Liberal Beliefs
A New Jewish Theology in the Making.
by Eugene B. Borowitz.
Westminster Press. 224 pp. $6.50.
How can a Jew Speak of Faith Today?
by Eugene B. Borowitz.
Westminster Press. 225 pp. $6.00.
For a long time now, many Jewish thinkers and scholars have proudly, even smugly, declared that there is no such creature as Jewish theology. Repelled by theological claims to certainty in areas in which certainty is not to be had—it has been said that some theologians talk as if they have just had lunch with the Deity—and stressing the Jewish preoccupation with action, some Jews have tended to look askance at the whole theological enterprise. The trouble with this, however, is that in a comparatively secure Jewish community like the American it is precisely theological thinking to which many sensitive Jews have now become attracted. No longer content with pious exhortations to follow the Jewish way of life, these younger thinkers wish to explore the meaning of that which has provided Jewish life with its inspiration. They want to know what it is that Judaism would have them believe. Eugene Borowitz is prominent among these new Jewish theologians on the American scene, most of whom are pupils of the late Leo Baeck.
In the two volumes under review (the only Jewish contribution to a series by Christian writers on new directions in theology today), Professor Borowitz declares his belief that the need for religion to accept the secular challenge—so dominant a theme in contemporary Christian theology—is not a burning problem for Jewish thinkers. On the contrary, Jewish theological concern is especially evident among those who are profoundly dissatisfied both with traditional formulations, or the lack of them, and with secularity. “Contemporary Christianity,” he writes, “may be agog with secularity. Since we were in it up to our nostrils for several decades, we know we are men of faith precisely because we must move beyond it. We obviously do not believe as much as our grandfathers did, but we have discovered painfully that we believe far more than our society does.” So much by way of prolegomenon. Borowitz goes on from here to deal in the first volume chiefly with the question of theological methodology; in the second, he puts the methodology to work on such problems as the “death of God,” the Covenant, the liturgy, and the Jewish confrontation with the secular world and Christianity.
_____________
The assertion that theology has no place in Judaism is dismissed by Borowitz as chutzpah. With a great gift for expounding the most abstruse themes, he surveys the main previous attempts at working out a theology for 20th-century Jewry (explaining Buber, for instance, with greater clarity than Buber himself was generally able to muster), stating the various options fairly and with a considerable degree of admiration but also exposing their shortcomings. Thus, Leo Baeck's emphasis on ethical monotheism as the basis for his idea of revelation through the Jewish people is found wanting from both the Jewish and the philosophical point of view: for does not Jewish particularism now risk distorting the universalistic message? Moreover, as history has posed its tests and plunged men into crisis, they have tended to discover a state of permanent ambiguity, rather than the Kantian categorical imperative upon which Baeck relied.
The functionalism of Mordecai M. Kaplan also fails in Borowitz's view because what once made God function in people's lives was their firm conviction that He was real—a conviction, one need hardly add, that some find hard to come by today. If, furthermore, Jews are primarily a folk like every other folk, as Kaplan would have it, it follows that their secular activities must be judged of equal worth as their religious activities; but can it seriously be maintained that Jewish folk dancing is the equivalent of the study of the sacred books? In the case of Buber, Borowitz rightly points out our indebtedness to this philosopher's insight into the relationship of the Jew to God and to his fellow man, but he marks also the contradiction inherent in Buber's insistence that it is the person and not the folk that is paramount when it comes to action; for indeed, whether one speaks of the Covenant at Sinai or of this particular moment in time, an individual Jew's sense of relationship and duty will always be as much a matter of folk as of self. Finally, the traditionalist thinkers A. J. Heschel and J. B. Soloveitchick are found to be less than completely helpful because they rely ultimately on the truth of the traditional theory of revelation in a way unacceptable to many moderns.
_____________
Borowitz's own approach is to refuse to act as if there were a truth superior to Judaism, but rather to have one's faith in Judaism come before any other faith one may have. This priority of faith constitutes Borowitz's methodological standpoint; and it is here, precisely, that we run into difficulties. As a liberal Jew Borowitz cannot opt for the Jewish tradition simply and without reservations; he claims the right to dissent. For instance, in the second volume he states that he finds it impossible to accept an “objective” view of revelation, in which God conveys propositions to man, but rather sees revelation only in “subjective” terms, as man's interpretation of the divine-human encounter.
_____________
Once this right of dissent is acknowledged, however, what becomes of the whole idea of the priority of faith? It will not do to argue, as Borowitz does, that all that is required is a shift of emphasis from earlier liberal views. “When in all seriousness I am moved to disagree, the responsibility now rests upon me to justify that disagreement. Previous generations of liberal Jews often acted as if Judaism had to justify itself to the Jew. I am arguing that making Jewish faith primary calls on me to justify myself when I dissent from it.” But dissent—whether it is undertaken jubilantly or with extreme reluctance—is dissent nevertheless, and it must, according to Borowitz's own premises, involve the granting of priority to the grounds of dissent over the traditional faith.
Indeed, Borowitz himself seems to admit as much when he writes:
In terms of my Jewish affirmations, religious existentialism is the most complementary philosophic style available. It supplies the hermeneutic instrument for interpreting Judaism in modern terms but may not usurp that role as a means to replace the primacy of traditional Jewish faith for me. This is what this self-conscious commitment to open traditionalism clarifies. Now when the religious existentialist insights contradict what study shows is classic Jewish faith, as is true in the areas of society, history, and law, I do not automatically judge Judaism to be wrong. Rather I investigate to see what it is that I truly affirm. . . . In the case of society and history it seems to me the existentialists are wrong and need the interpersonal, time-oriented vision which Jewish faith provides. In the case of law I dissent from both positions. That leads me to a Jewish sense that all authentic existence must be structured, an understanding foreign to existentialism. Yet I am also moved to an existentialist reworking of Jewish law in personalist terms it could not traditionally tolerate.
This comes perilously close to having one's cake and eating it. The primacy of the traditional faith is affirmed in the areas of society and history but not in the area of law. But primacy in this context is indivisible; a partial primacy is no primacy at all. And since ultimately Borowitz makes his own personal decision, and is prepared to question the existentialist insight in all three areas, what can he mean when he says that he finds religious existentialism to be the hermeneutic instrument for interpreting Judaism?
_____________
The difficulty, it seems to me, stems in the main from Borowitz's implied belief that in order to be modern or liberal one must have a philosophy—be it existentialism or some other current trend; this is how the problem of primacy arises in the first place. But it is not at all clear why such a “philosophy” should be needed, either as a means of safeguarding one's autonomy or as an instrument with which to grasp Judaism. The task of the theologian can just as properly be a reverential but critical investigation of Judaism executed not by comparing it with other “philosophies” but by trying to see how its traditional formulations cohere with the rest of our knowledge. When in the process certain traditional views are given up (e.g., the Mosaic authorship of the whole of the Pentateuch), this need not be done out of submission to a rival system but in order to make sense of Judaism itself.
Basically what is involved here is a question of logic, where the subject of primacy does not arise: to obey the formal laws of human reasoning is not to make God subordinate to logic but to enable the language we use about God and Judaism to do its work.
