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Is a Nonfoundationalist Jewish Philosophy Possible?

The Thought of Tamar Ross and Peter Ochs as Case Study

Student Number: 7299365

Supervisor: Prof. Alex Samely

This dissertation is submitted as partial requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with

Honours in Religion and Theology (Theological Attitudes to Philosophy and Ethics)

Religions and Theology Department

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

The University of Manchester

Tuesday April 23rd, 2013

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Abstract. Nonfoundationalism is the view that there is no premise from which

our beliefs can be deduced as certain. Though this might appear to present a

challenge to Jewish thought, a convincing nonfoundationalist Jewish

philosophy is possible. There has been little scholarly discussion of the recent

work by Tamar Ross and Peter Ochs, but it is there that a

nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophy can be found. Moreover, until now it

has not been noticed that their theological appropriations of

nonfoundationalism are the same, albeit expressed in different idioms with

different emphases. For both, Judaism is an anthology of words whose purpose

is not to refer to any particular truths, but to provide a rich way of thinking

about and experiencing the world for those who commit to living by them. The

actual meaning of the words is dependent entirely on each context. When the

old meanings cause suffering for those committed to them, Judaism demands

their re-interpretation so that the suffering can be repaired through the texts

themselves, and can continue in their function as a framework for perceiving the

world. As such, it can be called Reparative Contextualism.

Word Count: 11,999

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Abbreviations

Peter Ochs

RR ‘Reparative Reasoning’

AR Another Reformation: Postliberalism and the Jews

RAR Reasoning after Revelation

BM ‘Behind the Mechitsa: Reflections on the Rules of Textual

Reasoning’

PW ‘Philosophical Warrant for Scriptural Reasoning’

SL ‘Scriptural Logic’

CP ‘Compassionate Postmodernism’

Tamar Ross

EPT Expanding the Palace of Torah

RBPA Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age

CVR ‘Cognitive Value of Religious Truth Statements:

Rabbi A. I. Kook and Postmodernism’

RF ‘Response to Finkelman’

GT ‘Guarding the Treasure and Guarding the Torah’

   

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Contents

Introduction: Is a Nonfoundationalist Jewish Philosophy Possible?

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Chapter 1: The Conflict Between Jewish Philosophy and

Nonfoundationalism 9

i. Anti-Foundationalism in Analytic Philosophy 10

ii. The Postmodern Incredulity Towards Metanarratives 13

iii. The Challenge of Nonfoundationalism 16

Chapter 2: ‘Reparative Contextualism’ as Nonfoundationalist:

Tamar Ross and Peter Ochs 19

i. Tamar Ross as Contextualist Theologian 20

ii. Peter Ochs as Reparative Theologian 23

iii. Ross, Ochs and Nonfoundationalism 25

iv. The Opportunity of Nonfoundationalism 28

v. The Vision of Reparative Contextualism 31

Chapter 3: A Reparative Critique of Reparative Contextualism 37

i. The Challenge of Self-Refutation 38

ii. The Jewish Form of Life 40

iii. New Contexts, New Repair 43

Conclusion: The Rock of Horeb 48

Bibliography 51

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Introduction

Is a Nonfoundationalist Jewish Philosophy Possible?

The path of the Jewish philosopher is determined by one element that is variable and another that is constant. The variable is the intellectual, scholarly equipment that each thinker uses in building his own philosophy… Judaism contains the element of constancy because it is founded not on ideas but on certain facts and events.

Eliezer Berkovits1 Much of Jewish philosophy can be seen as the attempt to justify a commitment to

Judaism in terms not internal to Judaism. If so, a Jewish philosophy will have two

aspects: first, it will relate to beliefs, texts and practices that are seen as relevantly

Jewish, and which need justifying in order to commit to them; and second, it will

presuppose a certain mode of reasoning with respect to which the justification

will occur. A convincing Jewish philosophy will show how a particular

philosophical standpoint is compatible with – or better, necessitates – Jewish

belief and practice. Seen from this angle, this dissertation is a critical investigation

into one branch of contemporary Jewish philosophy; its subject is whether Jewish

engagement can be justified with recourse to a particular idea prominent in

current philosophical discourse - nonfoundationalism.

Before introducing nonfoundationalism and its advocates, let me mention

Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) and Eliyahu Dessler (1892 – 1953) as two

illustrations of my model of Jewish philosophy as an integration between a mode

of reasoning and a conception of Judaism. Cohen, a Liberal Jewish thinker,

adopted a mode of reasoning deeply influenced by Kant. On their view, though                                                                                                                1 Eliezer Berkovits, ‘What is Jewish Philosophy?’, Tradition 3:2 (1963), 120

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pure reason cannot teach us any truths about reality as it is in itself, we can use

practical reason to articulate universal, rational truths about ethics. From here,

Cohen can justify his conception of Judaism as a ‘religion of reason’,2 whose

prophets were the first to articulate the universality of ethics. He calls this

prophetic contribution ‘ethical monotheism’,3 which, for him, is the essence of

Judaism. Dessler, by contrast, was an influential Orthodox thinker. Though not

indebted to a particular philosopher, he still presupposes a mode of reasoning

that (as I will defend in Chapter 1) is reminiscent of Descartes. For him, when

‘the heart is cleansed of bias’ we can ‘rely on our intellect to give us true

conclusions’.4 From here, he claims that only the rabbis are free from this bias,

and thus can justify his conception of Judaism, which focuses on the importance

of trusting the rabbinic understanding of halakha (Jewish law) and faith.

Cohen and Dessler, despite having very different modes of reasoning and

conceptions of Judaism, fit into my model. However, there is already one

assumption their modes of reasoning share, what I call the foundationalist

tendency in Jewish philosophy. Foundationalists claim that a worldview can be

justified by showing how all its beliefs can be deduced from a ground of certain

knowledge. For Cohen, the universal truths of Reason are justified in this way,

and for Dessler, there can be access to ‘absolute knowledge’ through rational

thinking (at least for the rabbis!).5

In the second half of the twentieth century in particular, the foundationalist

model came under severe attack in several ways. In Chapter 1, I will                                                                                                                2 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason (trans. Simon Kaplan), (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) 3 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 242 4 Eliyahu Dessler, Strive for Truth! (trans. Aryeh Carmell), (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1978) (Vol. 1), 172 5 Dessler, Strive for Truth! (vol. 3), 221

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contextualize this debate and clarify the main issues involved. I will suggest that

the position of anti-foundationalism in analytic philosophy and the rejection of

metanarratives in postmodern thought share a rejection of any beliefs which are

treated as certain and immune to re-evaluation, and from which the status of all

others can be judged. This is the idea I will call ‘nonfoundationalism’. I will then

make it clear how changing our conception of justification has implications

beyond epistemology. After noting how Cohen’s and Dessler’s philosophy would

be incompatible with this position, I will conclude the chapter by raising the

central question of this dissertation: is there a conception of Judaism that the

nonfoundationalist mode of reasoning can serve to justify? Or, put differently, is a

nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophy possible?

In Chapter 2, I will introduce two attempts to build a nonfoundationalist Jewish

philosophy. First, Tamar Ross has argued that the meaning of Judaism depends

entirely on its context, and has tried to show how understanding Jewish sources

from within an egalitarian context will encourage halakhic development that is

mandated by divine revelation. Second, Peter Ochs has argued for a way of

reading Jewish texts that he calls ‘reparative reasoning’.6 This encourages people

committed to Judaism to read Jewish texts in such a way that they repair the

suffering of their readers, and Ochs is involved in such a reading for postmodern

academics. I will show how both of these attempts assume nonfoundationalism,

and how they welcome it as an authentic Judaism. I will conclude that their

theologies share a fundamental project, albeit expressed in very different idioms,

which I will call ‘Reparative Contextualism’.

                                                                                                               6 Ochs, RR, passim

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In Chapter 3, I will challenge and defend these attempts. I will examine the

objections that they neither live up to the nonfoundationalism they aspire to, nor

the concern for the tradition’s inner workings that they claim. I will suggest that

on both accounts reparative contextualists are internally consistent, and as such

affirm that a Jewish philosophy within the nonfoundationalist paradigm is indeed

possible. However, I conclude the chapter by suggesting that, inherent in the idea

of nonfoundationalist philosophy is the idea that it itself may be repaired if there

is reason to, and I will suggest that there may already be reason to do so in our

time.

I have chosen Ross’ and Ochs’ work because they are amongst the more prolific

and creative contemporary thinkers writing with the question of

nonfoundationalism in mind, and moreover, I have found them interesting,

challenging and provocative. The work I will focus on is from the past fifteen

years, though I will also refer to some of their earlier writings. The newness of

their work means there is little secondary literature on it. As such, in contrast to

the broad overviews of the first chapter, the second will be my own close-reading

and interpretation of their work, and the third will offer an original and critical

response.

