Robin W. Lovin

Virtue, Law, and Sacred Attunement

Michael Fishbane has focused his study of the human encounter with God on what he calls “sacred attunement.” God is primary in being and reality, the ground of all that is, has been, and could be. The whole of our world and the multiple ways we experience and know it are enfolded in this divine reality. From this follows the idea of attunement. To understand the world as it truly is, we must relate to it through our own relationship to God. It is not simply that there is a coherent, ordered reality beyond the mistakes and contradictions that pervade our ideas about it. The ground of the reality we seek to understand is also the ground of our understanding, so that it is only by attunement with God that we know ourselves or the world. These claims are not established by metaphysical arguments. They are an interpretation of the experience of God recounted in the Hebrew scriptures, especially the encounter between Moses and the divine “I am” at Sinai. Sacred attunement is possible because God has ordered the world and our lives in a certain way, but also—and perhaps only—because God is selfrevealing and because there are texts that are witness to that revelation. Thus, for example, the allegorical method of interpretation, Remez, reads scripture “in terms of clues or traces ðof types of hints, in factÞ of a deeper schema of values. Correlations are now made between certain value-structures presumed hidden in the text and one’s true nature. To read Scripture in this mode is to discover the hints of these values within the text and then conform oneself to their instruction” ð428Þ. Precisely because Professor Fishbane understands sacred attunement in this Jewish context, through traditional ways of reading sacred texts, the theology requires completion in ethics. The astonished shepherd reduced to silence by the encounter with God is the same person who delivers the Law and announces the terms of the Covenant by which the children of