avakesh

A new book on R.Nachman

 

Silence, music and mysticism

From a review by ZVI LESHEM

Mysticism and Madness, which analyzes several key issues in Nahman’s thinking, is largely a rejoinder to several scholarly works that have, until now, been considered definitive in describing R. Nahman’s religious world. Mark, who is very much at home in the vast corpus of both Nahman’s own writing and that of subsequent generations of Bratslav literature, presents a radically different understanding of Nahman, one that moves him closer to the kabbalistic-hassidic milieu in which he was raised (he was the great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who was the first hassidic leader), and returns him from the radical existentialist mode into which some of his earlier interpreters had thrust him.

The late Joseph Weiss, in his pioneering Hebrew studies of Nahman, emphasized his personal life (of which we are blessed with abundant material from internal Bratslav sources) and existentialist crises, downplaying the mystical elements in his life and teachings. Weiss was followed by Prof. Arthur Green, who, in his classic work Tormented Master, portrayed Nahman as a deeply conflicted individual who was blessed not only with a powerful self-awareness of his status as a tzaddik, but also with tremendous self-doubt and conflicts regarding his own faith and religious tensions. Green presented this existential portrait of Nahman as largely overriding the more mystical aspirations of the more typical hassidic rebbe, which may be subsumed under the general rubric of seeking a more intense personal and spiritual experience of God.

Mark argues forcefully that Weiss, Green and those who followed them misinterpreted key passages in Nahman’s writings, consistently overlooking their obviously mystical meaning and reinterpreting them through the prism of the existentialist lens through which they wrote. While not denying Nahman’s existential struggle, his theological radicalism or his sometimes bizarre behavior, Mark uses close philological analysis to convincingly demonstrate that despite his uniqueness in the world of hassidic thought, in the last analysis, Nahman’s major concern remains that of his other hassidic colleagues, finding a path to God for himself and for his followers.

Mark achieves his goals through analysis of issues such as Nahman’s approach to imagination, prophecy, faith, silence, music and the Land of Israel, to which he traveled at the beginning of the 19th century.

He also discusses some of Nahman’s mystical and devotional techniques, such as the meditative practice of hitbodedut (conversing with God) and hand clapping during prayer. He argues that the goal of these practices is to lead the devotee to a state of bitul (self-annulment) and deveikut (cleaving to God). Mark shows us to what extent Nahman was in fact continuing trends, both in thought and deed, found in earlier mystical literature, although he often infused the earlier texts with a creative new meaning....

Converts of Jewish ancestry

Rav Amsalem, an Israeli expert on halachos of Giyur, is coming out with a new sefer, Zera Yisrael, in which he argues that those converts who have a biological Jewish connection, unlike those from a compeltely non-Jewish background, do not require a full acceptance of all the mitzvos and an acceptance of a "traditional" lifestyle is enough, because the identification with the Jewish people- serving in the IDF and keeping mitzvos such as Kiddush, Kashrus, Yom Kuppur etc is sufficient.

It will be interesting to see his arguments. In the meantime, a controversy is brewing. For myself, does anyone know how to explain a Rashi (s.v.giyra)that says clearly that one can accept a Ger who does not believe in the Divine origin of Oral Law, as long as the rabbi who accepts him is certain that the convert will eventually be persuaded to accept it? Did Rashi believe that an agreement to perform mitzvos is enough, and that Ikkarei Hadas play no role in Giyur, as the plain meaning of the Talmud in Yevomos 47a seems to suggest? Rambam Issurei Biyah Ch.  14:2 famously rewords that gemara to make it about more about theology, or at least about Oneness of G-d,  as well as mitzva observance.

ומודיעין אותו עיקרי הדת שהוא ייחוד השם ואיסור עכו"ם ומאריכין בדבר הזה ומודיעין אותו מקצת מצות קלות ומקצת מצות חמורות ואין מאריכין בדבר זה ומודיעין אותו עון לקט שכחה ופיאה ומעשר שני ומודיעין אותו עונשן של מצות כיצד אומרים לו הוי יודע שעד שלא באת לדת זו אם אכלת חלב אי אתה ענוש כרת אם חללת שבת אי אתה ענוש סקילה ועכשיו אחר שתתגייר אם אכלת חלב אתה ענוש כרת אם חללת שבת אתה ענוש סקילה ואין מרבין עליו ואין מדקדקין עליו שמא יגרום לטרדו ולהטותו מדרך טובה לדרך רעה שבתחלה אין מושכין את האדם אלא בדברי רצון ורכים וכן הוא אומר בחבלי אדם אמשכם ואחר כך בעבותות אהבה

Aleph ShIn, Ten Lost, and Samson's Lion

Aleph Shin, a book about the Messiah was produced specifically for the Orthodox market but is the same story as Samson’s Lion (ISBN 0-96770-440-5), which was distributed in the general market and is also available from most On-Line Book Stores (Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders, Half.com, etc.) The difference between the books is that Samson’s Lion contains expletives and a few emotional scenes between a man and a woman (in the publisher's words, "very innocuously portrayed"). The book was published byTNS, which characterizes itself as, "  an avant guarde Jewish publishing company, not afraid to publish high-level literature that conforms 100% to Torah outlook. No scatological language or graphic scenes are found in our titles. However, we don’t subscribe to the censorship of mature concepts and realistic life experiences, which has relegated much of Orthodox literature to children’s books." Now, after three printings, TMS Publishing reprinted Aleph Shin in the same Volume as the new Ten Lost (Tribes). It is a prequel to Aleph Shin, in which Menachem Shabazzi, the Moschiach character of Aleph Shin, visits some lost tribes, learns martial arts, discovers the gold of Ophir, saves Yossele, kills many evil men with his bare hands, and sets up for Aleph Shin.