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Chapter 1

The Conflict Between Jewish Philosophy and Nonfoundationalism

With a chilling clarity Descartes leads us with an apparent and ineluctable necessity to a grand and seductive Either/Or. Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos.

Richard J Bernstein7

A familiar theme in recent philosophy has been the rejection of foundations.

Defenders of this idea claim that our worldviews cannot be given stable grounds

that justify our belief in them. In this chapter, I trace this notion through the

second half of the twentieth century. I suggest that it has appeared in several

guises, from the ‘anti-foundationalism’ of analytic philosophy (section 1) to the

‘incredulity towards metanarratives’8 of postmodern thought (section 2), and

show how broad its implications are for religious thought (section 3). In each

section, I contextualize these nonfoundationalist ideas before showing how they

threaten the philosophies of Cohen and Dessler mentioned in the Introduction.

Insofar as Cohen and Dessler are typical of two dominant trends within

contemporary Judaism - liberal and orthodox – it would seem likely that

nonfoundationalism is problematic for current Jewish philosophy.

                                                                                                               7 Richard J Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (University of Pennsylvania Press), 20 8 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), xxiv.

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i. Anti-foundationalism in Analytic Philosophy

The foundationalism/anti-foundationalism debate occupies a central place in

recent analytic philosophy, the dominant school in the contemporary Anglo-

American world. It begins with the epistemological question, ‘how can we justify

our beliefs?’ If I ask you why you believe x is true, you will give me a reason, y. If

I then ask you why you believe y is true, you will offer z. This can go on and on;

but is there any way to stop this process going on forever?

The dominant answer in the history of philosophy has been foundationalism, for

which Descartes is the clearest model. Descartes expressed his philosophical aim,

‘to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted up to then, and to begin afresh

from the foundations'.9 For him, we can have ‘clear and distinct ideas’ that are

self-evident truths. Most famous is the existence of the self: ‘I think therefore I

am’. This belief then stands as the foundation from which all other beliefs, such

as the existence of God and the truth of science, can be deduced. Locke initiated

an alternative, empirical (as opposed to rational) approach to foundationalism. It

is our sense-experience that provides self-evident knowledge, and from which

further beliefs can be deduced. According to foundationalists, then, we may

justify any x by y, and y by z, but z must ultimately be derived from the self-

evident, foundational belief, a.

Anti-foundationalism, which has become influential in recent analytic

philosophy, challenges this picture. It claims that there can be no foundation. That is,

there is no belief that is self-evident such that it can be either certain in itself, or

                                                                                                               9 Quoted in William Placher, Unapologetic Theology (Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1989), 25.

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the basis for deducing equally certain propositions. Richard Rorty, one of its

clearest and most influential proponents, claimed Sellars and Quine as its

philosophical fathers. Sellars ‘helped destroy the empiricist [eg. Lockean] form of

foundationalism by attacking the distinction between what is “given to the mind”

and what is “added by the mind”.’10 In other words, he claimed there is no pure

sense-experience, because all our experience is mediated through our language

and culture. As such, no sense-experience can be foundational, because sense-

experience always already presupposes other mediating categories. By contrast,

Rorty claims Quine ‘helped destroy the rationalist [Cartesian] form of

foundationalism by attacking the distinction between analytic and synthetic

truths’.11 In his essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Quine challenges a long-

standing assumption of philosophy, that certain truths – analytic truths - have

‘meanings independently of matters of fact’.12 Even ‘all bachelors are unmarried’

is not, Quine believes, an analytic truth. For him, then, no truth is true in and of

itself such that it could stand at the foundation of a system of thought deduced

from it.

Anti-foundationalism proposes a new answer to the question of justification:

beliefs are justified if they are coherent with all other beliefs a person has. As

beliefs about some things change, others may become incoherent, and so some

have to be removed or changed. The question then becomes: which beliefs

should be changed? The foundationalist would insist that there are certain beliefs

that can never be changed by their very nature. Quine, however, argues that ‘no

                                                                                                               10 Richard Rorty, ‘Introduction’ in Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism & The Philosophy of Mind, (London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5. 11 Ibid. 12 W.V.O. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ in From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press: 1980), 20.

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statement is immune to revision’, and equally that ‘any statement can be held

true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the

system’.13 Whether a person’s belief is rational depends on whether it can defend

its own coherence. As Quine put it, ‘our statements about the external world face

the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body’.14

Put differently, since there are no beliefs like a, our belief in x, y and z is justified

only if they cohere with each other.

Insofar as many Jewish thinkers are foundationalists, anti-foundationalism

challenges the way Jewish philosophers have justified their beliefs. Dessler, for

example, presupposes a model of knowledge that is comparable to Descartes.

Human rationality has access to clear rational truths:

…our awareness of our self, our ego, is direct and immediate. It depends

neither on the mediation of the sense nor on that of the intellect. We may

call this “absolute knowledge”.15

Likewise, ‘every human being… has the faculty of determining in his own heart

where the real truth lies’.16 From here, Dessler takes a surprising turn. Though

every human being can have access to truth, most in practice do not because of

the bias induced by poor ethical standards. ‘Many years of devoted and selfless

labor are needed before one can hope to strengthen the yearning for truth to

such an extent that one can free oneself from the bias’.17 It is the rabbis, Dessler

                                                                                                               13 Op. cit., 43 14 Op. cit., 41. 15 Dessler, Strive for Truth! (vol. 3), 221 16 Op. cit., (vol. 1), 180 17 Op. cit., 171.

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claims, who achieve this level of perfection through which intellectual clarity is

achieved, and they have access to the bias-free rational truth about the divinity of

Torah. From here, Dessler impresses the need to trust these rabbis, in order to

‘make use of their clear vision and see the world through their eyes’.18 Dessler is

not unusual in being a religious foundationalist. On the one hand, Burrell notes

‘the parallels between the modernist Cartesian desire for certitude and the

propensity of fundamentalism’.19 And in the Jewish context, Rynhold shows that

Maimonides has a ‘strong foundationalism’ in which ‘there is a single principle

that cannot be further analyzed and that serves as the basis for the rational

assessment of all ethical and religious practices’.20 Anti-foundationalism, then,

undermines much mainstream Jewish philosophy.

ii. The Postmodern Incredulity Towards Metanarratives

Anti-foundationalism is a significant claim, but quite limited in its scope. It sees

foundations in conceptual terms: either reason or experience. Postmodern

theorists, I argue in this section, have made a parallel claim to analytic

philosophers, but broaden the definition of foundations to include narratives that

are given too much authority.

Lyotard defined postmodernism as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives.21 A

metanarrative is a narrative that is taken as the source of justification for

everything else. He gives as examples ‘the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of

                                                                                                               18 Op. cit., 177. 19 Quoted in James K A Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 37n25. Many would describe Dessler as a fundamentalist, though I do not like the use of the term. 20 Daniel Rynhold, Two Models of Jewish Philosophy: Justifying One’s Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 113. 21 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv

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meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of

wealth.’ Their proponents – Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kant, Marx and Adam

Smith respectively22 – claim that all knowledge must fit into their metanarratives.

Lyotard rejects these metanarratives because he thinks that humans can only

speak from within particular modes of discourse that are not universally valid. He

is influenced here by Wittgenstein who emphasized that all our language and

ideas make sense only within particular ‘language games’. 23 In Lyotard’s

language for there to be a metanarrative its ‘narrator must be a metasubject’.24

His alternative model is that we accept that we are situated between many ‘little

narratives’.25 Different aspects of our life belong to mutually incommensurable

narratives, none of which is free from the need for legitimization, and none of

which is the source of legitimization of all others.

Lyotard’s position, we can now see, is fundamentally similar to anti-

foundationalism. Though analytic philosophy talks of rational justification and

postmodernism of legitimization, both are rejecting sources of knowledge

(foundations and metanarratives) that are self-justified and all-justifying. In doing

this, neither are denying the importance of rationality, but redefining it. Lyotard

still sees narratives as ‘the quintessential form of imaginative invention’.26 And

Sellars, for example, claims an empirical belief is rational ‘not because it has a

foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in

jeopardy, though not all at once’.27 For convenience, I will group the ideas of

thinkers like Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Rorty and Lyotard under the name

                                                                                                               22 See James K A Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (Baker Academics, 2006), 65. 23 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 7 and passim. 24 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 34 25 Op. cit., 60 26 Ibid. 27 Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 79.

