Michael L. Morgan

Joseph Soloveitchik and Halakhic Man

The modern philosophical critique of revealed religion in general and traditional Judaism in particular has been primarily normative, as opposed to epistemological, in nature. Take Spinoza, for example. While he contrasted theology and philosophy in epistemological terms - inasmuch as theology, in his view, does not possess any truth-value as opposed to philosophy, whose goal is the truth - his primary contrast between the two was normative - inasmuch as he claimed that theology leads only to obedience to God, as opposed to philosophy which gives rise to the love of God. As for the Mosaic Law, for Spinoza it possessed only a purely political significance and lacked any broader moral or spiritual, much less any intellectual value. Kant adopted Spinoza’s critique of Judaism, and in a similar vein argued that “Strictly speaking Judaism is not religion at all” but “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.” Of course, for both Spinoza and Kant, denying any value to Jewish law was tantamount to denying any value to Judaism in toto. By contrast, modern Jewish thinkers who sought to find the significance and value of Judaism as residing in something other than the study and observance of the Law could agree with the view of Jewish law taken by Spinoza and Kant, without believing that they had thereby rejected Judaism as a whole.

Baruch Spinoza and the Naturalization of Judaism

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) occupies a somewhat awkward position in the historiography of Jewish philosophy. In the standard story - or at least those versions of it that move beyond the simplistic description of how his philosophy represents a radical and heretical break from what comes before - he is presented either as the culmination of the Jewish medieval rationalist tradition (especially Maimonides and Gersonides) or as the father of modern Jewish thought, and sometimes as both. These are important (but still all too infrequently studied) perspectives for understanding Spinoza’s metaphysical, moral, and political ideas, and not just their antecedents and their legacies, but their substantive content as well. While most scholarly attention has been devoted to the seventeenth-century Cartesian background of Spinoza’s philosophy, his system also needs to be situated (as Harry Wolfson and others have recognized) in a Jewish philosophical context. But is this enough to give him a rightful place in a “Companion” to Jewish philosophy? After all, Thomas Aquinas was strongly influenced by Maimonides, and our understanding of the Summa Theologiae is deepened by a familiarity with the Guide for the Perplexed , but no one of course has ever suggested that St. Thomas is a Jewish philosopher. Does the additional fact that Spinoza, unlike Thomas, is Jewish alone qualify him for membership in the canon of “Jewish philosophers”?

Feminism and Modern Jewish Philosophy

INTRODUCTION: FEMINISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY The interactions between feminism and philosophy, and feminism and Judaism, have undergone serious development in recent decades. Starting with the former, many feminists have argued that Western philosophy has systematically excluded women. More specifically, feminists have argued that what Western male philosophers have presented as “essentially human” is in fact rooted in the male experience and does not reflect women’s experiences; that because the (male) ideals of reason were formed completely without female input, the Western philosophical tradition is thus biased; and that many philosophical works, written by men, contain numerous misogynist statements. In a similar vein, feminist theologians have maintained that Western religious traditions have systematically excluded women’s voices; that religious institutions have been predominantly male-oriented and reflect male concerns and priorities; and that many canonical religious texts, written almost exclusively by men, contain misogynist statements. That feminist philosophers and theologians have risen to the challenges raised by an androcentric philosophical and theological canon has been well-documented. Jewish feminists as well, influenced by their feminist peers, have begun to level significant attacks against what they see as a Judaism entrenched in patriarchal institutionalism. This patriarchy is perhaps best expressed by Judith Plaskow in her seminal work Standing Again at Sinai : “Underlying specific halakhot … is an assumption of women’s Otherness far more basic than the laws in which it finds expression …men – and not women with them – define Jewish humanity. Men are the actors in religious and communal life because they are the normative Jews.

Shame, the Holocaust, and Dark Times

Ten years after the Third Reich was defeated and the Nazi death camps were liberated, Alain Resnais was persuaded to create a film about their horrors and atrocities. Night and Fog was the result of his subsequent collaboration with Jean Cayrol, who wrote the narration, and Hanns Eisler, who composed the film’s musical score.1 The central theme of this remarkable film is that, appearances notwithstanding, the evil of the death camps and of Nazi fascism remained alive in France in 1955. It might have seemed to the film’s audiences that the evil and the horror had been destroyed with the liberation of the camps and with the end of the ruthless empire of death, but Resnais’s and Cayrol’s message was that they had not. Time might have deposited layers of debris over the past; life might have continued and grown, hiding not only that past but also the forces and agencies of evil that existed in the present, in 1955. The lesson of Night and Fog, however, is that while time may make forgetfulness easy and memory difficult, this means that memory becomes a challenge and a task.2 Forgetfulness goes hand in hand with a terrifying threat, that today and tomorrow, again and again, we will be made to live once more as agents, victims, or bystanders of such atrocities. If those alive in 1955 did not remember the past, then the forces of degradation and inhumanity would continue to win their victories, and we will all be their victims.

