Lerner's Jewish Bible Blog

My new article on Maimonides, repentance, and freewill

2009-05-11T12:44:00.002+03:00

http://philosophylerner.blogspot.com/2009/05/rambam-maimonides-and-middle-knowledge.html

“The Torah spoke of four sons: One is wise, one is wicked, one is simple, and one does not know how to ask”

2009-03-21T22:44:00.002+02:00

A Hebrew version of this article can be found at: http://www.netivot-shalom.org.il/parshheb/aharey8.php

We have become accustomed to relate to the midrash about the four sons with profound gravity and seriousness. Some find in it the kernel of a panacea for all of the problems of Jewish education, a kind of “road-map” for the Jewish People’s continued spiritual existence. I would like to suggest a less ambitious interpretative strategy.

Note the location of the midrash of the four sons in the Haggadah. Two passages appear immediately before it: The incident involving Rabbi Eliezer and his colleagues who celebrated the Seder in Benei Brak, and the words of R. Elazar ben Azaryah, who described himself as being “as one seventy years of age.” Next come the four sons, followed by the halakhic discussion, “One might start from the New Moon.”

These four passages appear consecutively; what is their common theme? The answer is clear: None of these passages comes to tell us about the Exodus from Egypt, none of them adds any information to what we have already learned from the section “We were slaves.” Their purpose is to tell us something about the manner in which the commandment to retell the story of the Exodus should be observed.

Before we get to the main section of Maggid – the retelling – before the many derashot dealing with the Exodus itself, the Haggadah wishes to tell us something about how we should go about performing the commandment of, You shall tell your son. The core message is quite plain; the main principle has already been set out in the end of “We were slaves”:

And even if all of us are wise, all of us understanding, all of us aged, all of us knowledgeable about the Torah, we are still commanded to retell the Exodus from Egypt. And the more one speaks of the Exodus from Egypt the better.

Rabbi Eliezer and his distinguished band of friends come to demonstrate how one is supposed to carry out the principle of “the more one speaks the better” in practice: “They spoke of the Exodus from Egypt all through that night, until their students came and said, ‘Our Rabbis, the time has come for the recitation of the morning Shema.’”

Next comes R. Eliezer ben Azariyah to explain why the Exodus must be mentioned at night. The four sons now make their appearance. Next, the editor of the Haggadah emphasizes the importance of devoting many hours to retelling the story of the Exodus by entertaining the theoretical possibility that people could begin performing the commandment from the first of Nissan. All of these passages aim at instilling us with readiness to retell the story of the Exodus in the best way possible, i.e., for many hours into the night.

Here we are confronted with a very important practical difficulty. How are we to engage our sons and daughters – who are, after all, the “target audience” of the Seder – in the commandment of You shall tell your son for hours on end? Perhaps our children are not really interested in a long, drawn-out discussion?

The four sons illustrate four typical responses of children to our educational efforts during the Seder. Their responses are typical, but there is no reason to assume that any one particular child will always behave like the wise son, or like the wicked son. It all depends upon his age, his mood, his wakefulness, and his stomach. If he did not take a nap in the afternoon, last year’s wise son can become this year’s wicked son. The son who does not know how to ask questions can turn into the wise son, thanks to the efforts of a talented teacher. What then is the advice which the Haggadah offers us in dealing with our children’s various behaviors?

The wise son: What does he say? “What are the statutes and ordinances and laws which the Lord our God has commanded you?” And you shall tell him the laws of the Paschal sacrifice [up to the detail]: “No desert is eaten after the afikoman.”

Here we have important messages for both parent and child. The child wants to behave appropriately and win praise. The Haggadah tells him what to do: If someone wants to look intelligent, he must ask many detailed questions. The message for the parent is no less important: If the child begins asking complicated and perhaps even annoying questions, the parent should not throw his hands up in despair, crying out, “God Almighty, this kid is driving me crazy!” Rather, the parent must take advantage of the opportunity offered by the child’s curiosity and teach the child as much as possible, “And you shall tell him the laws of the Paschal sacrifice [up to the detail]: ‘No desert is eaten after the afikoman.’” Such a parent will, no doubt, need to gird himself with patience and listening skills.

The dialogue with the wicked son is a different story. We must first understand exactly who this “wicked son” is who appears in the Haggadah. Is he a little heretic, a reincarnation of Spinoza or of Elisha ben Avuyah? Or perhaps the “wicked son” is a lowly traitor who collaborates with Hamas and Islamic Jihad? To my mind, we are dealing with a much less shocking situation. In his commentary on the Haggadah, Rabbi Yom Tov ben Avraham Ashvili, (known by the acronym RITVA d. 1330), formulates the wicked son’s question in these words:

What is this bother that you trouble us with every year, delaying our feast?

In other words, the wicked son is asking: “Nu, so when do we eat already?” The wicked son’s impatience teaches us that it is most inappropriate for one to announce one’s hunger to the other participants in the Seder while they are engaged in discussing the Exodus. Thus is solved the famous question regarding the differences between the wise and wicked sons. They both ask exactly the same question (“What are you doing?”), only that the wicked son speaks curtly in order to have the meal served as quickly as possible.

What, then, is the proper response to the wicked son? If a child complains that he is hungry, are we to “set his teeth on edge”? I believe that the Haggadah offers its own harsh response in order to spare us the need for such unpleasantness. We do not have to answer the evening’s “wicked son” – the Haggadah has already done that for us by proclaiming to the world that a person who complains that he is hungry at the Seder is behaving like a “wicked son” who has “removed himself from the community.” The Haggadah reminds us all that those who wish to be redeemed must demonstrate patience.

It should be no problem to guess the meaning of the passage regarding the “simple son.” He asks a simple question and receives a simple answer. If a child asks, “What’s that?” and we bury him under a long lecture describing “the laws of the Paschal sacrifice [up to the detail]: ‘No desert is eaten after the afikoman’” our efforts shall be wasted. In such a case, it is better to answer plainly: With a mighty arm, the Lord took me out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

Finally, we get to the one “who does not know how to ask.” Here we are not dealing with a child who refuses to participate in the Seder, rather he is not sure about how to participate. There are many different reasons why a child may not know how to ask: perhaps he is shy, or he thinks he already understands everything and is left with nothing to ask, or he might feel that the Seder is aimed towards his younger siblings and that it would be inappropriate to interject with questions that are of interest only to the older children. In any case, it is incumbent upon the parent to “open up for him,” a way must be found for him to participate in the Seder as an educational experience. This certainly demands that the parent be attentive to how the “passive” child understands his own role in the evening’s activities.

Each and every child can pass through a series of transformations in the course of the Seder, moving from archetype to archetype of the four sons. A particular child may begin as the one “who does not know how to ask.” When the parent tries to open up the discussion for him and becomes a bit long-winded, the child’s stomach might get the best of him, making him a “wicked son.” After a few minutes, he might compose himself and ask “simple” questions. Finally, as maggid is reaching its end and the meal is almost served, the child may allow himself to let loose with an onslaught of “wise” and complicated questions, which leave even the most experienced and learned of grandparents struggling for answers! There is no escaping it: Our duty is to remain flexible enough to deal with any educational challenges with which our children face us at the Seder table.

© Berel Dov Lerner

Joshua as Leader

2008-11-24T13:16:00.002+02:00

I discovered that a very short piece on Joshua's leadership which I wrote for Sh'ma has been posted on the JSafe site:

http://www.jsafe.org/pdfs/ShmaCharisma.pdf

Lot's Failed Trial

2008-10-22T17:52:00.003+02:00

Berel Dov Lerner: Lot’s Failed Trial

(This is an almost final version of the article to appear in the Jewish Bible Quarterly)

Lot is something of an ambivalent character; we do not know in what category to place him.1 He might be called a "righteous man in Sodom" (to borrow the Hebrew phrase), but then one must ask why a righteous man would decide to live in Sodom? Lot did learn the virtue of hospitality from Abraham, and when the angels came to visit Sodom, he insisted that they stay under his roof. However, when his home was later surrounded by a dangerous mob his hospitality took a grotesque turn and he addressed the crowd with an offer: ‘Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please; but do not do anything to these men, since they have come under the shelter of my roof’ (Gen. 19: 8). Is this the behavior of a righteous man?2

As far as the Torah’s narrator is concerned, Lot’s story ends quite badly. The last words we read about him leave him in exceedingly humiliating and unflattering circumstances: That night also they made their father drink wine, and the younger one went and lay with him; he did not know when she lay down or when she rose. Thus the two daughters of Lot came to be with child by their father (Gen. 19:35-36). This may be a case of poetic justice. The same "righteous" man who was prepared to hand his daughters over to a vicious mob, saying, ‘You may do to them as you please’ ends up finding himself in the reverse situation, his daughters doing to him as they please! How did Lot descend to such humiliation? What series of events took his story to such a disgraceful finale?

Let us review the background narrative. Two angels arrive in Sodom and remove Lot, his wife, and his two unmarried daughters from the town before its impending destruction. One of the angels explains to Lot that he must flee from the plains of Jordan to a safe place in the hills. Lot refuses, fearing he will not manage to escape in time. Instead, he asks the angels to spare Zoar, a nearby small town in which he might find shelter. The angel answers him, promising: ‘Very well, I will grant you this favor too, and I will not annihilate the town of which you have spoken’ (Gen. 19:21).

Something remarkable has just occurred – the angel has responded favorably to Lot’s request! It appears that Lot has succeeded where Abraham failed. Abraham had attempted to save Sodom and Gomorrah, but to no avail; Lot asks for Zoar to be spared, and his request is granted. Lot’s star is rising high in the firmament of the Torah’s spiritual heroes. But then something goes wrong. Lot has second thoughts about the promise given him by the angel; perhaps the town will be destroyed after all. He is afraid to stay in Zoar and leaves for the hills (Gen. 19:20): Lot went up from Zoar and settled in the hill country with his two daughters, for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar; and he and his two daughters lived in a cave.

Now Lot, whose wife has been lost when she was turned into a pillar of salt (Gen. 19:26), is alone in a cave with his two daughters. The situation seems drastic, the very end of his world. Lot’s older daughter looks around and comes to the conclusion that everyone else on earth has died; she must take action to preserve the continued existence of the human race.3 She gets up and tells her younger sister: ‘Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him, that we may maintain life through our father’ (Gen. 20:31).

Lot’s story reaches its notorious conclusion when his daughters succeed in getting pregnant by him. I would like to forward the claim that it is all entirely Lot’s own fault. He was supposed to have had faith in the angel’s promise; he was supposed to have remained in Zoar. Instead, Lot lost his nerve and headed for the hills. If only he had remained in Zoar, his daughters would surely have seen the townspeople and understood that their father was not the last man on earth. It would have never have occurred to them to become pregnant from him. Worse yet, Lot left the inhabitants of Zoar to face their fate alone. The town had been spared for his sake, and it may be assumed that his presence there would have guaranteed its survival. Did the people of Zoar in fact die as victims of Lot’s cowardice? There is no clear answer to this question. The town’s name is mentioned a few more times in Scripture (Deut. 34:3, Isa 15:5, Jer. 48:34, Ps. 42:7) but there is no indication that it was cited as anything more than a purely geographical designation marking the boundary of the barren zone surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Mishnah (Avot 5:3) tells us that Abraham withstood ten trials of faith; Lot was tested only once, but failed. What weakness led to Lot’s failure? The Torah alludes to a possible answer: Lot may have suffered from a kind of religious egocentrism. He thought everything depended on him, that he was the axis on which Divine Providence turns.

When Lot wants Zoar spared, he begins addressing the angel with these words: ‘Your servant has found favor in your eyes, and have already shown me so much kindness in order to save my life...’ (Gen. 19:19). Lot believes that he was spared because he found favor in eyes of God and of His angels. The man who had decided to take up residence in Sodom, a city whose people were very wicked sinners against the Lord (Gen. 14:13) because it offered water for his flocks (Gen. 14:10), the man who was prepared to throw his daughters to rapacious crowd, thinks himself to be a great saint. It was thanks to his own merit that angels were sent to save him. The Torah, however, almost immediately corrects this false impression. Just as we reach the middle of Lot’s story, the narration changes its point of view, leaving him momentarily aside and taking us far away to Abraham, who has woken early in the morning to survey the scene of catastrophe from a safe and distant vantage point. What piece of information could be so crucial for our understanding of the story that the flow of the narrative must be abruptly broken so that it can be revealed to us? We are told: Thus it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain and annihilated the cities where Lot dwelt, God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval (Gen. 19:29). The Torah takes pains to make it clear that Lot was deluded; he was not spared because he found favor in the eyes of God but rather because God was mindful of his constant protector, Abraham.

Now we can understand why Lot’s confidence broke down in Zoar. He thought that everything depended on him. He thought he had already taken advantage of God’s good will towards him when he was rescued from Sodom. Now he found himself making further demands, asking for Zoar to be spared. Doubts began to eat away at his confidence; could he be certain that the town would be saved? Did he really deserve another miracle? What had he done to merit a second divine intervention? He failed to understand that he was not alone, that Abraham’s merit was also protecting him. Feeling unworthy and afraid, he fled the town, setting in motion the events and circumstances that would lead to his impregnating his own daughters.

If the reading here presented in correct, Lot’s story is ironic indeed. He did not understand that he had survived thanks to Abraham, the true spiritual hero who passed every test thrown his way. Finally, when the moment came for Lot to face his own test, it was the delusion that everything depended on him alone that caused him to lose faith and fail.

References
1) For a list of general studies of Lot's character, see M. Avioz, "Josephus's portrayal of Lot and his family," Journal for the Study of the Pseudographia, vol. 16 (2006), pp. 3-13, footnote 1.
2) Lot's treatment of his daughters has been the subject of much controversy. In this paper I follow the general direction of feminist critics who condemn his behavior. See, for instance, I. Rashkow, The Phallacy of Genesis: a Feminist-Psychoanalytic Approach (Louisville, KY.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). Rashkow finds "Lot's offer to the crowd…incredible" (pg. 81) and goes on to attack several of his exegetical defenders. Surprisingly, L. Bechtel's "A feminist reading of Genesis 19.1-11" in Athalya Brenner, ed. Genesis. A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2nd series). (Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 108-128 offers something of an apology for Lot's behavior: "Lot…made his offer with confidence that its incongruity and inappropriateness…[would]…stop the action and prevent further aggression" (pg. 124).
3) It might be claimed that the men of Zoar survived and that the daughters should have been aware of that fact. G. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (Dallas: Word Books, 1994) pg. 61, writes: "Presumably, there were at least eligible husbands no further away than Zoar." That supposition could lead to a much darker understanding of the daughters' scheme than the one offered in the present paper. Could they have seduced their drunken father with the deliberate intent to avenge their honor after he had offered them to the crowd in Sodom?

How to refer to God

2008-08-04T19:41:00.002+03:00

A German language version of a piece I wrote about the use of the Tetragammaton by Christian bible scholars has been published in the Catholic publication, HEUTE in Kirche und Welt – Blätter zur Unterscheidung des Christlichen. See http://www.heute-lesen.de/content/view/273/1/ .

"And You Shall Chase Your Enemies"

2007-05-09T23:35:00.000+03:00

A new article of mine on Parashat Behukotai (in particular, Leviticus 26) is available in Hebrew on the Kibbutz HaDati website:
http://www.kdati.org.il/

The Challenge of Ruth

2006-06-04T23:30:00.000+03:00

I had an article about Ruth in the Jerusalem Post last week. Read it at:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1148482075754&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The Gardens of Eden and Sodom

2006-01-30T17:47:00.000+02:00

©Berel Dov Lerner. This is a slightly improved version of the article which appeared in The Jewish Bible Quarterly 33:3 (July-September 2003) pp. 174-180.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Yair Mordechai, who died on Sukkot of 5762 while preventing a suicide bomber from entering Kibbutz Sheluhot, saving many lives.

The Land of Israel (hereafter, referred to as “the Land”) is one geographical region that is certainly viewed with high regard by Scripture. Consider how Moses describes the Land to the Israelites who eagerly awaited entry into it:

For the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, [lit. by your foot], like a vegetable garden; but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. It is a land which the Lord your God looks after, on which the Lord your God always keeps His eye, from years beginning to years end. If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the Lord your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil. I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle and thus you shall eat your fill.
(Deut. 11: 10-15)

Here the Bible presents us with a distinction: the Land does not equal Egypt. Egypt may have been the country best suited to survive the droughts that plagued the ancient Near East, but the Land is superior to it. While Egyptian farmers must exert themselves to irrigate their crops with water drawn from the Nile, Israelite farmers could look forward to having their crops automatically watered by timely rain-showers. Of course, these agricultural conveniences were available only on the condition that the Israelites remained faithful to God. With no local Nile to fall back on, a drought brought on by idolatrous practices could be catastrophic:

Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For the Lord’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to you.
(Deut. 11: 16-17)

According to Scripture, the land of Israel is a very special kind of place. Its climate reacts to the spiritual condition of its inhabitants. In the words of the RaShBaM (on Deut. 11;10), “This land is better than all other lands for those who observe His commandments, and worse than all other lands for those who do not observe them.” Actually, there may be worse calamities than famine. Although Deuteronomy says that upon sinning, the Israelites would soon perish from the good land, biblical historiography never cites famine as a cause of the Israelites losing sovereignty over their land. Foreign conquerors were the instruments of such ultimate catastrophes. It is no wonder that given the choice, King David picked natural disaster over military conflict, Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for His compassion is great; and let me not fall into the hands of men (II Sam. 24: 14).

One might speculate that local weather in the Land of was thought to serve as a kind of automatic religious feedback mechanism. If the Israelites get out of line, drought and famine will throw them back to God before their actions warrant more drastic punishment. One is reminded of an idea forwarded by the great medieval poet and philosopher Judah Halevi. In his magnum opus, the Kuzari, Halevi compares the Jewish people to the heart, which is both the “healthiest” and “sickest” (or perhaps “weakest”) of the organs. Because the heart is so frail, it is sensitive to even slightest ailment. This hypersensitivity affords the heart early warning of medical problems, allowing it to purge itself of any dangerous influences before they can take root and wreak irreparable damage.

Similarly, the Jewish people is burdened by suffering “whilst the whole world enjoys rest and prosperity”, but “these trials are meant to prove our faith, to cleanse us completely, and to remove all taint from us.”[i] Analogously, the climate of the Land may be viewed as an instrument of divine discipline meant to keep the Jewish people from sliding into irredeemable depravity. The carrot of rain and the stick of drought will save them from genuine calamity. Famine may be terrible, but it is a price worth paying for the avoidance of even worse punishments.

Surprisingly, the Torah does tell us about a certain region immediately contiguous with the Land that once did enjoy the advantages of Egyptian-style agriculture. Soon after their arrival in Canaan, quarrels broke out between Abraham and Lot’s herdsman. They decided to take their leave of each other. While Abraham chose to remain in Canaan, Lot decided to move into the Jordan plain area:

Lot looked about him and saw how well watered was the whole plain of the Jordan, all of it – this was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gemorrah– all the way to Zoar, like the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.
Gen. 13: 10

This last verse sets up an interesting set of new equivalencies: Sodom equals Egypt equals the Garden of the Lord (Eden). How does the Garden of Eden fit into the equation? If Egypt has its Nile, Eden is served by an even greater watercourse, the headwaters of the great rivers of the biblical world:

A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is… The name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
Gen. 2: 10-11, 13-14

So Eden may be counted together with Sodom and Egypt as a riverside habitat. If Eden and Sodom are similar to Egypt, and the Land so different from Egypt, we may infer that the Land is also dissimilar to Eden and Sodom as well. Of course, neither Eden nor Sodom worked out very well for humanity. While the Land’s spiritually sensitive climate would not abide the radical moral decline of its inhabitants, Sodom’s forgiving climate and geography kept its populace well fed even as they rushed downwards to the depths of radical evil: Now the inhabitants of Sodom were very wicked sinners against the Lord (Gen. 13:13).

Punishment came too late for rehabilitation. In the end, the people of Sodom became so irreparably evil that they became subject to total annihilation. As in Sodom, divine discipline in the Garden was an all-or-nothing affair. The great river of Eden afforded no possibility of a soul-chastening drought or famine. While God was not about to destroy Paradise in retaliation for human sin, He did the next best thing. Driven forever out of Eden, Adam and Eve would never again be seduced by the carefree life-style of river dwellers.

Unfortunately, local climate control proved unequal to the task of suppressing the Israelites’ proclivity to sin. Eventually, God took harsher measures, bringing in foreign conquerors to exile the people and devastate their land, just as the Israelites had wrested the land from the Canaanites in punishment for their sins. In fact, that final catastrophe was something of a foregone conclusion. Deuteronomy (28: 49) already threatens that the Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like an eagle, bringing destruction and exile.

Now the Bible is describing a predicament much more serious and enduring than a temporary drought; cities will be razed and the people carried away. Devastated by war, the Land becomes comparable to Sodom; not the Eden-like Sodom which Lot found so appealing, but the ruined Sodom from which he had to flee. The old contrast between the Land and Egypt (and the inferred contrast between the Land and Eden or Sodom) becomes irrelevant. The new equivalency, the Land equals Sodom, becomes a recurring feature of the biblical rhetoric of catastrophe. For example:

And later generations will ask the children who succeed you, and foreigners who come from distant lands and see the plagues and diseases that the Lord has inflicted upon that land, all its soil devastated by sulfur and salt, beyond sowing and producing, no grass growing in it, just like the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His fierce anger.
Deut. 29:21-22

Had not the Lord of Hosts left us some survivors, we should be like Sodom, another Gomorrah.
Isa. 1: 9

Fortunately, there is also a bright side to the new equation. If Sodom-like devastation may befall the Land, Eden-like restoration may await it in the future. The old contrast between Egypt and the Land made it impossible to describe the latter in idyllic terms that only made sense for a riverside habitat. The complete desolation of the Land broke down the old metaphor, making room for metaphorical identification of the Land not only with the ruins of Sodom, but also with Eden’s bounty:

Truly the Lord has comforted Zion, comforted all her ruins; He has made her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the Garden of the Lord.
Isa. 51: 3

And men shall say, “That land, once desolate, has become like the garden of Eden; and the cities, once ruined, desolate, and ravaged, are now populated and fortified.”
Ezek. 36: 35

Of course, the new metaphor is not without its difficulties. Not the least of these is the simple geographical fact that the Land has no great rivers of its own. Despite its historical significance, the Jordan is a pitiful creek compared to the mighty Nile. (One may well wonder how Sodom was kept so well watered before its destruction!) The conversion of the Land into a new Eden would require constant divine intervention (or drip irrigation). I would suggest that biblical writers were aware of the dissonance implicit to the identification of the Land’s future glory with descriptions belonging to fertile river valleys. Perhaps the following verses from Zechariah may be understood as offering a solution to this difficulty:

On that day, He will set His feet on the Mount of Olives, near Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives shall split across from east to west, and one part of the Mount shall shift to the north and the other to the south, [forming] a huge gorge. And the Valley in the Hills shall be stopped up, for the Valley of the Hills shall reach only to Azal; it shall be stopped up as it was stopped up as a result of the earthquake in the days of King Uzziah of Judah…In that day, fresh water shall flow from Jerusalem, part of it to the Eastern Sea, and part to the Western Sea, throughout the summer and winter.
Zech. 14: 4-8[ii]

Zechariah offers us a radical resolution of the strain between the rhetoric of messianic hope and the plain facts of geography. In those future days, geography will change to fit the metaphor, and, like Eden, the Land of Israel will have a river running through it. Presumably, the Jewish people will no longer require the services of climactic spiritual control. However, Zechariah continues the prophecy from which I have quoted to explain that while the Land will be freed from its dependence on rain all other countries will find themselves subject to a regimen similar to that described in the eleventh chapter of Deuteronomy:

All who survive of all those nations that came up against Jerusalem shall make a pilgrimage year by year to bow low to the King Lord of Hosts and to observe the Feast of Booths. Any of the earth’s communities that does not make the pilgrimage to bow low to the King Lord of Hosts shall receive no rain.
Zech. 14: 16-17

Zechariah has neatly executed a complete reversal. The Land will become a riverside paradise, while all other regions will live by whatever rain God deems them to deserve. Only one detail is left to attend to. What will become of Egypt? Must the Nile dry up so as to make Egypt a rain-dependent nation? As translated by the Jewish Publication Society, Zechariah leaves us guessing exactly what Egypt’s punishment shall be: However, if the community of Egypt does not make this pilgrimage, it shall not be visited by the same affliction with which the Lord will strike the other nations that do not come up to observe the feast of Booths (14: 18).

I would like to suggest an alternative translation which better fits my general interpretative scheme. Consider two additional verses. Zechariah 14:19 seems to imply that if Egypt does not observe the Feast of Booths, it will suffer the same punishment as all the other nations (i.e. drought): Such shall be the punishment of Egypt and of all the other nations that do not come up to observe the Feast of Booths. How could that be possible if Egypt is not dependent on rainwater? Remarkably, an earlier verse (Zech. 10:11) clearly suggests that God will indeed dry up the Nile: And all the deeps of the Nile shall dry up…and the scepter of Egypt shall pass away. Now it seems clear that Egypt will actually cease to be a riverside habitat, leaving it vulnerable to drought. How can Zechariah 14:18, which claims that Egypt will not be subjected to the same punishment as are the other nations, be brought into line with this new information? A comparison with two other phrases may help:

Shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this? (Jer. 5:9)

Have I not the power to save? (Is. 50:2)

Both of these rhetorical questions are introduced by the same Hebrew word, ve’im (literally “and if”), as is Zechariah 14:18, and both share its basic structure. Our verse from Zechariah may therefore be similarly construed as asking a rhetorical question:

And if the community of Egypt does not make this pilgrimage, shall it not be visited by the same affliction with which the Lord will strike the other nations that do not come up to observe the Feast of Booths?

The verse’s new translation suits the geographical reversal of Zechariah’s apocalypse quite nicely. On the one hand, the Land of Israel will be watered by a mighty river throughout the summer and winter. On the other hand, the deeps of the Nile shall dry up, leaving Egypt prone to the same disastrous draughts with which the Lord will strike the other nations that do not come up to observe the Feast of Booths.

[i] Kuzari 1: 44, here quoted from Hartwig Hirschfeld’s translation, New York: Schocken, 1964, pg. 110.
[ii] Prof. John Goldingay reminds me that Ezekiel 47: 1-12 offers an even more striking description of the great river that will emerge from Jerusalem in the end of days, bearing plentiful fish (Ez. 47:9) and watering ever-bountiful fruit trees on both its banks (Ez. 47: 12).

Demythologizing and Remythologizing Scripture after Wittgenstein (more on the topic of Faith, Fiction, and the Jewish Scriptures)

2006-01-19T13:35:00.000+02:00

(This is a short paper I delivered back in 1995. If I had written it today, I would not be so hard on Bultmann, Winch, and Phillips, who are more profound thinkers than I then admitted.)

Throughout the centuries, religious texts have been reinterpreted to suit the spirit of those various times. I will here outline and criticize more recent attempts by Neowittgensteinian philosophers such as Peter Winch and D. Z. Phillips2 to "demythologize" religious discourse. I see in their work an attempt to make religion safe from the onslaughts of scientific thought at whose hands it has suffered since the dawn of the Enlightenment.

I borrow the term "demythologizing"3 from the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, whose project of biblical hermeneutics was the subject of much debate in the middle decades of the century. Bultmann wanted to separate the wheat of the gospel's saving message from its mythological, supernatural, chaff. Don't lose any sleep over the historical validity of miracles says Bultmann, just embrace the essentially Heideggerian message which they convey! So much for Bultmann

On to the Neowittgensteinians. I will call them "N.W.s" for short. The N.W.s' schema for the interpretation of religious discourse is an application of a more universal doctrine of interpretation of social practices in general. According to the N.W.s, different social practices or "forms of life" constitute epistemologically and hermeneutically autonomous units. If, for instance, one wishes to understand or judge the validity of a scientific claim, this may only be done in accordance with the criteria which are internal to science itself. These criteria, in turn, reflect the goals, the rationale, what Winch likes to call the "point" of the practice of science. Similarly, religious practices and discourse must only be understood on their own terms.

So - the correct interpretation of religious discourse will depend on the application of the appropriate criteria of intelligibility, and those criteria reflect the purpose or "point" of religious discourse. What then is the point of religion in general and of its discourse in particular? The N.W.s say plainly: The point of religion is to express and contemplate attitudes towards life. Thus the concerns of religion stand in stark contrast to the concerns of science and technology. Science and technology seek prediction and control of the world around us, religion deals solely in attitudes and values and not in the attainment of practical ends. Science creates a factual description of the world based on empirical observation, while religious language and ritual offer gestures which are expressive of attitudes towards the world.

