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| Science and the Jewish Covenants of Learning, Part 2
At this point, however, many orthodox Jews will be sure to caution me that the consensus you have been describing, extends only to biblical exegesis.' The Bible's narratives, its portrayals of God, of humankind, of Israel, and of the nations; its accounts of creation, of the end of days, and of the world to come; its poetics, prophecy and philosophy, are indeed all energetically discussed, heatedly disputed, but nowhere adjudicated and never decided. But there is far more to rabbinical Judaism than contemplating the word of God, they'd remind us. Judaism is primarily a religion of meticulously regulated works - human works, that is - not merely one of words. And with regard to its performative element, with regard to what Jews are required to do and to refrain from doing - as opposed to what they choose to think - one no longer finds the same happy polyphony. A very different consensus, most orthodox Jews believe, grounds and regiments the realm of religious law and Divine commandment, rendering it, contrary to biblical exegesis, profoundly monolithic.
Unlike biblical exegesis, religious law and Divine commandment are binding, deriving their normative mandate from three main sources of religious authority: the halakha - the accumulating body of Jewish law, the halakhic authorities, that is the courts and sages whose job it is to make and state the law, and The Almighty Himself, of course, whenever He chooses to make known His will directly. Here, in the realm of religious performance, many believe, religiosity for Jews becomes a matter of devout and uncritical submission, where, as opposed to that of biblical exegesis, one does not challenge authority, but undertakes piously to do what one's told. The covenant of Sinai, it is insisted, is a covenant of solemn obedience that is summarized forcefully by the phrase from Exodus 24 na'ase ve-nishma - first we undertake to do, and the, only then, do we hearken and take to heart. Moreover, it is the submissive unity created by uncritical compliance with the law that explains for many Judaism's unique interpretative pluralism. Hobbes was right, they imply, a religion can simply not function as a religion if its members are allowed - nay encouraged! - to interpret its sacred texts as each sees fit. However, rather than freely submit to the Leviathan's reading of scripture, as Hobbes insisted, Judaism leaves scripture free, as it were, and has its own "Leviathan" firmly dictate the law. Such a view certainly exists within rabbinical Judaism. It is the familiar voice of submissive orthodoxy with which many of us are well acquainted.
But I would strongly oppose the claim that this is rabbinical Judaism's only voice. Contrary to the consensus surrounding biblical exegesis, no consensus exists with respect to halakha - certainly not in the talmudic literature, on which I would like to concentrate. On the question of obedience and submission to the sources of religious authority, the talmudic sages, I insist, were sorely and intriguingly divided. In some of my earlier work I have tried to show this with respect both to the authority of the halakhic tradition, and that of the institutions of halakha. So let me take this opportunity of speaking among friends to say something about the ultimate source of religious authority, namely, the Almighty Himself - well, perhaps not so much about the Almighty Himself, as about the ways He is depicted by the rabbis. The book of Job is a case in point.
4. Working through the Talmud's midrashic treatments of Job, one cannot but be struck by the enormous span of disagreement regarding Job's religious standing. On the one hand, we find extremely positive assessments of his religiosity, such as R. Yohanan's claim that "Greater is the praise bestowed upon Job than the praise bestowed upon Abraham"! Other sources imply that Job's righteousness even exceeded that of Abraham. But contrary to these, one finds surprisingly negative depictions of Job's religious character such as the tannaitic source that claims that Job wasn't even Jewish, but "a gentile who came into this world only to receive his reward. The Almighty Blessed be He then inflicted him with suffering, and he began to blaspheme and curse. The Almighty thereupon doubled his reward in this world in order to banish him from the world to come" (Bavli, Bava Batra 15b).
The negative portrayals insist that Job be considered the villain of his book. He is accused of having denied God's justice in the world; of having spoken back to Him disrespectfully, of denying the resurrection of the dead and even of taking advantage of distressed widows! Their textual evidence is meager, to say the least, which of course makes their move all the more interesting. For them it is not Job, but his submissive, obedient friends who are the heroes of the book.
