How Michael Wyschogrod Taught Me To Eat Like a Jew

[Spengler]

How Michael Wyschogrod Taught Me To Eat Like a Jew on the Spengler Blog


by David P. Goldman


My essay on Michael Wyschogrod, the great Orthodox Jewish theologian whose work has graced the pages of First Things twice this year. It is an honor to honor Michael at any time, but especially during the Yomim Tovim.

An extract:

Wo es sich christelt, da judelt es sich auch, in Heinrich Heine’s word-play: It says more or less, “Where Christians do something, Jews do the same,” but with the onomatopoetic sense in German of “tinkling” (christeln) versus “doodling” (judeln). A rationalized rather than a lived Judaism comes down to doodling. Judaism that emphasizes “ethical monotheism” against “ritual observance,” and rejects or qualifies the chosenness of Israel, really is mainline Protestantism with a tallis.

Judaism without commandments never made sense to me. If you observe the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” because it comes from God, why not also observe the commandment in the next verse not to wear cloth woven of two kinds of material? And if these don’t come from God, where do they come from? No surviving school of philosophy claims to derive any system of ethics—let alone “love thy neighbor”—from reason. Even if we think that ethics can be deduced from reason, why do we need the Torah? Or if we believe that altruism is an evolutionary adaptation, why should ethics have anything to do with Judaism? If “love thy neighbor” is not a divine commandment, and if it is not a logical deduction, then what is it? For semi-affiliated Jews, it’s the residue of a faith to which formerly observant Jews of an older generation have a sentimental attachment.

There is a great gulf fixed between “ethical monotheism” and traditional Jewish observance, which demands that we accept God’s will rather than our own criteria of judgment. As Wyschogrod notes, just that was the sin of Eve and Adam, who ate the forbidden fruit in order to acquire autonomous knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge is what the philosophers promised from Plato to Kant, but failed to deliver; philosophy walked out on ethics in the 19th century and never looked back.

The trouble is that Jews who grew up surrounded by Christian culture do not know any way to act except according to their own autonomous criteria of judgment, yet the exercise of autonomous choice undermines the spirit of Jewish observance. How do we get there from here?

Read the essay and find out.

[Michael]

There is much there for Christians to ponder, too

[CognitiveDistoibance]

There is much there for Christians to ponder, too

Yes.

[Simple Minded]

From the essay:
Conscience, he explains, is not historically a Jewish concept. Conscience can tell us to do precisely what we shouldn’t. Christians place great emphasis on conscience, but that can lead to perverse results; he cites the dictate of St. Thomas Aquinas that if a man believes that “to omit fornication is a mortal sin, when he chooses not to fornicate, he sins mortally.” The secular reading of conscience is even more troubling. Heidegger tells us that conscience has nothing to do with ethics in the first place; it is our inner voice telling us to be authentic (which might explain why Heidegger’s Nazi party membership never troubled his conscience).

Judaism asks us to follow not our own conscience, but rather God’s commandments. What makes us accept these commandments? In the past, Jews may have kept the commandments to conform to community standards, but this no longer can be the case when only a minority of Jews keep the mitzvot: “It is much more probable than ever before that a Jew who remains faithful to the covenant in this day and age is acting out of conscience instead of social conformity,” Wyschogrod writes. “The Judaism of our day can no longer dispense with conscience as part of our theological arsenal.”

The solution, Wyschogrod maintains, is to acquire a biblical conscience—and here he draws on Karl Barth, who taught direct engagement with revelation. Jews can bridge the chasm between autonomous choice and divine command “by exposing conscience to those events and documents which constitute the record of Israel’s relation with God.” We cannot separate the Torah from our national life of the past 4,000 years and the lasting belief that God loved us and made us his inheritance. We answered that love by accepting the means God gave us to sanctify the quotidian, bodily life of Israel. The Jewish conscience, he argues, is “developed by the tradition of revelation to which the people of Israel are witness and without which Jewish conscience is impoverished and isolated, cut off from its source of historic sustenance.”

Thank you. That is an interesting line of thought... I have always thought that conscience, the small still voice within, is the voice of God talking to me. I have never been aware of my conscience misleading me.

