Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being Toward death

Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century

Personal Reflections

Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV

Contents

Acknowledgements ixContributors x

Introduction: Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century 1Aaron W. Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

1 The Historian as Thinker: Reflections on (Jewish) Intellectual History 11

Asher D. Biemann

2 After Germany: An American Jewish Philosophical Manifesto 42Zachary J. Braiterman

3 Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being toward Death 61James A. Diamond

4 Jewish Philosophy: Living Language at Its Limits 81Cass Fisher

5 Toward a Synthetic Philosophy 101Lenn Evan Goodman

6 Jewish Philosophy Tomorrow: Post-Messianic and Post-Lachrymose 119

Warren Zev Harvey

7 Transgressing Boundaries: Jewish Philosophy and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict 133

Aaron W. Hughes

8 Philosophy, the Academy, and the Future of Jewish Learning 152Claire E. Katz

9 Revisioning the Jewish Philosophical Encounter with Christianity 172

Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover


vi contents

10 Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Jewish Piety 205Shaul Magid

11 Otherness and a Vital Jewish Religious Identity 229Ephraim Meir

12 The Need for Jewish Philosophy 248Alan Mittleman

13 Historicity, Dialogical Philosophy, and Moral Normativity: Discovering the Second Person 266

Michael L. Morgan

14 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Jewish Philosophers of Encounter 296

Michael D. Oppenheim

15 A Shadowed Light: Continuity and New Directions in Jewish Philosophy 319

Sarah Pessin

16 Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences 343Heidi M. Ravven

17 God Accused: Jewish Philosophy as Antitheodicy 358Bruce Rosenstock

18 Overcoming the Epistemological Barrier 372Tamar Ross

19 Toward a New Jewish Philosophy: From Metaphysics to Praxis 391Avi Sagi

20 A Plea for Transcendence 410Kenneth Seeskin

21 The Preciousness of Being Human: Jewish Philosophy and the Challenge of Technology 428

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson


viicontents

22 In Search of Eternal Israel: Back to an Intellectual Journey 458Shmuel Trigano

23 Skepticism and the Philosopher’s Keeping Faith 481Elliot R. Wolfson

Index 517


© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�796�9_005

chapter 3

Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being toward Death

James A. Diamond

Autobiographical Sketch for Practicing Jewish Philosophy

In a certain sense, my entire intellectual biography can be charted along a series of engagements with what are, for me, three primary layers of the Jewish textual canon. It is first anchored in the nascent roots of the Hebrew Bible, which itself reflects many centuries of editorial tinkering throughout the biblical period and bears an even later imprint in its very canonization and final “publication.” Every aspect of biblical thought, be it legal, theological, historical, narratological, poetic, or otherwise, is then subjected to the radi-cal rabbinic transformation of the Mishnah and Talmud in the early centuries of the common era. It was fueled by new historical circumstances of catas-trophe, absence, exile, and challenges of competing theologies that were to develop into two other major religions that far eclipsed it in terms of mem-bership, power, and influence. Most important was the development of the academic house of study and debate, or beit midrash, as its new intellectual and spiritual center of gravity. Despite its lack of formal philosophical treatises or dialogues in the classical sense, Judaism produced a vast compendium of disparate ideas on every facet of human and divine life, and their intersection, which ensured both existential and philosophical survival. The Middle Ages then layers Judaism further for me, perfecting the foundational canon with the new thinking of the “early ones,” or rishonim. Particularly dominated by the Maimonidean and Nahmanidean oeuvre, it equipped Judaism with the diver-gent philosophical and spiritual means and parlance to address the challenges posed by what was then a modern period.

There was a certain beauty, charm, and comfort to the intellectual naïveté that suffused the orthodox familial, educational, and social milieu of my own formative years. The Jewish foundational texts of the Bible, Talmud, Midrash, biblical commentaries, liturgy, and responsa, all evolved, although that is cer-tainly not the term that would have been used, within a hermetically sealed world, untouched by any “outside” influences, be they historical, cultural, or intellectual. There was no sense of linear time or “periods” such as ancient,


62 diamond


medieval, and modern, since all these texts were timeless, floating, and pro-tective, recalling the primordial “wind of God” over the preeternal waters that preceded creation.

One of the most poignant descriptions of this pristine rabbinic mindset is offered by R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1903–93), himself a scion of lineage considered royalty in the yeshiva world of the last two centuries, recollect-ing what he had absorbed from both his father, R. Moshe, and grandfather R. Chaim of Brisk (1853–1918), the founder of the modern, yet ahistorical, ana-lytic approach to rabbinic texts known as the “Brisker” method. What R. Joseph Dov felt as an “ever-present historical psychological reality in the depths of my soul” translated into a perpetual engagement with his predecessors, elevating mere study to experiential encounter:

When I prepare to learn, I find myself suddenly and immediately in the company of the sages of the tradition. The relationship between us is personal. The Rambam [Maimonides, 1138–1205] is at my right, Rabbenu Tam [a French Tosafist, 1100–71] is at my left, Rashi [the most promi-nent of biblical and talmudic exegetes, 1040–1105] leads the discussion, Rabbenu Tam casts doubt, Rambam codifies, and Ra’avad [Abraham ben David of Posquieres, 1125–98] critiques. They are all sitting around the table with me in close quarters. They look at me with affection[,] engage me in logic and argument, encouraging and strengthening me like a par-ent. . . . Those that transmitted the Torah and those that received it con-vene in one historical gathering. (Soloveitchik 1978, 64–65)

Though, as a critical scholar of Jewish studies I can no longer subscribe in toto to such an approach to Jewish texts, there is something here worth preserving when we in the academy conduct our “research.”