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‘nonfoundationalism’, which is also its common term in theological literature. It

might be defined as follows:

Nonfoundationalism is the belief that no belief is unrevisable or the source

of all justification.

This, however, comes up against the immediate specter of self-refutation, because

it sounds as though nonfoundationalism is itself an unrevisable belief that will be

used as the judge of all justification. I will therefore use this more nuanced

definition, which accepts that, if there was reason to, it should give up its own

nonfoundationalism:

Nonfoundationalism is the revisable belief that no belief is unrevisable or

the source of all justification.

Expanding nonfoundationalism to include the rejection of metanarratives makes

it even more problematic to Jewish philosophy. Wyschogrod has claimed that

‘the leitmotif of liberal modern Jewish theology has been what is perhaps the

grandest of Enlightenment modernity’s metanarratives, that of Kantian and post-

Kantian philosophy’.28 Though there is some discussion about whether Cohen

should be seen as a foundationalist,29 it is easier to claim that his thought is

guided by a metanarrative of Reason. For Cohen, man is ‘not merely life, but

reason’.30 It is this basic faculty of Reason from which we gain our concepts, and

‘all possible knowledge have in the concepts their entire content and in reason

                                                                                                               28 Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Trends in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy’, Soundings 76:1 (1993), 129. 29 See Steven Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 45 30 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 88

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their common source’.31 Notice the claims of universality here (‘all’, ‘entire’). Not

surprisingly, then, he applies this to religion too: ‘Reason… has to be

presupposed and set up as a foundation for the concept of religion and for the

concept of Judaism’.32 Like Dessler, he ‘protests against all the alleged powers of

the self… which are rooted in pleasure and pain’.33 That is, he cannot accept a

pragmatic view of ethics, but is concerned to subsume it in a metanarrative of

Reason. It is precisely this that Lyotard opposes. As Smith puts it: ‘metanarratives

are distinctively modern systems of legitimation that appeal to (illusory) universal

human reason as the ground of their legitimation.’34

iii. The Challenge of Nonfoundationalism

Bernstein, in the passage quoted at the head of this chapter, attributes the desire

for foundations to a ‘Cartesian anxiety’ that lies ‘at the center of our being in the

world’. Part of this is a ‘religious, metaphysical, epistemological or moral

anxiety’,35 and in this section I suggest what, in the context of Jewish philosophy,

might be the main objects of this anxiety. It is these, in particular, that make the

nonfoundationalist position especially problematic for Jewish philosophers.

First, what rational justifications can be given for believing in or practicing

Judaism if there are no universally acceptable beliefs on which to ground them?

David Novak claims that a key task of Jewish philosophy in the modern era was

finding ways of justifying Jewish involvement in accordance with universal, as

                                                                                                               31 Op. cit., 5 32 Ibid. 33 Op. cit., 6 34 James K A Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (Michigan: Baker Academics, 2006), 60 35 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 19

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opposed to revealed, criteria. From this perpsective, ‘being philosophical seems to

mean being foundational, that is, proceeding from a rationally constituted

ontological foundation… taken from outside the Jewish tradition’.36 This concern

remains today. For example, Shubert Spero claims:

The demand for justification is within each of us. And the knowledge of

what to answer must be built into our educational agencies if Judaism is

to have a future.37

Nonfoundationalists, however, cannot offer such grounds for belief in Judaism,

for there are no universally acceptable foundations from which to build up the

justification.

Second, if religion is a mere language game, then it seems that we cannot claim

that God actually exists, for that is outside of that game; or if ethics is a mere

language game, we cannot claim that certain things are absolutely immoral. Yet

these are clearly central to religious thought. For example, Cohen writes

‘humanity is the subject of universal morality’,38 and for Dessler, we have

‘absolute knowledge of moral categories, such as justice and injustice’.39 For this

reason, nonfoundationalism is often seen as leading to relativism. As Stanley Fish

puts it, there is a ‘fear that those who have been persuaded by such arguments

                                                                                                               36 David Novak, ‘Textual Reasoning’, Journal for Textual Reasoning 1:1 (2002) [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/tr/volume1/novakTR1.html, accessed 02/04/2013] 37 Shubert Spero, Aspects of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Philosophy of Judaism (New Jesrsey: Ktav, 2009), 32 38 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 20 39 Dessler, Strive for Truth! (vol. 3), 221

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will abandon principled inquiry and go their unconstrained way in response to

the dictates of fashion, opinion, or whim.’40

Third, if we apply Quine’s idea of the web of knowledge, in which anything can

be revised, to religion itself, it would appear that there is no claim of religion that

is immune to revision. However, Jewish philosophers often point to what seems

to be an essential teaching of religion. For Dessler, it is ‘devotion to Hashem

[God] alone, making His Torah and His service our sole interest and aim in

life’. 41 For Cohen, ‘reason is meant to make religion independent of the

descriptions supplied by the history of religion’.42 That is, there is a rational

essence of religion independent of its practical manifestations.

Nonfoundationalism thus seems to preclude the possibility of rational

justification, of making claims about moral and theological truths, and claiming

that there is an essential religious truth. As such, if a nonfoundationalist Jewish

philosophy is possible, it will have to look very different from Cohen’s and

Dessler’s; and insofar as Cohen and Dessler are typical of the two ends of the

Jewish spectrum, Liberal and Orthodox, there should be, prima facie, some doubt

about the possibility of the whole project. If so, the question at the heart of the

next two chapters is a significant one: is a nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophy possible?

                                                                                                               40 Stanley Fish, ‘Consequences’, Critical Inquiry 11:3, 439. 41 Dessler, Strive for Truth! (vol. 2), 234 42 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 2-3

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Chapter 2

‘Reparative Contextualism’ as Nonfoundationalist:

Tamar Ross and Peter Ochs

And in general, this is an important rule in the struggle of ideas: we should not immediately feel obliged to refute any idea that comes to contradict something in the Torah, but rather we should build the palace of Torah above it.

Abraham Isaac Kook43 Tamar Ross (b. 1938) and Peter Ochs (b. 1950) are contemporary Jewish thinkers

who have accepted nonfoundationalism as I presented it in Chapter 1. In this

chapter, I introduce their Jewish theologies, and show how they not only accept

the nonfoundationalist critique, but also actively use it as a source of insights and

ideas for a new interpretation of Judaism. I begin by presenting the general

theological ideas that are given by Ross (Section 1) and Ochs (Section 2),

exploring in particular their implications for Jewish practice and theology. I then

show that they accept nonfoundationalism (Section 3), and discuss how they build

upon its broader implications (Section 4). Finally, I suggest that Ross and Ochs

are in fact saying the same thing, albeit in different ways, for different people, and

with different emphases (Section 5). I call the ideas they share ‘Reparative

Contextualism’ because it captures their two central claims: that the meaning of

Judaism depends on its context, and that through realizing this, the suffering of

its adherents can be repaired.

                                                                                                               43 Abraham Isaac Kook, Iggerot Hareayah I, 163-4, quoted in Tamar Ross, EPT, v.

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i. Tamar Ross as Contextualist Theologian

There are two central components of Ross’ theology: a philosophy of halakha

and a theory of divine revelation. Both accounts begin with contextualism.

According to contextualists, the meaning of any statement, action, or belief is

relative to its context; there can be no stand-alone meaning. From this premise,

as I will show, she understands Jewish law as ‘halakhah contextualized’44 and

revelation as ‘the Word of God contextualized’.45

The central question of Ross’ philosophy of halakha is: what are the internal

mechanisms by which Jewish law changes? She rejects a traditional view in which

there is an ideal system of halakha that simply needs expert application to

different scenarios. Using hermeneutic theory, she claims that this is invalid:

‘Because we can never be neutral at any stage, there is no sense in speaking of a

virgin meaning embedded in the text, simply waiting to be revealed’. Rather, we

already find ourselves ‘in the beliefs and opinions that enable discovery of a text’s

meaning as something that derives from the general sociopolitical context in

which he[/we] and the words take part’. 46 This idea has an important corollary.

