Subjective Faith
Rediscovering Judaism: Reflections on a New Theology.
by Arnold Jacob Wolf.
Quadrangle Books. 288 pp. $6.50.
Nine contemporary Jewish thinkers are represented in this collection of essays—each seeking in his own way the meaning and relevance of some particular aspect of Judaism. Though the writers are of diverse religious backgrounds, and though they differ in the modes of their Jewish piety, they are united in a common search: they are committed to the Jewish tradition, but the fact of its being a tradition—handed down, that is, through the generations—is not sufficient in and of itself to enable them to make it their own. In the depths of their beings they are Jews, but they are at the same time educated and thoughtful men who accept the premises and conclusions of our humanistic-scientific culture. For such men, Judaism cannot be received simply as a gift from our ancestors, but must be won anew through personal search and struggle. Characterizing the contributors to this volume, the editor writes: “For us, Judaism is not so much a heritage as an achievement. Or, perhaps more accurately, to make it our heritage has become our decisive task.”
In view of this orientation, it is not too surprising to find that few of the writers represented in Rediscovering Judaism are troubled by what others might regard as the most fundamental question of all—whether religious belief itself is still possible for contemporary man. Starting out as they do with a positive religious concern, and accepting Judaism as the framework within which that concern must be worked out, they are moved primarily to determine how to relate themselves to their Jewish heritage and how that heritage can become relevant for them as modern men; whether the heritage is itself viable does not, however, come into question. Most of these essays, then, will be of little help to the man who finds the very idea of religion anomalous; for him, the contributors to this volume both presume too much and offer too little. Yet there is no point in criticizing the book for not being a different one. Rather, we must examine how far these writers have achieved the goal they have set for themselves.
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The essays range in subject matter from such general questions as Lou H. Silberman's “The Task of Jewish Theology,” or Jacob Petuchowski's “The Dialectics of Reason and Revelation,” to such particular issues as “Psychoanalysis and the Temperaments of Man” by Arnold Jacob Wolf, or Stephen Schwarzschild's “A Jewish Perspective on International Relations.” They range in quality from the pedestrian to the profound, with occasional regrettable lapses into the vernacular. Thus one wishes, for example, that Zalman M. Schacter, in his “Patterns of Good and Evil,” had resisted the temptation to capture the reader with section headings like “My Son, the Catalyzing Fossil,” “If Y're So Committed, How Come Y'aint God?,” and “But Until You Get to the Inn You Still Need a Little Bit of Gin.” These seem particularly out of place in a volume which also includes Emil L. Fackenheim's “The Revealed Morality of Judaism and Modern Thought,” a model of sobriety and philosophic depth.
For the most part, the writers employ a dialectical scheme wherein they seek first to affirm, and then to overcome, the tensions between Judaism and modern thought. This comes out perhaps most clearly in the opening essay by Silberman in which he proposes “a program of study and work that can lead to a meaningful statement of Judaism, intellectually sound and spiritually relevant in and for the generation to which it is addressed.” To confront the tradition, Silberman argues, one must first know it—in all its vast diversity and complexity. Hence, the “program” he urges is to consist of a careful and unbiased study of all the main sources of Judaism. Silberman is fierce in his opposition to those “liberal” Jewish thinkers who have dealt with the tradition in a capriciously selective manner, retaining what supports their particular attitudes and rejecting or ignoring the rest. In his view, no Jewish source may be excluded a priori, for we cannot know in advance what will speak to us and to our situation.
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In Silberman's version, the dialectical tension is between the tradition and the subjectivity of the individual who confronts it. Because he cannot merely accept and appropriate the Jewish tradition as given, the contemporary Jewish thinker “must acquire the capacity for affirming and must affirm what he has the capacity to affirm.” Yet even while attempting to accept the fullest possible version of Judaism, the modern Jew can commit himself only to those elements which evoke a personal, authentic response in him, persuading his mind and engaging his total being. A response of this kind cannot—almost by definition—be prescribed, and Silberman offers us no sure guide to it, and so we are left with the reminder that though his inclination will always be in favor of the tradition, the contemporary Jew—notwithstanding Silberman's own injunction to “affirm”—can only affirm what is possible for him in his existential individuality.
