Rethinking Jewish Theology

Abstract

This short essay takes an exploratory approach to redefining Jewish theology. I will offer a brief reflection on both possible philosophical—through the concepts of participation, truth, and textuality—and theological—around the categories of philosophy of religion, propositional Jewish theologies, and Jewish theology—frameworks for it. Ultimately, I attempt to highlight that religious practice is essential for a significant exercise of Jewish theology in a Jewish context and, simultaneously, that theological meditation is fundamental for a meaningful Jewish journey.

1. Introduction

1.1 This introductory essay concerns the character of “Jewish theology”.1 It is beyond its scope2 to reconstruct the idea of “theology” or to define its alleged contents in the Jewish canonical texts3 or to engage with the discussions related to the topic found in contemporary literature.4 1.2 Due to the prefatory nature of these notes, I will only sketch the definitions based on which I will base future research on the character, purposes, and comparative prospects of Jewish theology. I will do so around two theoretical frameworks. The first, philosophical, is grounded on the concepts of participation, truth, and textuality. The second, theological, is rooted in the categories of philosophy of religion, what I will call propositional Jewish theologies, and Jewish theology more broadly. 1.3 From my perspective, Jewish theology should aim to offer a phenomenological model of the indivisible relations between what can be ambiguously labelled as “practice” and “theory” in Jewish religious life, conceptualising the unresolvable dialectics bounding the halakhic and metaphysical representations of it. Although this writing is a preliminary venture, it aims to be a modest step in this direction.

2. A Philosophical Framework for Jewish Theology

2.1.1 The relations between the different levels of reality are characterised by participation; that is,5 whatever it is, it is what it is by partially instantiating something other than itself, which is ontologically prior to it. 2.1.2 There is a correspondence between the levels of being and knowledge; therefore, one cannot know what at least relatively is not. 2.1.3 The access to reality is, consequently, always mediated by the one approaching that reality. That process constitutes a mediated objectivity, meaning “an objectivity that does not reflect the reality of an object which-stands-over-against the human consciousness, but rather that takes into account the contribution of our self-conscious mind for the establishment of the content of that metaphysical object, and thus reflects the relational unity between subject and object”.6 2.1.4 That mediated objectivity is not only individual but also collective. There is my experience, my Jewish experience, and Jewish experience. They cannot be dissociated because of the above correlation between ontological and epistemological participation. 2.1.5 Mediated objectivity involves a certain private language, in the sense that “a name, in the narrow logical sense of a word whose meaning is a particular, can only be applied to a particular with which the speaker is acquainted, because you cannot name anything you are not acquainted with”.7 In every private language, each name refers to an extra-linguistic particular to which the individual or communal subject of that language is related. That private language can be codified into a dictionary, the collection of terms used to represent the mediated objectivity on the base of it.

2.2 In Jewish texts, truth can be understood to be, beyond semantics, (in) a relation. Beyond the absolute truth, there is a derived epistemological understanding of relative truth—the closer a statement is to how someone or something is, the truer it is—and a fundamental ontological meaning of relative truth—the closer a person, object, or event is to what it should be, the truer it is.8 In both cases, truth exists in relation. In the first case, truth is not a property of sentences alone. When something is said about the world, it is assumed that there is an ontological imbrication between what exists and what is said about it. In the second case, truth is not a property of a person, object, or event. When something is said to be true, it is accepted that that exists in relation to other people, things, or events. The idea of truth expresses a particular crystallisation of what is there in relation to something else and a moment in the subjective understanding of it. In the first case, when something is true, that says something about everything else. In the second, when something is true, it means something about the individual arguing so.

