PART I
TALMUDIC TRADITION: MOURNING
Dissonance is the Truth about Harmony.
âT. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
1 Hermeneutics of Rabbinic Mourning
Learning mourning may be the achievement of a lifetime.
âStanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary
LEARNING HOW TO mourn may take a lifetime to achieve, as Cavell writes, its challenges emanating from not knowing how to lose. Soloveitchikâs sense of lossâboth personal and historicalâshows itself to be acute, cultivated in his later works to form the underpinnings of his radical conceptions of both ethics and the psyche. In programmatic midrashic statements, Talmudic tradition also figures loss, but does so at the center of its legal hermeneutics.
The âface to faceâ between the human and the divine in the biblical representation of the encounter between Moses and God in ExodusââThe Lord spoke with Moses face to faceâ (33:11)âdepicts the fullness of presence, an historical manifestation of the Edenic ideal, but one that already anticipates its eventual loss.1 This book on lawâlegal hermeneutics and epistemologyâbegins with midrashic readings of the âface to face,â or, in an extension of the generic category to include the Christian midrash of Paul, the philosophical midrash of Spinoza, and Freudâs extended set of psychoanalytic and anthropological midrashim on the life and death of Moses. Together, with rabbinic meditations on the death of Mosesâan event that marks for the rabbis an end to the privileged encounter of the human with the divine, as well as its lossâthey provide meditations on the nature of transmission and truth from out of which the parameters of the rabbinic hermeneutics of mourning emerge.
I begin, however, with the Rolling Stonesâ Exile on Main Street and the presentation of its own unlikely midrash of the âface to faceâ from Exodus, expressing an anxious response to lost presence and an impatience with language as compensation for that loss. The persona created in this 1972 portrayal of Main Street America laments, âDonât wanna talk about Jesus, just wanna see his face.â The song thus expresses the desire to dispense with the trappings of language, the excrescence of the material that detract fromâand veilâthe unmediated truth. That is, in its expression of a craving for the revelation of the divine âface,â Exile expresses the desire for the pure presence of an unmediated truth, or what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as the possibility of âpenetrating into pure immanence.â This fantasy has been nurtured from the beginnings of early modern philosophy, tapping into a trend of thought that has an ancient theological pedigree as well, what Harold Fisch describes as a âChristian impatience with textuality.â2
For the author of the second letter to the Corinthians, the veil that Moses puts over his face (Exodus 34:33) is a sign of the Jewsâ continued entanglement with languageâspecifically, the old dispensation of the law. As Paulâs Christian midrash elaborates:
But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, behold the glory of the Lord. (2 Corinthians, 3:13â18)
As Fisch points out, Paul defines the veil of Moses âas an image of textuality itself,â the inability to translate the literalism of the Old Testament into the allegorical truth of the Christian redeemerâthe âunveiled faceâ of the âglory of the Lord.â Paul himself, however, âbelieves that the New Covenant, using great plainness of speech, can evoke actual presence.â Against a tradition enmeshed in the carnality and contingency of language, Paul holds out the promise of an exoteric truth without mediation that is available to allâa âfreedomâ founded on the unmediated perception of the âunveiled face.â3 Paul dismisses the tradition of the âold covenantâ on account of its historicity, and indeed, that as a tradition, it depends on language at all. For Paul, those of the prior covenant read and hear, while those of the secondâin a purely visual registerâsimply âbehold the Glory of the Lord.â
Paulâs project, Platonist in its roots, evidences the conviction that theological languages could better accomplish what philosophy had once claimed, eliciting the presence of the divine face. Where the âdivided lineâ in Book 6 of The Republic diminishes the ontological validity of the phenomenal (in relation to the noumenal forms or ideas), the rejection of poetry in Book 10 echoes the allegory of the divided line by placing imagination and poetic representation on the lowest ontological and epistemological levels. As Platoâs Socrates claims, the âart of representation is ⌠a long way removed from truth, and it is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp over anything, and that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance.â4 In Paulâs articulation of the âface,â the discourses of the law are not merely phenomenal but now fleshly sinful and dead, implicitly taking their place in the lower part of the divided line, the realm of representation. The sight of the âglory of the Lordâ enacts in theological terms the accomplishment of the Platonic idealârejection of the phenomenal and achievement of an unmediated, nondiscursive realm of truth.