What was once conceived of, during the incipient period of my career as a Jewish thinker in the world of the yeshiva, as a monolithic continuum of voices engaging each other on common ground then graduated to the critical per-spective of the academy. As a result, Judaism for me could have gone the way of the self-declared decent burial prepared for it by the scholarship of the early founders of Jewish Wissenschaft. However, I was fortunate enough to have been introduced to the broader world of philosophy by Emil Fackenheim, who, resisting Jewish Wissenschaft’s own initial impulse to surrender to G. W. F. Hegel’s relegation of Judaism to anachronism and Immanuel Kant’s recommendation for its euthanization, broadened the philosophical horizon enough to bridge the divide between Jewish thought and philosophy. Despite its deceptively simple form, his consideration of midrashic discourse as a profound medium

63a jewish philosophy of being


of sophisticated theology (Fackenheim 1973, 15) opened the door to what has become a central focus of my own scholarship and contemplation of what pre-cisely constitutes a Jewish way of doing philosophy.

In a way, there is a need to retrieve some of the continuum of that yeshiva naïveté of my youth as it relates to a midrashic ingenuity spanning different historical periods and cutting across the range of Jewish “disciplines.” Whether halakhist/lawyer, philosopher, biblical exegete, or mystic, the canonical think-ers I consider instrumental to any determination of the future of Jewish thought share a common language and mode of midrashic thinking unique to their rabbinic antecedents. The boundaries between what are often regarded in Jewish studies as rigid disciplines of law, rabbinics, philosophy, and mysti-cism are more permeable than it appears. This connective midrashic thread weaves them all into an intertextual discourse that can be authentically quali-fied as “Jewish.”

Much of the philosophical distortion of Judaism flows from misconceiving Sinai, the radically formative event/revelation of Jewish history, as an imposi-tion of positive law crushing all human freedom and suppressing human par-ticipation. As Fackenheim points out, it is, in fact, more of a hybrid of “human freedom and Divine grace” (1973, 97). A prominent rabbinic rereading of the Torah’s unvowelized text, in fact, grounds the entire law in freedom when the classical rabbis transformed the term that described the divine text, or the “Ten Utterances,” as “incised” in the stone tablets, into “freedom”: “Do not read it charut [incised], but rather cherut [freedom]” (Blackman 1951; Avot 6:2, 4:540). What originated in the divine realm becomes humanized through interpreta-tion, the freedom of which is exquisitely conveyed by this very misreading.

In line with this rabbinic freedom, the single factor to my mind that must be most credited with guaranteeing Jewish thought its survival, vitality, adaptability, and philosophical capability is the further rabbinic mis/read-ing of the biblical assertion “it is not in heaven” (Deut. 30:12). Wrenched out of its context, it was read as mandating the exclusion of God from all subse-quent legal discussions. God is forever barred from the beit midrash, because “heaven” has no place in the interpretive process (Babylonian Talmud 1990, Baba Metzia 59b). This rule became so sacrosanct as to warrant the death pen-alty for any prophetic citation of God to substantiate one legal position over another (Maimonides 1975–2001, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 9:4). Otherwise, reason and thought would be squelched: how can one respond to the word of God other than with submissive silence? Without this principle, the divine word would indeed remain frozen in time and immutable, as the proverbial “etched in stone” indicates. Years of law school and the subsequent practice of law prior to entering the academy have also taught me that halakha

64 diamond


and secular legal systems share more jurisprudential principles than my ado-lescent yeshiva training would have had me believe. Once the letters on the tablets lost their ability to be heard, they flew off, leaving Moses holding an unbearable dead weight that came crashing down (Friedlander 1981, chap. 44). So, any system based on positive law must always be tempered by equity and judicial reasoning that is judicious, lest the system simply deteriorate into dead-letter law.

Unsatisfied with just the freedom they granted themselves vis-à-vis the tab-lets, or the textual mode of communication at Sinai, the rabbis also addressed its oral dimension. The inimitable divine sound that ceased and “was no more” (Deut. 5:18) is revived and resonates throughout time when the phrase is mis-read as “did not cease.”1 Though God is restricted from the Jewish house of study, his word continues to be heard in the human interpretive freedom exer-cised within its walls. The spirit of Sinaitic orality and textuality is perpetuated in the ongoing engagement with its jagged edges, inconsistencies, lacunae, and generally its “surface irregularities” (Kugel 1986, 92), all posing opportunities, rather than problems, for the advancement of Jewish thought.

How appropriate, then, is the first commandment, or rather preamble, for all this rabbinically assumed freedom, originating, as it does, in the event from which all Jewish law and thought emanates? The God who commands author-ity and allegiance is not the Creator, nor the One, nor does he consist of any of those attributes commonly associated with the rationalist monotheistic deity of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. He is the liberator, the “one who took you out of Egypt,” the one who is incensed by oppression and the human treatment of others as means rather than ends. Despite later medieval debates whether this introductory preface constitutes a formal command, God does not demand “belief in,” but rather grounds all law and obedience in moral authority. If imitatio dei inspires such ethical behavior as clothing the naked and visiting the sick, then surely it must also compel the cultivation of freedom—the essence of God’s inaugural relational act with Israel. Thus, the hermeneutical freedom the rabbis appropriated for themselves only initiates the supreme religious mandate of imitatio dei. Such a hermeneutic is ulti-mately consummated by thought that is launched by interpretive freedom but heads in the direction of a freedom that bears the most compelling of ethical connotations—resisting and releasing from oppression.

The primary boundary that cordons off thought as “Jewish” is its gaze back even as it looks forward—its engagement with the scriptures of the Jewish canon. What, for example, transforms a work such as Maimonides’ Guide of

1 See Rashi’s commentary, Katzenellenbogen 1988, 7:52.



the Perplexed from a philosophical treatise into Jewish philosophy is the ever-present verse, midrash, or halakha that confronts the reader at every turn and its obsessive concern with biblical language. That textual Jewishness is com-pounded by its living Jewishness in the Guide’s intended audience, which is plagued by the uniquely Jewish angst generated by a potentially lethal clash between “knowledge of the true sciences” and belief in “matters pertaining to the Law”(Maimonides 1963, 10). But more than that, its Jewishness lies in the imitatio dei that is its driving force. It begins in the compassion aroused by absence of a beloved disciple (ibid., 4), then in the overarching goal to relieve the “heartache and great perplexity” suffered by the religiously devout intel-lectual (ibid., 6), and finally manifests in its ultimate destination of a “way of life” that will “always have in view loving-kindness, righteousness and judgment, through assimilation to His actions” (ibid., 638, italics in original).