This is how TMS describes the plot of Aleph Shin: "

Over thirty years ago, an Israeli submarine, the Dakar, disappeared without a trace on its maiden voyage. On May 28, 1999 the wreckage of the vessel was found 2800 meters below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. Over the years, several theories had emerged as to its fate. Samson’s Lion, a fictional story, is predicated on a novel idea. The submarine was deliberately made to vanish and later scuttled. It concealed a vital, top secret mission of the Israeli secret service.

It is now the future. Missiles carrying poison gas launched from Iran rain down upon the Israeli populace in the wee hours of the morning. Israel doesn’t react. But a few hours after the onset of the attack, strange and inexplicable phenomena begin to wreak deadly havoc throughout the Middle East. Thousands of terrorist fighters on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border are plagued by an unknown deadly insect. People in the streets and squares of numerous cities throughout the Arab world begin dropping like flies, moribund to a torrent of invisible neutrons. The Aswan Dam mysteriously suffers a devastating earthquake, flooding out hundreds of thousands of dweller along the banks of the Nile River. The world can only speculate that Israel was behind this fierce and grotesquely exaggerated retaliation.

Less than one hundred men on the face of the earth knew exactly how these simultaneous responses were planned, implemented and executed. When you read Aleph Shin, you will learn about the cunning, the stealth, the boldness, and the ingenuity of the men who volunteered for this life long Mossad project, insuring the survival of the Jewish State under a Doomsday scenario.

You will learn:

How Alon Barnash, alias Abdallah Ibn Gash in the guise of a devout Muslim, raises a son who, independently, finds the path to Judaism. The boy, a computer whiz, then joins his father in planting the infrastructure to sunder the Aswan High Dam.

How Eli Kedem, alias Farshid Kermani, planted in Isfahan Iran, is discovered by an American business magnate, and is forced to assist in the rescue of his employees caught in the wake of a fanatical revolution.

How the heretofore secular but brilliant Benny Harkesef serendipitously found deep spiritual meaning in joining the project. Then, as Robert Benson, under deep cover in the United States, confounds an attack on Israel and helps to foil a conspiracy against the President of the United States.

Aleph Shin, blends just the right amount of action with sentimentality, politics, religious zeal and suspense, to make for a can’t-put-it-down read and an illuminating experience.

The finale’ of the book peaks in a tumultuous crescendo of abysmal mayhem. The President of the United States, under tremendous pressure to compel Israel to stop the catastrophe in the Arab world, is usurped by a conspiracy of the generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dissatisfied with the President’s reticence. Alas they too, cannot cajole, cannot threaten and cannot control the massive yet untraceable Israeli retaliatory measures. In a last ditch effort, they launch a cruise-missile attack against Israel, which, astoundingly backfires. As the international community coalesces to mount an all out effort to destroy Israel, salvation comes as the world is on the brink of Armageddon. An unexpected, undreamed of, series of events takes place. One man, out of nowhere begins a new wave of humanity that overturns the world order from that of cupidity, hedonism and godlessness, to one of justice, peace and prosperity.

It is a book of adventure and horror, but also one of hope. Out of a frenzied abyss of violence, evil, intrigue and chaos can emerge light and beneficence; it can be the culmination of human existence. Samson’s feat is repeated. From Samson’s Lion (Aleph Shin in Hebrew stands for Ari Shimshon – Samson’s Lion) flows forth sweet honey.".

What this description omits that all of these events were set in motion by Menachem Shabbazzi in the persona that he assumes of Colonel Rafi Schwarts of the Mossad. After arranging all this, the future Messiah retires to Yemen for a number of years  to work on his elevating his soul until his triumphal overland trip in a white limousine from Yemen to Jerusalem.

So, what do you think? When I first read the book, I thought that it was fantastic and over-reaching. On the other hand, it served a purpose for it demonstrated how the events leading up to the Messianic Redemption were possible. At that time, the world appeared geopolitically stable and while I certainly believed in the coming of the Moschiach, because the Torah so commanded, the possibility of his coming in those circumstances appeared remote. The book did a service by demonstrating that it was possible to subvert the existing order and within a short period of time. In that, it performed a service for Judaism and personally for me.

It was also fast paced, well-written and read like a thriller. It was very popular. It went through three printings, and in between the printings, I remember seeing it offered on E-Bay for more than $200.00.

What troubled me about the book, besides it's assumption that miraculous events can be pre-arranged by natural means and performed by the means of nuclear materials, tse-tse flies and bursting the Aswan Dam, or by planting explosives under the mountians surrounding Jerusalem, so that the invading armies are anihilated and the mountain, as the prophets predicted, splits into two, was violence. Never mind that hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Iranians die in retaliation for the death of 28 Jews; more importantly, the last pages contain a hand to hand combat sequence between Menachem, the Messiah and General Umenkoff, the Amalekite and his consorts, in which eyes are gouged out, spleens ruptured, windpipes shattered and blood spurts and sprinkles all over the place. It offended my Jewish sensibilities and disgusted my finely attuned neshama.

