Makhloket: Anti-Polemics

Abstract

This article explores the concept of makhloket (dispute, disagreement) as a foundational principle of rabbinic discourse, contrasting it with Western philosophical and political notions of conflict. Beginning with Mishnah Avot 5:17, which distinguishes between disputes “for the sake of heaven” (exemplified by Hillel and Shammai) and those that are not (exemplified by Korah), the essay argues that makhloket is not simply about contesting authority but about constituting a mode of discourse. To situate this, the article engages Heraclitus’s fragment on polemos as the “father of all things,” and traces its divergent readings in Heidegger and Schmitt, who grounded politics in existential struggle. Drawing on Gregory Fried’s analysis, the essay shows how Heidegger oscillated between interpreting polemos as Kampf (struggle for domination) and Auseinandersetzung (productive confrontation), thereby staging a conflict about conflict itself. The rabbinic model of makhloket is then read as an alternative to these traditions: not a war of logoi for supremacy, nor a negation of conflict in the name of unity, but a discourse generated through disagreement. By juxtaposing Talmudic and philosophical notions of conflict, the essay argues that rabbinic makhloket constitutes a polemical poetics that endures by refusing closure, offering a distinct vision of reason, tradition, and political thought.

1. Introduction

Can speaking about controversy ever be non-controversial? Can we write, can we think non-polemically about polemics? This question is akin to the one concerning political speech, that is the politics of speech or of logos: can we speak apolitically about politics? The kinship here is not just formal. Politics and polemics, we will see, bond in logos. Polis and polemos belong together discursively—state speech is at war.

The disagreement, the division, begins with the first word, ours, or rather a talmudic one: makhloket. What are we talking about when we talk about makhloket? Our logos is immediately disrupted here by the confusion of tongues, by the Babylonian strife at the beginning of political history, at least according to one source, a highly contested one. What makhloket means, as a word, is debatable: disagreement, conflict, confrontation, opposition, strife, divergence, feud, dispute, disputation, fight, polemics, perhaps polemos or war? The confusion of translation indicates a dispersion in the meaning of the word itself, indeed of every word. The word is built on division. In this sense, makhloket is the paradigmatic word, the polemic epitome of logos.

Speaking of makhloket is already engaging in one, namely in a makhloket over the meaning of makhloket, a conflict over the nature of conflict. We often think of speaking rather as the end of conflict, at least the beginning of the end. Talks announce the end of war, the commencement of negotiations in view of reaching an agreement, an understanding, maybe peace. Speaking, making sense, establishing a coherent narrative, positing a logos—seems to counter strife, to undo misunderstandings. Yet, where does a conflict draw its persistence if not from logos, that is from conflicting, perfectly sensible narratives? Disagreement is founded on divergent reasonings. The first divergence, perhaps, the foundational one, concerns the parties’ understanding of the nature of their conflict. In other words, a conflict is not just a confrontation between different positions, but between different oppositions. Every war is between warring wars. What at stake is not just what party wins, but which war, that is what story of the conflict.

Can we speak of makhloket in a non-polemical way? Or, if any makhloket, any dispute and division, is already a makhloket on the makhloket, should we not say that polemics constitute the very logos of makhloket, such that the only way of speaking about makhloket is to engage in one? The logos of polemics—speaking about disagreement, thinking on dispute—is itself a polemical logos, a confrontation, one narrative disrupted, contested, upended by another, at least one, a logoclastic encounter of rivaling reasons.

By this logic, I wish now to reflect on the talmudic makhloket through engaging in a makhloket: a makhloket on the nature of makhloket, to be structured as a confrontation between the talmudic disagreement and a non-talmudic one, a conflict of conflicts, or more precisely an opposition between divergent notions of conflict, between different narratives of division.1 For the talmudic one, I will focus on a foundational text on the nature of makhloket, an arche-text, an arche-makhloket on makhloket, a sort of original or originary debate, not a mother but a father of disagreements. I mean the fragment on makhloket from the Mishnah tractate “Avot,” the “Chapters of the Fathers” or of “the Principles,” which contains basic maxims and notions that are foundational for the rabbinic discourse.

Mishnah Avot 5:17 states: “Every makhloket that is for the sake of heaven, will in the end endure; But one that is not for the sake of heaven, will not endure. Which is the makhloket that is for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai. And which is the one that is not for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation.”

To speak of this makhloket, the talmudic one, I will contrast it with another one, a non-talmudic, or even, since we are engaged in confrontation, an anti-talmudic makhloket. For the anti-talmudic makhloket I am turning to an anti-Semitic or an anti-Jewish site of conflict, a site of anti-Jewish polemics and of anti-Jewish polemos, of actual war. I am looking for the anti-talmudic makhloket in the controversial writings of two authors, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who participated in the constitution of the discursive fabric of a German society while it was engaged in an exterminatory war on Jews.2

Genocides too have their logics. I will not fight them, but engage in a makhloket, that is, I will reflect on Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s notion of conflict polemically, namely by staging their own narrative as a polemic, by reconstructing the internal makhloket that generates their narrative. In other words, I will try to understand the conflict according to Schmitt and Heidegger by thinking Heidegger vs. Schmitt, and Heidegger vs. Heidegger. This polemic on the nature of disagreement will be grounded on conflicting readings of one logos, it too a father-logos of polemos, that is Heraclitus’s fragment 53: “War is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”

2. Polemics on Polemos

My analysis of the inner polemics in Heidegger’s reflections on Heraclitus’s polemos will unfold through a reading in Gregory Fried’s Heidegger’s Polemos. From Being to Politics (Fried 2008). I will proceed by reflecting on Fried’s thoughtful discussion of Heidegger’s various engagements with Fragment 53 during the 1930s. Our guide in this war, in this Kampf, will therefore be Fried, peace.

Fried’s own direct engagement with Heraclitus’s saying reveals the polemics nature of this urlogos of polemos. He articulates the agonistic essence of the foundational affirmation of war. This inherently martial performance of any act of speaking about conflict, the impossibility of any peaceful indication of strife, without always already taking part in it, arises in an exemplary manner from the expression “declaration of war,” meaning at the same time both stating the existence of war and starting one. In Fragment 53, so we find in Fried, Heraclitus is declaring war. The polemics to which the reading of Heraclitus gives rise, the polemics on the meaning of his polemos, concerns the identity of the rival. The controversy is over the rival of Heraclitus’s war, and the nature of the war waged against this enemy, the nature of polemos as “both father of all and king of all.”

Who is the rival, what is the war—these are the two concerns in question, the two causes of war, of all war. Indeed, it appears, as we shall shortly see, that Heraclitus’s polemos, and in fact all polemos, all war, has by definition more than one enemy, at least two. The first enemy is the direct one, the one against whom the war is primarily waged. In the case of Heraclitus’s declaration of the foundational principle of war (“father of all and king of all”), the enemy is the enemy of war itself. What the principle of polemos fights against is the state of no-war, the nonexistence of polemos, or more specifically the non-polemic contender to the role of “father and king.” However, the identity of this enemy or the specific essence of his enmity is itself a matter of dispute. Who or what is the non-polemos against whom Heraclitus directs his declaration of war?

This confusion or division, that is the debate over the nature of the enemy, generates a second polemic, that is over the nature of the war to be declared against this enemy. Who we fight determines how we fight. The nature of Heraclitus’s enemy, of non-polemos, determines the essence of his polemos. In other words, war is always a conflict not only against an enemy, but also against other wars, that is against other perceptions and performances of war. The struggle with these other perceptions confronts us not only with our enemy, but also—perhaps primarily—with our potential allies, that is with our potential selves. Being at war is being intrinsically divided, even if, as we shall see, polemos fundamentally gathers.