One more biographical detail is necessary as a prologue to the Jewish philosophical theology I am about to offer here that explains my particular choice of subject matter around which it is constructed. My parents and those of virtually every one of my classmates and friends had inhabited a world—indeed, another “planet”—gone mad, which ended, it has been argued, with the deaths of both human civilization and God. However, many of those par-ents, continued to live, raise families, and conduct themselves despite total devastation, as if there still remained a pulsating breath in both the human and the divine. I say “many” fully aware of the premature deaths, suicides, and madness that were the unspoken fate others chose or succumbed to. To extract meaning, therefore, out of unrelenting death that in some infinitesimal sense defeats its perpetrators is one component of the fulfillment of Fackenheim’s 614th commandment to survive as Jews. Thus, in keeping with the mandate of this volume, I here embark on the “practice” of Jewish philosophy, rather than its historical or sociological investigation, concerning the issue of death, which can only be confronted through a confluence of my rabbinic, philosophical, and legal training, as well as existential conditioning.

However, looking toward the future would be myopically non-Jewish, with-out what I consider a deep “midrashic” engagement with my Jewish textual and experiential past. As such, I set out now to address the meaning of death for authentic living by forging a Jewish philosophical discourse that spans a continuum of Jewish texts, thinkers, and exegetes from the Bible to the classi-cal rabbis to the medieval parshanim, to Hasidism, modern secular philosophy, and, ultimately, the Warsaw Ghetto. In the spirit of R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik’s own experience, the result is a formulation that emerges from an encounter with some of the “teacher/friends” I have made at various junctures of my life-long engagement with Jewish thought.

66 diamond


Questioning the Meaning of Death

How are Jewish views of life, ethics, law, and the pursuit of knowledge informed by the prospect of death or impending death? For Socrates of the Phaedo, the philosophical endeavor itself is melete thanatou, or a rehearsal for death, and the authentic philosopher, in his progressive noetic diversion from the body inward and upward toward the mind, is continuously engaged in the pursuit of death and dying. Socrates embraced death when it was imminent, as the culmination of his philosophical life or what he considered a ceaseless occu-pation with the “practice or cultivation of dying” (Plato 2002, 80e). Why evade what he had been practicing all his informed life?

While an uncommon biblical occurrence, a number of central characters such as Jonah, Elijah, Samson, and Saul desired death, with the latter two actu-ally consummating that desire. Is their yearning for death devoid of philo-sophical meaning? Is it simply attributable to distress, revenge, or emotional frustration, depending on the circumstance? Or, as is the case with Socrates, does it relate to some climactic attainment of wisdom or self-realization? Is Moses’s death at the conclusion of Deuteronomy simply accountable as pun-ishment, an unfulfilled life, a frustrated political mission, or a cruel exercise of divine whimsy? Or is there something more philosophically sublime conveyed by a death divinely ordained? What precisely is the meaning of dying by “the mouth of God,” an erotic departure that is depicted as an unnatural intrusion into an otherwise physically robust life whose “eyes were undimmed and vigor unabated” (Deut. 34:7)?

The Tree of Knowledge: Introducing Cunning and Shame

The relationship between the two notionally designated trees of life and of knowledge in primeval Eden might provide the initial clues as to the precise meaning of death for human existence. The prohibition not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad (Gen. 2:18) is preceded by an accompanying positive directive to “eat of all the trees of the Garden” (2:17). Presumably, at this point of the Eden narrative consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Life is permissible, or even obligatory, to Adam. Once Adam’s dietary regime is set, a divine assessment immediately follows as to Adam’s wanting state of loneli-ness, which is declared “not good”—“it is not good for man to be alone”—the remedy to which is companionship—“I will make a fitting helper for him.” Despite being ignorant of the knowledge of good and bad, man experiences the “not good” of loneliness. He exists in a wanting state, lacking an essential



social dimension of relationship. At this point, a life consumed exclusively by the social, or by the political the social necessitates, could be fully accom-plished absent any awareness of mortality, and, thus, would not be impeded by eating from the Tree of Life, or at least knowing that it can be eaten of. Life, no matter how long, is simply intolerable without camaraderie or company. This divine evaluation is merely a utilitarian appraisal without any moral connota-tions—man and woman need each other for support, procreation, friendship, and dialogue, without any regard for a relational “between” that is good in and of itself. An experiential “not good” merely needs an experiential corrective of togetherness. But there is yet to be a life that can be lived for the other.

The only textual clue we have as to what the knowledge the primordial cou-ple illicitly acquires of “good and bad” consists of lies in its immediate effect of the awareness of nakedness and the feeling of shame in front of each other (Gen. 3:7). There is no doubt that the strategic word play using the same term, arum, for nakedness as that used just prior for the trait singling out the snake from all other creatures connoting “cunning” or “shrewdness”—“and the snake was more arum than all the animals of the field” (3:1)—contributes substan-tively to its meaning.2 To be cunning is to gain advantage by means of knowl-edge. In this case, the snake exploits Eve’s lack of the knowledge associated with the tree, holding out an expectation of enlightenment (“and your eyes will be opened”) and becoming “godlike”—“and you will be like divine beings” (3:5). The latter connotes some mastery over creation that the divine epithet elohim has been so closely identified with thus far in the creation narrative. It is a potency that fails, in its most important expectation, to materialize.