But if this troubled you too, please do not read Ten Lost. This book is a veritable demolition derby. In it, the future Messiah fights his way through page after page, crushing opponents rib cages, bashing in their skulls and collapsing their larynxes. Blood flows freely.

I don't generally advocate censorship but this is way over the top. Whereas Aleph Shin had redeeming features - fast paced action, a minimally plausible plot, and a positive effect on emunah, the Ten Lost is heavy, it meanders slowly and leaves one knee deep in grotesquely mutilitated bodies of the enemies. It made me ill and not once. Is this Torah literature? No way. Is it entertaining? Not really? Is it good for one's soull. Not at all. Books like this give Jews a bad name.

Aleph Shin is a work with pluses and minuses and it can be defended on its merits. Ten Lost, in my opinion. should be banished beyond the Sambatyon.

P.S. I did like the other book that TNS published, Every Man a Slave, for its faithfullness to historical detail, depth of characterization and courage in tackling a difficult topic. But the review for that book must wait until a later time.

Modern Orthodox Artscroll

What would Artscroll look like if it came out a a Modern Orthodox (MO) sector?

Now we know!

My eight year-old has recently became interested in Onkelos. Don't ask why? He already knows a great deal of Chumash and Midrash and has been badgering me about learning Onkelos together. He delights especially in finding the differences between Onkelos and the Chumash test. I was passing through the Catskills to attend a meeting and stopped by a pizza shop, where a table of discount books was laid out, so I bought the Genesis volume for him.

Onkelos on the Torah is an ambitious attemtp to present the Targum Onkelos, the traditionally canonic Arameic translation of Pentateuch, to the general public. Written by Israel Drazin, an well-known academic authority on this Targum and Stanley P. Wagenr and published by Gefen, it looks and feels like Artscroll  ...but it is not Artscroll? This deluxe edition, which contains the Hebrew Massoretic text, a vocalized text of Onkelos and Rashi, Haphtarot in Hebrew with an English translation from the Aramaic Targumim, a scholarly appendix, and a “Beyond the Text” exploration of biblical themes As far as I can see form a limited sampling, it does not utilize traditional Onkelos commentaries to any great extent such as Nesinah L'Ger and others (here, p.223).

Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin is a Bible scholar, an author of ten books, a United States Army Brigadier General and chaplain, a rabbi and a lawyer. He he headed the United States’ Medicare’s civil litigation staff. In the United States Army, General Drazin developed the legal argument that saved the military chaplaincies of the Army, Navy and Air Force when lawyers insisted in court that these institutions were a violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. He published seven books on Onkelos through Ktav. By careful analysis of the ten thousand differences between the wording of the Targum and the Bible, Dr. Drazin identified the date of the Targum. He showed the Targum’s consistent reliance on the final edited version of the tannaitic Midrashim - which were edited around 400 CE - and that the Aramaic translator even copied a version of the Hebrew words of the Midrashim hundreds of times into his Aramaic translation. Dr. Drazin received his Rabbinic Ordination in 1957 from the Ner Israel Yeshiva in Baltimore, Maryland. Rabbi Drazin is a proponent of the rationalisitc approach to Judaism.

According to the RCA website, Rabbi Stanley M. Wagner has served the Denver community for more than three decades and is currently Rabbi Emeritus of the BMH-BJ Congregation (active: 1972–1997), Chaplain Emeritus of the Colorado State Senate (active: 1980–1998), Professor Emeritus at the University of Denver (active: 1972–1999), Founding Director and Director Emeritus of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver (active: 1975–1999), and Founding Director and Director Emeritus of the Mizel Museum of Judaica (active: 1982-2000). Ordained at the Yeshiva University’s Rabbinical Seminary, Rabbi Wagner holds six degrees of higher learning from this institution, including a Doctorate in Jewish History. He served as an instructor in the Department of Ancient Languages and Literatures at the University of Kentucky while holding a pulpit in Lexington, and was appointed Instructor in History at Hofstra University in New York while serving as Rabbi of the Baldwin Jewish Centre in Long Island. He has delivered scholarly papers at conferences of the American Association of Professors of Hebrew, the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the National Foreign Language Conference, the Congress on Science and Ethics, inter-religious conferences in Israel and Rome, and he has spoken as guest lecturer and as “Scholar-In-Residence” in communities throughout the United States.

 

The work is an important contribution to the scholarship on Onkelos, for those who care about such scholarship, and here is the rub. How many people value the pshat approach to Biblical interpretation and can a commercial success be built on those few? I concede that naysayers said the same about Artscroll when it first started and were proven wrong... but, really, does anyone expect an average Orthodox Jew, MO or not, to get deeply into comments like this note in the first verse in Genesis ( see also p.226)

The Lord said, "Let there be light". Saadiah explains God's sayings as "desires", thereby avoiding a protrayal of God speaking antrhopomorphically, as a human. While avoiding many anthropomorphisms, our targumist does not replace every anthromopomorphic description in Scripture. This would require too many alterations of the text and produce an almost unrecognizable translation." This is not too far from Etz Chaim'sComentary on this verse (p.5) and quite different from what Artscrollsays on this verse, which is, nothing. Artscroll provides some midrashic inspirational material and does not take up the issue of how G-d can be speaking at all.

