Ethical Monotheism

A Philosophy of Judaism

Ehud Benor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351263948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The term Ethical Monotheism is an important marker in Judaism's tumultuous transition into the modern era. The term emerged in the context of culture-wars concerning the question of whether or not Jews could or should become emancipated citizens of modern European states. It appeared in arguments whether or not Judaism could be considered a Religion of Reason—a symbolic, motivational representation of a universal morality, and in debates about whether or not Judaism could or should reform itself into a Religion of Reason.

This book is both a decisive departure from such discussions and an attempt to add a further, post-modern, statement to their ongoing development. As departure, it refuses to take for granted a philosophical conception of Religion of Reason as the standard for Ethical Monotheism according to which Judaism was to be evaluated or reformed. As continuation, the book undertakes a phenomenology of Jewish modes of ethical religiosity that allows it to inquire what kind of ethical monotheism Judaism might be. Through sophisticated analysis of select "snapshots, " or "fragments of a hologram, " guided by a robust theory of religion, the author discloses Judaic ethical monotheism as an ongoing wrestling with the meaning of justice. By closely examining five main "snapshots" of this long process—the Bible, rabbinic Judaism, Maimonides, The Zohar, and the modern philosophers, Buber and Levinas—the author offers his own constructive philosophy of Judaism and his own distinctive philosophy of religion.

Ethical Monotheism offers a new way to think about Judaism as a religion and as a coherent philosophical debate, and demonstrates the need to integrate philosophy, history, cognitive psychology, anthropology, theology, and history of science in the study of "religion."

1 The tree of knowledge

Limits of God’s power over chaos

How revolutionary were the rabbis?

The name “Judaism” is used, throughout this study, to designate the religion that emerged in late antiquity, for which the Rabbinic Bible became scripture. The scriptural process that unfolded over many generations, through transition from Persian to Hellenistic culture and may still, in some sense, be unfolding, will not concern us here. Our point of departure, in this chapter, will be mythical moments in which sages of the Mishna and the Talmud reflected on their scriptural legacy. The ideological weight of those imagined moments will provide us a vantage point from which to inquire whether or not rabbinic sensibilities are as revolutionary as they may seem to be. We should not be surprised to learn that those sensibilities are grounded in a specific legacy of their version of “The Bible.”¹

Any introduction to Judaism that addresses the question “What kind of religion is it?” can be expected to impress its audience, and to confound it at first, with two famous talmudic stories: the one is about Moses and Rabbi Akiva, the other is about Rabbis Eliezer and Joshua. Modern expectations of piety are so scandalized by the sophisticated, hard-headed cynicism of these myths² that they are primed to be puzzled by the strange religiosity of the ancient rabbis.³ Our task will be twofold: to find if this strangeness can be dissipated by a certain reading of the Bible, and to determine if that reading can also account for the recalcitrance the rabbis show toward non-legalistic moral thought.

The myth of the oral Torah

The religion of ancient Israel began to complete a metamorphosis into Judaism⁴ when a peace party among the Pharisees struck a deal with the Romans, who were putting down the Jewish revolt of 68–70 CE, to take over the leadership roles of the Temple priesthood and the Davidic aristocracy.⁵ Cultural change does not, however, happen overnight. The religion, which is envisioned in the early 3rd century compendium known as The Mishna, was more a normative idealization than representation of reality. Once rabbinic norms had gained full control – around the 9th century CE, in transition to the world of the Middle Ages – resistance to it broke out as widespread open revolt. It was the rabbinic method of midrash that became the object of greatest scorn. Armed with classical logic, Karraites used midrash as proof of rabbinic irrationality. They sought to replace midrash-based rabbinic halakha and biblical exegesis with reactionary, rigoristic, literal readings of scripture. Whatever streams of suppressed disaffection flowed into the Karraite revolt, it was clear that midrash was the Achilles’s heel of Rabbinism – as the threatened hegemony was called at the time. Midrash was a weakness the rabbis had been aware of for a very long time. This awareness is vividly attested to in the following talmudic story:

