claims to absoluteness. Although Fackenheim is impressed with the relative justice accorded Judaism in Hegel's exposition—the kernel of spiritual truth within Judaism is retained in the Hegelian system—still he points out that the system as a whole supersedes Judaism, which now assumes the character of partial truth.
As Fackenheim demonstrates, Hegel's understanding of Judaism is based upon the reification of Jewish theology. For Hegel, “the Jewish testimony must be simply unmoved and unmoving.” Fackenheim disputes this rigid view, showing that, “in point of historical fact,” Jewish history is characterized by a series of “internal Jewish self-mediations” which facilitated adaptation and survival in the midst of successive cultures. He undertakes a lengthy analysis of Hegel's philosophy of history to show that his preconceptions prevented Hegel from understanding the dynamic nature of Jewish faith. The analysis is meticulous, and constitutes a tour de force of intellectual history. Fackenheim emerges at the end with a powerful post-Hegelian, post-Auschwitz affirmation of Jewish existence, based, as one reviewer has put it, on a “corporate existentialism,” on “the fact that the Jewish people is here.”
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Joining Fackenheim in the small company of Jewish thinkers who have perceived the changed theological landscape of our times are, most notably, Mordecai M. Kaplan and Arthur A. Cohen. Wary of both a believing naiveté and a historical nihilism, each in his own way has attempted to plot a tenable course for modern Judaism. A recent collaboration—based on a series of tape-recorded conversations between the venerable Kaplan and his much younger colleague—has produced a remarkable volume, If Not Now, When?
The conversations, as they come to us in transcription, are vigorous, honest, at times intensely personal. The meeting ground of the two men is their “common passion and common concern—our love for the Jewish people and our wish that it remain whole, creative, enduring.” But beyond what Kaplan and Cohen share, there is much on which they differ. For Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, Judaism, like all religion, is primarily a social phenomenon, “the collective consciousness of an organic society.” For Cohen, religion (to quote Whitehead) is what the individual does with his solitariness: man's confrontation with God is stark, isolating, directly experiential.
Appropriately enough, the dominant theological concern of these conversations is with the natural and the supernatural. In an earlier work on the subject, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew, Cohen had in fact been sharply critical of Kaplan's reduction of divinity to a complete immanence. The issue is joined here again and thoroughly pursued.
Kaplan's understanding of God is “derived entirely from social psychology.” God, neither persona nor idea, is for Kaplan the process by which man experiences transcendence, and “transcendence is the part of nature known as organicity.” But organicity is by no means a metaphysical abstraction; men experience transcendence through the organic nature of collective social existence. The revelation of God is the attainment of responsible social consciousness, and is articulated in ethical social action; moral value is the ultimate term of religious existence. For Kaplan, the term “God” is purely a functional (not a substantive) noun, providing “an answer to what man needs to be, to have and to do in order to achieve his destiny as a human being, or, collectively, as a family, tribe, or nation.” Kaplan has, however, become sensitive to the change of theological reductionism, and denies that his God-term is itself naturalist. He is at pains in these conversations to define a “transnaturalism,” in which “the supernatural is not implied [yet] the natural is extended transitively.”
As against Kaplan's naturalism, or “transnaturalism,” Cohen offers a supernaturalism whose precise meaning is somewhat obscure. Cohen claims to reject supernaturalism in any theurgic or magical form but he also argues against an idealistic notion of God, holding instead to a form of personalism: “Only if we can take Him seriously as a God can we take ourselves seriously as men”; “for me God is the person who continues to keep His secrets”; and, “the mature relation between man and God is transactional, both natural and transcendent.” Kaplan predicates God upon human need, but for Cohen He is always already there. In the latter's very striking formulation, the historical tradition of the Jews “is a record of an ongoing transaction between two obduracies that never let go.” Cohen writes that he has “never undertaken intercessionary prayer”; nonetheless he speaks of his “calling out to God, to the respondent Other.” And, perhaps most dramatically, in words similar to a famous statement by Judah Halevi, “I believe in the existence of a God who brought my people out of Egypt.” But Cohen also goes on to accept Kaplan's “transnaturalism” and calls God the “source of coherence, coherence in nature, coherence in history, coherence in values.” Coherence, however, though objective, cannot be addressed; this ambiguity in his position Cohen does not resolve.
The theological abstractions of the discussions between Kaplan and Cohen are motivated throughout by a shared desire to diagnose and cure the disease from which, both men agree, contemporary Judaism is suffering. Kaplan in particular presses for the formulation of a program for action. Cohen insists upon a more patient refinement of ideology and outlook; he is suspicious of institutional prescriptions, and cites the spiritual emptiness of the contemporary synagogue. Here the difference between them appears again. For Kaplan, the religious question is still one of reconstruction, of the relegitimization of authority in the form of socially meaningful discipline. Cohen, on the other hand, argues that “we can never tie Jewish existence to any social or political polity as though that polity had the strength and indomitability to sustain us rather than we sustaining it.”
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“Genuine conversation,” wrote Buber, “means acceptance of otherness,” and by this standard If Not Now, When? must be judged a moral success. In a sense, too, the conversation between Kaplan and Cohen really includes Emil Fackenheim as well, for all three of these seemingly disparate authors address a common theological problem: how to define the precarious relationship of the natural to the supernatural within Judaism. To this end Fackenheim stresses learning, Kaplan social reconstruction, Cohen introspective imagination. But they share a still more fundamental focus than this, for the way of each leads ultimately to the problem of ethics and seeks there its justification.
The ethical act is the response of purpose to the demands of reality. Requiring the consideration of both theory and practice, the eternally true and the pressingly tentative, it connects the transcendent and immanent dimensions of existence—and it is precisely on this ground that all three authors meet. The theological dilemma moves Fackenheim to formulate anew the substance of Jewish ethics, Kaplan to reconsider the integration of social morality and religious consciousness, Cohen to relate the individual's call to God to the community's call to the individual. The theological labor of all three is born of an acute sensitivity both to the timeless character of religious truth and to the immediate needs of the present moment in Jewish history. In their shared refusal to slight the claims of either, they make perhaps their greatest contribution to contemporary Jewish thought.