If the meaning of halakha depends on what its adherents bring to it, then halakha

is inherently dynamic. Halakha, by its very nature, develops not by applying

unchanging internal mechanisms, but by ‘transforming [the] narrative’ of its

adherents, and only then applying its mechanisms as they are understood.47

                                                                                                               44 Ross, EPT, 184 45 Op. cit., 165 46 Op. cit., 169 47 Op. cit., 173

21

Yet, to be true to the internal mechanism of the halakha, there must be a

‘commitment to the interpretive tradition’s divine authority’.48 The challenge

here is to affirm that ‘the Torah is divinely revealed, without denying human

involvement’. 49 Human involvement cannot be denied because historical

scholarship and changes in moral, philosophical and scientific beliefs make it

clear how much the Torah, as much as anything else, is a product of its human

context. Ross’ solution is that ‘the Torah can be all human and all divine’.50 This

is because God is revealed anew in each context through human activity, for

example, in ‘rabbinical interpretation of the texts’ or ‘through the mouthpiece of

history’.51 What is given in revelation is not a ‘fixed and rigidly stable message that

is passed on intact from generation to generation’, that is, a list of ahistorical

truths.52 Rather, revelation is ‘a series of ongoing “hearings” of the voice at Sinai

throughout Jewish history’.53 In other words, in each context something new is

revealed - yet never completely new because it is always perceived through the

medium of already-given revelations: ‘His original message… always remains as

the primary cultural-linguistic filter through which these new deviations are

heard and understood’.54 But over time, the body of revealed Torah expands. As

such, she calls her view ‘cumulative revelation’.55

Ross’ theology is, then, deeply contextualist, and could aptly be called

‘contextualist Judaism’. Her best-known work is an application of this to the

feminism of our contemporary context. Her claim is that contextualism gives us

                                                                                                               48 Op. cit., 183 49 Op. cit., 197 50 Op. cit., 208 51 Op. cit., 198 52 Op. cit., 164 53 Op. cit., 197-8 54 Op. cit., 198 55 Op. cit., 198

22

strong reasons, internal to tradition, to welcome feminist developments. If the

meaning of law depends on the framework its adherents bring, then Jewish

women who are committed both to halakha and an egalitarian narrative are ‘the

ideal formulators of new legal meaning’.56 By changing the narrative of law, the

patriarchal connotations of some practices will be transformed, and there will be

new opportunities for the law itself to change. These feminist developments, she

claims, would constitute ‘the emergence of feminism as a new revelation of divine

will’.57 In other words, if these new interpretations are accumulated in the body

of Torah, it becomes a new “hearing”.

The full extent of Ross’ contextualism becomes clear when she claims that, in its

time, patriarchy was also divinely mandated: ‘the cumulativist will say that

patriarchy may not be a societal ideal today, but such was not always the case…

the patriarchal model for centuries served the interests of society in general’.58 It

is because the words of Torah are interpreted in, and for, their context that

‘although successive hearings of God’s Torah sometimes appear to contradict His

original message, that message is never replaced’.59 Put differently, patriarchy

and egalitarianism do not contradict, because they can be appropriate for

different contexts.

                                                                                                               56 Op. cit., 172 57 Op. cit., 210 58 Op. cit., 216 59 Op. cit., 198

23

ii. Peter Ochs as Reparative Theologian

Building on the rabbinic scholarship of Max Kadushin and the philosophical

thought of Charles Peirce, Ochs develops an understanding of Judaism as what

could be called a ‘Religion of Repair’. On this view, Jewish communities, when

faced with internal suffering, should not seek to give up their Jewish heritage, but

should use that very tradition as a source of repair.

Kadushin saw Jews as inheriting certain terms from their ancestors. These terms

he called ‘value concepts’.60 The Talmudic rabbis, for example, received from

the biblical era value concepts like ‘Torah’, ‘teshuva’ (repentance), and ‘tzedaka’

(charity). However, these words do not have a given meaning: ‘Value concepts

resists definition; they are concretized in situated actions, not in reified

thoughts’.61 Ochs claims that as contemporary Jews we similarly receive value

concepts from previous Jewish eras, yet their specific meaning depends on the

contexts we bring to them.

Peirce’s semiotics allows Ochs to articulate this from a philosophical standpoint

by moving us from ‘binary thinking’ to ‘triadic thinking’. According to binary

thinking, a statement or a text means x or not-x. This implies that things can have

a single, essential, or objective meaning. But Peirce rejects this mode of thinking

by developing a semiotic theory in which there are three parties involved: a) the

signifier (eg. the physical scribble ‘computer’), b) the object (eg. a computer), c)

the interpretant (the context of interpretation). Meaning is a result of the

interplay of these three. Thus: a) the scribble ‘computer’ refers to the b) object

                                                                                                               60 Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind, 2 and passim. 61 Peter Ochs, BM

24

computer c) for us. Applied more generally, the meaning of a whole text depends

on their interpretants, and as such is dynamic.

For Ochs, the inherent vagueness of texts leads to a contextualist approach like

Ross’. He emphasizes much more the need for us to actively use this idea in

practice. There needs to be a ‘reparative philosophy’62 that actively attempts to

re-read texts on behalf of those contexts that need it. To do this, readers of texts

need to be in relation to those sufferers, and thus texts need to be read with them,

forming a community of readers. Contexts are repaired through the reading: ‘the

repair binds together sufferer, agent of repair, and source of repair’.63 However,

God is ‘the ultimate source of repair’.64 This is because, ultimately, it is God that

calls the philosophers who otherwise ignore suffering ‘back to their reparative

task’.65

In the particular Jewish context, the texts that are read for repair are scriptural,

as well as Talmudic. Ochs sees his reparative hermeneutics as ‘the logic of

scripture’: 66 Torah has been received by Jews over time as a source that Jews

should re-read as the way to make pragmatic repairs of the community built

around it. Much of his work is for one particular interpretant: postmodern Jewish

philosophers who, in their intellectual confusion, he sees as suffering(!). He is thus

in relation ‘to the anguish of philosophers who don’t know where they belong.

                                                                                                               62 Ochs, AR, 11 63 Op. cit., 17 64 Op. cit., 13 65 Op. cit, 12 66 Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998)

25

We are homeless individuals’.67 Together, they form a new interpretant for the

Jewish tradition, which he calls Textual Reasoning.

It is only by re-reading the texts together, in practice, that they can become

meaningful, and a source of repair: ‘it is only as member of an everyday

community that any member of TR [Textual Reasoning] learns the three-part

relation among a text or sign and its meaning-in-use for some community of

practitioners’.68 This process allows postmodern Jews to retain the grammar of

Jewish tradition, whilst leaving the precise meaning open to interpretation:

These thinkers share commitment to Jewish value concepts. For example,

‘they share a fidelity to what they call “Torah”. Even if they understand

“fidelity” and “Torah” differently…69

iii. Ross, Ochs and Nonfoundationalism

In this section, I make it clear that Ross’ contextualist theology and Ochs’

reparative theology are both indebted to the nonfoundationalist ideas I discussed

in Chapter 1. My claim here is that it is right to see their projects as

nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophies, and will discuss whether they are

successful later.

                                                                                                               67 Ochs, RAR, 14 68 Ochs, ‘BM’ 69 Ochs, RAR , 1

26

Ross sees nonfoundationalism as part of ‘the theoretical background’ of her

contextualism.70 She defines it as follows:

There is no firm “foundation” that serves as the basis for our knowledge. In

other words, there are no “raw chunks of reality” to which our notions of

truth correspond.71

This claim, familiar from Chapter 1, says that in epistemology no idea is true in

and of itself, and in language no statement has meaning merely by its own

referring to something. Her contextualism is simply an extension of this to

theology, morality and halakha: no message is revealed with its own eternal,

time-independent meaning, no act is moral regardless of its context, no law has

meaning in and of itself. In all these disciplines, there is no ‘one universal truth,

"out there", simply waiting to be discovered, and unaffected by our perceptions

of it’.72

Rather, she sees the way in which justification occurs as ‘internal to the activity

or “form of life” concerned and tak[ing]… place in a web like manner’.73 Two

nonfoundationalist influences are clear in this statement: first, Quine’s image of

knowledge as a web in which statements can be revised one by one; and second,

Wittgenstein’s idea of language only making sense within a particular ‘form of

life’, that is, within a particular matrix of factors that exist at any point in time.

This leads directly to contextualism: an idea or reading is taken to be true at any

                                                                                                               70 Ross, EPT, 165 71 Ross, EPT, 165 72 Ross, ‘GP’. 73 Ross, ‘Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age’, 13

27

particular time only if there is ‘a coherence with other beliefs and opinions drawn

from the traditions of the wider community’.74

Ochs, based on his study of Peirce, argues that foundationalism’s mistake is the

‘misrepresentation of a set of reparative claims as if they were a set of constative

claims’.75 To understand this, recall the Peircian semiotic I introduced in the

previous section, where meaning is created through a signifier, an object and an

interpretant. A ‘constative claim’ is a normal statement in its general context (eg.