Enlightenment indeed ensues (3:7—“then the eyes of both of them were opened”) but, instead of empowerment, it consists in the weakness of emas-culating nakedness and the experience of shame. In the world of quotidian nakedness, cunning is not possible. In a world where everything is exposed, where nothing is hidden from the other, no advantage can be had at the expense of the other, for what is known to one is known to the other. Once man and woman succumbed to the snake’s cunningness, they felt vulnerable in the face of each other’s now exploitive gaze. They understood the need to conceal from each other what each might know or have, both as a defensive shield from and possible offensive weapon for exploitation. They can no longer simply be with each other but must always entertain the choice of being over and against each other by concealing or manipulating knowledge unequally

2 See the tight semantic connection created between the two meanings of the term arum noted by Kimmelman 1998.

68 diamond


shared between them. Rather than a leveling agent, knowledge becomes an instrument of advantage and disparity.3

That clothing does not remedy this state of nakedness is evident when man hides from God out of “fear for his nakedness” (3:10—“and I was afraid because of my nakedness and I hid”) immediately after they had just fashioned clothing for themselves. Nakedness now means a consciousness of vulnerability that clothing cannot dispel, especially realized in the context of an extreme imbal-ance of power presented by God’s confronting man. Clothing oneself does nothing to correct this consciousness or existential state. One more layer is needed, but this time through the act of clothing others undertaken by God: “and God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and He clothed them” (Gen. 3:21). Here the most extreme latent situation of power imbalance—God confronting human beings—results in compassion and care rather than exploitation and dominance. Maimonides may very well have determined the sense of this narrative in its tracing of Adam’s intellectual decline from a single-minded focus on universals (truth and falsehood) to one engaged with the contingencies of subjective knowledge (good and bad) (Maimonides 1963, 25). In other words, man moves from knowledge that is common to all—and is, therefore, unifying—to knowledge that fluctuates between all and is, thus, fragmenting—from knowledge that concerns all to knowledge that concerns the self.

Another type of “aloneness” now threatens to undermine the “togetherness” that the creation of other human beings was meant to provide as a corrective to solitude. Although there are others, their presence now poses the potential simply to supplement the self rather than bolster some relational mutuality. This is evident from the various relationships that are realized as a result of the seduction of the Tree of Knowledge, all defined by dominance, alienation, and exploitation:

1. hatred between the woman and the snake with a clear hierarchy of peo-ple above striking at the head of the snake and the snake below striking at the heel of people (Gen. 3:15—“they shall strike at your head and you shall strike at their heel”);

2. master/slave relationship of dependence between man and woman (3:16—“and he shall rule over you”);

3. man placed in opposition to his very environment (3:17–19—“cursed shall be the soil because of you; by toil shall you eat of it; by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread”);

3 For rabbinic views of nakedness, see Satlow 1997.



4. mothers and children situated at conception and gestation in a context of pain and opposition (16—“in pain shall you bear children”).

All actors at this stage of the narrative are caught in each other’s gaze of objectification.4

The Tree of Life: Mortality and the Life of Dying for Others

Only mortality and the shadow of impending death can transform this com-plex web of opposing aims and self-interested opportunities into some kind of integrated, mutually reinforcing whole. First, death is the only unifying dimen-sion of all human existence. All face this common fate of nonexistence, an unavoidable phenomenon captured best by Ecclesiastes’ cynical, yet morally instructive,5 leveling of all creation: “For human beings and beast share one and the same fate, as one dies so does the other, and both have the same life-breath, and man is not superior to beast, since both amount to nothing” (Eccles. 3:19). Although, at this early stage of Ecclesiastes’ meditations on life, the thought of death merely reinforces his crude materialism (“for there is nothing better for man than to enjoy his possessions” [3:22]), it articulates the kernel of what will eventually temper it: the humility that looking toward death inculcates in the thought that “man is not superior to beast.”

The question that death raises is an existential one that would surely stimu-late a quest for some quality that might elevate the human over the beast.6 In what sense is man, in fact, superior to the beast?7 Death itself poses the answer, for it is in the human power over death that no beast has, the ability to choose it freely on behalf of others. A talmudic legend relates a query put to the rabbis by Alexander the Great seeking an answer to a primal question: “What should one do in order to live?” The question elicits an enigmatic yet assumedly figurative rabbinic response: one should “kill oneself” (Babylonian

4 In the pre-sin state, there would have been no need for concealment since there would be no possibility of a “crippling external gaze.” See Nagel 1998, 17ff.

5 See Crenshaw 1995.6 In fact, death is the overarching theme that links the entire book of Ecclesiastes (Lo 2008).7 As one would expect, the subject of death is of great concern to philosophy as well as to

religion, so the literature is vast. For but one survey of philosophical approaches through the ages, see Choron 1963.

70 diamond


Talmud 1990, Tamid 32a).8 Curiously, an authentic life consists of dying. Despite its patent figurativeness, for Emmanuel Levinas, the profundity of this rabbinic version of Socrates’ “practicing death” lies also in its literalness: that what “animates the kindness of human beings between themselves” is the ulti-mate intention of self-sacrifice, of dying for another, and, as such, “is the dying that renders living possible . . . that requires all the forces of life to take up this wager of dying” (Levinas 1999, 92–93). Barring Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life enables a life overshadowed by mortality, by the specter of that which expresses humanity more than anything else, of choosing death on behalf of others. Death allows for the potential of the absolutely supreme act of “for oth-ers” that vitalizes all other such acts, that humanizes the world of knowledge that can so easily lapse into living for oneself.

As Levinas argues, there is nothing more tragic or comic than a life doomed for destruction that is lived only for its own sake, while living a life where “the Other concerns me despite myself” dispels its absurdity (Levinas 2006, 56–57).9 The narrative sequence positioning Cain’s fratricide immediately after obstructing entry to the Tree of Life, corroborates this interpretation. If biblical history can in some sense be viewed as a series of failures to live up to ideals, murder, of course, is the most extreme vitiation of the notion of dying for the other that an inaccessible Tree of Life and mortality teaches. Correspondingly, if self-sacrifice animates all other compassionate behavior, then Cain’s rejec-tion of a life as a “brother’s keeper” is an apt description of a life for itself that ultimately will annihilate others in pursuit of pure self-preservation.10

Elijah and the Silent Whirlwind of Dying for Others

Many of those narratives in the Hebrew Bible related to the yearning for death or actual suicide can now be appreciated in light of this moral dimension to death. Here I restrict the discussion to perhaps the most poignant of them. Elijah both craves death at a crossroads in his prophetic career and experi-ences the most spectacular death, or non-death, as the case may be, recorded

8 See Fishbane 1994 who traces the life of this Hellenistically influenced adage through its various incarnations in Jewish mystical and rationalist thought from Philo to Bialik.