This understanding of truth can be exemplified through a Talmudic passage. In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ḥullīn 7a, it is written that when Rabbi Pinḥas b. Yaʾir was going in a certain direction to fulfil a divine order, he saw a river blocking his path. He asked the river to part its water for him to pass through it, but the river answered that this was impossible for it: “you [R. Pinḥas] are going to perform the divine will for you [to pass through the river to obey God’s commandment] and I will also perform the divine will for me [to continue flowing as a river]”. However, R. Pinḥas replied: “if you do not part, I [will] decree upon you that water will never flow through you’”. It has been disputed that this expression should not be literally read as expressing that the river was going to be condemned to no longer exist, as a consequence of an event, in a future time. On the contrary, the truth of the river in relation to its creator and the truth of the river in relation to the rabbi encounter each other, and when this happens, both are transformed. The river is, and it is true in relation to God and the individual who is in front of him. The rabbi is, and it is true in relation to God and the river. They both are and are true in relation to each another. Each of our truths, which each of us somehow is, exist in their mutual relationship. In the story, the river misunderstood his truth as static, falling short of living up to what it truly was, meaning, what it should have been. Therefore, it was condemned to have never existed, not in the future, but in itself.9

With regard to the same issue, it has been clarified that truth can only be discovered through one’s own experience.10 Each experience is always different from the others’11 because truth exists in the relationship constituted by that experience. That experience is not only revealing a certain truth; it is that truth itself. It would be impossible to understand the ontological truth (or to represent it with a truthful statement) of something we have no experience of, to have the experience of something we are not related to, and to be related to something we at least somehow are not. Truth potentially exists in the infinite relationships by which all things are constituted, and it is actualised by the individual and collective appropriation through which it becomes true. In Judaism, this movement is the collective testimony of the People of Israel and the personal authentication of every Jew.12

2.3.1 The coming of meaning into language is not universal.13 In Judaism, revelation is contained, articulated and expressed through texts and their interpretation, which is not only about what is being said but also about what it means to say it—the Jewish path of coming into language. Therefore, considering the textual core of the Jewish intellectual and spiritual traditions throughout time, it is vital to first clarify14 what is, metaphysically,15 a Jewish text.16

2.3.2 Textuality is a mode of apprehension which construes its object assigning it a specific way of being—that of a text.17 Nonetheless, there are no isolated Jewish texts. In the Jewish tradition, the property of textuality—that is, of being a Jewish text—is not projected into one object but the underlying weave. Every Jewish text is a commentary of every other Jewish text. Commentaries are not unidirectional, closed texts. Each text—each commentary—is co-present with every other text, those of which it is a commentary, even if they are not mentioned, and those that will be a commentary on it, even if they have not been written yet.18 In Judaism, the chain of transmission is itself one of interpretation.19 That is, the written Torah pre-contains the chain of interpretation of the oral Torah, but the latter is not an interpretation of the former: it is Torah itself. The chain of interpretation is ontologically primitive. Relations and relata are inextricably interconnected.20

2.3.3 The textuality of a Jewish text relies neither on its objectivity nor on its subjectivity. On the one hand, the textuality of a Jewish text does not inhere within it. On the other hand, the textuality of a Jewish text is not the meaning it carries. A Jewish text is not so because of what it is or says. Its textuality is conferred by its reader through the act of use. This act of use implies assigning an actual meaning to an object that is seen as carrying a potential truth (or a range of potential truths). A reader, interpellated by a text, within the framework of a collective, theoretical and practical tradition of exegesis and use, abstracts the text’s verbal content from its original setting, interpellating it through a particular interpretation. Paraphrasing the famous and usually misunderstood Derridean dictum, it could be said that there is nothing outside the poem, and, simultaneously, there is nothing outside-poem. Every text is a poem which can only be understood from the truth of its readers.

