Jewish Philosophy and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Luke Ford

Aaron W. Hughes writes in 2014:

* Having grown up non-Jewishly in a home completely devoid of Judaism, let alone any religion, my path to the tradition, both intellectual and spiritual, for all intents and purposes only began in graduate school, where I went to pursue further academic and linguistic training necessary for work in Jewish-Muslim thought in the Middle Ages. Whereas, prior to this, I had been, since an undergraduate, attracted to Judaism intellectually, it was only as a graduate student—especially in Oxford as a senior PhD student—that I began to learn and appreciate the liturgical, ritualistic, and social dimension of the tradition. Keeping shomer shabbes and attending a daily minyan, I began to appreciate the rhythm of Jewish life and time. Although unable to maintain
such a level of observance, I nevertheless remain, as I trust will become clear in what follows, simultaneously close to and aloof from the tradition.

I believed at the time that the best disciplinary setting to undertake work in Jewish-Muslim relations was in religious studies, one of the few fields that did not patrol disciplinary boundaries and was instead open to a variety of theoretical and methodological frameworks. Luckily, I entered a graduate program at Indiana University that was very sophisticated when it came to thinking not only about how religions interact but about whether the category “religion” was even a valid category of intellectual analysis. I was trained in Jewish intellectual history by my coeditor to this volume, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, in addition to Islamic philosophy with John Walbridge and theory and method in the study of religion with, among others, J. Samuel Preus, Robert Orsi, and Robert F. Campany. My work since has largely involved all three areas, and I primarily use the discourses associated with the academic study of religion to mine the datasets provided by Jewish and Islamic philosophy. While good for my intellectual development, in subsequent years, it has not proved conducive to my religious journey! I, thus, came to see “religion” as a social formation, one that is invented, maintained, and patrolled by a host of ideologically charged discourses that have been sublimated as either divine or as existing naturally in the world.

This skepticism defines me and, for the most part, informs as my primary intellectual orientation. It translates into the fact that I am always uncomfortable with both the status quo (something that reinforces my self-perception as a self-defined outsider) and of accepting received opinion simply because this is what tradition demands of us… I remain a seeker, one who never feels at “home” in organized religious life because of its rigidity and desire for certainty. The academy has become for me, as it has for many others, a place of respite from the dystopia of religious community.

* I, thus, find it impossible—again, reflecting my skeptical approach—to say that there exists a uniquely Jewish contribution to world civilization, any more than we can isolate a uniquely Greek, German, or Scottish one. Even monotheism, what some consider the great gift of the Jews, was little more than a political invention under the Deuteronomic reforms in the First Temple Period. To claim the ancient Israelites were ethical monotheists implies that Israel formed in a vacuum and that Israel’s neighbors were somehow “unethical.” This is a highly apologetical claim grounded more in contemporary politics than historical fact.

* In 1983, Benedict Anderson published the influential book Imagined Communities, in which he argued that communities—he had in mind nations, but we can just as easily say religions—are socially constructed or imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group (Anderson 2006 [1983], 1–6.). Because all the members of a nation or a religion lack face-to-face interaction, they must hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. Through shared symbols and texts, groups are able to imagine themselves as belonging to a community that is much larger than they would otherwise realize. This belonging, in turn, is predicated on perceived borders that distinguish each community from other communities—often constructed as other nations or religions. At around the same time, Pierre Bourdieu argued that how groups imagine themselves is based on a set of criteria that people within these groups internalize at a young age. Taste, he claims, is not—as we would think—an innate disposition but something constructed by one’s social group (Bourdieu 1984). People from different classes, for example, are habituated to like certain foods and not others. This social construction of taste and related judgments (what smells good or bad, concepts of beauty) further aids the construction of social identity and group belonging.

* The objection could certainly be raised that my claim of construction is contradicted by biology; for example, the fact that certain diseases (for example, Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis) are found more frequently among Jewish (especially Ashkenazic) populations than in non-Jewish populations and that this is proof of Jewish “genes” or whatever else we want to call them. This I do not doubt, nor is it my concern. That there is a biological reality of Jewishness in no way abnegates how Jewish identity is constructed and understood in different times and places. (By way of comparison, death is a biological necessity, but this does not negate the fact that various groups and cultures understand, construct, and commemorate death in different ways.)

* Jew and Arab are not locked in some eternal conflict, if for no other reason that what constitutes “Jew’” and “Arab” is in constant flux.