9 See also Levinas 1988, especially his conclusion that “[t]he humanness of dying for the other would be the very meaning of love in its responsibility for one’s fellowman” (216).

10 See also Levinas’s analysis of Cain’s act, which claims that Cain should have possessed the knowledge that “we approach death as nothingness in the passion for murder” (1991, 232).



of any biblical character. Elijah’s victorious confrontation with the idolatrous prophets on Mount Carmel turns out to be hollow, for he is still hunted by the regime he opposed. Like Moses and Jonah, he becomes so despondently frus-trated with his apparently failed leadership that he begs God for death: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” (1Kings 19:4). Though Elijah’s opposition to the cult of Baal was publicly vindicated by a dramatic supernatu-ral sign, just prior to this moment of extreme despair, he bolsters his author-ity further by seizing and “slaughtering” the opposition (18:40). The exegetical struggle by various commentators to rationalize this extraordinary extrajudi-cial measure simply highlights its legal and moral dubiousness.11 Could Elijah’s success at Mount Carmel restoring religious dedication to the rightful God have been scuttled by a brash moral failure, a murderous rage reflecting some other facet of his character antithetical to the dying for others lesson of death? In fact, Isaac Arama, a major fifteenth-century Spanish exegete, draws this con-clusion and interprets the revelation that follows Elijah’s plea for death as a direct rejoinder to this very moral collapse, to the “zeal for God” Elijah claims was the purpose of that murderous purge (19:10).

The epiphany that places God within the “soft murmuring sound” rather than earth shattering wind, earthquakes, or fire (1Kings 19:11–13) is an indict-ment of Elijah’s actions. Divine presence is not reflected in destructive rage, but rather in conduct that is, in Arama’s words, “calm, composed, and for the sake of truth, humility, and justice” (Arama 1960, 4:127). Elijah’s petition for death prods the conveyance of the authentic lesson of death that challenges Elijah to surmount his ideological fanaticism with an equally fierce care for others, to transform his willingness to die for himself to an empathic way of life animated by a willingness to die for others. Elijah’s preference for death inspires a new philosophical theology that is driven not by the assertion of power as signified by the brute force of various destructive natural phenomena but by the moral suasion of humility that emanates from the quiet and the calm. As a reenactment of Sinai, this transcends Elijah’s personal predicament, completely transforming the original thunderous, terrifying, and imposing basis for God’s relationship with Israel into a benign “softness.” Compassion now replaces passion.

Elijah’s moral transformation at Mt. Horeb pursuant to his death wish cul-minates in his actual (or rather virtual) death when he is whisked up to heaven

11 See Gersonides, Nahmanides, and Isaac Abarbanel on Exod. 32:27 (Katzenellenbogen 1988, 4:199). The use of the term shachat is almost exclusively reserved for slaughtering animals. For other instances of such “butchery” indicating inordinate cruelty, see 2Kings 10:7, 14; Jer. 39:6; 41:7; and Ezek. 23:39.

72 diamond


in a whirlwind. Central to that narrative is the relationship between Elijah and his disciple Elisha, whose repeated refusal to abandon his master is one of the most sublime expressions of devotion to another human being in the entire Bible. Exasperated by his student’s refusal to leave his side, Elijah offers to accommodate one last request before surrendering his life. Elisha responds with what at first appears an arrogant demand that he be granted “double the spirit” Elijah possesses.12 Though Elijah considers it a difficult request, he con-ditions its fulfillment on witnessing his death: “if you see me taken away from you then it will be granted and if not, it will not” (2Kings 2:10). Thus, Elisha’s future reputation is guaranteed by observing a death. Clearly, as in the case of Moses’s viewing from Mt. Nebo, the test cannot be visual, or even accessible to anyone capable of sight, but rather must present a conceptual challenge. Elisha must understand this death. If the lesson of death is “dying for others,” then Elijah’s strikingly conveys it, in that its very essence is the enabling of his beloved successor to eclipse his own life’s work and prophetic legacy. For Elisha to see Elijah’s death is to absorb it as a supreme gesture of self-sacrifice. The death for others Elijah finally experiences overwhelms the self-centered death he yearned for prior to his moral transition effected by the sounds of silence at Horeb. The fact that Elisha comprehends this conception of death is evident from the confusion of the group of fifty other prophetic disciples who perceived displacement rather than death, or, in other words, failed to assimi-late the lesson of death (2:16–19).

Elisha “sees” Elijah transported heavenward by a whirlwind (sa’arah), a nat-ural force that plays a revelatory role two other times in the Hebrew Bible, once as the initiator of Ezekiel’s graphically mysterious account of the chariot (Ezek. 1:4) and once as the medium of Job’s revelation in response to his theologi-cally inscrutable suffering (Job 38:1). Despite its enigmatic character, a series of questions and overpowering images rather than definitive answers are intended to subdue Job’s ego into a state of enlightened ignorance “of things beyond me which I did not know” (Job 42:3). However, rather than endow some theoretical knowledge, the whirlwind accomplishes a moral transforma-tion. Job’s final act retrieves the original prophetic role introduced by Abraham (Gen. 20:7), to care and intercede for others in their time of need. Indeed, the act of praying on his “friends’ ” behalf, is what the narrative credits with Job’s augmented restoration to the wholesome life that preceded all his suffering—

12 Although, grammatically, the phrase pi shenayim might mean “two-thirds,” the context and Elijah’s difficulty with it seems to accord with its rabbinic interpretation as twice as much (Babylonian Talmud 1990, Sanhedrin 47a). See also Deut. 21:17, where the phrase certainly means double.