One learns that this is not Artscroll as soon as he/she opens the introduction, which is scholarly, but dry. A statement like this(p.xxiv) will NEVER appear in Artscroll.

The Onkelso translation is a work of a brilliant human, but since he was human, one cannot expect consistency...For example, there are verses in Genesis where PseudoJonathan adds memra but our targumist fails to do so... It is possible that these were oversights in the Onkelos translation.

Whoa... Heavy MO stuff! When one relizes that the authors did not believe that it was actually Onkelos who wrote this targum (p.244  of Genesis), as reported in Kiddushin 49a (where it says that this Targum is from Sinai) and Megilla 3a, some of the edge is taken off this statement but another edge is added on. The source in Megilla says that Targum Onkelos was written in the second century CE, by Onkelos, a convert to Judaism, under the guidance of R. Yehoshua and R. Eliezer. As is known, the parallel passage in Yerushalmi says that is was Aquilas ( a.k.a.Achilles) who wrote this Targum and also that Aquilas wrote a rabbinically authorized Greek translation. Parenthetically, a recently reprinted work by Freidmann, of which I was lucky to have a copy, speculates that Onkelos is simply a Hebraicised version of Aquilas, with he "N" sound intruding like it does into the word Yaakov, transforming it into Yankev.

A curious feature of what is billed a a pshat commentary is Onkelos Highlights and Beyond The Text. It is here that the authors' MO orientation comes to the fore, when one encounters comments, such as these(p.232 of Genesis):

It is interesting to note that Nachmanides did not make such a  comparison with other verses when commenting on 34:7. He seems to have overlooked the many appearances of "proper" in the Targum..."

Nachmanides overlooked??!

From "Beyond the Text" feature on p.233, "Do you feel that the punishment meted out by Simeon and Levi fit Shechem's crime? Some sages suggest that the community also bore responsibility for Shechem's crime since they did not punish him. Do you agree?

This way of teaching typifies adult education in  Conservative congregations, where teaching is a  discussion about how "one feels about" and where the unlearned and the misguided pass judgment on the statements of R. Akiva, Abraham's actions, and Biblical attitudes. The more traditional camp would never approve of such comments, certainly not on a routine basis.

This is a valuable work, that contains a great deal of important content. The audience is necessarily limited but it will certainly remain on my shelf, although safely out of reach of my eight and half year-old.

 

Interesting new books

*

Several new books of interest have been reviewed in Haaretz recently. Haaretz is a liberal, left-wing and anti-religious paper that, like so many liberal Jews that are its audience, has a love-hate relationship with Judaism. Like the New York Times, it is fascinated, may I say obsessed, by Judaism in all its manifestations.  Reviewing books is one way of staying connected but without the committment demanded by a vibrant relationship, and so, the reviews in Haaretz are often fascinating. Haaretz selects reviewers who are knowledgeable in the topics that they review and often add value. Here are links to a few recent book reviews:

A Scapegoat for All Seasons
The Donmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey
by Rifat Bali, Isis Press, 418 pages, $45

Nehama Leibowitz
Teacher and Bible Scholar, by Yael Unterman
Urim Publications, 607 pages, $33

Emmanuel Levinas: Biografia
by Shlomo Malka (Emmanuel Levinas: La vie et la trace, by Salomon Malka; translated into Hebrew by Daniel Yoel), Resling, 312 pages, NIS 94
(Published in English in 2006 as Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, translated by Michael Kigel and Sonia M. Embree; Duqu esne University Press, $21.50)

 

Personhood of God; Dr. Muffs and all that stuff

One of the greatest problems of devotional life, if it be based on true faith, tangible spirituality and meaningful worship, is how to understand and relate to God. We are fortunate to have opportunities and challenges in how God is to be conceived because when we struggle with a lack if clarity in who He is, we also understand better who we are. A relationship requires both kinds of understanding.

Why is it a problem? Because the God who we feel in the deepest recesses of our beings, sense with our hearts and feeling and read of in the holy books is not He who our minds tell us He is.

Reason, philosophy and intellect lead us to the God who is perfect, immutable and distant, Pascal's "God of Philosophers, not the God of Abraham. Isaac and Jacob." Our minds conceive of Divinity that is too great to be contained within the heart of men; yet, if we can ever hope to relate to Him, we must reduce the dread and he awe of the overpowering Presence to manageable, workable concepts and images of God the Sovereign, Father, Teacher, Lover.