3. Anti-Zeus

Who is Heraclitus’s direct enemy? Who is the non-polemic rival of his polemos, who is the enemy of war as such? Fried refers us to Charles Kahn’s 1979 translation and commentary of the Heraclitan fragments (Kahn 1979). In his comments, Kahn quotes, among others, Aristotle, who in his ethics wrote with respect to Fragment 53: “Heraclitus reproaches the poet for the verse ‘Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men! [Iliad 18.107]’” (Eudemian Ethics, 1235a25). “The poet” is Homer. Heraclitus, Aristotle tells us, declared war on a tradition, epitomized by the Homerian epos, which sought to ban conflict, and so declared war on war.

Tradition’s war on war was declared in the name of a god, the ruler of gods and men alike. The god of gods, in the historical discourse arising from the Bible, will later be called God, and in the Hebrew branch of this tradition carries a proper name, JHWH. In Heraclitus’s tradition, the tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the one on which he declared his polemos, the same one to which he, by this very declaration of war, eo ipso declared his belonging, God had a different name. As Fried writes: “we cannot fail to hear a direct challenge to the traditional conception of Zeus as father of gods and men and ruler of the Olympian court. Most commentators on the fragment recognize this resonance. As father and king of immortals and mortals, Zeus represents an overarching, commanding authority in both divine and human affairs” (Fried 2008, p. 22).

Heraclitus’ fragment is a declaration of war on Zeus. The war against Zeus is however not waged against a specific enemy, but against the enemy of war as such. As god of all gods and men, as God, Zeus stands for the end of conflict in total unity, in harmony and justice. Accordingly, I continue reading Fried, “to name polemos as father and king, as Heraclitus does, is both to supplant Zeus in his role as ultimate authority, recognized since Homer, and to mock the bucolic sense of morality and justice that characterizes Hesiod’s conception of Zeus” (Fried 2008, p. 22). Heraclitus’s war targets the enemy of war, Zeus, who stands for the state of no war, the perfect state of absolute agreement of all with all, what we today may call universal morality and justice, or simply universalism.

I note the ambivalence in trusting universalism, that is universal unity, to a proper entity, such as Zeus or JHWH. By holding together and so abolishing all tensions, such as between gods and men, that is by ruling as a king, as a monarch, this God simultaneously places himself over against and so in a fundamental conflict with both gods and men, and with all other parties. God posited as the enemy of all wars. We can say that the enemy of war is the enemy par excellence, who wages the war par excellence, the war of wars. Si vis pacem, para bellum.

This means that the declaration of war begins with the declaration on the end of war, which is the declaration on universal justice, or God. Formulated inversely, God, or for that matter Zeus, is the very name of polemos. This insight leads to a reading of Heraclitus as contesting the Zeus tradition not by affirming another god, “polemos,” but by unfolding the logics of tradition itself. Heraclitus does not contest the primacy of peace by claiming the primacy of war. Rather he argues that any tradition that affirms itself as the proper tradition of universalism, as the people of Zeus, or JHWH, who stands for universal harmony and justice, by this very affirmation declares a state of war, a cosmos where polemos is king of all.

4. Against Liberalism

In Fried’s text I find two different understandings of Heraclitus’s polemos, two competing interpretations, two warring wars. Each war is based on a different understanding of Heraclitus’s enemy, that is of Zeus as the universal. Each understanding of the universal as the enemy calls for a different war against him, that is for a different understanding of what is this polemos, which is “both father of all and king of all.” Both conflicting readings arise from Fried’s analysis of Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus. Accordingly, the hermeneutic strife is internal to the Heideggerian corpus, marking a shift between the moment of his enthusiastic engagement in the National-Socialist cause in 1933–1934 and the period of his gradual withdrawal from this engagement thereafter.

The first understanding is based on Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus’s polemos as Kampf, that is as struggle or fight. As Fried notes, the notion of Kampf plays a central role in Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede from May 1933, in which he, as the freshly Nazi appointed President of the Freiburg University, presented his vision for the role of science in Hitler’s struggle (Heidegger 1983a). The corresponding reading of Heraclitus was articulated a little later, after Heidegger’s resignation from the university’s leadership, in the first lectures of his 1934–1935 seminar on “Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’” (Heidegger 1989).

In this seminar, Heidegger translated Fragment 53 to German as follows: “Der Kampf ist allem Seienden zwar Erzeuger, allem Seienden aber auch Beherrscher, und zwar die einen macht er offenbar als Götter, die anderen als Menschen, die einen stellt er hinaus als Knechte, die anderen aber als Herren.” In Fried’s English rendition: “Struggle is indeed the sire to all beings, but for all beings also ruler, and some he makes manifest as gods, the others as humans, some he sets forth as servants, the others as masters” (quoted and translated in (Fried 2008, p. 29)).

As a key for reading Heidegger’s translation, I follow Fried’s reference to Heidegger’s letter to Carl Schmitt from August 1933, where Heidegger was thanking his fellow Nazi party member for sending him the new edition of The Concept of the Political. In this letter, Heidegger writes: “your quote from [Fragment 53 of] Heraclitus particularly pleased me in that you did not forget the basileus, which gives the fragment its full meaning, if one interprets it completely” (letter of 22 August 1933; Heidegger to Schmitt, trans. G. L. Ulmen, in Telos 72 (Summer 1987), p. 132, quoted in Fried 2008, p. 28). In his own translation of Fragment 53, Heidegger in fact orients Heraclitus’s phrase by the idea that polemos is the basileus, translated as Beherrscher, “the ruler” of all things. This reading connects the affirmation of polemos with the notion of domination, Herrschaft, echoing the Hitlerian link between the Kampf and the Führer, and the Schmittian nexus between war and sovereignty.

In asserting Heraclitus’s polemos, Schmitt and Heidegger were, as Fried writes, “rejecting an ideal of the liberal Enlightenment,” that is an ideal of universal reason as the basis for a “government or some kind of federated world order.” Just as Heraclitus contested the tradition of Homerian harmony, epitomized by Zeus, Heidegger and Schmitt challenged “the Kantian vision of perpetual peace,” allegedly embodied by the liberal order (Fried 2008, pp. 18–19). Yet, the contestation here (we are still unpacking the first understanding of polemos) does not concern the ideal of universal reason, but its concrete, historical realization. War is declared here not against universalism per se, but against—so Fried—“false universalism” (Fried 2008, pp. 18–19), that is against the false affirmation or self-affirmation of any political order, of any ruler, to represent universal reason, to stand for unity and harmony.

Heraclitus’s polemos accordingly does not target unity but Zeus, that is the association of unity with a proper name—of one specific god, people, tradition, be it Greek or German. The asserted universality is false insofar as it represses, it does violence to the factual undecided diversity of competing universal visions. This state of undecided competition of worldviews is the essential polemos that constitutes human history. Schmitt described this situation theologically as the state of sin, where God is absent, and in His place rules the Political, which holds the world together not peacefully but in a state of war.

In this condition of political history, any given worldview, any narrative or conceptual system, any logos, which claims to transcend its specific cultural location and to represent all humanity, that is any false or “posthistorical universalism” (Fried), such as the world order of liberal Enlightenment, will not instate the harmonious unity of universal reason but rather put in place totalitarian tyranny, imperialist colonialism and the war of extermination (Fried 2008, p. 19). The Heraclitan polemos is accordingly declared against the war on war (i.e., the self-affirmation of any political party as fighting for peace, which constitutes false universalism), which is by necessity total war.