Rav Judah said in the name of Rav, When Moses went up to God [to receive the Torah] he found the Holy One (Blessed be he!), decorating the letters with crowns. Moses said: ‘Sovereign of the Universe, who is keeping you from giving it to me?’ God answered: ‘Some generations in the future there will be a man whose name is Akiva ben Yoseph, who will draw from each decorative stroke stacks upon stacks of laws.’ Moses said: ‘Sovereign of the Universe, show him to me. God replied: ‘Turn around.’ Moses [found himself in Akiva’s academy and] went and sat down behind eight rows [of students and listened to the discussion]. Unable to understand what was being said, Moses became despondent. When Akiva came to [speak of] a certain matter, the students asked him: ‘Master, how do you know that?’ Akiva replied: ‘It is a law given to Moses at Sinai.’ Hearing Akiva’s answer, Moses was consoled. Moses then turned back to face the Holy One (Blessed be he!), and said: ‘Sovereign of the Universe, you have such a man and you give the Torah by me?’ God replied: ‘Be silent! Such was the thought that came before me.’⁶

‍The only aspect of this wonderfully rich story that will occupy us here is the conflict that the story makes an effort not to be about. Ostensibly, this is a story about Moses and his difficulties in receiving the Torah, prior to giving it to the people. Being exceedingly humble, Moses needs to be assured that he is the right person for the task. Difficulties emerge from the start. Moses has just arrived in God’s heavenly abode, having left behind an erratic crowd of 600,000, and found that God was not yet ready for the transfer. Moses does not ask what the obstacle might be, but who it might be, that is holding God back. Seeing God waste time on fanciful calligraphy that means nothing to Moses, Moses suspects that there might be someone better than him, for whom all those pen strokes are meaningful. God confirms that such a person exists. Moses asks to see him and finds himself, far in the future, in the school of Rabbi Akiva. Moses hides in the back rows because he already suspects that he does not belong in this academy. This suspicion is painfully confirmed when Moses fails to understand the lesson. Poor Moses would probably not even dare show himself in that learned society. He feels completely redundant there. Things are made slightly better for Moses when students ask a question, which Akiva answers by invoking Moses and the tradition of law he had brought from the Sinai theophany. Perhaps Moses is not totally redundant after all. God is remarkably unhelpful in response to Moses’s question about why he, and not the more qualified Akiva, was chosen to receive the Torah. God shuts Moses down, saying only: “Choosing you was the thought I had.”

Two points of great ideological significance can be deduced from the story: (1) Akiva, hero of the great theoretical expansion of Halakha, was worthier than Moses to receive the Torah;⁷ and (2) rabbinic discourse is unintelligible to Moses. Together, these two points constitute the “between the lines” meaning of the story, and we need to inquire why a person like Rav would tell such a story. Rav was a first generation amora (a talmudic scholar), who lived through the consolidation of the Mishna in the academy of his teacher, Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi, and then went to Babylonia to establish an academy in which the Mishna would be studied as an additional sacred text. This was a de facto expansion of the Judaic canon, which could only be justified on the grounds that the Mishna does not exceed the bounds of divine revelation because it is based on interpretation of the closed canon. However, saying that the laws of the Mishna are interpretations of scripture is more of a problem than a solution. Whoever might examine the literary style of the Mishna would find that it is a self-contained cryptic text that speaks in an absolutely authoritative voice, as if it were, itself, setting the law. As it does so, it also provides an extremely abbreviated record of Tannaite views concerning the whole range of topics that constitute Jewish law.⁸ Most significantly, for our purposes, the Mishna rarely refers to verses in the Torah on which its laws might be based, and it is even rarer for the Mishna to engage in interpretation of such verses. The Mishna, then, is not an exegetical work and it would take a major effort of amoraʾim, the rabbis of the Talmud, to speculate on what midrashic reading[s], of which verses, could have led the Mishna to any of its pronouncements.