A similar view is presented in Jakob Petuchowski's essay exploring the relations between reason and revelation. In reiterating the familiar history of the problem, he shows that we have moved far from classical Judaism in which “the role assigned to Reason was wholly within the framework of revealed religion,” so that today we stand at the opposite pole where reason dominates all, leaving no room for revelation. The problem, then, is to recapture revelation and restore it to its proper place, and this requires, according to Petuchowski, an existential gesture. As man affirms his own individuality he discovers the insufficiency of reason, for no set of rational categories is sufficient to cope with the trans-rational mystery of human personality—of what it means to be a man. In the same way, religious experience, too, transcends rational limits. God is revealed to us in prayer, and His covenant with Israel is revealed whenever we take our stand as Jews in the stream of Jewish history. But since personal responses cannot be programmed, what, precisely, is that stand to consist of? Herein lies the danger in the personal, relativistic approach of much of this book.
Though none of the writers included in it would go so far as to substitute for normative Judaism a pure subjectivity, they occasionally come very close to doing so. Granted that their subjectivity is conditioned by, and responds to, the tradition, yet in the course of this same process the tradition is being refracted through, and hence considerably transformed by, their individual responses. And though this dilemma is not a new one—one could even say that it is the perennial dilemma of any living religion—yet the essays in this volume reveal a radical departure on the part of our contemporary Jewish thinkers from the way it has been dealt with in the past. The classical Jewish response to the tradition has always been made not only in terms of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs, but also, and above all, in terms of specific patterns of piety—that is, of conformity in practice to the Halakhah. This conformity has served throughout our history as an anchor, safeguarding the tradition from the dangers of subversion by excessive subjectivity. In other words, so long as the relatively stable norms of the law have regulated the quality and character of the Jewish community, a wide variety of individual responses to theological questions could be permitted, with no danger to the tradition itself.
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As a paradigm for this situation we can look as far back as the 13th century when the sage Nachmanides attacked the doctrines of Maimonides without restraint—going so far as to assert, for example, concerning certain aspects of Maimonides' theory of prophecy, that “these teachings directly contradict Scripture; it is forbidden to hear them and certainly forbidden to believe in them.”
Could one not therefore maintain that these great sages not only differed in their understanding of the tradition, but that their differences stemmed, in fact, from their subjective responses, since they quite clearly inhabited different intellectual worlds, were moved by different inner needs, and hence viewed the traditional teaching from their own peculiar perspectives? And if so, what, then, held them together within the common Jewish tradition? Most certainly, it was the fact that in halakhic matters they no longer responded with this same subjectivity. Though there can be differences of opinion in matters of Jewish law no less than in other matters, as we well know, yet there do exist in this area recognized methods for resolving such differences, or, at least, for reaching decisions about them, one way or another. The very same people who are at swords'-point on theological questions live out their lives in accordance with identical legal norms—which is why in the legal literature we are not surprised, for example, to find the mystic Joseph Karo defending (in his Kesef Mishneh) the code of the rationalist Maimonides against attacks from various quarters. These men and others like them, who might never have been able to share a common set of theological interpretations of reality, did possess a common law.
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It is the attempt to find normative Judaism without such a law that ultimately makes the contributors to the present volume prisoners of their own subjectivity. All of them seem to affirm the traditional doctrines of God as Creator, of His presence in history, of His covenant with the people of Israel, and His redemptive power. But these doctrines are open to so wide a variety of interpretations that a normative Judaism cannot be constructed out of them alone. The subjectivity of the individual writers dominates, even as they confront those teachings of the tradition which they all seem to hold in common. When we consider some of the essays dealing with particular problems of present-day Judaism rather than with the more general theological questions, this becomes even more readily apparent.
Steven Schwarzschild, for example, calls his essay “A Jewish Perspective on International Relations,” but the reader is hard pressed to find anything specifically Jewish in his approach to the subject, though he does make certain basic distinctions which are illuminating. In brief, Schwarzschild's argument is that Christianity, in its advocacy of a dualism between body and spirit, abdicated concern with this world. Seeking the Kingdom of God in another world, Christianity could leave the state to Caesar and, as a result, Christian culture sets no moral norms for the state as a corporate entity, allowing it to be controlled exclusively by the claims of self-interest. Judaism, on the other hand, is concerned with this world. It views all principalities and powers as bound by the law, as is shown by the extensive legislation to be found in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Codes, prescribing norms of conduct for kings and governments, no less than for individuals.