“The Lord restored Job’s fortunes when he prayed on behalf of his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice what he had before” (42:10). In perfect symmetry, the revelatory whirlwind doubles Job’s previous fortunes and, likewise, doubles Elisha’s prophetic prowess because of the teaching of death.

According to one rabbinic opinion, the message of Job is that, since death is the “end of man” one should cultivate a “good name” in anticipation of death (Babylonian Talmud 1990, Berakhot 17a). What is missing from the initial description of Job as “blameless, upright, God-fearing, and shunning evil” is care for others. That is the meaning of Satan’s challenge, whose claim is that Job’s whole world hinges on himself and his family. The test will determine what remains of his faith once all is lost concerning his own welfare, and noth-ing else remains but the other’s interests.

Finally, Elisha’s lament, “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen,” is a powerful testament to death’s teaching. Virtually every bibli-cal instance of the pairing of chariots and horsemen signals the aggressive power of the monarch and that self-serving military complex that maintains his oppressive grip on the reins of government.13 By substituting the father for the king as synonymous with these armaments, Elisha discerns true power in the relationship of father/child, one that is defined by self-sacrifice, rather than the king’s forces, which signify its polar opposite—the expendability of others in the king’s service or the dying of others for oneself.

Elaborating on the rabbinic tradition that counts Elijah as one of a number of biblical personalities who entered Eden alive, David Kimhi, the prominent medieval exegete of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, asserts that, Elijah’s clothes burned off and “God admitted him physically to the Garden of Eden just as Adam existed before he sinned.”14 The image is striking for its preser-vation of Elijah’s death as a symbol of the pre-sinGarden, where comfortable nakedness indicated relational bliss. Remnants of Elijah’s clothing remain behind for Elisha—“And he picked up Elijah’s mantle that had fallen from him” (2Kings 2:13–14)—who must succeed Elijah in this world, to wear as a testament to the utopian moral state where it is otiose. Indeed, the very bibli-cal proof text that catapulted Elijah into the forefront of Jewish imagination throughout history as the harbinger of the messianic period casts his role that enables a utopian historical climax in terms of father/child relationship who “shall reconcile fathers with children and children with their fathers”

13 Every reference in Exodus, except one, attributes them to Pharaoh (14:9, 17, 18, 23; 15:19), while the remainder of the prophetic references link them to the king (1Sam. 8:11; 2Kings 9:22; 2Chron. 8:9).

14 On verse 2:1.

74 diamond


(Mal. 3:24). In other words, only the one who died as a father for the benefit of a child can reignite that same parental/filial relationship with the dying for others necessary to consummate human history itself. It is no wonder, then, that Ezekiel’s account of the chariot, the only other product of a revelatory whirlwind aside from Job’s, is rabbinically identified as the last subject Elisha and Elijah were engaged in at the time of Elijah’s departure.15

Dying for God versus Choosing Life

Of course, no discussion of a Jewish philosophy of death would be anywhere near complete by focusing only on the issue of dying for others without dealing with the further question of dying for God. I believe I am on secure footing to state that the general thrust of biblical and classical rabbinic theology is ori-ented toward valuing life rather than ideological death or martyrdom.16 Even the one classic case of the martyrs Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the book of Daniel concerns only a willingness to die that was never consummated. Suffice it for our purposes to mention two biblical dictates and their rabbinic interpretations that endorse this position. Lev. 18:5 (“You shall keep my laws and statutes, so that man may practice them and live by them”) betrays the biblical penchant for life and is the locus classicus for restricting martyrdom to a bare minimum of three cases of idolatry, incest/adultery, and murder.17 It is important to note that these are rare exceptions to the general rule that pro-scribes rather than prescribes martyrdom.

The other passage, Deut. 30:15–20, poses various options from which to choose—“life and good or death and bad”—and adjures the choice of life, in the here and now, a life “of lengthy days on the land” (v. 20). The alternatives presented, apropos the thesis developed thus far, look back at Eden and its obstructed entrance to access the Tree of Life. Once eternal life is ruled out and death becomes an inescapable fate, one is mandated to choose life over death in the performance of commandments. But if the goal of obedience is life, and not just individual but national survival specifically on “the soil that God swore to your ancestors” (v. 20), then surely any command must give way when it comes into conflict with that overarching aim of life. Life and death are inextri-cably bound with the knowledge of good and bad, so all choices between good

15 Yerushalmi Talmud, Berakhot 5.16 Greenberg 1992, 53, who concludes after a detailed review that “choosing life and hope

trumps their renouncement and defeatism.”17 Babylonian Talmud 1990, Sanhedrin 74a; Yoma 85b; Avodat Zarah 27b.



and bad must be determined in the shadow of the lesson of death as dying for others as its supreme expression. Choosing life, therefore, entails choosing the life of others since the consequences mentioned are all in terms of community and nation: “populating and blessings in the land” (v. 16); “loss of land” (v. 18); “lengthy life in the land” (v. 20).

In this sense, all three exceptions of mandatory martyrdom are cases of dying for others. Choosing death rather than committing adultery, incest, and murder is for the sake of others, but, even in the case of idolatry, as the antith-esis of a monotheistic belief that binds, death for its sake is a dying for others in its resistance to an assault on national cohesion.18 This is indicated by the extension of obligatory martyrdom to all commandments in a time of religious persecution aimed at destroying Judaism (sha’at hashemad). The example of even the most insignificant “commandment” that one must die for during such systematic attack on Jews is “changing a shoe strap.”19 By singling out some-thing that is devoid of religious significance in itself but rather represents some national characteristic that culturally distinguishes Jews from others, the rabbis perceive shemad as an assault on the nation, as well as on Judaism. As such, martyrdom in this case is a dying for others: a dying so that others can continue to fulfill their lives; a dying that, in fact, loves life, rather than primar-ily a dying for God. The name of God is sanctified when life is preserved.20