Philosophic cognition of God leaves us with an arid, distant and unappealing spirituality that fails to motivate and inspire. Man is small and God is great and never can the this gulf be bridged. Man worships the unattainable not because it cares for him or desires his attention but because he has no other choice, or, in the Maimonidean formulation, because all of Creation suffers the same fate. This is the tragedy of the neoplatonic mystic, to pine away for something that can never return his interest. Not only is it dry and unsatisfying because the object of our love is unattainable but also because there are no intermediate steps by which to approach it. There is no bridge between God and man and that's it. Go, do with it the best that you can. Personal God, on the other hand, we know and we recognize. All men have loved, rebelled, pined for, dealt with and negotiated with Sovereigns, Fathers, Lovers and Teachers. We know how to do it, and we can throw ourselves into this process of relating with ardent enthusiasm - consequently we can relate to God. In some way, the emotions do not ask questions, do not reason, do not pose philosophical problems. By turning the mind away from God as He is, man can submerge himself fully in God who we can love adn with who we can share. Not only this, we can enroll all our feelings, every nook and cranny of our personality, every quirk, every illogical and unreasonable emotion, bias and misconception into this process. Love is blind and so is the Lover's response. The lover of God has a full right to expect love in return, despite our failings, flaws, warts and all. We pray and get a response, we thirst and are watered, trust and are not betrayed, cry out in pain and are saved - gloriously! The philosopher, on the other hand has nothing to look forward to, except the grandeur of his vision. Maimonidean-like philosophical frameworks that set a transcendent Being in opposition to a lowly world, do not only not succeed in conveying a living religion to the masses, they often have an unintended effect of impoverishing the spirit and vitiating the commitment of the elite. It is of course an over-generalization to say that Maimonideans tend to be over-cerebral, dismissive of expressions of religiosity, and unaware of the great stores of religious feeling and sensibility that others possess. However, at least sometimes (and I know that I will get flack for it), they are cynical, distant and secretly racked by doubts... at the same time as they espouse a religious vision of grandeur and beauty. Why is it so? What can we learn from it? Perhaps that the mind alone is insufficient for religion.

There is yet a third religious approach -that of the Kabbalist. It is not just God and the universe out there, it is a world filled with unending gradations of supernatural. The spiritual is at hand, ready for taking. In a world like this, the spiritual is very, very close, part and parcel of existence. In fact, in such a world leading a purely physical existence is distinctly abnormal. For the affordable price of credulity, folk religion acquires an abiding closeness to God in all His manifestations, right here, all around us. The difference between popular sensibility and Maimonidean rationality is like that of a luscious rain forest and the driest of deserts. The former surrounds its dwellers with life-giving moisture from all ends. The latter deprives them of life-sustaining water, leaving them to be nourished by trust that it exists somewhere else and with measured, limited, barely sufficient cupfuls in their canteens.

My personal answer to this central conundrum of religious life is that the servant of Hashem must learn to transition easily and effortlessly between the three conceptions of God, moment by moment sliding into whichever one is appropriate to the time and place in which he finds himself. The rationale that warrants this is the inability of the human being to grasp all three conceptions at one. Like the three blind men and the elephant, our tools display a different Divinity to us, a God who constantly changes and transmutes as we attempt to deal with Him. "And you shall see my back and my front you will not see". Very simple, if I look at you from your front I cannot see your back and if I walk around and observe your back, your front is now invisible to me. Such are the limitations of human beings. Pragmatically, the Personal conception is the more productive in that the entire human personality can enter into it, it is effortless for prayer and love and it is the one emphasized in Scriptures. The kabbalistic conception requires more learning and socialization into a vocabulary and a way of thinking but can also be very productive. The Philosophic conception is useful at times.  The fusion of all three make for a sophisticated, original and profound religious personality. A lecture on this topic can be found here and its summary here .

Having struggles with the Problem, I read Dr. Yochanan Muffs' book, The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image with great expectation and a hope and a longing to encounter a kindred quest. The book is special but I was disappointed because I encountered an erudite and poetic soul but on a different pilgrimage. The author assuredly seeks to find Hashem and I agree with Dr. Arthur Green's description, "His vast but understated erudition is completely fused with his own passionate religiosity that make sfor stimulating and challenging reading". Dr. Muffs has a unique perspective, which is a source of his strength and his weakness - Mesopotamian cult. He is at his best when he compares Babylonian religious conceptions with the Biblical thesis, producing straddling and often illuminating insights. The book is written in an engaging style with flashes of recognition and  interesting observations on almost every page. I was thoroughly diverted by its scintillating analyses but slowly a realization dawned on me that Dr. Muffs is no less pained than I am by the inscrutability of the Divine image... but his problem is not my problem. I apologize upfront to Dr. Muffs for making assumptions that are supported only by reading a book. After all I do not know the author and how can I draw conclusions? Still I must try, for the topic is cosmically crucial. I explain.

What bothers Dr. Muffs is the blandness of contemporary humanistic religion in comparison to the vivid, colorful and organic Mesoppotamian (and Biblical) model. He longs for the time when ritual and faith pervaded not only daily life but informed the entire outlook. Contemporary religion, he rightly observes is stifled by the scientific and rational outlook of our age. What I read between the lines is that Dr. Muffs wishes for the wholeness of the simple faith of a believer but he cannot see how it can possibly be preserved alongside critical inquiry, to which he is committed. Hence, the assumption that ":..doubt stimulated by critical inquiry is healthy...that it separates the person of real faith from the religious behavioralist. Faith is not a passive state but an inner struggle. It is an order superimposed on chaos that constantly threatens to break forth".

He makes a virtue out of a tragedy.

"It is doubt that stirs hearts from their complacency and sets the dialectic of faith and doubt in motion. Farthermore, the greater the faith the greater the amount of doubt the man of faith will be able to digest without losing his equilibirum...If the man of faith has teh great frtune to comeout fo this battle without having denied either religion or science, he will unknowingly develop a new skill: the ability to hold life like a bird, tightly enough that it doesn'tfly away, gently enoguh that it isn't choked to death (p.192)". Dr. Muffs calls for a "re-mytologizing" of religion along the Messopotamian modes, I presume, so that the vividness of ritual and supersition revives the flagging spirit being choked by scientific inquiry and doubt that comes from reading too many academic publications and breathing, eating and washing in scientific rationalism.