It is important to note just how seriously the N.W.s take their own claims. Although they might not be willing to put it in these terms, I think it would be fair to say that for the N.W.s the idea that religion deals with attitudes is constitutive of the very category of the religious. In other words, if you see a ritual or text which does not merely express attitudes it simply does not legitimately belong to religion. Generally speaking, the N.W.s deal with such cases in one of two ways. Either they relegate the phenomenon in question to the category of superstition, or they will say that the phenomenon constitutes a mistake, a confusion, in the practice of religion. If, for instance, a cancer patient believes that his prayers, as well as his chemotherapy, contribute to his recovery, he is engaged in superstition rather than in religion. If some people speak of God as actively interfering in history (and mean this literally), they have made a mistake in their use of religious language.

If all prayers which explicitly intercede for the well being of the worshipper are superstition, and biblical accounts of miraculous divine intervention in history a mistake in the language game of religion, what then is left of historically existent religious discourse? The answer is that the N.W.s interpret traditional religious discourse by their own lights. Thus, according to the N.W.s, when generations of Christians have prayed to God that He give them their daily bread, this was not intended to influence their chances for prosperity, but merely to express their feeling of dependence on God. So too - and here the similarity to Bultmann becomes clear; bible stories were not intended to convey historical descriptions, but rather to express, in some symbolic fashion, an attitude towards life. Traditional religion thus becomes thoroughly insulated from any possible factual critique, a situation which the philosopher Kai Neilsen has dubbed "Wittgensteinian Fideism".4

The most fascinating aspect of all of this as a cultural phenomenon is that the N.W.s take a resolute stand against anyone who would call them religious reformers. They insist that they are merely exhibiting the objective, underlying logic of religion. This logic is common to all genuine religious practices in all cultures and at all times. That this logic just happens to be systematically impenetrable to the attacks of scientific criticism, and that the rise of modern science has been the major force for secularization in the modern world, is simply a matter of coincidence.

Several books have already been devoted to criticism of the N.W.s' doctrine, but for now I will just touch upon the difficulty of its application to the exegesis of Hebrew Scripture. The N.W.s' largely avoid discussing the Old Testament, and for good reason. If, by their doctrine, the Hebrew Scriptures do not qualify to be read as religious texts, this would appear to constitute a reductio ad absurdum disproof of the N.W.s understanding of religion. The scandal of the Old Testament lies in its combination of theological and historical elements, a combination which is particularly resistant to non-literal interpretations.

I admit that it would be anachronistic to suggest that Scripture was written in the context of an established discipline of historical research. However, in biblical times there did already exist an established social practice which was concerned with formulating agreed-upon, factual accounts of past events according to formal rules of evidence. I am referring to the institution of law. The core of the biblical narrative is concerned with delineating a set of contractual arrangements made between God and the Jewish people, and the miracles of the exodus, the wanderings in the desert, etc. constitute a record of how each side kept its part of the covenant. I find no reason to believe that the historical claims of scripture should be taken in any less a literal sense than the claims made in any other description of a legal nature. Thus Judaism, or at least biblical Judaism, was not immune to historical criticism. If the exodus did not occur, the Ten Commandments lose their self-proclaimed material basis.

Since biblical Judaism boldly claims itself to be verified by historical evidence, it is able to criticize pagan beliefs and customs in terms of similarly pragmatic, factual criteria. If the psalmist (115:5) complains that the gods of idolatry have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, etc. this obviously implies a contrast with a true God who is capable of interaction with the world. The biblical notion of settling religious disputes by empirical criteria reaches its high point in the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel. Chapter 18 of First Kings tells of how Elijah challenged the priests of Ba'al to a contest which would take place before the entire nation. Whoever succeeded in bringing down fire from heaven to light their sacrifice would prove the reality of their god. What could be the point of this story if the factual claim is not taken seriously?5 I would go so far as to say that the biblical demand for pragmatic, empirical demonstrations of the validity of religious claims constitutes an important contribution to the development of the human capacity for critical thought. Several authors, including most recently the Harvard anthropologist S.J. Tambiah6, have noted the role of biblical thought in the development of the West's critique of mythic and magical thinking. That the very texts which herald the epistemological revolution against traditional mythological thought simultaneously introduce what secular scholars must view as a new myth of God's intervention in Jewish history is a paradox worth pondering.

Beyond the epistemological implications of the literal interpretation of scripture there lay ethical and even political issues. In short, the ethically and politically active God of Scriptures implies the worth of such action for human beings as well. The notion that God actually broke through into human history in order to free slaves in Egypt-that human servitude is a matter which could demand the intervention of the very Master of the universe- is a more powerful message of the importance of political liberation than any offered by a non-literal interpretation of the Exodus story. Only such a "carnal" interpretation of scripture can allow for a similarly "carnal" concern with the solution of this-worldly problems. It should come as no surprise that in contrast with this, Neowittgensteinian religion and ethics tends to the quietistic adoption of correct spiritual attitudes towards the world, rather than towards redemptive action in the world.

ENDNOTES

©Berel Dov Lerner
1) This is a slightly edited version of a short paper presented at the Colloquium on Modern Theories of Allegory: Imaginative Discourse and Historical Continuity sponsored by The Center for Literary Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on November 15, 1995. My thanks to Dr. Jon Whitman for having kindly invited me to speak at the colloquium.
2) Representative works are D.Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) and the essays in Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
3) A classic statement of Bultmann's position may be found in Rudolph Bultmann et al, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). A good overview of the debate surrounding "demythologizing" may be found in John Macquarrie, The Scope of Demythologizing: Bultmann and his Critics (London: SCM Press, 1960).
4) See his "Wittgensteinian Fideism", Philosophy 42 (1967), 191-209.
5) For more on this point, see my "Faith, Fiction and the Jewish Scriptures", Judaism 39 (1990), 215-20.
6) See Tambiah’s Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6-8.

Faith, Fiction, and the Jewish Scriptures (on the Book of Job and the literal truth of Scripture)

2006-01-19T13:15:00.000+02:00

(I wrote this article quite a while ago - my son Tzviki has since finished hesder and is doing a BA in Jewish education!)

©Berel Dov Lerner. This article originally appeared in Judaism 39: 215-20, 1990.

My six year old son, Tzvi, is precociously sensitive to the complexities of narrative truth. Once, after I related to him in Hebrew a conversation from my childhood, he exclaimed: “That can’t be right, you’ve got everyone speaking Hebrew, but in America people speak English.” I hope that no one else takes similar offense at my having translated his Hebrew for quotation in an English language publication. More seriously, he also asked a question which has, no doubt, thrown many a parent into a fit of soul-searching unknown since adolescence. The question is: “Are the stories of the Bible true?” Personal beliefs aside, it is clear that the traditional Jewish consensus answers with a resounding “yes.” Surprisingly, there is one narrative book in Jewish Scripture whose traditional status in unclear. I refer to the book of Job.

The concluding pages of the first chapter of the Talmudic tractate, Bava Batra, contain a relatively long and sustained discussion of Job. In the course of the Talmud’s attempt to establish the time and authorship of the book, the following incident is recounted:

A certain one of the Rabbis came before Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani and sat down and said: “Job did not exist and was never created, rather he was [a character in] a fable “(B. Bava Batra 15a).

While R. Shmuel bar Nahmani argues against this view, it has certainly found its supporters among later authorities. In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides clearly states that the story of Job “is a parable intended to set forth the opinions of people concerning providence.” More recently, the prominent Orthodox Israeli exegete, Amos Hakham, has stated that “all of the contemporary commentators agree that Job is a parable.”2

The fact that Job was not thought of as literally true tells us something important about the rabbinic attitude towards Scripture as a whole. The Rabbis did not adopt a “fundamentalist” view of scriptural truth, requiring that Scripture qua Scripture be historically accurate. Given, then, the flexibility of rabbinic thought, we may reasonably ask why the rest of the Bible’s stories were (almost) always thought of by classical Judaism as accurately describing past events.

Some texts lose none of their importance if read as fiction. It makes little difference to the reader that Madam Bovary never existed. But, suppose one read such things about one’s own spouse! Then the accuracy of every detail might seem more crucial. Most of the stories of the Jewish Scriptures belong to the second category of texts. When the Book of Exodus retells the story of Israel in Egypt, its self-conscious purpose is to establish the historical basis of God’s special dominion over the Jewish people, as expressed in the first of the Ten Commandments. The covenant between God and His people partakes of the formal aspect of a legal contract, and the believing reader (and this is the only reader taken into consideration by the Torah) consults Scripture as an accurate record of each party’s compliance with the contract. If the Exodus were considered a myth, the entire material basis of the covenant between God and Israel would collapse.

There is also a deeper, epistemological issue at stake here. In the Torah, Moses repeatedly urges his audience to accept the evidence of their own eyes, to remember the miracles performed for them:

You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land the great trials which your eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles. (Deut.29: 1,2).

Why call upon the people to remember events unless they were supposed to have actually taken place? Moses calls upon them not to worship images, since “you saw no manner of form on the day that the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire” (Deut. 4:15). What sense can be made of such an appeal if it is not understood as pointing to a real experience of theophany at Sinai?

All of this leads to what must be, for the secular reader, the great paradox of the Bible’s place in the development of human consciousness. On the one hand, the Bible promotes an anti-mythical, almost empiricist view of the world. As a modern philosopher might say, the myths of pagan religion were unverifiable. Human experience could offer no evidence for or against the truth of mytho-poeic entities. Yet, the Bible takes religion seriously and seeks to apply to it the same standards of credibility which are used in every day life. The paganism of ancient times failed the Biblical test. The Canaanite gods did not answer human prayers in a regular fashion; neither did they punish the wicked nor reward the just. Attacking idolatry in terms of an almost vulgar positivism, the prophets deride the “holy” images of competing religions as the lifeless artifacts of a preposterous superstition.

On the other hand, the Bible replaces the rejected pagan myths with new, equally incredible tales of Divine intervention in the mainstream of ancient history. Of course, these stories describe exactly the kinds of events which could serve as empirically valid evidence for the truth of Judaism. But those who reject the truth of Scripture must ask, how did it come to pass that the same prophets who introduced a critical attitude towards the Divine were also the promoters of this new, fantastic mythology? To make matters worse, this new mythology is presented against the backdrop of an astonishingly naturalistic historical narrative. The Jewish people and its greatest leaders are repeatedly subjected to bitter criticism consistent with the muck-raking style of Scripture’s attack on paganism. This practice of honest self-appraisal was quite unheard of in the literary traditions of Israel’s ancient neighbors. The result is a kind of “warts and wonders and all” account of covenantal history. Why embellish mere myths with such painfully realistic detail?

The tension between miraculous events and the critical Biblical out- look reaches its height in the story of Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal. According to the story in the First Book of Kings, Elijah assembled the entire Jewish nation at Mount Carmel in order to witness a daring experiment. He was to prepare a sacrifice to God, while four-hundred and fifty prophets of Baal made ready an offering to their deity. The point was to see which god would demonstrate his reality and power by sending down fire from heaven to consume his particular sacrifice. The prophets of Baal went first. During the performance of their rites, Elijah baited them: “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is musing or he is easing himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is sleeping and must be wakened” (I Kings 18:27). Elijah’s contempt for the Baal worshipers was typical of the critical prophetic stance. He took Canaanite paganism as a religion about as seriously as a modern Westerner might take the native cults of Africa or the Pacific Islands. One might even say that, by today’s standards, Elijah’s intemperate positivism seems somewhat old-fashioned. His disdain for the supernatural is more appropriate to the French Enlightenment than to late twentieth century “New-Age” thinking. Yet Elijah’s experiment did not end by merely refuting superstition. The prophet went on to repair God’s broken altar, prepare the sacrifice, and have it all repeatedly doused with water until the surrounding ditch was also filled. After Elijah pronounced a short prayer, fire came down from heaven, consuming the offering — altar stones, water and all. What are we to make of the conclusion of this story? After arousing in the reader a feeling of shared intellectual superiority — we join Elijah in scoffing at the ineffectiveness of the Baal worshipers’ primitive rites — it goes on to describe the most incredible wonder performed by the God of Israel before the massed audience of his wayward people. As usual, the skeptical reader is left in a quandary, but one thing is clear; this story was meant to be taken in dead earnest and any attempt to soften its claims by a metaphorical interpretation will undo its basic intention. The point of the story is that the true God of Israel can do what the mythological Baal cannot. Neither can we dismiss the description of Elijah’s miracle as the product of an uncritical mytho-poeic imagination. By holding the claims of idolatry to the standards of everyday reality, Elijah overthrows mytho-poeic thought. If it did not really take place, the story tells us nothing.

If Scripture’s mixture of common-sense empiricism and tales of God’s wonders is confusing to the nonbeliever, it is downright exasperating to the believer. The great challenge of the Bible to contemporary Judaism is how to remain loyal to the critical spirit of the prophets and still keep faith with God in a world that has not known His direct intervention for quite some time, Would the generation that “feared the Lord and believed in the Lord, and in his servant Moses” (Exodus 14:31) after witnessing the splitting of the Red Sea have gained this faith in the century of the Holocaust? The most typically modern answer to this problem is to take the Existentialist’s “leap of faith”, a freely made decision to accept the truth of religion without regard for objective reason. Satisfying as such fideism may be to religious sentiment, nothing could be more foreign to Biblical (and most post-Biblical) Jewish thinking. Whether or not we accept the Exodus as historical fact, the Jews of Biblical times most certainly did. To pledge allegiance to a God who has miraculously freed you from centuries of repressive slavery hardly requires a leap of faith!

In its complete form, the existentialist argument extends beyond questions of faith to questions of works. God’s mitzvot become the absurd commands of the Lord of Kierkegaard, a deity as far removed from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as is the God of the philosophers. The non-believer has his own version of fideism, exchanging Judaism’s Moshe Rabbeinu for a Nietzschean super-man who imposed a new table of values upon his people through sheer force of will. These views have become so popular that even people who should know better interpret Scripture by their lights. Contrasting Enlightenment political thought with the Torah, Allan Bloom writes:

Such imperatives are the very opposite extreme from those enunciated in the Ten Commandments, which provide no reasons for obeying their injunctions and do not affirm fundamental passions but inhibit them.3

Of course, this is sheer nonsense. As in matters of faith, Scripture takes a reasonable attitude towards matters of law. In the first place, it must be recalled that, to Biblical thinking, Divine Providence was a very real factor worth taking into account by those who sought to satisfy their “fundamental passions.” The commandment to “Honor thy father and thy mother” was tied by Divine promise to the very real “passion” for long life — “that thy days may be prolonged” (Deut. 5:16). Secondly, no philosophical consequences may be deduced from the fact that the Ten Commandments provide no explanations of the social and political benefits which their observance will incur. Indeed, we do not always expect such explanations to be written into the wording of modern legal codes either. In any case, the Torah clearly views itself not as the fiat of an inscrutable Deity, but, rather, as a just and reasonable system of law whose wisdom should be apparent to all nations:

For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes, and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people... And what nation is there so great, that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this Torah, which I set before you this day? (Deut. 4:6,8).

It might be argued that fideism constitutes a refinement of Biblical faith, a higher plane of religious existence. The fideist has freely chosen to believe, while the characters who populate Scripture had belief forced upon them by the crude testimony of their own senses. How is Biblical man’s concept of God to develop beyond the bounds of his personal experience of the miraculous?

Although miracles may “force” belief in the existence of God on those who witness them, they by no means dictate love of God or faithfulness to Him. This distinction might seem artificial, the theological fall-out of modern philosophy’s attempt to sever values from facts. Could a person who had witnessed authentic miracles reject the God who had produced them? According to the Torah, yes. After living through a prolonged process of miraculous redemption from slavery, personally escaping the Egyptian army by crossing dry land in the midst of the sea, arid eating manna from heaven, the Jewish people remained a cantankerous, rebellious mob of runaways. No act of Divine intervention could keep them from grumbling about Moses’ leadership, the hardships of nomadic life, or their monotonous diet. Given half a chance, they would gladly worship idols or chase after Moabite women. No matter what God did, the Jews had to make up their own minds about being faithful to Him.

By adopting concepts from Hassidic thought, it is possible to develop a religious psychology which explicitly confronts the tension between man’s unceasing struggle to establish an ever-more authentic relationship with God, and the primitive basis of that relationship in the testimony of Biblical history. While human spiritual development requires “falls” — periods of questioning — as well as “ascents,” a Jew’s fundamental indebtedness to the God who took him out of Egypt will always preclude the possibility of a complete break. Of course, the value of such a religious psychology for us is severely restricted by our ability honestly to accept the Bible as historically true.

That Biblical man did achieve a level of religious existence beyond that implied by a mere common-sense belief in God and His covenant, should be evident to any sensitive reader of Psalms. A verse such as, “Oh God, thou art my God; earnestly I seek thee: my soul thirsts for thee, my flesh longs for thee in a dry and thirsty land” (Psalms 63:2), is clearly informed by a deep religious sentiment. Would we consider a woman’s love for a man any more profound because she had no good reason to be sure that he really ever existed in the first place? Or would we merely question her sanity?

So far we have seen why most narrative portions of Scripture demand a literal reading, and why such a reading did not necessarily impose a limit on the reader’s spiritual growth. It is also now clear why the Rabbis were not especially troubled by the idea of Job’s fictional status. The action of Job takes place in the distant land of Uz, far removed from the arena of God’s great interventions in history. Its protagonists are not even designated as being Jewish, so that anything which happens in the story has no bearing on Israel’s covenantal relationship with God. The scope of action is personal. The vagaries of a single man’s life, detached from broader public events, cannot offer sound evidence of God’s presence. Since there was no compelling reason to accept Job as fact, the Rabbis were willing to treat it as Divinely inspired fiction.

Given that a fictional reading of Job was possible for Judaism, it still remains unclear why some of the Rabbis decided to make good on the option and declare Job a fable. Would it not have been safer to preserve the uniform validity of the entire Jewish canon? I believe that the main problem which the Rabbis had with the Book of Job was with the character of Job himself. According to the Rabbis, Abraham’s unique piety was the original foundation of his election by God. What, then, are we to make of Job, an ancient, perhaps non-Hebrew, saint, perhaps a contemporary of Abraham himself, who underwent so much suffering, yet remained true to God? Was he Abraham’s equal?

Many midrashim were written in response to this threat to Jewish chosenness. Some tried to prove Job a secret heretic, or that Abraham’s trials were the more demanding. Talmudic concern for Abraham’s rival reaches the heights of paradox in a statement of Rabbi Levi:

Satan’s intentions were for the sake of Heaven... When he saw that the Holy One Blessed Be He was beginning to favor Job over Abraham, he said, “God forbid, He has forgotten Abraham’s love!” [and therefore set out to persecute Job] (B. Bava Batra 16a).

It is there further related that when Ray Aha bar Yaakov later retold this idea, Satan himself arrived to kiss the great rabbi’s feet in gratitude!

While these Talmudic ploys help justify Abraham’s election, they dilute the strong lessons of Job. If Job is portrayed as less than righteous, his suffering seems less appalling, his appeals to God’s justice smack of insincerity. If Job is more righteous than Abraham, why was he not chosen by God? By fictionalizing Job, both Abraham’s historical uniqueness and the high seriousness of Scripture’s great theodicy could be preserved.

Notes
1. Guide to the Perplexed, Pines, tr., III:22, p. 486.

2. Sefer Iyyov (Da’at Mikra series, Jerusalem, 1970), Introduction, p. 19.

3. Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987), p. 288.

"And He Shall Rule Over Thee" (a rereading of the Garden of Eden story)

2006-01-11T23:46:00.000+02:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. This article is a slightly corrected version of “And He Shall Rule Over Thee,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought Vol. 37, No. 4, Fall Issue 1988 pp. 446-9.

Michael L. Rosenzweig’s article, “A Helper Equal to Him” (JUDAISM, Summer, 1986) took Jewish biblical exegesis an important step forward toward making the story of Adam and Eve palatable to the modern reader. He demonstrated that the Hebrew phrase, “ezer kenegdo,” used to designate Eve’s role vis-à-vis Adam, may be plausibly translated as a helper equal to him where the word helper does not carry its usual connotation of inequality.

Nevertheless, Rosenzweig’s article fails to address the much more problematic passage:

Unto the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply the pain of thy childbearing; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and yet thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).

Proper treatment of this verse requires more than philological analysis. It calls for a reinterpretation, within the broader context of the first book of Genesis, of the punishments meted out to the snake, to Adam and to Eve.

My interpretation of the list of punishments is rooted in the simple observation that each aspect of life that was made difficult by God’s curses has been referred to earlier in the text. For example, the snake is told (3:14) and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. According to an earlier passage, the snake would have eaten plants: And every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food (1:30). So, too, Eve is cursed with in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children (3:16) when previously she had been blessed with fecundity: be fruitful and multiply (1:28). Adam, cursed with hard work: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread (3:19), at the outset had been placed in the Garden of Eden, to till it and to keep it (2:15).

In each, a basic activity of living, i.e., eating, reproducing, and working, is first mentioned in a positive context and then distorted and made difficult by God’s curse. Food, described as God-given, becomes dust for the snake. The blessing of human fecundity becomes a source of pain and danger. Work, the divine purpose of man’s creation, is transformed into a bitter struggle for survival. Although God’s curses distort the activities of eating, reproduction and work, Jewish Scripture retains their basic positive value. Thus, throughout Scripture, children are counted as a much sought-after blessing. Unlike the well-documented disparaging attitudes that are voiced in classical Greek and Roman sources, Jewish Scripture and tradition accord honor to productive labor. Thus, the role of God’s curses is somewhat paradoxical. The activities which are the objects of God’s curses had been formerly declared by God to be valuable in themselves. They then remain valuable even when deformed by God.

Having dealt with the three activities tainted by God’s curses, I turn now to the two basic relationships affected by the divine punishments. The first is mankind’s relationship with the snake, which can be taken as man’s relationship with Nature in general. As originally depicted, man’s relationship with Nature is that of straightforward human sovereignty:

…replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth (1:28).

Following the commission of the sin, the clear dominion of man breaks down and is replaced by continuous struggle:

And I will put enmity between thee [the snake] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel (3:15).

The earth, which man was to replenish and subdue, will become cursed ... for thy sake (3:17). Originally designated to rule Nature, mankind must forever do battle with it.

I come now to the central problem addressed in this essay: the second relationship affected by God’s curses, that between man and woman. We must apply to this case the principles developed in the examination of the punishments of the snake and of Adam. As in those cases, here, too, we are dealing with a valuable aspect of life which has been made distorted. Indeed, the value and original nature of the man/woman relationship is clearly depicted in Genesis. When first presented, men and women are on quite egalitarian terms. The genders are mentioned almost as an afterthought: So God created Mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them (1:27). The blessings that they received, including dominion over the earth and the charge to subdue it, are all addressed in the plural, indicating that both man and woman would share them.

The detailed account of woman’s creation, in chapter two of Genesis, might be construed as indicating feminine inferiority (e.g., Paul’s declaration: A woman ought not to speak, because Adam was formed first and she afterwards (Timothy 2:13). Yet, a careful reading of Genesis will reveal an insistence upon the importance of Adam and Eve’s relationship and her equality within that relationship.

Throughout the creation narrative we read of God declaring things good. God saw the light, that it was good (1:4). So, too, the separation of water and land was good (1:9) as was the creation of vegetation (1:12), the heavenly bodies (1:18), creatures of the seas and the air (1:21) and of the land (1:23). All were declared good. The first chapter of Genesis ends with the verse: And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good (1:31). After such a persistent affirmation of creation’s goodness, any hint of imperfection in God’s world takes on a special salience. All the more so when God, Himself, bluntly states the problem:

It is not good that the man should be alone (2:18).

The solution to the problem is obvious: I will make a help to match him (2:18). (Or, in Rosenzweig’s words: a helper equal to him.) Strangely, the biblical narrative does not proceed directly with Eve’s creation, but, rather, tells of how God created specimens of all of the living creatures and brought them before Adam so that he might name them.1 The purpose of this interruption in the narrative becomes clear when we read its concluding verse:

And man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a help to match him [a helper equal to him] (2:20).

Man was in need of the companionship of an equal. By presenting him with all of the animals of Nature, God was telling Adam that here were all of the beings that he was meant to rule, yet none of these creatures which were subservient to him could dispel his loneliness. Finally, when presented with Eve, Adam declares with relief: This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh (2:23). He has finally discovered the partner with whom he can share the privileges and purpose given to him by God.

As in the case of man’s relationship to Nature, man’s relationship to woman is also damaged by God’s punishment. We read: Unto the woman he said ... he [man] shall rule over you. The proper order of things has been completely overturned. Nature, which was created to serve mankind, rebels against man’s authority. Woman, who was to be man’s equal, becomes subservient to man. Thus, Genesis instructs us that, while initially posited in ideal terms, four central aspects of human existence (i.e., reproduction, work, the relationship of mankind to Nature and the relationship between man and woman) were negatively altered and distorted as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve.

What is the meaning of their punishment for us? Some anti-feminists would like to count and he shall rule over thee as the 614th commandment of the Torah. The implausibility of such an interpretation should now be triply clear. Firstly, the verse and he shall rule over thee describes a punishment, a state of affairs which is, by definition, undesirable. Secondly, the ideal man/woman relationship, as fully explicated earlier in the text, is a condition of shared privileges and responsibilities between equals. Thirdly, there is no indication given that any human being is called upon to enforce God’s punishments.
Although God may have made work difficult for man, it is no human’s job to insure that weeds choke my vegetable garden. The Torah does not depict these punishments as a penance to which we must dutifully submit, but, rather, as objective difficulties against which we must struggle. Although God has caused childbirth to be painful and dangerous, the Torah has nothing but praise for the midwives, Shifra and Puah, who served the Jewish women in Egypt (Exodus 1:15-21). Later Jewish tradition also supports the efforts of those who could try to lighten the burden of God’s curses. Rashi explains that Noah eased the toils of his generation by inventing agricultural implements (see his comments on 5:29).

In sum, I believe that it has been demonstrated that the Torah does not offer the verse and he shall rule over thee as a recipe for marital bliss, but, rather, as a critical depiction of an evil of human existence of no less consequence than the ravages of Nature or the constant struggle to make ends meet. If we extrapolate from the attitudes towards God’s curses as they are evidenced in Jewish Scripture and tradition, we can only conclude that the struggle against the social inequality of women is as legitimate as the struggle to wrest material sustenance from intractable Nature.

l The interpretation of this section largely follows U. Cassuto, From Adam to Noah (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1986) pp. 83-90 (in Hebrew).

Omphalos Revisited (a critique of one form of Jewish fundamentalist creationism)

2006-01-11T23:14:00.000+02:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. This article originally appeared in the Jewish Bible Quarterly XXIII:3(91) July-September 1995, pp. 162-7.

Philip Henry Gosse was a nineteenth-century British naturalist who proposed a theory meant to insulate the belief in the literal truth of the biblical account of Creation from the onslaughts of modern science. The particular issue of his day was the contradiction between the biblical cosmogenic chronology (six days of Creation occurring about six thousand years ago) and the chronology of modern geology (continuous processes taking millions of years). Gosse called his book on the subject Omphalos (Greek for “navel”), in reference to the knotty theological problem of whether or not Adam was created with a navel. Such a navel would seem to evidence the past existence of an umbilical cord and the experience of birth. This would appear to contradict Genesis, according to which Adam had been created a fully-formed adult. Yet fully-formed adult humans do possess navels. So goes the paradox. Gosse broadens the discussion to take in many other biological phenomena, and comes to the conclusion that all life must always seem to evidence previous life. Our experience would have us believe that every chicken was once an egg; but what of the First Chicken created directly by God? And what says Gosse of the First Cow?

Every argument by which the physiologist can prove to demonstrate that yonder cow was once a foetus in the uterus of its dam, will apply with exactly the same power to show that the newly created [on the sixth day of Creation] cow was an embryo, some years before its creation.’1

Gosse goes on to compare the entire cosmos with an individual living organism. Just as any single stage of an organism’s development appears to imply the passing of earlier stages, so too the present state of the cosmos gives witness to other, earlier states. The first creatures originally created by God were indistinguishable from the creatures of today. If we were to inspect the remains of those first animals, we might falsely believe that they had also grown through many stages of development, and had been preceded by previous generations of their species. By analogy, the state of the cosmos at the moment of Creation would also have seemed to suggest the passing of other, earlier states. In particular, the earth, upon its creation, was endowed with geological formations which seemed to witness extremely long-term changes. Gosse invented a terminology to expedite the presentation of his argument, coining the expression “diachronic time” to refer to the past which had actually occurred, while “prochronic time” refers to the hypothetical past during which ancient processes would have occurred had God chosen to call the universe into existence at an earlier stage of its development. When was the First Chicken an egg? In reality, never; hypothetically, in prochronic time.