5. Adversus Hobbes

I noted that the war against the direct enemy always entails a second war, namely against competing understanding of the enemy’s nature and therefore of the nature of the war to wage against them. Accordingly, the polemos against Zeus, understood as false universalism, in the sense of the wrong understanding and performance of universal reason, is also defined through a second conflict, versus a false understanding of the nature of conflict itself—a war against the wrong war. The falseness—or correctness—of the war is determined in view of the nature of the enemy. A false, wrong or misguided war is a war that only seems to constitute an opposition to the enemy, whereas in reality it does not actually counter the enemy, but confirms him, that is it becomes complicit with the cause that it seeks to fight.

Heidegger’s first understanding of Heraclitus’s polemos, in his 1934–1935 seminar on Hölderlin, is in fact defined through a contrast against another notion of war. The rightly understood war, he clarifies, is “not arbitrary quarreling and discord and mere disturbance” (Heidegger 1989, p. 125; quoted in Fried 2008, p. 30). The polemos against the harmony of universal reason is not arbitrary, that is, it is not without reason. What is at stake here, the polemic cause of Heidegger and Schmitt, against the enlightened liberal order, is not the contestation of rationality as such, in the name of irrational, anti-logical drive to violence.

In Gregory Fried’s analysis I find an elucidation of the concrete, historical notion of polemic politics that is rejected here. Heidegger understands polemos, Fried writes, “not in the Darwinian sense of a struggle for existence as the survival of the fittest or in a Hobbesian sense of a war of all against all” (Fried 2008, p. 15). The struggle against false universalism does not aim at rejecting the very notion of universal, unifying reason and embracing strife as such, war for war’s sake. Rejecting the liberal order does—or should—not mean subscribing to a vision of bellum omnium contra omnes.

Why is this the wrong war, the misunderstood polemos? As I suggested, the wrong war only seems to undermine its opponent, while in reality it reconfirms it. Accordingly, the “arbitrary” polemos against the (false) affirmation of universal reason would not counter this affirmation, but support it. I think we can understand this as follows. By placing the principle of polemos beyond all reason, that is as constituting a reality that is completely devoid of intelligibility, of logos, a social existence that lacks any unifying vision, any universal meaning, we confirm that reason, not the false but the right one, that is the very principle of logos, excludes conflict. By affirming polemos as anti-logos, we simultaneously confirm that choosing logos, seeking reason, means rejecting struggle. Similarly, we may say that the ideas of social Darwinism and of Hobbes’s natural state of war in fact do not refute the universal order of the liberal state, on the contrary they ground this order, namely by defining the evil against which this state supposedly constitute the necessary defense.

6. Kampf ums Sein

If the main enemy of polemos is false logos, its secondary enemy is the notion of war as alogos, as devoid of reason. Hence Heidegger’s first reading of Heraclitus. Polemos, according to the formulation we find in his Hölderlin seminar, is “not arbitrary quarreling and discord and mere disturbance, but rather the strife of the great opposition between the essentials powers of Being [der Streit des großen Widerstreites zwischen den Wesensmächten des Seins]” (Heidegger 1989, p. 125; quoted in Fried 2008, p. 30). The Heraclitan war is not an arbitrary, irrational, senseless power struggle, an ontic “quarrel” between competing individual entities, but a confrontation of “essential powers of Being,” that is an ontological war between diverging existential visions. Polemos is the war of logoi, the struggle of universals, or as the first page of Being and Time calls it (quoting Plato’s Sophist), a γιγαντομαχία περί τής ούσίας, “a battle of giants about being”, which would be the (forgotten) foundation of philosophy (Heidegger 1977, p. 3).

This is the understanding that underlies Heidegger’s first translation of Fragment 53: “Der Kampf ist allem Seienden zwar Erzeuger, allem Seienden aber auch Beherrscher, und zwar die einen macht er offenbar als Götter, die anderen als Menschen, die einen stellt er hinaus als Knechte, die anderen aber als Herren”; “Struggle is indeed the sire to all beings, but for all beings also ruler, and some he makes manifest as gods, the others as humans, some he sets forth as servants, the others as masters.” Polemos is the Being of beings, the ontological constitution of reality as the struggle that decides between different understandings, that decides which visions will rule. Polemos decides between the competing logoi. It is in this sense that we can understand Heidegger’s emphasis on the “basileus” in his letter to Schmitt: war is the king that makes kings, it is the king of kings. This corresponds to Schmitt’s own understanding of the Political, namely as the condition of existential struggle not between selfish, senseless individual claims, but between competing worldviews, values, narratives, which is decided by (actual or potential) war.

Yet this understanding of polemos must be called into question. In fact it was and is called into question through a conflict, through the challenge of a differing, diverging, rivalling understanding formulated by Heidegger’s second, a little later translation. This is how I suggest to grasp the difficulty raised by Heidegger’s first understanding of poelmos. As I showed, this understanding is defined through a double conflict, against the direct enemy, i.e., the false universalism of liberalism, and against a secondary enemy, i.e., the wrong war on liberal harmonizing reason in the name of arbitrary violence. The problem with the wrong war is that by contrasting logos against polemos it does not really contest but ultimately confirms logos. It confirms that universal reason, the true one, essentially excludes struggle. In contrast to this false notion of polemos, Heidegger’s first understanding insists that polemos is not devoid of reason, on the contrary it is the productive struggle of different rationalities, which decides what logos will prevail.

However, doesn’t this conception of polemos as the battle of logoi once again contrast between polemos and logos? Doesn’t the competition of rational narratives, and the condition in which they compete or struggle with one another, still leave unharmed or in fact reaffirm the very principle of logos, as unity beyond conflict? Doesn’t polemos act here as the king that determines what logos will become the ruler, the master discourse? Indeed, once this determination is made, the master reason suffers no longer any contestation—all diverging voices become “servants.” Would this mean, once again, that universal reason is posited beyond the strife of political history? Doesn’t this purification of logos from polemos underlie simultaneously the eschatological horizon of Schmitt’s political theology (God beyond sin) and its political model, the total state?

7. Contra Nihilism

It is in view of these questions that I suggest Heidegger’s second reading of Heraclitus’s polemos, a second reading that struggles with—and thereby defines—the first. Fried refers us to Heidegger’s 1935 seminar “Introduction to Metaphysics,” in which we find his “most sustained treatment” of Fragment 53 (Fried 2008, p. 36). Heidegger’s new understanding gives rise to a new translation: “Auseinandersetzung ist allem (Anwesenden) zwar Erzeuger (der aufgehen läßt), allem aber (auch) waltender Bewahrer. Sie läßt nämlich die einen als Götter erscheinen, die anderen als Menschen, die einen stellt sie her(aus) als Knechte, die anderen aber als Freie.” “(Auseinandersetzung) is indeed for all [that comes to presence] the sire [who lets emerge], but (also) for all the reigning preserver. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces [sets forth] as slaves, but others as the free” (Heidegger 1983b, p. 47; quoted in Fried 2008, p. 32). Polemos is no longer Kampf, struggle, but Auseinandersetzung, literally setting-apart, in the sense of confrontation or opposition. Basileus is no longer Beherrscher, ruler or master, but Bewahrer, preserver, and the slaves no longer contrast with the masters, but with the free.