Death at the Summit: Recalling the Blocked Tree of Life

We can now return to the death with which we began this study, the death toward which the Five Books of Moses unfolds from the point of death’s intro-duction at the expulsion from Eden. Moses’s death by the “kiss,” and his pro-phetic singularity of the “face to face,” recovers his origins in the living for others that was often overshadowed by the exigencies of political leadership. The first time the Bible relates the Mosaic distinction of the “face to face” is instructive, for it appears in the aftermath of a violent purge conducted by Moses at Mount Sinai, that precisely parallels Elijah’s at Mount Carmel, exceeding it only in the numbers executed. Here, Moses rationalizes his decimating order by attribut-ing it to divine fiat: “So says the Lord, God of Israel, each of you put your sword

18 See Faur 2006.19 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 74b.20 Soloveitchik 2004 considers the halakhic justifications of Jewish martyrdom under the

Crusades “bad law” spurred by tragic circumstances and, thus, not determinative of nor-mative Jewish positions.

76 diamond


on your thigh and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp and slay each man his brother, each man his friend, each man his kin” (Exod. 32:27). The suspect nature of his claim is indicated by the rabbinic attempts to locate its source, and, like Elijah, the rabbinic tradition struggles with its question-able ethical and juridical dimensions.21 The thrice reiterated identification of the victims as “brother, friend, and family” extends its ruinous consequences to the ravaging of every relational dimension that grounds society. The cost of the mass killing of others is a community devoid of relationship where there is no longer an ethos of dying for others. Even in the shadow of this massacre, Moses’s origins are not entirely suppressed but peak through with his interces-sion, challenging God with an ultimatum to either forgive or erase him “from the book You have written” (33:32). He is willing to die and obliterate his exis-tence from the historical record altogether, in defense of others.

As a result of his extreme action, however, not only have the individual members of his community become alienated from each other, but Moses has become alienated from his people. This is indicated by Moses having to pitch the sacral tent outside the camp to commune with God distantly and, shrouded in clouds, obscurely (Exod. 33:7–10). At this juncture Moses’s dialogi-cal relationship with God is first described as “face to face.” However, consider-ing the relational impoverishment Moses has effected among his people, this “face-to-face” feature is meant to be didactically restorative, by its analogy to the dialogue between friends, “as a man speaks to his friend” (33:11). Moses’s zealousness for God problematically submerged his zealousness for others, compelling him to sacrifice others for God’s sake. The face to face of divine friendship ironically, but correctively, reorients Moses away from God’s face: “you cannot see My face for no man can see Me and live” (33:20). In other words, the lesson of the face-to-face relationship of divine immediacy actu-ally veers Moses away from the divine face, since life must concentrate on the human face to live.

The account of Moses’s death, therefore, does not simply end on a private note describing his prophetic uniqueness, superior vision, and erotic death, but rather with his public persona in the face of the entire nation: “for all the great might and all the awesome power that Moses displayed before the eyes of all Israel.” The very last words of the Pentateuch focus on the community, not the individual, and Moses’s image fades into the image of the whole, of others. Though barring him from entry into the Promised Land may have been some form of punishment, Moses’s death is not. In the midrashic tradition, God himself cannot rescue Moses from the inevitable fate of all human beings

21 See Mechilta, Pisha, Bo, 12, and Nahmanides’ rationalization of the extrajudicial nature of Moses’s executions without due legal process.



for, “despite the fact that God attested to his superior uniqueness, it was not within His capacity to save him from the death all human beings are destined for” (Liebermann 1992, 130).

To conclude with Moses’s death, then, and not his extraordinary intimacy with God, is to emphasize his humanity in the service of others and close the circle begun with cordoning off the Tree of Life and the awareness of dying for others. Just as every human being anticipates death by virtue of God’s quaran-tining of the Tree of Life, so every human being, no matter the righteousness animated by that anticipation, experiences death. Moses’s death, then, is an ethical archetype rather than a supreme model of metaphysical knowledge. The implication of the literary interplay between death and knowledge, then, is not to value death as an epistemologically accomplished life where the soul or intellect reaches its ideal disembodied state; rather, it is that knowledge as ethics is a process of being toward death, toward that which all of humanity faces in common and that equalizes rather than empowers. The final words of the Pentateuch, the “eyes of all of Israel,” to which Moses dedicated his life, signals that Moses’s absorbing focal point veers away from God and toward the human.

Postscript: Sarah’s Suicide in the Ghetto

In a sustained act of supreme resistance to suffering the hasidic master Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), the Piaseczner Rebbe, more pop-ularly known as the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe, vigorously maintained his role as rebbe to his followers even in the face of unimaginable pain and loss. His collection of sermons, The Holy Fire (Shapira 1960), delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1942, were transcribed, buried, and then fortuitously retrieved after World War II. It is a rare and vital testament to both console his followers and wrest spiritual meaning out of evil of such magnitude as to defy all theological reason. One of the most daring theological statements on death, or any aspect of Jewish theology, for that mat-ter, to my mind is his reinvention of the midrashic causal link between the akedah and the subsequent narrative of Sarah’s death. Her death, as R. Shapira recalls it, is a consciously chosen and defiant response to the perceived news of her son’s death. Despite the traditionally acknowledged purgative func-tion of suffering, Sarah undertakes death voluntarily “to demonstrate to God how Jews cannot tolerate excessive suffering” (Shapira 1960, 10). In a brilliant exegetical move, the apparently redundant phrase “years of the life of Sarah” (Gen 23:1), midrashically accounted for as attributing righteous consistency to each and every phase of Sarah’s lifetime of 127 years, are taken to refer even to

78 diamond


the years Sarah could have lived had she not taken her own life. That saintli-ness evidenced throughout her physical lifespan extends even to those post-humous years that suicide, in its preclusion of, would normatively have been condemned for, “since she performed it for the welfare of Israel.”

