Studies in Jewish Civilization

This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice

Leonard J. Greenspoon

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781612495149
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Dining on Leviathan. Discoursing with Socrates. Debating the nature of existence in the afterlife. These are among the topics authors address in this wide-ranging account of how Jews have conceptualized the world to come and structured their lives in this world accordingly. Some authorities portrayed the afterlife as an endless round of feasting and drinking of chazerie that would put the fanciest Las Vegas buffets to shame. There were visionaries who mapped out otherworldly climes populated by monstrous creatures. Others, decidedly more staid, saw the world to come as a location where neither food nor wine would be consumed; instead, it would offer the opportunity to bring moral certitude to questionable practices that could not be eradicated in this world. More down to earth are comparisons between Rabbi Akiva and Socrates, and analyses of influential thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn and Emmanuel Levinas. And more practical are discussions of how concepts of the afterlife serve to determine mourning practices, or more broadly, how humans should fashion their lives in the here and now. The chronological range of these chapters also is impressive. The earliest documents discussed are from Apocryphal literature, including apocalypses, that were composed from 400 BCE to 200 CE. There are creative analyses of rabbinic material and documents from the medieval period through the twentieth century. Evolving ritual and liturgical practices bring readers up to the early twenty-first century. Each of the thirteen authors whose works are brought together in this volume shows historical, cultural, and religious sensitivity both to the unique features of these differing manifestations and to the elements that unite them. For the readers of this volume, which is equally rewarding for general audiences and for specialists, the result is a carefully nuanced, creatively balanced exploration of the breadth of Jewish thought and practice concerning some of the most profound and perplexing issues humans face.

Worlds to Come Between East and West:
Immortality and the Rise
of Modern Jewish Thought

Elias Sacks

There are many ways to describe the intellectual agenda of modern Jewish thought. We might tell a story about a growing emphasis on ethics, focusing on ways in which modern philosophers often grant morality a more central role in religious life than did premodern thinkers.¹ We might also tell a story about a newfound interest in history, arguing that many modern Jews stress themes such as the unceasing development of ideas and societies, the links between Jewish and non-Jewish history, and the importance of deriving Judaism’s beliefs and relevance from the historical-critical study of Jewish sources.² Yet another option would be to focus on the classification of Judaism itself, exploring debates about “whether Judaism and Jewishness are matters of religion, culture, or nationality.”³ And there are still other possibilities, as well.⁴

In this article, I wish to recover the importance of another issue for the emergence of Jewish intellectual modernity: immortality. While it is clear that the notion of a messianic future is a central concern for many modern thinkers,⁵ there is considerable disagreement about whether the idea of olam ha-ba or “world to come” in the sense of personal immortality—in the sense of the survival of the soul or some other aspect of the individual after the body’s death⁶—plays a significant role in modern Jewish thought. A group of publications in the early 1960s suggested that debates about Jewish and non-Jewish access to the afterlife allowed philosophers to explore the role of reason and tolerance in the Jewish tradition,⁷ and a number of studies have argued that nineteenth- and twentieth-century denominational literature, most notably works of liturgy, emphasizes personal immortality over themes such as bodily resurrection.⁸

By contrast, a starkly different view appears in the work of the historian and philosopher Hans Jonas, who famously began a 1961 lecture at Harvard Divinity School by invoking what he termed the “undeniable fact … that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality,” especially to the “really substantive concept of immortality: survival of the person in a hereafter.”⁹ This position would reappear almost three decades later in the influential collection Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, whose entry on “immortality”—written by Allan Arkush—argued that since the eighteenth century there has been no “major Jewish thinker … for whom the doctrine of a life after death was a consolation and not a source of some embarrassment.”¹⁰

A middle position of sorts appears in a recent essay by Leora Batnitzky. Like the first group of interpreters, Batnitzky argues that “a commitment to immortality is central to modern Jewish thought” and that modern Jewish philosophers have largely rejected (or at least downplayed) bodily resurrection. But Batnitzky indicates that she is concerned less with immortality in the sense of the survival of the individual self and more with what she terms a “loose conception of immortality” or “immortality in a very general sense,” namely, “the idea that the meaning of human life transcends human finitude or mortality.” She focuses on what she describes as attempts “to refute materialist conceptions of human existence without committing to any particularly theological or traditionally metaphysical notion of immortality,” and most of the thinkers she discusses are concerned with topics other than personal immortality—with the Jewish people’s eternal survival, for example, or with the eternity of humanity’s moral tasks.¹¹