To understand Heidegger’s second reading of Fragment 53, I suggest considering that it articulates a second understanding of Heraclitus’s polemic. We saw that the affirmation of polemos as “father and king of all things” was a declaration of war against the tradition of Zeus as representing the harmonious unity of a just and rational order. I indicated that the first understanding of this polemos interpreted Zeus, the enemy of polemos, as standing for false universality. The contestation consisted accordingly in affirming—both against the false logos and against the no-logos (arbitrary violence)—the war of logoi, which, as I noted, nonetheless preserved the idea of (the true or ruling) logos beyond polemos.

In the 1935 seminar Heidegger expresses a different understanding of the polemic against unity. “Where struggle ceases,” he writes about the condition of non-polemos, the enemy of polemos, “world turns away…. Beings become objects, whether for observing (as in a view or picture) or for making, as the fabricated, the objects of calculation” (Heidegger 1983b, p. 48; quoted in Fried 2008, pp. 34–35). The problem here is not false universalism. We are not dealing with the choice or struggle between different competing unifying orders, between different constellations of domination, mastery and slavery. Rather, this passage describes the problem as arising from the very condition of unity without struggle: not the problem of false universal harmony, but of the real one. Polemos here contests the unity in the principle of logos itself. The danger that it seeks to preempt is not the repressive tyranny of ideology but the objectifying nihilism of technology.

8. The Logic of Aus-Einander-Setzung

If the enemy of polemos is not only the unifying reason of false universalism but unifying reason as such, what does it imply for the nature of its war? Polemically formulated, what kind of war it precludes as misguided? The polemos against the unity of logos as such has as a secondary enemy not only war as “arbitrary quarrel,” that is war as devoid of logos, which preserves and even reaffirms the unity of logos. Furthermore, the polemos in Heidegger’s second reading of Heraclitus also polemicizes against Heidegger’s first, Schmittian understanding of war as “the great opposition between the essentials powers of Being.” Understanding polemos as the struggle between different logoi for ultimate domination keeps the principle of reason beyond the historical-political reach of conflict, keeps polemos and logos apart.

It is therefore as a polemos against the Schmittian war that we can understand Heidegger’s second reading of Fragment 53. In contrast to Kampf, the struggle between competing positions (“essential powers of Being”), polemos as Auseinandersetzung is the setting apart, the division or makhloket, literally the Aus-einander-setzung: the opposition that generates position. Auseinandersetzung Heidegger writes, “allows the things that essentially unfold to step apart from each other in opposition, first allows position and status and rank to establish themselves in coming to presence.”

Here, Heidegger does not emphasize the role of polemos as king but as father. Strife does not just determine mastery between competing rationalities—it generates reason itself, creates order, cosmos. “In Aus-einandersetzung, a world comes to be.” What this means is that by declaring war on the universal claim of Zeus, Heraclitus does not seek to posit conflict instead of unity, polemos instead of logos. Rather he asserts polemos as the essence of logos. As Heidegger later added to his original seminar notes, “[Auseinandersetzung does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same]” (Heidegger 1983b, p. 47; quoted in Fried 2008, p. 33).

Polemos and logos are the same, or as Fried puts it, “Auseinandersetzung is both polemos and logos” (quoted in Fried 2008, p. 32). Fragment 53 calls for war neither on reason nor between reasons but as the essence of reason. If reason unifies, it does so not by way of harmony, but through strife, by setting apart. The unifying, “gathering,” function of struggle does not operate only between things or essences, but as the very power or condition that brings them forth, gives them form as things and essences, that is creates a meaningful world from chaos. The cessation of struggle accordingly does not instate one—false or right—order and reason while tyrannically suppressing others, rather it dissolves the tension that holds together things as things against one another. The end of polemos signifies the dissolution of things to objects and of reason to technology, the return of world to chaos.

9. Polemics Versus Hermeneutics

What does it mean that logos and polemos are the same, that logos is based on polemos? How does polemic logos look like, how does it function? Does it look like Heraclitus’s speech, or Heidegger’s? Does it—can it—still look and function like logos, in the sense of a coherent discourse, unified by the unity of its position, its intention, its meaning and its author? Or, if polemic reason, as Auseinandersetzung, is in fact not based on the principle of unity, but constitutes it, wouldn’t it have to take, within speech, a form that surpasses in its agonistic structure the mere polemical, controversial logos? Wouldn’t it have to dissolve the basic unity of discourse that defines speech as logos? Wouldn’t it have to take the form of rational language that is nonetheless structured on a different principle than logos?

Gregory Fried’s intervention addresses this question, that is the logos or logein of polemos. We may perhaps call it the question concerning the poetics of polemic reason, meaning the way in which polemos, not as destructive, but as generative of a world, produces itself as language. As a key passage, Fried refers us to Heidegger’s 1936 lectures on Nietzsche, where he writes: “Auseinandersetzung does not express itself in ‘polemic,’ but rather in the manner of interpretative construction, of the setting in place of the antagonist in his highest power and dangerousness” (Heidegger 1985, p. 275; quoted in Fried 2008, p. 39).

Once again, we see how polemos, here as Auseinandersetzung, now within the realm of expression, of logos, is determined through polemos, here in the contrast to another understanding of polemic poetics. The enemy declared by Heidegger is “polemic.” The poetics of polemos is not polemic. What Heidegger means, I suggest, is a speech act that has no other meaning than to undermine another speech act, a purely negative act of destruction. This kind of polemic reflects, within the realm of language, the “arbitrary quarrel,” which constitutes a war devoid of reason, a Darwinian or Hobbesian power struggle for survival.

Gregory Fried also mentions a second figure of polemic logos that Heidegger’s conception refutes, another enemy. With respect to the question of polemos in history, within Heidegger’s thought, Fried writes: “History is polemical, although not dialectical in the Hegelian sense” (Fried 2008, p. 17). If we ignore for a moment the specific question of history, we understand that polemos, insofar as it expresses itself in logos, does not take the form of dialectics. Hegelian dialectics can be described as the struggle between “essential powers of being,” namely between different conceptual moments, different logoi, which nonetheless preserves the underlying unity of the concept and projects, or produces, beyond history, the oneness of absolute spirit.

Neither polemic nor dialectic, Auseinandersetzung, the performance of polemos as logos, expresses itself rather “in the manner of interpretative construction.” As Fried explains, founded on the principle of polemos, logos takes the shape of hermeneutics. Hermeneutic reason affirms itself in relation to another reason, rationality oriented by its relation to—and tension with—otherness. As hermeneutic, logos consists of acts of meaning that are asserted as a response—a reading, understanding, interpreting—against other acts of meaning. Polemic thought asserts counter-meanings against given meanings. In other words, oriented by the principle of polemos, thinking is a war with one’s givenness, in the sense of one’s own history. Polemic reason is a struggle with tradition, which constitutes the essence of hermeneutics.

In Heidegger’s own logos, Fried indicates, the hermeneutic-polemic principle generates a central performance of this corpus of thinking that consists of an interpretative struggle with the historical texts of philosophy. He refers to an early seminar of Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle” from 1922, which describes the polemic operation of hermeneutic as “the path of destruction” (quoted in Fried 2008, p. 41). In Being and Time as well, Heidegger writes that the question concerning the meaning of Being must engage, beyond the existential analytic of Dasein, with the history of ontology by way of “Destruktion” (Heidegger 1977, p. 27).

Yet, as we saw, the hermeneutics of Auseinandersetzung does not mean a pure negative act of destruction, that Heidegger calls “polemic.” The engagement with tradition that polemic logos requires is rather, recalls the quote from the Nietzsche lectures, “the setting in place of the antagonist in his highest power and dangerousness.” The war on history does not mean destroying tradition. On the contrary, it means constructing (or deconstructing) tradition as the most powerful enemy. Tradition, the given, is not a gift but a challenge, a battle.

