Moses Mendelssohn and the Oral Torah of the Internet

Current questions about how our modes of communication affect our lives are not new, and in fact represent only the latest reactions to the most recent radical changes in the way we interact and exchange information. In his foundational work, Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn describes his perceived effect of the printing press on religion and human life in general:

"The diffusion of writings and books which, through the invention of the printing press, has been infinitely multiplied in our days, has entirely transformed man. The great upheaval in the whole system of human knowledge and convictions which it has produced has, indeed, had on the one hand advantageous advantages for the improvement of mankind, for which we cannot thank beneficent Providence enough. However, like any good which can come to man here below, it has also had, incidentally, many evil consequences, which are to be attributed partly to its abuse, and partly also to the necessary condition of human nature. We teach and instruct one another only through writings; we learn to know nature and man only from writings. We work and relax, edify and amuse ourselves through overmuch writing. The preacher does not converse with his congregation; he reads or declaims to it a a written treatise. The professor reads his written lectures from the chair. Everything is a dead letter; the spirit of living conversation has vanished. We express our love and anger in letters, quarrel and become reconciled in letters; all our personal relations are by correspondence; and when we get together, we know of no other entertainment than playing or reading aloud." (trans. Arkush, Brandeis, 1983, p.102)

These words ring strangely in the ears of the 21st century reader, particularly their critical tone. In a world with television and the internet, many parents would be happy to have their children grow up in the environment that Mendelssohn describes. What many cultural critics today share with Mendelssohn, though, is the fear of a decrease in human interaction and communication. Throughout the rest of this essay, Mendelssohn shows why he claims that this change is so dangerous.

This statement by Mendelssohn serves as an introduction to his view of both the cause and perils of idolatry, and the solution in the monotheistic, ritual-based religion of Judaism. He claims that the way societies have attempted to portray language in writing, either through pictures and only later through phonetic alphabets, has profoundly affected the way they learn and believe. Mendelssohn blames the rise of idolatry on the confusion of symbols (like hieroglyphics or other pictographic images) with the ideas that they represent, akin to Saussure’s signified and signifier. Unable to comprehend the symbols and analogies used to describe God, idolatrous peoples began to confuse those symbols for the very God that they were mean to represent, says Mendelssohn.

With the development of alphabets, this problem is traded for another: Mendelssohn recalls the same concerns as the rabbis over the writing down of religious texts (the Oral Torah particularly):

דרש רבי יהודה בר נחמני מתורגמניה דרבי שמעון בן לקיש כתיב (שמות לד) כתוב לך את הדברים האלה וכתיב (שמות לד) כי ע"פ הדברים האלה הא כיצד דברים שבכתב אי אתה רשאי לאומרן על פה דברים שבעל פה אי אתה רשאי לאומרן בכתב דבי רבי ישמעאל תנא אלה אלה אתה כותב ואי אתה כותב הלכות א"ר יוחנן לא כרת הקב"ה ברית עם ישראל אלא בשביל דברים שבעל פה שנאמר (שמות לד) כי על פי הדברים האלה כרתי אתך ברית ואת ישראל

“Rabbi Judah bar Nahmani interpreted, from the spokesman of Rabbi Simon ben Lakish: “It is written ‘write for yourself these things’ and it is written ‘according to these words.’ How (should) this (be interpeted)? Words which are written you are not allowed to say by memory; things which are memorized you are not allowed to say [from a written text]. The House of Rabbi Ishmael taught: [both] may be written down, but you don’t write down halakhot. Rabbi Yochanan says, the Holy One who is blessed [only] made a covenant with Israel [for the sake of] spoken (memorized) words, as it say, ‘for by (at the mouth of) these words I made a covenant with you and with Israel.’"

-Bavli Gittin 60b.

Mendelssohn’s point is that texts, when they are written down, lose their flexible, living character, becoming, in his words a “dead letter.” In a way, this is no less idolatrous than confusing animals for God: the eternal truths present in the evolving set of laws are confused with the individual laws themselves. When these laws are recorded, they then become a fixed set, having a sense of authority on their own, outside of the greater values that they represent. So in Mendelssohn’s view recorded language, for all of the advantages that it brings, endangers greater human understanding of “eternal truths.”