To this I say: "No, thank you". "Your ways are not my ways and neither your thoughts are my thoughts". I do not wish to hold on to two crutches at once. Neither is there a need to re-mythologize the Living God.

Dr.Muffs wrote an interesting book that, like many such books, answers the question that bothers him. The point of departure from the Mesopotamian tradition is interesting and productive but the questions that he asks could benefit from calling upon medieval philosophy and kabbala, of which there is precious little in this work. Had he done so, he would have perhaps discovered that the contrast between the Personhood and Transcendance of Hashem has occupied many before him but from within the tradition rather than from outside of it. Instead of asking the central questions of religion, Dr. Muffs focuses on what is a common but still a personal and psychological religious struggle, which he perceives and passes off as a central religious question of our times. I do not claim that such questions are not important- they are. However, they are not questions of religion but questions about religion. This omission and its point of departure, that tweaking the Personhood of God can somehow solve the internal conflict between faith and doubt, are the greatest weaknesses of a fascinating effort.

Haggadah as a midrashic text

The Pasover Haggadah is probably the best recognized Jewish text outside of the Bible; it is also one of the least understood. Who has not been frustrated by its apparent lack of clear organization, its seeming jumping from topic to topic, and its many digressions and tangents. One is faced with a collection of disjointed paragraphs that only tenuously connect to one another but without an overall apparent structure. If we recognize it as a midrashic commentary, however, these features, with which we are already familiar from the midrashic literature, become much more intelligible.

The introduction to the Malbim Haggadah includes precisely such an analysis by the 1894 publisher and compiler of this haggadah.[1] For the complete translation see the Malbim's Haggdah (Targum Press, 1993 by J. Taub and Y. Shaw) or an adaptation at http://www.ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/802.

The source verse for midrashic expansion is: And you shall tell to your son on that day saying, because of this Hashem did for me in my going out of Egypt. (Shemos 13:8). The key words and concepts of each section of the verse are repeated and recombined in the corresponding sections of the Haggadah.

This verse can be seen as containing 6 parts:

1. And you shall tell to your son
2. on that day
3. saying
4. because of this
5. Hashem did for me
6. in my going out of Egypt

To elaborate (numbers in front of the paragraphs correspond with parts of the above sentence):

1. The first eight paragraphs, beginning with "Avadim Hayinu" and concluding with "The son who does not know how to ask", are an explication of -- And you shall tell to your son. Each paragraph contributes an essential element to describe the words "V'higadta l'vincha", "And you shall tell to your son": the basics information, the importance of telling it, that even the greatest Sages engaged in it, and the role of sons in this process.

2. The next section starts exactly with the words of the verse which it explicates - " (Ykhol M'Rosh Chodesh, Talmud Lomar)  "on that day" - Bayom Hahu", on the day, and which describes the proper time for this obligation.

3. The third section corresponds to the third phrase, "Leimor -- saying", and contains the saying of the story of the Exodus. This section of the Haggadah starts with "Mit'chilah Ovdei Avodah Zarah Hayu Avoseinu" and continues with "Tzei u'lmad". These sections are followed by "Kammah Maalos Tovos" and "Al achas kamma v'kamma", which we say as praise.

4. Rabbon Gamliel's explanation of Pesach, Matzah and Marror, containing and interpreting this part of the verse - because of this.

5. Here we say, "In every single generation one is obligated to look upon himself as if he personally had gone forth out of Egypt." This explains the "Asah Hashem li -- Hashem did for me" in the above verse.

6. The sixth section of the Haggadah begins with "L'phichach" "Therefore we are obliged to avow thanks", an introduction to the recital of Hallel, and the first half of Hallel itself. The latter, of course, contains in its second paragraph these very words from our verse  "B'tseis Beis Yisrael Mimitsraim".

Thus the arrangement of the entire Haggadah turns out to be based on one verse, albeit the key one, that serves as the source of the obligation to retell the story of the Exodus.[2]

I would also like to point out that within the general pattern, there are a number of other midrashic style sub-passages, such as in the third section, the midrashic commentary to Devarim 26: 5-8 or in the second section, the Mekhilta passage on B'Yom Hahu. These are in the style and arrangement of Tannaitic midrash, such as Mekhilta etc.

These features of the Haggadah would argue for its composition at the same time that the popularity of Midrashic approach was at its zenith, around the time of R. Akiva, R. Yishmael and their disciples. This conclusion is at variance with the one reached by the abovementioned introduction to the Haggadah which, on other grounds, concludes that it was written at the time of Rebbi and organized in its final form by R. Nachman.

A different approach is presented by R. Reuven Margolius introduction to his Haggadah in which he draws the same conclusion from the style of the Haggadah. He suggests that the child asking questions corresponds to the customary design of a public derasha which started from a student's question (in his usual way he supports this with many references) and then meandered through assorted subjects, praised the Torah and its students, told stories of Sages and Forefathers, and ended up by ultimately answering the original question. In the same fashion, the head of the family functions as the Darshan, the son as the student who asks the question, and the haggadah as the customary derasha with all of its customary components.