My goal is to show that what Jonas terms the “really substantive concept of immortality” does, in fact, play a key role in modern Jewish thought—indeed, that the survival of the soul after death is crucial to works well beyond denominational documents and liturgical texts. I will do so by exploring the Hebrew writings of two thinkers who are widely invoked but too little understood: the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and the Eastern European thinker Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840). Frequently portrayed as a leading figure in the late Enlightenment and as the founder of modern Jewish thought, Mendelssohn is known for his German writings on topics ranging from aesthetics to politics to metaphysics. Yet while these German works have long occupied scholars of philosophy and Judaism, Mendelssohn’s extensive body of Hebrew writings is only starting to become an object of sustained study, and 2011 marked the first time that a broad selection appeared in English translation.¹² Krochmal has received even less attention, especially among English-speaking audiences. A teacher, businessman, and communal leader born in what is now Ukraine, he is remembered as one of modernity’s most significant Eastern European Jewish philosophers, and his unfinished Hebrew magnum opus—The Guide of the Perplexed of the Time [Moreh Nevukhei Hazeman]—is an early Jewish attempt to wrestle with developments such as biblical criticism and historicist thinking. However, despite some signs of renewed interest, his philosophy has rarely been subject to scrutiny in North America, and his Guide is still largely unavailable in English.¹³

This essay will draw on these neglected Hebrew works to reassess the role of personal immortality in the rise of Jewish modernity. More specifically, I will argue that the emergence of modern Jewish thought involves a high-stakes soteriological debate between East and West—that one of modern Jewish philosophy’s early episodes is a debate between Krochmal and Mendelssohn about immortality and the nature of Judaism. I will begin with Krochmal, showing that he casts Judaism’s affirmation of an afterlife as the product of long-standing debates among postbiblical Jews who disagreed about whether the soul is immortal. I will then suggest that Krochmal’s view is best read as a critique of a type of position that he associates with Mendelssohn, whose Hebrew writings are concerned less with showing that immortality was contested among postbiblical Jews and more with establishing that this doctrine is affirmed by the Bible itself. I will conclude by arguing that the Mendelssohn-Krochmal clash is, in part, a dispute about the nature of the Jewish tradition. Whereas Mendelssohn’s claims are part of a broader project of presenting Judaism as a vehicle of rationally accessible eternal truths affirmed by the Bible, Krochmal’s position helps ground a different vision of this tradition—a vision of Judaism as a phenomenon whose doctrinal content emerges through the efforts of postbiblical human beings. For these foundational philosophical voices in Jewish modernity, the world to come serves as a crucial terrain for formulating—and contesting—theories of Jewish existence.

A preliminary remark is in order. Readers familiar with Mendelssohn’s thought will not be surprised to find him invoked in an essay on immortality. His fame in his own era was due, in part, to a celebrated 1767 treatise—a rewriting of Plato’s Phaedo—that defends the demonstrability of immortality and was quickly translated into five languages.¹⁴ Nevertheless, for many commentators, Mendelssohn’s work signals the end of a concern with personal immortality among modern Jewish philosophers. When Arkush suggests that after the eighteenth century “the doctrine of a life after death was … a source of some embarrassment,” he takes Mendelssohn to be the “last major Jewish thinker” for whom this was not the case.¹⁵

Similarly, Neil Gillman, one of the readers who focuses on the role of immortality in modern denominational literature, moves from his treatment of Mendelssohn not to a survey of other philosophical perspectives but rather to topics such as “modern liturgical reforms,” returning to philosophical voices primarily when discussing renewed interest in bodily resurrection among late twentieth-century Jews.¹⁶ By contrast, I seek to complicate this picture and recover a trajectory of philosophical thinking about immortality as a significant element in the emergence of Jewish intellectual modernity. Rather than signaling the end of a philosophical embrace of the survival of the soul, Mendelssohn’s writings constitute the first stage in a debate, extending from Germany to Eastern Europe, that treats this belief as an opportunity to construct visions of the Jewish tradition.

KROCHMAL

Krochmal’s Guide is a wide-ranging text, dealing with topics including metaphysics, Jewish law, and biblical criticism as part of an effort to address “perplexities” plaguing nineteenth-century Jews. Unfinished at the time of its author’s death in 1840, the manuscript was edited by a leading German scholar, Leopold Zunz, and eventually published in 1851.¹⁷ The key section for us is the Guide’s discussion of Ecclesiastes, a biblical book that presents itself as the words of “Koheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem,” traditionally identified as King Solomon.¹⁸ This insistence on Solomonic authorship was challenged by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical critics such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Krochmal devotes a section of the Guide to defending this critical perspective. Ecclesiastes, he argues, was written long after Solomon’s reign by a Jewish nobleman who oversaw a group of scholars, and the book’s post-Solomonic provenance was already well known to the rabbis of late antiquity.¹⁹

Krochmal’s initial comments explore Ecclesiastes’ concluding verses:

A further word: Because Koheleth was a sage, he continued to instruct the people. He listened to and tested the soundness of many maxims. Koheleth sought to discover useful sayings and recorded genuinely truthful sayings. The sayings of the wise are like goads, like nails fixed in prodding sticks. They were given by one Shepherd. A further word: Against them, my son, be warned! The making of many books is without limit and much study is a wearying of the flesh. The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments! For this applies to all mankind: that God will call every creature to account for everything unknown, be it good or bad. (Eccl 12:9–14)

Commentators have long noted that these words read more as an epilogue appended to Ecclesiastes than as an integral part of the book. Krochmal suggests that the opening of this passage was written by the book’s post-Solomonic author,²⁰ but he argues that the final lines were written not by that individual, but rather by a later group of scholars involved in the process of compiling the biblical canon. It is worth quoting Krochmal’s words at length:

Behold, it seems to us that those verses at the end of the book of Ecclesiastes—“the sayings of the wise are like goads,” etc., until the end of the book—are verses of sealing and completion not for this book (for what would be the reason for and sense in Solomon, or whoever wrote this book, warning against producing further books beyond this book of his?), but rather for the collection of the books of the Writings [the third section of the Hebrew Bible] as a whole. It seems that the men of the Holy Assembly of that time—which was closer to the time of the initial arrival of the Greeks and the priest Jaddua or Simon I—sealed and closed the compilation of the third part of the Holy Scriptures with these verses. … They further completed their words of sealing with ethical teaching: “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done,” etc. They did this in order to remind [readers] that the purpose of all the study and reading of books is reverence for the Lord and observing His commandments, in accordance with the verse: “The beginning of wisdom is reverence for the Lord” [Ps 111:10].²¹ And with the statement “God will call every creature to account,” etc., they were affirming the final judgment in the world to come, since many denied this at that time, as is known from the Sadducees.²²

According to Krochmal, the final verses quoted above were written by the compilers of the canon not as a conclusion to the book of Ecclesiastes, but rather as an epilogue to the entire third section of the Hebrew Bible—as “verses of sealing and completion not for this book … but rather for the collection of the books of the Writings as a whole.” The idea here is that Ecclesiastes was originally the concluding book of the final division of the Bible²³ and that these lines were intended to serve as the closing words of that section—and, by extension, the canon as a whole.

I am interested less in the historical accuracy of this claim and more in the argument Krochmal builds on its basis. Consider his declaration that “with the statement ‘God will call every creature to account,’” the compilers of the canon “were affirming the final judgment in the world to come, since many denied this at that time, as is known from the Sadducees.” He is suggesting that this epilogue to the Bible was composed, in part, as an intervention in debates in antiquity. On this interpretation, many ancient groups denied “the final judgment in the world to come,” and the compilers of the canon responded by placing a reference to this judgment in olam ha-ba at the end of the Bible as a whole, reminding readers that God “will call every creature to account.”

If we read this comment against the backdrop of earlier sections of the Guide, it becomes clear that the reference to “the world to come” is crucial—that Krochmal sees these lines as an intervention not simply in debates about a “final judgment,” but rather in debates about the very existence of a “world to come” in which such a judgment can occur. More precisely, he takes these lines to be an intervention in debates about whether the soul endures after the death of the body. He suggests that the tensions he has in mind are similar to those involving the ancient sect known as the Sadducees, and he stresses earlier in the Guide that this group clashed with another sect, the Pharisees, over whether the soul survives death.

According to Krochmal, the Pharisees “believe that there exists within souls the power of eternal life, and that beneath the earth there is reward and judgement for everyone who proceeds through life to righteousness or wickedness: the lot of the latter is eternal imprisonment, whereas the former are given the power to live and return to life.”²⁴ Drawn from the historian Josephus,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Contributors
• “The End of the World and the World to Come”: What Apocalyptic Literature Says about the Time After the End-Time
• Warriors, Wives, and Wisdom: This World and the World to Come in the (So-Called) Apocrypha
• The Afterlife in the Septuagint
• Rabbi Akiva, Other Martyrs, and Socrates: On Life, Death, and Life After Life
• Heaven on Earth: The World to Come and Its (Dis)locations
• Olam Ha-ba in Rabbinic Literature: A Functional Reading
• Dining In(to) the World to Come
• What’s for Dinner in Olam Ha-ba? Why Do We Care in Olam Ha-zeh?: Medieval Jewish Ideas about Meals in the World to Come in R. Bahya ben Asher’s Shulhan Shel Arba
• The Dybbuk: The Origins and History of a Concept
• Tasting Heaven: Wine and the World to Come from the Talmud to Safed
• Worlds to Come Between East and West: Immortality and the Rise of Modern Jewish Thought
• Emmanuel Levinas’s Messianism and the World to Come: A Gnostic-Philosophical Reading of Tractate Sanhedrin 96b–99a