According to the Omphalos hypothesis, the cosmos is a system lacking an obvious moment of origin in recent time. God created the cosmos like a projectionist starting a film in the middle of the third reel. Anyone entering the theater would assume he had missed the first part of the movie, but in fact it had never been screened. Scientists studying the fossil record of evolution or the seemingly ancient background radiation left over from the “big bang” deal with what would have happened if God had decided to endow the cosmos with existence in an earlier stage of its hypothetical development. They are like film critics trying to deduce what images had been cast upon the screen long before the projectionist had even dimmed the house lights.

Gosse’s views were not well received. On the testimony of his own son, “Atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away.”2 The scientist and historian Stephen Jay Gould attributes the unpopularity of Gosse’s views to the British tendency to “respect the facts of nature at face value” rather than adopt the “complex systems of non-obvious interpretation so popular in much of continental thought.”3

During a recent visit to the United States, I had a long talk with a yeshiva student about various areas of apparent conflict between Judaism and modern thought. Inevitably, the discussion led to the problem of science and religion, and its most salient issue, creationism versus evolution. To my surprise, the view he supported was clearly a contemporary reconstruction of the Omphalos thesis. Unfortunately, he was not aware of a published version of this argument, and I have not discovered such a version in my admittedly cursory search for it in the appropriate Jewish literature. He assured me, however, that the argument is well known in the “yeshiva world,” having heard it himself in a lecture given by his own rosh yeshiva. It appears to me from this discussion that, despite its poor original reception, the Omphalos thesis may be enjoying a kind of renaissance, this time appearing in the garb of modern ecological science.

In short, the new argument states that life as we know it can only survive in a pre-existing, dynamic and balanced environment. Let us see what it tries to prove; i.e., that the first chapters of Genesis depict in literal terms events which occurred about 6000 years ago. Consider the moment when God created the various plants whose survival depends on the presence of long-dead and decayed organic material in the soil. For those plants to survive, God would have had to create the soil with already decaying organic material in it. Imagine a hypothetical scientist traveling back in time to the day after Creation. Analyzing the freshly- created soil, the scientist would mistakenly deduce that the decayed bodies nourishing the newly-created plants had in the past belonged to once-living creatures, now long dead. However, according to our assumption of the literal accuracy of Genesis, we know that these bodies had never lived; they had been created a short time earlier in their present decayed state.

Beyond merely explaining the presence of decayed organic materials in the soil, the thesis further claims a role for even the most ancient of fossils in the grand scheme of nature. After all, experience has confirmed the ecological importance of interactions between even the most seemingly independent elements of the natural world. By broadening the scope of the argument to include all aspects of the cosmic environment (e.g., starlight which has apparently beet traveling for millions of years before it reaches the earth) it may be extended to cover (almost) every contradiction between the scientific chronology and the biblical doctrine of Creation in six days. The universe was created in a relatively short period of time, but for it to work properly it had to exactly resemble a universe which had already existed for billions of years.

What are we to make of the new version of Omphalos? First of all, it is clear that the new version is subject to the same criticism traditionally made against the original: neither is empirically testable. Rather than disprove Omphalos, its opponents simply point out its lack of scientific interest. In the words of Stephen Jay Gould:

The world will look exactly the same in all its intricate detail whether fossils are prochronic or products of an extended history. But theories that cannot be tested in principle are not part of science. We reject Omphalos as useless, not wrong.4

Gould’s criticism must ring hollow in the ears of biblical literalists. After all, they are not really interested in proposing hypotheses which will advance the progress of scientific research; they merely seek an accommodation between Genesis and the existing body of scientific knowledge. The literalists do not expect science to verify the biblical cosmogony; they only wish to show that science does not conflict with it. Gould himself has admitted that science cannot prove Omphalos wrong, and that is all that the literalists need to hear. Be that as it may, the Omphalos thesis fails its genuine, apologetic, purpose for an entirely different reason, as I shall now demonstrate.

Gosse meant to propose a thesis which would contradict neither the results of scientific research nor the biblical account of Creation. As we have seen, the Omphalos thesis can account for all of the evidence for evolution; this is exactly what it had been designed to do. What Gould, as well as the thesis’s fundamentalist supporters, forgot to ask is how well it fits the biblical story of Creation.

It would be unnecessarily messy to get involved in questions such as how the plants created on the third day survived until the creation of the sun on the fourth. God would have no problem miraculously sustaining them until the entire ecosystem, fossils and all, swung into operation. A thornier problem is posed by the fact that all fossil evidence points to the existence of large communities of animals 5000-6000 years ago, as well as millions of years ago. In order to assure the continuity between the prochronic fossil record and the first days of diachronic time, we would have to assume that God created birds in their flocks, deer in their herds and wolves in their packs. This in itself does not pose an insurmountable obstacle for the literal interpretation of Genesis. As usual, we, the human beings, pose the real problem.

Genesis is quite specific about the creation of exactly one first man and one first woman. Adam recognizes his special place in history and calls his wife Eve, for she was the mother of all that live (Gen.3:20). But what of fossil and archeological records which trace the existence of human communities in the far-flung corners of the world? These settlements were founded well within prochronic times and survived into our own, ontologically-favored diachronic era. This reveals prochronic processes which would not lead to the existence of exactly one man at the moment of the creation of humans. An “omphalitic” reading of the Bible would make us expect to find archeological records of a humanity languishing in a process of extinction, leaving only one man alive at the moment of Creation.

It might be suggested that Adam was a special case. While all other organisms had to be created as participants in pre-developed ecological communities, Adam’s survival was not dependent on a prochronic past. From the standpoint of religious apologetics, such special pleading is worse than useless. The whole point of the Omphalos argument is to explain the existence of fossils by emphasizing the importance of continuity between the prochronic and diachronic. What could be the point of God’s creating human fossil remains if these lack any prochronic evolutionary connection with the diachronic Adam? Worse yet, how could the Omphalos thesis explain the existence of far-flung early diachronic human communities contemporary with the alleged historical Adam?

The Omphalos thesis could not have failed to support Scripture at a worse moment. The special creation of an historical Adam is essential to a number of key theological ideas. For the literalist, Adam’s uniqueness constitutes the material basis of the religious notions of human equality and fraternity: i.e., that we may all claim the same original ancestry. Many of the less pleasant aspects of human existence are explained by the Bible as having resulted from Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience to God. If they were not the only people living at that time, why should all of humanity (including those who are not their descendants) suffer for their sin?

I see the fundamentalists gaining little advantage by adopting the Omphalos thesis. While it does buttress the literalist claim as to the recent creation of the world, the question of the age of the universe is of minor theological consequence compared to the doctrine of the historical Adam.

Fortunately, even some Orthodox rabbis have avoided the problem entirely by allowing for a non-literal interpretation of the Creation story. Foremost among them is Avraham Yitzhak Hakohen Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of the land of Israel, who wrote:

It makes no difference for us if in truth there was in the world an actual Garden of Eden, during which man delighted in an abundance of physical and spiritual good, or if actual existence began from the bottom upwards, from the lowest level of being towards its highest, an upward movement. We only have to know that there is a real possibility that even if a man has risen to a high level, and has been deserving of all honors and pleasures, if he corrupts his ways, he can lose all that he has, and bring harm to himself and to his descendants for many generations.5

Having been disinterred and subjected to the indignity of a late post-mortem examination, the Omphalos thesis may again be returned to its rightful resting place among the discarded doctrines of philosophical theology.

1. As quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile (New York: 1985) pp. 111-112.
2. Ibid., p. 110. 3. loc. cit.
4. Gould, op. cit., p. 111.
5. Ray A. Y. Kook, Selected Letters, trans. Tzvi Feldman (Ma’aleh Adumim: 1986) p. 12. Original text may be found in Igrot Ha-RAYaH, letter 134.

Oppressive Metaphor and the Liberating Literal Sense (a defense of hierarchical theological language)

2006-01-08T16:08:00.000+02:00

©Berel Dov Lerner. This essay is reprinted here with minor corrections from Ralph Bisschops and James Francis, (eds.) Metaphor, Canon and Community: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Approaches (Berne: Peter Lang, 1999) 233-41. It has been reprinted a number of times, most recently in the journal, The Reconstructionist. To see it as it appears there, look for for my name at http://www.therra.org/recon_journal_authors-2.htm.)

When we think about our relationship with God, we quite naturally tend to understand it in terms borrowed from language describing the ties and alliances which hold between human beings. It is hardly necessary to mention that the contemporary (Western, high-brow) common wisdom views all such types of relationships between people as more-or-less temporary cultural constructs whose very existence is constantly threatened by the contingencies of social, political, economic and technological change. When a particular kind of human relationship is affected by such changes, it may cease to serve as an intelligible metaphor for the human/divine relationship, a predicament which Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit have called "the fading of the metaphor".1

Sometimes a theological metaphor will not merely fade into unintelligibility; it may become positively jarring. Such is the case when ancient texts refer to the human/divine bond in terms of social relationships which are now rejected as oppressive or exploitative, i.e. God as our King, Master, Lord, etc. Perhaps the best known critique of such metaphors is Mary Daly's now classic work of feminist theology, Beyond God the Father. Despite her radical rejection of traditional Christianity (which she calls "Christolatry"), Daly's scholarly grounding is in Christian theology, and she (at least in her earlier work) openly adopted central ideas of modern Christian theologians such as Paul Tillich. Of course, the Jewish community has not remained untouched by these issues. Members of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement recently expressed similarly critical attitudes towards these "politically incorrect" metaphors in the discussion surrounding the publication of Shabbat Vehagim, the newest addition to their series of prayer books, Kol Haneshamah. The Spring 1994 number of The Reconstructionist was largely devoted to these issues. One writer there complained that

...the image of God as King not only reinforces the notion that men are the real leaders; it also reinforces hierarchy rooted in a single powerful patriarchal authority figure, whether that figure be the rabbi, the corporate executive, or the public official. Jewish liturgy can unintentionally reinforce the legitimacy of excessive presidential power . . .2

Even those who have discovered ways to make their peace with the traditional liturgy still recognize the "cognitive dissonance [which] results from praying with images of God that one finds archaic, false or repugnant."3 We, who are neither ruled by kings nor enslaved by masters, may at first find these metaphors for God unpalatable. However, a more sophisticated approach to theological language must take into account the traditions in which these metaphors occur. For example, before we reject monarchy as a theological metaphor on the basis of its political implications, it is worth investigating the political uses to which it was put by our predecessors who both embraced the metaphor and actually lived in a world governed by kings. Most crucially, we must consider whether the notion of God as king was meant to be understood metaphorically to begin with.

Divine Kingship Undermines Human Kingship

At least within the Jewish tradition4, a strong case can be made for the thesis that when a human power-relationship is used as a theological metaphor, far from strengthening the original human relationship, the metaphorical usage radically undermines the legitimacy of the human relationship. The notion of God's kingship is an obvious case in point. One might think that this metaphor would serve as the basis for some version of the doctrine of the "divine right of kings".5 Be that as it may, in telling the story of Gideon's campaigns, the author of Judges seems to have arrived at the opposite conclusion:

Then the men of Israel said to Gideon, "Rule over us you, your son and your grandson as well; for you have saved us from the Midianites.“ But Gideon replied, "I will not rule over you myself, nor shall my son rule over you; the Lord alone shall rule over you.“ (Judg. 8: 22-3)6

A similar sentiment informs the story in I Samuel of Saul’s rise to power as the first king of Israel. From the start the prophet Samuel opposes the elders' request that he appoint a king. God himself complains that "It is Me they have rejected as their king" (I Sam. 8:7). Samuel, following God’s command, delivers to the people a harrowing catalogue of the injustices which they must expect to suffer under a human monarch, which ends with the chilling prediction, "The day will come when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and the Lord will not answer you on that day" (I Sam. 8: 18). Despite Samuel's protestations and warnings, the people insist on being ruled by a mortal king "like all other nations" (8: 5). Even after Saul's initial successes, Samuel continues to harangue the people for having said "'No, we must have a king reigning over us' - though the Lord your God is your King" (12: 12).

In order to understand Gideon and Samuel's antimonarchical politics, it is important to keep in mind that the biblical institution of kingship defines a king's claim to his subject’s obedience and loyalty as being unique. In a monogamous society, an individual may not be married to more than one person at a time. Similarly, monarchical political tradition did not allow a person to be a subject of two or more different kings at the same time.7 Therefore, if I recognize God as my king, it is no longer possible for me to recognize some human being as also playing that role.

The rhetorically crucial point of Gideon and Samuel’s talk of "God our King" is that they are not speaking metaphorically, but rather quite literally. A literal king does not challenge the legitimacy of a metaphorical king (and vice-versa). Suppose a Jordanian lover of popular music had complained that Elvis Presley, rather than Hussein, was the true king. We would have pointed out to him that just because he recognizes the metaphorical status of one person as "The King of Rock n' Roll", he need not forswear granting someone else the political status of literal kingship. In the same way, if Gideon and Samuel understood God's kingship to be merely metaphorical, they would have no reason to complain that the anointment of a literal king would somehow impinge upon it.

The literal nature of God's kingship has striking implications for both language and politics. For more than two thousand years, sophisticated pagan and monotheist readers have dealt with scandalous passages in religious texts by reading them as metaphor and allegory. Embarrassing anthropomorphisms which seem to imply God's corporeality are safely transformed into descriptions of his power and actions, as in the case of the expression "the hand of God". The problem with these non-literal interpretations is that they cut both ways. Suppose I express my appreciation for some woman's beauty by metaphorically referring to her as a rose. My use of such a metaphor will obviously commit me to the notion that a rose itself is in fact beautiful. Similarly, if I express the depth and importance of the relationship between God and Israel by referring to it metaphorically as a relationship between lover and beloved, I must obviously be committed to the notion that human erotic love is not a trivial matter. We are so used to applying metaphorical interpretation to anthropomorphic religious language that we naturally assume that an expression such as "the Lord your God is your King” should also be taken metaphorically. However, the above discussion makes it clear that the metaphorical interpretation of divine kingship implies that we attribute positive qualities to human kingship, which we then go on to ascribe to God by way of metaphor. Because neither Gideon nor Samuel meant their talk about God as King metaphorically, they were not attributing qualities of human kings to God (nor, reciprocally, God-like qualities to kings).8 On the contrary, by conceiving of God as King, they reveal how intolerably presumptuous it is for any mere human to assume such a role. Only God, who is absolutely and ontologically different from and superior to human beings, can legitimately claim the kind of power which mortal kings try to wield over their fellow human beings. A human king is literally "playing God". Just as the association of the practice of worship with the divine makes it unthinkable for one mortal to demand worship from his fellow, the notion of God as King undermines the attempt of any merely human leader to claim our absolute obedience and loyalty. A people which thinks of itself as ruled by God will have no truck with tyrants who would usurp God’s role. Martin Buber has stated that this theocratic/libertarian attitude has informed the Jewish spirit since the theophany at Sinai:

The paradox of every original and direct theocracy, that it involves the intractableness of the human person, the drive of man to be independent of man, but for the sake of a highest commitment, already appears in the Sinai covenant.9

God as Master and Liberator

Several other seemingly "archaic, false or repugnant" images of God become paradoxically liberating when understood in their original, literal, sense. The human institutions of slavery and servitude are obviously unjust and the notion of "God our Master" has traditionally been used to undermine and limit precisely these institutions. Just as people who recognize the literal kingship of God will not abide human tyranny, those who call God "Master" cannot allow human beings to claim mastery over their fellows. Furthermore, Scripture tells us that God exercises the uniquely legitimate prerogatives of Divine mastery so as to undo the injustices of illegitimate human mastery. In Leviticus 25: 54-5, it is God's literal claim of mastery over the Jewish people which underwrites the demand that Jewish servants be freed in the Jubilee year:10

If he has not been redeemed in any of those ways, he and his children with him shall go free in the jubilee year. For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants; they are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt, I the Lord your God.

The Babylonian Talmud further applies the idea that the servant of God is free from servitude to mortals to the relations between employer and wage laborer. No work agreement is absolutely binding, as this would constitute a challenge to God's ultimate mastery:

Rav stated: A laborer may renege [on his agreement to work] even in the middle of the [work] day! . For it is written, "For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants" - My servants, and not servants to [other] servants.11

The notion of God's mastery does not merely limit the powers of a would-be human master. Those who recognize God’s mastery must realize the freedom that this entails in their own lives. The Torah speaks of the loyal servant who, after seven years of enslavement, rejects the liberation offered by God:

When you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years; in the seventh year he shall be freed, without payment . . . But if the slave declares, "I love my master, and my wife and children: I do not wish to be freed," his master shall take him before God [or perhaps, the judge]. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall then remain his slave for life. (Ex. 21: 2, 5-6)12

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai's interpretation of this strange procedure is given in Tractate Kiddushin 22b of the Babylonian Talmud:

How is the ear different from all other parts of the body [that it is to be pierced in a slave who refuses his freedom]? The Holy One blessed be He said: "The ear which heard my voice at Mount Sinai when I said, For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants"; My servants, and not servants to [other] servants - and this one went and acquired himself a master - let it be pierced!

According to Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai, one’s attainment of personal freedom from enslavement to humans is itself a fundamental expression of one's commitment to serve God.

Passing Mary Daly's Test

The Talmudic interpretations I have mentioned regarding the notion of "God our Master" have an importance beyond the light they shed on the biblical text. The exegetical imagination will always be capable of inventing apologetic glosses on Scripture which make it palatable to contemporary tastes. However, it may be argued that this is not sufficient to justify our continued positive appreciation of biblical texts. Consider, for instance, Mary Daly's opposition to Paul Tillich's13 reinterpretation of the story of The Fall:

However, as in the case of his analysis of the Fall, Tillich abstracts from the specific content of the symbol, which in fact functions to justify oppressive social structures. Once again there is no notice taken of the fact that the medium is the message. Defenders of this method argue that the symbol "can be used oppressively" but insist that it need not function in this way. This kind of defense is understandable but it leaves a basic question unanswered: If the symbol can be "used" that way and in fact has a long history of being "used" that way, isn't this an indication of some inherent deficiency in the symbol itself?14

The style of interpretation which I am here endorsing does not suffer from the deficiencies which Daly attributes to Tillich. Here there is no question of abstracting "from the specific content of the symbol", since the images of God here discussed are being considered in terms of their literal "specific content", rather than as symbols or metaphors. Furthermore, as is demonstrated by the Talmudic passages here cited (and these exemplary passages could be multiplied with many others from the rabbinic literature through the ages), these purportedly oppressive images of God do not have a "long history of being 'used'" in an oppressive way, at least not within the Jewish tradition. I would go so far as to say that an oppressive interpretation of these notions of God could only be made in spite of how they have been understood by the rabbis. The discomfort of the contemporary faithful with "archaic, false or repugnant" images of God may indicate a deficiency in the cultural grounding of our generation rather than "some inherent deficiency in the symbol itself".

The danger will always remain that people will make incorrect inferences from the propriety of talking about God's superiority to the propriety of talking about the superiority of particular human beings. If, however, for political reasons, we censor all hierarchical religious language, we will also lack the means to speak of divine transcendence. Of course, those who reject a personalist theology, or who are unwilling to contemplate the possibility of a Being who quite properly relates to human beings as their absolute superior, will still have reason to reject traditional references to God's mastery and kingship. However, as I have demonstrated, the upshot of God’s superiority far from implies the endorsement of unequal relationships between human beings.

Landownership and the Lessons of the Exodus

My final example involves the return of ancestral lands to their original owners in the jubilee year. According to biblical law, every fifty years (in the jubilee year), each family, no matter what deals it may have struck in the preceding five decades and regardless of its financial fortunes, regains possession of its original familial lands. Here again we see the divine/human relationship described in the language of oppression. God is the great landowner and we but his tenant farmers: "The Land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with me" (Lev. 25: 23). However, divine "monopoly" ownership of land does not imply unjust distribution. In fact, the priestly tribe of Levi, who would seem to be the most natural beneficiaries of such ownership, "have received no hereditary share along with their kinsmen: the Lord is their share" (Deut. 10: 9). Instead, the claim of divine ownership is mentioned only in order to undermine any human attempt at gaining monopoly control of land. No one may be permanently disinherited of their ancestral portion, "the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with me".

The three aspects of liberation which I have discussed (i. e. freedom from monarchy, freedom from slavery and freedom from monopoly land-ownership) precisely define the liberation described in the story of the Exodus.15 In Egypt, the Israelites were enslaved by an absolute monarch who owned all of the land (see Gen. 47). The liberation from these forms of oppression is depicted by the Exodus story as the replacement of Pharaoh's dominion by that of God. In the words of the late biblical scholar Binyamin Uffenheimer:

Pharaonic slavery was conceived by Israel as the symbol of human bondage. As against it, the Kingdom of God was meant to be free from any kind of human domination.16

Careful examination of one word in the original Hebrew text of Exodus will help strengthen this point. God does not directly call for the freeing of the Israelite slaves, rather he repeatedly demands of Pharaoh "Let my people go that they may worship Me" (Ex. 7: 16, 7: 26, 8: 16, 9: 1, 9: 13, 10: 3). The word "worship" is deserving of further scrutiny. In the Hebrew, it appears as ve'ya'avduni, which may also be literally rendered "that they may serve me". The term here translated as "worship" is derived from exactly the same root as the word eved (slave or servant), which is used by scripture to describe the position of the Israelites in Egypt. In other words, God may be seen as demanding that Pharaoh hand over to him the mastery over the Jewish People. When the Israelites fully realize their servitude to God, they become fully liberated from their servitude to Pharaoh. Here again, in the story which has most fundamentally expressed the need for human liberation in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, we encounter the theological- political axiom that only God has the right to make absolute demands of human beings, and what He does demand is that they be free.

Notes

This essay is reprinted with minor corrections from Ralph Bisschops and James Francis, (eds.) Metaphor, Canon and Community: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Approaches (Berne: Peter Lang, 1999) 233-41.
1. See their Idolatry, Naomi Goldblum, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 30-35. Halbertal and Margalit argue that changes in nature of marital relationships have spoiled the use of erotic jealousy as a metaphor for God's response to idolatry.
2. David Teutsch, "Seeking God in the Siddur: Reflections on Kol Haneshama," The Reconstructionist 59: (1) 1994, 15.
3. Eliezer Diamond, "Image and Imagination: The Revealed and Hidden Faces of God in Jewish Liturgy". The Reconstructionist 59(1): 1994, 57.
4. David Nicholis, "Addressing God as Ruler: Prayer and Petition," British Journal of Sociology 44(1) 1993,reviews the political uses of the notion of God's kingship in the Christian tradition.
5. Exceptions to this thesis may be found in the tiny portion of Jewish liturgy, which relates directly to human monarchs. B. Berakhot 58a states: “One who sees a king of Israel says ‘Blessed [is he] who has given of his glory to those who revere him.’ [One who sees] a king of the nations says, ‘Blessed [is he] who has given of his glory to flesh and blood.’" Also see Sarah Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1997) 334-348. Japhet argues convincingly that several verses in Chronicles (I Chr. 17: 14, 28: 5, 29: 23, II Chr. 9: 8, and 13: 8) point to a counter-tradition which understands God's kingship as supportive of human (especially Davidic) kingship. Expressions of this tradition may also be found in Psalms. Don Levenson Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 117 writes: "The theology of Psalm 89...sees the governance of the world as lying in the hands of a dyarchy of God and king."
6. All biblical quotations are from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia and New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1988).
7. The ancient Near Eastern attitude towards the king’s unique claim to his subject's loyalty is somewhat more complicated than I have described it here. Jon Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), 70 - 75, points out that the Hebrew word melek, while usually translated as "king", may refer to two different forms of political authority, which he calls, respectively, "sovereignty" and "suzerainty". Levenson claims that while the general notion of God's sovereignty does not undermine human kingship, God's role as suzerain (an emperor, or in other words, a master of vassals) strictly implies his unique rule over Israel which pre-empts any other claim, be it human or divine. Vassals "must acknowledge only one suzerain, the great king [emphasis in original] of their alliance" (pg. 71). "Both Israel as a nation and the Israelite as an individual stand in the position of royal vassals of the divine suzerain" (pg. 72).
8. I should point out that, literally understood, kingship refers merely to a particular political-legal relationship. The fact that someone is a king tells us a lot about his legal prerogatives in a monarchical state and very little about his essential characteristics. In regard to these the fact that someone may be called a king only tells us that he fulfills the minimum definition of a "person" who is capable of claiming such a role. Similarly, we might infer from the statement "Charlie Brown owes me five dollars" that Mr. Brown is someone legally definable as a person rather than a cartoon character or a cat of the same name. This legalistic understanding of what it means to be a king reduces the metaphysical difficulties of attributing literal kingship to God. The same is true of the terms "landowner” and "slave owner" dealt with below.
9. Martin Buber,Kingship of God, (Richard Scheimann, trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 138. Not surprisingly, anti-monarchists in the modern period have made political use of these biblical sources. The great defender of the American and French revolutions, Thomas Paine, devoted several pages of his classic treatise Common Sense to Gideon and Samuel, and wrote of the ancient Israelites:

Kings they had none, and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts. And when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of kings, he need not wonder that the Almighty, ever jealous of his honor, should disapprove of a form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of heaven. (Thomas Paine, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, (N. F. Adkins, ed.) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1953), 11).

Paine concludes:

These portions of scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty has entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the scripture is false. (pg. 13)

For further examples of the antimonarchical use of scripture in the modern West, see Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985) 127-8. Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) was the most prominent medieval Jewish thinker to base an extended anti-monarchical argument on these scriptural passages. The relevant sections of his biblical commentaries are conveniently available in English translation in R. Lerner and M. Mahdi (Eds.), Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (New York: The Free Press, 1963).
10. Emmanuel Levinas presents a similar discussion of these sources in his book Beyond the Verse, (Gary D. Mole, trans.) (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 10. I am indebted to Dr. Ralph Bisschops for bringing this to my attention. My analysis also shares a weakness in common with Levinas's Jewish writings. While we both seek universal human liberation, tradition usually only relates to liberation internal to the Jewish people. Strictly speaking, the notions of God as King, slave-owner and landowner serve within Judaism to free Jews from human kings, slaveowners and landowners. The issue of particularism does not touch my central thesis that within Judaism, hierarchical God-talk is liberating.
11. B. Bava Mezia 10a. In Levinas' book this is mistakenly cited as 10b.
12. The standard Jewish interpretation would have it that even such a "slave for life" would be freed even against his will in the jubilee year.
13. See Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, (vol. II). (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 31-39.
14. Mary Daly,Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 72.
15. A further discussion of the relationship between the deprivations of Egypt and the social provisions of biblical law see my "Redemption: Time and Space," Jewish Biblical Quarterly 21(3)1993: 178-82.
16. Benjamin Uffenheimer, "Utopia and Reality in Biblical Thought," Immanuel 9: 1979: 7. See also his Ancient Prophecy in Israel (revised edition, Hebrew), (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1984) for an in-depth discussion of many of the points I have touched upon in this paper. His treatment of the ancient Near Eastern background for Israel’s covenant with God is especially interesting.

Maimonides on Free Will at the Societal Level

2005-12-20T20:24:00.000+02:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. This article originally appeared in Interpretation: a Journal of Political Philosophy 32(2): 115-123 (Spring 2005).