A recently published Haggada is devoted entirely to this question. See a sample, _here

I understand that the new JPS Haggadah also devotes  (too?) much space to the questions of composition, history and structure.

Another work this year that is devoted to these issues, here

 

---

1 The English adaptation of Malbim's Haggadah is followed by an appendix in which this introduction is ascribed to R. Naftali ben MaskilLeAison. It also argues that the Haggadah commentary was also composed by him "in the style of Malbim".

2 The Haggadah thus serves as a midrashic expansion of the verse; however, it may also be organized around this verse for mneumonic purposes. This arrangement allows everyone, even the not particularly learned members of the Jewish nations, to conduct a roughly the same Seder as everyone else.

The Pasover Haggadah is probably the best recognized Jewish text outside of the Bible; it is also one of the least understood. Who has not been frustrated by its apparent lack of clear organization, its seeming jumping from topic to topic, and its many digressions and tangents. One is faced with a collection of disjointed paragraphs that only tenuously connect to one another but without an overall apparent structure. If we recognize it as a midrashic commentary, however, these features, with which we are already familiar from the midrashic literature, become much more intelligible.

The introduction to the Malbim Haggadah includes precisely such an analysis by the 1894 publisher and compiler of this haggadah.[1] For the complete translation see the Malbim's Haggdah (Targum Press, 1993 by J. Taub and Y. Shaw) or an adaptation at http://www.ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/802.

The source verse for midrashic expansion is: And you shall tell to your son on that day saying, because of this Hashem did for me in my going out of Egypt. (Shemos 13:8). The key words and concepts of each section of the verse are repeated and recombined in the corresponding sections of the Haggadah.

This verse can be seen as containing 6 parts:

1. And you shall tell to your son
2. on that day
3. saying
4. because of this
5. Hashem did for me
6. in my going out of Egypt

To elaborate (numbers in front of the paragraphs correspond with parts of the above sentence):

1. The first eight paragraphs, beginning with "Avadim Hayinu" and concluding with "The son who does not know how to ask", are an explication of -- And you shall tell to your son. Each paragraph contributes an essential element to describe the words "V'higadta l'vincha", "And you shall tell to your son": the basics information, the importance of telling it, that even the greatest Sages engaged in it, and the role of sons in this process.

2. The next section starts exactly with the words of the verse which it explicates - " (Ykhol M'Rosh Chodesh, Talmud Lomar)  "on that day" - Bayom Hahu", on the day, and which describes the proper time for this obligation.

3. The third section corresponds to the third phrase, "Leimor -- saying", and contains the saying of the story of the Exodus. This section of the Haggadah starts with "Mit'chilah Ovdei Avodah Zarah Hayu Avoseinu" and continues with "Tzei u'lmad". These sections are followed by "Kammah Maalos Tovos" and "Al achas kamma v'kamma", which we say as praise.

4. Rabbon Gamliel's explanation of Pesach, Matzah and Marror, containing and interpreting this part of the verse - because of this.

5. Here we say, "In every single generation one is obligated to look upon himself as if he personally had gone forth out of Egypt." This explains the "Asah Hashem li -- Hashem did for me" in the above verse.

6. The sixth section of the Haggadah begins with "L'phichach" "Therefore we are obliged to avow thanks", an introduction to the recital of Hallel, and the first half of Hallel itself. The latter, of course, contains in its second paragraph these very words from our verse  "B'tseis Beis Yisrael Mimitsraim".

Thus the arrangement of the entire Haggadah turns out to be based on one verse, albeit the key one, that serves as the source of the obligation to retell the story of the Exodus.[2]

I would also like to point out that within the general pattern, there are a number of other midrashic style sub-passages, such as in the third section, the midrashic commentary to Devarim 26: 5-8 or in the second section, the Mekhilta passage on B'Yom Hahu. These are in the style and arrangement of Tannaitic midrash, such as Mekhilta etc.

These features of the Haggadah would argue for its composition at the same time that the popularity of Midrashic approach was at its zenith, around the time of R. Akiva, R. Yishmael and their disciples. This conclusion is at variance with the one reached by the abovementioned introduction to the Haggadah which, on other grounds, concludes that it was written at the time of Rebbi and organized in its final form by R. Nachman.

A different approach is presented by R. Reuven Margolius introduction to his Haggadah in which he draws the same conclusion from the style of the Haggadah. He suggests that the child asking questions corresponds to the customary design of a public derasha which started from a student's question (in his usual way he supports this with many references) and then meandered through assorted subjects, praised the Torah and its students, told stories of Sages and Forefathers, and ended up by ultimately answering the original question. In the same fashion, the head of the family functions as the Darshan, the son as the student who asks the question, and the haggadah as the customary derasha with all of its customary components.

A recently published Haggada is devoted entirely to this question. See a sample, _here

I understand that the new JPS Haggadah also devotes  (too?) much space to the questions of composition, history and structure.

Another work this year that is devoted to these issues, here

 

---

1 The English adaptation of Malbim's Haggadah is followed by an appendix in which this introduction is ascribed to R. Naftali ben MaskilLeAison. It also argues that the Haggadah commentary was also composed by him "in the style of Malbim".