Maybe "never been aware" is a revealing statement.

Then again, humans possess an infinite capacity for delusion and/or rationalization.... how to know?

Does this statement:
"In the past, Jews may have kept the commandments to conform to community standards, but this no longer can be the case when only a minority of Jews keep the mitzvot: “It is much more probable than ever before that a Jew who remains faithful to the covenant in this day and age is acting out of conscience instead of social conformity,”
not support the concept of an intuitive understanding of God?

Is it possible for a Jew to "keep the mitzvot" and "remain faithful to the convenant" without formal training or conscious knowledge of doing so?
Does not the idea of God exist even in those without exposure to formal "religious" education?

I am ignorant of the formally defined "Jewish" relationship (for lack of better terminology) between commandments, mitzvot, covenant, and conscience. I am especially ignorant of the definition of mitzvot and covenant (as covenant is used here).

Please overlook anything I wrote that was offensive. That was not my intent. Language often seems imprecise when dealing with these matters.

I have often found the personal testimony of others to be more satisfying than the "reasons" of "it is tradition" or "cause I said so!" I welcome descriptions of your personal experiences.

[Michael]

If I may, with great diffidence, offer a Christian perspective, I can only do so by pointing to a paradox.

On the one hand, Christians believe, that, if our motives are to be pure, we ought to love God for his sake and our neighbour for God’s sake. We obey God, because we love him, not because we agree with him.

On the other hand, we believe that God loves us and his commandments are given to us for our sake, not his. Thus St Thomas Aquinas says:

("Non enim Deus a nobis offenditur nisi ex eo quod contra nostrum bonum agimus", (ScG III. 122) – God is only offended, when we act against our own good

Perhaps, we can find the best analogy in parents instructing their children.

It is obvious enough that God, the supreme, original good and our good must somehow coincide. Theologians say that God is our objective final end and happiness is our subjective final end.

The Schoolmen famously tried to show the harmony between the ethics of Aristotle and the divine law, as revealed in scripture, not that they blasphemously supposed that God’s law required a rational justification from us, but to shed a little light on its character.

“Conscience,” in the modern sense of moral judgment, is a topic on its own and it would be much better to speak of practical reason, if only to remind ourselves that all reasoning requires premises. Now, one great insight of the Schoolmen was that the premise can take the form, not of a concept, but from the knowledge of our own intentional acts – things can be known in actu exercito and we can learn some things, only by doing them.

All this is very tentative.

[Darryl Harb]

"Traditional Jewish observance . . . demands that we accept God’s will rather than our own criteria of judgment." This sort of thing sticks in the craw of those who like to pontificate about the "primacy of conscience". The first commandment is the hardest one to get. Norman Podhoretz recently hosted a forum on the question "Why are Jews liberals?" I thought at the time it might be more interesting to ask why liberals would any longer bother to consider themselves Jews. Then again, those so bothered would seem to be fewer and fewer.

[truepeers]

If you observe the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” because it comes from God, why not also observe the commandment in the next verse not to wear cloth woven of two kinds of material? And if these don’t come from God, where do they come from? No surviving school of philosophy claims to derive any system of ethics—let alone “love thy neighbor”—from reason. Even if we think that ethics can be deduced from reason, why do we need the Torah?

Spengler goes on to argue, with Rabbi Wyschogrod, that

The Jewish conscience... is “developed by the tradition of revelation to which the people of Israel are witness and without which Jewish conscience is impoverished and isolated, cut off from its source of historic sustenance.”

This seems to me correct, as is the claim that the philosophical tradition has become ethically impoverished. But in arguing that we must locate our ethics in the historicity of revelation, in the specific historical event, we need not yet, it seems to me, be convinced that the only way to respect the truth of this revelation is to adhere strictly to the ritual practice that has, historically, been the vehicle for remembering the original revelation. (In other words, the question becomes, just what is the relationship between God or "God" and revelation and ritual...) One can recognize the ethical truth of revelation - at least to some extent - through historical and an anthropological thinking that can see beyond the limits of Western metaphysical thinking (as does the Generative Anthropology of Eric Gans). Having said that, i agree that for most people, the most efficient route for reconstituting one's relation to Sinai or any revelation with which one somehow identifies will be through formal religion. But intellectuals, it seems to me, can forever defer the question of whether or to what degree the revelation is divine and/or human in origin. In seeing religion as anthropological truth we minimize the difference between believer and non, ritualist and intellectual, and make ever less weighty the difference that the two sides have heretofore thought to contend.

