Kedushah and Kavod

Ancient Jewish Philosophy.
by Israel I. Efros.
Wayne State University Press. 199 pp. $7.95.

With the general claim that there are important philosophic ideas in the Bible and rabbinic literature, one can hardly take serious issue any longer. As Professor Efros correctly notes, “The very first verse of Genesis contains a whole philosophy: there is a God and a world which He created, and the world is not God and God is not the world.” But he did not write this book merely to reopen an old argument—one which in my opinion has been adequately closed for all time. His significant contribution consists of an original and illuminating account of biblical and rabbinic metaphysics, which he then uses as the basis for a philosophy of biblical ethics. He presents a convincing case for the view that a large part of the literature of Jewish antiquity is intelligible only in the light of these metaphysical constructs, though not without making the necessary distinction between them and the systematic philosophies of classical Greece—for in the Bible “philosophy” is implicit rather than explicit, presupposed rather than worked out openly and in detail.

Professor Efros maintains that early Jewish thought was unique among ancient philosophies. On the one hand, there were the various pagan cultures which conceived of a single world order jointly inhabited by the gods and man; on the other hand, there were the Greeks in whose dualistic metaphysics only one dimension of being represented true reality, while the other was merely a pale copy of it. The Platonic Ideas, moreover, “were completely inert,” even as the Aristotelian concept of pure Form was “entirely inactive—a pagan god contemplating eternally its own navel.” Only in the Bible were the worlds of God and man held to be equally real, with no impassible barriers separating them from one another.

The metaphysical basis for this unity, according to Dr. Efros, resides in two principles which underlie all ancient Hebraic thought. They are the principle of Holiness (kedushah), representing the tendency of God to withdraw from the world; and the principle of Glory (kavod), representing His involvement in the world. Wherever we find instances in the Bible of the spiritualization of the divine, of God being made morally or metaphysically Other, the principle of Holiness is manifest; when the emphasis is upon the nearness of God, upon His love for man and for the world, then the principle of Glory predominates.

Throughout the Bible and the Talmud, according to Dr. Efros, there is to be discerned a process of constant alternation between these two poles which he traces from the prophets through the Apocrypha, the Wisdom literature, the Tannaitic writings and the Amoraic tradition. There is greater emphasis now upon one, now upon the other, of the two principles—depending upon the period and the writer in question—but neither is ever lost sight of entirely. Thus, Dr. Efros finds that pre-exilic prophecy, for example, at first placed primary stress on the concept of Holiness, but tended, as it developed, to give ever more place to the concept of Glory; post-exilic thought, on the other hand, reversed the process, stressing more and more the transcendence of God.

It should be noted, however, that in Dr. Efros's reading, kedushah and kavod are not mutually exclusive, nor are they simply to be equated with the conventional theological categories of the transcendence and immanence of God. For these very categories—fixed and unalterable as they are—already presuppose an irreconcilable duality: a philosophic system that invokes them places God either outside the world or else identifies Him with the world. The greatness of biblical religion, however, lies in its ability to reconcile these polarities. The God of the Bible is prior to and independent of the world He created, yet He enters that world and affects its history; He is a unique being, yet man is created in His image; He is absolutely independent, yet He is constantly in search of man. By declaring God and man to be in a state of permanent interaction, by seeing the world as a stage on which is played out the drama of God's search for man and man's search for God, by giving priority to becoming rather than being, Hebraic thought succeeds in transcending the fixed categories of classical philosophy and traditional theology.

The conviction that man in relation to God is more than just a rational animal is, of course, a central element of Hebrew religious thought. Though logic cannot cope with it, and reason cannot comprehend it, God enters into history and engages man. Homo religiosus, at least in the Hebraic version, lives in a condition of love and tension with a God who cannot be apprehended by the intellect alone. These insights are not new but we are nonetheless indebted to Dr. Efros for rediscovering them and recalling them to our attention—so much so that his tendency, on occasion, to weaken his own case by overstating it, seems all the more regrettable.

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An example of such overstatement is to be found in his treatment of the prophetic writings. While it would have been sufficient for his own thesis merely to show that certain prophets tended to view God primarily under the aspect of kedushah, while others tended toward the aspect of kavod, Dr. Efros insists upon assigning to the various prophets an exclusive commitment to one or the other “school”—going far beyond the verifiable evidence in order to do so. Notwithstanding the fact that there is a very wide range of opinion (even among those who accept the claims of biblical criticism) about how the received text of the Old Testament should be emended, Dr. Efros freely reinterprets or eliminates passages that would get in the way of his attempt to establish the terminological consistency of the prophetic writings. To Dr. Efros, for example, Isaiah is a leading protagonist of the Holiness school; hence, whenever Isaiah uses the term kavod, or one related to it, Dr. Efros assures us either that the passage in question is an interpolation from some unknown prophet or that it is “generally regarded as belonging to Deutero-Isaiah.” Similarly, he tells us that though Hosea belongs to the school of Glory, he “uses the term kadosh, but in the sense which converts it to the idea of kavod.” This would seem to show that the prophets did not employ these terms with perfect consistency. Indeed, we need only recall that the Targum paraphrases and interprets Isaiah's “holy, holy, holy” to mean, “Holy in the highest heavens . . . holy upon earth the work of His might, holy for endless ages is the Lord of hosts,” to realize that in the Book of Isaiah also the terms kadosh and kavod overlap much more than Dr. Efros allows for.