Thus far, Schwarzschild's explication is cogent enough, but at this point—where we would reasonably expect him to show us what specifically the directives of Jewish law are with respect to contemporary international problems—we are given not one word on the subject. Instead, Schwarzschild tells us at some length about himself and his own private views on various major issues of international politics. Speaking as “an unashamed and self-confessed pacifist, Jewish traditionalist, and theological messianist,” he confesses, for example, that he opposed American intervention in the internal affairs of Guatemala, but favored our naval threats to Trujillo's Dominican Republic, the latter preference being grounded in the fact that “I thoroughly disliked Trujillo, whereas I had some sympathy with the revolutionary Guatemalan regime.” One wonders at the confusion which could lead to presenting judgments of this kind under the title, “A Jewish Perspective. . . .”
Similarly subjective responses can be found in Maurice Friedman's “Christianity and the Contemporary Jew.” Friedman's dilemma is not unfamiliar. He cannot ignore Christianity, for it is a present reality which demands his response, nor yet can he deal with it with any measure of detachment. At least in one respect, his response is a Jewish one—he refuses to grant to Christianity any claim that it represents final religious truth, “that Christ is the fullest conceivable revelation of God.” But this is, after all, what could be called the minimally Jewish response; short of it, one would cease being a Jew altogether, and become a Christian.
Having, then, made this minimally Jewish response, Friedman more or less lets it go at that, so far as the Jewish tradition is concerned, and proceeds to expatiate on the subject of his own personal spiritual dilemmas. Among them is the desire to maintain some living relationship with Christianity and with the Christ who is a “stumbling-block to Jews,” which impels him to reinterpret not only Judaism but Christianity as well. In this connection, he rejects the cross because it is a symbol of Jewish suffering caused by anti-Semitism—a good reason, perhaps, but by no means the central Jewish one; similarly, he disallows Christianity's own historic claims not because of the absence of scholarly evidence on the subject, but because they appear to be unacceptable to him personally. Thus, in spite of the normative Christian views on the subject, he is certain that Jesus did not think of himself as the Messiah, because, as he puts it, that is “unthinkable to me.” He finds it equally unthinkable that Jesus had foreknowledge of the future significance of the cross, or that he founded his church upon the rock which was Peter. Here we have a kind of apotheosis of theological subjectivity, whereby an individual Jew, speaking out of the privacy of his own concerns, undertakes to reform classical Christianity in order to be better able to relate himself to it.
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A much-needed contrast to the excessive subjectivity of most of these writers is the brilliant essay by Emil L. Fackenheim that I have already mentioned. Fackenheim examines the issues, rather than his own needs, and approaches them with the rigorous tools of the trained philosopher. Though rejecting all purely external interpretations of Judaism, Fackenheim insists nevertheless that no serious contemporary Jew can ignore the challenges of modern thought, the most serious of which is, according to him, that posed by the philosophy of Kant. If we view morality, with Kant, as autonomous, what happens to the status of the divine commandments? Or, as Fackenheim poses the question: “How can man appropriate a God-given law or commandment, accepting and performing it as though it were his own, while yet remaining, in the very act of appropriation, essentially and receptively related to its divine giver? How can man ‘morally’ obey a law which yet is, and never ceases to be, essentially revealed?”
In formulating his answer, which deserves fuller treatment than is possible here, Fackenheim sees the law not as a barrier between God and man, but rather as a bridge which unites them. Morality does not consist, as Kant thought, of rules which are to be observed only because they are intrinsically valuable; nor is the moral relationship one that exists only between man and man. It exists also between man and God, so that every moral act is performed both for its own sake and at the same time for God's sake. Without the relationship to God, we can have no morality, for there would then be no ground on which we could ascribe intrinsic value to man. But if man is to be a moral agent, he cannot merely be a puppet subject to God's control. Autonomy and heteronomy thus come together in the Jewish view of morality. Man, who is commanded, acquires his freedom in the fact of being commanded. In deciding for God, he decides for his own intrinsic worth, as well as for that of every other man.
Thus does Professor Fackenheim take significant steps toward clarifying an aspect of Judaism in relation to modern thought. In the end, the rigor of his objective analysis moves us far more deeply (and personally) than the subjective responses of his colleagues. Of all of them, he seems to have contributed most to this common effort “to rediscover Judaism.”