2.3.4 Nevertheless, in the Jewish texts, truth does not lie within them.21 It is not their property; it does not inhere in them. The “true” text is rejected as an idol.22 The interpretation mentioned above should not be reduced to a mere theoretical inquiry, and the act of commentary should not be confused with that of exegesis.23 Texts are not a collection of propositions about reality. They are imbricated with it24 because the act of use by which a Jewish reader engages with the Jewish texts, actualising their truth, is to fulfil25 the commandments—one of them to study these same texts.26

2.3.5 The commandments can only be fulfilled by deeds. They can be utterances, mental acts, or bodily acts.27 The commandments are regulative ideas,28 “pieces of advice”,29 but must involve at least a certain degree of intention.30 These actions implied by the commandments “concretise” the revealed truths articulated by the texts.31 However, the commandments’ truth comes into existence when they are fulfilled, and in this movement, their number is infinite. Each of them, each act by which they are due to be fulfilled, is unique.32 Nobody can fulfil a commandment, verify a truth, or interpret a text like anyone else, or even as it has been done in the past or will be done in the future.33

2.3.6 Texts are co-present with the reader. The attribution of textuality through the act of use assimilates the reader to the text’s time, on the one hand, and the text to the symbolic world of the present, on the other. Textuality creates a transtemporal space, a liminal zone between past and present. The temporality of a Jewish text is a “practical present”34 in which past and future collapse into the present by means of the practice through which the truth of a text is verified and hence, actualised. In the end, to read a text is always to write it.

2.3.7 The same object may be bestowed with another mode of being, including non-Jewish textuality.35 Nonetheless, there is no Jewish textuality without engaging with the texts through the commandments. This is why, every morning, a series of blessings are mandatorily recited before studying any piece of Torah, the last of which says that the Torah is truth itself. The truth of Torah—the truth of every Jewish text—lies in itself. The Torah is true by itself. However, the Torah becomes so when the reader engages with it by fulfilling the commandments, the first of which, in this case, is to claim that the Torah is true. Otherwise, the Torah would be true, but it would not be. When a Jewish text is studied by a reader who does not engage with it, since its textuality does not lie in itself but in the act of use, this text becomes a vacuous tautology that only says what it says, without saying—because of not being interpellated—anything at all.

3. A Theological Framework for Jewish Theology

3.1.1 It is usually assumed that in every theistic worldview, it is possible to find—or to derive from—a particular “theology”, which is seen as a formal category that only varies in its contents across religions. Consequently, it is said that there are neutral theological problems, assumed to be so beyond a particular tradition, to which different, apparently comparable solutions could be given from each religion’s viewpoint. 3.1.2 However, this perspective impoverishes the multiple ways each tradition thinks about the dilemmas that took shape in its historical, intellectual, and spiritual context because the experience of the theos is not universal, and the logia uttered about that experience is untranslatable. Each religion implies a dictionary in which there are no nouns, only verbs, because every term, to be understood, involves a specific experience of what is named.

3.2.1 The private language that, through its dictionary, each religion is, can be translated into another private language. As in any translation, this involves a second-degree definition of each name, in which they are related to another name in a different private language instead of to the particular one they named in the first place. This is the movement from theology to philosophy of religion, where the signifiers do not point beyond themselves to other signifiers instead of a transcendent signified. In philosophy of religion, every name is the name of a name. Throughout this iterative process, much of these names’ meaning is lost. 3.2.2 Comparative philosophy of religion is possible because, since conceptual categories are reducible to other categories, abstract puzzles can be postulated in its domain: Notwithstanding, comparative theology is not possible because there are not—and there could not be—abstract theological dilemmas disconnected from the experience on which each tradition is based.

3.3 From the explicit or implicit propositional content of Jewish canonical texts,36 it is possible to derive several theoretical definitions. These definitions talk about “what it is […] that Jews actually stand for”37 or “Jewish cultural and religious beliefs and practices”.38 As such, they are constative speech.39 The sum of these propositions, the output of philosophical research, can be labelled as “propositional Jewish theologies” in the plural. 3.3.2 The best interpretative tool to investigate, systematise, and understand, conceptually and historically,40 propositional Jewish theologies (as an object)41 is analytic theology (as a method).42 When applied to them, analytic theology becomes Jewish Analytic Theology. In a nutshell, Jewish Analytic Theology can be defined as a category for certain prominent Jewish scholars raised in the analytic tradition dealing with conceptual problems that they find in the Jewish canonical texts based on the philosophical grounds determined by their intellectual family and, in the case of some of them, through their religious faith.43