“this is a computer”), such that the interpretant (“in twenty-first century English”)

does not have to be made explicit. Such constative claims assume certain rules of

inquiry (eg. this is what people call “computer”) that may in time have to be

changed (such as if the meaning of “computer” changes). A ‘reparative claim’ is

one that seeks to enact such a rule-change (“Herschel, this is no longer called

‘computer’”).

According to Ochs, foundationalism is what happened when Descartes sought to

make a significant ‘reparative claim’ to medieval scholasticism, but made it in the

form of a ‘constative claim’, such that its interpretant was ignored. In other

words, Descartes mistake was phrasing his repair as a context-independent truth.

If ignoring the interpretant of reparative claims is the mistake of foundationalism,

Ochs’ effort is to engage in a nonfoundationalism at whose heart is ‘reparative

reasoning’.76 This is repair that is very aware of its interpretant, in other words,

its context-specificity. In practice, this means finding a context in need of repair,

and repairing it by repairing its basic texts for that particular context.

                                                                                                               74 Ross, EPT, 166 75 Ochs, RR, 193 76 Peter Ochs, RR, passim.

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iv. The Opportunity of Nonfoundationalism

Both Ross and Ochs, then, accept nonfoundationalism, and indeed place it as

one of the presuppositions of their work. Some might challenge their views by

raising the issues I mentioned at the end of Chapter 1 as reasons why modern

Jewish philosophy would not be able to accept nonfoundationalism: that it would

mean there is no essence of religion, that there is no moral objectivity or

theological truths, and that there can be no rational justification of one’s belief.

Ross’ and Ochs’ response shows two things: that these challenges already

presuppose foundationalism, and thus are invalid as philosophical objections; and

that the acceptance of nonfoundationalism and its wider implications is a fruitful

source of theological insight.

Ross and Ochs welcome the lack of essentialism. Judaism, Ross claims, is open to

any belief: ‘any development is logically possible’.77 Like planks in a raft, any

belief could become part of Judaism, any could be taken out. Even the title of her

book, Expanding the Palace of Torah, expresses this idea. It alludes to Kook’s claim,

quoted at the head of this chapter, that perceived contradictions to Torah should

become the basis for a new interpretation of it. Ochs, relating this same point to

his critique of binaries, claims that there is no context in which Judaism could not

flourish:

‘what I really object to is the dichotomous form of thinking we see in

these philosophies: tradition/modernity, Zion/Diaspora,

Holocaust/Israel, theism/atheism. These forms of thinking offer

                                                                                                               77 Ross, EPT, 182

29

either/or choices and attempt to establish universal truths and final

solutions for modern Jewish life’.78

However, they both hold that, though there is no philosophical idea that Judaism

must affirm, there are certain words that Jews must find context-dependent ways

to use: for Ross, the accumulated texts, and for Ochs, the inherited value-

concepts. Ochs puts it like this:

we are prepared to receive the words as behaviorally and

epistemologically authoritative and, at the same time, as vague (or

indefinite) and multivalent, and in that sense, as incomplete – that is, as

achieving their correct meaning and force only by ways of context-specific

readings.79

These words are not prescribing an essence of Judaism, but describing the

mechanism by which Judaism in fact functions, that is, as retaining words more

than ideas. From this perspective, foundationalist thinkers are in fact untrue to

historical Judaism. Dessler, for example, claims that ‘the Torah is high above all

human prejudice and its judgments represent the absolute truth’.80 Yet, the

nonfoundationalist would claim, all words are human and thus prejudiced, and

there is no absolute truth, so to be true to Judaism must simply mean retaining its

words.

                                                                                                               78 Ochs, RAR, 15 79 Ochs, RAR, 20 80 Dessler, Strive for Truth! (Vol 2.), 192

30

However, Ross and Ochs do not accept that only being able to speak from a

particular context, or language game, entails that we cannot believe God exists

beyond it. Ochs insists that ‘there are, indeed, non-foundationalist ways of

conceiving of both logic and metaphysical inquiry’. 81 Ross claims that ‘the

alleged “flight from metaphysics” attributed to Continental thought and post-

analytic philosophy may have been overdone; there may be room in a

constructivist position for a metaphysics that refers to something beyond the

linguistic scheme’.82 This, she claims, is not an untraditional view of God. She is

following ‘several of our great Jewish mystics and philosophers [who]

recognize[s] the limitations of our ability to grasp and portray the object of our

spiritual striving’.83

Neither do they see themselves as relativists by virtue of their contextualism. Not

just anything is right or wrong; their rightness or wrongness too depends on the

context. To know whether something is right or wrong means justifying a

position coherently with respect to all other beliefs at a particular time. The same is

true for interpreting texts: different contexts will only support certain readings. It

is important to note that Ross’ line quoted earlier – ‘any development is logically

possible’ - is immediately followed by the qualification ‘but not equally

plausible’.84

This leads to a more nuanced challenge of relativism. There often seem to be

multiple coherent worldviews, yet how do you choose between them? For

example, if both political liberalism and conservatism, or both Judaism and                                                                                                                81 Ochs, SL, 66 82 Ross, ‘RBPA’, 29 83 Ross, ‘RF’, 23 84 Ross, EPT, 182

31

Christianity, are coherent, what reasons can you have to choose one over the

other? Where the foundationalist could refer to universal principles that show

that one worldview is more morally, philosophically or theologically preferable,

nonfoundationalists do not have these. This then leads to the question of

justification: why choose to belong to one worldview as opposed to any other?

Ross and Ochs respond to this through their pragmatism. For Ross, there can

only be ‘an educated guess as to the best option in light of background factors

and pragmatic considerations’.85 Ochs, in the absence of universal principles,

suggests ‘the ancient virtue of compassion as a rule for philosophic practice’.86 In

terms of choosing between religious worldviews, it is simply a question of

personal identity. As Ochs puts it, ‘Our Jewish praxis defines our particular

identity. It defines us not as superior, but as what we are’.87 In other words, the

ground of Jewish identity is not a rational truth but a personal commitment, at

best based on a deep identification with one particular community. The nature of

this commitment will become clearer in Chapter 3.

v. The Vision of Reparative Contextualism

So far, I have claimed that Ross and Ochs welcome nonfoundationalism as a

resource for new theology, and even a return to some neglected Jewish ideas.

With this alone, I can draw the first conclusion of this chapter: that a

nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophy is possible (or that it at least seems to be). I

will critically examine this claim in the next chapter. Before, though, I want to

make a second claim: that in fact Ross and Ochs, despite using very different                                                                                                                85 Ross, EPT, 183 86 Ochs, ‘CP’, 78 87 Ochs, RAR, 12

32

language and speaking to very different readerships, are proposing basically the

same positions. Though Ross emphasizes contextualism, and Ochs emphasizes

repair, each affirms both. As such, I will call their shared response to

nonfoundationalism ‘Reparative Contextualism’, which can be defined as

follows:

Reparative Contextualism: The belief that contexts can be repaired by their

basic texts as long as the meaning of those texts is repaired for their

contexts.

This definition makes it clear that reparative contextualism is compatible with

any tradition whatsoever. Yet, it is the Torah, Talmud and later canonical texts

that are the source of repair in Judaism. As such, there are both very radical and

very traditional aspects of Reparative Contextualism. The radical side is clearer

in Ross’ work, which is encouraging a contextual understanding of halakha to her

traditional peers, whereas the traditional side is clearer for Ochs, who is

encouraging a text-based, traditionalist pragmatism for liberal Jewish thinkers.

By way of clarifying what Ross and Ochs share, and summing up their claims I

have presented them in this chapter, several ‘principles’ of Reparative

Contextualism, as applied to Judaism, can be distilled:

• Judaism does not need foundations to justify committing to it.

• There is no essence of Judaism, rational, theological, moral or otherwise.

• The meaning of Jewish beliefs, texts and practices changes fundamentally

according to context.

33

• Jews receive the words of earlier texts/practices as givens, and fill them

with meaning.

• God is a metaphysical reality, though religious language does not seek to

articulate its details.

• Communities that suffer on account of existing meaning of Jewish beliefs,

texts and practices can re-interpret them as a source of repair.

• God is the source/revealer of this process of re-interpretation.

It might be challenged that there are in fact two major differences between Ross

and Ochs. The first is seen in the way they articulate their premises, with

different precedents and as part of different philosophical discourses. Put over-

simplistically, Ochs speaks the language of postmodern academia and liberal

Judaism, and sets Peirce and Kadushin and, more broadly, the rabbinic method,

as precedents; whereas Ross speaks the language of analytic philosophy and

Orthodox Judaism, and sees herself as following Wittgenstein, Kook, and the

kabbalists more generally. The second is their conceptions of repaired Judaism

are different. For Ross, repair means interpreting Jewish texts more freely. Ochs,

by contrast, sees repair as necessitating a return to tradition.