Paul may have translated Platoâs philosophical categories into Christian terms; Spinoza, returning to Corinthians and its Old Testament antecedent, appropriates the âface to faceâ to assert the disciplinary priority of the early modern philosopher. For Spinoza, the philosopher would once again claim precedence, ascending to the highest rung of the disciplinary hierarchy through an unmediated access to truth. In his championing of a new modern philosophy based on what he calls âuniversally valid axiomsâ and the study of âNature,â Spinoza turns to Christ as providing a model of the privileged acquisition of knowledge. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza argues explicitly for an unmediated form of truth: âWe may quite clearly understand that God can communicate with man without mediation, for he communicates his essence to our minds without employing corporeal means.â Communication, in the Spinozan context, is not through the corporeal means of language, rather, immediateââof the divine ontological essence.â Spinoza continues, affirming: âa man who can perceive by pure intuition that which is not contained in the basic principles of our cognition and cannot be deduced therefrom must needs possess a mind whose excellence far surpasses the human mind.â For Spinoza, the highest form of cognition is limited to a mind that, in Aristotelian terms, transcends the category of the discursive and understands through âintuitionâ only. No one, in his view, has attained âsuch a degree of perfection surpassing all others, except Jesus.â To his Jesus, the privileged mediator, Spinoza continues:
Godâs ordinances leading men to salvation were revealed not by words or by visions, but directly, so that God manifested himself to the Apostles through the mind of Jesus as he once did to Moses through an audible voiceâŚ. Therefore, if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man may do with his fellow (through the medium of their two bodies), then Jesus communed mind to mind.5
In asserting that God communicates with man without âmediation,â Spinoza argues against forms of knowledge that rely on the intervention of language or images, taking the Pauline attack on the letter of the law and giving it philosophical force. Indeed, for Spinoza, the entirety of the Jewish tradition is compromised because of its self-avowed reliance on forms of mediationâlanguage and images. From his perspective, such mediations, subject to time, place, and circumstance, are transcended for philosophical concepts of universal and eternal validity.
From the perspective of Spinozaâs Christianized philosophy, even the prophecy of Moses is compromised because of its reliance on speechâfor God speaks to Moses âin an audible voice.â Spinozaâs exemplary philosopher, Jesus, however, requires no such intervention, as he moves beyond all forms of mediation to a direct apprehension of God. There are neither âwordsâ nor âvisions,â only the direct contact with the divine. While the Jews celebrate Moses, who spoke âface to faceâ with God, Spinoza himself heralds the Christian philosopher, who requires no intermediary but rather communes with God âmind to mind.â For the Spinoza of the Tractatus, philosophical discourse achieves both truth and certainty, reaching axioms of universal and eternal validity. The Jewish tradition, however, comprised merely of âhistory and language,â leads not to âtruth,â Spinoza writes, in anthropological terms, only âobedience.â In Spinozaâs view, the ideal figure of Jesus, replacing Moses in the face to face encounter (as Paul did before him) is not a figure of tradition, and certainly not one of historical transmission. Even when he communicates with the Apostles, it is nondiscursiveâan abstractionârendered through Jesusâs mind.6
Along with other early modern philosophers, Spinoza set the ground for the emergence of modern conceptions of objectivity, tied to early modern scientific methodologies and assumptions of epistemological neutrality, as argued further in chapter 3.7 In contrast to the theological culture from which they emerged, such early modern methodologies begin to assert, as Jonathan Lear writes, that âknowledge is available from no perspective at allâ (Love, 120). Indeed, the situated nature of both knowledge and interpretation, tied to language and history, are from within Spinozaâs early modern philosophical perspective impediments to a truth that is abstractly conceived and objective. Spinoza and his philosophical contemporaries were part of an early modern movement to initiate a split between subject and object (one maintained in an earlier poetic culture), through which the philosopher-scientist claimed objectivity and religious figures, humanists, and poets were relegated to an impoverished realm of subjective contingency.8 In Spinozaâs reading, âthe face to faceâ celebrates an unmediated truth, one that emerges, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, âfrom nowhere at all.â9 Through his appropriation of Paul, Spinoza transforms a tradition based on transmission into a visual culture of imminence, based on a more literal reading of the Old Testament âface to face.â