Although there has been some debate regarding Maimonides’ esoteric view of human metaphysical freedom (Pines 1960, 195-98; Altmann 1974) there is no doubt that his public stand is one of uncompromising support for the doctrine of free will, or what is known in philosophical circles as libertarianism (not to be confused with the similarly named political doctrine!). As Moshe Sokol (1998, 27) points out, Maimonides was concerned with defeating “four different grounds for denying freedom of the will: astrological fatalism, kalam (‘a school of medieval Islamic theology’) and other notions of divine will and causality, psychological determinism, and divine foreknowledge.” These indeed are the only obstacles to human freedom which Maimonides explicitly addresses as possible foundations for an attack on libertarianism. Maimonides attacks psychological determinism, but he does not mention sociological determinism. His discussion in the final chapter of Shemonah Perakim concerns inborn psychological predispositions and ‘second nature’ resulting from repeated deliberate action, rather than the effects of social factors. However, it is clear from the Mishneh Torah (Hyamson 1962) that Maimonides also contends that social pressures constitute a very real challenge to autonomous action:

It is natural to be influenced, in sentiments and conduct, by
one’s neighbors and associates, and observe the customs of
one’s fellow citizens.
(Deot 6:1)

Although Maimonides is never troubled by the social factor’s philosophical significance for human freedom, I believe that it does serve a pivotal role in the solution of an interesting puzzle in the Mishneh Torah, a puzzle which brings together issues in biblical interpretation, metaphysics, and the philosophy of the social sciences. My explication of this problem begins with the fifth chapter of Hilkhot Teshuva (Laws of Repentance) of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, where he makes a general argument harmonizing human freedom with divine foreknowledge:

As to the solution of this problem, understand that “the measure thereof is longer than the earth and wider than the sea” (Job 11:19), and many important principles of the highest sublimity are connected with it. You, however, need only to know and comprehend what I am about to say. In the second chapter of the Laws Relating to the Fundamental Principles of the Torah, we have already explained that God does not know with a knowledge external to Himself, like human beings whose knowledge and self are separate entities, but He, blessed be His Name, and His knowledge are One.
(Teshuva 5:5)

The crux of Maimonides’ argument seems to be that divine foreknowledge does not interfere with human freedom because divine knowledge is different from human knowledge. Apparently, Maimonides is saying that if one person’s future decisions really were genuinely known now by another human being, that would create a problem for the former’s freedom. However, since God is not a human being and His knowledge is not similar to that possessed by humans, his foreknowledge of human decisions does not interfere with human freedom. (I shall return later to the question of what it is about human foreknowledge that makes it a problem for libertarianism.) Maimonides devotes his next chapter (Teshuva 6) to the exegesis of scriptural verses which seem to contradict the libertarian doctrine. Among these is Deut. 31:16:

The Lord said to Moses: You are soon to lie with your fathers. This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land which they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant which I made with them.

Deuteronomy seems to be saying that the children of Israel are foredestined to sin. How can this square with their human freedom? Maimonides explains:

It is also written, “This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land” (Deut. 31:16). Did He not decree that Israel should worship idols? Why then did He punish them? [The answer is] that He did not decree concerning any particular individual that that individual should be the one to go astray. Any one of those who went astray and worshipped idols, had he not desired to commit idolatry, need not have done so. The Creator only instructed Moses as to the way of the world, as one might say, “This people will have among them righteous and wicked persons.” A wicked man has no right, on that account, to say that it had been decreed that he should be wicked, because the Almighty had informed Moses that among Israel there would be wicked men, just as the text, “For the poor shall never cease out of the land” (Deut. 15:11) [does not imply that any particular individual is destined to be poor].
(Teshuva 6:5)

Maimonides’ apology for Deut. 31:6 is based on the distinction he makes between knowing how a particular person will behave as against knowing what we might call the statistical distribution of future behaviors in a certain society. He reads the verse as we would read the economic prediction that next year unemployment in some country will reach ten percent. The economist does not claim to be able to produce a list naming those who will lose their jobs, but rather only offers a general indication of how many people will be unemployed. Similarly, Deuteronomy is not telling us that any particular person will worship false gods, rather that there will indeed be such sinners among the Israelites.

Maimonides’ comparison of Deut. 31:6 with the prediction, “This people will have among them righteous and wicked persons,” is a bit misleading. Deuteronomy is not talking about the kind of deviance from accepted norms which occurs in every human community. The prediction, “This people will thereupon go astray,” implies a society-wide phenomenon of mutiny against God. In simplest terms, Deuteronomy may be understood as saying that a majority of Israelites will be involved in idolatry. Following Gilbert (1989, 257; 1998), this is what might be called a ‘simple summative account’ of group action. Assuming that Maimonides would accept this point (and in this paper I take Maimonides’ biblical exegesis not to be mere ad hoc apologetics, but rather a serious attempt to explicate scripture in a way that addresses issues of plain meaning and context), his understanding of the verse may be given the following formulation: Although more than fifty percent of the Israelites will worship foreign gods, no specific individual is compelled to belong to that number. Furthermore, this situation reflects “the way of the world,” i.e., the historical phenomenon of widespread Israelite idolatry was a natural and predictable state of affairs. Maimonides seems untroubled by the idea that human behavior is predictable at the aggregate, societal, level.

Maimonides’ solution to the problem of Deut. 31:6 invites (at least) two questions: First, what is it about Deut. 31:6 that deserves special comment? (I shall not here attempt an explanation of Maimonides’ parallel interpretation of Gen. 15:13 in the same section of Teshuva.) Why not simply assume that it is covered by the general argument for the harmonization of libertarianism with divine foreknowledge in Teshuva (5)? Second, how does Maimonides square individual freedom with determinism on the societal level? In order to answer these questions, we must examine the immediate context in which Deut. 31:6 appears.

God, knowing that the Israelites will sin after Moses’ impending death, asks him to teach them the song (Deut. 32:1-43) which, in the future, will help them to understand the meaning of their own history of redemption and exile:

The Lord said to Moses: You are soon to lie with your fathers. This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land which they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant which I made with them. When I bring them into the land flowing with milk and honey that I promised on oath to their fathers; and they eat their fill and grow fat and turn to other gods and serve them, spurning Me and breaking My covenant, and the many evils and troubles befall them—then this poem shall confront them as a witness, since it never will be lost from the mouth of their offspring. For I know what plans they are devising even now, before I bring them into the land that I promised on oath.
(Deut. 31:16-21)

Later, Moses addresses the Levites:

Well I know how defiant and stiff-necked you are: even now, while I am still alive in your midst, you have been defiant towards the Lord; how much more then, when I am dead! Gather to me all the elders of your tribes and your officials, that I may speak all these words to them and that I may call heaven and earth to witness against them. For I know that, when I am dead, you will act wickedly and turn away from the path which I enjoined upon you, and that in time to come misfortune will befall you for having done evil in the sight of the Lord and vexed Him by your deeds.
(Deut. 31:27-29)

Moses’ speech places the prophecy of Deut. 31:16 in a rather odd light. It is trouble enough for the libertarian doctrine that God predicts Israel’s spiritual failure. Here we have Moses speaking as a human being and in his own name predicting the turn to idolatry! As Maimonides’ great critic, R. Abraham ben David of Posquieres (c. 1125-1198) points out in his gloss on Teshuva 6:5, Moses was capable of making this prediction through the exercise of his own intelligence. Now it is clear why Maimonides must offer a special explanation of Deut. 31:16. His general argument harmonizing divine foreknowledge with human freedom depends on a strict distinction between divine and human knowledge. Deut. 31:16 relates to foreknowledge which is also directly available to human beings such as Moses.

Moses’ speech may also help us understand what it is about human foreknowledge that may create problems for human freedom. Moses does not baldly proclaim that the Israelites will sin. Rather, he offers an explanation of how he knows that this will occur. This takes the shape of a well-formulated sociological prediction: “Well I know how defiant and stiff-necked you are: even now, while I am still alive in your midst, you have been defiant towards the Lord; how much more, then, when I am dead!” (Deut. 31:27). In modern parlance, one might say that Moses observed in the Israelites a tendency to rebellion against God so powerful that it prevailed even in the face of a strong countervailing factor, i.e., Moses’ own leadership. Certainly with the removal of the countervailing factor (i.e., after Moses’ death), the underlying tendency to idolatry will continue to determine Israelite behavior.

Moses seems to be engaging in exactly the kind of psychological forecasting which Maimonides sees as threatening the libertarian doctrine. I propose that Moses’ prediction makes salient that aspect of human foreknowledge which is so problematic when applied to future human behavior. To borrow Maimonides’ expression, Moses’ knowledge of the future is “outside of himself.” It is a knowledge based on the observation of past and current tendencies which will continue to determine the course of events in the future. How do we human beings know that the egg, which has just been thrown off the top floor of a high building, will soon splatter on the sidewalk? We have seen eggs fall in the past, and we assume that the same determining processes and tendencies that splattered eggs in the past are also at work in the present situation. If no determining processes were involved, we would be unable to predict the egg’s fate. Similarly, we may only predict future human behavior to the extent that that behavior results from determining processes on which we may depend, processes that are incompatible with human freedom. Inasmuch as divine foreknowledge does not depend on the presence of empirically discoverable determining processes, it does not imply a lack of human freedom (at least not for the reasons under discussion).

So far I have argued that Deut. 31:16 poses special problems for Maimonides’ libertarian doctrine. He proposes a solution to these problems which suggests that God (and Moses) did not predict that any particular individual would worship idols, but merely that idolatry would become a widespread feature of Israelite society. On my interpretation, Maimonides is here willing to accept the notion that widespread social phenomena may be caused by predictable, determinate processes. This brings us to my second question, i.e., how does Maimonides square individual freedom with determinism on the societal level?

In order to answer this question, we must recall that even when he argues against psychological determinism, Maimonides admits that a person’s decisions are influenced by his or her particular psychological tendencies. A naturally (or experientially conditioned) charitable person will find it easier to give alms to the poor than will a born (or experientially conditioned) miser. Furthermore, the miser is not free to instantaneously become charitable. Rather, he may choose to undertake a course of training (consciously designed to exploit natural psychological processes) that will serve to develop his charitableness.

In the short term, certain aspects of human psychology are predictable. Mary who is a miser in the morning will remain a miser at noon. She may, through sheer force of will, perform generous acts. Indeed, that is exactly the therapy which Maimonides would prescribe. However, even if she has undertaken to change her ways, character traits cannot be overturned in the course of a few hours. If the moral inertia generated by natural psychological tendencies can be shown to become stronger at the cumulative societal level, perhaps we will have discovered the mechanism which allows for predetermined social processes of a kind which are not paralleled in the psychology of the individual.
In order to explain how, according to Maimonides’ psychological doctrine, moral inertia accumulates and strengthens at the societal level, I must now reintroduce the notion of social pressure with which I began this paper. Like other psychological forces, social pressure is, for Maimonides, a factor to be recognized and even harnessed for the achievement of moral perfection:

It is natural to be influenced, in sentiments and conduct, by one’s neighbors and associates, and observe the customs of one’s fellow citizens. Hence, a person ought constantly to associate with the righteous and frequent the company of the wise, so as to learn from their practices, and shun the wicked who are benighted, so as not to be corrupted by their example. So Solomon said, “He that walks with the wise, shall be wise; but the companion of fools shall smart for it” (Prov. 13:20). And it is also said, “Happy is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked” (Ps. 1:1).
(Mishneh Torah, Deot 6:1)

Social influences are so powerful that one should come to terms with them by simply avoiding contact with the wicked. When an entire society becomes evil, a person who strives for righteousness has no choice but to leave:

So too, if one lives in a country where the customs are pernicious and the inhabitants do not go in the right way, he should leave for a place where the people are righteous and follow the ways of the good.
(Deot 6:1)
If all societies have become corrupted, one must shun human company altogether:

If all the countries of which he has a personal knowledge, or concerning which he hears reports, follow a course that is not right—as is the case in our times—or if military campaigns or sickness debar him from leaving for a country with good customs, he should live by himself in seclusion, as it is said, “Let him sit alone and keep silence” (Lam. 3:28). And if the inhabitants are wicked reprobates who will not let him stay in the country unless he mixes with them and adopts their evil practices, let him withdraw to caves, thickets, or deserts, and not habituate himself to the ways of sinners, as it is said: “O that I were in the wilderness, in a lodging place of wayfaring men” (Jer. 9:1).
(Deot 6:1)

We may infer from Deot 6:1 that the influence of social pressure is so overwhelmingly powerful that it is impossible for a person to remain within a corrupt society without partaking of its corruption. The scope of individual moral choice in such a society shrinks to the single issue of staying or leaving, or, if relocation is not a viable option, participating or not participating in the life of the community. Inasmuch as the society survives, its general moral tenor will be defined by the behavior of those of its members who do not choose to leave it, and who continue to function as its members, i.e., the morally weaker element. Anyone participating in such a society will inevitably be corrupted by its influence. All other things being equal, such a community qua community is trapped in a moral decline which its own members are incapable of reversing. Even if each and every person in the society were to simultaneously make an individual decision to abandon evil, a societal reformation could not take place. Instead, their decisions would only result in the total dissolution of the society through the dispersion of its members.

The case of Moses’ predictions of future Jewish idolatry may be reinterpreted in the light of these speculations. Moses may have held the Jewish people of his time to be so radically predisposed to idolatry that he was sure that after the mitigating factor of his own charismatic presence would no longer be in effect, they would degenerate into the kind of hopelessly depraved community from which a pious individual must choose to flee. In that case, the Jewish people’s fall into idolatry was indeed the foregone conclusion of an inevitable causal process. Indeed, such a thesis conforms to ideas that find explicit expression in the Bible. The second chapter of the book of Judges sets out a cyclical model of Israelite history, in which a “secular trend” towards idolatry is temporarily interrupted in reaction to the presence of an external military threat and the divine appointment of a successful military leader. In the long term, such leaders were no more successful than was Moses himself: “But when the chieftain died, they would again act basely, even more than their fathers, following other gods” (Jud. 2:19).

Only the ultimate catastrophe of exile and the turbulent struggles of the Second Temple period would be able to finally shake the Jews free of their propensity to worship strange gods. The rabbis of the Talmud were well aware of how different they were from the Jews of earlier times who had found idolatry irresistibly attractive. It is related that Rabbi Ashi spoke with King Menasheh in a dream and asked why even the wise men of his generation succumbed to the idolatrous impulse. King Menasheh retorted that had Rabbi Ashi lived in those early days when idolatry was overwhelmingly enticing, the good rabbi himself would have “lifted up the hem of…[his] robe to run after it” (B. Sanhedrin 102b).

Is there any basis for these speculations in Maimonides’ own writings? According to the account in Mishneh Torah, the Israelites had fallen into an almost irreversible spiritual decline during their stay in Egypt:

When the Israelites had stayed a long time while in Egypt, they relapsed, learned the practices of their neighbors and, like them, worshipped idols, with the exception of the tribe of Levi, that steadfastly kept the charge of the patriarch. This tribe of Levi never practiced idolatry. The doctrine implanted by Abraham would, in a very short time, have been uprooted, and Jacob’s descendants would have lapsed into the error and perversities universally prevalent.
(Avodat Kokhavim 1:3)

Apparently unable to help themselves, the Israelites were lifted out of the depths of idolatry by divine Providence acting through the person of Moses:

But because of God’s love for us and because He kept the oath made to our ancestor Abraham, He appointed Moses to be our teacher and the teacher of all the prophets and charged him with his mission. After Moses had begun to exercise his prophetic functions and Israel had been chosen by the Almighty as His heritage, He crowned them with precepts, and showed them the way to worship Him and how to deal with idolatry and those who go astray after it.
(Avodat Kokhavim 1:3)

Here, then, is the “Moses factor,” come to restrain (with rather modest success, as all readers of Scripture know) the tendency towards idolatry acquired by the Israelites from their Egyptian “hosts.” This much of the story is explicitly recorded in Maimonides’ writings. It would be fair to suggest that Maimonides believed that after Moses’ death, his immediate personal influence would cease to work against idolatry, leaving the Jewish people fated to regress once more. We might add that only the long and tortuous historical process of the genuine internalization of the Law, accompanied and prodded by the course of external events, would finally bring about the true break with idolatry.

References

I first discussed the ideas set forth in this paper in a lecture on “Maimonides on Sociological Determinism and the Covenant Between God and the People of Israel,” sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Wolfson Chair of Jewish Thought, Haifa University, December 1997. My thanks to the holder of the Wolfson Chair, Prof. Menachem Kellner (who also commented on an earlier version of the paper), as well as to others who participated in the discussion. My thanks also to Jerome Gelman, David Widerker, Josef Stern, and an anonymous reviewer who spoke or corresponded with me in connection with several points in this paper.

Altmann, Alexander. 1974. The Religion of the Thinkers: Free Will and Predestination in Saadia, Bahya and Maimonides. In S. D. Goitein, ed., Religion in a Religious Age. Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies.

Gilbert, Margaret. 1989. On Social Facts. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.

_________. 1998. In Search of Sociality. Philosophical Explorations 1: 233-41.

Hyamson, Moses, ed. and trans. 1962. Mishneh Torah:The Book of Knowledge by Maimonides. Jerusalem: Boys Town Publishers.

Pines, Shlomo. 1960. Studies in Abul Barakat al-Baghadi’s Poetics and Metaphysics. Scripta Hierosolymitana 6: 195-98.

Sokol, Moshe. 1998. Maimonides on Freedom of the Will and Moral Responsibility. Harvard Theological Review 91: 25-39.

A philosophical fragment on the benediction "shelo assani isha" ("Thank God I'm not a woman!")

2005-10-29T22:47:00.000+02:00

(A couple years ago I thought that the idea described below could be turned into a full-scale article. However, after gaining a better acquaintance with the philosophical issues involved, I started worrying too much about how to deal with certain problems suggested by the relevant technical literature - a hint for philosophical insiders: think of Kripke's "origin essentialism.")

According to tradition, every male Jew is required each morning to recite the following benediction, which I quote in its full English translation:

Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a woman.[i]

Not surprisingly, this benediction (henceforth, NAW, “Not A Woman”) has, in recent years, become the most controversial sentence in the traditional Jewish prayer book, and has been deleted from the non-Orthodox liturgy. Rather than recite the various feminist attacks and Orthodox defenses of NAW, I would like to discuss the conditions and background assumptions under which utterance of the benediction can constitute an appropriate ritual act for a particular worshipper. The idea of appropriateness here employed derives directly from Jewish ritual law itself. Jewish law positively forbids the recitation of inappropriate, or so-called “wasted” benedictions. For instance, the liturgy contains a benediction that thanks God for having created grapes. This benediction may only be recited by someone who has just drunken wine. More generally speaking, a benediction of thanksgiving for some divine gift may only be recited by someone who, in fact, has benefited from that gift. My question becomes, what are the conditions and background assumptions that can make it appropriate for someone to bless God for not having made him a woman?

I will now introduce a fairly esoteric notion from the contemporary philosophy of language which can be applied with surprising results to the exegesis of NAW and other benedictions of similar formulation. The notion is that of essential qualities which can determine the identity of an object or person across possible worlds.[ii] "Possible worlds" are simply all of the ways that things could be. Identity is the property of a thing to be itself. When Tevye the Milkman sighed, "If I were a rich man", he was referring to the possible world (or rather, the set of possible worlds) in which he would, in fact, be a rich man. In one such world, Tevye might find a lost treasure, making him fantastically wealthy. In that case we would have no difficulty recognizing Tevye as Tevye; we can imagine him leading his horse to the village and discovering a pot of gold by the side of the road. But what of the possible world in which Tevye is a rich man because he has been born a Rothschild? Is it still clear that we are thinking of how the same person could have lived in different circumstances, or are we imagining a world in which the human being known to us as Tevye the Milkman simply does not exist, and in which there happens to exist another, completely unrelated person named Tevye, scion to the House of Rothschild? When philosophers talk about essential qualities which can determine identity across possible worlds, they are talking about the qualities which, for example, make Tevye Tevye in all circumstances which we could imagine befalling him. If having been born to a particular set of parents is one such essential quality, than talk about how our Tevye would have faired as a Rothschild would be self-contradictory. Furthermore, when we imagine a world where no one possesses Tevye's essential qualities (such as our own world, since Tevye is, after all, a fictional character) we are imagining a world in which Tevye simply does not exist.

We are now prepared to consider the philosophical consequences of NAW. Consider first a hypothetical benediction that does not exist in traditional Jewish liturgy:

Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a lobster.

It is not terribly surprising that the authors of the morning benedictions left this one out. Most people (and here I will leave believers in metempsychoses to work out their own metaphysical difficulties) do not think of the possibility of being created as lobsters as constituting a genuine threat to human well-being. It isn’t that people bear no objections to crustaceanism as an alternative lifestyle, or that, like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, they wished could adopt it. (“I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.")[iii] Rather, it simply makes no sense to say that a person could have been a lobster. People and lobsters are just too dissimilar. In the jargon of possible world semantics, one would say that we will never find a particular human being in World1 who may be identified with a particular lobster in World2. It makes no sense for me to think of what might have been had I been born (better: hatched) a crustacean. That possibility would be properly described as belonging to a world with one less human and one more serving of non-kosher sea-food! If, as in some fairy-tale, a wicked witch were to “change me into a lobster”, one of two things would actually occur: either 1) I would simply cease to exist, replaced by a lobster, or 2) horrifically, my human consciousness would somehow continue to function within a crustacean body. But surely, a lobster that is capable of bemoaning its own fate is not a lobster at all, but rather some kind of misfortunate monster. The upshot of my discussion of the lobster discussion is this: it is inappropriate for me to thank God for having saved me from logically impossible misfortune.[iv] I should only thank God for not having made me a lobster, if, in principle, I could have been a lobster. Since it was impossible for me to have been created as a lobster, I have nothing to thank God for on that account.

By now, the application of this idea to NAW should be obvious. In terms of Jewish ritual law, a man who thinks that gender constitutes an essential element of personal identity would be prohibited from reciting NAW; it would constitute a transgression of the rule against brakha levatala, the recital of an uncalled for benediction. For such a man, the very idea that he might have been born female is as illogical as the suggestion that he might have been born a lobster. Jewish law does not require – nor permit - one to recite a blessing thanking God for having been spared from involvement in a logically impossible predicament.

When the author of NAW thought of women, he could not, at pain of semantic confusion, have been thinking of beings radically different from himself. He must have thought of himself as someone who could have been a woman. That woman would have possessed all of his most vital, essential qualities, the qualities without which he would not have been the person he was. (But she also would also have suffered from the social disadvantages suffered by persons due to contingencies of gender. The blessing may thus be interpreted as, "Thank God I don't have to put up with the all the stuff that woman have to put up with!") Obviously, he could not have held that his masculinity constituted an essential element of his personal identity. Paradoxically, when a male possible-world-semanticist recites NAW, he implicitly announces that, in at least one other possible world, he is, in fact a woman.

Now that I have spun out the metaphysical consequences of NAW, let us examine the two benedictions which immediately precede it in the morning service:

Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a heathen.
Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a slave.[v]

The application of the argument I have made concerning shelo assani isha to these two other benedictions results in a universalistic vision of humanity. If Jews and gentiles belonged to essentially different orders of being, there would be no point to thanking God "who hast not made me a heathen." Similarly, if the institution of slavery gave legal expression to intrinsic differences between human beings, it would be nonsensical for a freeman to thank God for preserving him from a plight logically incompatible with his very nature. In the light of these three benedictions, all of the major categories which have divided the human race, i.e. gender, ethnicity and economic status, are recognized as mere contingencies which have no part in defining the essence of the individual. This universality jibes neither with racialist interpretations of Judaism such as that expounded by Judah HaLevi in his Kuzari (or at least found there by some interpreters) nor with the classical attitude towards slaves enshrined in Aristotle's Politics[vi] ("All men who differ from others as much as an animal from a man are by nature slaves.")
Pretty good for "mere semantics".

© Berel Dov Lerner.

Endnotes
[i] Daily Prayer Book. (Phillip Birnbaum translator) (NewYork: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1977) pg. 18.
[ii] A general discussion of these matters may be found in R.Bradley and N. Schwartz's Possible Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979).
[iii] From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1934) pg. 6.
[iv] Similarly, Jewish law prohibits a worshipper from reciting the special benediction of thanks giving for having survived an unusual danger (such as a traffic accident) unless the worshipper had, in fact, been involved in an especially dangerous situation.
[v]. Daily Prayer Book, pp. 16-18.
[vi]. Politics 1.5.8.1254b as appears in The Politics of Aristotle (Ernest Barker, translator & editor) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962) pg. 13.

The Ten Curses of Eve (an unpublishable article on women in Judaism)

2005-10-24T00:25:00.000+02:00

(Authors note: The following was written as a companion piece to my article "And He Shall Rule Over Thee," which appeared some years ago in JUDAISM. It is not really concerned with biblical interpretation, but rather with the role of women in traditional Jewish life. The article assumes some knowledge of rabbinical literature. Non-Orthodox publications refused to print it unless I made it more stringently critical of Orthodoxy, while Orthodox publications found it too hot to handle. Since I remained unwilling to change its conclusions to make it more congenial to the views of various editors, it remains unpublished. A final word of warning: this article deals with the traditional Jewish view regarding the value of women's role in Jewish society. It does not deal with the essential value of women-in-themselves, which Jewish authorities have almost always held to be equal to that of men.)

Broadly speaking, Orthodoxy has adopted a mixed strategy[1] in response to the feminist claim that Judaism traditionally discriminates against women in communal and ritual affairs. On the one hand, some Orthodox women, with the support of the liberal wing of the Orthodox rabbinate, strive to broaden women’s participation in ritual life. Women’s prayer groups, women’s Torah and Meggilah readings, etc., all serve to “push the envelope” of the degree of equal ritual participation possible within Jewish law. New Orthodox institutions have been founded, allowing women to study Torah at a level previously possible only for men attending yeshivot. Women have even begun to find their way into the corridors of Jewish legal power, serving as professional halakhic advocates who represent clients before Orthodox religious courts, and offering halakhic advice on issues of ritual purity.

On the other hand, more traditional Orthodoxy has adopted an ideology of “different but equal” roles for men and women in the religious community. While men lead public lives and strive to become Torah scholars, women are seen as taking charge of the domestic realm. By emphasizing the central role of the home for Jewish spirituality and survival, Orthodox apologists can argue that the women’s traditional role as mother and homemaker is no less spiritually fulfilling then that of their husband-scholars. Rabbi Moshe Meiselman’s pioneering work, Jewish Woman in Jewish Law, is perhaps the most scholarly and articulate defense of traditional Jewish femininity. There he writes:

The Jewish woman is the creator, molder, and guardian of the Jewish home. The family has always been the unit of Jewish existence, and while the man has always been the family’s public representative, the woman has been its soul.[2]

Home and family are central to Jewish existence, although I think that this fact has implications for the lives of men as well as for the lives of women. I do not intend to quarrel here with those who deem the domestic sphere to be essentially feminine and domestic life obligatory for women. Rather, I ask whether the notion of a different but equal role for women is authentically rooted in the consensus of traditional Jewish thought. After all, “right wing” Orthodoxy is committed to more than the domesticity of women. It also claims to be heir to an unchanging world-view, which is canonically set forth in the classic rabbinic texts of the Talmud and midrashim. Did the Rabbis really perceive women as fulfilling a different but equal role in Jewish religion and society? Would they agree with the claim of modern apologists that there is nothing discriminatory or oppressive about the treatment of women in traditional Jewish societies? I shall try to answer this question by considering three classical sources: The midrashic tradition of “The Ten Curses of Eve”, commentaries on the Mishnah Horayot 3:7, and the blessing in which Jewish men thank God for not having made them women.

Eve’s Curses

Although the story of Adam and Eve may remain repugnant to some feminists, egalitarian interpretations of the opening section of Genesis have been available for some time. Outstanding among these is the third chapter of Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.[3] My own modest contribution to this line of exegesis, the short essay “And He Shall Rule Over Thee”, appeared in JUDAISM in fall of 1988. My conclusions agreed broadly with those of Trible, whose work was not known to me at that time. In particular, I offered three reasons why the curse meted out to the woman Eve, “And he [man] shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16), cannot be understood as endorsing or prescribing male domination over women:

Firstly, the verse…describes a punishment, a state of affairs which is, by definition, undesirable. Secondly, the ideal man/woman relationship, as fully explicated earlier in the text, is a condition of shared privileges and responsibilities between equals. Thirdly, there is no indication given that any human being is called upon to enforce God’s punishments.[4]

I further pointed out that all of the other curses handed out to Adam and Eve, such as painful and dangerous childbirth and the difficulties of agricultural work, have always been understood by Judaism as offering challenges to human ingenuity. Midwives were expected to do their best to make childbirth safe and painless, and artisans were praised for inventing tools that eased the work of farmers. By the same token, we must conclude from the Book of Genesis that the struggle against gender inequality is a similarly admirable pursuit. The implications of this for the classical midrashic expansions of the biblical story are quite far-reaching.

I have argued that a curse, by definition, must be understood as calling forth an unfortunate situation. The authors of the Talmud and midrashim exploited the textual opportunity presented by the biblical curses addressed to Eve in order to describe the misfortunes which they saw as peculiar to the lives of women. A tradition developed within rabbinic literature of expanding on the biblical account of women’s torments to produce lists of precisely “ten curses of Eve.”