However, I believe that neither of these differences indicate disagreements. Even

if Ross and Ochs speak within different philosophical idioms, it should be clear

by now that their substantive points are the same. And the fact that they have

different understandings is simply because they are repairing for different people:

Ross for Modern Orthodox women, Ochs for people who think in a postmodern

trend. The differences are a result of what needs to be emphasised. For example,

both affirm the contextual and reparative role of Judaism. Nevertheless, Ross,

34

speaking to a traditional audience that already accepts Judaism’s reparative

power, needs to emphasise contextualism, whereas Ochs, speaking to an

audience familiar with contextualist claims, needs to emphasise the reparative

nature of Judaism. Each, I think, would affirm the others’ approach as largely

appropriate for their context. That is, Ochs would say that Ross’ concern for

traditional halakha was broadly justified for the context of Modern Orthodoxy,

and Ross would say that Ochs’ text-based Judaism was broadly justified for the

academic setting.

It should be noted, though, that in grouping Ross and Ochs together, I do not

intend to reduce all potential disagreements to context alone. There could, for

example, be particular disagreements between them, such as about what is,

pragmatically, best for a particular context. Nor do I intend to imply that there

are areas that both achieve equally well. For example, Ochs has a more

sophisticated account of how texts can function as themselves a source of repair;

whereas Ross has a bolder attempt to actually repair, showing how this

understanding can be useful not just for people who accept postmodernism, but

for broader social communities too.

Until now, my account of Reparative Contextualism, through Ross and Ochs,

can be seen as an answer to the question: how does nonfoundationalism impact

the way we understand the change that Judaism undergoes over time? But I

would like to ask a final question to get to the heart of Reparative

Contextualism’s perspective: what, seen from their context, is Judaism? In the past,

Judaism has been seen as religion, community, nation, civilization. I think Ross

35

and Ochs, without denying that in our context it has aspects of all those, would

see it more as a practice, or as an exercise in seeing the world as a certain way.

Being Jewish does not mean accepting a set of theoretical positions, but a

practical and performative tradition.

This can be made clearer by making explicit an important shared influence on

them: postliberal Christianity. Arising in the 1980s, postliberal Christianity is an

important school of nonfoundationalist Christian theology. In one of its founding

books, George Lindbeck described religion as a ‘cultural-linguistic framework’.88

For him, the doctrines of Christianity are not important because of any

philosophical content, but because of the words it uses. ‘It is the text, so to speak,

which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text’, he wrote.89 Ross

imitates this exactly when she claims ‘it is the Torah which must absorb the

world rather than the world the Torah’,90 as does Ochs when he writes ‘you

might speak of the Bible’s ‘absorbing’ the world,’ rather than being absorbed by

it’.91 For Ross and Ochs, then, texts absorb the meaning that is brought to it. But

in turn, it constitutes the communal rules of a particular community, defining

what can be thought, and what it makes sense to say, within that community at

any particular time. According to this idea, being Jewish means seeing the world

through the lens of Jewish tradition, even if in doing so that tradition is re-

interpreted. As Ross puts it, religious truth claims do not express philosophical

truths, but ‘much stronger claim[s] that will regulate her entire life’.92 And as

                                                                                                               88 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1984), 18 89 Ibid., 118 90 Ross, EPT, 171 91 Ochs, ‘SL’, 69 92 Ross, EPT, 194

36

Ochs put it, ‘postmodern Jewish thinking is fundamentally a “thinking with” –

with the signs of the Torah about God and the world’.93

Even this has roots in the nonfoundationalist project. Parallel with the turn away

from foundationalism was what Rorty called ‘the linguistic turn’.94 Sellars, for

example, writes that ‘all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all

awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a

linguistic affair’.95 Ross and Ochs can be seen as responding: Yes, all awareness is a

linguistic affair, but if so, we must make sure that the language that underlies our awareness of

the world is that which we inherit from tradition. If we do this, regardless of our philosophical

beliefs, our entire outlook on life will be a Jewish one.

                                                                                                               93 Ochs, RAR, 5 94 Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn, (University of Chicago Press, 1992) 64 95 Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 63

37

Chapter 3

A Reparative Critique of

Reparative Contextualism

…if you go with Wittgenstein so far as to say “no more metastories,” then you had better

not tell me a metastory – not even a metametastory!

Hilary Putnam96

In Chapter 1, I asked whether a nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophy is possible.

In Chapter 2, I claimed that it is, and demonstrated this by proposing a model,

Reparative Contextualism, as exemplified by Ross and Ochs. I have already

shown that some objections, such as from the lack of justification and the danger

of relativism, already presuppose the foundationalism that Ross and Ochs reject

as philosophically false and theologically unnecessary. In this chapter, I consider

several other concerns. Ross and Ochs are committed to the rejection of

foundations, but does their perspective not display a foundationalism of its own

(Section 1)? And if Judaism is primarily a ‘form of life’, does their understanding

of Judaism not undermine this (Section 2)? On both these accounts, I defend

their approach. However, in my final remarks I suggest that trends in

contemporary society might necessitate a repair of the presuppositions of

Reparative Contextualism, one which Reparative Contextualists should

themselves want to accept if they keep to their own principles (Section 3).

                                                                                                               96 Hilary Putnam, ‘A Comparison of Something with Something Else’, New Literary History 17:1, 74

38

i. The Challenge of Self-Refutation

Ross and Ochs often make claims that seem to contradict their own positions.

For example, Ross writes that ‘for the non-foundationalist… all knowledge is

context-related’, but this principle is presented as true for all contexts.97 And

Ochs writes ‘universals may be universal only within some finite domain of

reference’, yet this statement is phrased in a universal form.98 These statements

are not merely self-contradictory, but undercut nonfoundationalism itself. If

propositions such as these are meant absolutely, there must be a foundation of

knowledge from which they can be demonstrated. Put differently, these claims

are part of a nonfoundationalist metanarrative: that knowledge is always

necessarily contextual.

One plausible response is to give up the concern for absolute nonfoundationalism

or contextualism in favour of affirming something like ‘all non-trivial beliefs are

contextual’, and claiming that contextualism is itself a trivial claim. If so,

contextualism would be a legitimate non-contextual truth. Ochs in particular

distances himself from such approaches, though, because he is concerned not to

repeat the foundationalist errors that he is seeking to challenge. He is aiming at

an absolute nonfoundationalism. This, for example, is why he uses Peircian

semiotics. He sees it as a way of reasoning ‘that repairs, rather than re-

instantiate[s], the foundationalist practices of modernity’.99 In Ochs’ idiom, ‘all

knowledge is contextual’ cannot be construed constatively. It must be understood

reparatively, such that it acknowledges its interpretant – ‘for us postmodern

                                                                                                               97 Ross, ‘RBPA’, 23n56. 98 Ochs, ‘PW’, 480n5 99 Ochs, ‘RR’, 187

39

thinkers’. Put more simply, Ochs and Ross must accept that ‘all knowledge is

contextual’ is a contextual claim itself. This important nuance parallels my

definition of nonfoundationalism, in Chapter 1, as the revisable belief that there

are no unrevisable beliefs.

This perspective has a significant implication: that there might have been

contexts in which the belief ‘all knowledge is contextual’ was not a justified belief.

Realizing this, Ochs can look back at previous philosophies as appropriate for

their period. Thus, for example, ‘the modern paradigms had their sphere and

time of usefulness’. 100 As Thiel puts it ‘the metaphors of foundation and

foundationlessness specify neither a context-free error nor a context-free

epistemic norm respectively’.101 More importantly, it means that there could be

future contexts in which it is not reasonable to believe in contextualism. Ross

accepts this: ‘knowing the surprising twists and turns of theological and scientific

thought over the centuries, I do not even foster any certainty that this

[nonfoundationalist] type of resolution will last forever.’102 What neither of them

discuss is the actual developments in contemporary society that might make it

improper to hold by their nonfoundationalism, and I will sketch some of these in

the final section.