2 The Haggadah thus serves as a midrashic expansion of the verse; however, it may also be organized around this verse for mneumonic purposes. This arrangement allows everyone, even the not particularly learned members of the Jewish nations, to conduct a roughly the same Seder as everyone else.

A new book on Elisha Ben Avuyah

A new book on Elisha ben Avuyah

A classic novel by one of the leaders of the Conservative movement, clearly an exploration of his own relationship to tradition, here

A .pdf of Jefferey Rubinstein's comparative study of Yerushalmi and Bavli Acher stories ( I disagree with a lot in it but the method is of interest), here

Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America

Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America
By Edward K. Kaplan
Yale University Press
544 pages; $40
"Abraham Joshua Heschel was capable of enormous acts of kindness, and he was also capable of enormous petulance. He was conscious of having been raised as the prince of a noble hassidic dynasty, but he was also conscious of having been raised in a sect that stressed humiliation as a means of character training. He was capable of enormous vision, but also of enormous insecurity. "

Review here

Moshe Halbertal:A Partial Assessment of Man and his Work

Moshe Halbertal is a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University in 1989, and from 1988-92 he was a fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.  Moshe Halbertal has also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is David Hartman's son-in-law.

He is the author of the books Idolatry (co-authored with Avishai Margalit), and People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority, both published by Harvard University Press.  He has also authored two books, Interpretative Revolutions in the Making, and Between Torah and Wisdom: R Menachem ha-Meiri and The Maimonidean Halakhists in Provence, both published in Hebrew by Magnes Press. His last book published in Hebrew is Concealment and Revelation: The Secret and its Boundaries in Medieval Jewish Thought (Yeriot, 2001). His most recent work is Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications.

Halbertal's work is always interesting and thought provoking. He has the ability to use concepts and categories of modern philosophy, sociology, anthropology and religious studies to classify Talmudic disagreements, explain various positions in the rishonim and like a seasoned lamdan give and take within the sygyos and around them. It is almost like a new genre of learning, let's call it "academic-talmudic fusion"; many attempt it but few do it well.

Dr. Halbertal's books are chock-full of insights. Some are more speculative than others bit each book contains some revelation (no pun intended), some explanation that elucidates obscure and complex questions and gladdens the heart. They are more a collection of related ideas than a single well-developed argument, but in each there are gems. Marring his books is a tendency to end each one with an involved discussion of modern philosophical issues in the light of what was related of the Jewish tradition rather than the opposite, but this is, perhaps, a flaw which is in the eyes of the beholder. I am naturally more interested in the Jewish angle and not in how it related to modern fields of inquiry than vice versa - but the, again, I am not an academic, who needs to swim in those waters, like Professor Halbertal.

To give three examples:

In Concealment and Revelation..  Dr. Halbertal develops an idea that esoteric knowledge is by definition unstable, for it begs to be revealed in hints and allusions. As such, it invites fuller and fuller revelation at each stage. He shows how this process led to uncovering of Kabbalah in pre-exilic Spain. There were two centers of Kabbalstic learning in Spain, one located around Talmudists, like Raavad and Ramban. The other was composed of the students of R. Ezra and Azriel and R. Moshe of Burgos. Since the two schools disagreed in many details, when one school revealed something, it had to be countered by a revelation from the other school. This is so by necessity because once something is revealed in writing, a different version of it cannot survive as before, as an oral tradition restricted to a few, for the written and public version will rapidly supplant the other, hidden variant. The process fed on itself until most of the hidden science of Kabbalah became revealed and public within two or three generations.

Personally, I do not find the thesis convincing, for mystical societies  are not constituted primarily of thinkers who are in limited but continuous intellectual discourse with the outside world, but of men of emotion and feeling to whom esoteric teachings are a means  of deepening the intercourse with the Divine and whose very impulse is withdrawal from the common society of men. Such people do not necessarily need to reveal hidden knowledge to those others with whom they often feel little kinship. I therefore find Halbertal's thesis interesting but not convincing.

Fortunately, Dr. Halbertal' ideas appear to have been developed slowly and painstakingly over several years. Because of this, one can find traces of them in earlier stages on the Web - here.

In People of the  Book, Halbertal offers an interesting and encompassing perspective on the views of various rishionim on the subject of mesora, here and here

In Idolatry (ch.2), he discusses, to restate it simply, the three types of representation: linguistic, as the word dog represents dogs by convention, having no "dogginess" in it at all; substitution, where the image substitutes for its object, as a photograph corresponds in its details to the object photographed; and metonomyc, in which the symbol corresponds in some detail or feature to its representation. An example of this would be how a scented kerchief of a loved one can stand in for her, or how an eagle ensign can represent a country. Linguistic representation is always permitted, substitutive representation is idolatry and always forbidden - metonomyic representation is only permitted in very controlled settings.  With this classification drawn from modern philosophy, Halbertal is able to explain why verbal representations of God are permitted in language, statues are forbidden and cherubim are permitted in the Temple but nowhere else.

His works are filled with astute observations of this kind.  Halbertal's ability to apply modern categories of thought to basic Talmudic material in an original and unique manner continues to evoke admiration. His personal religious views notwithstanding, those accomplished in classic Talmudic learning and in the fields of modern investigation will continue to hope for more such studies from this original and profound thinker, unfulfilling as he may be in some crucial areas of devotion and faith.

for other studies, see here