Mendelssohn is not the last up to our day to note the challenges of sea change in the way we communicate and learn. Haym Soloveitchik, in his now famous essay “Rupture and Reconstruction” (Tradition, vol. 28, no. 4, 1994) notices the changes that occurred in Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Starting with the Mishna Berura, a early 20th century commentary on the first section of Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh, Jewish practice begins to be based less on learned behaviors passed from generation to generation (mimesis), and more based on the printed texts of halakha that were widely available. Before this time, so powerful was common Jewish practice (minhag) that the technical, recorded opinion was reread to incorporate the divergent custom into the law. However, the Mishna Berura, instead of accommodating these views, castigated those whose practice diverged from the norm as it was recorded in the codes, encouraging all God-fearing people to avoid such practices.

This reflects a different attitude towards the conversational, human interactions of everyday lived Jewish experience, rejecting it for the precision, and inhumanity, of the written word. The reasons for this shift are complicated, and include the decreasing religiosity and education of many Orthodox parents and the increasing rancor of denominational politics. Whatever the reason, people started to learn how to keep kosher from manuals, and to learn how to daven from Artscroll (didactic, rather than mimetic). This attitude prevents not only a more fluid, flexible application of the law, it even proscribes anything new to be said about halakhic topics. One of my teachers insists that because of this trend, the period of Aharonim, later halakhic decisors, is over. The current period in which we are living should be called “the anthologies,” in his view, because of the tendency of almost all halakhic works (like Shemirat Shabbat k’Hilkhata and the Artscroll Halachah Series) to simply summarize and reorganize information, adding almost nothing to any halakhic discussion; essentially, the very dead letter about which Moses Mendelssohn wrote.

Isidore Twersky argues persuasively in his “Shulhan Aruk’: Enduring Code of Jewish Law,” (Judaism, 16, 1967, p.141-158) that this tension between codification and standardization on the one hand, and respect for the diversity and fluidity of Jewish practice on the other, is a historical pattern that repeats itself. He observes that throughout the period of the Geonim and the Rishonim there is a sort of accordion effect, where excessive diversity creates the need for codification, and when that codification is found to exclude long-standing customs of communities or other understandings of rabbinic literature, the leadership of those communities pushed for decision-making based on the more democratic responsa rather than codes. Many European rabbis before the advent of Caro’s code were hesitant to write a code, precisely over these concerns, and criticized his code after it was published. Once again, this is the fear of “Oral Torah” becoming “Written Torah.”

Mendelssohn believed that the solution for his linguistic problem, and this tension between Oral and Written Torah, is the religious or “ceremonial” law of Judaism. Rather than committing the instruction of greater religious ideas to the realm of books and knowledge (Written Torah), or to myths and symbols (which can lead to confusion and idolatry), religious instruction of eternal truths would be learned through acts (mitzvot):

"Man’s actions are transitory; there is nothing lasting, nothing enduring about them that, like hieroglyphic script, could lead to idolatry through abuse or misunderstanding. But they also have the advantage over alphabetical signs of not isolating man, of not making him to be a solitary creature, poring over writings and books. They impel him rather to social intercourse, to imitation, and to oral, living instruction. For this reason, there were but a few written laws, and even these were not entirely comprehensible without oral instruction and tradition." (p.119)

Here Mendelssohn is sensitive to the need for the mimetic (to use Soloveitchik’s language) learning of tradition to prevent it from becoming stagnant. Only when the law is practiced in community, through the continuous interpretation of the community can it continue to transmit the eternal truths of Judaism which transcend any individual law. Crucial here, too, is that Mendelssohn recognizes that even to the extent that there is a Written Torah, it will be interpreted through its being lived in real life, through the Oral Torah.

Mendelssohn had essentially three concerns about the way media (in his day the printing press) could affect our lives: 1)that the wide availability of print would cause meaningless speculation rather than meaningful conversation, 2) that the commitment of essentially fluid information to writing would cause stagnation the development of religion and 3) that we would miss greater spiritual truths by focusing on fixed texts that had a particular historical context. Considering our situation today, what would he say?