* Unfortunately, the story of Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century, much like that in the premodern period, has been about adumbrating others, whether internal (that is, Jews who do not share a particular vision) or external (that is, Arabs), at the expense of understanding or trying to understand them. This is because, in order to create a discourse of itself, Jewish philosophy—as any discourse—needs a discourse of the other. Self and other, as we have seen, subsequently become essentialized as natural properties as opposed to be seen for what they are: taxonomic indicators.

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The politics of biblical interpretation

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Luke Ford

Aaron W. Hughes writes in 2018:

* The Biblical narrative has long been used to articulate political positions about Jewish life. The history of Jewish philosophy, for example, is essentially the history of reading the Bible through a set of lenses supplied by the non-Jewish world, showing how the latter’s ideas and interests lay dormant in the biblical narrative. Platonism, Aristotelianism, Renaissance Humanism, and Kantianism, to name but a few, have all been located therein. Jewish philosophy, past and present, is about looking to the Bible in order, simultaneously, to uncover and prove a series of connections, believed to be indelible and eternal, between Judaism and European rationalism.

Following their Jewish philosophical predecessors, the authors under discussion here—Michael Walzer, Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Berman, and Yoram Hazony—make big promises. Their goal is nothing short of offering us the secret and hidden life of the Bible by providing the key that promises to unlock what they variously perceive to be its true or originary intent. Like Philo, like Maimonides, like Mendelssohn, to name but a few of their predecessors, they all read contemporaneous ideas gleaned from various non-Jewish contexts into the biblical narrative and in such a way that these ideas are now transformed and imagined to be quintessentially Jewish. While this essentialism may strike many readers as problematic, it is something that is of very little concern to the authors in question. Much like their premodern predecessors, Berman and Hazony (but not necessarily Walzer or Miller) claim to have uncovered veritable or authentic Judaism, an originary tradition that has the potential to address and solve modern shortcomings. However, that the right of center Tikvah Fund and Shalem Center, which I shall discuss shortly, are behind virtually all of these works is surely worthy of notice. Both of these organizations are interested in discovering and investing in what they not unproblematically call ‘‘great Jewish ideas.’’ What better way to reveal that Jews and Judaism are intimately connected to the fate of the West than to show (1) that the ‘‘great’’ ideas of the latter preexist, even if inchoately, in the Bible, and (2) that the Bible has nothing to do with its immediate Ancient Near Eastern (or, using modern parlance, Middle Eastern) context. Such claims, however, are as politically motivated as they are ultimately impossible to verify.

* There cannot be, the claims of many religious to the contrary, a correct reading of a religious text. There can be better readings and there can be worse readings, but no correct reading. Modern historiography and contemporary understandings of literary theory belie the notion of disinterested interpretation. However, this carries with it the obligation of self-reflexivity on the part of the interpreter and, when this is not done with sufficient clarity and transparency, it is the task of the critic to shed light on latent information, showing if possible its investment in ideological concerns that remain hidden from the reader.

It is worth noting that the books examined here are but a spate of recent publications that seek to argue that patterns of nation formation visible in modern Europe were preexistent in ancient Israel. Such books often argue that the latter possessed a centralized monarchy that was able to exploit a concept of ethnicity to create a national identity using concepts such as monumental architecture, uniform codes of law, and the standardization of worship.

* My interest here is less in establishing whether or not this was the case, but in why now. Why, in other words, is there a need to remove ancient Israel from its Ancient Near Eastern setting and transform it into an ancient democracy?

* Zalman Bernstein, a venture capitalist and ardent Zionist, founded the Tikvah Fund with the ‘‘hope that by investing in great Jewish ideas and great Jewish leaders, the heritage he cherished and the people he loved would be a light unto all nations.’’1 The Tikvah fund—with its tens of millions of dollars that helped to establish academic centers at NYU and Princeton (both now defunct), an academic book series (at Princeton University Press), quasi-academic journals (e.g. Azure), popular Jewish journals (e.g. The Jewish Review of Books), and academic conferences and workshops for students, faculty, and lay audiences throughout the North East—is in the business of manufacturing ‘‘Jewish ideas.’’ Recent seminars include ‘‘Is Israel Alone?’’ taught by Elliot Abrams and Charles Krauthammer, and ‘‘What is Jewish Conservativism’’ taught by, among others, William Kristol.