                                                                                                               100 Ochs, AR, 6 101 Thiel, Nonfoundationalism, 87 102 Ross, ‘GP’

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I want to conclude by emphasizing that Ross and Ochs do believe that

nonfoundationalism is actually true; the fact that a belief may be revised by no

means implies that they expect it to be. Placher presents a clear statement of this

view in a postliberal Christian context:

I would not be a serious conversation partner if I said (and meant),

“Nothing anyone could say or show me could conceivably alter my

Christian faith.” Yet it does not follow that I expect that my faith will be

undercut; such an expectation, in fact, seems contrary to the nature of

faith.103

ii. The Jewish Form of Life

After discussing the coherence of Reparative Contextualism’s

nonfoundationalism, I want to question whether it is coherent in its interpretation

of Judaism. At the heart of religion, for Ross (echoing Wittgenstein), is a

particular form of life, and she believes that a form of life is constructed by the

language it uses. As such, Ross believes that the primary purpose of religious

language ‘does not lie in the beliefs and opinions that it expresses but rather in

the form of life that it engenders’.104 It is the particular (accumulating) language-

norms of any given community that creates its distinctive form of life: ‘these

paradigms establish the basic grammar of the religious tradition’.105 Examples of

this ‘basic grammar’ might include reference to characters such as Abraham and

Moses, concepts such as ‘teshuva’ (repentance) and ‘halakha’ (Law), and events

                                                                                                               103 Placher, Unapologetic Theology (Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1989), 148 104 Ross, ‘RBPA’, 13 105 Ibid., 12

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such as ‘the hurban’ (the destruction of the temple) and ‘the shoah’ (the

Holocaust). Living a Jewish form of life means ordering one’s reality with such

words, whatever particular meaning they are given. This is why re-interpretation

of existing texts and practices is so important to Ross: if a particular religious

statement appears ‘untenable’ to a person or community it might ‘render the

doctrines ineffective in accomplishing the regulative function for which they are

meant: to compose the “picture” that stands behind the religious form of life’.106

The problem is that this view of religious language might in fact prevent people

from achieving the Jewish form of life. One reason for this is that, thinking that

there is no true and cognitive meaning of religious language, people might simply

take it less seriously, and give up that language-system altogether. Another is that

being aware of the context-specific nature of religious language might make it less

able to engender a strong religious experience. Along these lines, Hashkes’

remark on Ochs’ work could be applied to Ross:

…the complete freedom of the interpreter and his reparative reading

described in Ochs’ work creates a picture of religious practice that does

not mirror the religious-existentialist phenomenology that Jean-Luc

Marion describes and the experiences of those who actually practice the

religious way of life.107

                                                                                                               106 Ross, EPT, 197 107 Hashkes, ‘Religious Faith In Light of Postliberal Theology’, Zehuyot 2, 145. (Hebrew, my translation)

42

Ross is deeply concerned about this point, because she does want to sustain the

‘religious-existential phenomenology’ prevalent in Orthodox communities.

However, she does not take it as a given that her view of religious language will

preclude this, but rather as a challenge to make it work:

It is obvious that developing the means for disseminating a theology

which takes the relative nature of any truth-claim into account with

complete intellectual integrity, while leaving religious fervor intact and

undiluted, may turn out to be the greatest religious challenge of our

age.108

Hashkes’ comment, though, seems less problematic for Ochs himself, simply

because he is less concerned about the phenomenology of religious experience,

and more about the social role that Jewish texts can play in repairing Jewish

communities.

I would like to add a second, greater concern. Ross understands the importance

of Jewish continuity in terms of the Jewish form of life:

Their [particular religious paradigms’] value lies in virtues that are unique

precisely to these models, in their ability to engender distinctive ways of

being and experience which would otherwise be lost.109

The suggestion presupposes that, insofar as a particular anthology of words are

used, a distinctive Jewish ‘way of being’ will be perpetuated. However, it seems

unlikely that ways of being are purely linguistic. Why could it not be that beliefs

also contribute to distinctive forms of life? For example, surely the idea of God

                                                                                                               108 Ross, ‘CVR’, 528 109 Ross, ‘RBPA’, 15

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existing as a father and king has a stronger impact on the Jewish form of life than

the mere words from the prayer, ‘Our Father, Our King’.110 The issue is more

pressing still for Ochs. Unlike Ross who also considers the relation between

halakha and contextualism, he focuses entirely on the reading of Jewish texts.

Missing is an account of the importance of Jewish action - that is, not just learning

Torah but observing it – in Judaism, and as a potential source of repair. In other

words, Ross and Ochs privilege language at the expense of other dimensions of a

Jewish form of life, belief and practice.

Moreover, if it is true that keeping language the same is what a form of life

depends on, then the dynamism of a reparative Judaism, with its continued

acceptance of new words into the corpus, makes it difficult to imagine that there

is any single Jewish form of life over time. Indeed, surely the best way to

‘engender distinctive ways of being which would otherwise be lost’ would be to

adopt a traditionalist, foundationalist framework, and to refuse admitting

anything new into the revealed corpus of Judaism.

iii. New Contexts, New Repair

Is it true that Judaism could flourish in any context, regardless of its philosophical

presuppositions? Consider two prevalent philosophical contexts in the world

today, atheism and humanism. Atheists would have trouble accepting the Jewish

sources as they tend to be understood in our culture because they imply the

existence of God; humanists would have trouble accepting just the Jewish sources

because they would want to accept texts from all cultures and sources of human

productivity. Now, it would be possible to repair Judaism for these contexts. For

                                                                                                               110 Jewish prayer book (my translation).

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the atheist, it would involve re-interpreting all talk of God as, for example,

expressing feelings of deep existential import. For the humanist, it would involve

reading the language of Jewish particularity as including all humanity, and seeing

it as the product of all human cultures.

Ross’ and Ochs’ view thus allows for rejecting two elements of Jewish thought

that some might consider foundational – God and particularity – in the name of

an understanding of the reparative mechanism of Jewish change-over-time. This

would lead to new humanist and atheist additions to the body of Torah, which

Reparative Contextualists should actively welcome as new accumulations. After

all, for Ochs, these new interpretations would be demanded by the reparative

logic of Judaism itself; and for Ross, they would be revealed by God. The claim

here, then, is parallel to the one in the first section, that nonfoundationalism has

to be willing to give up its own nonfoundationalism.

Yet even if Judaism can be repaired for every context, should it? The suggestion

that it should seems to display a political passivity, where a community’s texts

should never be replaced but only re-interpreted. Ross, for example, is reluctant

to give up any of the statements of Judaism, whether statements of unintuitive

belief or affirmations of patriarchy, and the like. For example, ‘paradoxically,

rejection of the traditional rhetoric of appeal to an objective context-free truth…

would be regarded as a violation of the ground rules of religious discourse’.111

Ochs, similarly, emphasizes reparative philosophy as opposed to replacement

philosophy, which would advocate working within a tradition to re-interpret it as

opposed to trying to replace it with something that appears to be better suited.112

Yet a more pragmatic approach would say that there are many contexts – such as                                                                                                                111 Ross, ‘RBPA’, 13 112 Eg. Ochs, ‘RR’, 194

45

the humanist and atheist one I considered – in which it might be better to ignore

the old textual paradigms altogether in favour of more intuitive ones. Put

differently, repair too should only be a solution for particular contexts.

I want finally to return to nonfoundationalism itself. I suggested at the beginning

of this chapter that reparative contextualists should be ready to reject

nonfoundationalism if there is a reason to do so. It appears to me that there is

already a reason to do so, at least to a certain degree. The

foundationalism/nonfoundationalism debate assumes that, reflecting on the

evidence we have, each of us as rational individuals can work out which of the

two it is justified for us believe in. However, a recent philosophical development,

called social epistemology, might suggest otherwise. It says that we have to pay

attention to how what others believe should impact our own beliefs. One of the

main areas within this is known as the epistemology of disagreement. Machuca

introduces it as follows:

Classical epistemology has recently been criticized for being too

individualistic… [This] is clearly not sufficient for a full appreciation of the

epistemic significance of disagreement, since it does not take into account

the impact that the opinions of one’s dissenters may have upon one’s

beliefs.113

The prevalent stance in the epistemology of disagreement is that, as Feldman

puts it, ‘the cases that seem to be cases of reasonable disagreement are cases in

which the reasonable attitude is really suspension of judgment’.114 In other words,

                                                                                                               113 Diego Machuca, Disagreement and Skepticism (Taylor & Francis, 2013), 2 114 Richard Feldman, ‘Epistemological Puzzles About Disagreement’ http://www.philosophy-dev.stir.ac.uk/postgraduate/documents/FeldmanPaper.pdf [Accessed 18/04/2013]

46

two people of equal intelligence, both of whom have good arguments for what

they believe and yet are unable to fault the others, should rationally not commit

to either. With this in mind, it is important to remember that there are many

people in the contemporary world who are still foundationalists. Some accept the

arguments against classical foundationalism (eg. Descartes, Locke, etc.), but

believe that a form of foundationalism can be upheld. For example, Reformed

Epistemologists, such as Alvin Plantinga, talk of ‘basic beliefs’. 115 Though they

are not proven, these beliefs can act as rational foundations for the rest of our

beliefs. More controversially, I might suggest (though it is against contemporary

prejudices), that so-called fundamentalists who are more in the model of classical

foundationalists, could, in some contexts, be considered epistemic peers too. If

so, according to the epistemology of disagreement, we might want to suspend

judgment about whether nonfoundationalism is true or not.