It is true that our smartphones, computers, and social media sites take a lot of our time that could be used for personal interactions. On the other hand, social media has allowed larger circles of friends to stay in touch more easily than ever before. Furthermore, the internet has democratized information in a way that books never could have. We have gone even further than Mendelssohn’s description of “poring over volumes” instead of asking someone, to simply typing our questions into a search bar. However, isn't it possible that the internet might actually represent the synthesis of the Oral Torah and the Written Torah that Mendelssohn wanted to achieve? The internet does record information with an almost frightening permanence (Written Torah), but that information is being constantly debated, commented on, and and reedited on wikis all the time; all this with a record of the changes and those who made them. The technology that we have provides unique opportunities to have a Written Torah with an essentially Oral, democratic method of transmission. Clearly we are not unique in having to deal with the challenges of new forms of communication, and we will adapt to the change. Hopefully we will take advantage of it to advance understanding of the mitzvot as they are lived in real life, and of the practice of Judaism as an expression of the eternal truths of the Torah.

As this site becomes more active, may it and its participants be a part of the transmission of Torat Hayyim, the living Torah, both written and oral.

כן יהי רצון

Spinoza and the Problem of Hagiography

This is the first of a several part series addressing Spinoza and the problem of hagiography. No understanding of modern Jewry is complete without a reckoning with Spinoza. Unfortunately, while the thought of this person has been terribly significant in the shaping of the modern enterprise, his action has been equally significant, but only terrible. Thousands of Christians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century developed their view of Judaism from Spinoza's books. One could say that what Spinoza writes about Judaism also constitutes thought, but referring to it as action places what he has written on this topic within the realm of בן אדם לחברו an area where Spinoza is a much more questionable figure. For this reason, this post and subsequent posts in this series are about Spinoza and hagiography. One usually sees hagiography disappear as time develops and a person comes under increasing scrutiny, but in the case of Spinoza, accounts up to this very day cast him as a saint.

And here is the rest of it.

This matter is most important because it is a proxy for a larger discussion about traditional Judaism and its dissipation before the modern enterprise. Those that praise Spinoza's person too much betray their desire to cast the modern enterprise too favorably. It is not enough for Spinoza to be a great thinker. His conduct must also win praise. After all, Spinoza's choice - to become a philosopher - was made in juxtaposition to the more traditional alternative of becoming a rabbi. Rabbis are praised for their capacity to think, but if their conduct is poor, they are not revered. Therefore, Spinoza - though he is the anti-rabbi - must abide by the same criterion as rabbis do in the sense that he can not only be a great thinker; he must also be a great person. In other words, if his conduct is questionable, his thought suffers in the eyes of modern and aspiring modern Jews. For this reason, his conduct must be described as good for those who are committed to his thought. And the problem of hagiography ensues.

In upcoming posts, I will be discussing the following scholars, who respond to Spinoza - Leo Strauss, Hermann Cohen, Steven Nadler, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Strauss and Cohen provide a most excellent critique of Spinoza's character and played no small role in reframing the discussion around this most controversial Jew. Newberger Goldstein tends toward the hagiographical, apparently not taking into account the writings of Strauss and Cohen. As for Nadler, I am still reading his book.

I hope to demonstrate that the critique of Spinoza's character is legitimate in order to strike a blow to any current or future hagiographical accounts of him. Nevertheless, I do not mean to belittle his importance as a thinker, and I will give credit where it is his due, as he is one of the founders of the modern political enterprise - liberal democracy - which I cherish. I hope to convince readers that his work must be affirmed, but his person is not one to which we should pay any allegiance.