Plato, Inquiry, and Painting

For Plato, inquiry or learning begins with beliefs and ends, ideally, with knowledge. The beliefs are initially derived from observation, experience, common lore, and similar sources, and they are beliefs about what justice, courage, equality, and such things are. The knowledge is the outcome of a rigorous and elaborate educational program and is ultimately associated with apprehension of the Forms; it is knowledge about what justice, courage, equality, and such things are. At some stage of learning, however, the inquirer or incipient philosopher comes to apprehend physical objects, properties, actions, and institutions differently. He or she comes to realize that the objects of inquiry and knowledge are not these things at all but rather something else, of which they are only copies or images. This is a critical stage of inquiry, but it is one that Plato does not clarify to the degree that we might want. In this paper I focus on this important stage of inquiry. My strategy will be indirect. There are a few passages where Plato does tell us something about this type of perceptual act. But greater help can be got elsewhere. In the Republic, in the course of an attack on imitative poetry, Plato criticizes painting and especially several late fifth-century innovations. There is some controversy about whether Plato does in fact engage in such a criticism and exactly what his criticism is. I want to try to clarify these issues, for, I think, Platos treatment hides an understanding of art and the viewing of art that actually clarifies how the philosopher, at the critical stage of inquiry identified above, should apprehend physical objects.

Claire Elise Katz. Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. 247 pp.

just the “Mizrah. i” Jewish experience) played a decisive part in Jewish modernity at large. Understanding this will enable us to go beyond simply following the cues of postcolonial discourse and help us recognize the critical potential Jewish studies can offer to the rethinking of the terms of postcolonial discourse. If seen this way, this might be only a beginning of a more encompassing project of ambitious proportions; the editors present us with the opportunity to at last begin to understand how crucially important this project will be. For the change in perspective is not just an urgently overdue revision of the role the Arab Jewish community plays in Israel and at large. It also helps us to put into new perspective Zionist and other non-Arab Jewish discourses that would, with often strikingly similar words, emphasize the bridge function that Middle Eastern and “Asian” Jews might bring to the task of producing a more inclusive, richer, and more promising vision of modernity.

Eugene B. Borowitz: An Intellectual Portrait

For over sixty years, Eugene B. Borowitz has been engaged in the project of understanding modern Jewish existence. This is the task of Jewish theology, and for Borowitz it has been his task to develop a Jewish theology for the non-Orthodox Jew in the world of late-twentieth-century Jewish life. In over twenty books and hundreds of essays and articles, he has sought to speak to this audience about its responsibilities and to frame for it a portrait of self-understanding which would serve to provoke it to revitalization and renewal. With a conception of this communally and historically embedded Jewish self and of a self Covenantally related to God, Borowitz goes on, in these later writings, to formulate what he calls a conception of Jewish duty. This is Torah for the non-Orthodox Jew. It is a sketch of what the ideal Jewish life might look like for the contemporary liberal Jew. Keywords: Eugene B. Borowitz; God; Jewish existence

Jewish Thought, Philosophy, And The Holocaust

The Wissenschaft des Judentums , a discipline that emerged parallel to Goethe’s concept of a world literature, and, more precisely, the establishment of Jewish literary studies by Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider as well as the creation of a Jewish literary history it inspired, demonstrate that the concept of a specifically Jewish literature was forged, above all things, against the background of the model of world literature. It is important to analyze the three patterns of argumentation occurring in the establishment of secular Jewish literary studies by the Wissenschaft des Judentums as expressed in programmatic texts. This chapter focuses on the German-Jewish philology of Wissenschaft des Judentums , i.e., mainly on Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, David Cassel, and Gustav Karpeles, because these scholars first interpreted the older—theological and halakhic—paradigm of Jewish literature from a modern scientific perspective and radically extended it in terms of cultural politics. Keywords: cultural politics.; German-Jewish philology; Jewish Literature; Wissenschaft des Judentums ; world literature

The Curse of Historicity: The Role of History in Leo Strauss's Jewish Thought

A fundamental problem for modern religious thought is to understand the relationship between religious truths or beliefs and history. In what sense, if any, are the meanings of religious beliefs subject to historical determination and alteration? And, once the question of meaning is settled, is the truth of religious conviction open to historical falsification, confirmation, or modification? Indeed, to what degree must these very questions themselves be understood as the result of our own historical situation? What is that situation? Is there in fact just one such situation that we all share? Modern Jewish thinkers seem rarely to appreciate this bundle of issues, and yet any serious and fruitful reflection on the nature of contemporary religious experience and purpose can hardly afford to neglect them. For this reason, if for no other, I have come to treat the political philosopher Leo Strauss as one of the most profound Jewish thinkers of our day. Vigorous opponent of historicism, Strauss was thoroughly sensitive to the role that history can play both in life and in thought. And in one remarkable essay he displays that sensitivity in a classic defense of Jewish orthodoxy in the modern world.1 Although I disagree with its conclusions and am not