But I am not (yet) a practitioner of ritualized religion so I may really not grasp what about revelation can only be thus accessed. I would like to hear more thoughts on this if anyone can go deeper into the mystery of "first one does, then one understands..."

[Simple Minded]

Michael,
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Tough stuff to put into words. You do a better job than many.

[Simple Minded]

But I am not (yet) a practitioner of ritualized religion so I may really not grasp what about revelation can only be thus accessed. I would like to hear more thoughts on this if anyone can go deeper into the mystery of "first one does, then one understands..."

I can't help you much with the idea of revelation.

Regarding the second point:
You can warn a child: "That stove is hot! Do not touch it!"
If they chose to ignore you and they actually touch the stove........ they have a much better comprehension of "hot" and "not."

"Everything is better understood in retrospect."

[Michael]

But I am not (yet) a practitioner of ritualized religion so I may really not grasp what about revelation can only be thus accessed. I would like to hear more thoughts on this if anyone can go deeper into the mystery of "first one does, then one understands..."

I can't help you much with the idea of revelation.

Regarding the second point:
You can warn a child: "That stove is hot! Do not touch it!"
If they chose to ignore you and they actually touch the stove........ they have a much better comprehension of "hot" and "not."

"Everything is better understood in retrospect."

I remember a lecture by Miss Anscombe, in which she argued that it is impossible to point out a colour to someone (without using words). You will only be pointing at a coloured object. The only way to do it is by doing things with coloured objects - such as sorting them by colour - She was good at simple examples of serious points of epistemology

[ellens]

I can't help you much with the idea of revelation.


"Everything is better understood in retrospect."

According to Dave's top 10 reasons the world isn't coming to an end, the stock market isn't going to crash. Now, that counts as a revelation AND something better believed in retrospect. And starting tomorrow night, we won't be eating much at all for a full day, like a Jew or otherwise.

[Pastaneta]

My parents came from orthodox families, my mother from Warsaw, my father from Lublin (well ... Chelm). But my father told me after the war that he had a beef with God for allowing the Shoah. His words were: "my parents were shomrei mitzvot all their lives... And God allowed them to be murdered together with all of my family. God is capricious. So why should I listen to him?". So they didn't follow anything after the war. My father only went to a shul again once in 1967, before the Six days war, to pray for Israel.

So they stopped to eat like Jews in 1939 (in Russia during the war, you ate what you found...) I wonder what Wysogrod would have answered my father.

[ellens]

My parents came from orthodox families, my mother from Warsaw, my father from Lublin (well ... Chelm). But my father told me after the war that he had a beef with God for allowing the Shoah. His words were: "my parents were shomrei mitzvot all their lives... And God allowed them to be murdered together with all of my family. God is capricious. So why should I listen to him?". So they didn't follow anything after the war. My father only went to a shul again once in 1967, before the Six days war, to pray for Israel.

So they stopped to eat like Jews in 1939 (in Russia during the war, you ate what you found...) I wonder what Wysogrod would have answered my father.

But his prayer was answered, Pastaneta, wasn't it? I have been praying for Israel all my life, even during the dark gloomy days of the Arab oil blackmail, and the antiZionism campaigns of the Islamic states and Europeans. I always believed the enemies of Israel would be vanquished, and so it is coming to pass....in our lifetimes no less. That doesn't make up for the Holocaust. But still, it's something close to miraculous.

[Pastaneta]

Ellens:

Yes, this prayer was answered... But all his family was killed before... He was a man divided.

I guess when you go through the fire, you come out changed.

Gmar chatima tova to all.

[Frodo]

There is much there for Christians to ponder, too

Yes.

Polish that apple! Good boy!

Make constructive comments to the subject of the thread and not snide comments directed at other members on the board. There is entirely too much of this coming from your quarter. Yes, this is Auerbach. I am still here. Next time I will start editing or deleting posts--