The Idea of Tradition in the Late Modern World

An Ecumenical and Interreligious Conversation

Thomas Albert Howard

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532678912
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Our late modern era is marked by the rapidity of change; waxing pluralism; focus on the future, not the past; the elevation of personal choice over communal obligation; and, for some, a sense of spiritual and intellectual disorientation that can lead to resentment, fear, nostalgia, and/or a disordered desire for absolute certainty and rigid authority. How can religious traditions be maintained and even thrive in such an environment? How do they negotiate the fluidity of it all and transmit their beliefs and practices to future generations? What should be the role of academic authorities vis-a-vis religious authorities in this process? Finally, what can different religious traditions learn from one another on the general topic of tradition? This volume invites readers to participate in a candid ecumenical and interreligious conversation involving Christian, Jewish, and Muslim voices. The editor and contributors alike contend that the "Abrahamic" faiths, while having honest differences, face common challenges from contemporary culture, which often fosters incomprehension about the depth, breadth, and intellectual rigor of religious traditions. At the same time, traditions can become disengaged and moribund without attending to them with careful reflection, discernment, and conversation with others who hold different points of view.

1

Tradition or Innovation as the Dilemma of Modern Judaism

David Novak

University of Toronto

Introduction: Political Status of the Jews: Old and New

The question of how tradition and innovation are related is certainly one that contemporary Jewish thinkers have to confront regularly. In order to understand its true importance, though, we need to see how it arose at the very dawn of modernity (at least for Jews), namely, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Indeed, one can see the question raised most starkly by the liberal nobleman, Count Stanislas de Clermont Tonnerre, in a speech to the French National Assembly on December 23, 1789, when he asserted: “Everything is to be refused to the Jews as a nation; everything is to be granted to the Jews as individuals” (Il faut tout refuser aux Juifs comme nation, et accorder tout aux Juifs comme individus).48 Now designating “the Jews as a nation” means the way European Jews were constituted politically by the ancien régime and by themselves, namely, as a semi-independent community (a qahal in rabbinic terms) within a larger more independent polity (imperium in imperio or, in Tonnerre’s words, une nation dans la nation), that larger polity enjoying fuller political liberty and wielding greater political power. (Tonnerre recalled their previous status as un corps politique.)49 The smaller, more politically-dependent Jewish community was largely governed by rabbis as the official custodians, transmitters, interpreters, and applicators of the normative Jewish tradition (masoret Israel in rabbinic terms). The normativity of this tradition is believed to be rooted in “the Torah Moses accepted from God at Sinai.”50

Most importantly, premodern (or “mediaeval”) European Jews did not take their theological-political warrant from the Christian regime hosting them; instead, their warrant came from the Torah God revealed to Israel at Sinai, which the Jewish tradition deems to be the official vehicle of its normative transmission. Indeed, the Christian host regime also took its theological-political warrant from the Torah the same God revealed to Israel at Sinai plus (i.e., as novum testamentum) the Torah God revealed to Israel at Sinai as embodied in Christ. Therefore, both Jews and Christians had to find authorizations within their own respective, revelation-based traditions for entering into a political relationship with one another in good faith.51

In this premodern situation, the political arrangement of Jews in Christendom was not a relationship of individual Jews and the non-Jewish host state; instead, a relationship between the Jewish community (where one’s status therein was a largely natal or “national” matter) and the Christian regime pertained. The standards that governed this political relationship and the status of the Jews in it were negotiated through a contract between the non-Jewish sovereign and the foreign Jewish nation living in his or her domain under their rule. Conversely, though, in the modern regime Clermont Tonnerre was advocating (very much influenced by Rousseau’s Le contrat social), the political relationship was to be between all individual citizens and the state. As such, the modern state so conceived had to revoke the traditional communal rights of the church as much as it had to revoke the traditional communal rights of the Jewish community.

In fact, the revocation of the traditional communal rights of the church was more radical than the revocation of the traditional communal rights of the Jewish nation, since the church under the ancien régime provided the theological warrant for the state itself, by which the state permitted only Christians to be first-class citizens. (In fact, many poorer Christians were third-class serfs, under the control of the aristocracy, and in many ways, theirs was an even more precarious existence than that of the Jews.) All Christians in the realm were first members of the church and the subjects of a Christian sovereign subsequently. (This theological-political reality is best expressed in the famous words of Thomas More to King Henry VIII on the occasion of his martyr’s death on July 6, 1535, declaring himself to be “the King’s good servant but God’s first.”52) Jews could only be second-class, tolerated aliens in this kind of regime unless, of course, they converted to Christianity and ceased to be Jewish. Such conversion to Christianity meant exchanging their ancient religio-political status within a minority community for a newer religio-political status within the majority community. For Jews as for Christians, such an existential move could only be regarded as apostasy, although Jews did not have the political power to pursue Jewish apostates the way Christians could pursue Christian apostates—to forcibly bring them back under the church’s control. Nevertheless, both Judaism and Christianity teach that if apostasy is forced upon one, that person should choose to die a martyr’s death in its stead.

After the French Revolution, Jews could now become full citizens of the state without apostasy.53 Moreover, Jews were able to accept their new status in the modern state more easily than Christians could accept their new status there. To be sure, most Jews in Western Europe (i.e., those countries affected by the French Revolution) regarded modernity as being their political and even cultural gain, while most Christians regarded modernity as being their political and even cultural loss. In Western democracies like the United States and Canada, where even though these states have never been officially “Christian” in the legal or political sense, Christians still have enjoyed the cultural hegemony of the majority. Yet these Christians are now suffering the loss of something the Jews have never had. The Jews gained political power they didn’t have as a community while Christians lost the political power they did have as a community, i.e., as the dominant community in Western polities. This might explain why Christians who long for Christendom as their idealized ancien régime at times turn into anti-modern anti-Semites, resentful of the power that they believe the Jews have taken for themselves in modernity at the expense of Christians.

Social Contract: Old and New

The acquisition of this new political power by modern Jews can be seen as based on the newer modern notion of the social contract. It is very much different from the premodern notion of the social contract, which we have been examining. The old social contract was a negotiated agreement between two national communities, each of whose rulers received their traditional political warrant from God’s covenant with their community. The revealed constitution of the community is written and preserved in a book (i.e., a sefer in Hebrew; biblos in Greek, hence “the Bible”), then transmitted (masoret in Hebrew; traditio in Latin) to and through the community intergenerationally, i.e., historically. (The biblical term toldot or “generations,” as in Genesis 5:1, in modern Hebrew becomes “history.”54) As revelation itself is an event in history, so is tradition a process moving with revelation’s content through history, towards the end of history, as a hoped for eschatological end as yet unknown to any creature.55 As such, the parties to the premodern social contract came to the contract with considerable traditional baggage, which they not only wanted to keep but also wanted the social contract to protect and even help flourish. In no way did they want to cede the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Tradition or Innovation as the Dilemma of Modern Judaism
• 2. Tradition
• 3. Tradition and Authority
• 4. Disruptions and Connections
• 5. Tradition
• Bibliography