Judaism as Radical Language

'Boy were you on today. Boy did you ever make that guy look sick. When he hit that one down the line and you got it and fell down and hit that drop-volley Pemulis said the guy looked like he was going to be sick all over the net, he said.'
'Boo, I kicked a kid's ass is all. End of story. I don’t think it's good to rehash it when I've kicked somebody's ass. It's like a dignity thing. I think we should just let it sort of lie in state, quietly. Speaking of which.'
'Hey Hal?'
'…'
'Hey Hal?'
'It's late, Mario. It's sleepy-time. Close your eyes and think fuzzy thoughts.'
'That's what the Moms always says, too.'
'Always worked for me, Boo.'
'You think I think fuzzy thoughts all the time. You let me room with you because you feel sorry for me.'
'Booboo I'm not even going to dignify that. I'll regard it as like a warning sign. You always get petulant when you don’t get enough sleep. And here we are seeing petulance already on the western horizon, right here.'
'…'
'…'
'When I asked if you were asleep I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there, when you were so on, making that guy look sick.'
'This again?'
'…'
'Really don’t think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and drills in six short hours is the time and place to get into this, Mario.'
'…'
'You ask me this once a week.'
'You never say, is why.'
'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not that crazy about, I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.'
-David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest page 40

This week, a week of tennis and theology, I've been thinking about the late-night conversation between (two of) the Incandenza boys, Mario and Hal. The Australian Open, the first Major of the calendar year, will soon be over. And, admittedly, I've been watching too much of it. Luckily there's a good amount of down-time between points, games, sets, matches, which makes tennis a pretty good sport to watch if you have, say, a book of Jewish theology to finish reading for class. So, this week, my heart has been in Melbourne, but I, I have been in Arthur Green's masterful Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition.
Now if you'd like to see a review of Green's book, and a response to the review and a response to the response, look in the pages of the tasteful “Jewish Review of Books.” Unlike the talented authors writing for that publication, I haven't even finished reading the book; but I'm already pretty confident that it does some very important things. First and foremost, and without getting into particulars, it is an example of what a non-dogmatic theology can be; a theology for moderns who are unwilling to give up their beliefs in what have come to be regarded as social and scientific truths. Equal rights and opportunities for people of all genders and sexual orientations, basic trust that science pretty much gets things like evolution right, etc.
And he does all this without hiding his own embeddedness, his own contingency. On page one he reveals who he is: “Through [sacred language, rites, and symbols] I am sometimes able to enter into states of inner openness to a nameless and transcendent presence, that which I choose to call 'God.'” Green is much like Mario (nicknamed Boo) in the Wallace passage quoted above. He doesn't prove God's existence through logic games or appeals to Scripture. He has moments of transcendence, some of which are “evoked by great beauty,” (4) and he chooses the theological language(s) of Judaism to talk about those experiences. For Mario, the language of God is how one expresses that feeling of being totally “on” in a tennis game. A melding, as it were, of mental and physical reality. Hal, whose conception of God is more about logic than about experience, chooses not to use his brother Mario's “metaphor.” The language we use to describe the world is a choice we make. If we think that there is only one description for something, perhaps we are deceiving ourselves. The question Green forces us to answer is: have we actively chosen the language we use? And if so, why?
Green's book is not just important for us committed Jews who want to be challenged in how we think/talk about God; it is, I think, important for those Jews and non-Jews who are atheists or “new-atheist” anti-God/anti-religion people. Green addresses this latter category: “'Religion,' to them, seems to allow for nothing other than a literal belief in nonsensical biblical tales and various accruing superstitions. This caricature obviates the need for serious dialogue and the encounter thus devolves into mutual distrust and recrimination, great fodder for the media but quite useless for the future of civilization.” (9) Green offers sophistication, and invites everyone into the conversation of Jewish theology in an open and honest way.
It's not about whether you end up reading this book and agreeing with it. The book makes radical claims and interpretations that traditional Jews may be uncomfortable with. But ultimately, the book is an act of faith that the Judaism it promotes is quite useful for the future of civilization.
If you get to the end (page 971, which is almost the end) of Infinite Jest you'll read about how Mario's simple kindness makes a difference to the people around him. And you may wonder if his moral goodness is related to the religious language he chooses to use when he witnesses beauty, like that of Hal's tennis game. The question of how religious language can contribute to the improvement of the world is an important question to ask. I believe that Art Green makes a lasting contribution, outlining in religious language what it means to be thinking Jews in our era, and what it can mean to be “partners of the One in the survival and maintenance of this planet....” (27)