An early list of the “ten curses of Eve” appears in the “B version” of the midrashic collection, Avot De Rabbi Nathan, (hereafter, ARNB). ARNB is a kind of expansion of the well-known Mishnaic tractate, Pirkei Avot. It is thought to have been composed as early as the second century C.E. In the 42nd chapter of ARNB, we read:

Ten decrees were passed with regard to Eve.
The first is menstruation, when she is driven from her house and banned from her husband.
The second is that she gives birth after nine months.
The third is that she nurses for two years.
The fourth is that her husband rules over her.
The fifth is that he is jealous of her if she speaks with any other man.
The sixth is that she ages quickly.
The seventh is that she ceases to give birth while men never cease being able to beget children.
The eighth is that she stays in the home and does not show herself in public like a man.
The ninth is that when she goes out into the marketplace her head has to be covered like a mourner. That is why women precede the bier, saying: We have brought death upon all the inhabitants of the world.
The tenth is that if she was upright, her husband buries her. For we find that this was the case with our ancestors: our father Abraham buried Sarah our mother. Isaac buried Rebecca our mother. Jacob buried Rachel and Leah.[5]

ARNB presents us with a fascinating list of curses, freely mixing items belonging to the biological (“she gives birth after nine months”), psychological (“her husband is jealous of her if she speaks with any other man”), social (“she stays at home…”) and ritual (she is “banned from her husband” during menstruation due to the laws of ritual purity) spheres. For our present purposes, what is most surprising about this list is that it lists not only accepted norms of feminine domesticity, but even a fundamental principle of the halakhah, i.e. the prohibition on sexual relations with a menstruating woman, as being a curse from which women suffer. The last item on ARNB’s list poignantly bewails the fate of widows in patriarchal societies. Lacking any independent power or status, widows are better off dead. Society is so cruel to widows that God spares righteous women that fate by making sure that they die before their husbands.

Our next example comes from a later source, Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer, thought to have been composed in the first half of the eighth century. There we read:

He gave the woman nine curses and death:
[1] the afflictions arising from menstruation
[2] and the tokens of virginity;
[3] the affliction of conception in the womb;
[4] and the affliction of child-birth;
[5] and the affliction of bringing up children;
[6] and her head is covered like a mourner; and it is not shaved except on account of immorality,
[7] and her ear is pierced like [the ears of] perpetual slaves;
[8] and like a hand-maid she waits on her husband;
[9] and she is not believed in matters of testimony;
[10] and after all these (curses comes) death.[6]

Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer adds yet more surprises to the list of Eve’s curses. Child-raising, the most sacred of traditional women’s responsibilities becomes a curse and an “affliction”. Care for one’s husband becomes a condition of servitude, a wife is “like a hand-maid”. While traditionalist apologists insist that Jewish law rules women’s testimony inadmissible in order to spare them the embarrassment of appearing in court, Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer counts this legal disability as a curse.[7]

Our final list of curses appears in the Babylonian Talmud. In the tractate Eruvin 100b we read:

R. Isaac ben Abdimi stated: Eve was cursed with ten curses, since it is written:
“Unto the women He said, ‘and I will greatly multiply,’” which refers to the two drops of blood,
[1] one being that of menstruation
[2] and the other that of virginity,
[3] ‘thy pain’ refers to the pain of bringing up children,
[4]‘and thy travail’ refers to the pain of conception,
[5]‘in pain thou shalt bring forth children’ is to be understood in its literal meaning,
[6]‘and thy desire shall be to your husband’ teaches that a women yearns for her husband when he is about to set out on a journey,
[7]‘and he shall rule over thee’ teaches that while a wife solicits [her husband to make love to her] with her heart [i.e., not explicitly], the husband does so with his mouth [i.e., he makes his desires known verbally]…
…these are only seven. When R. Dimi came he explained:
[8] She [her hair] is wrapped up like a mourner,
[9] [is] banished from the company of all men [i.e. may only be married to one man at a time],
[10] and confined within a prison.

Eruvin’s list adds the asymmetrical nature of traditional sexuality to the curses heaped upon Eve. While Judaism has, in the past, allowed polygamy, women were never allowed to marry more than one man. Even within the confines of marriage, women are not allowed to freely express their needs and desires as their husbands do. However, the final curse is the most striking. Female domesticity is decried as confinement “within a prison.” For today’s Orthodox reader, Rashi’s comment on this last phrase is remarkably ironic. He simply quotes the verse from Psalms 45: 14, kol kevuda bat melekh penima, whose midrashic interpretation, “all the princesses’ treasure is stored within”, is used by the Rabbis to describe female domesticity. Today this phrase has become the veritable slogan of the campaign for the preservation of traditional gender roles in Judaism. According to Rashi, the rallying-cry of modesty and domesticity becomes metaphorically equivalent to the imprisonment of women!

What are we to make of these rabbinic lists of women’s curses? Are the Rabbis calling for social change? Clearly, Judaism is in favor of alleviating some of the difficulties listed as curses. It has never suppressed efforts to ease the pains and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. I imagine that if someone devised a method for making childbirth a completely safe and painless process, no posek would complain that God’s decree had been foiled. On the other hand, it is simply unimaginable that Rabbis sought to undermine the validity of the halakhic laws of ritual purity, sexual morality, modesty in dress, etc., which discriminate against women.[8] At best, men are enjoined to help ameliorate the suffering caused to women by such laws but never to actually challenge the halakhah itself. Regarding the sixth curse, Daniel Boyarin points out that

The fact that she desired him especially when he was about to go on a journey, which is one of the curses with which she was cursed, does not mean that therefore she must suffer frustration but that he must sleep with her before he leaves…Not only is the curse not a justification for causing her to suffer, it is that very curse that creates the responsibility of the husband to “take care of her.” Once again it is clearly the case, however, that the gender relations are asymmetrical, that the position of women in sexuality is subordinate, and the position of men is dominant.[9]

Even if the rabbis never thought of their lists of women’s curses as challenges to the halakhah, there is no reason to think that they did not view these lists as cataloguing genuine sources of suffering.[10] I would suggest that the rabbis simply saw discrimination against women as being necessary for the functioning of society. Women are worse off then men, but there is simply no practical way to root-out the causes of women’s oppression without overthrowing the very foundations of human society. The great religious Zionist rabbi, A.I. Kook, was certainly no egalitarian towards women, but at least he remained cognizant of the ethical costs and dangers entailed by traditional inter-gender relations:

The virtue of modesty effects many benefits in the world, and therefore it is deemed important enough to negate other virtues, desirable in themselves, but which, because of man’s passions and weakness of character, might result in a breach of modesty on which the spiritual and material worlds depend. The virtues of love and friendship, in all their expressions, should have been the same for both sexes, but because of the high value of modesty is the virtue of good manners superseded so that the sages once advised a man not to extend a greeting to a married woman (Kiddushin 70b).
The modest person recognizes that this is not because of hostility to the feminine sex that he keeps his distance and establishes restraints, but because of a general rule that is sound.[11]

It is often said that being strict in one aspect of the halakhah often requires being lax in another. Strictness regarding terumot u’ma’asrot (laws of priestly gifts and tithes) often comes at the expense of laxity regarding ba’al tashhit (the prohibition of wasting useful things, especially food). Similarly, strict measures taken to avoid any potential danger of giluy arayot (forbidden sexual relations) may impinge upon a man’s duty to love his fellow Jew(ess). Rabbi Kook tells us that in a prefect world we could avoid this dilemma, but as things stand equality and fraternity among the sexes would lead to licentiousness and the downfall of human society. Somebody must pay the price for the avoidance of disaster, and women must pay the lion’s share.

Saving women’s lives

At this point a traditionalist might concede the point of Eve’s curses and simply point out that, at the end of the day, what is important is not how pleasant one’s life has been, but how valuable. The lives of Jewish women may be objectively more difficult than those of Jewish men, but that certainly does not make them less holy or somehow less important. After all, as is stated in Pirkei Avot, lefum zara agra, “one’s reward is commensurate with one’s suffering and efforts.” Perhaps women should relish the opportunity to bear the burden of their unique contribution to Jewish life. It might be claimed that the price paid by women pursuing their traditional domestic role only serves to emphasize the magnitude of their spiritual achievement.

While the ideology of different but equally important gender roles might be attractive to today’s traditionalists, it is far from clear that it reflects classic rabbinic attitudes. One of the gravest problems for anyone claiming equality of the sexes in Judaism is the fact that men are obligated to observe several mitzvot, (i.e. time-limited positive mitzvot such as tefillin, sukkah, etc.) whose performance is not required of women. Since Judaism places such great emphasis on kiyum mitzvot, the fulfillment of mitzvot, this difference might seem likely to diminish the woman's status. Once again, Rabbi Meiselman reassures us:

As the Talmud points out, the exemption [of woman from many time-bound positive mitzvot] implies nothing as to the relative worth of male and female - both are equally sacred."[12]

Rabbi Meislman's citation, T.B. Bava Kama 15a, does not actually make any reference to the concept of ֹkedusha (sacredness). His use of the term `sacred' is doubly unfortunate since it does appear in rabbinic literature in a context most contrary to his statement. Mishnah Horayot 3:7 states: "The man's life is saved before the woman's." Maimonides explains in his Commentary on the Mishnah:

You already know that males are obligated to keep all of the commandments while the females are obligated to keep only part of them, as is explained in Kiddushin (Mishna 1:7) and he is [thus] more sanctified and therefore the man's life is saved first.[13]

The Jewish concept of kedusha, be it translated as holiness, sanctity, or sacredness, invariably finds practical halakhic expression in the application of special laws to the holy object. Thus, the sanctity of the Land of Israel is expressed in the special laws (i.e. first fruits, etc.) applicable only within its boundaries.[14] A Jewish man, subject to special laws not applicable to a woman, is therefore technically more sanctified than she.

Maimonides' comment is based on a rule appearing in the previous mishnah. It is there stated (Horayot 3:6) in regard to the order of the sacrificial service that "anyone more sanctified than his fellow has priority [i.e. offers his sacrifice before] his fellow." The same Hebrew term kodem, "has priority", is used to describe both the succession of sacrifices and the precedence of a man's life over a woman's. The linguistic similarity of the two mishnayot allows Maimonides to apply the rule about Temple etiquette to understanding why a man's life should be saved before a woman's. (It should be noted that this entire chapter of the Mishnah moves freely between different examples of status hierarchies, without always clearly differentiating between their functions).

There is also a more pragmatic logic behind Maimonides' explanation. Since it is in the general interest of Judaism that as many mitzvot as possible be performed, it becomes imperative in drastic situations, when only some lives may be saved, that the lives of those capable of fulfilling more mitzvot (i.e. men) take precedence over the lives of those obligated to keep less mitzvot (i.e. women).[15] Rabbi Ya'akov Emden (1697-1776) makes use of similar reasoning to decide in the heartbreaking case of a boy and girl who had been kidnapped by gentiles with the intention of raising them as Christians. There was some chance of ransoming one, but not both children. But which child? Here we must recall that having a Jewish mother is a necessary and sufficient condition for one’s being born a Jew. If the boy is left behind, he will not be raised as a Jew, he will marry a gentile woman, and that will be the end of the matter. If the girl is left behind, she will become the progenitor of countless generations of Jews who will also be raised as Christians. It might therefor seem that the girl must be ransomed, but Rabbi Emden answers:

I know of no room for doubt since the Mishnah in the end of Horayot states that the man's life is preserved before the woman's because of his greater sanctification. All the more so in regard to apostasy his preservation takes precedence, because making someone sin is worse than killing him, and since he has more mitzvot than the woman, and will have to transgress many more [mitzvot] than the woman is commanded, therefore certainly the male takes precedence in being ransomed to save his soul.[16]

In a religion based on the performance of God's commandments, it is impossible to wish away the implications of some people having more mitzvot than others. The mitzvot which a particular Jew is expected to observe must have some bearing on his or her social standing. And if I be suspected of making too much of Maimonides' interpretation, let me add that the classical Mishna commentaries of R.Ovadia Bertinoro (c.1450) and R.Israel Lipshutz's (1782-1860) Tifferet Yisrael as well as R. David Ben Shmuel Halevi's (1586-1667) Turei Zahav[17] all concur with Maimonides' reading. His is the standard interpretation of the mishnah in question.

Traditional apologists may claim that when other laws are taken into account, the bias against women is redressed. It is in fact true that Jewish law often gives priority to women over men. A poor woman should be fed and clothed before a poor man; a captive woman is usually ransomed before a captive man, etc. Yet, in all of these cases, these privileges have been traditionally understood as granted in deference to the woman's greater sensitivity and embarrassment, rather than due to the importance of her role in society.[18] One need merely consider the traditional Western maxim "women and children first" to understand how women can benefit from specific privileges in a society which does not value their contribution equally with men's.

It is interesting to note that the importance of woman's role as mother and homemaker is never taken into account in these discussions. If these functions were as respected as recent Orthodox apologists would have us believe, surely they would outweigh woman's technically legal deficiencies. At the very least, the classical sources might have tried to to explain away apparent biases in the law. We have already seen how the advantages granted women by Judaism were seen not as signaling the inferiority of men, but rather the peculiar weaknesses of women. Yet the traditional commentaries make no attempt to square the discriminatory ruling on life-saving with some notion of the nobility of woman. The issue of woman's equal dignity simply did not trouble them.

Of course, the number of mitzvot that one is obligated to perform is not the sole criterion of precedence in Judaism. Other contributions to Jewish life through public service and Torah scholarship can be overriding factors. The mashuah milhama ("anointed of war") was the priest chosen to address the troops before going to battle. According to the fifth century sage Mar Zutra, the life of the mashuah milhama must take precedence over that of the segan, or second to the High Priest, since many people depend on his participation in the war effort.[19] As might be expected, scholarship ranks first among the sources of status in classical Jewish sources. The Mishnah (Horayot 3:8) makes clear the relative importance of technical sanctity compared to personal scholarship;

Priest before Levite, Levite [before] Israelite, Israelite before bastard. When does this hold? When they are all equal [in scholarship]. But if the bastard were a scholar and the High Priest an ignoramus, a scholarly bastard precedes an ignorant High Priest.

Tosefta Horayot (2:8) declares the scholar's superiority over even the most illustrious of public officials: "A wise man [is saved] before a king; if a wise man dies he is irreplaceable, if a king of Israel dies, any Israelite is worthy of kingship."

Thus the factors of public service and Torah scholarship may also determine the importance of one's role for Judaism.[20] Yet these two activities are precisely those traditionally denied to women, leaving them no means to improve their social standing.

Blessed is He…who did not make me a woman

The idea of women having an equal role with men was impossible for classical Judaism since it was contradicted by the fact that men were obligated with more mitzvot. Men openly acknowledged the superior position granted them by halakha, and felt it only proper to thank God for not creating them as halakhically-deprived women with the much debated daily blessing "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe Who did not create me a woman." Tosefta Berakhot 6:18,[21] the earliest source for this blessing, explicitly explains its intention:

Rabbi Yehuda says: “A man is required to say three blessings every day: “Blessed [is God] who did not make me a gentile, blessed [is God] who did not make me a woman, blessed [is God] who did not make me an ignoramus ... [one must say]”, Blessed [is God] who did not make me a woman,” since women are not obligated with [time-dependent] mitzvot."

A variant of the tosefta appears in Menahot 43b.[22] Immediately afterwards, the Talmud relates an incident in which R. Aha bar Yaakov objects to his son’s recitation of the blessing “who did not make me an ignoramus”, and suggests that this should be replaced with the blessing thanking God for “not making me a slave.” However, the Talmud rejects that suggestion, since the status of women and slaves are similar, and men are already required to bless God for not making them women. Rashi offers two different interpretations of this remark. The first states that women are like slaves to their husbands, indicating that once a man has thanked God for sparing him from feminine servility, it is unnecessarily repetitious to also thank God for not having been made a slave. While this would seem to indicate that the blessing is concerned with differences in social status rather than differences in halakhic obligation, Rashi’s second reading hearkens back to the Tosefta. He states that women and slaves share a common misfortune – neither are required to perform time-dependent positive commandments. As soon as a Jewish man thanks God for preserving him from woman’s halakhic disability, there is no need to mention slaves, who suffer from the same lack of halakhic responsibility as do women. R.David Abudarham (14c.) seems to combine both of Rashi’s ideas, and writes that the blessing is recited because a woman is not obligated with positive time-bound commandments and that, in addition, “she is fearful of her husband and cannot even fulfil those [commandments] which do apply to her."[23] Tur Orah Hayyim 46:18 (R. Jacob ben Asher 1270?-1340) states that a man must say the blessing “`... who did not make me a woman', since she is not obligated with the positive time-bound commandments." I think it would be fair to say that this view represents something of a consensus.[24] At the end of the day, rabbinic tradition is perfectly aware that women are worse off because they lack the halakhic obligations and opportunities afforded to men.

Conclusion

The present essay does not address the broad and difficult question of the future role of women in Judaism. It is simply a plea for intellectual honesty.[25] Throughout the generations, Jews have tried to explain the purpose of the mitzvot in the light of the attitudes and beliefs peculiar to their particular historical and cultural situations. For instance, medieval scholars explained the laws of kashrut in terms of biological and medical theories which have long since been discarded. I would be the last person to suggest that out generation should avoid the challenge of ta’amei ha’mitzvot, finding reasons for the commandments. Innovations and hiddushim are essential for Judaism’s vitality. On the other hand, we live in an era of unavoidable historical self-consciousness. People are awake to the possibility of cultural change, and they take notice of such changes. New ideas must be acknowledged to be new ideas.

While there is certainly a need for continued readjustment of halakhic norms regarding women, some notion of different but equal gender roles within Judaism will remain unavoidable. On the one hand, even the most liberal of poskim would never stretch the halakhah so far as to make the lives of men and women absolutely identical (if only out of concern for the biological survival of the Jewish people!). On the other hand, modern people simply cannot accept the idea that women are relegated to an inferior position in Jewish society and practice. Men’s roles and women’s roles will always be somewhat different, and yet we need to be able to endow them with equal importance.

We certainly hope that Jewish boys and girls will grow in their knowledge of the Torah.[26] If they are alert and thoughtful students of traditional texts, they are bound to discover that the notion that the roles of women in Jewish life are equal in dignity and importance to those of men is an essentially modern notion formulated in response to modern concerns and conditions. How will we prepare them for this discovery? How will we explain to them why Judaism’s attitudes towards women have changed? On the one hand, we must unapologetically celebrate the improvements that have taken place among contemporary observant Jews - some of “Eve’s curses” have finally been redressed. Modern Orthodox women can contribute to public life; they may pursue economic independence, and, most crucially, become Torah scholars. On the other hand, halakha is not infinitely flexible. We will have to find ways to relate to its unchanging laws in ways that celebrate womanhood rather than belittle it. One might say that full respect for the role of women is a truth of the Torah which has remained hidden from the eyes of earlier generations, waiting for us to be its discoverers. However, we cannot pretend that those earlier generations had already made this discovery. That would be a fabrication of history and a sin against intellectual honesty.

ENDNOTES
[1]. In reality, practically all sections of the Orthodox camp combine both strategies described below to create various distinctive responses to the feminist challenge. Ultra-Orthodox girls currently enjoy a level of formal Jewish education that would have certainly scandalized the forerunners of Orthodoxy living two centuries ago. Such innovations are usually explained away as constituting unfortunate but necessary concessions to the spiritual depravity of our times.

[2]. New York: Ktav, 1978, p. 16.

[3]. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Although Prof. Trible is a Christian, her exegesis of Tanakh is free of Christological elements and may be read with great profit by Jews who are interested in a literary/peshat approach.

[4]. “And He Shall Rule Over Thee”, pp. 448-449. Trible worries about the implications of calling female subordination a “punishment”, and writes, “God describes this consequence, but does not prescribe it as punishment” (pg. 128). I argue elsewhere that human beings are required to struggle against suffering caused by divine punishments, and may indeed succeed in such struggles, unless God specifically instructs them otherwise. See my “Interfering with Divinely Imposed Suffering”, Religious Studies 36:95-102, 2000.

[5]. As appears in Anthony J. Sadarini, S.J.’s translation, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan (Abbot De Rabi Nathan) Version B: A Translation and Commentary, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975) pp. 251-2.

[6]. Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer, 14. As appears in Gerald Friedlander’s translation, Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer translated and annotated with introduction and indices, New York: Hermon Press, 1965, pg. 100.

[7]. Rabbi Meislman writes:

Ability to testify and obligation to testify are interdependent in Jewish law…To require women to testify at all times might very possibly contradict their private role in Jewish life…The technical disqualification of women in Jewish law may also be due to a feeling that it would be improper to subject women to the indignity of intense cross-examination in court.
pp. 78-9

Rabbi Meiselman goes to great lengths to establish that the disqualification of female witnesses is not predicated on the assumption that women are more prone to lying then men, of which he states, “Nothing could be more absurd” (pg. 73). But we find exactly this absurdity in the classic medieval Torah commentary, Hizkunei. The comment on Genesis 18: 15 reads: “From here we learn that women are disqualified from testifying since they deny [the truth] out of fear.”

[8]. Actually, Rabbeinu Gershom’s famous edict prohibiting polygamy and requiring the wife’s consent for a divorce to take place may be fairly understood as a deliberate move to create equality between men and women under Jewish law. R. Asher ben wrote in a responsa that R. Gershom acted in order to “make the power of the woman equal to that of the man” (Shut HaRosh, 42: 1). I am indebted to Rachel Levmore for bringing this source to my attention.

[9]. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Berkley: University of California Press, pg. 131.

[10]. It is entirely possible that many of the rabbis’ female contemporaries would take exception to the inclusion of some of the items in the lists of curses. After all, these lists offer men’s descriptions of how hard it is to be a woman. For instance, might not all this hand wringing over the curse of female sexual frustration involve the projection of male sexual frustration? Did women really not enjoy raising their children, or was it just difficult for men to understand that women might take pleasure in caring for children?

[11]. Midot Harayah (printed together with Musar Avikha) Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1971, pg. . Here as translated by Ben Zion Bokser in his Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, Lights of Holiness, The Moral Principles, Essays, Letters, and Poems, New York: Paulist Press, 1978, pg. 180.

[12]. Pg.43.

[13].The Hebrew term mekudash also appears in the original Arabic version of Maimonides' commentary (see Rabbi Yosef Kafah's Hebrew – Arabic edition). Maimonides, unlike many later authorities (Beit Yosef on Tur, Yoreh Deah 251:8; ReMA's gloss on Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 252:8,etc.) does not mention this statement as binding law. (Interestingly, although it appears in the Beit Yosef, it does not appear in the Shulkhan Arukh). It may also be important that the Rishonim come to take saving someone from attempting suicide by drowning as a paradigm case. See also note 15 below. For my purposes it is sufficient that the male's greater sanctity is taken by Maimonides as an accepted fact which can be used to explain the mishnah.

[14]. Mishnah Kelim 1:6. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, following Rabbi Meir Simkha of Dvinsk, argued that the word kedusha (except as applied to God) merely indicates a special technical ritual status which in no way indicates a special ontological or metaphysical status.

[15]. One can not stress enough that the overriding concern in all such cases is to first save whoever, male or female, is in the greater immediate danger. See Rabbi Haim Hirschensohn's (1857-1935) comments on our mishnah as appear in the recent anthology HaTorah VeHaHaim, pp. 120-121 published in Tel Aviv by Kibbutz HaDati, 1988. Hirschenson claims that the Mishnah’s preference for male lives reflects an outdated image of woman’s role in society and is no longer legally binding. See also R. Hayyim David Halevi, Mekor Hayyim vol.1 (Tel Aviv, 1991) pp. 291-4, which makes a strong case for the claim that the halakhic literature has tried to severely limit the applicability of the Mishnah’s ruling.

[16]. She'elot Yavez I:68

[17]. Yoreh Deah 252:6.

[18]. Tur Yoreh Deah 251 states: "The woman is dealt with before the man, whether to feed or clothe her because she is embarrassed to ask". A woman captive is ransomed before a man in order to avoid her being raped, yet when there exists a possibility of homosexual rape, the man is ransomed first (see traditional commentaries on Mishnah Horayot 3:7).

[19]. T.B.Nazir 47B.

[20]. These three sources of status, i.e. sanctity, scholarship and public service parallel the "three crowns" of personal distinction mentioned in Avot 4:17 and Shemot Raba 34:2, namely the "crown of priesthood", "crown of Torah" and "crown of kingship".

[21]. 7:22 in some editions. See also J. Berakhot 63b. A recent and comprehensive treatment of this blessing may be found in Joseph Tabory’s “The Benedictions of Self-Identity and the Changing Status Of Women and of Orthodoxy” in Joseph Tabory, ed., Kenishta: Studies of the Synagogue World , vol. I (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2001) pp. 107-138 in the English section.

[22]. Versions of the sugiyah from Menahot also appear in the Rif, Berakhot 44b, and the Rosh in the end of chapter nine of Berakhot.

[23]. Abudarham HaShalem, Jerusalem 1959 pp.41-42.

[24]. I should take this opportunity to emphasize a point which both the critics and defenders of the blessing “…who did not make me a woman” seem to have missed. While it is fairly clear that the blessing’s author thought of womanhood as a fate less fortunate than manhood, the recital of the blessing itself may be taken as an expression of belief in the essential, one might say the ontological, equality of men and women. By thanking God for not having made him a woman, each individual Jewish man admits the logical possibility that he might have entered this world in a female body. I hope to develop this line of argument in a future essay that will address the technical issues of linguistic philosophy at play.

[25]. For a similar discussion of how contemporary apologies for the laws of family purity misrepresent traditional views, see Jonah Steinberg’s “From a Pot of Filth to a Hedge of Roses and Back”, in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 13 (1997):2: 5-26,

[26]. Perhaps genuinely equal opportunities for women to grow in Torah learning will make the other inequalities of ritual life appear trivial. When a woman may gain communal recognition as a talmidah hakhamah [woman Torah scholar], it might be beneath her dignity to worry about pedestrian trappings of honor such as receiving an aliyah la’Torah. But has this been true of men to whom the gates of learning have always been open?

© Berel Dov Lerner

Joseph the Unrighteous (a critique of Joseph's administration of Egypt in the famine years)

2005-10-09T21:35:00.000+02:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. This article originally appeared in Judaism: a Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, issue 151, vol. 38, no. 3, Summer 1989, pp. 278-281.

The narrative of Genesis 47:13 to 47:26 depicting Joseph’s treatment of the Egyptian people during the years of famine is troubling both from a literary and from a moral perspective. From a literary perspective we may ask: what is the point of interrupting the story of Joseph and his brothers with a seemingly superfluous description of Joseph's history as the viceroy of Egypt? Surely not in order to explain his ability to sustain Jacob's family and cause his brothers to fear him. Joseph's power is already sufficiently established by the prior stories of his elevation to high office, administration of policy, and manipulation of his brothers' lives.

The ethical problem presented by Joseph's administration is even more perplexing. Joseph is here portrayed as ruthlessly pursuing a course of coercive economic centralization. After collecting the surplus product of the seven fat years, he sells back the food to its producers at an exorbitant price - eventually forcing them to hand over their savings, livestock, land, and freedom to Pharaoh, in order to avoid starvation.

I believe that Joseph's story is best approached as a lesson in political morality and the instruction that it offers is of universal importance. Let my motives be clear: this interpretation is not meant as a veiled criticism of some aspects of modern Jewish history. If anything, Jewish politicians have shown little susceptibility to Joseph's faults. My purpose here is openly apologetic. I wish to demonstrate that the Torah does not condone Joseph's obviously inexcusable behavior, and to give some explanation why his actions were recorded for all time.

Although the Torah nowhere openly criticizes Joseph's policy, there are clear indications that Joseph's behavior is not to be seen as fulfilling the will of God. It is with great pathos that the Torah gives voice to the pleadings of the Egyptians : "Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? For the money fails." (Gen. 47: 15). And again, "There is nothing left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands. Why shall we die before your eyes, both we and our land?" (47: 19). These are not the words of a people benefiting from the care of a thoughtful ruler.

The Torah also hints that Joseph's tyrannical stance was not part of the original divine plan. When Joseph first appears before Pharaoh to explain his dreams, he repeatedly insists on the Divine origin of the dreams and of their interpretation. Joseph's economic plan is delineated as an integral part of the dreams' explanation:

Now therefore let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh do this and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven years of plenty. And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh and let them keep it for food in the cities. And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt, that the land perish not through the famine (41: 33-41: 36).