3.4.1 Notwithstanding, Judaism cannot be reduced to the multiple “propositional faiths”44 that have emerged from it—and their analysis. Judaism is not about having faith in the contents of the revelation on Mount Sinai or even in the revelation as an event but about testifying to it through the observance of the commandments to which, therefore, Jewish theological ideas are intimately attached (for instance, the theological question of substitution prayer for sacrifices is based on the physical question of the need to bring sacrifices). 3.4.2 This is not arbitrary. As it has been said, “having lost the touch of His presence, they [Jews] seek now solace in the pressure of His yoke”.45 However, Jewish “primacy of practice”46 should not be a legal rigorism attempting to fill the empty space left by the abandonment of metaphysics. On the contrary, through the observance of the commandments, the truth potentially contained in the revealed texts is actualised by collectively and individually appropriating them. This is what Jewish theology should be worried about, not only to look for potential answers but to go deep into the question itself amid everyday life.47 In other words, “the theme of theology [here, “propositional theologies”] is the dogma, the content of believing, [and] the theme of deep theology [here, “theology”] is the act of believing, its purpose being to explore the depth of faith, the substratum out of which belief arises. It deals with acts which precede articulation and defy definition”.48

This—the problem of what it means to be Jewish—is the only “content” of Jewish theology, which cannot be expressed in the language of analytic philosophy because the propositions that are the object of analytic theology are always reducible to a specific religious experience and Jewish theology deals with the irreducible experience of being Jewish. As it has been said, “in order to appropriate theological language, phenomenology must be interested in irreducible religious experience. This is the kind of experience that cannot be explained away as epiphenomenal […]. Moreover, this religious experience is of unique historical events in which God makes His specific claims on the humans subjects to whom he has revealed these claims. Since these events occur at a particular time, in a particular place, to particular people, they are not universally at hand for everyone, anytime, anywhere”.49 The characteristic feature of Jewish theology is that this very way of being—not of being this or that—is the central issue that defines it. Furthermore, “whenever a phenomenological concept is drawn from originary sources, there is a possibility that it may degenerate if communicated in the form of an assertion. It gets understood in an empty way and is thus passed on, losing its indigenous character and becoming a free-floating thesis”.50 Jewish theology should be, thus, a phenomenology of Jewish existence.

Since it speaks from within something, Jewish theology is performative speech, meaning a discourse “focused on what happens beyond saying: what speech acts are performed in or by saying what is said, or what is generated by saying what is said”.51 As a fundamental movement of self-reflection on the act of being Jewish, Jewish theology implies a transformation of the individual whose experience is enacted through this practical52—neither theoretical nor poetical, even when modern academic life implies a certain “poietical” deformation of both theory and practice.53 That is, it is an intellectual exercise with spiritual implications for the practitioner’s life, not only an academic exercise that solves philosophical problems.54 As it has been argued, “a worldly statement about something present, even when it is performed as a simple naming, can refer directly to the said. On the other hand, a statement about human existence as well as every statement about being (every statement about the categorial), in order to be intelligible, requires an overhaul and reorganisation (Umstellung) of the understanding in terms of what the statement is pointing out”.55

It would be historically incongruous to argue that there was or is an “indigenous” Jewish thought, whether theological or philosophical. Witnessing the revelation at Mount Sinai has been, and the process of participating in the ongoing tradition of interpretation still is, “purely” Jewish, yet this experience is put into words using concepts from different nations. Jewish theology is not Jewish due to its topics56, but because it is anchored in a meaningful dialogue with the Jewish tradition of interpretation, recognised as epistemically authoritative and ontologically constitutive. That is, it is not only inspired by Jewish texts or ideas: it relies on ontological participation in the ongoing chain of interpretation and transmission.