Suspending judgment about nonfoundationalism would not undercut the

reparative contextualist project as I have presented it. It would, however, involve

rejecting Placher’s claim that I mentioned earlier, that we can believe

controversial things until we are persuaded otherwise. Instead, reparative

contextualism might prefer a useful distinction between justification and truth.

On this account, nonfoundationalism is justified as a position to live by, but in the

face of fundamental disagreement, it would not commit to its truth. Indeed, this

suspension of judgment seems truer both to the contextualism and to the

pragmatism of reparative contextualism than the committed and sure (though

still open-minded) nonfoundationalism that Ochs and Ross prefer. It is truer to

the contextualism because it not only recognizes the fact that our contexts affect

                                                                                                               115 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, eg. 94

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our interpretations of Judaism, but also, as it were, the way we interpret our

interpretations of Judaism. It is truer to pragmatism because it does not lead to

the troubling claim of irrationality on the part of contemporary foundationalists,

which could lead to practical and moral tensions that Ross and Ochs want to

avoid.

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Conclusion

The Rock of Horeb

The Lord answered Moses, “…I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” Exodus 17:6116

If asked to tell a brief and broad narrative of the history of Jewish philosophy, a

Reparative Contextualist might offer something like the following:

In the beginning, Jews lived in accordance with their beliefs. As time went on,

they encountered new ways of living and new ways of believing. Their

philosophers were faced with a choice: to argue for sustaining the old ways of life,

or to sustain the old core beliefs. The dominant approach in the history of Jewish

philosophy has been the latter: Judaism must guard certain truths, no matter

what. In the Introduction, I called this the foundationalist tendency in Jewish

philosophy, and gave Dessler and Cohen as examples. For them, the Jewish truth

comes first; the Jewish practice – ethical (Cohen) or rabbinic-halakhic (Dessler) -

follows. It has taken the philosophical trends I described in Chapter 1 as

nonfoundationalist to remind us of the path not taken. Thinkers like

Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Rorty and Lyotard reject the idea that particular

truths – whether rational, empirical or narrative-based – have independent

meaning, such that they can act as foundations. As such, it becomes problematic

to see Judaism as founded on guarding truths like this.

                                                                                                               116 New International Version (trans.)

49

Recently, some Jewish philosophers have begun to use these nonfoundationalist

developments to conceive their task differently: to explain why and how the

Jewish life must be sustained. The Jewish life is not constituted by assent to

rational truths or general ethical acts, but by accepting a comprehensive tradition

as a medium through which to think about and experience the world. But as Jews

accept yet new ways of believing, the texts and practices as previously interpreted

cause them suffering. To heal the suffering, they must not abandon the practices,

but reinterpret them, and use those reinterpretations to build yet new practices.

Judaism itself thus heals the suffering of Jewish lives. In Chapter 2, I showed two

examples of this conception of Jewish philosophy, by Ross and Ochs. Ross shows

how seeing the meaning of halakha and revelation as contextualized can help

Modern Orthodox women; Ochs shows how seeing Jewish texts as a source of

repair can help postmodern Jewish academics. Despite differences in idiom and

emphases, I showed that Ross and Ochs are arguing for the same position.

On this view, the Jewish life comes first; philosophy follows.117 The purpose of

philosophy is not to chart in advance what a Jewish life must look like. Rather, it

is to model, post facto, how the Jewish life looks and how it repairs itself, and then

to find ways of contributing to this process of repair. As I argued in Chapter 3, if

Jewish life in the future necessitates abandoning any belief - even

nonfoundationalism, contextualism or the focus on internal repair themselves -

this can and must be done. Already today, I suggested, Reparative Contextualists

                                                                                                               117 Phrasing it like this makes clear another Christian parallel to their thought, though never explicitly recognized: recent political and liberation theologies. For them, praxis is always prior to theory. Gustavo Gutierrez, for example, writes ‘Theology is not first; the commitment is first. Theology is the understanding of the commitment, and the commitment is action’, in Gutierrez, ‘Toward a Theology of Liberation’ in Alfred Hennelly (ed.) Liberation Theology: A Documentary History (NY: Orbis, 1990), 63

50

must not see themselves as committed to the truth of nonfoundationalism as a

philosophical position, and should be happy for Jews to commit to other ways of

life if they so wish.

It is worth mentioning several connected topics that, for reasons of space, I have

not been able to discuss. First, there are many other contexts that Reparative

Contextualism has sought to repair, and in the future should seek to repair. Ross

has already written about the question of homosexuality within Orthodoxy,118

and Ochs on the nature of interfaith work,119 and in reality there can be as many

reparative theologies as there are groups in need of repair.

Second, it is worth considering other recent Jewish theologies that might be

considered nonfoundationalist. For example, Avi Sagi and Gili Zivan propose

what Feldman-Kaye calls a ‘neo-pragmatist theology’, which focuses on Jewish

practice and ignores Jewish belief altogether.120 On the other hand, there could

be a Jewish equivalent of what Murphy calls ‘post-conservative theology’, more

influenced by Alisdair Macintyre than Lindbeck,121 which try to retain traditional

notions of truth. A strong possibility here is the work of Jonathan Sacks.122

Moreover, there could be Jewish equivalents of Reformed Epistemology; they

would begin with foundations, yet seek to avoid the problems of classical

foundationalists like Descartes and Locke.

                                                                                                               118 See Tamar Ross, ‘Halakhic Reasoning and Context: Homosexuality as a Test Case’ [Unpublished] 119 See, for example, Peter Ochs, ‘The Rules of Scriptural Reasoning’, The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 2.1 [Accessed 16/04/2013 http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/ssr/issues/volume2/number1/ssr02-01-e01.html] 120 Miriam Feldman-Kaye, Provisional Jewish Theology in a Postmodern Age: A Comparative Study of Professor Tamar Ross and Harav Shagar, (Unpublished PhD: University of Haifa, 2012), 32 121 See Nancey Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity (Westview Press, 1997), 113 - 131. 122 For example, Jonathan Sacks, ‘Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost’ in The Dignity of Difference (Continuum, 2003), 45 - 67

51

In the Introduction, I claimed that Jewish philosophy is the attempt to justify a

commitment to Judaism through the use of a certain mode of philosophical

reasoning. Though clearly more need to be written on this subject, I feel well

justified in concluding not only that a Jewish philosophy in the

nonfoundationalist mode is possible, but that a coherent, creative and caring

nonfoundationalist Jewish philosophy, Reparative Contextualism, has already

been developed by Ross and Ochs.

* * *

It seems appropriate to conclude a study of Ross and Ochs, who are so dedicated

to seeing the world through the lens of Jewish words, with a suggestion of how

my claims in this dissertation can be expressed as scripture.

The Hebrew Bible is full of suffering. In Exodus 17, we find the Israelites

complaining of thirst. God tells Moses to go to the rock (zur) at Horeb and strike it.

He does, and water comes out. Forty years later, in Numbers 20, the Israelites

are again thirsty. God tells Moses to speak to the rock (sela), but Moses strikes it.

Because of this act, he is prevented from entering the Holy Land.

52

The rock (zur): this is the source of revelation. We thus first encounter the

rock at Horeb, the mountain of revelation.

The water: this is Torah – as the rabbis say, ‘water is nothing but Torah’.123

Thirst: this is the suffering that is part of our Jewish journeys.

The Israelites: this is the Jews.

The texts ask us: when Israelites (Jews) are thirsty (suffer), how do they

access the water (Torah) from the rock (source of revelation)?

Exodus 17: this is the beginning of the journeys in the desert - this is the

context of isolation.

Numbers 20: this is the beginning of the preparations for entry into the holy

land - this is the context of multi-culturalism.

Strike the rock (zur): this is foundationalism, for the staff is upright, firm,

ordered.

Speak to the rock (sela): this is nonfoundationalism, for all we have is words.

The texts teach us: Moses, teacher of the Torah in one context, did not

understand God’s truth, that we access different Torahs (zur, sela) that are

still yet Torah (rocks).

THE ROCK OF HOREB GIVES FORTH TORAH TO ITS SUFFERERS

ACCORDING TO THEIR CONTEXTS

                                                                                                               123 Babylonian Talmud, Baba Kama 82a

53

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