However, to become readers and therefore enemies of Heidegger’s text, shouldn’t we say that even as his text goes to war on other texts, even as it engages in polemic hermeneutics, it nonetheless always remains, in the structure of its own speech, in its own poetics, an act (or various acts) of unified logos. It remains Heidegger, just as Fragment 53 remains Heraclitus. Shouldn’t we protest that in their discourse, it is not polemos who is the king of all things, but after all and nonetheless Zeus? If this contestation is not just “polemic,” if it indeed constitutes a genuine Auseinandersetzung, we are now required to posit a rival, in the form of a competing performance of rationality as polemic hermeneutics.

The rival I suggest to deploy against Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung is the talmudic makhloket.

10. Makhloket on Makhloket

Mishnah Avot states: “Every makhloket that is for the sake of heaven, will in the end endure; But one that is not for the sake of heaven, will not endure. Which is the makhloket that is for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai. And which is the one that is not for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation” (mAvot 5:17).

Is this a rabbinic logos? Whose? What kind of author and authority is the Mishnah, what sort of “basileus”? Our passage is a statement, a text that concerns makhloket, a word that can be translated as disagreement, dispute or division, a good literal translation for Auseinandersetzung, a concept of polemos. As I noted in the introduction, the Mishnah tractate Avot (“fathers”) contains statements on the basic principles of rabbinic discourse. Avot 5:17 can be read as a primary utterance on the rabbinic principle of makhloket. Yet this utterance is not logos in the sense that it does not offer an indicative statement on the essence of makhloket. In contrast to Heraclitus’s Fragment 53, Avot 5:17 does not say what makhloket in general is, does not provide a general definition, description or narrative, such as “polemos is the father and king of all things.” The unifying logos is missing.

Instead, the thematization of makhloket here is shaped, in its linguistic structure, through a makhloket, by a division between two different, competing forms of makhloket, a makhloket of different makhlokot. In this sense, Avot 5:17 does not define but manifests and performs makhloket as the polemic form of rabbinic poetics. If makhloket is a principle of rabbinic speech, then the makhloket on makhloket constitutes “the father” or rather the mother of all things rabbinic, the matrix of talmud.

11. For Heaven’s Sake

“Every makhloket that is for the sake of heaven, will in the end endure; But one that is not for the sake of heaven, will not endure.” The matrix of makhloket is presented through an inner division between two kinds of makhloket, between two makhlokot. The two makhlokot are opposed, they so to speak struggle with each other. Their struggle is for endurance, for persistent existence, “le-hitkayem,” ein Kampf ums Dasein. In its being, in its very existence, a makhloket, every makhloket—like everything else, according to Spinoza—strives to remain in being, to endure.

It is not entirely clear what “the end” means in this passage—“will in the end endure.” It introduces a dimension of temporality to the existence of makhloket. Makhloket is a temporal event, it is what takes place in time, perhaps it is the very event of time, the life of history. To “endure in the end” may mean that the relevant makhloket, in the sense of a contesting affirmation, a disagreeing opinion, will prevail and become “the ruler” after the dispute is over, at the end of time, beyond history and sin. But it can also mean that the dispute itself will prevail and endure as such, beyond all rulers. These two interpretative options correspond to the two conflicting notions of polemos that we found, with Fried’s guidance, in Heidegger’s divergent readings of Heraclitus.

The Mishnah, inasmuch as it does not provide a logos-like definition of makhloket, nonetheless offers a key for deciding the war between the divided makhlokot. In order to endure, in order to persist in existence, “in the end,” in order to be, that is, so we can say, in order to actually be a makhloket, a genuine one, the given dispute must be “for the sake of heaven,” le-shem shamayim. It is not explained nor is it obvious what “heaven” means here. It is trivial to say that it refers to God. The question is what signification of God is meant by the notion of “heaven”—transcendence, universality, unity, or perhaps rather plurality (since shamayim is in plural)? Does the term therefore mean, like Zeus for Homer and Hesiod, the unifying order of justice and reason? Does it mean logos?

One thing is certain—every makhloket is “for the sake of” something, it has a purpose, direction or intention, it has a cause. In other words, a makhloket is never an “arbitrary quarrel,” rather it has a meaning, it is driven by some reason. Furthermore, even though we know that every makhloket strives to endure, to fully exist, the makhloket that will ultimately achieve endurance is not the one that exists “for the sake” of its own existence. A genuine makhloket does not arise for its own sake. The divided, struggling rivals are not solely interested in their own survival, it is not a pure power struggle, as a Darwin or a Hobbes would have it. In this sense, “for the sake of heaven” appears to mean for the sake of something beyond one’s own existence, for the sake of something general, even universal. The rabbinic makhloket, that deserves its name and its being, does not contest unifying reason, on the contrary it goes to war for it.

Therefore, the heart of the makhloket, of every real makhloket, is “heaven,” that is the meaning of “for the sake of heaven.” Since only the latter ensures endurance, such that only a contestation or disagreement done for the sake of heaven merits to exist, the underlying, foundational claim of every dissent must be that it is neither arbitrary nor done for its own sake, but for the sake of some transcendent or universal reason. The fundamental dispute at the basis of each makhloket is what party’s claim is really asserted for the sake of heaven.

Should we say that the fundamental dispute in general, the mother of all makhloket, therefore concerns the meaning of heaven and what it means to engage, to fight and struggle for heaven’s sake? “For heaven’s sake!” is the basic affirmation of any act of conflict, and it means something like: “I am now affirming myself, putting myself against you, but I am not acting just for my own narrow, individual interest, not in my own name, but in the name of something higher than me, higher than both of us, that both you and I must acknowledge, and agree on, and it is for the sake of this agreement that I now disagree with you, why don’t you see that, you must be able to see that, for heaven’s sake!”

12. The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Second Enemy

“Which is the makhloket that is for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai. And which is the one that is not for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation.”

The Mishnah, as I noted, provides no conceptual definition or delineation of what “heaven” means and when a makhloket may be said to be in fact for heaven’s sake and not just for its own sake. We get no universal logos. Instead, the mahloket of Avot 5:17 refers to another makhloket, a historical one. More precisely it affirms an opposition between two historical cases of makhloket. The question of heaven is addressed through a hermeneutical act, an act of giving meaning, of interpreting a given event of signification, an act of reading. We may invoke here Fried’s understanding of Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung as the principle underlying the hermeneutic performance of polemic speech, which sets itself apart from its history, and by this very act at the same time also posits this history as such, and as its own, and as its greatest antagonist, “in his highest power and dangerousness.” Could we say that the Mishnah, makhloket-based, deconstructs its own history?

The Mishnah contrasts two historical cases of makhloket and declares the one is a case of makhloket for the sake of heaven, the other not. Following the logic of polemos, I will begin with the latter makhloket, which according to the Mishnah is not a genuinely rabbinic one, not really or entirely a makhloket, insofar as its end is not to endure, that is it carries with itself an ultimate nullity, non-being. We may say that in Avot 5:17, the rabbinic makhloket, identifying as its protagonist the first mentioned makhloket of the two mythological rabbis Hillel and Shammai, posits the second makhloket, a biblical one, “of Korah and all his congregation,” as its historical antagonist, as its enemy. Or more precisely, the Mishnah posits Korah’s makhloket as its second enemy, that is as the wrong or misguided makhloket, the one that is not for the sake of heaven. But who is the primary enemy of Mishnah Avot? Against whom or what does the father-text of rabbinic thought affirm the principle of makhloket? Who is the Talmud’s arch-enemy?