As if to reemphasize the Divine origin of the plan, Pharaoh says to Joseph "Since God has shown thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art" (41: 39). But Joseph's enacted policy deviates from the original on several points. The original plan does not mention selling the grain back to the Egyptians, but states simply that the "food shall be for store in the land." The purpose of the plan was not to increase Pharaoh's power, but to guarantee that "the land perish not through the famine." Also, the original plan did not call for uprooting the people from the land and concentrating the population in the cities.

The critical attitude of the Torah towards Joseph's administration again becomes evident if we compare his treatment of the Egyptians to God's care for his people, the Children of Israel. Joseph's policies repeatedly fail even to approach the ideal of imitatio Dei. While Joseph reinforced the Pharaoh's claim to rule by enslaving his people, God's claim to rule, as expressed in the first Commandment, is founded on having freed the Jews from slavery. Joseph's acquisition of land for Pharaoh was a further deprivation of people's rights, whereas God decrees "The land shall not be sold forever, for the land is mine" (Gen. 25: 33) in order to assure that no one be forever deprived of his patrimony. During their sojourn in the desert, God gave manna freely to the Children of Israel and did not use food to extort power.

The Torah's account of Joseph's early life presages his moral failure as ruler of Egypt. From the outset Joseph is depicted as having somewhat narrow social horizons. As the favorite son, he gets on well with his father. Yet, Joseph seems to be incapable of consideration for his brothers. He informs on them to their father and evokes their jealousy by relating to them his dreams of dominion over the whole family. Isaac and Jacob before him had been selected as sole inheritors over their brothers and Joseph's brothers must have suspected that he was preparing to follow suit by usurping their collective succession of Jacob. Eventually, Joseph's insensitivity towards his brothers led to his enslavement and exile.

In Egypt, Joseph's life continues its pattern of narrow loyalty to his immediate superior. When the wife of his master, Potiphar, tries to seduce him, Joseph does not resist on general moral grounds; rather, he cites his personal obligation to his master. After being unfairly incarcerated, he gains the trust of his new master, the warden. Thus, Joseph takes upon himself the administration of a prison which, from his own experience, he knows to be an instrument of less than perfect justice. Finally, he is brought before Pharaoh. As always, he quickly directs all of his energies to serving the new master. Once more, his moral horizons are cramped. His only loyalties are to Pharaoh. Just as he was prepared to sacrifice his brothers' trust in order to ingratiate himself with his father, so Joseph is ready to disregard the well-being of an entire nation in order to gain yet more power and wealth for Pharaoh. The classical Jewish commentators explain that the verse "and Joseph brought the money to Pharaoh's house" (Gen. 47: 14) is intended to demonstrate his moral stature; Joseph did not take money for himself. Unfortunately, this singular devotion to Pharaoh is constitutive of Joseph's entire political morality.

The Torah's implicit criticism of Joseph is not enough. In the Jewish scriptures, moral wrongdoing, especially on the part of heroic figures, inevitably brings ill consequences in its wake. Thus, Miriam was stricken with leprosy after speaking ill of Moses. Moses himself was not allowed to enter the land of Israel on account of his sins. The house of Eli lost its title to the position of high priest because he failed to restrain the blasphemous behavior of his children. Could it then be possible that no evil came of Joseph's despotism?

In order to answer that question we must sketch the changes in Egyptian culture and society brought about by Joseph's policies.

The Torah does not offer us much information about the political culture of Egypt before Joseph's rule, but it can be assumed that the innovations instituted by Joseph were unknown prior to his coming to power. Since the Egyptians gave up their land rights to Pharaoh, we may infer that the right to possess land was previously respected in Egypt. Since the Egyptians sold themselves into slavery, we may assume that they had previously enjoyed the status of freemen. Since Joseph decreed that the Egyptians must give one-fifth of their harvest to Pharaoh, we may assume that this tax did not previously exist. By working backwards, we arrive at a picture of Egypt prior to Joseph's innovations, an Egypt where citizens enjoyed a political culture which granted them the status of freemen and the right to own property and which placed ceilings on taxation. By instituting the new policies Joseph completely disrupted the original political culture.

In a normative vacuum, individuals and groups can flourish only if they enjoy a special relationship with those in power. Thus, in Joseph's time, the children of Israel prospered in Egypt by reaping the benefits of unabashed nepotism. After Joseph's death their fortunes would change. The connection with Pharaoh would be broken and there would exist no commonly accepted framework of rights to protect them. The Torah makes this quite plain. Thus, the verse which begins the story of Israel's enslavement states simply: "Now there arose a new King over Egypt, who knew not Joseph" (Exod. 1: 8), as if to explain all that follows.

In a society stripped of political morality, sudden mass enslavement and the murder of all male children can become feasible options of policy. It was under Joseph's initiative that the entire Egyptian population became enslaved to Pharaoh. Could the Jews, then, complain if they were required to serve Pharaoh as slaves? Ironically, they were forced to build treasure cities, doubtless to store wealth brought to the Pharaohs through Joseph's initiatives.

Thus, the Torah's condemnation of Joseph's administration is complete. It disassociates Joseph's behavior from the original Divine purpose. The plight of Egypt under Joseph is described with pathos. The shortcomings of his rule, in contrast to Divine example, become plainly obvious. Finally, the entire Jewish nation suffers as a result of his narrow loyalty to the sovereign and disregard for the rights of the governed.

*Koren Jerusalem Bible translation, Jerusalem, 1969. All quotes from Genesis if not otherwise noted. Names are given in their conventional Anglicized forms.
** Genesis 41: 44: "I am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt" is taken by Rashi and other classical commentators to mean the power to make war and not generalized, central authority.

Wittgenstein's Scapegoat (an article for Yom Kippur)

2005-10-09T14:30:00.000+02:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. This is a slightly corrected version of the article that originally appeared in Philosophical Investigations 17:4:604-12 (1994).

In his essay "Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual"1, Rush Rhees quotes with approval a remark written by Wittgenstein several months before he began writing his comments on Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. The remark refers to the ritual of the scapegoat, one element in the elaborate procedures described in the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus. These procedures served two functions; they were necessary for Aaron's safe entry into the Shrine (Lev.16:3) and, more generally, constituted the rite of the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:29-34). Here is a translation of the verses dealing specifically with the scapegoat:

Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the Lord at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the Lord and the other marked for Azazel. Aaron shall bring forward the goat designated by lot for the Lord, which he is to offer as a sin offering; while the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be left standing alive before the Lord, to make expiation with it and to send it off to the wilderness for Azazel...When he has finished purging the Shrine, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar, the live goat shall be brought forward. Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated man. Thus the goat shall carry on him all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (Lev.16:7-9;20-22)2

And now Wittgenstein's comment:

The scapegoat on which sins are laid and which goes out into the wilderness with them, is a false picture and like all the false pictures of philosophy. Philosophy might be said to purify thought from a misleading mythology.3

Wittgenstein's comment is of singular importance for the exposition and defense of his ideas on religion. His followers have been frequently accused of "Wittgensteinian Fideism", an epithet coined by Kai Neilsen4 to refer to their alleged unwillingness to criticize religion. Here, at last, in Wittgenstein's comment, is an instance in which the criticism of a particular religious practice is undertaken by the master himself. Wittgenstein's disciples are well aware of the comment's apologetic value. In his book Belief, Change and Forms of Life 5 D.Z. Phillips quotes the comment in order to demonstrate that "one cannot ascribe to Wittenstein the view that anything that is called religious or ritualistic is free from confusion." Rhees himself originally introduced the comment in order to dispell the impression that "Wittgenstein was coming forward in defense of the ancient rituals".6

Wittgensteinian criticism of the scapegoat ritual is philosophically problematic. It requires the underlying assumption that we possess an infallible appreciation of ancient Israelite sensibilities. To quote Rhees, "Wittgenstein thought the symbol, in the role that was given it, was badly mistaken."7 In order to make such a judgment, Wittgenstein would have to know a) what account of the expiation of sin would make sense for the ancient Israelite religion and b) how the ancient Israelites were likely to misinterpret the symbolism of the scapegoat. Rhees suggests that the ancient Israelites thought along the following lines:

If the people assembled here do bear the sins of their fathers, and of their brothers now living, then why should the priest not bring in some animal to be made one of them in this sense only - that it bears their sins - and then, after laying his hands on it, send it with their sins away from them into the wilderness?'

Rhees himself admits that "it is hard to see the substitution in the scapegoat that delivers them of their sins. I do not know how they thought of this. Nordoes anyone now." Yet he concludes with the non-sequitor "This does not affect the point Wittgenstein is making."

After freely admitting that he lacks a basic understanding of what he sees as the central point of the scapegoat ritual, Rhees still remains confident enough to lable it as misleading. The conventional dictates of interpretational charity point to a different conclusion. If a particular interpertation of an ancient ritual implies that the ritual was essentially flawed, this should motivate us to reexamine the validity of the interpretation itself. More specifically, we should consider the possibility that the investigator had inadvertently sought in the ritual the expression of ideas native to his own culture yet absent in the culture in which the ritual was actually practiced. In particular, while the scapegoat ritual might seem misleading to someone living in a Christian culture, it may have been completely unproblematic for Jews living before the rise of Christianity. After all, it is meaningless to talk about a "picture" being false outside of any cultural context. It is equally meaningless to talk about a ritual presenting a particular "picture" in an extra-cultural sense. Rhees does demonstrate some concern for the importance of the cultural context of ritual. H e believes that his interpretation of the scapegoat is grounded in an appreciation of tribal notions of "bearing the sins of others", ie. that one may bear the sins committed by the members of one's family, living or dead. Against this I contend that Rhees's attempt to uncover the source of the scapegoat's misleading nature merely underscores his own cultural prejudices. Let us first examine his analysis of the linguistic description of the ritual:

When Wittgenstein calls this rite a misleading picture, he may mean something like this:

consider
1)"Children carry the sins of their fathers."
2)"A goat, when consecrated, carries the sins of the people."

In the first sentence "carry" is used in the sense of the whole sentence. In the second sentence "carry" seems to mean what it does in "The goat carries on his back the basket in which we put our fire wood"; and yet it can't mean that.

It is always dangerous to subject a translation to linguistic analysis. In the present instance, the Hebrew verb translated as "carry" in Leviticus simply does not possess exactly the same range of meaning as the English word "carry". Perhaps this point is not sufficiently philosophical; but can Rhees be seriously suggesting that a proper understanding (an understanding so precise that it may serve as the basis for the rejection of the symbolism it means to explain) of the Old Testament may be gained through the analysis of contemporary English usage? Exodus 34:7 has been translated as Extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. The same verb which was translated as "carrying" in Leviticus is here translated as "forgiving". The philological situation does not allow for easy analogies to English.

Problems of interpretation aside, it is possible to develop a much more charitable interpretation of the scapegoat based on Rhees's own schema. Consider the remark made by Hegel after first seeing Napoleon: “This morning I saw the Emperor - this world-soul - ride through the town."8 Presumably, Napoleon was riding on a horse. The horse bore Napoleon on his back. Hegel's remark might be restated as "This morning I saw a horse bearing a world-soul". Compare the following two sentences:

A) The Emperor bears a world-soul.
B) The horse bears a world-soul.

We may now rewrite Rhees's comment:

In the first sentence "bears" is used in the sense of the whole sentence. In the second sentence "bears" seems to mean what it does in "The horse bears on his back the basket in which we put our fire wood"; and yet it can't mean that.

The point is, given the context of Hegel's statement, that it can mean just that. Napoleon's horse was just a horse; he let his master worry about the consciousness of freedom. Although B) may sound like a joke, it is not hard to imagine a cultural situation in which it could become a perfectly normal and comprehensible utterance, i.e. if Hegel's remark had entered into to everyday speech as a way of referring to Napoleon. I would suggest that Rhees's statement 2) about the scapegoat be understood in the same fashion. The ritual of the scapegoat was in fact symbolic; it symbolized God's forgiveness for the sins of the people, the sins had been symbolically banished to the uninhabited wasteland. However, it was unnecessary for the goat to substitute for anyone or be granted honorary membership in the nation of Israel. No one had to take these sins upon himself; God was going to forgive the sins, make them "go away". The high priest symbolically placed the people's sins on the goat - but this does not mean that the goat was thought to have taken on some kind of spiritual responsibility for them. The goat's role was purely practical; he served as a means of transportation. Perhaps this would be clearer to us if instead of merely uttering a verbal confession the priest had tied a written list of sins to the goat's head. The goat's job would be to physically carry the list far away to the wilderness. Of course there was no written list, but we can hardly fault the ancient Israelites for not introducing yet another material element into a ritual which was meant to express an entirely spiritual concern.

A comparison with a Jewish ritual, known as tashlih, which is still observed today, may make this clearer. On the afternoon of the first day of the Jewish New Year, it is customary to visit a natural body of water, throw crumbs of bread into it, and read certain verses from Scripture, including Micah 7:19:

He will take us back in love; He will cover up our iniquities, You will hurl all their sins into the depths of the sea.

The point of this ceremony is to symbolize the longing for divine forgiveness. It might be said that the bread crumbs represent sins, and that they are borne away by the waters of the river or stream. No one would think that the water was somehow going to suffer for the sins of the participants in the ritual, or that Micah meant to say that the depths of the sea would be spiritually burdened with the sins of men. The point is that the sins are forgiven, cast away to the inaccessible depths from which they can never return.

Even when understood in this way, the scapegoat ritual (or rather the entire ritual procedure of the Day of Atonement of which the scapegoat was merely one element) might still have been misconstrued by some worshippers as mechanically forcing God to forgive their sins. The same might be said of the tashlih ceremony, or for that matter, of the Christian sacraments. In fact, this kind of misunderstanding is endemic to practically all religious ritual and hardly gives cause to isolate the scapegoat for special criticism.

The deeper cultural roots of the misunderstanding of the scapegoat ritual become clear a few lines later in Rhees's article:

Perhaps we'd not find it incongruous - we'd not find the picture jams in in symbolizing what is intended for it - if you said that a man might take on himself the sins the people have had to bear, and to offer himself in atonement for them. But a goat?

Rhees has let the cat out of the bag. The notion of a man taking on the sins of others and offering himself (or should I write Himself) in atonement for them is all too familiar. Rhees has been mislead by the application of a picture - the Christ idea - to a culture in which it simply had no application. I would suggest that the "false picture" which the scapegoat is thought to project was simply not available to those who actually performed and observed the ritual.
By modeling his interpretation of the scapegoat ritual on the crucifixion, Rhees reduces it to a kind of confused religious farce. Of course, a goat does not make for a terribly impressive Christ figure. Worse yet, the ritual does not make for a convincing analogy to the crucifixion. Scripture gives us no reason to believe that the goat suffered at all: and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness, not such a terrible fate for an animal living in a culture with an active sacrificial cult! (Later, Talmudic, sources do state that the goat was killed in the wilderness, but apparently the point of this was to make sure that it did not wander back into inhabited territory)9. But why force an analogy which merely obscures that which it is meant to make clear? Isn't it more reasonable to conclude that the scapegoat is simply not comparable to Christ?

Ever since Peter Winch published his celebrated book The Idea of a Social Science and his subsequent essay, "Understanding a Primitive Society"10, philosophers in the Wittgensteinian camp have attacked the idea that the magic and ritual of primitive societies constitute some failed form of proto-science. They view this idea as the product of the imposition of Western thinking on non-Western societies; perfectly good magic is misinterpreted as hopelessly bad science. By forcing the scapegoat ritual into a Christological mold, Rhees becomes subject to an exactly parallel criticism. Certainly if we are prohibited from reducing magic to bad science, we should avoid reducing biblical Judaism to bad Christianity.

Phillips's treatment of Wittgenstein's comment offers no improvement on Rhees. Before quoting Rhees at length, he offers his own version of the scapegoat ritual:

In Leviticus we are told that on the Day of Atonement, a goat said to be laden with the sins of the people is driven into the wilderness, the abode of Azazel, leader of the evil angels. As the scapegoat is driven into the wilderness, so the sins of the people depart with it to the spirits of darkness to whom they belong.11

Even a cursory comparison of this description with the text of Leviticus (unless by "Leviticus" Phillips means "Leviticus as translated in the Syriac version" rather than the Masoretic Hebrew text, the ancient Septuagint and Vulgate translations, or any of the modern translations) makes it clear that Phillips places the scapegoat in the worst possible light. Scripture makes no mention of mythic elements such as "evil angels" and "spirits of darkness". The meaning of the word "Azazel"(which is not capitalized in the Hebrew, since that language lacks capitalization) is not explained by the text; it may designate a geographical location. Most translations I have seen treat it as such. Phillips's description does reflect, without any of their scholarly caution, the views of some modern Bible researchers. Yet Phillips goes much farther than they do in depicting the ritual in crassly barbaric terms. Father Roland de Vaux, in his classic work, Ancient Israel arrives at an interpretation of the scapegoat similar to that of Phillips; and then he adds:

It is important to remember that the transferring of sins and the expiation which results from it are said to be effective only because the goat is presented before Yaweh (v. 10): Yaweh brought about the transfer, and the expiation.12

Someone who had only read Phillips's description of the ritual might not even be aware that God was thought to have any role in it, or that it was part of the practice of a monotheistic religion. Certainly he gives no indication that the ritual might be intended to express some more subtle sentiment through symbolic means.

After reproducing Rhees's discussion Phillips quotes from The Interpreter's Bible:

Christ, as identified with man in his shame and sin, rejected by men and driven away bearing their sins and done to death for their forgiveness, is symbolically depicted, crudely and inadequately yet really, in the scapegoat.13

Phillips then comments:

Notice that here one has the possibility of criticism within a tradition. The ritual concerning the scapegoat is called crude and inadequate.

While the quotation from The Interpreter's Bible offers a fine example of the Christian reinterpretation of Judaism, it says nothing against the fact that the scapegoat ritual, as an anthropological datum, had absolutely nothing to do with Christ. One might as well criticize the rituals of Africa's Azande tribesmen for so poorly symbolizing the Immaculate Conception! As for Phillips's claim that this constitutes a "criticism within a tradition", one must wonder exactly which tradition he is talking about- that of ancient Judaism, which apparently found no fault with the scapegoat ritual, or that of Christianity, which radically reinterpreted the ritual in terms of a doctrine which had not yet been formulated during the period in which the ritual was actually practiced. It seems a bit messy to offer an example which spans the gap separating two theologically distinct and historically mutually antagonistic religions as an illustration of "criticism within a tradition". I would like to take this opportunity to point out a much "cleaner" example.

The Old Testament itself offers clear evidence of the rejection of a ritual element belonging to the ancient Israelite tradition due to the inherently confusing nature of its symbolism. I refer to the copper serpent from Numbers 21:9:

Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover.

Considering the Israelites' much lamented predilection for the worship of graven images, it is not hard to imagine the "false picture" which Moses’ creation projected to the people. Much later, in the course of carrying out his religious reforms, King Hezekiah destroyed the serpent. The author of Kings apparently approved:

He did what was pleasing to the Lord...He also broke into pieces the copper serpent which Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan. (II Kings 18:3;4)

Given such a well documented case of "criticism within a tradition" why pick on a scapegoat?

NOTES
1) Pp. 450-484 of Essays on Wittgenstein in Honor of G.W. Wright, vol. 28 of Acta Philosophica Fennica (Amsterdam 1976).
2) All biblical quotations are from the Jewish Publication Society of America's translation (Philadelphia 1962 and 1978).
3) As translated by D.Z. Phillips in his Belief, Change and Forms of Life (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey 1986) pg.30.
4) See his "Wittgensteinian Fideism", Philosophy Vol. xlii no.161 pp. 191 - 209. 5) Phillips pg. 27.
6) Rhees pg. 459.
7) Rhees pg.460. All further quotations of Rhees are from this and the following page.
8) As quoted in Shlomo Avineri's Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge 1972,pg.63)
9) See the Mishna, Tractate Yoma 6:6. The unimportance of the scapegoat's death for the proper completion of the ritual may be inferred from Yoma 6:8, according to which the high priest was informed of the goat's arrival at the wilderness, but not of its death.
10) (London 1958) and American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 1 no. 4 pp. 307-324.
11) Phillips pp. 29-30.
12) Volume II: Religious Institutions (New York 1965) pg. 509. This page also contains a discussion of the problems of identifying "Azazel" in the various versions and translations of the Bible.
13) Phillips pg. 31.

Saving the Akedah from the Philosophers

2005-10-09T13:55:00.000+02:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. This paper appears without minor editorial modifications in The Jewish Bible Quarterly 27(1999):3:167-173.

The Philosopher's Akedah

Genesis 22 tells how God called upon Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountaintop in the land of Moriah. Abraham dutifully went about executing the divine request. He set off with Isaac for the appropriate spot, built an altar, bound him up as a sacrificial victim, and drew his knife to slay the boy. At the last possible moment, an angelic voice from heaven called off the slaughter. Abraham replaced Isaac with a ram for sacrifice, and the angel announced the blessings which God bestowed upon Abraham in recognition of his faithfulness. This astonishing series of events is usually referred to as the binding of Isaac, or in Hebrew, the Akedah.

Few stories in the Torah have aroused as much philosophical interest as the Akedah. Philosophers usually discuss it under the disciplinary rubric of "Divine Commands and Morality". Their reading of the story is seemingly straightforward: God has commanded Abraham to murder Isaac. Murder (and especially murder of one's own child) is obviously immoral. Therefore the Akedah story offers the classic example of a clash between the demands of God and those of morality. Which authority deserves our ultimate allegiance? The great philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested a solution which reflects his typically Enlightenment willingness to question the authority of Scripture:

Abraham should have replied to this putative divine voice: "That I may not kill my good son is absolutely certain. But you who appear to me are God is not certain and cannot become certain, even though the voice were to sound from the very heavens"...[For] that a voice which one seems to hear cannot be divine one can be certain of...in case what is commanded is contrary to moral law. However majestic or supernatural it may appear to be, one must regard it as a deception.1

Like other issues brought up by philosophers and theologians in connection with the Akedah, Kant's point has it's own intrinsic interest. However, it is my contention that the association of these issues with the akedah is based on a complete misunderstanding of the biblical story itself. In fact, while the Akedah is crucial for Judaism, it is useless for philosophy.

Kant's interpretation of the Akedah takes into account only two of the factors which Abraham had to consider before taking the knife to Isaac: God's putative command and the moral prohibition of murder. The philosopher forgets a third all-important element, God's promise to Abraham that Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac; and I will maintain My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring to come (Gen. 17:19).2 If Abraham had put a permanent end to Isaac's life, God's word would have been broken. One might say that while God command tested Abraham's obedience, Abraham's obedience tested God's faithfulness to the covenant. On Mount Moriah, both God and Abraham proved their devotion to the fulfillment of the divine word.

Given the promised covenant with Isaac, how was Abraham to understand his situation at the Akedah? On the one hand, Abraham's faith demanded that he obey God's command to slaughter Isaac. On the other hand, his faith equally demanded that he believe God would keep his covenant with Isaac. Abraham knew that he must do what he must do, but that somehow Isaac would live to inherit his blessings none the less.

Abraham's faith in the divine promise must modify our appraisal of the moral implications of his intended sacrifice of Isaac. Since the fulfillment of the covenant required that no evil befall Isaac, Abraham had no need to fear that in obeying God his son would be injured. Even if he had slit Isaac's throat, he would not invite moral reproach. Every day surgeons cut open the bodies of their patients and there is nothing wrong with that. Similarly, there is nothing morally reprehensible about a father slitting the throat of his son if he knows for a certainty that this could not possibly injure the child in any way. Given God's absolute guarantee of Isaac's safety, Abraham's predicament is of no particular interest for ethics.

Foremost among the akedah's philosophical interpreters is Soren Kierkegaard in his classic treatise, Fear and Trembling.3 In contrast to Kant, Kierkegaard is well aware of the importance of God's promised covenant with Isaac for the understanding of Abraham's predicament. He explicitly mentions that “Abraham believed...that he was to grow old in the land, honored by the people, blessed in his generation, remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life” (pg.35). Though Kierkegaard is aware of God's promise, this does not save him from misinterpreting the akedah. In his eagerness to make Scripture speak to moderns, Kierkegaard refuses to take seriously the possibility of the miraculous. While Abraham may have believed that things would work out for the best, Kierkegaard calls this belief "preposterous" (ibid.). Such irrational faith certainly cannot solve the Akedah's challenge to morality. Abraham's trust in God was too absurd to excuse his behavior before the tribunal of rational ethics. Kierkegaard is left with no choice but to understand the Akedah in terms of "the teleological suspension of the ethical".

From the viewpoint of Biblical Judaism there was nothing "preposterous" about divine intervention in earthly events. Abraham, who had just witnessed the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah, would have every reason to believe that God could intervene, even in the worst possible situation, to save Isaac. Furthermore, the abstract issue of "Divine Commands and Morality" which concerns Kierkegaard and his fellow philosophers is out of place in the Scriptural context. Just a few chapters (Gen. 18:19) before the Akedah, God proclaimed that

I have singled him [Abraham] out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, in order that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what He has promised him.

According to this verse, the "way of the Lord" and "doing what is just and right" are identical. God charged Abraham with the mission of instructing adherence to divinely endorsed morality. What would be the point of testing his adherence to divinely endorsed immorality? There is no need for Genesis to discuss the conflict between divine commands and morality because this was simply not considered a problem for biblical Judaism. The Torah sees itself not merely as a collection of amoral religious fiats, but rather as offering a system of law whose ethical validity should be evident to any thinking human being:

Observe ...[God's commands] faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, "Surely that is a great nation of wise and discerning people"...What great nation has laws and norms as perfect as all this Teaching that I set before you this day? (Deut. 4:6,8)

Kierkegaard wrote ironically of a reader of the Akedah narrative that, "had [he] known Hebrew, he perhaps would [have] easily understood the story and Abraham" (pg. 26). Indeed, if he had only understood the ancient Hebrew mentality, Kierkegaard may have easily understood the story himself. From the biblical standpoint, Kierkegaard's openness to the possibility of a conflict between morality and duty to God seems "preposterous", while Abraham's faith in the covenant was perfectly reasonable.

The Unphilosophical Akedah

By now, many readers of this essay will be exasperated. I have, it would seem, too "easily understood" the Akedah. Abraham knew that no harm would come Isaac's way, so he could cheerfully climb the heights of Moriah without a second thought. The great test of faith appears trivial. This reaction reveals how thoroughly ensnared we have become in the philosopher's reading of the Akedah. All we look for is the conceptual puzzle, the theological paradox. We read the story as if it were an example from a text-book on ethics, and we are disappointed by its lack of intellectual interest.

Often, what is trivial in theory is profound in practice. Had Abraham been asked to "solve" the problem of the Akedah in a philosophy examination essay, there would be nothing impressive about the story. However, Abraham was called upon to take not merely a pencil to a sheet of paper but rather a knife to his son's throat. His faith in the covenant was so great that he was actually prepared to perform the terrible deed, knowing that God would somehow spare Isaac. The akedah did not test Abraham's grasp of existential theology, but rather the true mettle of his obedience to God's command and his trust in God's promise.

A test of trust need not strain reason. Consider the exercise popularized by psychologists in which I am asked to fall straight back into my friend's waiting arms. If my friend does not catch me, I may be seriously injured. I know my friend realizes this and would never allow such a thing to happen. In principle, I should be prepared to participate in the exercise without hesitation. However, at the moment of truth, my faith may easily fail me. While the conscious regions of my mind command that I fall, my very body resists. My entirely rational trust in my friend has not penetrated into my muscles and bones. Yet Abraham's hand did clutch the knife. The Akedah teaches us that absolute trust in God had permeated every aspect and level of Abraham's existence. That Abraham had no reason to question his faith on intellectual grounds makes his adherence to it in practice no less impressive.

The Defense of Sodom and Gomorrah

Once we understand that Genesis is more concerned with the spiritual development of living, embodied human beings than with posing abstract theological paradoxes, other episodes in Abraham's career become more intelligible. For instance, from the philosopher's standpoint, Abraham's haggling with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah seems ridiculous. When it came to sacrificing his own son, Abraham knew better than to question divine justice. What was the point of arguing about God's plans to punish blatantly corrupt cities? Abraham might be regarded as having failed in regard to Sodom and Gomorrah. Such is the view proposed by James Rachels,4 a leading writer on ethics:

...he [Abraham at the akedah] subordinated himself, his own desires and judgments, to God's command, even when the temptation to do otherwise was strongest. Abraham's record in this respect was not perfect. We...have the story of him bargaining with God over the conditions for saving Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. God said that he would destroy those cities because they were so wicked; but Abraham gets God to agree that if fifty righteous men can be found there, then the cities will be spared. Then he persuades God to lower the number to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, then twenty, and finally ten. Here we have a different Abraham, not servile and obedient, but willing to challenge God and bargain with him. However, even as he bargains with God, Abraham realizes that there is something radically inappropriate about it: he says, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes...Oh let not the Lord be angry...(Genesis 18:27, 30).

