The
second inquiry relating to the issue of authenticity should deal overtly with
the theological implications of the evidence of pluralism in belief and practice
throughout Jewish history. Religious fundamentalism cannot tolerate pluralism;
the very assumption that the believer knows explicitly what God wants from him
and his community leaves no room for alternative versions of
that message. To take
the step out of fundamentalism is to abandon, for
ever, the notion that any believer or community of believers can ever have that
kind of assurance.
It
is beyond question that throughout its history, Judaism recognized the
legitimacy of theological pluralism. What is even more striking, however, is
the equally pluralistic character of the Jewish legal tradition. Even a cursory
glance at the first major codification of the entire body of Jewish law, the
Mishnah, will confirm that on just about any legal issue, the code itself
records a number of positions, each of which was seen as carrying some degree
of legitimacy. Further, the later discussion of each of these issues as
recorded in the gemara typically broadens the range
by introducing still more legitimate opinions on each point of law. Pluralism,
then, seems to have been built into the system from the very start. The Talmud
records that the two major first century C.E. schools of rabbinic law, the
schools of Hillel and Shammai,
disagreed on over three hundred issues, but the judgment of the tradition is
that "both are the words of the living God."[1] This
verdict must not be understood as simply a pious sentimentality; it is rather,
a metatheological statement about the language of
Torah. It acknowledges that no single
human being can claim with absolute certainty that he is the sole repository of
God's explicit truth. The most recent comprehensive codification of Jewish law,
the Shulhan Arukh of Joseph Caro
was accepted as authoritative by Ashkenazi Jewry only because of the
supplementary and frequently opposing glosses of Rabbi Moses Isserles, the outstanding Polish rabbinic authority of his
generation. These comments, inserted into the very text of Caro's
work, reflected the Ashkenazic legal tradition which
was often at odds with Caro's Sephardic tradition.
The text of the Shulhan Arukh as we have it today reflects both of
these traditions side by side which is precisely why it attained its status as
authoritative for European and later American Jewry.
One
further word on the question of authenticity. Should any doubt remain that on
the issue of revelation, the contemporary traditionalist does not hold a
monopoly on authenticity, this doubt will be quickly dispelled by studying the
material assembled in Abraham Joshua Heschel's monumental Torah Min Ha-Shamayim Be-Aspaklarya
Shel Ha-Dorot.[2]
The two volumes of this work published to date have not exerted the influence
on contemporary Jewish theology that they should have, in all likelihood
because they have not as yet been translated into English. But the overwhelming
conclusions of this study are first, that rabbinic literature subjected the
issue of revelation to an intricate and subtly nuanced inquiry in comparison to
which most contemporary efforts appear positively simplistic; second that the
contemporary traditionalist view far from exhausts the range of options
reflected in that literature; and third, that we contemporaries are not the
first to question, on theological grounds, the dogma of verbal revelation. In retrospect,
Heschel's critique of the literalist position in God in Search of Man clearly
nurses from the material that he was to study in this later work. It provides
irrefutable support for our view that classical tradition provides ample
precedent for a number of equally authentic theological approaches to
revelation.
However,
even those authorities who accepted verbal revelation were saved from toppling
into narrow fundamentalism by the rabbinic doctrine that parallel to Scripture,
God revealed an oral Torah that serves to interpret the written Torah. The
inescapable conclusion is that the Rabbis understood God' s revelation in
scripture to be ambiguous. It is the rabbinic authorities in each generation
who have the responsibility to say what, in fact, the text means. That, too, is
a metatheological statement about the language of
Torah. The ultimate effect of this doctrine is to free the written word of
Scripture from its purely literal meaning and to permit a certain openness to
historical development and pluralistic interpretation. How much openness,
of course, depends on the individual authority and his age; clearly, more
openness was permitted in theology than in law, and even in the latter area,
there are rabbinic legal "conservatives" as well as rabbinic legal
"liberals." Our debate with modern Orthodoxy may well revolve around
this question. But once the very possibility of openness was established,
classical Judaism was forever preserved from the more pernicious dangers of
religious fundamentalism.