Many of these ideas that the Tikvah Fund seeks to articulate, not surprisingly, are ones Israel shares with America. Democracy, freedom, equality are so-called virtues common to both of these countries and would seem to be predicated on their common myth of origins as found in the Bible. The Tikvah fund also gave the money to help establish the Shalem Center in Israel, with its first president being one of the authors discussed below, Yoram Hazony, a friend and confidant of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hazony, among other things, appointed former hawkish politician Natan Sharansky, to be the director of what is now known as the (Sheldon) Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at Shalem (see Hughes, 2013: 109).2 Virtually all of the authors discussed here and in the previous paragraph have had fellowships and have received subvention grants from either Tikvah or Shalem.

* The goal is nothing short of creating the intellectual justification of a Jewish state that is committed to the ideal of Jewish strength in the service of Jewish interests and aspirations. Recent years have seen the political fallout of this in the rise of nation-state bills in Israel that seek to emphasize the Jewish ethnic character of the state by, among other things, making Hebrew the only official language, ensuring a Jewish majority, and establishing Jewish law as legitimate. Influenced by neo-conservative trends, a new group of Zionists, among whom Hazony is a major player, seek to establish Israel’s standing as the nation state of the Jewish people based on modern political theory that recognizes the principle of the self-determination of peoples as the most appropriate organizing principle.

* Since neither ancient Israel nor its neighbors had the term or the category ‘‘political,’’ taxonomic and ontological uniqueness is extremely problematic to determine if it is to be based on a set of terms that lie outside the scope of ancient Near Eastern political thought. How, framed somewhat differently, can the religious traditions of ancient Israel break with that of its neighbors over anachronistic terms and categories?

The result is that, despite claims to the contrary, all four thinkers ultimately read their own concerns—political and other—into the biblical narrative. In so doing, they use categories with a distinctly modern provenance and make them exist, both tenuously and artificially, in select passages from the Bible. Terms such as ‘‘religious,’’ ‘‘secular,’’ ‘‘governmental,’’ ‘‘economic,’’ and ‘‘egalitarian,’’ however, are not autochthonous to either the Bible or the Ancient Near East. They are decidedly our terms. The concerns of biblical authors/redactors, it is worth repeating, are not our concerns…

* Perhaps there is good reason why universities in general and programs in Bible Studies more generally do not engage in the sort of activity that Berman and Hazony do: ideology. These individuals, supported as they are by neo-conservative private foundations, are not engaged in innocent or value-neutral scholarship. They have ideological claims to stake out and they do so using heavy-handed hermeneutical strategies that ultimately prove tone deaf to the beauty, creativity, and multivocality of the biblical narrative.

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Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Luke Ford

Bruce Lincoln writes in this 2012 book:

* This is not a religious book. Rather, it is a book about religion. Insofar as it aspires to truth, said truth is strictly provisional and mundane.

* Like all proponents of the social and not the divine sciences, they [historians] study human subjects: finite, fallible mortals who occupy specific coordinates in time and space as adherents (and advocates) of particular communities, who operate with partial knowledge and contingent interests (material and nonmaterial) to advance various goals.

* Religion, I submit, is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal. History, in the sharpest possible contrast, is that discourse which speaks of things temporal and terrestrial in a human and fallible voice while staking its claim to authority on rigorous critical practice.

* ( 3 ) History of religions is thus a discourse that resists and reverses the orientation of that discourse with which it concerns itself. To practice history of religions in a fashion consistent with the discipline’s claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, communities, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine.
( 4 ) The same destabilizing and irreverent questions one might ask of any speech act ought to be posed of religious discourse. The first of these is Who speaks here?—that is, what person, group, or institution is responsible for a text, whatever its putative or apparent author. Beyond that, To what audience? In what immediate and broader context? Through what system of mediations? With what interests? And further, Of what would the speaker(s) persuade the audience? What are the consequences if this project of persuasion should happen to succeed? Who wins what, and how much? Who, conversely, loses?
( 5 ) Reverence is a religious and not a scholarly virtue. When good manners and good conscience cannot be reconciled, the demands of the latter ought to prevail.

* ( 10 ) Understanding the system of ideology that operates in one’s own society is made difficult by two factors: (a) one’s consciousness is itself a product of that system, and (b) the system’s very success renders its operations invisible, since one is so consistently immersed in and bombarded by its products that one comes to mistake them (and the apparatus through which they are produced and disseminated) for nothing other than “nature.”