Taking into account that in the Sodom and Gomorrah episode, Abraham had not actually been commanded to do anything, Rachel's comments lose much of their force. If God wants to hurt someone, that is His affair. Our business remains, as always, to help each other in times of need. The Torah never denies our morally responsibility to ameliorate any and all human suffering, even suffering resulting from divinely inflicted (and ultimately justifiable) punishment. For instance: Eve's curse from God I will make most severe your pangs in childbearing; in pain shall you bear children (Gen. 3:16) was never understood as undermining the moral standing of the midwife's vocation of easing the birth process. Despite Adam's curse By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat (Gen. 3:19), we remain obligated to share our bread with the needy, even (especially!) when this lightens their burden of work.5 Although these considerations weaken the case against Abraham, we may still wonder whether Abraham was right to question God's decision. Was it not pointless to question God's obviously perfect and unchanging justice?

Here again we must remember that the Torah is concerned with Abraham as a complete human being rather than as an abstract theological cogitator. Of course, from a strictly theoretical standpoint, there is no room for Abraham's argument with God. Setting oneself against the almighty, omniscient and perfectly just Divinity is irrational. However, there are times when the spiritual price of strict rationality is too great. Entire cities stand to be annihilated; can theological casuistry silence Abraham's appeal? How coldhearted would Abraham have to be in order to resign himself to the cold logic of philosophy? What would have been left of Abraham's human solidarity had he stood idly by while God spoke of destroying whole communities?

Abraham could march forth to Moriah with the faith that God would keep his promise to make Isaac prosper. Faced with the terrible knowledge that God intended to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham came forward to defend them. Neither occasion involved a test of his theological acumen. In each case, Abraham acted as befits a living, caring, human being who is completely permeated with faith in the reality of God's words and actions.

The Meaning of the Akedah for Judaism Today

What the Akedah has lost in philosophical interest, in gains in its importance for Judaism and the Jewish people. Kierkegaard's brand of paradoxical theology has not traditionally appealed to Jews. It is true that Christianity has, at times, gloried in the "scandal" of its doctrine and praised the pure faith of those who believe in spite of their reason. However, as Leo Strauss pointed out, "Jewish orthodoxy based its claim to superiority over other religions from the beginning on its superior rationality."6 Far from invoking "the teleological suspension of the ethical", Judaism has traditionally dealt with apparent clashes between divine commands and morality by reinterpreting the divine commands (i.e. halacha – Jewish Law) in a way which takes into account moral concerns.

What Jews must attend to in the akedah story is Abraham's active trust in God and obedience to His word. Such trust and obedience was essential for Abraham, and later for the entire Jewish people, to fulfil their respective historic missions. Judaism today does not demand that we take our children up to some new Moriah, but it does ask that we educate them to form the next generation of Jews. History has taught that such a destiny may bring to them its own real dangers. While Abraham witnessed miracles and conversed with God, our experience of the divine is limited. Will we find the strength to share Abraham's trust in the covenantal promise, and will our trust be as well justified? Such are the questions which the Akedah poses for Jewish existence today.

Endnotes
1) From Kant’s Streit der Fakultaten as translated by Emil Fackenheim in his Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1973) pg. 34. What I call the "philosophical" reading of the akedah has such a strong hold on modern thinkers that even so staunchly Jewish a philosopher as Fackenheim admits to the importance of Kant's problematic for Judaism.
2) All scriptural quotations are from the New Jewish Publication Society translation.
3) Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (Walter Lowrie, translator) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941).
4) Page 42 of "God and Human Attitudes" in Paul Helm's (editor) Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.34-48.
5) See my "`And He Shall Rule Over Thee'", Judaism 37:4 (Fall 1988): 446-9. This principle does not contradict the requirement of our obedience to divine commands which call upon us to inflict justified suffering on the wicked, i.e. the punishments due to criminals under Jewish law. See my paper, “Interfering with Divinely Imposed Suffering” Religious Studies 36:95-102 (2000)
6) Leo Strauss. Spinoza's Critique of Religion (E. M. Sinclair, trans.) (New York: Schocken, 1965), pg. 30.

Pharaoh and the Freedom to Will the Good

2005-10-09T00:44:00.000+03:00

© Berel Dov Lerner. Originally published in Le'ela December 1999, 11-13.

Judaism passionately insists on the truth of two seemingly contradictory doctrinal claims: divine omnipotence and human freedom. On the one hand, any limitation on God’s power would constitute an affront to divine perfection. On the other hand, a denial of the notion that humans are the free authors of their thoughts and actions would drain the central concern of Judaism, i.e. the performance of God’s commandments, of its ethical and religious value. In order to avoid the conclusion that God is unable to affect our volitions, human freewill is usually viewed as resulting from God’s voluntary decision not to exercise His power over us. As Rabbi Akiva said, hareshut netuna (Avot 3:19), God grants us leave to do and think as we please.

Leaving aside the question of this solution’s philosophical validity, its scriptural validity has been the subject of longstanding concern for Judaism. The major source of scriptural difficulty derives from the notion of God’s “hardening” or “strengthening” someone’s heart. This expression appears to refer to God’s interfering with the reasonable course of someone’s thinking in order that they choose to act in an irrational and imprudently evil fashion. While scripture speaks of God similarly affecting the hearts of other biblical characters (see, for instance, Deut. 2: 30, Josh. 11: 20), the notion is first and most extensively used in reference to the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Several times during the course of the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh appears prepared to give into Moses’ demand that the Israelites be let out of Egypt, only to have his heart “hardened” by God (Ex. 9: 12; 10: 20, 27; 11: 10). His resolve strengthened by divine intervention, Pharaoh stands firm against Moses and so invites further catastrophes upon Egypt. Finally, when the Jews leave Egypt, God once more interferes to insure that Pharaoh sends his troops out after them (Ex. 14: 8), a decision which leads to the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

Many exegetes, both ancient and modern,[1] have tackled the problem of Pharaoh’s hardened heart. Maimonides offers one of the classic Jewish solutions to this problem. He explains in the Mishneh Torah (Hilkhot Teshuva 6: 3) that God did in fact interfere with Pharaoh’s moral autonomy, but that this was appropriate because Pharaoh belonged to the class of exceptionally evil people to whom the possibility repentance is denied in order that they not escape punishment for their terrible deeds. In the present essay I shall forward an explanation of why Pharaoh was particularly deserving of such treatment. My basic contention is that God’s tinkering with Pharaoh’s inner thoughts must be understood against the wider role of what might be called “mind control” in the story of the Exodus.

It is important to note that God is not the first character in the Exodus story to blatantly interfere with human autonomy. Interference with the human will is not a uniquely divine prerogative; it is an option available to anyone who is able to apply the requisite physical force. Indeed, the whole point of the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt was not economic, but rather it served as a technique for the control of an entirely different aspect of thought and behavior. Allow me to approach this ultimately quite obvious point in a round about way.

The Torah describes the work done by the Jewish slaves in Egypt as being b’farekh (Ex. 1: 13,14). This term is usually translated as "harsh" or "rigorous". The word reappears later in Leviticus 25:43 (and again in 25:46), in a verse limiting the powers of a master over his Hebrew slave: "You shall not rule over him ruthlessly [b'farekh], you shall fear your God."[2] Since the word b’farekh appears in a legal context, it requires a positive halakhic definition. Maimonides (Hilkhot Avadim 1: 16) states:

It is forbidden to work any Hebrew slave with rigor [b'farekh]. And what is rigorous work? It is work without a set limit, and unnecessary work whose only purpose is to keep him busy.

According to Maimonides, the category of avodat parekh includes work which has no genuine economic purpose. Such indeed was the nature of the drudgery performed by the Israelites in Egypt. Although the Egyptians obviously enjoyed the fruits of Israelite labour, originally and in essence the enslavement of the Jewish people was not instituted with an eye to Egyptian economic interests. Rather it was imposed as a shrewd method of social control, a strategy to change Israelite family life in order to address the threat of a burgeoning Jewish population. Pharaoh himself proclaims:

Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us, then, deal shrewdly with them, lest they increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies in fighting against us and gain ascendancy over the country (Exodus 1: 9-10).

The “solution” is arrived at immediately:

So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor; and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses (Ex. 1: 11).

This particular attempt at shaping the Israelite psyche does not succeed. Pharaoh’s taskmasters do not break the Jewish will to bring forth new life (Ex. 1: 12). However, Jewish resistance to the intended effects of Pharaoh’s policy should not blind us to the very real limitations of human self-determination. The Israelites of scripture are not absolutely self-determined existential heroes. Rather, they are imperfect human beings who must struggle for control over their own lives and minds. Jews have never blinded themselves to this aspect of their existence. Although Maimonides wrote in Hilkhot Teshuva (5: 2) that, “every human being may become righteous like Moses our Teacher”, anyone acquainted with his ethical works must know how aware he was of the psychological and social impediments to self-directed spiritual development.[3] In Exodus, the Torah makes us aware just how fragile human freedom can be.

The background of the incident to which I refer begins with Moses’ qualms regarding his ability to serve as God’s spokesman to the Israelites:

But Moses spoke up and said, “What if they do not believe me and do not listen to me, but say: The Lord did not appear to you?" (Ex. 4:1)

God replies by supplying Moses with a series of "signs" which will demonstrate the authenticity of his mission:

The Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” And he replied, “A rod.” He said, “Cast it on the ground.” He cast I on the ground and it became a snake; and Moses recoiled from it. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Put out your hand and grasp it by the tail” – he put out his hand and seized it, and it became a rod in his hand – “that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did appear to you." (Ex. 4: 2-5)

In the subsequent verses, God instructs Moses how to perform additional signs, instantly afflicting and curing his hand of leprosy (4: 5-7) and changing water from the Nile into blood (4: 9). Moses’ planned meeting is a great success:

Then Moses and Aaron went and assembled all the elders of the Israelites. Aaron repeated all the words that the Lord had spoken to Moses, and he performed the signs in the sight of the people, and the people were convinced. When they heard that the Lord had taken note of the Israelites and that He had seen their plight, they bowed low in homage (Ex. 4: 29).

So far we have a story which reflects respect for the autonomy of human reason. Moses realizes that the Israelites must be offered convincing evidence of the authenticity of his mission. The Israelites properly assess the signs presented to them by Moses and correctly concluded that God has decided to redeem them from slavery. The great medieval scholar, Rabbi Solomon ben Aderet, reads these passages as a veritable celebration of the independence of human thought:

To Israel, the heir of the religion of truth, the children of Jacob, the man of truth…it is easier to bear the burden of exile than to believe in anything before it is thoroughly and repeatedly examined and all its dross has been purged away, even though it appears to be a sign or a miracle. The undeniable evidence for Israel’s love of truth and rejection of anything which is doubtful can be seen in the relationship of Israel to Moses. In spite of the fact that they were crushed by slavery, yet when Moses was told to bring them the tidings of their redemption, he said to the Lord: “What if they do not believe me and do not listen to me, but say: The Lord did not appear to you?”[4]

While Moses is troubled with the epistemological niceties surrounding the reception of his message of hope, Pharaoh’s response to Israel’s new faith in the redemption is brutally practical. He simply commands its forceful destruction:

Let heavier work be laid upon the men, and let them keep at it and not pay attention to idle chatter (Ex. 5: 9).

The Torah explicitly dissuades us of any illusions regarding the invincibility of the human spirit. Oppression can destroy even the most rationally justified faith. In a later meeting with the Israelites, Moses tries to repeat his message of coming redemption, “But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage” (Ex. 6: 9). Religious conviction is not immune to the arguments of the taskmaster’s whip.

What does all of this say for the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart? It should now be clear why the peculiar nature of Pharaoh’s evil cried out for such special treatment. Pharaoh was a tyrant who brutally tried to rob people of their innermost freedom. He attempted to extinguish the Jew’s very will to continue the chain of life, and at one point, succeeded in closing their minds to the words of God. How fitting, then, that he too should have the final degree of moral obtuseness forced upon him. The Pharaoh who would destroy, in others, the possibility of faith, was himself made unreceptive to God’s message, and in this found his downfall.

[1] Joseph Albo's Sefer HaIkkarim 4: 25 offers an important alternative to Maimonides' interpretation. Recently, Pharaoh's hardened heart has attracted new interest among philosophers of religion. See Eleonore Stump, "Sanctification, Hardening of Heart, and Frankfurt's Concept of a Person", Journal of Philosophy 85:8 (August 1988): 395-420, Norman Kretzman, "God Among the Causes of Moral Evil: Hardening of Hearts and Spiritual Blinding", Philosophical Topics 16: 2 (Fall 1988): 189-214, and David Schatz, "Hierarchical Theories of Freedom and the Hardening of Hearts", Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXI (1997): 202-224, which explicitly favors Albo's interpretation over its modern competitors.
[2] All biblical quotations are from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia and New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1988).
[3] See, for instance, the drastic efforts which Maimonides says must be made in order to neutralize evil societal influences in Mishneh Torah, Deot 6: 1.
[4] Responsa no. 548, as translated in Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is not Alone: a Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1951) pg. 159 in footnote.

Could Moses' Hands Make War? (On Moses' Human Limitations)

2005-10-09T00:09:00.000+03:00

Questions on the Mishnah

In Judaism, the “Written Law” contained in the first five books of the bible is interpreted and supplemented by the dynamic tradition of “Oral Law”. Originally, the Oral Law was in fact just that, an unwritten body of legal lore that was transmitted through speech and preserved in memory. It has long since been committed to writing, and has burgeoned into a huge and complex literature. Of course, the Oral Law can never be entirely captured by the written word simply because the collective future religious insights of the Jewish people cannot be contained in any finite library.

The Mishnah is the earliest canonical compilation of the Oral Law. It consists of six main subdivisions or “orders”, each of which contains several tractates, which are further divided into chapters. The chapters themselves are composed of a sequence of short, relatively independent paragraphs, each of which is referred to as a mishnah. Most of the Mishnah consists of laconically formulated rulings dealing with ritual, civil and criminal matters. It is therefore somewhat surprising to discover, in the third chapter of the tractate Rosh Hashana, a purely exegetical and theological statement:

Could it be that Moses' hands make war or break war? Rather [the verse's intention is] to tell you that when Israel gazed upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would prevail, and if not they would fall.

A bit of background will be necessary to make the Mishnah’s meaning clear. It refers to an incident recounted in the seventeenth chapter of the book of Exodus. Soon after leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea, the Children of Israel were attacked for the first time by their eternal nemesis, Amalek. The Torah tells us that in response to the attack, Moses sent forth Joshua to assemble an army to oppose the enemy. Meanwhile, Moses ascended a hill overlooking the scene of battle, taking with him Aaron, Hur and the "rod of God", which had assisted him in the performance of previous miracles. "And it came to pass", the Torah relates, "when Moses held up his hands, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed" (Exodus 17: 11). Eventually, Moses became incapable of keeping his hands up by himself, so he sat on a rock and let Aaron and Hur support his arms. With their help, Moses was able to hold up his hands until sunset and the completion of Israel's victory over the Amalekites.

The Mishnah wants us to know Moses himself was not directly responsible for the battle’s outcome. Rather, victory was dependent upon the reawakening of faith in the people who were inspired by his gesture. The Mishnah’s comment on this story raises some serious questions: Many great miracles are attributed to Moses, including several of the plagues in Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea and bringing forth water from the rock; why not simply add the defeat of Amalek to the list? How did the Israelites commitment to God effect their victory? What purpose is served by Moses’ miracle-working? Finally, and most pertinently to the theme of the present book, how do these issues bear upon Moses’ power and authority as a leader and prophet?

Miracles Establish Moses’ Authority

Clearly, one of the central purposes served by Moses’ performance of miracles is the establishment of his authority as a prophet of God and as the divinely chosen leader of the children of Israel. In his first encounter with God at the burning bush at Horeb, Moses is already concerned that elders of Israel will question the authenticity of his revelation and asks, “What if they do not believe me and do not listen to me, but say: The Lord did not appear to you?” God calms Moses’ worry by arming him with two convincing miracles, first, the metamorphoses of his staff into a snake, and second, the instant affliction of Moses’ hand with disfiguring leprosy and its equally sudden cure. God assures Moses, “And if they do not believe you or pay heed to the first sign, they will believe the second” (Ex. 4: 8). If, never the less, neither miracle should prove convincing, Moses “shall take some water from the Nile and pour it upon the dry ground; and the water that you have taken from the Nile will turn to blood on the dry ground” (Ex. 4: 9). Miracles continue to instill faith in Moses mission throughout the redemptive process. After witnessing the splitting of the Red Sea and the drowning of Egypt’s charioteers, “When Israel saw the wondrous power which the Lord had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord: they had faith in the Lord, and in His servant Moses” (Ex 14: 31).

Nowhere does the bible more clearly indicate the importance of Moses’ miracle working for his prophetic authority than in his eulogy contained in the closing verses of Deuteronomy:

Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display in the land of Egypt, against Pharoah and all his courtiers and his whole country, and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel.
(Deut. 34: 10-12)

These verses are of paramount theological importance for Judaism. If Moses can be proven preeminent among prophets, then the content of his prophecies (the Torah) will out-rank any possible future revelation. No prophet will ever have the authority to dismiss or contradict Moses’ teachings. Read this way, the verses seem to imply that Moses’ unequalled role as a miracle-worker underwrites the eternal validity of Torah and of Judaism itself as the religion of the Torah. Later we shall see that some Jewish thinkers, especially the great Moses Maimonides, balked at the notion that Judaism could be so directly dependent on the performance of miracles for its validation. In the meantime, a brief look at the early career of Joshua, Moses’ successor, will offer a final line of evidence for the importance of miracles for the establishment of Moses’ leadership.

The People Test Joshua

As everyone knows, Moses did not live to enter the Promised Land. The task of its conquest and settlement fell to his protege, Joshua. The first chapter of the Book of Joshua finds him soon after Moses’ death, being instructed by God to ready the people for the entry into Canaan. Joshua’s first order of business is to require from the members of the tribes of Reuben, Gad and half of the members of Menassah that they make good on their earlier promise to Moses. Numbers 32 relates how these tribes asked Moses to be allowed to settle outside of Canaan proper in the lands captured to the east of the Jordan river. Moses agreed to this on the condition that they joined the other tribes in the war of conquest. Now Joshua needs to be sure that he can depend on their military contribution. The two and a half tribes agree to keep their end of the bargain, but also make it clear that their continued allegiance will depend on the continuing validation of Joshua’s prophetic and political credentials:

They answered Joshua, “We will do everything you have commanded us and we will go wherever you send us. We will obey you just as we obeyed Moses; let but the Lord your God be with you as He was with Moses!”
(Josh. 1: 16-17)

It would seem that Joshua is in for some trouble. The people require that he prove to be no less close to God than was his predecessor, but Deuteronomy has stated that no other prophet will enjoy Moses’ miracle-working abilities and intimate relationship with God. Indeed, their demand is a bit unfair. After all, Joshua is merely carrying out a program whose details had already been announced in some detail by Moses himself. In any case, something must be done to secure Joshua’s standing, and once again the testimony of a miracle serves this purpose. Eventually, God speaks to Joshua reassuringly, “This day, for the first time, I will exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they shall know that I will be with you as I was with Moses” (Josh 3:7). If Israel came to believe in Moses after crossing the Red Sea on the dry land of the sea bed, Joshua’s authority is confirmed by Israel crossing the dry river bed of the Jordan, whose flow is miraculously cut off for their convenience. The significance of the event is clearly underlined by scripture, “On that day the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, so that they revered him all his days as they had revered Moses” (Josh. 4: 14). The point of the story seems to be that similarly impressive miracles produce similarly effective authority.

Miracles Invite Idolatry

If Moses’ miracle-working is crucial for the establishment of his authority, and by implication, the authority of the Torah itself, why is the Mishnah wary of attributing to him yet another miracle, i.e. the victory over Amalek? The beginning of an answer may be found in the very next statement of the Mishnah itself, which reads in its entirety as follows:

Could it be that Moses' hands make war or break war? Rather [the verse's intention is] to tell you that when Israel gazed upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would prevail, and if not they would fall. Similarly, you say, “Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover” (Num. 21: 8). Could it be that the snake kills or the snake revives? Rather, when Israel gaze upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would be healed, and if not, they would waste away.

Once again, some background should help clarify the Mishnah’s message. Numbers 21: 4-9 tells of one of the incidents of mutiny which occurred during Israel’s forty year journey through the desert. The people complain that they are tired and hungry and sorry they had left Egypt. God sends out poisonous seraph snakes to punish them, killing many. When the people plead with Moses that he intercede for them, God instructs Moses to make a copper figure of a snake which effects a cure in any victim of snake bite who simply looks at it. Once again the Mishnah insists that supernatural powers not be attributed to something or someone which appears to perform miracles. However, the radical nature of the Mishnah’s point can only be understood if we take into account further historical developments. Centuries after its creation, the copper snake would be destroyed by Hezekiah, the great reforming king of Judah:

He did what was pleasing to the Lord, just as his father David had done. He abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the copper serpent which Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan. He trusted only in the Lord the God of Israel…
(II Kings 18: 3-5)

From the Second Book of Kings we learn that the earthly emblems or conduits of divine power, even when instituted by God, can eventually be mistaken as being themselves divine. The copper snake made by Moses under God’s direct instruction came to be worshipped as a god. From the perspective of a king who “trusted only in the Lord God of Israel”, it had to be destroyed as would any other idol. If Hezekiah robbed the copper snake of its physical presence, the Mishnah undermines Nehushtan’s magical presence. The once powerful fetish is reduced to a mere sign post pointing towards heaven, God’s metaphorical home.

By comparing Moses with the copper snake, the Mishnah suggests that human conduits of divine power, such as great prophets and miracle-workers, can also become objects of idolatrous worship. The faithful might forget that the ultimate role of such religious leaders is merely to direct attention towards God himself. More radically, we might wonder whether Moses’ death might, under certain circumstances, become as necessary as Nehushtan’s destruction. That is a question which will be addressed later in this chapter.

An Alternative Foundation for Moses’ Authority

Moses, like Nehushtan, is reduced by the Mishnah into a mere pointer indicating God’s heavenly abode. However, we must recall that there remains a crucial difference between Moses and the copper snake. There is hardly any theological price to pay for demoting Nehushtan, a ritual object which was never granted an important place in the canonical rites of biblical Judaism. Moses, however, is the greatest of prophets, and his Torah is the ultimate revelation. His miracles are the guarantors of the Torah’s legitimacy. The inherent conflict between the need to establish Moses’ authority through his miracle working and the need to play down Moses’ supernatural powers in order to avoid his deification will not easily be resolved.

One obvious solution to our dilemma is to propose a different foundation for Moses’ authority. Some writers have tried to do this by pointing to the unique conditions surrounding Moses’ crucial revelatory moment, the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. For instance, the great medieval legal scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that:

Israel did not believe in Moses our Master because of the signs he performed, since one who believes because of signs is uncertain of heart, for it is possible that the sign was performed through trickery or magic. Rather, all of the signs which Moses performed in the desert were done as needed, not in order to bring evidence for [the validity of] his prophecy. It was necessary to sink the Egyptians - he split the sea and drowned them in it. They needed food – he brought down the manna. They thirsted – he split the rock [and out flowed water]. Korah’s congregation rejected him – the earth swallowed them up. And so forth with all the other signs. And what made them believe in him? The assembly at Mount Sinai. For our own eyes saw – and not some stranger’s and our own ears heard – and not some other’s, the fire and the thunder and the torches, and he approached the mist and the voice spoke to him and we heard, “Moses, Moses, go tell them such and such.” And so it is written, “face to face the Lord spoke to you (Deut. 5:4). And it is said, “It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, [but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today]” (Deut. 5:3). And from whence [do we know] that the assembly at Mount Sinai alone is proof of the truth of his prophecy, without any blemish? That it is said, “I will come to you in a thick cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and trust you forever” (Ex. 19: 9). From this it may be inferred that previous to this event [the assembly at Mount Sinai] they did not trust him with an eternal faith, but rather with a faith which leaves room for consideration and thought.
(Yesodei HaTorah 8:1)

While the last verses of Deuteronomy may create the impression that Moses’ unmatched success as a miracle-worker underwrite his prophet credentials, Maimonides plays down the importance of miracles and instead insists on the self-evident validity of the prophetic experience itself. Someone who experiences prophecy will be sure of its authenticity. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides learns this principle from the story of the binding of Isaac. According to Genesis 22, God instructed Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac to the land of Moriah and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering. Abraham obeys, and Isaac’s slaughter is cancelled at the very last moment by the command of an angelic voice. While this story has generated a whole literature of theological reflection, one point at least is clear; Abraham had no doubt about the validity of his prophetic experience. In the words of Maimonides’ Guide:

All that is seen by a prophet in a vision of prophecy is, in the opinion of the prophet, a certain truth, that the prophet has no doubts in any way concerning anything in it, and that in his opinion its status is the same as that of all existent things that are apprehended through the senses or through the intellect. A proof for this is the fact that [Abraham] hastened to slaughter, as he had been commanded, his son, his only son, whom he loved, even though this command came to him in a dream or in a vision. For if a dream of prophecy had been obscure for the prophets, or if they had doubts or incertitude concerning what they apprehended in a vision of prophecy, they would not have hastened to do that which is repugnant to nature, and [Abraham’s] soul would not have consented to accomplish an act of so great an importance if there had been a doubt about it.
(Guide III: 24)

So, according to Maimonides, the experience of revelation is so powerful and convincing that no prophet could ever doubt its reality and validity. While people may always wonder if a miracle was performed through some sort of trick, the authenticity of personal revelation is undeniable. At Mount Sinai, the entire Jewish people became privy to Moses’ prophetic experience, they shared with him a moment of revelation. For each member of the Israelite nation, Moses’ divine message possessed the unimpeachable authority of a personal encounter with God. The indelible impression made by this experience is foretold by God himself. Before the epiphany at Sinai, God says to Moses, “I will come to you in a thick cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and trust you forever” (Ex. 19: 9). By allowing the people to "eavesdrop" on Moses' prophetic experience, God gives them the ultimate, unimpeachable demonstration of the validity of Moses' prophecy.

Moses’ Death and Burial

Given the Mishnah’s concern over the danger of Moses’ deification, it may be theologically convenient to be able to fall back upon Maimonides’ alternate theory of Mosaic prophetic authority. Still, one might ask whether scripture itself shares the Mishnah’s anxieties. In other words, one might ask whether there is any indication that the Torah itself takes steps to combat the tendency towards making Moses into a false god. Jewish bible commentaries discover such a precaution in the story of Moses’ death. His last moments are described in final chapter of Deuteronomy:

Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the summit of Pisgah, opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan; all Naphtali; the land of Ephraim and Manasseh; the whole of the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea; the Negeb; and the Plain – the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees – as far as Zoar. And the Lord said to him; this is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “I will give it to your offspring.” I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there, in the land of Moab, at the command of the Lord. He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, near Beth-peor; and no one knows his burial place to this day.
(Deut. 34: 1-6)

Here we have a remarkably poignant depiction of the aged leader who has brought his people to the verge of accomplishing their national aspirations. He may only look upon the Promised Land, but is not allowed to enter it. Several commentators point to a strange detail in the biblical text. The burial places of most other biblical heroes become well-known shrines. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are all laid to rest in the Cave of Machpelah in the city of Hebron. Each succeeding generation has no difficulty finding the cave in order to bury its dead. Although Rachel, the remaining matriarch, was buried elsewhere, her grave’s location was hardly a secret, for, “Over her grave Jacob set up a pillar; it is the pillar at Rachel’s grave to this day” (Gen. 35: 20). Why then must the location of Moses’ grave remain a mystery, which “no one knows” “to this day” (Deut. 34: 6)?

Levi ben Gershom (known as Gersonides, d. 1344), one of the great Jewish philosophers and exegetes of the middle ages, confronts this difficulty in his commentary on Deuteronomy, relating it directly to the concerns of our mishnah. In his commentary on Deuteronomy 34:6, Gersonides explains that God did not allow the location of Moses’ grave to be known

For perhaps if the place of his grave would be known the coming generations would err and make of him a god, on account of the fame of the wonders which he performed. Do you not see that the copper snake made by Moses caused some to err on account of the station of its fashioner?

