Jews, Temporal & Timeless
The Natural and the Supernatural Jew.
by Arthur A. Cohen.
Pantheon Books. 326 pp. $6.00.
In this book, Arthur Cohen asks that Judaism and the Jewish people be restored to their historic role as God’s witnesses on earth. In his view “the rediscovery of the supernatural vocation of the Jew is the turning-point of modern Jewish history . . . for the Jewish people is not a fact of history but an article of faith.” Mr. Cohen devotes most of the book to an exposition of major figures in Jewish thought from Solomon ibn Verga in the early 16th century to our contemporary Will Herberg. He reads Jewish intellectual history, especially from the 18th century on, as a history of progressive secularization. In our time, however, this trend has been somewhat arrested. That certain contemporary thinkers have returned to a conception of the Jew as one who stands in a special covenanted relationship with God, Mr. Cohen feels, is the most exciting, significant, and hopeful development of recent Jewish history.
Moses Mendelssohn is, in certain respects, the unwitting villain of the drama. In spite of his outer conformity to Jewish religious discipline, Mendelssohn (in Mr. Cohen’s version) laid the foundations for secularization by cutting the historic tie between the Jewish faith and the Jewish people. The tendency was carried further by Leopold Zunz, Heinrich Graetz and other spiritual descendents of Mendelssohn, on the one hand, and by Moses Hess and the Zionists, on the other.
In their concern to “normalize” the Jew—the Zionists by restoring him to his own land, the proponents of the Wissenschaft des Judentums by integrating him into Western culture—both groups rejected the supernatural dimensions of Jewish existence and thereby robbed Judaism of its most important distinguishing characteristic. Even Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great leader of Orthodox Judaism in Germany, fails by Mr. Cohen’s standards; though he affirmed the supernatural dimension of Jewish existence, he erred in disengaging Jewish from general culture.
Mr. Cohen stresses two themes repeatedly. First, he holds that what he calls the “natural” Jew, the Jew defined by the ordinary categories of history and sociology, must be integrated with the “supernatural” Jew. Neither aspect of Jewish existence is sufficient when taken alone; nor can we understand the Jewish past or be confident about the Jewish future unless we restore this unified perspective. Second, Mr. Cohen insists that Judaism can fulfill its proper end only so long as it functions in an intimate relation with world history: “. . . the truth of Judaism has relevance and bearing upon the destiny of mankind. . . . The Jew can no longer afford the luxury of isolated sanctity, cut off and disinclined to share the history and time of his environment.” Mr. Cohen’s strongest criticism of most modern Jewish thinkers is that they have neglected to affirm one or both of these two points.
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Thus, Hermann Cohen, in struggling to identify the Jewish with the German spirit, made God the supreme moral teacher, but never came to terms with the Jewish belief in a God who is an “autonomous person.” Nor did Leo Baeck—though he saw clearly that Judaism in contemporary society had to confront Christianity—really face up to the supernatural base of all Jewish existence. Instead he assigned to Judaism a primary concern with the ordering of human ends. Even Rosenzweig and Buber fail to meet Mr. Cohen’s demand for an adequate synthesis of these two elements within our tradition. Rosenzweig stresses the supernatural Jew at the expense of the natural, while Buber’s natural Jew struggles unsuccessfully to confront the God who is beyond nature.
If Rosenzweig and Buber do not satisfy Mr. Cohen’s quest, then we can be certain that Mordecai Kaplan is beyond all hope. For Kaplan is a naturalist whose God is “anything the community, the folk, the civilization defines Him to be.” Mr. Cohen grants that Kaplan has fought assimilation, struggled to give vitality to Jewish culture, and devoted enormous effort to redefining Jewish belief in a way that would make it acceptable to our scientifically-minded contemporaries. But he finds Kaplan’s medicine worse than the disease it would cure. For “the adjustment of the Jew to the natural conditions of his environment divests him of the only weapon, his supernatural vocation, which allows him to survive what he must always survive—terrestrial history. The moment the civilization of the Jew is refashioned in order to accommodate his role in natural history the terms of his eclipse have been granted. The natural Jew as such has, we believe, no hope.”
Mr. Cohen claims to have learned much from two contemporary American Jewish thinkers, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Will Herberg. He holds that Heschel has illuminated the supernatural vocation of the Jew, but has not met in a convincing way the challenges of modern philosophy and science: Mr. Cohen wants not only affirmations of faith or religious rhetoric but arguments which will penetrate disbelief and irreligion. From Will Herberg, Mr. Cohen has learned to appreciate “the all-importance of history,” a stress which recurs throughout the book. He understands theology, in fact, as “the science of sacred history” which “sets itself but one task: to apprehend and interpret the presence of God in time and history.” Nevertheless, while many of the central points in Herberg’s thought are here echoed, “Will Herberg cannot be a satisfactory Jewish thinker,” because in his thought he transcends both Judaism and Christianity, “losing the real particularity which is the history of each.”