* ( 13 ) When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths,” “truth claims,” and “regimes of truth,” one has ceased to function as historian or scholar.

* the nature of the cosmos is not significantly affected by the content of human speculation. The nature of society, in contrast, exists only insofar as it is continually produced and reproduced by human subjects, whose consciousness informs their constitutive actions, perceptions, and sentiments. When any given discourse—metaphysical or cosmological, as well as explicitly sociological—succeeds in modifying general consciousness, this can have profound consequences for social reality, even if cosmic reality remains serenely unaffected.

* the modern university—with reason (not faith) as its core principle, under patronage of the state (not the church), with arts and sciences (not theology) at the center of its curriculum, designed to produce civil servants and citizens (not priests)—emerged in the nineteenth century and replaced an older institution of the same name, which had taken shape in the Middle Ages.

It’s surely an oversimplification to see this as a direct effect or straightforward extension of Enlightenment values, for other trends (romanticism, nationalism, idealism, capitalism, e.g.) also contributed. But it is certainly the case that religion occupied a very different place in the nineteenth-century university than it did in its predecessor. Rather than being central to the institution’s mission, raison d’être, and organizing apparatus, “religion”— whatever that means—increasingly became available as an object of study and, as such, excited considerable interest.

* a full quarter century elapsed after the final blast of the critical era (Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, 1939) before a discipline of religious studies took shape; and when this did finally happen, it occurred not in Europe, where critical approaches had originated and flourished, but in the United States, where attitudes toward religion consistently were—and remain—kinder, gentler, more cautious, and more reverent.

* When religious studies took shape in the mid-1960s on campuses beyond NABI’s prior clientele and orbit, its students quickly came to include many who were curious and/or conflicted about their own religious commitments and longings, which is to say, starry-eyed seekers of all sorts (this was, after all, the 1960s!), and the standard introductory course on “world religions” was designed to offer a veritable mall of attractive and exotic goods to the would-be consumers. Buddhism, Sufism, shamanism, and Tantra were all given sympathetic if superficial treatment, alongside Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and more staid—but profoundly spiritual exemplars of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Little attention was devoted to the institutional side of religion that so many found alienating or offensive, or to potentially embarrassing details of the historical record. Rather, discussion tended to dwell on the eternal search for meaning: a meaning simultaneously transcendent and most profoundly human, and a search troped as most often successful.

* Most students and scholars in the field, as well as its journals, favored books, and syllabi, reflect the national mood regarding religion. As such, they remain committed to a validating, feel-good perspective, and do not welcome interventions that disrupt the serene, benign, and eirenic ethos they have fostered.

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Tikkun ha-Olam: The Metamorphosis of a Concept

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Luke Ford

Gilbert S. Rosenthal writes in 2005:

* The notion of tikkun ha-olam—healing, mending, repairing the world, improving society—has become a popular concept these days. Everyone seems to be invoking the term or the concept: it is a shibboleth in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles; it has captivated the imagination of scholars and theologians, of statespersons and politicians. Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton have invoked it; former New York Governor Mario Cuomo discussed it on a national television program; Catholic and Protestant theological statements cite it; there is even a left-wing magazine based in California that is named Tikkun. The term has become synonymous with social activism. In a word, tikkun ha-olam has arrived. But what does it really mean? What is its origin? How did it evolve and develop? What is its significance for Jews and non-Jews in today’s world?

* Tikkun ha-olam may be implicit in biblical legislation and tales; it assumes potentially far-reaching dimensions in the rabbinic world.

The verb t-k-n appears only three times in the Bible, and only in the late book Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). There it means “to straighten, to repair, to fashion.” In rabbinic Hebrew, as well as in the Aramaic of the Targum and Talmud, the verb assumes many meanings and, in fact, becomes one of the most flexible verbs in the language. It means to fix or repair objects such as shoes, a road, a vessel, or a staff or to beautify a person with cosmetics or clothing. It connotes preparing or readying oneself for a significant event or the study of Torah.5 It means to legislate or pass ordinances, to enact laws in order to remedy legal inequities or unjust situations. A takkanah (ordinance, legislation) is the repair of a legal inequity or societal flaw in marital laws, divorce matters, economic affairs, market protocols, and the redress of an inequity. It is the legal step taken to improve society.6

In purely ritual or cultic practices, t-k-n is the verb of choice to justify instituting new procedures in religious life—often in the wake of calamities such as the destruction of the Second Temple. The verb is applied to the composition or formulation of new prayers and liturgical procedures, the emendation of biblical texts, the fixing of the calendar and festival dates, and the cultic or ritual preparation of foods such as grain that were required to be tithed.7

Occasionally, the Midrash speaks of the role of human beings in completing or putting the finishing touches on God’s work of creation, and the verb selected is t-k-n.8 Only rarely does the Talmud utilize the verb to describe the need of humans to “mend their souls” or “repair spiritual damage” or “rectify sin.”