Gersonides fears that if the location of Moses’ grave would be known, it might attract inappropriate attention. Nothing is more natural for folk religion than to seek the aid of deceased prophets and saints who might intercede for the sinful before God. And nothing is more natural than the creation of new rituals and services to be performed at the graves of the great religious figures of past ages. It is a short step from beseeching the dead to pray on the behalf of the living to setting up the dead themselves as gods deserving of worship. All the more so in the case of Moses, a prophet who in life was known to be the greatest of miracle-workers. In order to avoid this danger, the place of Moses’ burial must never be known. By explicitly undermining any future attempt to set up a shrine at Moses’ grave, Deuteronomy signals its awareness of the danger of Moses’ deification.

Moses Had to Die

Earlier I mentioned that if we drew the Mishnah’s parallel between Moses and the copper snake to its ultimate and most radical conclusion, we must suppose that Moses’ death could become just as necessary as the snake’s destruction. This is, in fact, the view of Rabbi Meir Simkha of Dvinsk, one of the leading talmudic scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rabbi Meir Simkha possessed a rare mix of intellectual virtues best exemplified by his Torah commentary, Meshekh Hokhmah. That work makes striking theological and philosophical points, which are forwarded in terms of often daringly original recombinations of ideas taken from the whole breadth of rabbinic and biblical literature. Rabbi Meir Simkhah’s take on the role of Moses’ death displays all of these features.

The occasion of R. Meir Simkha’s comments on Moses’ death is somewhat surprising. By the time Moses delivered the series of farewell addresses which constitute the book of Deuteronomy, he was well aware that God did not intend to allow him to enter the promised land:

Now the Lord was angry with me on your account and swore that I should not cross the Jordan and enter the good land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage. For I must die in this land; I shall not cross the Jordan.
(Deut. 4: 21-2)

Most commentators understand these verses against the background of the story told in the twentieth chapter of Numbers. There we read that the shortage of water in the desert drove the children of Israel towards rebellion. God told Moses that he, together with his brother Aaron, should appear before the people and speak to a rock that would then give forth water. Instead, Moses spoke harshly to the people and hit the rock with his staff. Although the water came pouring miraculously out of the rock, God was not pleased and told Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them” (Num. 20: 12). The various biblical commentators vied with each other to best explicate the exact nature of the sin which Moses and Aaron had committed; was Moses’ wrong to scold the people so sharply, or perhaps Moses defied God’s command by striking the rock instead of speaking to it? Apparently, the proper interpretation of Deuteronomy 4: 21-2 will depend on how we explain the story in Numbers 20.

R. Meir Simkha, for his part, completely sidesteps the story in Numbers in his interpretation of the verses from Deuteronomy. Instead, he looks to their own immediate context within Moses’ address to the children of Israel. Oddly, these verses appear just after an extended warning against the dangers of idolatry, including the worship of images fashioned after the forms of animals of the land, sky or water, of images of human form, and the worship of heavenly bodies. What does the prohibition of idolatry have to do with Moses’ announcement of his impending death? R. Meir Simkha explains that with the words, “Now the Lord was angry with me on your account”, Moses meant to say that it was on account of the Israelite predilection for idolatry that God had to treat him with “anger”. After having so many miracles, there was a great danger that Moses might be deified by the people. But why must his death occur before entering the promised land? That is understandable in terms of the differences between the different generations of Israelites who had lived under Moses’ leadership.

The “Generation of the Wilderness”

Although the Torah tells us of many punishments suffered by the Israelites for their repeated acts of mutiny against God and his prophet Moses, one sin in particular brought about consequences which changed the entire nature of the journey from Egypt to Canaan. Having received the Ten Commandments and built the Tabernacle, the Children of Israel were ready to enter the Promised Land. In the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers we are told that God commanded Moses to choose a representative from each of the twelve tribes to participate in a scouting expedition of Canaan in preparation for its conquest. After successfully completing their mission, something went terribly wrong when it came time for the scouts to make their report to the people. They announced that while the land “does indeed flow with milk and honey” (Num. 13: 27), it was also populated by powerful inhabitants who lived in fortified cities. The Israelite conquest of Canaan became unthinkable. In a memorable phrase, the scouts claimed that compared to the gigantic Nephilim of Canaan, “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (Num. 13: 33). Although two of the scouts, Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua, exhorted the people to have faith that God would ensure them an easy victory, their words fell on deaf ears, “and the whole community threatened to pelt them with stones” (Num. 14: 10).

God told Moses that he would annihilate the Israelites and raise up a new nation of Moses’ progeny in their place. In response to Moses’ pleading, God lessened the punishment’s severity;

None of the men who have seen my presence shall and the signs that I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried me so many times an have disobeyed me shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers; none of those who spurned me shall see it”.
(Num. 14: 22-3)

More precisely, God instructed Moses to inform the people that

In this very wilderness shall your carcasses drop. Of all of you who were recorded in your various lists from the age of twenty years up, you who mutter against me, not one shall enter the land in which I swore to settlle you…Your children who, you said, would be carried off – these will I allow to enter; they shall know the land that you have rejected. But your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, while your children roam the wildernesss for fory years, corresponding to the number of days – forty days – that you scouted the land: a year for each day.
(Num. 14: 29 – 34)

The punishment for the “Sin of the Scouts”, as it is known in Rabbinic literature, casts a pale over the rest of the story of Israel’s journey to the Promised Land. Anyone who, as an adult, experienced slavery in Egypt and the miracles of the Exodus and at Sinai would die before entering Canaan. An entire generation, which came to be known as “The Generation of the Wilderness,” would perish in the course of forty years of wandering. On the other hand, those who would enter the land would recall, if at all, only dim childhood memories of those dramatic, yet distant events that constitute the main historical narrative of the Pentateuch. Paradoxically, R. Meir Simkha argues that the rebelliousness of the Generation of the Wilderness was, in some ways, spiritually beneficial.

The Advantages of Rebelliousness

All things considered, the rebelliousness of the Generation of the Wilderness was an unfortunate spiritual shortcoming that brought much anguish to the Children of Israel. On the other hand, it also afforded them a measure of spiritual protection. People who repeatedly ignored Moses’ authority were unlikely to mistakenly worship him as a god. This was the great advantage that the Generation of the Wilderness enjoyed over their children who entered Canaan. As long as members of the rebellious older generation were around, the danger of Moses’ deification was minimal. However, only the younger, faithful generation would enter the land, creating a society that would be primed to lose sight of Moses’ humanity. R. Meir Simkha writes:

One of the reasons why God willed that Moses die in the desert was that this man Moses brought water out of a flint boulder, abstained from having relations with his wife all the time he was in the desert [according to the Talmud, b. Shabbat 87], did not eat bread or drink water [forty days on Mount Sinai] gave them bread from heaven, killed the Amorite kings, and split the Red Sea. However, all the time that people of his age were alive, who remembered him as a youth and thought of themselves as his equal or superior, who continued being jealous of him and said, “all the community are holy […why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?]” (Num. 16: 3), and who gazed after Moses to raise suspicions regarding his action [according to the Talmud, b. Kiddushin 33], the Torah was not worried at all [that Moses would be deified]. However, after that entire generation of bickering complainers ended and was cut off, there remained a new generation which from its youth remembered only Moses’ supernatural acts…and in particular during their youth it had not been inscribed upon their hearts to attribute these to God, to whose name Moses called out, and with whom he spoke always. Therefor the higher wisdom feared lest upon their entry to the Land of Israel they would relate to him as to a god…

R. Meir Simkha goes on to explain that this is the precise meaning of the verse from Deuteronomy: “Now the Lord was angry with me on your account and swore that I should not cross the Jordan and enter the good land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage.” It was on account of God’s anxiety “on your account”, i.e. on account of the readiness of those entering Canaan to proclaim Moses’ divinity, that He was not allowed to enter the land. Moses, like the Copper Serpent, had to be removed from Israelite society in order to prevent idolatry. As long as the rebellious backsliders were around, Moses was safe. The faithfulness of those who entered the Land was his undoing. The audacity of R. Meir Simkha’s exegesis is remarkable. He has turned the biblical narrative on its head, finding a virtue in every vice of the Generation of the Wilderness.

Why the Battle with Amalek was Special

While it should now be understandable why the Mishnah would be anxious to dispel the impression that Moses was personally empowered to perform miracles, it remains unclear why of all of the miracles of Moses’ career, the victory over Amalek was seen to constitute an especially dangerous source of theological confusion. An important hint may be found in the words of R. Meir Simkha quoted above. He claims that Moses always called out God’s name and spoke with Him continuously. Indeed, the Torah portrays Moses as constantly conferring with God, praying and receiving revelation. He never works alone; the divine origin of every miracle in which Moses was involved is explicitly marked by communications with the Almighty. But not quite every miracle. Consider the biblical account of the battle with Amalek:

Amalek came forth and fought against Israel at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, “Pick some men for us, and go out and do battle with Amalek. Tomorrow I will station myself on the top of the hill, with the rod of God in my hand.” Joshua did as Moses told him and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went to the top of the hill. Then, whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; but when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.
(Ex. 17: 8-11)

Moses did not pray at Rephidim, nor did he receive divine instruction. The nearest thing to a sign of heavenly intervention in this story is the “rod of God”, a physical object which could be easily thought of as some kind of magic wand. Of course, Moses is not to blame here. One can easily imagine how God's rebuke of his hesitation at the Red Sea - "Why do you cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward!” (Exodus 14: 15) - was still fresh in Moses' mind. There is no time for standing on ceremony when the Children of Israel are in immanent danger. Never the less, Moses’ behavior does create the danger that people will attribute the miraculous victory to his own supernatural powers rather than to God. This, then, is the special difficulty that the Mishnah tries to address.

“And Moses’ Hands Were Heavy”

Considering how theologically problematic the story of Israel's battle with Amalek is for monotheistic religion, one would expect the Torah itself to make some gesture towards preventing its readers from attributing the victory to Moses' own powers. A hint, and perhaps more than a hint, of this concern may be found in a rather peculiar detail in the continuation of the Torah's narrative:

But Moses' hands grew heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur, one on each side, supported his hands; thus his hands remained steady until the sun set. And Joshua overwhelmed the people of Amalek with the sword.
(Exodus 17: 12-13)

It is unusual for the Torah to tell us of someone kept from acting out their intentions by simple human frailty. When Jacob decided to roll a large stone off of the well at Haran (Genesis 29: 10), his strength did not betray him. Moses himself is not recorded as having experienced difficulties when he fasted forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai (Deut. 9: 18) to appease God's anger after the sin of the golden calf. It is my contention that the Torah deliberately mentions Moses' weakness in order to avoid any confusion about his human status. True, Moses did not consult God before assuming his vigil on the hilltop. And it is also true that when he raised his hands, Israel prevailed. But if we ask "Could Moses' hands make war or break war?”, "Was Moses some kind of divine or semi-divine being gifted with autonomous magical powers?", the Torah answers in a firm negative. Not only is it beyond Moses' ability to determine the course of battle, he does not even posses complete control of his own body. How could he bear the burden of defeating the entire Amalekite nation if he was incapable of bearing the burden of his own two hands? And so the problem addressed centuries later by the Mishnah had already been answered by the Torah itself.

Back to Joshua

Once again, the Book of Joshua offers a useful comparison to a story about Moses. Chapter eight tells us how, following a failed first attempt, God instructs Joshua to try once again to conquer the town of Ai. A clever stratagem empties the city of its defenders. At that crucial moment Joshua receives a message from God:

The Lord said to Joshua, “Hold out the javelin in your hand toward Ai, for I will deliver it into your hands.” So Joshua held out the javelin in his hand toward the city. As soon as he held out his hand, the ambush came rushing out of their station.
(Josh. 8: 18-19)

The next six verses tell the tale of the day’s bloody battle, and then we read:

Joshua did not draw back the hand with which he held out his javelin until all of the inhabitants of Ai had been destroyed.
(Josh. 8: 26)

Here we have a quite strong parallel to the story of the battle at Rephidim. While Moses spent the duration of his battle holding up the “Rod of God” in his hand, Joshua held out his Javelin towards Ai until the town’s conquest was completed. Moses’ hands became heavy, but no mention is made of Joshua experiencing any particular difficulty. If Joshua's stamina lasted the whole day, why could Moses not endure a similar test? Because Joshua had been commanded by God to hold out his javelin, leaving no question that God had granted victory to Israel, while Moses chose to hold up the “rod of God” of his own volition, and some sign was required to demonstrate that Moses’ hands alone could not “make or break war.”

© Berel Dov Lerner

No Happy Ending for Esther (On Purim's tragic heroine)

2005-10-08T23:50:00.001+03:00

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Jews often view the Book of Esther (to which I shall refer by the single Hebrew word Megillah, or “scroll”) as a light, almost comical, biblical text. Its public reading takes place in the carnival atmosphere of the Purim holiday. Children, dressed in costumes, eagerly follow the reading in order not to miss any opportunity to drown out Haman’s name with their noisemakers. Despite these frivolous trimmings, it is obvious that a story about a failed attempt at genocide must possess some darker aspects.

The Megillah may be read as a guide to the politics of Jewish life in the Diaspora. It tells us of the dangers of anti-Semitism and of how such dangers may be neutralized. It describes anti-Semitism’s propaganda and real interests, but speaks also of the Jewish response and of Judaism's real concerns. In addition, it presents us with the background of a culture of government in terms of whose political discourse both anti-Semite and Jew must formulate their respective appeals. Perhaps most importantly, the Megillah has granted every new generation of Jews a textual foundation for further contemplation of these themes through the exegesis and supplementation of the biblical narrative.

The concerns I have mentioned are all addressed in a seemingly simple and straightforward way by the unadorned text of the Megillah. Haman’s anti-Semitism is motivated by a personal rivalry with Mordecai, who happens to be Jewish. In Haman’s speech to King Ahasuerus, political discourse shrinks to the single issue of demonstrating that it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate the Jews (3: 8). As if to underline the narrow scope of Ahasuerus’ considerations, Haman adds a personal bribe (let an edict be drawn for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the stewards for deposit in the royal treasury (3: 9)) to bolster the strength of his arguments. The implicit arguments for Jewish preservation (in as much as arguments may be said to be forwarded) are no less shallow. The Jews must be saved because, after all, the beautiful Queen Esther is a Jew and it would be a shame not to have her around. Furthermore, Mordecai must be treated well since he foiled an assassination plot against the king.

The biblical text does present some surprising ironies. Haman complains to Ahasuerus that the Jews are a people whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws (3: 8). Remarkably, the Megillah makes no attempt to disprove Haman’s charge. We are explicitly told that the trouble begins when Mordecai the Jew refuses to obey the royal command that all must bow to Haman (3: 2). For his own part, Haman is the very model of obedience; when ordered to do so by the king, he unquestioningly dresses Mordecai in royal garb and leads his horse through the city (6: 11). Ironically, the penultimate section of the Megillah (9: 20-32) tells of the institution of yet another set of peculiarly Jewish laws, i.e., the laws of the Festival of Purim. Could the evil Haman have a valid point against the Jews?

Notwithstanding the canonicity of the biblical text, the contradictions implicit to the Megillah’s story become clearer in the light of its treatment by the ancient Jewish translations (the Greek Septuagint and Aramaic Targumim) and midrashim.[1] The Septuagint version of the Megillah includes several fascinating apocryphal additions to the Masoretic text, which are usually attributed, at least in part, to Lysimachus, an Alexandrian Jew who lived in Jerusalem in the second century B.C.E.[2] Among these is found the text of the genocidal edict prepared by Haman to be published in the king's name:

Ruling over many nations, and having obtained dominion over the whole world, I was minded (not elated by the confidence of power, but ever conducting myself with great moderation and with gentleness) to make the lives of my subjects continually tranquil, desiring both to maintain the kingdom quiet and orderly to its utmost limits, and to restore the peace desired by men. But when I had enquired of my counselors how this should be brought to pass, Haman, who excels in soundness of judgment among us, and has been manifestly well inclined without wavering and with unshaken fidelity, and has obtained the second post in the kingdom, informed us that a certain ill-disposed people is mixed up with all the tribes throughout the world, opposed in their laws to every other nation, and continually neglecting the commands of the kings, so that the united government administered by us is not quietly established. Having then conceived that this nation alone of all others is continually set in opposition to every man, introducing as a change a foreign code of laws, and injuriously plotting to accomplish the worst of evils against our interests, and against the happy establishment of the monarchy (2nd addition).[3]

The Septuagint version of the edict supplies us with a more broadminded Persian political philosophy as well as with a more sophisticated attack on the Jews. Haman has Ahasuerus portray himself as trying to maintain a kind of pax Persiana whose stability requires universal respect for the king’s laws. Jews do not respect these laws and are furthermore “set in opposition to every man.” The other anti-Semitic charges mentioned by later Jewish writers fall under these two main headings. Let us begin by examining the first of these.

As we have seen, the Megillah itself mentions the charge that Jews respect only their own laws rather than those of the king. Like many other Jewish sources, the Aramaic Targum Sheni[4] to the Megillah connects this complaint to the multiplicity of Jewish holidays, which interfere with the performance of public works ordered by king. After a lengthy and self-mocking description of the festivals of the Jewish calendar, the Targum Sheni places these words in Haman’s mouth:

[The Jews] do not perform the service of the king; they say to us: Today it is forbidden. Thus they spend the year in idleness, in not performing the service of the king.[5]

Interestingly, neither the Septuagint additions nor the Targum Sheni make any attempt to quash these charges. In the Septuagint additions' version of Ahasuerus’ decree sparing the Jews we read:

But we find that the Jews, who have been consigned to destruction by the most abominable of men are not malefactors, but living according to the justest laws, and being the sons of the living God, the most high and mighty, who maintains the kingdom, to us as well as to our forefathers, in the most excellent order (4th addition).

The author of the Septuagint additions does not even pretend that the Jews actually live by the laws of the land. Rather, they live by their own laws, which are, however, just; perhaps even more just than the king’s own laws. Jewish indifference to the king’s laws does not invite anarchy because, in fact, it is the Jewish God who oversees the good maintenance of the monarchy. The Targum Sheni’s preoccupation with the Jewish festivals is itself a great bit of Purim humor. Haman despises the lazy Jews who are always celebrating some holiday when there is the work to be done. How are his accusations addressed? With the institution of yet another holiday in which the Jews will celebrate his downfall instead of performing the king’s service! In the words of the medieval[6] midrashic collection Esther Rabbah (7: 12)

Said the Holy One, blessed be He, to him [Haman]: ‘Wretch, you cast an evil eye on their festivals. Behold, I will overthrow you before them, and they will observe an additional festival for your downfall, namely, the days of Purim’; and so it says, A fool’s mouth is his ruin (Prov. 18: 7).[7]

Since all of these texts were written by Jews and obviously present a pro-Jewish point of view, why do they not seek to refute the charges which they themselves bring up? Because such a refutation would contradict the very point of Jewish survival. The sages who produced these texts could hardly propose that Jews actually honor the gentile king’s laws over those of God! Absolute commitment to God is Judaism’s raison de etre. If Jewish survival in the Diaspora were genuinely dependent on absolute and sole commitment to the law of the land, the Diaspora community would be doomed from the start. No consideration, not even the physical safety of the Jewish people, comes before dedication to God. The Septuagint additions even have Mordecai making this existential calculation in his explanation why he disobeyed the royal command to bow down to Haman:

Thou knowest all things: thou knowest, Lord, that it is not in insolence, nor haughtiness, nor love of glory that I have done this, to refuse obeisance to the haughty Haman. For I would gladly have kissed the soles of his feet for the safety of Israel. But I have done this, that I might not set the glory of man above the glory of God; and I will not worship any one except thee, my Lord (3rd addition).

At the personal level, Mordecai’s dilemma finds the happiest of solutions. Mordecai becomes vizier, and the command to honor Haman is rendered moot by his execution. Esther is less fortunate. It is her fate to live with the dilemmas implied by Haman’s second accusation, that the Jews are “set in opposition to every man.” This issue, like Mordecai’s, is solved by Esther’s rise to power, but at great personal cost. While the Megillah tells us of Mordecai glorying in the trappings of power, Mordecai left the king’s presence in royal robes of blue and white, with a magnificent crown of gold and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool. And the city of Shushan rang with joyous cries (8: 15), the Septuagint additions have Esther disparaging her very crown:

Thou knowest that I hate the symbol of my proud station, which is on my head in the days of my splendor: I abhor it as a menstruous cloth, and I wear it not in the days of my tranquility (3rd addition).

But here we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering Esther’s plight, we must be clear what is meant by the claim that the Jews set themselves “in opposition to every man”. As I understand it, this charge refers to Jewish insularity and in particular to those Jewish laws prohibiting the sharing of food, drink or beds with the gentiles. As the Talmud points out, the prohibitions apply even to the gentile king, and thus constitute an affront to his honor:

Raba said: There was never a traducer so skillful as Haman. He said to Ahasuerus…Their laws are diverse from those of every other people: they do not eat our food, nor do they marry our women nor give us theirs in marriage…Therefore it profiteth not the king to suffer them, because they eat and drink and despise the throne. For if a fly falls into the cup of one of them, he throws it out and drinks the wine, but if my lord the king were to touch his cup, he would dash it on the ground and not drink from it" (Tractate Megillah 13b).[8]

Here, then, is a dangerous challenge to Jewish claims of good citizenship. On the one hand, Jewish survival in the Diaspora depends on the tolerance and liberality of the powers that be. On the other hand, the demands of Jewish law and the threat of assimilation require that Jews remain somewhat illiberal towards their gentile neighbors and rulers. Esther Rabbah goes so far as to suggest that God had the Jews be threatened with destruction as punishment for their participation in Ahasuerus’ banquets. These were originally instigated by Haman in an attempt to entice the Jews to lewdness, and thus incur God’s wrath (Esther Rabbah 7: 13). If Jews are forbidden to feast and sleep with gentiles, what are we to make of Esther, who clearly did both?
Unsurprisingly, the author of the additions to the Septuagint found it difficult to accept the idea of a Jewish heroine married to a gentile king. He has her exclaim,

I hate the glory of transgressors, and that I abhor the couch of the uncircumcised, and of every stranger (3rd addition).

Such are the innermost thoughts of Esther, for the sake of whose apparently pure love Ahasuerus was willing to spare the Jewish people. For, as the additions to the Septuagint have it, Ahasuerus explains the rescinding of Haman’s edict with the consideration that Haman had betrayed the king,

having by various and subtle artifices demanded for destruction both Mordecai our deliverer and perpetual benefactor, and Esther the blameless consort of our kingdom (4th addition).

What would Ahasuerus have thought if he had known that his beloved queen "abhorred the couch of the uncircumcised"? Yet, how could our heroine remain true to her Judaism while genuinely loving the gentile Ahasuerus? Rather than downplaying this aspect of Esther’s relationship with the king, some Jewish sources aggravate the problem. Esther’s sexual allegiance to the Jewish people is maintained at all costs. Rabbi Meir is cited in the Talmud (Megillah 13a) as saying that Esther was not merely Mordecai’s adopted daughter, but also his wife. If, according to the Megillah, Ahasuerus became incensed at what comically appeared to be Haman’s attempt to rape Esther (7: 8), what would he say of the Talmudic comment,

Raba said in the name of Rab: She [Esther] used to rise from the lap of Ahasuerus and bathe and sit in the lap of Mordecai (Megillah 13b)?

In any case, even if Ahasuerus gained access to Esther's body, he never really won her erotic interest. Esther is said to have remained completely passive in her relations with Ahasuerus, or in the memorable words of the Talmudic sage, Abbayei, Ester karka olam, “Esther was like the everlasting ground” (Sanhedrin 74b). One still might ask how Esther became entangled in her predicament to begin with. Why did she allow herself to be taken to the king’s harem? Where was Mordecai in her hour of need? The Targum Sheni offers an interesting version of these events:

When Mordecai heard that virgins were being sought, he took and hid Esther from the officers of King Ahasuerus, who went out to seek the virgins so that they should not come and lead her away. He enclosed one room within another room so that the messengers of the king should not see her. Now when his messengers used to pass by, the gentile girls would dance and show off their beauty through the windows. Thereupon the messengers of the king would go out and bring many virgins from the provinces. Moreover, the messengers of the king knew of Esther, so when they observed that Esther was not among these virgins, they said to one another: ‘We are wasting our energy in the provinces. There is here in our province a girl beautiful in looks and pleasing as well as amiable in appearance, more so than all of the virgins which we have brought.’ So when Esther was sought but not found, they informed King Ahasuerus. When he heard (of it), he wrote an order that every virgin who shall hide herself from before his messengers, there is only one decree for her- that she be executed. So when Mordecai heard of the order, he panicked and brought out Esther, his father’s brother’s daughter, into the street. (Targum Sheni 2: 8)

Now both of our themes join together in a single episode. Mordecai, anxious to preserve Esther’s Jewish sexual purity, actively interferes with the fulfillment of a royal decree. Yet salvation for the community of the pious may only be gained through the sacrifice of the piety of an individual. In his own hour of truth, Mordecai feels free to risk all, including endangerment of the community, in order to avoid idolatrous prostration before Haman. Esther enjoys no such luxuries of conscience. She simply must sleep with the gentile Ahasuerus and drink his wine, lest the Jewish people be destroyed. And if such behavior is unthinkable, the Targum Sheni and Midrashim will apologize that she did these things at pain of death. The tragic heart of the Megillah is revealed. As Esther Rabbah has Mordecai ask, “How is it possible that this righteous maiden should be married to an uncircumcised man? It must be because some great calamity is going to befall Israel and they will be delivered through her” (Esther Rabbah 6: 6).

Esther struggles under the crushing weight of the Diaspora’s paradoxes. Impossibly, she must show herself and her people deserving of the king’s love and protection, while her faith leaves her incapable of genuinely seeking such love. Somehow Esther must remain a proper Jewish heroine while also serving as living proof that Jewish women are not beyond gentile reach. She is neither courtesan nor prostitute, but rather a victim whose rape is fortuitous for the precarious survival of her people.

For many years, I have found the Megillah’s conclusion, its happy ending, chilling for its omissions:

King Ahasuerus imposed tribute upon the mainland and the islands. All his mighty and powerful acts, and a full account of the greatness to which the king advanced Mordecai, are recorded in the Annals of the Kings of Media and Persia. For Mordecai the Jew ranked next to King Ahasuerus and was highly regarded by the Jews and popular with the multitude of his brethren; he sought the good of his people and interceded for the welfare of all his kindred (10: 1-3).

The evil Haman, we already know, is dead. Ahasuerus is busy exploiting his subjects, and Mordecai basks in the glory of his political success. One wonders: What became of Esther? Does she not live happily ever after? No; Esther’s happiness and even her personal piety are expendable. She remains trapped in the palace and bedroom of a drunken Persian king. It is her part to absorb the story’s shocks and tensions, to physically bear and be worn away by the inherent political contradictions of Jewish survival in the Diaspora. There is no happy ending for Esther.

Endnotes

[1] For a feminist analysis of the post-biblical Jewish treatment of the Megillah, see Leila Leah Bronner’s “Esther Revisited: An Aggadic Approach” in Athalya Brenner, editor, A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) pp. 176-197. See also Barry Walfish’s Esther in Medieval Garb: Jewish Interpretation of the Book of Esther in the Middle Ages (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).
[2] See Bruce Metzger, “Esther, Additions to the Book of”, Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972) vol. 6 pp. 913-4.
[3] All Septuagint quotations are from Sir Lancelot Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1851). Personal names and punctuation have been standardized to preserve consistency with the present essay.
[4] Scholars disagree on the dating of Targum Sheni, placing it anywhere between the fourth and 11th centuries. Despite its name (targum means, literally, translation), Targum Sheni is more of a midrashic collection than an Aramaic rendering of the Masoretic text. See Yehuda Komlosh, “Targum Sheni", Encyclopedia Judaica vol. 15 pp. 811-13.
[5] Targum Sheni quotations from Bernard Gossfeld, The Two Targums of Esther, (Collegeville, MI: The Liturgical Press, 1991).
[6] Esther Rabbah found its final form in the 12th or 13th century, but its first two chapters were apparently composed no later than the beginning of the sixth century. See Moshe David Herr, “Esther Rabbah”, Encyclopedia Judaica vol. 6 pp. 915-6.
[7] Esther Rabbah translations are from Maurice Simon’s Midrash Rabbah: Esther (London: Soncino Press, 1939).
[8] I. Epstein, translator, The Babylonian Talmud (London: Soncino Press, 1938).