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Mr. Cohen provides us with an analysis of modern Jewish thought which, though tendentious, is often remarkably perceptive. His main interest, however, has not been to write a brief history of modern Jewish thought. He has sought, rather, to use the subject as a foil for the development of his own ideas.
Basically, this book is another product of the renewed Jewish effort at self-understanding. Mr. Cohen is concerned with understanding what it means to be a Jew, and even more with making sense out of his own existence as a Jew. Though he criticizes Heschel for not providing an arsenal of persuasive arguments, he himself begins with a personal confession of faith, or, as he calls it, “a statement of existential dogma.” The strand that unites the various elements in his dogmatic statement is the belief in the essentially supernatural character of the Jewish vocation. This dogma is primary. It is not argued, since, as he tells us, “what I say here I must believe, because without it there is nothing I consider ultimately relevant or meaningful to believe.” We cannot quarrel with a personal confession, nor deny any man the right to make sense out of his world in his own way. However, when private dogmas are published they become subject to criticism, for they are clearly intended to persuade others. They make a claim for themselves as normative. Moreover, dogmas which seek to define Jewishness must be judged in the light of evidence provided by classic Jewish sources. How does Mr. Cohen’s dogma stand up by these criteria?
A limited authenticity it certainly has, given the fact that it leads to a plea for the restoration of that Jewish vocation which the tradition has faithfully elaborated since the Covenant of Sinai. The crucial point is not whether Cohen is right or wrong, but whether the enterprise of Jewish theology, as he conceives it, is possible. Can one speak of “Jewish theology, rightly understood,” without falling into a trap? Every Jewish theology arises at a particular time and place and is, in part, a reaction to a particular cultural context. Mr. Cohen’s book, likewise, is the product of contemporary concerns and the contemporary religious situation, and like the thought of his predecessors his theology must also prove partial and incomplete. Thus he wisely stresses the importance of the supernatural Jew at a time when naturalistic interpretations of Judaism still dominate. But was not Kaplan responding equally to his estimate of the Jewish environment of thirty years ago when he made his great plea for Judaism without supernaturalism?
Perhaps Judaism has never given a primary place to systematic theology precisely because such systems are necessarily reactions to particular cultural circumstances. Over the centuries Jewish intellectual energy has instead been devoted primarily to the Halacha. A Jew was defined and defined himself by halachic norms, which achieved a kind of transcultural permanence. Jewish philosophy and theology were for the most part rooted in and related to halachic literature. I would suggest that the most striking symptom of that very secularization Mr. Cohen is protesting is the fact that hardly any of the thinkers he discusses sees an organic relationship between Jewish theology and the principles of Halacha: nor does Mr. Cohen himself note any such relationship. It is not enough to talk about the supernatural vocation of the Jewish people. We must be concerned with the forms of human behavior that objectify and give substance to this vocation.
Were he more deeply rooted in the halachic tradition, Mr. Cohen might also see more value in the efforts expended for naturalist Jewish survival. “All adjustments and rationalizations,” he tells us, “are designed to insure that the natural Jew will survive, even though the supernatural Jew may perish. What concerns us, however, is that the supernatural Jew shall survive.” Halachic teaching, on the contrary, places enormous importance on the survival of every individual Jew, no matter how far he falls short of the Jewish ideal. “Dos pintele Yid” which remains, however deeply buried, in every Jewish heart still constitutes a saving remnant. The tradition shares Mr. Cohen’s concern for the survival of the supernatural Jew, but it is fully aware that existential confrontation with God is not the only way to such survival. In each act of charity, in every expression of human and humane concern, however secularized, there continues to be some element of that supernatural vocation. Even if contemporary Jews have survived as Jews primarily through their philanthropy, they have not lost their vocation completely, for Jewish doctrine has always held that a straight path leads from love of man to love of God.
Perhaps what is basically wrong is that the categories “natural” and “supernatural” have no proper ground in Jewish thinking. The Jew, qua Jew, has never been able to admit this distinction. If all the world is God’s creation, if He is the Lord of both nature and history, then every dismembering of human existence into natural and supernatural is artificial. The Jew is the historic witness to this faith, having been commanded to bring heaven and earth together. Mr. Cohen pleads repeatedly for this very unification of the natural and the supernatural Jew. He sees clearly enough that there cannot be one without the other—but what he tends to forget is that no natural Jew exists, in his sense. Whatever is identifiably Jewish, however it may struggle to make itself “natural,” inevitably fails to shake off the “supernatural” element. This is why the Halacha places such great value on the fulfillment of a mitzvah even when done without proper intention. If the act is performed out of any Jewish motivation whatsoever, it transcends its own natural boundaries and becomes a step toward the proper Jewish vocation.
In short, until Mr. Cohen succeeds in incorporating the halachic tradition into the suggestive theological framework he has already built, he will stand at the periphery, rather than at the center, of Jewish thought. He has not yet shown the way to that very synthesis of the natural and the supernatural Jew for which he argues. For this he needs the system of Halacha—the only instrument that Jewish faith has for standing simultaneously in the worlds of the temporal and the eternal.
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