Pluralism

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



[1] T.B. Eruvin, 13b.

[2] London and New York: The Soncino Press, Vol. 1,1962; Vol. 2,1965.

[3] An illuminating discussion of this process is Alan Yuter's "Mehizah, Midrash and Modernity: A Study in Religious Rhetoric," Judaism Vol. 28 (Spring 1979), pp. 147-59.