Rav, the amora to whom our story is attributed, was a key figure in launching the talmudic enterprise of engaging the Mishna in multiple efforts to link it to the biblical text. The story Rav told about God, Moses, Rabbi Akiva, and the giving of the Torah is, accordingly, a moment of reflection on his own talmudic enterprise. With this background in mind, let us consider several questions. Is this story the best Rav could do to provide secure ideological foundations for the project of talmudic reasoning? Hardly! The story he told is powerful precisely because of the haunting indeterminacy that runs through it. We might expect a cynical critic to come up with a story like that, not an advocate arguing his case. What are we supposed to think of the decorations that God was adding to the letters of the Torah? Do they convey meaning? Is their meaning whatever Rabbi Akiva would claim to have derived from them? If the decorations are meaningful, why are they meaningful only to Rabbi Akiva and not to the rest of the sages? God seems to be so happy with the “mounds of laws” that Rabbi Akiva would derive from his calligraphy that God works on the Torah a little longer, to give Akiva more to work with. Does that mean that God encoded Akiva’s laws in the Torah and made them part of its meaning? Suppose that Rabbi Akiva were to derive a law from some decorative stroke only to see his view voted down by a majority of the sages and fail to become law. Would that conflict with God’s intentions? Rav could have told a story in which all those questions are resolved. He did not. Rav left us, instead, without resolution even to a more acute question, which hovers above the rest: If Moses, who spent forty days and forty nights studying the Torah with God, does not understand what Rabbi Akiva is saying, how could anyone think that Akiva was right? The legitimacy of the whole rabbinic project seems to depend on some hope that Akiva is right, but in Rav’s story that hope is frustrated. Moses never comes to understand what Akiva is saying.

The category of “a law given to Moses at Sinai” is part of the rabbinic doctrine of the Dual Torah. In its basic form, the doctrine of the Dual Torah holds that Moses received, at the Sinai theophany, not only the whole written text of the Pentateuch, but also oral explication of the details that would be required for the implementation of its laws.⁹ In this basic form, the doctrine is not merely a justificatory myth for rabbinic practice, but also a relatively plausible theory of law.¹⁰ The doctrine has a more ambitious, proto-mystical form, according to which God revealed to Moses every exegetical innovation, made by mature scholars, to the end of historical time.¹¹ The story, as told by Rav, is a direct challenge to the naiveté of both versions of the doctrine, but not to the doctrine itself. While Moses is said to be comforted when even the great Rabbi Akiva relies on him to justify a point of law, there is no indication whatsoever that Moses knows what Rabbi Akiva is talking about. In failing to assert that Moses was aware of the tradition attributed to him, Rav tacitly acknowledged that the category of an oral law given to Moses at Sinai is a legal myth, a legal instrument to bring debate to an end, when no conclusive argument is available. Likewise, in attributing to Moses puzzlement at seeing God applying decorative, non-semantic pen strokes to the letters of the Torah and in asserting that Moses was unable to understand what Rabbi Akiva was saying in his lecture on the Torah, Rav admits that Rabbi Akiva’s teachings cannot be considered part of the original meaning of the Torah, as it was received by Moses. Nevertheless, Rav’s story is an affirmation of the validity of Rabbi Akiva’s teachings, whether they are based on extreme midrashic derivations from (even) non-semantic aspects of the text or on a postulated oral tradition. It is an affirmation based on consent, not on logical or extra-logical derivation of meaning. According to Rav, Rabbi Akiva’s teachings are valid because they, and the methods that justify them, are said to have been foreseen and affirmed by God. In other words, Rabbinic Judaism is justified by the Torah, not because rabbinic teachings can be traced logically to the meaning of the sacred text, but because God has foreseen the divinatory use of the Torah by the Rabbis and has given the Torah to Moses with that divination practice in mind.

This brief analysis of Rav’s story shows that the rabbinic ideology that the story expresses does not hide its wisdom or its power of judgment concerning what Judaism ought to be behind a mask of an alleged of meaning of the text, nor behind implied dependence on deductions from the written record of divine wisdom.¹² No matter how strange rabbinic halakha and its methods of justification may seem to be from a literal (or a “plain meaning”) reading of Scripture, they constitute foreseen applications and adaptations of the Torah. At Sinai, rabbinic teachings were seen as a valid rendering of God’s will, not because they were derivable from the meaning of the Torah, but because they were (as a matter of fact, not of semantics or logic!), for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: holistic study of Judaism
• 1 The tree of knowledge: limits of God’s power over chaos
• 2 Afflictions of love: rabbinic moral psychology
• 3 Cosmological Halakha: Maimonides’s ethico-theology
• 4 Theosophic Torah: a kabbalist theory of justice
• 5 Before the law: Buber and Levinas – totality vs. transcendence
• 6 Concluding Reflections
• Postscript: Can Judaism become archaic?
• Appendix 1: Translations of tamim in KJV
• Appendix 2: Partial translations of sections from Hilkhot Deʿot
• Index