Jewish
traditionalists often use the doctrine of the oral Torah and similar doctrines
which teach that the written Torah contains layers of more or less esoteric
meaning to counter the charge that they fall into the fundamentalist camp.
Paradoxically, however, this argument is nullified by their own reluctance to
use the freedom thus gained. The traditionalist claims that
though the written word of Torah is open to multiple interpretations, only
certain ones, preeminently those of the ancients, are legitimate. Only these
specific interpretations carry authority, a quasi-scriptural authority, even
though they depart from the plain sense of scripture. The ancients can say that
God commands us to recite Hallel on
Hanukkah; we can't do the same for Yom
Ha-Atzma'ut.
Phenomenologically then, the traditionalist
interpretation of Judaism ends up with all of the characteristics of religious
fundamentalism despite the freedom alotted to it by a
number of sound and authentic traditional doctrines.
Implications for Halakhah
If
this inquiry has any merit, it should lead us to the conclusion that it is
misleading to speak of the halakhah as if it were one
monolithic, internally coherent whole. It never was and it surely cannot be in
our day. It is the definitive "the" that is offensive here. We
should, instead, speak of a halakha
and view our own movement as a set of overlapping communities, each with its
own overlapping halakhah. This is not peculiar to Conservative Judaism.
Contemporary Orthodoxy, as we have seen, also consists of a number of
overlapping halakhic communities. We should be equally wary of using the phrase
"within (or outside) the halakhah" as if there were a clearly defined
set of parameters which, in an a priori way, outline what constitutes a
legitimate halakhic system and which determine whether a position
is legitimately halakhic or not. There is an inherently subjective dimension in
any legal system. What becomes halakhah on any one issue is whatever a
community and its authorities in fact decide it is. It cannot be prescribed or
defined in an objective or predetermined way. The parameters of any one
halakhic system are constantly in a state of redefinition as decisions are made
within that community.
This
should not be taken to mean that there are no parameters, that any and every
possible position on a point of halakhah is equally legitimate. It does mean,
however, that any one community's parameters cannot be set down ab initio as logically presupposed by the
system itself. In practice, they are arrived at inductively and collegially
within each community. This position assumes the commitment and seriousness of
purpose of both the community and its rabbinic authorities and the latters' breadth of learning. We assume that they do not
view the process as a game but pursue it in "fear and trembling." But
commitment, seriousness of purpose, breadth of learning and "fear and
trembling" are all extrinsic criteria. There are no intrinsic criteria which make the decision-making process of one
responsum authentic and that of a second, illegitimate. Every responsum chooses
its precedents, decides what weight should be given to extra-halakhic
considerations and then proceeds to make certain leaps from the known to the
unknown. How all of these factors are brought to bear in the decision-making
process depends on the subjective intuition of the authority[3] and-and
this is equally decisive-his community's implicit or explicit consensus on what
it wants to affirm on the issue at hand. The distinctive configuration which
all of these factors assume in a series of decisions is precisely what defines
that halakhic community, separates it from others, and separates a coalition of
such communities (read "Conservative Judaism") from another. But the
process is essentially inductive, and the flow of influence between the
community and its authorities works both ways. It may take years for the
process to work itself out, and the interim may be marked by uncertainty,
widespread variations of practice, and anxiety about the outcome, but this is
simply unavoidable. If anything, it testifies to the seriousness with which the
entire enterprise is undertaken. It should, then, not be viewed with dismay but
rather as a sign of health and vitality.
This
position also assumes that halakhah is central to our reading of Judaism.
Whatever the implications of our distinction between the halakhah and a halakhah,
we still insist that our reading of Judaism does have concrete behavioral
implications and that how a Jew is to act in a specific life situation has to
be determined in reference to a legal tradition that is to be taken seriously.
Is it legitimate to use this rhetoric and the sense of authority that it
conveys if God is no longer understood as literally or verbally a metzaveh?
From Toward a Theology for Conservative Judaism by Neil
Gillman in Conservative
Judaism, Vol. 37(1), Fall1983 @1983 The Rabbinical Assembly
NOTES