The genuine makhloket and the misguided one share the same enemy—this is the basis for their rivalry. The Mishnah does not specify who is Korah’s enemy. His makhloket is not even titled as such, namely through a confrontative “against” or “versus,” on the contrary it is marked with a conjunctive “and”: “the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation.” Does the Mishnah refer to a conflict that divided between Korah and his congregation? As we shall see, the rabbis do remember such a dispute. Yet this is not the main conflict that made Korah famous, his main enemy was another. By omitting to designate this enemy, the Mishnah no doubt presupposes the notoriety of this episode for its likely readers. At the same time, however, this omission is also a poetic performance of the Mishnah’s own hermeneutical position with respect to this makhloket, that is of the understanding that the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation “is not for the sake of heaven,” and therefore “in the end will not endure.”

The Mishnah posits itself as the end, where Korah’s makhloket has no longer any existence, is no longer even spoken of as such. This effacement from rabbinic memory reenacts the more dramatic wiping out of existence as described in the Book of Numbers: “and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with their households, all Korah’s people and all their possessions. They went down alive into Sheol, with all that belonged to them; the earth closed over them and they vanished from the midst of the congregation” (Num. 16, 32–33).

It would seem that Korah and his followers declared war on God himself, or more precisely against JHWJ, just as Heraclitus declared a polemos on Zeus. Yet the biblical text describes the conflict in different terms. “They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, ‘You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and JHWH is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above JHWH’s congregation?” (Numbers 16, 3). Korah does not contest JHWH, rather his congregation identifies itself and speaks in the name of “JHWH’s congregation.” It is in the name of JHWH that Korah identifies his actual enemy as Moses. The makhloket of Korah is a polemos against the interpretation of JHWH as the Mosaic order, which the Pentateuch institutes. Korah’s contestation is the constitutive polemos of the biblical logos: his makhloket is the enemy whose wiping out provides the ground on which Moses’s Torah stands. The memory of Korah posits the Torah itself as enemy.

13. Ezer ke-Negdo

“Which is the one that is not for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation.” What is Korah’s makhloket against Moses’s Torah, and why is it a wrong one? From what I said so far, it is clear that we should be wary of dismissing Korah too quickly, or be too quick to assume that the Mishna condemns him for contesting the authority of Moses, the Torah and God himself. The difficulty that we should experience in understanding Avot’s declaration is that in Numbers we read that Korah and his congregation raise their complaint—“Why then do you raise yourselves above JHWH’s congregation?”—literally in God’s name.

In fact, by choosing these precise words, “for the sake of heaven,” the Mishnah can be read as modelling its specific makhloket on Korah’s makhloket. The rabbinic project of makhloket does not reject Korah’s contestation of Moses, rather it accepts Korah’s own terms and project—disputing Moses’s Torah in God’s name—and criticizes him for failing to execute it properly. In other words, my claim is that the Mishnah condemns Korah not for disagreeing with the Mosaic order, but for not being radical enough, and it is for this reason that, notwithstanding Korah’s own claim to speak in God’s name, his makhloket against Moses was not in fact genuinely “for the sake of heaven.”

To support my reading of the Mishnah, I refer to a rabbinic reading of the Korah story in Numbers. The Babylonian Talmud’s tractate Sanhedrin, in its eleventh and last chapter, contains a series of midrashim on Korah. The chapter begins with the Mishnah declaring that “all of Israel have a share in the world to come” (BT San. 90a) and then goes on to list all the exceptions. In this list we find: “The congregation of Korah has no part to the world to come” (BT San. 109b). The Talmud parts with Korah and this parting, that is the rabbinic makhloket with Korah and his congregation, we may say, will in the end endure, that is, we may conclude, this makhloket is for the sake of heaven. We know that the cause for the rabbinic makhloket with Korah is his own makhloket with Moses. The Talmud brings a series of midrashim on the matter. I am now reading one of them, which attempts to flesh out Korah’s opposition.

To do this, as we can now better understand, the rabbinic midrash stages an internal opposition within Korah’s opposition, a makhloket within makhloket, in the form of an Auseinandersetzung between Korah and his congregants. Next to the figure of Korah, the midrash conjures a second figure, On the son of Peleth, who is mentioned in Numbers as one of Korah’s associates. The two figures become the representatives of two positions within the opposition, of two rival understandings and performances of the anti-Moses contestation. The midrash clearly sides with On against Korah. In other words, the midrash posits On’s figure as the rabbinic position within Korah’s opposition to Moses, that is as the understanding of Korah’s makhloket against the Mosaic Torah that prefigures the rabbinic makhloket, “for the sake of heaven.”

This divided division is presented to us in the form of two dialogues. In other words, within each position, Korah’s and On’s, we are again introduced to an inner split, to an exchange between two voices. The dialogues feature these two men in conversation with their respective wifes. The unity of each figure, of each interpretation of the makhloket against Moses, is presented a constituted by a tension between man and woman, husband and wife. More specifically, the more active, assertive and agonic voice in each dialogue is the wife’s. Within the unity of the self’s intimate sphere, within the domestic order, the feminine represents the power of polemos.

This rabbinic motif echoes Genesis’s second story of creation, which tells how God creates the woman, Eve, next to the man, Adam, in order to provide him with an עזר כנגדו, ezer ke-negdo, that is a counterpart or literally a paradoxical assistance “against him.” In this context it would also be pertinent to reflect on Eve’s role in the first human contestation of the divine order, in the first sin, of eating from the tree of knowledge. The fatal human seizure of knowledge “of good and bad,” arguably the rise of human reason, through a transgression against God’s word, begins when the snake convinces the feminine counterpart of humanity that God, “father and king of all things,” is in fact man’s enemy: “God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad” (Gen. 3, 5). God’s universal law, which seems like paradise, is in fact a tyrannical system of repression. Thus begins the polemos between God and Man that inaugurates worldly existence.

14. Down with Moses

Eve in this sense prefigures Korah’s wife. We read in Sanhedrin: “Korah’s wife said to him: See what Moses is doing. He is the king, he appointed his brother High Priest, and he appointed his brother’s sons deputy priests. If teruma [=tax] comes, he says: Let it be for the priest; if the first tithe comes, which you as Levites take, he says: Give one tenth to the priest. And furthermore, he shears your hair and waves as excrement, as though he set his sights on your hair” (BT San. 109b).

Just like in Eve, in Korah’s wife arises the critical perception of the given order, which appears as the universal divine law—there the prohibition on eating from the tree and here the Torah itself—as an instrument of power. God’s law makes Moses king. As (the sound of) Korah’s name in Hebrew implies, in his house, through his wife, law means “force” (korakh), and universal law means imperialism. Obeying the law therefore signifies submission to repression, which the feminine eye detects exemplarily in the requirement imposed by Moses’s law on Korah as a Levite, when entering the temple service, to shave his hair (cf. Num. 8, 7).

The struggle between hair and law plays a key role in this text, as we shall see. The domestic conversation is not entirely harmonious. Korah raises an objection to his wife’s criticism of Moses’s Torah as an oppressive regime. “Korah said to her: But didn’t he also do so? She said to him: Since it is all for his own prominence, he said: Let me die with the Philistines.”

Korah’s objection refers to what his wife perceived as the epitome of the Mosaic law’s repressive essence, the obligation on Levites to shave their hair. Korah objects that Moses too shaved his hair. Even if he is in fact made a king, he nonetheless obeys the same law, which therefore should not be understood as arising from Moses’s will to power, but indeed as a transcendent, divine universal order. Moses submitted to the law by cutting his own hair. Korah’s wife answers by quoting another biblical figure with hair issues, Samson. Samson too had his hair shaved, by the enemy who took the intimate form of a woman. He then, in a suicidal act, embraced his disempowerment by universalizing destruction to unite him with his enemies in joint death: “Let me die with the Philistines” (Judges 16:30).