Focusing on the figure of Moses, Freud elaborates the psychological, historical, and anthropological underpinnings for what Spinoza understands as a Jewish culture grounded on âobedience.â The priority of obedience leads to what Freud describes as a psychic phenomenon based on repetition and the necessary avoidance of the divine face. Freud, like the rabbis, focuses on Moses as a historical figure of transmission, but for him, the prophet fails at his task. In Freudâs genealogy, the Jews reenact the primal murder of the father in the killing of Moses, and through the repression of its memory, fall prey, as Robert Paul explains Freud, to âa collective obsessional neurosis, namely Judaism itself.â In Freudian terms inflected by Spinoza, the neurosis of Judaism is the refusal of an unmediated truth, the avoidance of the face (not only of God, but also Moses), and the subsequent fall into repetition. The inability to remember transforms into repetition, as Robert Paul writes, of âapparently trivial or pointless rules, ordinances, ceremonies, prohibitions and self-accusations.â In the Judaism understood to be a religion of repetition, the âTorahâ is merely an âinstruction manualâ to be ârecited, copied, taught, studied, and infinitely replicated.â10 Taking themselves out of history, Freudâs version of the ancient Hebrews consign themselves, as Hans Loewald, adopting Mircea Eliade, to an âatemporal realmâ in which there is âno emphasis on individuality, nor on process with a direction either into the past or into the future, and no emphasis on actively establishing a relationship ⌠between past and future, which activity would give dignity to the present.â In their repressed guilt for the unacknowledged murder of Moses, Freudâs Jews give up autonomy, which is itself a function of their abandonment of history. Relegated forever to the realm of Eliadeâs primitive âpremodern,â Mosesâs descendants, for Freud, inhabit a realm outside of history in which the conditions for a traditionâother than as mere repetitionânever maintain (Loewald, 99â100). That is, Freudâs Jews are distinctive for having lost the capacity to remember and for never achieving a state of âmodernity,â itself defined through memory, and the futurity and free will that rest upon it. For Freud, it is not a Christianized philosophy that redeems humanity from loss; rather, the endless repetition of the unacknowledged guilt of Judaism is replaced by a Christian memory that saves and, in the process, overcomes the obsessional repetitious neurosis associated with the law.11
Freudâs figuration of Judaism is linked to his representation of Moses, particularly his deathâhis slaying, in the story Freud tells, at the hands of the people of Israel. The primal act of the murder of Moses emerges as a cultural, indeed a world-historical, principle through which the psychic configuration of guilt characteristic of Western culture (and especially, for Freud, Western religion) is traced to the original trauma enacted in the repressed rebellion of the people of Israel against their leader, itself a reenactment of the murder of the primal father by the horde. For Freud, the history of the Jews and religion itself begins with that repetition, and a failure of memory. The âshared obsessional neurosisâ of guilt begins in the failure of transmission, part of the ambiguous Jewish legacy to the West, with its antecedent and cause in the forgotten murder of Moses. Without the activity of tradition, informed by the psychoanalytic self-consciousness embodied in the process of âworking through,â the Israelites remain unredeemed from their tragic repetition. As Freud writes, the more one evidences âthe compulsion to repeat,â the less one experiences âthe impulsion to rememberâ (SE, 1:151). For Freud, religion imagined as obsessional repetition and obedienceâand the loss of memoryâbegins with the murder of Moses.
Without adhering to Freudâs narrative of Jewish origins, however, Moses and Monotheism, remains important for its insights into what Richard Bernstein describes as âthe meaning of a religious tradition,â the nature of religious transmission, or what Freud describes as the ideal possibility of uniting âinfluences of the present and the pastâ (SE, 23:207).12 Paul and Spinoza remove the âface to faceâ from history, assimilating it to a nonlinguistic conception of the âglory of the Lord,â thus rendering tradition obsolete. Freud, however, focuses on Moses as the historical figure who, on account of his murder, shows himself to be a failed figure of transmission. This Freudian account of Mosesâs murder and its relationship to a tradition understood as repetition allows for an understanding of a different set of representations of Mosesâs death: those in rabbinic literature, that is, the aggadic figurations or interpretive stories of the Talmud.
In both rabbinic and Freudian narratives, Mosesâs death figures significantly in the respective conceptions of transmission, particularly of how the people of Israel perpetuate the law (though often despite themselves). In abandoning the genealogical narrative of Moses and MonotheismâMosesâs death at the hands of Israelâthe current account emphasizes what Lear describes as the volumeâs most significant insight, âthat it is only when one kills off the messenger that the message gets installed.â13 For the rabbis, however, the âkilling offâ is not the literal event that it is for Freud, one that makes any future based on memory impossible.14 To understand the rabbinic representation of Mosesâs death, or more figurative âkilling off,â I elaborate the insight of Moses and Monotheism that death as well as a certain kind of forgettingâCavellâs mourningâare critical to transmission and the recovery of loss in relation to rabbinic figurations of Mosesâs death.
The representations of Moses in the Talmud show the rabbis meditating on forgetting death (and even murder) in ways that foreground not so much guilt but rather anxiety in facing the demands of transmission, particularly mourning and the creative remembrance it entails. Further, what I call, in relation to Talmudic tradition, the hermeneutics of mourning does not elicit a singular absolute truth. Embracing loss and language produces a necessary pluralism, one which, read backward, reinforces the emphasis on textuality that Paul and Spinoza aggressively reject. Through the representation of Mosesâs death, the rabbis elaborate the anxiety of the people of Israel in facing a truth that no longer has its provenance in the privileged prophesy of Moses, and requires embracing a historical tradition based on loss and nurturing multiplicity.
Death of Moses: Mourning Becomes the Law
The Old Testament verse cultivates the...