No biblical figure is as radically disputed in the talmudic literature as Job. For some, his critical, confrontational attitude toward God is considered a supreme model of religious conduct, for others, sheer blasphemy. The interesting point, though, is less the disagreement about Job as the foundational theological and religious dispute that grounds it. To get a better sense of this more fundamental disagreement. I would like us to take a brief look at two different midrashic renditions of the same biblical moment. In the course of his long farewell speech, recorded in the opening chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls how, upon nearing the Holy Land, God had warned him saying:
"You are to pass over through Ar, the border of Moab, this day; And when you come near (...) harass them not, nor contend with them; for I will not give you of the land of the sons of Ammon any possession; (...) Rise, take your journey, and pass over the brook Arnon; behold, I have given into your hand Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his land; begin to possess it, and provoke war with him. This day will I begin to put the dread of you and the fear of you upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear the report of you, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of you." And I sent messengers out of the wilderness of Kedemoth to Sihon king of Heshbon with words of peace, saying: "Let me pass through your land; I will go along by the high way, I will neither turn to the right hand nor to the left. (...)" (Deuteronomy 2: 16-19, 24-28) Moses, it seems, chooses to disobey God's explicit instruction, deciding on his own accord to send Shimon Peres, as it were, instead of provoking war. Midrash Rabba, Deuteronomy, explains his disobedience thus:
Although the Holy One, blessed be He, instructed Moses 'Begin to possess', he did not so do, but rather 'sent messengers [... with words of peace]', Although He told him 'Make war', he sought peace! [He did so] because it is written in the Torah: 'When thou comest near to a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it' (Deut. 20:10), that is why he sent words of peace to Sihon, for it is written 'out of the wilderness of Kedemoth', on account of words of the Torah that come before those of the Almighty. Therefore it says 'words of peace.' This, I believe, is about as orthodox and submissive a reading as the verses in Deuteronomy can be given without doing them real violence. Moses is described as apologizing piously for not heeding to the Lord's instruction to provoke war, arguing, that he is not at liberty to defy the Torah's very commandment always to propose peace before attacking. In case of contradiction, he explains, the words of the Torah should 'come before' those of God. Midrash Rabba, Numbers 19: 20, however, tells a different story entirely. This is one of three things said by Moses to the Holy One, blessed be He, to which the latter replied: 'You have taught Me something!' (...) when the Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: 'Make war with Sihon. Even though he does not seek to interfere with you, you must provoke war with him' (...) Moses did not do so, but, as it is written further down, 'sent messengers [... with words of peace]'. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him 'By your life! You have spoken well! You have taught Me something! And I shall thereby cancel My words and adopt yours'; as it is written: 'When thou comest near to a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it' (Deut. 20:10). This is one of three cases in which Moses is forcefully portrayed as having challenged God's decree on moral grounds, as a result of which God is said to have introduced major changes in the Written Torah! According to the former midrash Moses disobeyed because the Torah instructs differently, according to this midrash, the Torah instructs differently because Moses disobeyed!
The other two examples are equally dramatic. Upon hearing the Almighty declare at Sinai "for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, punishing the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation", Moses is said to have objected: "Sovereign of the universe! Many are the wicked who have begotten righteous sons. Shall the latter bear some of the iniquities of their fathers? (...) Is it proper that the righteous should be punished for the iniquity of their fathers?" To which the Almighty is said to have replied as above: "You have taught Me something! By your life, I shall cancel My words and adopt yours!" For it is said "Fathers shall not be put to death for children, neither shall children be put to death for fathers, every man shall be put to death for his own sin." (Deut. 24:16) According to the midrash, the principle of individual liability was introduced by God in response to Moses' criticism of the Ten Commandments!