Art Green will be speaking on Radical Judaism on February 03, 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm at JTS, 3080 Broadway, Mendolson Convocation Center

Why I Don't Fear For Conservative Judaism

In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, it seemed that the culture wars of the 1990s would continue to divide us in the first decade of the 21st century. Lines were drawn in the sand because the issues of the day touched on the most fundamental questions of human life: When does the right to life begin and who decides? Is human sexuality hard-wired or learned? Is there a right to die? Fundamental questions are not easily given to subtle answers, and the battles did not easily allow one to occupy middle ground. Nor were we Jews untouched by our own internal battles, often waged along similar lines: Who is a Jew? Who decides who can become a Jew i.e. who controls conversion? Can there be gay rabbis? The culture wars, it seemed, showed little sign of subsiding and are with us even now.

It should come as no surprise then that it has become fashionable to deride Conservative Judaism and to bemoan its prospects. If ours is an age of extremes, the religious moderates of the Jewish people are likely to be on the defensive no less than the moderates of the American people were until recently (and perhaps still are). In a moment of Orthodox triumphalism we are told that we have failed to sufficiently adhere to Torah and what it demands of us. On the other hand, Conservatism's continued insistence on both Tradition and change seems to offer a less courageous, equivocal version of Reform Judaism's dyed-in-the-wool embrace of progressivism, itself a form orthodoxy. "Choose sides" we are told time and again. Either throw in your lot with Halakha and be "authentic" or successfully link your Judaism to a program of ever greater levels of emancipation. But whatever you do, choose and be clear about where you're holding. Like Mordecai Kaplan once quipped: "On the one hand, you have the Orthodox; on the other, Reform. On both hands, you have the Conservatives". He did not intend this as a compliment.

The success of Conservative Judaism has always mirrored the success of the political and moral center more broadly, and if the wider American culture is divisive and partisan then the Jews are going to follow suit. But if ours is an age of extremes, we need only remember the period of moderation that preceded it. At midcentury, when Liberalism constituted a big tent, American power was thought to be a force for good in the world and its form of democracy the best form of government available. True, even then Liberalism benefitted from having clear-cut and definite enemies: Fascism and Communism. But in that moment, religion was a major member of the coalition - it provided the building blocks of the good society and the best means of socializing the individual. As President Eisenhower famously put it: "Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." The particulars of one's faith were less important than the fact that one had a faith and was churched - belonging was itself an act of belief in the American way of life. It was in this period that Conservative Judaism thrived because it best captured the American and Jewish pulse while benefiting from a public culture that successfully sidestepped issues of fundamental divisiveness. Of course, as we all know, this did not last, but this does not mean that there is not a transcendent center to be sought.

What we are experiencing today is a period of realignment, not an ever expanding series of divisions. Regardless of how history will judge President Obama's first term, it seems clear his vision is one of pragmatic idealism, one which in many ways hearkens back to America at mid-20th century, yet is cognizant of the fundamental ethnic, racial, sexual and technological changes the country has undergone since: the Common Good, he reminds us, is difficult if not impossible to achieve, but it is sacrifice and clear-eyed accounting that are required to attain it. Belong. Chip in as individuals and as members of a sacred community, however you define it, and build the society you envision. As he put it in his landmark First Inaugural, with help from 1st Corinthians, "The time has come to put away childish things". If we are truly entering an Obama age, it bodes well for the vital center of American and Jewish life. The Transcendent Good, the place where philosophy and theology meet, is the place that transcends the multifaceted and very real divisions we face. In the American idiom, we might say: E Pluribus Unum. As Jews, we might follow the Zohar and say: God, Torah, and Israel, are one.

The Conservative Judaism I'm referring to transcends the particulars of a movement and refers to a Golden Mean out there, a Conservative Judaism shel malah. It is the province of all those who refuse to occupy a universe like the one described by Yeats, whose apocalyptic vision is preceded by prophetic words: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." To be a principled moderate is difficult, but if we truly believe ourselves to be the "best", we cannot "lack all conviction". We truly believe that Orthodox and Reform Judaisms have a certain legitimacy, but they're wrong because they are reductionist. This is what allows them to be "full of passionate intensity".