In the second part of the book, Dr. Efros presents a theory of biblical ethics wherein the tensions involved in his version of Judaic metaphysics are finally resolved. It is through man's moral self-realization, the author holds, that he becomes divine and the divine is concretized in him. In the moral moment, God and man—beings that are metaphysically distinct—become one, as ethics supersedes ontology.

Viewed in this way, morality is self-imposed—not a matter of submission to an externally imposed law, but an attempt on the part of man to discover the meaning of his own existence. True morality is not obedience to God, but rather the expression of man's divinity: “This infinite morality, moreover, does not force itself upon us from the outside. It enters into the depths and speaks to us from there, immanently: ‘Thus said the Lord,’ my voice is your voice, the voice of your depths, my command is your command. It is not I who makes the laws you are to obey: you yourself are the legislator. . . .”

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Given this conception of the moral life, it follows that there can be no fixed moral rules, nor even any general principles to guide us in the making of moral decisions, for each situation is unique and man must find the answer to his moral perplexities within himself. As he confronts the moment of decision, he responds in his own way to its particular demands. Thus, true morality, according to Dr. Efros, is creative—to bind man by rules would mean to restrict what could be called his “moral creativity.”

It is here that I must raise strong objections to Dr. Efros's views. Whatever judgment one may make of this ethical theory per se, it seems impossible to take it seriously as an account of biblical ethics. Dr. Efros himself observes that the first verse of Genesis proclaims that “the world is not God, and God is not the world,” to which might be added the corollary that man is not God and God is not man. The Decalogue begins with the proclamation that God is the Lord of History, that He alone is worthy of adoration, and He alone is the source of every commandment addressed to man. “Thus said the Lord,” declares the Bible, not “Thus says man to himself.” Biblical morality, in other words—and I think that this matter cannot be stressed sufficiently—is based on God's commandments, not man's intuitions. Man is enjoined to imitate God, not to become God—a form of self-idolatry repugnant to biblical theology no less than to biblical morality.

If there is no fixed standard of moral right, how does Dr. Efros account for the conception of sin or moral error? What becomes of all the prophetic denunciations of the Jewish people for their moral failures? And if Dr. Efros were to temper his claims with the assurance that the moral insight each man finds in himself always corresponds to the moral law of the Bible, he would merely have trivialized the notions of moral intuition and moral creativity. Since there is no evidence of the existence of universal moral intuitions, he would be forced to distinguish between true and false self-realization. True self-realization would then be revealed as according with certain prior moral principles, which only brings us right back to a source of morality external to ourselves.

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Finally, one must protest against Dr. Efros's exclusive identification of the ethical with the Divine and his consequent reduction of religion solely to its ethical component. What can he possibly mean when he speaks of the “biblical I Am, who is sheer Ethics,” or affirms that “God is ethics itself”? How can he purport to represent this as a biblical view? Goodness is an attribute of God, but the biblical God is not identical with His goodness, and it is assuredly not the case that, in the Bible, “ethics . . . is itself conceived as the Deity.” The rebuttal to that argument, in fact; is to be found in the very passage in Exodus which Efros cites only partially: Moses, having pleaded for full knowledge of God, is denied his wish, whereupon he asks, “Show me. . . Thy glory (kavod).” To this God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee,” but He adds the admonition that “Man shall not see me and live.” The passage is to be interpreted as meaning that it is enough for Moses if he grasps God's self-manifestation in the world, if he sees in history the evidences of divine mercy and goodness. The Bible explicitly denies, however, that this goodness is identical with the whole of God's nature, for the God of the Bible transcends the world. Curiously, in asserting as he does that God and ethics are synonymous, Dr. Efros has turned away from his own hard-fought distinction between Holiness and Glory.

Finally, I must protest the carelessness of the book's production. There are a great many typographical errors, many of the sources cited in the text are wrong, the footnotes are completely chaotic. The notes to Chapter 6, in particular, are out of order, misnumbered and misplaced. In a scholarly work, such lapses are well-nigh inexcusable.

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