In all three cases God is astonishingly described as having produced a morally deficient early draft of the Torah, Moses is portrayed as having refused to comply, and having challenged it on moral grounds, and the Written Torah is subsequently described as having been happily improved, by virtue of God having accepted Moses' superior moral judgement! What kind of a theology is at work here, and what concept of religiously appropriate conduct does it entail? The God portrayed in this midrashic passage - which by no means stands alone! - is very different from the omnipotent and perfectly moral Deity to whom we have become accustomed in virtually all religious discourse inside and outside Judaism. The God of this midrash and its likes is a covenanting God, but the covenant His human partners are invited to enter, is not one of religious obedience and submission. It is better described as a covenant of constructive confrontation, especially moral confrontation; a holy partnership dedicated to the betterment of the world, of the Torah and of the self. God's need for the critical input of His human partners is as real as theirs should be for His. It is a partnership of mutual learning. God makes known His imperfection by initiating real engagement, by learning and by admitting mistakes. And in doing so urges humans, by example, to acknowledge their own. It is a partnership of mutual constructive criticism. Confronting the Almighty can be terrifying, and taking moral responsibility is never easy. The temptation of pious surrender is ever-present. The Mekhilta describes Elijah's replacement by Elisha as an act of impatient divine dismissal, owing to God's unwillingness to employ prophets, who like Elijah, refrain from speaking back! This rabbinical voice has little patience with religious yesmanship. The relationship God seeks to establish with his human partners strongly implies that they should seek to establish similar relationships among themselves, and with the other sources of religious authority.
If there is any truth to my readings of these texts, then there are two, rather than one foundational theology at work at the heart of the formative canon of rabbinical Judaism, each generating a very different notion of religious commitment. One insistently advocates a religious culture of uncritical halakhic obedience, based on faith in a perfect system of law sanctioned by a perfect, intervening God; the other, equally insistently, advocates one of constant moral rethinking based on considerations of epistemic and moral humility similar to those outlined in Rabbi Berlin's introduction to his great exegetical undertaking. (He himself, I might add, clearly refrained from extending his antitraditionalism to the realms of halakha or theology.)
Nahmanides, the great thirteenth-century halakhist and exegete, horrified as Hobbes would be by the thought of a society whose leadership was not granted absolute authority, states emphatically, commenting on Deuteronomy (17:11), that "even if you think in your heart that [the court is] mistaken, and even if the matter is as obvious to you as the difference you discern between your right and left, you are to follow their command!" He cites in support the Sifre's famous rendition of the verse: "Thou shalt not deviate from the sentence which they shall tell thee, to the right hand or to the left" (Deut. 17:11), says the Sifre: "Even if they tell you that right is left and left right, obey them!". It is hard to imagine a clearer and more vigorous statement of religious submissive obedience.
However, Nahmanides knew very well, that in citing the Sifre, he was not stating the obvious, but making a choice. It was a choice between the Sifre's submissive rendition of the verse, and the very different rendition of it found in the Palestinian Talmud, with which Nahmanides was, of course, well acquainted: "Can it be the case", asks the Yerushalmi rhetorically, "that if [the court] tells you that right is left and left is right, you should obey them?! Scripture therefore teaches us: 'to the right or to the left' (Deut. 17:11): that [is to say, that only if] they say to you, right is right and left is left, [should you obey]." According to the Yerushalmi, if one prudently believes the court to have ruled mistakenly, his religious obligation is not to comply! And it is hard to think of a clearer or more vigorous expression of a confrontational religiosity! 5. The formative canon of rabbinical Judaism is radically divided, one could say, with regard to its very own meaning. And yet, intriguingly, its two voices remain fully accommodated within a single religious framework. How can that be? How can such diametrically different accounts of religiosity, pertaining to such diametrically different theologies remain, nonetheless, authentic expressions of one and the same religious culture? What do they share? What common ground grounds them? The answer, I believe, lies in the Jewish tradition's unique approach to the very idea of religious canon, the approach expressed so vividly by Rabbi Berlin with regard to the Bible. Unlike Reformation or Counter-Reformation Christianity, talmudic Judaism makes clear distinctions between its holy texts, the religious obligation to study and make sense of them, and the resulting plethora of the actual readings produced. The unique feature of talmudic Judaism is the fact that while the texts themselves are deemed solemnly sacred, and their study deemed the very highest of religious works (ve-Talmud Torah ke-neged kulam), none of the readings and understandings thereby produced are collectively treated as final. Judaism in its talmudic constructions forms a single and coherent religious entity by constituting "The People of the Book", to borrow the title of Moshe Halbertal's important work: a people constituted by its books; by its books, that is, and not by the ways in which they are read, or by any one of the various readings they are given.