This lesson on the destructive nature of disproportionate suffering mate-rializes as a result of Moses’s own editorial strategy who “placed the death of Sarah in proximity to the binding of Isaac in order to champion our cause and to illustrate the consequences of excessive suffering—her soul took flight. In addition if such occurred to Sarah . . . whose years were thoroughly righteous and still could not withstand the extreme suffering, all the more would we be unable” (Shapira 1960, 10). R. Shapira’s sermons themselves, in their herme-neutical ingenuity, perpetuate the editorial legacy of Moses contrived to reori-ent the divine vista to encompass the human plane that cannot endure the torment of such suffering as the loss of a child, a loss that R. Shapira himself experienced just prior to delivering this sermon in the fall of 1939.22 The final sentiment expressed in the sermon then should not be viewed as a standard sermonic conclusion of pious quietistic anticipation of God’s grace but rather as dictating what God is obliged to do as a result of resurrecting Moses’s edito-rial tendency: “therefore God will have mercy on us and all of Israel and rescue us spiritually and physically immediately with manifest kindnesses.” It is the concrete expression of his own willingness to die for others, reflected in his refusal to escape when afforded the opportunity to do so, insisting, “I will not consent to saving myself while leaving my hasidim abandoned” (Polen 2004, 7).

R. Shapira, the Warsaw Ghetto’s own Moses, casts Sarah’s death, like those suicides discussed at the start of this study, as the supreme expression of a dying for others, a willing death to evoke compassion and effect an end to suf-fering. However, this time it was aimed at halting a divinely sanctioned suffer-ing. The ghettos of Europe and the ultimate murder of its inhabitants could only have taken root in an ideology that considers death in terms of Martin Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode (Being toward Death). Such a state of being primar-ily concerns the self, whose fundamental framework consists of terms such as “ownmost” and “nonrelational.”23 An evil of such magnitude could never have

22 R. Shapira’s “son, his favored one, whom he loved,” R. Elimelekh Ben Zion, passed away on Friday, September 29, 1939, as a result of injuries sustained in the bombing of Warsaw. This sermon was delivered November 4 of that same year (Polen 2004, 6–10).

23 See Levinas’s response to Heidegger’s notion of “being toward death,” especially his analy-sis of David’s funeral chant for Saul and Jonathan in 2Sam. 1:23, which takes it as a con-tra Heideggerian proposition that “in death all relationship to the other person were not undone” (1988, 215).



materialized had the Bible, Midrash, Levinas, and the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe shaped the world’s conception of death and defined it in terms of the other rather than the self. Though the philosophical core of this being toward death may not be uniquely Jewish, its development and presentation here are func-tions of a unique practice of Jewish philosophy arriving at a universal ethic. That ethic conditions the very height of humanity on a care for the other whose life and suffering takes precedence over one’s own.

References

Arama, Isaac. 1960. Akedat Yitshak. 5 vols. Jerusalem: np.Babylonian Talmud. 1990. 26 vols. Edited by Isidore Epstein. London: Soncino Press. Blackman, Philip. 1951. Mishnayoth. 6 vols. London: Mishnah Press. Choron, Jacques. 1963. Death and Western Thought. New York: Macmillan Co.Cohen, Hermann. 1995. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated by

Simon Kaplan. Atlanta: Scholars Press.Crenshaw, James. 1995. “The Shadow of Death in Qoheleth.” In Urgent Advice and

Probing Questions: Collected Writings on Old Testament Wisdom, 573–85. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Fackenheim, Emil. 1973. Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken Books.

Faur, Jose. 2006. “On Martyrdom in Jewish Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides” (Heb.). Bar Ilan Annual 30–31: 373–408.

Fishbane, Michael. 1994. The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Friedlander, Gerald, trans. 1981. Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer: The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great. New York: Sepher Hermon Press.

Greenberg, Moshe. 1992. “The Value of Life in the Bible” (Heb.). In Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel, edited by I. Gafni and A. Ravitzky, 35–54. Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar.

Katzenellenbogen, Mordechai. 1988. Torat Chaim Chumash. 7 vols. Jerusalem: Mossad HarAv Kook.

Kimmelman, Reuven. 1998. “The Seduction of Eve and Feminist Readings of the Garden of Eden.” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 1, no. 2: 1–39.

Kugel, James. 1986. “Two Introductions to Midrash.” In Midrash and Literature, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, 77–104. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

80 diamond


Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “Dying for . . . .” In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 207–17. Translated by M. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1991. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

———. 1999. New Talmudic Readings. Translated by Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

———. 2006. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Liebermann, Saul. 1992. Deuteronomy Rabbah. Jerusalem: Shalem Books.Lo, Alison. 2008. “Death in Qohelet.” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 31:

85–98.Maimonides, Moses. 1963. Guide of the Perplexed. Edited by Shlomo Pines. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press. ———. 1975–2001. Mishneh Torah. 7 vols. Edited by Shabse Frankel. Jerusalem: Ohel

Yosef.Mandelbaum, Bernard. 1987. Pesiqta DeRav Kahana. 2 vols. New York: Jewish

Theological Seminary.Nagel, Thomas. 1998. “Concealment and Exposure.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 27,

no. 1: 3–30.Niditch, Susan. 1990. “Samson as Culture Hero, Trickster, and Bandit: The Empowerment

of the Weak.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 52, no. 4: 608–24.Plato. 2002. Phaedo. Translated by David Gallop. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Polen, Nehemiah. 2004. The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman

Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Satlow, Michael. 1997. “Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity.” Journal

of Biblical Literature 116, no. 3: 429–54.Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman. 1960. Esh Kodesh. Jerusalem: Vaad Hasidei Piaseczno. Shemesh, Yael. 2009. “Suicide in the Bible.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 37, no. 3: 157–68.Soloveitchik, Haym. 2004. “Halakha, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval

Ashkenaz.” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 1: 77–108 (pt. 1); 94, no. 2: 278–99 (pt. 2).Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov. 1978. “But from Thence shall you Seek” (Heb.). Hadarom 47:

1–83. Translation is mine.

Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being Toward death

Documents

Transcript of Constructing a Jewish Philosophy of Being Toward death