The comparison of Moses with Samson is intriguing in may ways, not the least since it portrays the Torah as an act of self-sacrifice. For Korah’s wife, the fact that Moses himself submitted to his own law, just like the others, his subjects, does not in any way reduce from the repressive, tyrannical nature of this law. It is a Mosaic law, which, in the name of JHWH—which could have just as well be called Zeus—institutes not justice, but a king, basileus, Beherrscher. In other words, what Korah’s wife criticizes is that the Torah represents only a false universalism. It is against this problematic form of unifying universality, against this pathological logos, that she has Korah wage his polemos.

What is accordingly the nature of Korah’s makhloket? There are—at least—two divergent readings here, whose conflict underlies perhaps the structure of every grievance. One reading focuses on the individual nature of the litigated offense, which seemingly undermines the very essence of universal law. Korah’s wife would represent self-interest, a selfish ego who can only perceive competing egos, and in all generality, in all reason, law and institution recognizes the illusion that only conceals the cynical yet exclusively authentic game of power. Torah, JHWH, law, are only tools in the bellum omnium contra omnes. The only true God is the self, his true prophet is Darwin and divine law is war for survival. This is the model discussed above of polemos without reason, a makhloket for the sake of makhloket.

The second reading of Korah’s makhloket, and of any makhloket, is attuned to another, contrasting essential feature of the grievance, which is that the individual offense is always affirmed, as an offense and violation, in the name of some general principle, some justice. In fact, as we already noted, Korah’s contestation of Moses is done, as we read in Numbers, in the name of JHWH: “For all the community are holy, all of them, and JHWH is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above JHWH’s congregation?” Korah does not reject universality as such. On the contrary, by invoking God, he is fighting for the cause and for the sake of “all.” In other words, against the false universality of the Mosaic order, which nonetheless institutes a hierarchy, “raises” the ones and represses the others, Korah is the voice of a real, perfect universality, where “all the community are holy, all of them, and JHWH is in their midst.”

This is how Adi Ophir recently described Korah’s rebellion against the Mosaic theocracy: “[Korah’s] demand subverts the hierarchical structure and the binary logic that characterizes the biblical text in general and the priestly sources in particular. Korah, in Michael Walzer’s words, was ‘the first left oppositionist in the history of radical politics’” (Ophir 2022). Accordingly, Korah’s makhloket does not contest the principle of universal reason, on the contrary it criticizes the order established by Moses for not being universal enough. Against the Mosaic theo-logos, which is based on institutional hierarchy, Korah affirms another political theology, a radical one, of egalitarian anarchism. On this reading, the struggle between Korah and Moses is a conflict between competing logoi, between two opposite ideologies, what Heidegger would perhaps call two “essential powers of Being,” in any case two theologies, such that each side, both Moses and Korah, should be considered as fighting “for the sake of heaven.”

What is then the Mishnah’s problem with Korah? Why does it nonetheless contest that his makhloket was waged for the sake of heaven? Why was this makhloket doomed not to endure? As noted, I argue that it is not because Korah contested the Mosaic performance of JHWH, namely the law and order established by the Pentateuchal Torah; nor is it because Korah’s contestation of Moses’s Torah rejected the idea that JHWH’s name should be the basis for a universally unifying law, for, strictly speaking, a political theo-logy. On the contrary, I claim that the Mishnah acknowledged the significance of Korah’s dispute against the Mosaic theocracy, and actually recognized and affirmed his polemos as a precursor for the rabbinic makhloket. This is the powerful historical deconstruction that takes place in Avot 5:17: the mythological rebel against Moses’s Torah is posited as a role model.

Korah is therefore, so I argue, not condemned by the rabbis for raising the makhloket against the Mosaic logos, but for not offering a sufficiently powerful polemos, which can endure. To state it simply: against the Mosaic order, Korah affirms another order, which is even more universal, even more unifying and absolute, that is even less open to conflict, to Auseinandersetzungen, even less open to makhloket. Korah’s universalism, for being more universal, is also more repressive. I think this is the same problem that Schmitt recognized both in liberalism and in anarchism, which are the cause for a war waged against war, a polemos against polemos, in the name of perfect reason. It is also the problem that I indicated in Heidegger’s first, Schmittian reading of polemos as struggle between “essential powers of Being,” as Kampf of logoi, which nonetheless reaffirms the principle of logos itself, beyond political history, as excluding conflict. Korah, the revolutionary Levite, “the first left oppositionist in the history of radical politics,” prefigures the Jacobin, who in the name of equality establishes a totalitarian state.

We can say, accordingly, that the rabbinic makhloket criticizes Korah’s makhloket as wrong, since even though it appears to contest the Mosaic order, ultimately it in fact reaffirms and even reinforces its repressive power. The idea that Korah’s attack on Moses consolidated the Mosaic rule calls to mind Freud’s narrative in Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion, translated as Moses and Monotheism. Freud suggested that Moses’s theo-political order encountered the Israelites’ resistance. Strongly resonating with the talmudic voice of Korah’s wife, Freud writes that Moses, acting in the name of the one universal God, “employed no methods other than did the king; he commanded, he forced his faith upon the people.” Accordingly, he “met with the same fate that awaits all enlightened despots…. the savage Semites took fate into their own hands and rid themselves of their tyrant” (Freud 1964).3

Freud does not mention Korah, but we could say that the narrative that he develops offers a scenario in which Korah’s rebellion was actually successful. In contrast to what we read in Numbers, it was actually Moses and not Korah that died in the conflict. According to Freud’s psycho-mythological hypothesis, the murder of Moses gradually produced the effect of collective guilt and regret, which ultimately generated a collective return towards a mythological figure of the founding father in the form of the monotheistic God. It was the murder of the person Moses which, over time, led to the establishment of the Mosaic religion.

The Talmud offers us an echo of a similar scenario in the reference made by Korah’s wife to Samson, “Let me die with the Philistines.” To establish his law, the man Moses had to die. According to this logic, Korah’s makhloket played a dialectical role in instituting Moses’s theocracy, which repressed all further disputes and ended makhlokot. Korah therefore did not integrate the makhloket in the divine order, did not establish the makhloket “for the sake of heaven,” but was instead instrumental in instituting a regime in which God’s name ended all disagreement.

15. Hair

This realization, I suggest, underlies the midrash on Korah in the talmudic Sanhedrin. I noted that the midrash posits an opposition within Korah’s makhloket, between Korah himself and On the son of Peleth, both articulated through the voices of their wives. So far we heard Korah’s side, which challenges the Mosaic logos not with the rejection of all reason in favor of irrational power struggle, but with the radical vision of universal reason, of prefect logos, which undermines even more the principle of makhloket.

It is this perspective on Korah’s cause that animates the intervention of On’s wife. “She said to him: What is the difference to you? If this Master is the great one, you are the student. And if this Master is the great one, you are the student.” On’s wife understands that against Moses’s universal logos, Korah does not contest the principle of unifying reason, but affirms his own universal logos. She quotes the words in Numbers (16, 3) that attest to Korah’s piousness: “She said to him: I know that the entire assembly is holy, as it is written: ‘For all the assembly is holy’.” Korah’s makhloket is the conflict of one Torah against another, one Master against another, a struggle of two “great ones”, between two Rabbis, two “essential powers of Being.”