3.5 Propositional Jewish theologies and Jewish theology are inseparable. Jewish theologies need theology not to be reduced to a philosophy of the Jewish religion. The contents of propositional Jewish theologies are a conclusion from the movement of actualisation of the texts’ potential meanings by epistemologically and ontologically participating in the chain of revelation and interpretation through the performance of the commandments. When the answers to the one and only question of Jewish theology appear, the propositional content is born, and it should be analysed through the methodological tools and conceptual maps of analytic philosophy. Notwithstanding, abstracted from this fundamental movement, Jewish theological ideas can be formally enunciated, but they are no longer themselves. Each Jewish theological concept exists through those acts because of which they come to be.57 Jewish theology needs theologies because it assumes that although Jewish essence can never be grasped completely, it can be brought to language.58

3.6 Since partial and plural metaphysical and, hence, epistemological participation in other religions such as Christianity and Islam could not be possible for a Jew, and, therefore, (s)he could have no “evidence” of the multiple Christian or Islamic truths,59 there is nothing that (s)he can say concerning the truth or falseness60 of Christianity and Islam.61 Philosophically, this leads not to a positive but a negative pluralism,62 a suspension of judgment where each truth can only be affirmed from itself—an idea that several Jewish thinkers have expressed, throughout history, in different ways.63

3.7 The very idea of “theology” should be abandoned or at least replaced by conceptual categories such as “Jewish theology”, “Christian theology”, or “Islamic theology”, remembering that these are not different versions of the same but equivocal, even if unavoidable, names for different ways of representing respectively incommensurable encounters with the divine.

Nevertheless, this does not aim to diminish the urgency of inter-religious work.64 On the contrary, it clears it from the epistemic arrogance implied by comparative theology,65 taking the human aspect which should be at its core, back to its centre. The more time a person spends with someone else, the closer (s)he will get to understanding the experiences upon which the other’s dictionary is based. As a Jew, the Christian or Muslim experiences of my colleagues David and Mohammed, which come before their experience of Christianity or Islam as a body of beliefs, will always remain inaccessible to me. Therefore, I would never understand the propositions they derive from it. Nevertheless, after the time we have spent together, getting to know each other, I can at least grasp what they mean when they say this or that because I have gained some access to how they live.

As has been said, “the logos, the word, in which the multifarious religious experience is expressed, does not lend itself to standardisation or universalisation. The word of faith reflects the intimate, the private, the paradoxically inexpressible cravings of the individual for and his linking up with his Maker. It reflects the numinous character and the strangeness of the act of faith of a particular community which is totally incomprehensible to the man of a different faith community. Hence, it is important that the religious or theological logos should not be employed as the medium of communication between two faith communities whose modes of expression are as unique as their apocalyptic experiences. The confrontation should occur not at a theological, but at a mundane human level”.66

4. Conclusions

The vast majority of contemporary scholarship in Jewish philosophy and theology is thematically and methodologically dominated by the history of ideas.67 The history of Jewish thought, the philosophy of Judaism, and propositional theologies are essential to understand the what, the why, and the how of Jewish life. It has been said that “prayer must be always related to a prayerful life”,68 implying that the former without the latter is an empty signifier. Since it would be impossible to imagine a Jewish text that does not participate in the weave of the Jewish chain of interpretation, the same can be said of Jewish theology. There should be, for anyone willing to live (in) the characteristically Jewish tension between deeds and words,69 a space for theological metaphysics that, through a phenomenological approach, gives words to the conceptually irreducible flow of Jewish life. This is Jewish theology, which in the end, is nothing but a very narrow bridge through which, by embracing the text, we aim to become—ourselves—a commentary.70 As the poetess wrote, “even if I say sun and moon and star, I am talking about things that happen to me. And what did I wish for?/I wished for a perfect silence./That is why I speak”.71