6. One last word about science. As noted, in the heady wake of Newton's great achievement, philosophers attempting to make sense of it found themselves having swiftly to abandon both of the two mutually exclusive philosophies that had originally launched modern science on its way coupled so harmoniously and intriguingly to religion. And in doing so the intimately close ties that had briefly bound the budding cultures of early-modern science and Reformation and Counter-Reformation Christianity were gradually severed. The crisis developed in two main stages. First the two-books analogy had to be abandoned in both its versions. Science and religion were still identified in terms of the systems of knowledge to which they lay claim, but the ways knowledge was acquired in science and religion no longer resembled each other. The second stage was even more crucial.Enlightenment visions of human reason measured rationality in terms of epistemic trustworthiness. Science was hailed the paradigm rational endeavor for the way it succeeded in amassing great bodies of truth by applying proven methods to reliable data. (This is the stage Phillip Clayton refers to as Act 2)
But this was to change as it became apparent that science's claims to truth were unwarrantable as such. Science is still considered a paradigm of rationality, but our understanding of rationality has become very different. (And this is the additional Act 21/2 I tend to insert between Clayton's Acts 2 and 3.) The achievement of science is no longer measured by the proven reliability of its theories, methods or data, as by the critical scrutiny to which they are subjected. Rationality, philosophers have come to realize, is far less a matter of proven confidence in what we know, as of a humble, self-doubting, yet constructive awareness of our tendency to err. At this point the image of the two-books collapses even as a metaphor. To quote Peter Harrison yet again, in the wake of the Protestant reform of Bible study "the mainspring of Christian religiosity ceased to be the performance of ritual acts presided over by an ecclesiastic hierarchy ... Instead, religion came to be identified with systems of belief". Science, by contrast, ceased to be identified with the systems of knowledge it erected, but is come to be thought of, primarily, as an activity, a rational and constructively skeptical activity much along the lines of Rabbi Berlin's shrewd description, in the course of which, quite unlike religion, its tentative claims to truth are constantly questioned. The great divide between science and religion in the Christian world is thus complete: If science is what human rationality is about, then religion is not merely different, but downright irrational. Here (long before the onset of Clayton's Act 3!) is where the problem-situation asserts itself, that sets the stage for much of enormous concern with science and religion in the Christian world we are witnessing today. Unfortunately, rabbinical Judaism has not had much need for science, and science, for that matter, not much need for rabbinical Judaism. Modern science, as we have seen, owes its origins exclusively to early-modern Christian sensibilities. But one cannot help wondering how modernity and the various reactions to it might have developed had that not been the case.
Exercises in counter-factual history cannot change what happened, of course, but they can enrich our understanding of why things out turned the way they did. More importantly, they can offer us glimpses of some of the roads not taken, and of some of the roads we might still want yet try. Rabbi Berlin's extraordinary text offers us a fleeting yet meaningful image of a joint approach to science and religion of a kind Western culture never experienced during the formative stages of both: viewing them both as constructively skeptical, modestly assertive, and genuinely pluralistic undertakings. Grounded in a religious, yet humble epistemology, such a joint view of scientific and religious knowledge stands in Janus-faced opposition to both highly worrying forms of latter-day irrationality In a world caught between uncritical dogmatism (namely, the more worrying aspects of Clayton's act 2) and equally uncritical radical relativism (those of his act 3), it is a voice much needed both within orthodox Judaism and without.
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Published 2002.07.30
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