* The noun form tikkun ha-olam, which I prefer to translate as “the improvement of society,” is found some thirty times in the Mishnah and Gemara of the Babylonian Talmud, eight times in the Talmud of the Land of Israel, and a mere handful of times in the Midrash and Tosefta. Remarkably, almost all the references are to be found in the fourth and fifth chapters of Tractate Gittin, which deals primarily with divorce laws. This leads me to conclude that the principle was originally devised to protect the rights of women in divorce cases and to shield them from unscrupulous, recalcitrant, and extortionist husbands.

* [In the Aleinu prayer] God, rather than humans, will repair the world. The Talmudic sense of the word was this-worldly; the liturgical is other-worldly.

* [Tikkun ha-Olam] is used sparingly in the vast Responsa literature.

* All of this changed, however, with the advent of the Zohar and the new system of Kabbalah that appeared in the thirteenth century in Spain as a consequence of the writings and impact of Rabbi Moses de Leon (d. 1305). The Zohar frequently uses the term tikkun, in a variety of contexts, to mean “repair,” “restoration,” or “amendment.” In the words of Isaiah Tishby, “it becomes a central concept in the history of Kabbalah.”43 More significantly, the Zohar views every human act as of cosmic importance so that when humans perform mitzvot, engage in prayer and Torah study, and observe the festivals of the calendar year, they help unite the sefirot, the ten emanations of the Divine, and restore the world to its pristine state, ending all divisions so that all existence is united with God.

* [Israel] Salanter, who held a pessimistic view of human nature, was not so much interested in repairing the world or improving society or rectifying the original flaws in the universe caused by creation. He was more concerned with correcting the flaws of the individual Jew, improving and refining his or her character, and creating better people.

* And then, the doctrine disappeared almost entirely, except in esoteric kabbalistic circles. Few wrote about tikkun ha-olam in the classic rabbinic sense outside of the walls of the various yeshivot. Then, quite suddenly, the concept reappears in the middle of the twentieth century. Martin Buber began to allude to the doctrine, without actually using the appropriate terminology.

* for the Reform and Conservative groups, tikkun olam (as they phrase it) has become virtually synonymous with their social action agendas. This phenomenon did not become immediately apparent and the use of the classical term is a rather recent
development. For example, the Reform movement did not utilize the phrase in its platforms of religious principles in 1885, 1937, and 1976.

* Ironically, the Reconstructionist movement also names its social actions program Tikkun Olam. The founder of the movement, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, was bitterly opposed to Kabbalah and any manifestation of mysticism in Jewish thought or practice, dubbing it, “theurgy.” For his movement to adopt a kabbalistic concept is both bizarre and amusing.

* Thus, the concept of tikkun ha-olam has come full circle. First, it was a limited rabbinic norm or legal principle with great potential, all but forgotten in the Middle Ages. Then we encounter a brief and ambiguous reference in a single prayer with eschatological overtones ascribing to God the power to bring mending to the world. Afterward, the Zohar reinterprets the idea so that it implies tikkun olamot—the repair of the supernal and lower worlds and restoration of the balance of the sefirot. In its next metamorphosis, the Lurianic School stresses the role of humans, and especially of Israel, in mending the flaws in creation, healing the cracks, and redeeming the sparks of divinity scattered throughout the world. Afterward comes the Hasidic emphasis on improving human souls so as to ease their transmigration and hasten the coming of the messiah. Finally in our odyssey, we arrive at the current phase: the modern borrowing and reversion back to the Talmudic notion of tikkun ha-olam—of improving and bettering society through legislation, social action, and activism and highlighting the human component required to achieve these goals, with a dash of eschatology thrown in.
Undoubtedly, Rabbi Isaac Luria would be amazed and astonished.

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How Luke Ford and his Show “Changed my Life”

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Luke Ford

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