“On said to her: What shall I do? I was one of those who took counsel and I took an oath with them that I would be with them. She said to him: I know that the entire assembly is holy, as it is written: ‘For all the assembly is holy.’ She said to him: Sit, for I will save you. She gave him wine to drink and caused him to become drunk and laid him on a bed inside their tent. She sat at the entrance of the tent and exposed her hair [as though she were bathing]. Anyone who came and saw her stepped back. In the meantime the assembly of Korah was swallowed into the ground.”

Realizing that the apparent makhloket against the Mosaic theocracy is in reality the clash of two authoritative regimes, On’s wife marks a new position in the conflict, a new opposition. Refusing to identify with any of the warring Masters, she takes a stance against the war itself. Nota bene, she does not tell On to reunite with Moses, she does not dismiss Korah’s contestation. Yet, she disagrees with the way Korah resists. On’s wife thus marks a new stance, which rejects both logoi, and more fundamentally rejects makhloket as the struggle of logoi.

The new position, the new kind of makhloket, is defined in this narrative negatively. To escape both rival kings, both regimes of hair-cutters, On’s wife, his agent of discord, exposes her hair and lets him, On, lay behind it, intoxicated. Against the war of reasons, she deactivates and suspends the principle of reason. It is this new suspended position that the Talmud embraces, applying to the wife of On, son of Peleth, the words of Proverbs “The wisdom of women builds her house” (Prov. 14:1), whereas the second part of the verse, “But folly tears it down with its own hands”: “this is referring to the wife of Korah.”

16. Makhloket After Moses

The talmudic midrash identifies in Korah’s rebellion, in the figure of On’s wife, the emergence of a new opposition to Moses, a new kind of makhloket, which is characterized purely negatively, as rejecting repression in the name of universal law. There is a modern reading of the Korah story that offers, I think, a similar insight, by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s “Towards the Critique of Violence,” Zur Kritik der Gewalt, makes a brief mention of Korah. Benjamin is interested in the response to Korah’s contestation of the Mosaic law, which does not come from Moses, is not an act of legal violence that emerges from the force of the law, but rather from God, as divine violence: “and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with their households, all Korah’s people and all their possessions. They went down alive into Sheol, with all that belonged to them; the earth closed over them and they vanished from the midst of the congregation” (Num. 16, 32–33).

Benjamin indicates that the divine violence unleashed against Korah was “bloodless,” doubtlessly referring to the words “they went down alive.” (Benjamin 1977). He therefore suggests that God’s violence was not directed against Korah’s life (“mere life”), but, on the exact contrary, against the kind of violence that exclusively applies to mere life, namely against legal violence, Rechtsgewalt. For Benjamin, Korah represented legal violence since he was a Levite, and as such a “privileged” of the Mosaic regime, its official agent. Yet Korah was more importantly a rival of the Mosaic hierarchy, whose more prominent agent was Moses himself, the “king.” If we accept Benjamin’s reading, that in attacking Korah God’s violence was undoing the violence of law, then it is because Korah represented not simply the Mosaic regime, but the misguided resistance to it. Divine violence, we may say with Benjamin, inaugurated a new kind of makhloket, a non-Mosaic one, “for the sake of heaven.”

This new kind of makhloket, I suggest, is what Mishnah Avot 5:17 proclaims as the foundation of rabbinic reason. We saw that the Midrash, by introducing the figure of the wife of On the son of Peleth, disputed both the Mosaic regime and Korah’s makhloket by rejecting their common adherence to the principle of unified, harmonious order. I argue that the Mishnah develops this intervention, so as to define the basic rabbinic position vis-à-vis Moses’s Torah. The rabbinic position is defined as an opposition, a makhloket. Avot posits the rabbinic makhloket polemically, makhloketlly, in opposition to another makhloket, Korah’s, by affirming in contrast to it “the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai.”

Hillel and Shammai are two of the founding sages of the rabbinic discourse, sometimes referred to as “the fathers of the world”, avot ha-olam (Mishnah Eduyot 1:4). They are often mentioned as bound together in a dispute, on various specific questions, but more deeply as a seminal conflict between basic rabbinic positions. This conflict extends from a disagreement between the two masters themselves to an ongoing war between their two schools, which marks a generative tension at the heart of rabbinic reason. In this sense, “the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai” can be understood as the founding polemos of the talmudic order, “the father and king of all things” rabbinic.

In the context of Avot 5:17, “the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai” indicates not only the conflict between Hillel and Shammai, but also the opposition that Hillel and Shammai, precisely in their polemic conjunction, in the makhloket that binds them, feature vis-à-vis the makhloket of Korah. This is the central opposition of this Mishnah: “Which is the makhloket that is for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai. And which is the one that is not for the sake of heaven? Such is the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation.”

The makhloket of Hillel and Shammai represents a polemic configuration that is comparable to but also divergent from the configuration of the makhloket of Korah and all his congregation. Based on the analysis presented above I suggest that the conflict between these two configurations delineate the rabbinic principle of makhloket, which is itself affirmed polemically, against the principle of unity. My discussion of Korah’s makhloket showed how the principle of unity is represented in this context by the Mosaic order, against which Korah advanced his contestation. My claim is that the Mishnah affirms this basic makhloket as a precursor for the position of the rabbinic discourse vis-à-vis Moses’s Torah as it is articulated in the Pentateuchal logos. Just like Korah’s stance, the rabbinic position vis-à-vis Moses is an opposition, a makhloket. In other words, Moses is the common enemy of, on the one hand, Korah and his congregation, and on the other hand, of Hillel and Shammai.

Yet, and this is the decisive point of my reading of Avot, the polemic constellation inaugurated by Hillel and Shammai diverges from the polemos of Korah. If Moses is the primary rival of the rabbinic discourse, Korah is the secondary adversary, as he represents the misguided kind of makhloket. As my analysis showed, the basic problem with Korah’s makhloket, as the rabbinic midrash understands it through the figure of Korah’s wife, is that it affirms the polemos against the repressive order of the unified Mosaic law only for the sake of another unified order—it contests the Mosaic logos for the sake of a Korahite logos. But Korah does not introduce the makhloket as an alternative principle altogether for the order of speech and action, for the world established on God’s name. Korah fails to introduce makhloket “for the sake of heaven,” as the constitutive mode of Torah.

To speak in Heideggerian terms, Korah’s makhloket remains a Kampf, a struggle for domination, for Herrschaft, between diverging ontologies or theologies, represented by two kings, Moses and Korah. It is against this configuration of makhloket, that the talmudic midrash posits On the son of Peleth as a negative performance of dissent, which suspends the war, refuses to take part in it. Mishnah Avot develops this seminal rabbinic gesture and posits the positive performance of resistance to Korah’s makhloket by affirming the makhlolet of Hillel and Shammai as the alternative form of polemos, configured not as Kampf but as Auseinandersetzung. In contrast to the Korahite polemos, a struggle of one total order against another, the rabbinic makhloket is a foundational principle not of polemics but of poetics, a setting apart, an opposition, which generates positions and creates a world.

This is the profound double significance of the expression “the makhloket of Hillel and Shammai”: it is a makhloket against the unity of the Mosaic discourse, similar to Korah’s rebellion, which however, in contrast to Korah, posits makhloket itself as an alternative mode of discourse, an alternative Torah. This alternative, polemic Torah, so Mishnah Avot declares, unlike Korah and his congregation, will end up enduring, as a makhloket against the Mosaic Torah, as anti-Bible, and its name for us will be, I suggest, Talmud.